As I drove down to get the mail today and threw an apple core into the woods near a stone wall, I realized that I've probably thrown one somewhere into the woods beside our laneway, about three times a week for the five years that we've lived here. Even when you figure in the times I've been away camping, traveling or just not up for getting the mail that day, that's upward of 700 apple cores.
I still remember the first time I threw one out. Daughter was four and she was horrified at my "littering". "Mom!" She said, as sternly as only a four-year-old moralist can say it, "You go get that apple or the police will give you a ticket." In her defense, we had recently gotten a handout from the supermarket that featured Kid TV characters preaching about citizenship. According to the handout's attractive young man in a very revealing Lycra body suit with what looked like a strawberry on top of his head, littering is NOT good citizenship.
No amount of explaining on my part would convince the tot that I hadn't littered. Strawby, or whatever the heck his name was said throwing things out of car windows was littering and that was that. Feeding the little forest creatures, which was what I called it, wasn't gonna fly with her. Telling her that the apple was organic and that I left enough apple on the core to feed a sizeable field mouse family just got me the kind of look you see on a judge's face when the defendant claims that he was just trying to help the old lady across the street, when she got the crazy idea that he was attempting to rip her purse off her arm.
After a couple of days of this, I got a brilliant idea. I packed up the kid and lunch, complete with two apples, and we went for a picnic. Down the laneway we strolled until we got to the stone wall - a pleasant place to sit and have our lunch I told her, feeling a lot like the Grinch explaining to Cindy Lou Who why he was taking the Christmas tree. So we sat on the wall and ate our lunch, including the apples and had a delightful conversation about the little creatures that no doubt lived in the wall and how hard it was for them to feed their families and how we could help them by leaving them some food.
I carefully positioned a little piece of bread crust and my apple core on a flat rock, next to a small hole in the wall. "I bet a chipmunk will come out as soon as we're gone and have a nice little picnic with her family. Wouldn't that be nice?" I asked my animal-loving daughter. "Oooh, can I feed them something?" she asked.
"Of course," I said, "What do you have left?" as if I didn't know that she'd eaten every crumb of her sandwich and only had an apple core left. Machiavelli could have taken notes on my cunning plan that day if he needed some fresh content for "The Prince".
She put her apple core on another flat rock and then arranged some smaller rocks around it for chairs for the woodland creatures that were going to picnic there. She even found some acorn tops and filled them with water from our thermos and put a small leaf beside each cup, "in case the animals want to wipe their whiskers." She would have put a lovely berry at each place until I realized that they were deadly nightshade and probably shouldn't be on the menu, so we buried them under some leaves and went home to wash our hands thoroughly.
The next day, we drove down to get the mail and I opened the window to throw out my apple core. "Mom! You're not gonna litter again, are you?" she said from the backseat. "But I'm not littering," I protested, "I'm just feeding the animals like we did yesterday on our picnic."
"No," the Voice of Four Year Old Reason said, "You're littering. We didn't throw the food out the window yesterday. We put it carefully on a nice rock table and I even gave them "nakkins". You're just littering."
"But if I don't throw the apple core to the animals, how are they going to get it?"
"You can stop the car and go in the woods and put it on a rock table," she said, very patiently considering my obtuseness, although she was tapping her right foot and she might have rolled her eyes a few times.
As a seasoned parent, I realized that this was a battle I couldn't win, no matter what I did. Who is a four-year-old going to believe - her mother or a guy she's never met who wears a pink suit and has a giant strawberry for garnish? I opened the window, threw out the apple core and resigned myself to listening to a lecture every time I did it until she was old enough to embrace the moral ambiguity that we all discover when we realize that sometimes following the rules just doesn't make sense.
These days, she freely throws apple cores and anything else that's biodegradable and edible by woodland creatures, out of car windows, off the deck and even from her bedroom window. She doesn't throw them in town or onto people's lawns or at their mailboxes, although she mentioned once that it'd be fun. She's lightened up a lot from when she was four. And that's a blessing.