As parents, we try to keep them from running off cliffs. We hope they will climb mountains and not be trapped in one or another disastrous morass. But our control is disappearing fast. Our children are off on their own journeys, carrying with them whatever we have given them, knowingly or unknowingly. I neither knew enough nor had sufficient experience.
Adulthood legally begins at eighteen or twenty-one for good reason.
I turned twenty-one and entered adulthood in several of the usual ways in 1971. And I returned once more to learning the names of trees. For a college field project in an introductory botany class at CC, I censused conifers along a thousand vertical feet of switchbacking trail on St. Charles Peak in Colorado's Wet Mountains. I learned to identify six evergreens in addition to the deciduous aspen I already knew, and analyzed their elevational distributions and limits. Never before had I noticed the specificity of trees in their environment.