Oh Canada!

I'm tired tonight, but totally happy with the day. I was blessed with the opportunity to share some of the Canada that I love so much, with a new Canadian. Let me tell you about it.
I spent the day giving sighted guide to a young client of the CNIB. He's the adult literacy student I work with. Our "classes" are most usually spent inside the CNIB at the keyboard of a computer loaded with adaptive software, but today was really different.
Dave lives downtown, right in the concrete heart of the big city. He has come here from Jamaica, and has had very little opportunity to experience much of a natural Canadian setting. In fact, he rarely experiences much more than sidewalks and asphalt and that's been bothering me for a while, so today I finally had the opportunity to do something about it. As prearranged, we met at the CNIB this morning and drove off in my car, heading up to Kortright Conservation Centre. I picked that destination because unlike the parks within the city, it is not "manicured" so all the paths are truly footpaths through the woods.
We spent time before this trip, talking about vocabulary like "underfoot", as in the leaves make a carpet underfoot. We talked about some of the birds like the woodpecker and blue jays that live there. We talked about animals like the beaver and the coyote and some of their habits; all in preparation for him to get the most possible out of the trip.
When we got there today, things went even better than I could ever have imagined. First we stopped at the visitors' centre to pay the admission and I found myself face-to-face with a former teaching colleague of mine. She went out of her way to bring out from the back room all sorts of special items for Dave to handle. The list included a stuffed owl and an opossum, as well as the pelts of a beaver, a raccoon, and a fox. She had a swatch of black bear hide with its thick, thick fur and the tail of a beaver, too. She also had recordings of the calls of a chickadee, blue jay and cardinal.
After all that , we headed out into the woods. We walked for two hours. He felt moss and the old weathered split-rail fencing beside some of the trail. He felt tall pine trunks and knobbly old sugar maples. We climbed over a huge branch that had fallen across the trail at one point and made our way down to the river, where we tossed in stones and fallen branches to hear the splash and gauge thereby how close the river was to us.
We stopped and just listened to the quiet. As Dave said, he "never hears that sound in the city". We heard blue jays calling and chickadees singing. At one bend in the trail, we arrived at the same time as a white-tail doe. She stopped and we did, too. She looked at us for a minute and in spite of my voice raised in the excitement of telling Dave about the beautiful creature just feet away from us, she didn't run. In fact, she daintily and gracefully made her way across the trail and disappeared among the trees. We felt the sun warm on our faces and the breeze cool at our backs and both agreed we had a wonderful time.
Before we left, we returned to the centre to tell my friend that we had seen the deer and she hurried off to bring out something else for us. This turned out to be several deer antlers. She explained to Dave how the deer shed them each fall and how the centre staff collect them to show to visiting school groups. She explained too about the bucks using their antlers to "duel".
Dave had a morning truly filled with learning. We stopped for some late lunch on our way back into the city and as we ate, we listed words from the morning's adventure that Dave will use in his homework. His assignment is to write a sentence for each word, and we've done that kind of list before, but never with vocabulary gathered in such an interesting, hands-on way before.

I feel so good tonight!