When I was just a little girl, not much older than my daughter is now, I was allowed to stay up late during thunderstorms. Despite all the rain in Washington State, true T-storms were unusual. My mother and I would usually gather some cookies and milk (mint chocolate remains our favorite) and get cozy on the couch facing our big picture window in the living-room. I still remember the orange and yellow seventies style drapes we would hook back from the window, how we'd pull a blanket over our knees and settle in as if preparing to watch a movie. Then, when the thunder boomed and the lightening cracked, we'd scream and marvel.

My parents, and later my single mother, didn't own a TV until I was ten, so I didn't grow-up on new MTV, the Cosby Show, or even Sesame Street. What I had was thunderstorms, and books, and a big muddy backyard. I'm not sure if I'm a better person for it. I'm not particularly patient, and don't spend inordinate time contemplating nature, although I do seem to enjoy silence more than most of my friends. I'm also very close to my mother, who spent lots of patient time collecting caterpillars and building blanket forts when my brother and I were small. When I was two, she went back to work part-time, and soon thereafter began law school, but she always made space for us, even when it meant taking her lunch hour to pick me up from school so we could go out together.

These last two weeks in Flagstaff it's stormed almost every day, and when I hear the thunder, it makes me a little nostalgic for those childhood days and our attentiveness to something other than a screen. I worry sometimes, as I rush around getting ready for work while my daughter watches Barney, that she's missing something I was given. I guess the most I can do is remember to join her childlike attentiveness to the world whenever I'm able – and to turn off the TV most of the time. Intuitively, it seems important to get down on my knees to look at the green-striped beetle, to let her walk at her own pace through the woods, to turn-off all the lights and watch the lightening. I just hope someday she'll also feel she has a peaceful place inside her, even while she rushes to make school lunches while a toddler or two hangs from her leg.