One of the advantages of growing up outdoors is that memories closely associated with play, free time, and the limitless prospect of youth return to you with every new season throughout the rest of your life.

There was a time when children loathed being indoors. That’s where homework, the list of chores, and parental supervision confined the winding and wide impulses of young life to the straight and narrow. The goal among kids in my old neighborhood was to get out early and stay out late. Because we were pretty successful at this, we were exposed for hours of every day in every season to the natural world. We weren’t taking notes, but we were taking it all in.

So a few weeks ago when I heard the call of a red-winged blackbird for the first time this spring, it registered more as a memory than as a bird song. The memory was of a stretch of road on a summer day halfway to the distant last house on my paper route, overlooking the rotting wood walls of a long-abandoned outdoor hockey rink collapsing into a marsh. That was 45 years ago; the marsh would completely swallow the rink in just a few more years. The rink ruins were disappearing into thickets of cattails populated largely by red-winged blackbirds.