When my husband’s job took us from the East Coast to California last summer, I didn’t realize our kids were going to experience horticulture shock.

    “There are so many trees here!” William yelled as we drove from the airport to our rental house.

“Whoa!” Jessie said when we opened the gate to our house and stepped into a sprawling, brilliantly hued garden. It was a far cry from our home in Boston, a brick townhouse lined on two sides by a concrete sidewalk and out back by our cobbled parking space—a.k.a., “the yard.”

It didn’t help that most of my childhood memories take place in the woods behind my family’s house in a coastal Connecticut town on a street called Old Hickory Lane. We were surrounded by woods and fields and streams. In summer, my friends and I caught salamanders and frogs and got our fair share of poison ivy. In winter, we ice-skated in the woods behind my friend Deana’s house, sitting in the enormous, hollowed-out trunk of a tree to put on our skates.

 My mother gardened and I learned how to plant and weed and know when the tomatoes were ripe for picking. And on Sunday afternoons my father and I walked up the street to feed carrots and sugar cubes to the neighbors’ horses. I always imagined my kids would grow up like I did.

Over time, Michael brought me around to the concept of raising our kids in the city, and shortly after our son, William, was born, we moved to Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We love our loud, bustling street, but in the back of my mind I’ve always wondered: Are our children missing something essential?

My fears seemed justified soon after we got to California and the screaming began:

“Help! Bug!”

“Help! There’s an ant on me!”

“Help! A spider’s going to kill me!”

    Daily our children made these chilling outcries, sometimes even calling them out in their sleep. At any given moment, they seemed to think some speck of a creature was about to bite into a meaty calf or sting a delicate forearm.

The first time I heard their screams, I ran to the back yard and found them crouched over the ground, studying the world’s tiniest, least threatening bug as if it were a deadly scorpion.

 “It’s just a bug,” I said. “It’s not as if you’ve never seen one before.”
They looked at me dumbly.

“Haven’t you?” I asked. “Seen a bug before?”

“What is it?” William asked.

Dear God, I thought. What have we done?

The next day, when they were screaming because a spider was standing in the middle of the garden path, I tried to teach them a coping mechanism that didn’t involve making my ears bleed.

“See, guys,” I said, waving my arms in front of me in a sweeping motion. “Just do this and say, ‘Shoo, Bug! Shoo, Bug!’”

But instead of shooing the spider, they leveled their eyes at me in their most perfect city-kid look—a steady, imperturbable stare that makes me feel simultaneously old and pathetic.

Then they walked around the spider they way they’ve learned to skirt perceived danger in our own neighborhood, eyes straight ahead, without speaking.

Just as they’ll make their own way in school, marriage (or not), and career, their childhood isn’t something I can predict or control. Their youth won’t be the concrete jungle of their father’s or the suburban idyll of mine. It will be a mixture—and something wholly their own.        
A few weeks into our California trip, I heard Jessie playing outside when she paused suddenly. I braced for her to scream: “Help! Ant going to bite me!” or “Bug!”

And a little voice inside me intoned its worried refrain: “Will nature always feel so foreign to them?”

But then she said something I’ve never heard anyone say before and when I heard it I let myself stop worrying. Summoning all the sass I like to think she learned back home on the mean streets of Boston and bringing it to bear in our mellow California Eden, she blurted out her own imperturbable version of “Shoo!”

In her calmest, big-girl voice, Jessie said, “Walk away, bug.”

Katherine Ozment is a Glam Family contributing editor and a freelance writer working on her first book. Her essays about motherhood have been widely published and can be found at www.katherineozment.com. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two kids.