Story is the leafy crown we weave to create a shared experience and connections to each other and to our place in the world. We tell stories of our day. We tell stories of the place we live and the places we visit. We tell stories about things we see and experiences we share. We tell stories of pure imagination. Story helps shape our voice and understanding. It gives us a mutually shared language to celebrate and provide comfort.

And yes, story has foundational underpinnings in language and social emotional development as well as every kind of scaffold and support for literacy and math — storytelling is deep and wide.

I found proof and pudding in the strength of story this past summer. We had a summer of snakes, but the story begins with the main snake — Grandmother Snake.

Each week, as new campers join us, we always begin with the Story of What Went Before. It’s a way to provide connection quickly to place and to adventure. In this case, our Story of What Went Before included the names the children had given to different destinations and the things they did or saw there. This story gives the children who are just joining context, while also giving those children returning from the week(s) before the opportunity to learn that they each played an important role.

In these short weeks, just as during the school year, I look for ways to instill a sense of well being, to discover a unique sense of self, to develop emotional self-regulation, and embrace self care. These qualities of the program can and have all been encapsulated and expressed through the practice of storytelling.

Over the course of weeks, we shared and built the Story of Grandmother Snake. By week four, there were enough snake contacts to really weave a wonderful, but also heartbreaking, tableau.

The thing is, by week four, I was in deep with the story because by then Grandmother Snake, her very self, made a spectacular cameo. As I told the story, I watched the children’s faces, as you do. There, there see that face? This child was waaaayyyy alarmed. His inner dialogue was ramping up fast. I asked him if he was worried about the possibility of seeing a snake.

I had to weave — quick, quick — new things into the story. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, weave “We won’t see any snakes,” because honestly, we already had a bunch of children who would ask for their money back if we didn’t see a snake (which p.s. we didn’t. Story will give you comfort in knowing, one day you will see a snake).

We are hardwired to fear snakes, I told him. We all get that same feeling when we see one. But our brains are also built to reason, imagine, and plan. The snake is also hardwired to fear us, but the snake already knows to RUN (or slither). We are a guaranteed danger. Using our brains, we know how to plan and move to protect ourselves AND even better to craft a world that is less stressful for the snake (please read the story below). I told him that when I am worried about something, I go to the creek and find a good worry stone. This worry stone gives me time to think, to reason, to imagine, to plan.

For the moment, he borrowed some comfort and confidence from this part of the story — a worry stone?!? that sounds like something — our brains can do all that. He got himself, along with the other campers, down to the creek. Once there, I found him and went looking for a good worry stone. We found several. I told him, and this is true in my mind, that there is a stone that is perfect for every person and for every worry. We tried out several. The one that fits your worry has the just-right indentations for finger, thumb, and palm. Holding the “one” reveals the “just-right.”

I know the power of story, coming and going. The following week, he told me that whenever he is worried he just picks up a worry stone and it takes care of itself. He told me this with the knowledge and skill that this was his very own story.

I didn’t tell it, he did.

Here is the What Went Before story I told;

We haven’t seen grandmother snake in so long. We worry she’s dead because she lived at the edge of the old stone bridge. For years, we would see her with her babies curled all around her. But the old stone bridge was torn down and a new one put up. The bank where she nested was torn away as part of the construction.

Still, we look for her.

The first week of camp, we found a teenager snake. Its belly wrapped, so tight, too tight, in plastic netting that is meant to hold down newly planted grass after construction. She hung, trapped by that netting above the water she’s meant to swim and hunt in. We thought she was dead, but then she moved. She struggled. We ran back up to the school to get a cutting tool to cut her loose. We did the best we could. We could only cut each end of the branch but the plastic still caught her around the belly.

Off the teenager snake swam. Her belly still wrapped in a belt of plastic. The stick, now cut in half, positioned like wings on each side of her swimming body.*

The next week, we saw the smallest baby snake dead on the edge of the stone bridge. We don’t know how it died. It was just dead. We made a stick raft and set that sailing to the Anacostia and sang to it on its way.

But then we got to thinking. If there was a teenager snake and a baby snake so close to the bridge — Was grandmother snake still there? Had she found a way to live there at the new stone bridge?

We decided to look.

We walked, step step step, along the creek’s bank looking in the grass for her nest.

We walked all the way to the stone bridge with no hint of grandmother snake.

One of the children pointed at a damsel fly drifting over a section of grass, I paused to take a photo and as I did, I heard grass shudder-shift. I checked my footing, my hand, the children behind me. I thought I was standing still . . . but

Suddenly . . .

A snake, surely our grandmother snake, flew out.

And I mean flew. She burst out, whole body hovering, for almost too long, over the water, and belly flopped into the creek. She swam away — so fast — towards the children building their own stone bridge — but she was so fast, so swift, we couldn’t truly see where she went.

We yelled a warning to the stone bridge builders, but would they hear us in time?

Note: I choose, in the Grandmother Snake story, to assign she/her to the snakes. I also choose they/their in other stories to express non-binary pronouns. The reason for this is the prevalence of he/him/his in Western European-sourced stories of nature and the natural world. In the sharing of this story, the camper is identified with he/him because those are the pronouns he shared at the time of the telling.

*at this point of the story (the snake swam away with the belt of plastic) the listeners asked, “Did it die?”

My response to this is that we are asking the wrong question. The question is actually, “Why is plastic netting more important than this snake’s life? We ask this because the snake most certainly and tragically died.”

And this is when the story listeners will become the storytellers. They call on all they know about the erosion the plastic netting is addressing, about the food supply chain, about where the water of this creek leads from creek to river to river to bay to ocean and all the animals this plastic would encounter along the way. So many things to tell and to know in heart and head.