Gratitude for Childhood

In later years Fr. Solanus often reminisced in letters to the family about their happy days of childhood. He always gave thanks to God for their good parents and their dear family. In a letter to his brother Maurice in 1946, he paints a scene of those childhood days:

When we think of the blessings of the past, since we went berry picking and picking hops and nuts and digging ginseng—when the “old field” was all we had open and the prairie chickens used to stage a picture like that of the first Paradise in the morning sun as they shook the dew from the great oaks…I have never seen a picture in Bible history or elsewhere so nearly like an earthly paradise as I remember that scenery to be—with deer in twos and threes and more stopping on the hillside or valleys to gaze at what we might be doing. No doubt what heightened the appreciation of those days was our innocence—and how the hawks were wont—as we would play on the grass stopping to watch them—to circle around and around in their upward flight. They seemed to me as they circled to the clouds to invite us to strive with them to get to heaven.

—from the book Gratitude and Grit: The Life of Blessed Solanus Casey,
by Brother Leo Wollenweber, OFM Cap, page 5