Brave hunter

This morning my cat, Dodger, was full of passion. I sat on the steps near the staircase landing, my toes hanging over the edge, and he rubbed against them m'yowww'ing at me. The more I scratched him the more he turned to give me tiny love bites. He was so full of sensuous catness. The roiling and rubbing and nipping at my toes and fingers.  Harry came out of the bathroom and that cat rushed to the corner of the railing and pushed his head through, a whoosh of passion rushing over him towards his boy. "Pet me! Rub me! I looooove you!" he seemed to say.

A little while later I found him here:

curled up on a sleeping bag on the floor of my bedroom (Toby had slept there the night before).

A little while after that I found a BIG dead mouse smack in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Aha.

More like, proud brave kitty, home from the kill. (Although, I will admit the mouse seemed almost flattened on one side and quite dead...not sure if Dodger did it. But he was oh so proud all the same!)

There's nothing like battle to turn on the passions.

:: right now ::

Maurice was impressed with the size of the onions at our local farmer's market.

 
right now I am...

:: enjoying  getting to know our 15 year old foreign exchange student, Maurice, who is staying with us this month. He is a delight: bright, witty, enthusiastic, willing, and open. His English is excellent and he loves video games! What more could our family ask for?

:: basking  in the sweet afterglow of two teen boys returned from a week of meditating and getting real with themselves. The conversations we've had...aaaahhh...sweet!

:: watching  said boys turning into spectacular young men.

:: digging  into some serious creative sewing using the book Do-It-Yourself Clothing Design by Cal Patch. My first attempts last week (with A-line skirts) turned out beautifully and I can't wait to get started on the second project!

:: gathering  food to make our 3rd of July picnic. We have a glorious down-homey celebration here in town the night before the big day. We'll be showing Maurice the Big American Holiday, Sebastopol-style!

:: feeling  the gratitude for a bountiful life, a beautiful place to live in, and much, much love around me every day!

weeds in the garden

I was almost going to talk about the weather. And how the unexpected warmth we're having makes me feel so guilty. A guilty pleasure to be so warm and dry in February.

I was almost going to talk about my unfinished knitting projects and how pointless warm wool shawls seem when the skies are clear blue and the breeze is so calming.

But, when I looked out over the rail of our deck, scanning our vegetable garden the other day, I decided I wanted to talk about weeds.

The garden is in complete disarray. A jungle. Thistles and grass and who-knows-what else. You can't even see the gopher piles for the weeds that have accumulated. It looks like such a huge job to address that, and frankly, I've avoided it completely for months.

Last summer our garden became a war zone. Us against the deer. The deer won. We ultimately gave up, 45 tomato plants down. Sometimes it's easier to admit defeat and shop at the farmers market than it is to feed the local deer population.

In some ways I enjoyed the farmers market more. The selection, the interactions with the farmers. The great coffee. Holding my husband's hand as we stroll the lanes. The bounty we bring home each time we go. I really love the summer farmers market. And it's definitely less back-breaking.

I've avoided dealing with our garden since July. But, this morning I decided it was time to pick some arugula for our salad. Arugula is a weed. I will admit I did pay for the arugula seeds at one point in the past, but now it is a weed just like the thistle plants that cover the beds and walkways. The difference is that I love to eat arugula and it doesn't hurt to touch it. You can even eat the flowers, or pick them and put them in an old vase on the counter. Arugula's spicy-peppery-woodsy taste is perfect with lemon and olive oil, maybe a little anchovy and garlic, too. Tastes like Italy to me.

I lived in Florence back in 1985-86 (with my mom and brother) and had an Italian boyfriend. His mama kept a little spade in his glove compartment so that if he was driving her around the countryside and she happened to see some delectable greens on the side of the road, she could easily pick them for their dinner.

"Ah, Mario! Ferma la macchina! Vedo la rucola laggiu`!" "Ah, Mario! Stop the car! I see some arugula over there!" (I'll admit Google Translate helped me with that. My Italian was probably never quite so good.)

My mom and I had never eaten such tasty greens before. The stuff we now refer to as "yuppy chow," the mixed baby greens we can get at just about any market, was unheard of in the States and we'd never had such spicy lettuce as arugula. I used to laugh at the bowl of weeds we were enjoying every night at dinner.

But in my garden this morning, as I braved the jungle of spikes and spiderwebs, I was pretty satisfied to gather something as nourishing as weeds in my basket. I picked some borage flowers too. They're the most beautiful periwinkle blue color, they have a light sweet-nutty flavor and, yes, borage is a weed as well. It's rampant in my garden. And I found a little rosemary hiding in a couple of old pots. It never even got planted properly, but it's surviving, none the less.

I was thinking about waxing rhapsodic about the Weeds we encounter in Life, the Weeds in My Life. How lovely it is to find the beauty in something as common as a lowly weed. One day, perhaps.

But for today I will leave it at arugula and borage and go whip up some lemon-garlic dressing.

some spiders never learn

I found this web this morning, strung between the handles of the manure wheelbarrow and the green bin. Same as two days ago. So beautiful with the beads of dew strung across each rib. Toby and I admired it for a while and then we unhinged it...just like the last time...gently.

The pasture must get cleaned.

But this time I made sure to leave the wheelbarrow far from the green bin. I hate to waste a spider's efforts, even if she doesn't learn.

fragile

I came across this beautiful spider's web this morning when I was down at the pasture. It was strung so perfectly between the handles of the manure wheelbarrow and the green waste bin.

I needed to go clean the pasture, so I had to move the wheelbarrow. But the beauty and fragility and amazing strength and commitment of this spider's web made me pause.

Things are never black and white. People are rarely only fragile or only strong. Sometimes we pour ourselves into an endeavor and yet we find in the end we've chosen the wrong place or time or moment for it. Life is full of contradictions. Doesn't a spider's web capture that perfectly?

Scooping up manure is my meditation these days. There's something about the fog, the quiet of the country, the animals quietly munching on their hay. There's something meditative in the repetitive action of scoop, lift, heave, scoop, lift, heave. I do some good thinking out there.

But first I had to deal with the web. There really wasn't a choice. Silly spider, didn't she know I was going to have to move the wheelbarrow? What a choice...to construct her net between two transient objects.

I really didn't want to destroy that beautiful web. So, I moved the wheelbarrow slowly and slowly the web unhinged from the handles. Ultimately, it draped down from the green bin, useless, broken. The spider, luckily, was nowhere to be seen, so hopefully she did not witness the destruction.

I've been caught in a sticky web of conflict these days with some people in my life. Hurt feelings, silences, tears and rage. It's so easy to make blanket assumptions about people and to forget how complex they can be. It's so easy to destroy something beautiful, something that took much effort to build. It's also so easy to spiral down and down into a pit of anger, crushing the forward progress you've already made. Out in the pasture, my thoughts kept spiraling to a conversation I recently had and the things I wished I'd said and the things I'm relieved I didn't say. My anger bubbled up and my heaves of manure got pretty rough.

I stopped and breathed deeply and shook my head to clear it. My heart was racing. Again.

If we storm through, without taking in that quiet, without those moments of meditation, we're sure to cause damage. What I want now is to move through this, to carefully disconnect the sticky web, gently put it aside, yes broken, but gently, and move on through.

For some reason though, right now it seems to be about the destruction. I wonder when we'll get to heal?

today

Ben with Tess the day she arrived.

Today I am:

{blue} The morning feeding out in the pasture felt huge and empty without my girl Tess. It's impossible to not be reminded of her in every little thing. In time I know this will pass. But for now I am aching.

{quiet} Boys still sleeping, heavy fog outside. Weed is no longer calling for his girl. Even the birds are quiet this morning.

{planning} A long list of sewing and knitting projects ahead. Organizing my craft areas (again). A workshop I'll be teaching for new homeschoolers at the HSC conference one week from this morning.

{exhausted} From days of crying and saying good bye to my horse.

{expectant} Picking up my little one (not so little, I'll admit) from a week at camp. I'm expecting big smiles and lots of dirt!

She earned her wings

Today I said good bye to my girl, Tess. We had two and half sweet years together, but they were two and a half years of pain and discomfort for her and anguish for me. Last week I made the difficult decision to end her life before she got to the point of complete agony. Some have told me it was the brave thing to do, I just know that hard as it was for me, it was right.

Tess came to me at age 16 with a long history of hard labor behind her. In her 19 years she was a rodeo horse, a pack horse, a dude horse, and my horse. For me, she was my very first horse after over 40 years of wishing and dreaming of having one. For me, she was my girl...the only other girl on Three Boys Farm. She was sweet and calm and expressive. She'd say hi to me every morning when I came down to feed her her breakfast. She'd rub my arm with her lip when I massaged her back. She'd blow warm air onto my face when she sniffed at me to say hello.

I could tell you the whole long story about what was wrong with her and how these past two and a half years were mostly spent in search of the treatment that would heal her poor feet. But it's technical and honestly, I don't have the energy to do it. What I want to tell you is that having her in my life was a blessing and I am only regretful that she had to live so long with so much pain.

Tess tolerated the donkeys, but she loved our old guy Weed, our gentleman border horse who came to live with us two winters ago specifically to keep each other company. They fell in love over a fence and spent the last two years like an old married couple. Every evening I'd let him out of his side pasture (where he was fed his high calorie diet) and he'd romp into the main pasture (where she'd eat her low carb diet), go straight to his girl and usher her into the barn shed for the evening. "Go home, Woman," you could practically hear him say. They were both chestnut quarter horses (though she was a papered Appaloosa...however without any spots!) and they looked like bookends. He would move her around the pasture whenever he wanted...go here, go there...he was her boss.

Tonight he walks the pasture calling and calling for her.

It breaks my heart to hear him.

We'll all adjust, Weed will adjust, but it will take time. Weed will remember the donkeys are there (he seems entertained by them) and will bond more, maybe even usher them into the shed, if they'll listen. I'll miss my girl every morning when I go out to feed and clean. I'll miss her whinny and her soft sweet hay smelling breath, her dark copper coat and her beautiful long tail that swept the ground. I'll miss seeing my horse, the one I always wanted, when I look out my window. But I'll be comforted in knowing it never got to the point where her feet hurt so much she couldn't get up. That is a good thing.

Tess earned her Pegasus wings. She worked so hard in her life and she endured a lot. Our two and half years together were a peaceful end to that life. 

(A big thank you to Mark and Joanna for being right there with me at the end...and to all my friends and my sister, Mara, for checking in with me and making sure I was ok. I love you all!)

Farewell, Oh Beautiful Swing Tree

A few weeks ago during a tremendous storm we lost our beloved swing tree.

The enormous old twisted oak that was the anchor for our new home, on whose swing I first fell in love with our property, silently gave up the fight. She had been unwell for a while now and we'd cut the swing's ropes a couple years ago to prevent a terrible accident from happening. She fell down over our pasture fences in the middle of the night, didn't even wake us up. Though Mark and Harry have sawn up much of her limbs and branches, her huge trunk still lies across a part of our field and when I look at that fallen tree I grieve her loss. We designed our house around her architecture, we watched her leaves bud out each March in fuzzy pink new growth, we enjoyed the screen she gave us from the road when popping in our hot tub on the deck, and the shade she gave the equines in summer.

In honor of the tree I am remembering one of my favorite books from childhood: A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry. And, I am posting, below, a piece I wrote eight years ago about our decision to move up here to Sonoma county. Our beloved swing tree figures in essentially, at the very end...so read it all!

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Blame it on Cooperstown

You’re not sure if it’s the stretch of white board fence, the old white clapboard house, or the verdant green lawn shaded by trees, but your eyes are pulled over to that little photograph in the back of the magazine. You are ruefully perusing the section they have every issue that advertises old, sometimes ancient by your California-girl standards, houses for sale across the country. This one has definitely caught your eye. “Horse Lover’s Fancy” it reads. “7 acres of beautiful countryside, lovely 5 bedroom home, plus carriage house and 8 stall stable. Excellent condition.” There’s more, but you speed through the details. You’ve already peeked at the price. You can barely buy a shack where you live for that.

You sit back and sigh. There you are, tucked away in your comfortable Northern California neighborhood, each home within spitting distance of its neighbor. Your eyes wander back to the ad. “Near Cooperstown, NY.” You take a quick look at mapquest.com to check out the exact location of the city of Cooperstown in the state of New York. Far north. Not even close enough to the in-laws to justify a cross-country address change.

Whoa! What was that? Here you are innocently reading the ads, like they’re open houses on a Sunday afternoon. (Just because you like to look doesn’t mean you’re going to buy, does it?) And suddenly you’re planning, actually looking for a rationale to move. To Cooperstown, NY.

It’s probably the horses. The possibility of horses. You’ve been a horse-fanatic from the age of 3, but never did convince your parents to buy you one. Living in urban Los Angeles didn’t help, not exactly horse country. And even though your knees hurt every time you’ve ridden in the past ten years, having a horse of your own isn’t a fantasy you’re prepared to give up just yet. Even at 40.

Maybe it’s the seven acres. That’s a lot of land. You can’t even picture seven acres if you tried. Your mind drifts out of the office, down the stairs and into the bedrooms of your three sons. Lately, you think, lately life has been loud and chaotic here in your snug house in your snug neighborhood. Your mind flashes to the postage stamp-sized brick patio you knew would never be enough. Three boys need a place to run at full speed. Like an expanse of lawn. Three boys need some trees to climb. And maybe their mom needs a horse. Or eight.

You plot driving directions from Cooperstown, NY to the Long Island house your in-laws have lived in since before your husband was born. Maybe it’s not so far.

Later that night you casually ask your husband, “How far is Cooperstown from your folks?” wanting some verification that it’s just too far. Some really good reason to abandon this fantasy. “What’s it like?” you ask. He laughs, and describes winter in Cooperstown. Snow, piles of it. Weeks and months of it. You can barely imagine that much snow. At the high school you went to in Southern California, you could take surfing for P.E.

But that vision won’t go away. The next day you find the website dedicated to the sale of “Horse Lover’s Fancy”. Just for the fun of it you search their other listings and find yourself gazing at a ranch in northern Montana, copper-colored grasslands with a view of snow-covered mountains. And then there’s the home in southern Oregon on 40 acres (why dream small?) with miles of trails already groomed for you and your horses.

A visit to your therapist feels like the thing to kick this tickle-that-feels-like-an-obsession-brewing out the door. But when you mention “I’ve been dreaming about moving to the country,” she says “Go with it,” and you go deeper and uncover some visions you have about your sons, about the over-stimulation that comes with city living, about how you gave up on the big backyard when you were looking for the bigger house because big yards are just hard to come by in the city. And you talk about your husband, now one-year unemployed, a casualty of the dot-bomb era. Even though you were the one who convinced him to stay home and enjoy a slower pace for a while, you’ve been worried about the rut he’s gotten into, the amount of time he spends on computer games, and the grayness that seems to be hovering around him like an aura.

At the end of the session your therapist says, “Go with it,” again. So you return home thinking about moving to the country.

When your husband asks how your session went (he does that more now that he’s in therapy, too) he’s pretty surprised that you didn’t talk about him and the fight you had the other day about your sex life, or your lack of sex life. He’s shocked, really, when he hears what you talked about and he even looks a little worried. He knows what you can be like when you get an idea in your head.

And, like a bull dog you persist. Later that night in bed you have a long talk about this fantasy and he says, “I’ll look into it with you, but I’ll tell you right now I’m not moving.” The first part of his statement is really a victory and you know that. Before this year off and the time he’s had for his own evolution (therapy) he never would have entertained even thinking about something that scared him like moving. You remind him that when you moved into your current house he said, “The next time I move is in an urn,” and you both laugh. You, nervously.

Calendar pages fly off the wall. Hours spent doing research on the internet and in books and magazines. You love a project like this. Ordinarily, you do this for trips, but this adventure is more than just looking for motels, restaurants and museums, you’re looking for schools, community organizations, and local newspapers. Together the two of you make lists of pros and cons of moving and staying. Together you name the things you need and the things you want. Need: Good schools. Want: Good politics. Need: Jewish community (three bar mitzvahs are on the horizon). Want: Good produce. There’s even a list of what you can’t abide: Rednecks. Skinheads. Airports three hours away.

You notice he’s gotten interested. He’s been doing some surfing, too. Eyeing pieces of land in the Sierra foothills. And then he suddenly bites onto the concept of building the house himself. He’s an engineer, he knows his hammers from his rat tail files. He has a workshop in the garage that he never gets to use because it’s too cramped and there’s no room to spread out. He did contracting work in college. He’s a fine carpenter. Your favorite piece of furniture in your whole house is the big kitchen table he made from a length of bowling alley. He can do the electrical and plumbing, too. Loves that stuff, in fact.

All of a sudden, this adventure is taking shape. You can feel the movement and you no longer feel that you are in control. The electricity that sparks between you is making you stronger. The fantasy becomes a project and the project is driving you.

The worries arrive just about then. The questions and regrets. You start a new ritual: the listing of the things you’ll miss. Walking to school, your friends, short drives to the market, the preschool you love. And suddenly the house you live in is perfect, the city you live in is perfect and the friends you felt were only acquaintances are professing their love and admiration for you. Your nine-year-old has a teacher who completely understands him. Your business is picking up. Everything seems to be gelling. How can you entertain the idea of moving away from all this?

The more people you tell about what you’re contemplating, the more their responses make you question your choice. You never knew how many people harbored dreams of moving to the country. They live vicariously through you. But you weren’t someone with that long-term dream. You feel like a fraud. You want to stay put. One friend warns you about other friends of hers who had problems in their marriage, moved to the country, built a house, and when the house was done their marriage fell apart. Those stories make you think of all the people you know who had the problems, stayed in one place, and then their marriage fell apart.

You bring the boys up to the country to see different properties you’re considering and they always freak out. These wild, grassy, overgrown places intimidate them. The one who’s always adventuresome becomes clingy and the other ones get bored and whiny. “They have to learn how to play in the country,” someone says.

Then one day you find yourself swinging on a tree swing on a property in western Sonoma county. The swing has incredibly long ropes and when you swing you go out over a slope so far that at the farthest, highest point you’re probably about 20 feet up. It swings so slowly that you feel like you’re flying. You look around. The place is scruffy, there’s no verdant lawn, only an old vermin-infested mobile home and a rickety three story well tower. There’s no white rail fence, but lots of beautiful gnarled oaks, more than you can count. It’s only four acres, but that seems like plenty.

You sit back on the swing, hang on the prickly, lichen covered ropes. You pump your feet, push off from the ground as hard as you can. You want to go high, higher, higher. You fly. You fly on that swing and you can feel your chest expand. You breathe deep.

Your mind floats off the swing and up into the trees. Slowly it comes to you that it’s not about the horses anymore. It’s about living your life as big as you can.

summer garden expectations

I was so happy that we finished a project this year. I asked for a garden this spring and that's exactly what I got. I showed you pics of it back after I first planted in June and now it is in full festoon. We harvest the beans, nasturtiums, herbs and squash every other day and still more come. I get so much pleasure from the snaking vines, the scents, the 8 foot tall towers of sunflowers. But, I am not a perfectionist in the garden. I've read some books, looked over the seed packets, and still my garden has issues. I am trying to look at this in a philosophical way and I'm learning about expectations.

I almost gave up on the beans. I almost pulled them out at one point in early June. They looked so wilty, so weak. And then, finally, they took hold and VA-VA-VOOM! Holy Moly! My beans are insane producers. I love hunting for them, my hair falling in my eyes (ok, I hate that part), searching through the dense underbrush of bean foliage and nasturtium tangles. There are always a zillion hiding out deep in that forest. Every day I get a full bucket of beans and then I make a marinated bean salad that is perfect summer potluck fare. Garlic-Dijon-Champagne vinaigrette over green and yellow beans (recipe below). Marinate all day. No cooking necessary. Crunchy, garlicky goodness!

The Cinderella pumpkin plant, below, is immense, taking up a full 12 foot bed. One seed made that plant. One little seed. I am awed by that kind of power. There are so many shoots and new pumpkins that I'm constantly cutting it back, giving some hope and energy to the ones already developing. It's hard for me to prune my veggies. Must be something in that that I could psychoanalyze, but suffice it to say I hate to minimize potential harvests. What I've found though is that some plants need the sting of the pruning sheer to flourish. The tomatoes are covered with blossoms but no fruit has appeared. The tomatillos are covered with empty paper lanterns but are waiting for the juicy green fruits to fill them from the inside out. Now that I see the wasted opportunity, I actually appreciate the idea of gardening with some reserve, with some self-control. It's like having a good sense of boundaries with your kids. A little uncomfortable to have such hard edges sometimes, but it's what they need to feel safe and to ultimately flourish.

When I planted the garden I had a combination of anxiety and impatience. Anxiety that nothing would grow and no patience to wait the time necessary to fill the empty spaces in between the plants. (I used to be like that with boys too, hating to wait for them to call me back, anxious about the future and the past until I'd talked to them again. It's been a long time since I had to play those games, and luckily, the guy I eventually got didn't seem to mind at all when I called him back right after a date!) So I planted plants in those in between spaces and now there are corners of the garden that I believe are suffering from claustrophobia. The bush beans are starting to keel over and the squash has stopped producing new fruit.

Of course, it's late August and we've barely had a handful of long, warm days. The wind from the ocean blows every afternoon and often brings a heavy wave of fog with it. There are mushrooms sprouting in our brand new organic compost + soil mix. I water by hand, but I'm never sure which things need more and which less.

But I guess I'm feeling sort of Zen about it. I accept it as it is. No need to improve. Everyone's having issues with their tomato crop this year. You can see many of my tomato plants have keeled over, musty and skeletal. I am thinking about planting a winter garden soon. My palate down in the garden needs some cleaning out. Lettuce, winter squash, maybe some Brussel sprouts. Lots of possibilities.

Honestly, I'm just glad we got through our challenges this past spring and were able to put a garden together.

I think the garden is helping me to deal with dashed expectations. Or maybe I should say "altered". This is somewhat of a struggle for me, the perfectionist homeschooling mom. I hate to live with no expectations, and yet every time I make a to do list for the boys or pile up a stack of books and materials to share with them I find that their agenda is apparently different from mine.

This year I've been collecting books that seem to relate to this place, our land, Mother Earth, Northern California. I have a strong urge to get us up and out of the house and to focus our attention on the horizon as well as the minutae around us. On our table is An Everyday History of Somewhere and Keeping a Nature Journal, a stack of brand new spiral bound sketchbooks, and some watercolor pencils. I have dreams of hiking and spotting jackrabbits, sitting quietly and watching hawks and vultures soar overhead. Honestly, we could sit on our deck and do some of that, but I want us to venture out a bit as well. 

We homeschool year round, meaning we don't stop in June and start up in September, but we've been so out of kilter with Ben's surgeries, camp, camping trips and the like that we are not in a rhythm other than being in an unsatisfying one for me. I've started waking the boys up a bit earlier (9 am, not so early!) and writing a to do list of sorts on the white board the night before with things like: "Some things we may get to..." at the top. Maybe I'm not being forceful enough, but I've learned this much at least: If I force it they definitely don't show up!

I started reading An Everyday History to them yesterday. They were oh so resistant. For three days I'd written it on the white board and they'd avoided it in one fashion or another. But finally, I made them sit and listen yesterday. And guess what? They LOVED it. Toby has to figure out sitting quietly and focusing, but they all were intrigued by this lovely storyteller's history of the native peoples and animals of Northern California. Today I didn't need to coerce them at all and they even asked when we'd be reading it.

Tomorrow we head out to the annual California Homeschool Association conference in Sacramento. A weekend of fun, inspiration, and time in the pool with our friends. I haven't been looking forward to it nearly as much as in years past, but I'm starting to get excited. This year I'm volunteering in the exhibition hall rather than going to the lectures. This year I'll hang out more than soak up new information. I know more about what I want from our homeschooling life already six years into this life. But still, I'm trying not to have too many expectations, even low ones, of the weekend ahead, and yes, of the year ahead. I'm trying to let my garden teach me something. Having expectations often means having dashed ones.

That's such a negative, glass-half-empty kind of outlook, you know? Instead, I can choose to embrace the uncertainty, I can choose to wait with quiet patience and embrace the anxieties that go with not knowing what will come. I can also trust that if something fails, something else wonderful may fill the void left behind. I can do that, I'm sure.

Tomatoes are usually our favorite crop. But this year it's the beans.

Garlic-Dijon-Champagne Vinaigrette Beans

Ingredients:
Bucket o' beans
Nasturtium flowers for garnish
Dijon mustard
Champagne vinegar
Olive oil
Garlic
Salt and pepper

Trim beans. Place in a large ziplock plastic bag. In a bowl mix 1 T mustard, 1/2 c olive oil, 4 T vinegar, and 2 chopped cloves of garlic. Mix till they are fully incorporated. Pour into bag. Squeeze out air, zip closed. Toss until beans are covered with marinade. If there doesn't appear to be enough marinade, add more olive oil and vinegar. Marinate several hours in the fridge. Turn a couple times throughout the day.
To serve: Place in a serving bowl, pour marinade over beans, salt and pepper to taste and decorate with clean nasturtium flowers (I soak these in water to make sure the ants have evacuated!).

the honeymoon is over

Yesterday all hell broke loose here. (Will I never learn to inform the universe that I'm feeling great?)

1. The boys started fighting with each other.
2. My horse got gimpy again. VERY gimpy.
3. The house is a total and complete wreck (two camping trips in direct succession and a cross-country trip for surgery will do that to a house).
4. Ants have invaded and staked out territory in the kitchen.
5. Mark and I talked about finances.

Well, I suppose I could have avoided the grief of the last on the list, but unfortunately, it's the month before the "new" year starts (schooling-wise) and I have plans. Big plans. Plus, Toby and I spent a couple days at the beach with Mark's sister and brother-in-law, and that got me to thinking how much our family needs a beach vacation. A vacation that doesn't involve surgery, as Ben would say.

And so the cash register started to b-rr-rr-rr-ing!

But the first four on the list, well, those just got me off on the wrong foot. I was literally in tears about Tess, my horse, who was doing great (just benignly neglected of late) foot-wise. She was very gimpy last year, but I healed her. And now, she's worse than before. Sigh. It feels as if any left over energy I might have gets funneled into someone with a chronic medical condition. Double sigh.

The morning hit its peak, though, when Toby and Ben were fighting over the breakfast table. Ben was feeling sorry for himself and apparently Toby and I weren't showing enough sympathy for his plight. (I was already taxed, having spent a couple hours dealing with Tess and calling various people who might have some insight and come to my aid.)

"I am feeling terrible about my life because of all the things I can't do!" he grumped.
"Oh, what things can't you do?" I asked, definitely not showing my usual compassion.
"Well, bungee jumping and sky diving," he said.
"You can do those when the rod comes out," I said.
"When I'm 19! I have to wait until I'm 19!" he said.
"How many people do you know who sky dive and bungee jump before they are 19? You'll just have to wait!" I wasn't getting any points for best mom here.

The conversation stopped but he glared at us. I returned to the reason for our raised voices: he had been calling Toby "stupid."

"Maybe you're not in the right frame of mind to go visit your friends today," I warned. Plans had already been made with Victor and Alex, two of Ben's favorite buds.
"No! You can't cancel that!" he and Toby shrieked together.

And then Toby burst into tears.
"Please don't cancel that!" he cried.
"Why are you crying, Toby?" Ben asked. "They aren't even your friends."
"Because," sob, sob, sob, "I just want you to have fun!" sob, sob, sob.
"But why are you crying about it?" Ben asked again, clueless.

"Because," Toby choked out, "I'm a mensch and mensches care more about other people than they do about themseeeeeeeellllllvvvves!" Oh boy! It was quite the moment, I can tell you.

Ben's eyes got pretty wide at that point, awareness dawning. Things calmed down. Apparently, Toby had justified himself and Ben apologized for his snarkiness. Moments later we rallied to get the car packed up for the day.

Suddenly, sobs rang out again. Ben and Toby had collided and Ben's back, specifically the exact spot where his adjustable growing rod attaches to his ribs, was in the epicenter of the collision.

Ben cried. And then, Toby cried. I stood and held one boy under each arm, patting them gently. "Ok, guys, it's gonna be ok," I said.

With that kind of morning, who needs nightmares?

Catching up

Foggy summer morning in our new garden.

I would have to agree with my friend Sarah who said recently that the longer you stay away from your journal the harder it is to return to it. I have definitely been remiss with this blog but life has a way of getting in the way. I have been overwhelmed by the minutiae, and unable to find enough time to gather my thoughts, cull through them, and focus on this task.

Truth be told, the main reason I didn’t write a post just after Jasmine’s wedding was that the only thing I could really talk about was slugs. Yes, slugs. SLUGS. With all the wet weather and then the warmth, the slug population in our area has skyrocketed and there are slugs everywhere. In the garden, on the front porch, all over the hay barn, on the wheelbarrow, inside the grain bin, inside the grain bag.

There were so many all over the hay barn, that I adjusted how I dressed for the task of feeding the animals every morning: cowboy hat pulled snuggly down to my ears, flannel shirt buttoned up to my neck, collar up, even as the weather warmed up. The thought of one of those slugs being shaken loose and falling onto my head and down into my clothes almost kept me from the job. They are baby slugs or a small variety, but their tininess doesn’t make them less disgusting to me. People keep saying, “Too bad you don’t have chickens” but if I did I’d then have to face the fact that chickens eat slugs and then I eat their eggs…better not to know.

Slugs on the outside of the hay barn as seen from the inside.

Above L, the hay barn. Above R, slugs as seen on the outside of the barn.

It offended me to follow such a pretty post with a post about slugs. But for a bit, that was all I could think about. So I didn’t write.

Almost three weeks later the slug fest is pretty much over and I feel that there’s enough space between the slugs and Jasmine’s wedding to proceed.

The slugs (guess I am not quite done) have been ravaging my garden as well. Despite the copper tape edging all of my raised beds and the saucers of beer that I’ve put out, there are nibbles taken out of almost every leaf and some crops have had a hard time overcoming their place in the late night buffet. The weather has changed enough that I think we’re getting ahead, the garden is bursting with new growth. I almost wrote “Maybe there’s enough for everyone” and then changed my mind. There’s not. I’m selfish about my garden. I want it all for us humans at Three Boys Farm. The tomatoes, the beans, the lettuce, the tomatillos, herbs, and nasturtiums. The pumpkins and cucumbers and squash. The flowers that the boys planted. I want it all for us! That’s why Mark and Harry built so many gorgeous gopher-proofed raised beds for me this year. No sharing! Once we start harvesting, if you’re human come on by. If you’re slug or gopher, this offer is not for you.

Summer is officially here. The camping trips, beach days, afternoons at the pool or the Russian River, and Fanwar (LARP: Live Action Role Play) events are filling the calendar. The boys sleep late while I go out to feed the animals and water the garden. I love this weather as I have always loved the beginning of summer, when you can really appreciate the change of seasons.

People ask me if we stop homeschooling for summer and I usually respond that our whole year looks more like most people’s summer vacations, so no, I don’t tell the kids, “It’s June. Stop learning.” and when September comes around, “It’s September. Start learning.” Our homeschool life IS learning. Wherever, whenever. We’re not gathering every morning to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the boys don’t sit in desks doing penmanship. There are no timed quizzes and there is no extra-credit busywork. By my bedside table are some new books that are inspiring me about science and nature journals, and one called Macbeth: for Kids to get us prepared up for the Sebastopol Shakespeare Festival next month. But no, we don’t stop for summer.

I saw some school kids the other day in town, a small gang of teens in cut-offs and tank tops, and they had the definite look of kids just set free from school. A wave of recognition swept over me, a sensation I remembered very distinctly, that feeling one has the first week of summer break. It’s pure freedom. No homework, no early morning bus rides. No pressure. I grew up in Santa Monica and those first weeks of summer were amazing because we’d grab our towels and hit the beach, just a few blocks from my home. This season was such a contrast to the rest of the year, not to mention the weeks preceding the last day of school/first day of summer break that had so much anticipation built in. The weather was warm and the ocean was calling to us.

My kids don’t have that definition in their lives even though our activities change during summer. Their lives have so much more freedom on a regular basis that they don’t chafe at the end of spring to be set loose. That makes our life different from a school-based life. Better in myriad ways, I believe, than it would be if we were sending them to school every day. But I still felt the nostalgia for the traditional when I saw those kids in town the other day.

Harry’s bags are packed and his hair is newly shorn for three weeks at Camp Tawonga. We’ll be taking him to the camp bus pickup tomorrow morning. This summer he’ll be an S-I-T, Specialist in Training, his ultimate goal is to be the arts and crafts counselor one day. We’ll miss him, but it will be a great experience for him and he has always loved Camp Tawonga. Toby will join him in a week, and is thrilled that his big brother will be a “counselor” while he’s there.

The rest of the summer holds three camping trips (two to Mendocino and one to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows), cooking camp for Ben at Sur la Table, and the Homeschool Association of California’s annual conference in Sacramento.

Oh, and a surgery for Ben.

Three weeks ago we took another x-ray of Ben’s spine and found that his curve has progressed to 27 degrees, up 12 degrees from the last x-ray. This is a sign of growth. As he grows the rod is holding his ribs down and so we need to get him to Shriners Philadelphia so Dr. Cahill can get in there and adjust it. Just a centimeter…or should I say, a WHOLE centimeter! We just got the surgical date (July 30) this week and have begun to make the arrangements. Ben and Mark will be going while I’m in Yosemite with the other guys. We had two choices of dates, July or early October and the latter just felt too far away with the amount of change we’d seen in 7 weeks. Also, Ben had already opted out of the Yosemite trip, so it wasn’t a real conflict for him. Well, on one level, anyways.

I called the Ritz-Carlton yesterday. It was just like I remembered. As soon as I said who I was (speaking to the general manager’s assistant) I was greeted with, “OH!! How is BEN?! Everyone is asking about him!!” Within minutes the wheels were in motion and a “superior” room was booked for us and I was arranging for our star to have a tour of the restaurant kitchen one of the days he’s there. Those folks are so incredible. They want to do anything to make Ben happy, it’s truly incredible. Ben and I were interviewed recently for the Philadelphia Inquirer about our stay there, since now the hotel has developed a special program called the Medical Concierge, to help people staying there who are in Philly for medical treatments. Ben’s quote is priceless (“They treated me like a god”), and his story was the lead story in the article. His picture (from my blog) graced the front page of the newspaper. If he was a rock star there before, he’s a mega star now. I’m sure he and Mark will really get the royal treatment.

That helps a bit, but this is Ben’s personal rollercoaster of emotions and he’s having a hard time of it. Just when he was feeling really good physically (running around and battling with foam swords at Fanwar events, and rolling and jumping into swimming pools), he’s facing down his demons again. July 30th is just around the corner, but it feels like February 15th was not so long ago. This surgery should be much less difficult, with fewer hours under anesthesia, only a day in the hospital, less pain, if all goes well. However, as much as he enjoys seeing his friends and fans and being pampered at the Ritz-Carlton, I think he’d trade it away in an instant to have what he calls a normal life. He’s had seven surgeries in his 12 years, with more to come, and that is bitter for him. For his mama, too.

If you’ve made it this far through my post, I will say thank you. And, I promise to try to keep up with my posts, even if it means following up beautiful and sweet with disgusting and slimy. This, is my life. I need to appreciate the definition!

This is where I live

I have been wanting to share with you some snapshots of my world. This is the first of two photo posts, giving you a little window into my life.

Welcome to my world

It occurs to me that you might look out the window on a morning like today's...rain pelting down, skies gray, temperatures low...and hug your mug of coffee a little closer to you thinking, "Sheesh, I really am not in the mood to brave this weather today!" or "Man, my commute is going to be a doosey..." or "Yuck. Too cold and wet. Gonna stay inside, make a fire, and read a good book."

Well, all's I can say is: Welcome to my world:

The girl....................................................and the boys.

Weed, Donkey Boy (aka Burrito) and Cassidy.

Tess. "OMG. That picture makes me look like a MOOSE!"

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I may prefer taking care of business during the spring and fall, but I do love my equines and my country life!