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?

bounty

We’ve been getting a weekly box of produce from a local farm since June. It’s an incredible bounty to absorb each Wednesday. Bags of greens, shiny cucumbers, fragrant apples, huge brown eggs. I love going to pick up our box at a neighbor’s front porch, stepping over a pair of tiny blue flip-flops and carefully avoiding tripping over the tricycles and scooters strewn across the floorboards. It’s a very country spot, down a gravel road, across from an apple orchard, a stack of produce boxes sits waiting right there in the shade. I open our box and walk back to the car, arms full of bags bursting with Mother Naturey goodness. Sometimes there’s so much I need to make two or three trips to the car. Sometimes, I come better prepared with sacks of my own to carry all the loose carrots, turnips, corn, beets, and onions.

The way summer is we’ve had several weeks where we barely could touch all the great food in the fridge what with camping trips and homeschool conferences to pull us away from our kitchen. A couple times we had a friend pick up the box instead so her family could enjoy it, but mostly we just bring it home hoping to eat it, save it or haul some of it along on our travels.

Oddly enough, our own vegetable garden was a complete failure this year. Deer have gotten in either over the fence or squeezing in past the gate at least three times eating our beans, lettuces, and tomatoes down to nubs. We replanted the beans and tomatoes at the beginning of the summer only to find them eaten up again and so we gave up on those crops. We’d planted over 30 of each and it was a real disappointment to walk away. At this point we have some zucchini (who doesn’t?) and a possibility of pumpkins in the fall, herbs, and some radicchio, I think. I have a sinking feeling every time I look over the deck railing down into the garden since I’m afraid of what I’ll find.

So our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box has given me an alternative happy farmer feeling.

What is required each week, however, is a certain amount of processing as soon as it all comes home. It’s a serious job and if I’m not feeling up to it, I stuff everything into the fridge and hope for the best. But, the reality is that the lettuces need to get washed, spun, torn and stored in a large bowl in the fridge, covered with a paper towel to absorb the moisture and plastic wrap. The root veggies need their green tops removed and to be bagged and put away. The onions need to be tossed in the pantry. And the cherry tomatoes and fruit need to get eaten! Fast! Otherwise they’ll be compost.

Last night, one day home from the biggest and final camping trip of the season, I cleaned out all the bins in the fridge and processed all the veggies we had. There were a few things hanging around past their due, a few that luckily lasted, and all the new goodies I’d picked up yesterday afternoon.

Besides a large bag of amazing compost material (looking on the bright side, of course), I was left with a huge bowl of lettuce, three full drawers of satsoi, spinach, cukes, scallions, parsley, basil, broccoli, turnips, and carrots. A bowl of Gravenstein apples sits on the counter. Red and gold beets roasted in the oven. My bedside table has three cookbooks on it (Local Flavors:Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets by Deborah Madison, From the Cook’s Garden: Recipes for Cooks Who Like to Garden, Gardeners who Like to Cook, and Everyone Who Wishes They Had a Garden by Ellen Ogden, and Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon)…I’m looking for some inspiration, something good and different for a bounty of sweet carrots and a large bag of spinach.

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!)

A month done and gone

A month has passed.
My oldest chick has returned to the nest, having stretched his wings and grown in ways that are immediately evident and ways we have yet to see. It was an amazing month for him full of new sights and experiences. I was warmed to see how well he knew himself in the face of new opportunities, how brave he was in undertaking new challenges, and I was also reminded that "no matter how far you go, there you are." He is who he is who he is. Just as I am, of course, but why is this lesson so hard to learn?

I hope you followed along on his blog, as this one was totally silent (sorry) and he has a wonderful writer's voice. This makes me extremely happy, chip off the old block and all that, but I so wish my dad were alive to read it, too. Harry's grandmas both loved it and drank it up daily. (It was wonderful to be so close to the action and he was faithful in getting posts out almost every day.) That helped to assuage their worries about our boy so far away in a big, scary city! (I can say it helped me, too!) But, his Papa Joel would have enjoyed the storyteller in his grandson and the adventurer in a new port. He was like that himself. And loved to live vicariously.

This past month I have had writer's block, I suppose. And the longer I go with no words on the page, the harder it is to encapsulate all that's passed. There have been many moments I've thought "Oh that'd make a wonderful blog post." But alas, I never got the words out.

During the month Toby went to camp again for two weeks by himself and had a blast. Toby is known for his happy nature and will have fun wherever he goes.

During the month Ben went to stay with Nana and then Cousin Ruthie and then several different wonderful friends. He cooked, baked, chatted, played games, chilled, meditated, played more games (and video games), watched fireworks, camped and LARPed. And that was only one week out of four!

During that month Mark and I went away for our "second honeymoon" as he so lovingly referred to it. Despite the fact that he had just thrown his back out moving hay bales and was in terrible pain, we still had a wonderful time at Rancho Pescadero. We relaxed and relaxed and relaxed. Jumped (okay, hobbled slllooowwly) into the pool, sat on our terraced deck and listened to the waves on the shore, watched the waves on the shore for that matter! It's the most relaxing I've done in, well, my whole life I think. And it was much needed. Mark also visited a chiropractor while we were there...a well recommended ex-pat surfing chiropractor who worked his magic on Mark a couple times. Finally, a couple weeks later Mark is feeling somewhat better. Sigh. We're getting old!

Summer moves on. More to tell later. Thanks for your patience!