savor

The play is finished and my people are home. 

After an entire day of elving (they are being so mysterious, leaving me...gasp!...alone for hours on end!), we ended the day sewing while listening to Dan read: part of  A Child's Christmas in Wales, Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory...so beautiful and sad. The beginning of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever to cheer us up a bit, nestled amongst cats and stitching away. 

These are my favorite bits of this season.

reading the fridge

I love reading peoples' fridges.  I have to say that I have never understood a clean, empty refrigerator door.  I won't judge you, but it might take me longer to get you... I would really love to have you come over to my kitchen and peruse the fridge while I make you something warm and tasty, but this will have to do.  Right now ours is a collection of drawings our house sitter made while we were gone this summer; lists of food I want to make for my family when they come after Christmas (juuuuust thinkin' ahead...); and old photos of some of the friends we got to see in Seattle...

Rica and the girls

one of the first photos taken of us, circa 1993

oh, so fuzzy...but we saw these two with their *own* babies this summer!!

I can't look at this photo of Maire and Finny without doubling over, laughing.
And there's one of Ani's famous portraits of me, which I treasure.

Oh, there is more. So much more. But that will have to do for now.  I have sprinkles to clean off the floor, frosting to chip off my kitchen table - gingerbread houses, you know - and two munchkins covered with face paints to usher to an art hang-out up the hill...

right now

I know I haven't finished up with our trip pictures, and I know you know there is a load of wedding up next, but we are transitioning into the next thing already and I'm needing to pause in the chronicles just long enough to say...Hi.  We're home.

So, today my oldest child, my twelve year old stepped foot inside a public school classroom for the first time.  Gasp! And she lived to giggle about it.  And yes, she is still eclectically unhomefreerangeschooling, it's just that this episode includes lockers and class bells and a morning art class in the best room in the building (sky-lights and shelves full of art supplies!). In Ohio you can partially enroll and take up to two classes and still be considered a homeschooler, so after talking about it for a year and a half, here she is, walking up the hill to the middle school every morning this fall.  I'll let you know how it goes...

I'm suffering from a bit of anti-climax after our awesome trip.  Ohio in August is muggy and hot and our house is dirty and cluttered and all of the bills are due.  You know the feeling?  It helped that friends stopped by for big hugs yesterday.  It helps that summer nights in Ohio are gorgeously loud and alive with insect chatter; I never realized how quiet the west is without the cicadas and crickets. It helped that Jen left me a pile of eggs to come home to and brought me homemade butter today. Ah, and a new recipe has me humming...thanks to my sister-in-law, who dug it out of an issue of Mary Jane's Farm, here is what I get to eat when my family orders our favorite pizzas that I can no longer eat, and I'm happy to report that it is delicious.

Cauliflower Pizza Crust (for one personal pizza)

1 head of cauliflower - wash, cut, and "rice" in the food processor

- roast on a pan at 425 for 10 minutes - cool - drain in a colander lined with a dish cloth and then squeeze out all of the liquid.

Mix with the following:

1/2 cup or so of grated parmesan cheese

1 egg

1 TBS seasoning - I used oregano and basil

salt & pepper

Smoosh it out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast for 20 minutes (or until brown).  Carefully flip it over by lying another piece of parchment and another pan over the crust and turning the whole thing over.  Peel the old parchment off (is this obvious?) and put in the oven for another 10 minutes.  Pile with toppings - tonight was pesto, goat ricotta, carmelized onions and cherry tomatoes OH MY GOODNESS - and pop back in to melt the cheese.

Voila, so delicious.  I think it would also make good flat bread for dipping, or maybe breadstick-like-things.   

I promise to deliver on the rest of the trip report; I just needed to pause and check in on Today.

home

Yes, yes, we are home from our 3 weeks away.  A week and a half ago I was watching the Wisconsin landscape slide by from my seat next to Dan, imagining the post I'd write when we got home, about how much easier it is to road trip with older kids.  Mostly we listen to stories - this trip was about Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis - and the girls draw and read to themselves.  I crochet or knit, trying to keep my eyes off the road in an effort to not add to the stress of the drive with my sudden gleeps and intakes of breath.  Sometimes it even looks like this:

But in the more real-world version, someone was complaining because the sun was in their eyes or the story wasn't loud enough or someone was poking them and there was construction on the road, and by the last (9-hour) day my fairytale post was dust.  We were so glad to get home.

Then we learned that the sump pump in our basement had broken, and the water rose to the point of floating our plastic tubs we were storing down there, overturning them and letting water in to soak old letters, photos, baby clothes...

It was heart-sinking. Overwhelming. 

We peeled apart sheets of letters after dismantling the soggy envelopes and hung them around the house and yard, hoping they would dry before Wednesday's thunderstorm.  Envelopes with my gramma's handwriting, years of letters from good friends, long before email, treasured letters from siblings, old scripts and playbills, notes from our spiritual warrior about our wedding ceremony, notes from the several weddings I have officiated at, postcards from our parents...

I kept thinking about people who lose their homes and everything in them.  Katrina, Sandy, the forest fires out west.  Bulldozers and soldiers - there are so many ways to destroy a history.  We pretty quickly regained perspective and just plowed on, saving what we could, laughing over some of the photos and sighing at how romantic we were in the early days.  Dan spent a summer in Alaska the year after we met, and there is no better way to really get to know someone than to read pages of their thoughts and their attempts to express their feelings to you. 

It has felt vulnerable having these words and memories on display while they dry.  I remember being that girl who loved that boy and these letters record the incredible highs and lows of a new relationship, beautiful and painful.  

But mostly there was a lot of laughing and marveling over how many friends we have had the good fortune to have made in our lives, and how many versions of "us" there have been, tracking back through friendships and addresses to trace each incarnation.

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I will finish off our trip another day; we are still transitioning home (does your family have to do that? Hours and hours of audio books, or three readings straight through of 600-page volume of the old comic Little Lulu?) and our lives are a bit off-track this week as we ramp up to the annual Silver Baby Cup golf tournament!!!!!  It means our friends-in-the-woods-who-live-in-Texas-right-now are here for the week and life as we know it is on hold.  It also is Dan's first week of teaching in his new position! Get this - his first class Monday morning was to freshmen, which means his was their first class of their university career!! How awesome is that - Dr. Dan as your first professor.  Wish we were all that lucky! He also turned forty this past week, which probably made looking through his past all the more poignant...He is a beautiful forty.  

really home.

Loading these photos, I found myself thinking really obvious thoughts like, wow, flowers are so incredible! And don't even get me started on insects!!!!!  Yeah, my thoughts run pretty deep these days, mostly towards the grateful and the content.  

My people came home in the early hours of this morning, tired but so happy to have ventured to Maine.  Dan had good news and bad news, which do you want? Um...well, it all turned out to be the same news: he lost the Silver Baby Cup Golf Championship by 2 strokes. Wow!! So, sad, because he almost got it, and good, because this year's champion is next year's host! Ha ha!! Dodged that bullet...Maybe we can figure out where we'll be next year first, and then go for the gold.

Things looked pretty much like Life around here today, at long, long last.  Ani and I walked to the garden to weed like mad-women (she is one mean weeder) and harvest some surprise onions, some wonky sweet carrots and a bowl full of jalapenos.  And that lovely basil.  

I realized while cooking some vegetable soup from some of these good garden veggies, that simply the smell of garlic and onions sauteeing makes me feel like I'm home.  I missed that.  And then there are the four new jars of things fermenting on my counter...

And the critters in the front yard, doing their amazing things...

And Rat-a-tat-Cat and The Wind in the Door and feeding the worms and a pile of library books and the inspired writing of a new story and the laundry and the puttering about, the making, the doing...

Home.

here

It was lovely having grandparents here last week, to enjoy summer days and a birthday and each others' company. 

 

One beautiful morning while Ani stayed home sick with Dan, we went to the garden for an hour of weeding. That's a lot of weeding for three adults and one child. It brought us leaps and bounds from where we were, thick in mugwort and johnson grass, to cleared pathways.

It was also just nice to be home. Nothing like going away for 10 days to make home feel sweeter, no matter where you've just been.

Thank you for coming to see us! We love you!

 

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Saturday evening we had a celebratory potluck for Eliza's birthday, and it was wacky and delicious and so much fun.  She wanted to play games, and our friends brought her a Mexican Loteria, which is basically bingo, in Spanish.  Dan had looked up some old classics and took the kids and a few adults across the street to the school to play on the grass there, and they ran like mad for hours.

Loteria!

What time is it, Mr. Wolf?

It is one of the things I love most about my husband - at any gathering, you will find that he is one of the very few adults who joins the kids, willing to jump into a game for a while, unwilling to let them have all the fun.

carrot cake! happy happy happy!

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And then there was Sunday; a day made for golf. And conversation. And coffee.

Lizard demonstrates the fancy new ball washer - "Par Aide"

I don't know - with a new bench and a ball washer, things are getting mighty fancy over there in the woods.

So, yes. Home.  Good. And next up is some more Ithaca...