Party for The Graveyard

At the beginning of the week we found out about a party being held last night for Neil Gaimon's (he wrote Coraline, among many other books) newest book - The Graveyard. We have been to this unique children's book store several times before, once for a rocking Harry Potter party, so we knew it would be worth it to drive in last night for this and we read as much of the book as possible during the week. The invitation asked that only those nine-years old and up attend as they planned to scare the life out of us. Gillen and Jesse wore frightening costumes but you'll have to take my word for it. I only have pictures of them with peeled back layers and with their sweet faces showing through.
I love that Gillen still gets scared. He didn't even go with Jesse and I on the dungeon horror walk. I think this shot caught the moment when his imagination got the better of him and he stepped out of the line.

I love a party that can provide a terrifying ghost walk, an eleven year old great lead singer:AND the possibility of reading books while you party:
The party was held in answer to a challenge put out by the author, Neil Gaimon, to independent booksellers. Whichever book store put on the greatest Graveyard party will be honored by a visit from Gaimon in December. I don't know how anyone could have surpassed Little Shop of Stories.

My Weekend in Boston

Though rain had been predicted, instead it was one of those perfect, soft May weekends, with Cherry trees, tulips and every other spring-thing in bloom. I got loads of city energy from so much people-watching and from seeing the buildings of my childhood. I also managed to appreciate the subway all day Friday, and then to be off of it before there was a serious wreck on it that evening.


Boston is so pretty.I took the subway from Logan airport to Boylston Street, near where my mother's ballet school used to be, and then walked to the Public Gardens. I saw the Swan Boats, the Frog Pond and the statues that had been part of my childhood from the time I was seven.

I ate at a cafe on Newbury Street. It was one I'd been to before, but with another name (both mine and that of the cafe).

Walking to the Boston Public Library, I saw that the building where we'd performed when I was with Boston Childrens Theater had now become an H&M clothing store.

In the middle of the giant Boston Public Library is a courtyard, with tables and a fountain. It feels like an Italian Piazza, without the good coffee and loud voices. I sat here for a while.
The sun moved in and highlighted the girl to the right of the fountain, and I thought of my childhood friend Ruth, and how we had shared a love of books, of writing and of our own unique whackiness, at Park School, at the library and at (what was then) Newbury Street's Harvard Bookstore Cafe. This girl looked so much like her.
Ruth couldn't make it to the reunion.

But, it was so great to stay with my first best friend - Sally Solomon - and to see so many others.

See how giddy I am? See what the old friends are thinking? "Barbara" really needs to get out of the boondocks more often...We all immediately slipped right back in synch., connecting as easily as we had back then. They all now know about unschooling. I learned a lot too. They remember lots of fantastic stories, even ones about my childhood home and family, that I had forgotten! I'm blaming it on moving around so much and not getting back in touch sooner. Or, I just live in the moment too effectively. Yeah, that's it.

It's nice to think that these memories were stored with old friends. Maybe I'll be able to hang on to a few of them now. Periodically, I'll have to record some here.There were other highlights :

- Going alone to a Coolidge Corner art house movie theater (where the popcorn was organic and the butter was real!) to see a film, "Every Little Step" about the making of A Chorus Line (a show that my mother and I loved and trudged through the blizzard of '78 snow to see).

- Sharing a Turkish brunch and deep conversation with my stepfather.

- Browsing through a great independent bookstore for an hour and then buying a book I've been waiting to find for months, that was now available in paperback - Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri.

This next one really needs it's own post. Remember the picture (you three regular readers ;) that I posted of myself in this post? The fireplace remains the same but everything else has evolved.
To be continued.

After days of rain,

vines burst forth,
the guys no longer slipped while shooting hoops,
and we were rewarded with an orchestra of color.

The massive rain had caused some turmoil at the farm as it washed away precious top soil. It kept me up for several nights, comforting storm-phobic Tuki-dog. There was a leak. There was some cabin fever.

Today, there was sun. Does looking at Wysteria, Dogwoods and Azaleas feel this way every spring?

Jesse found Wind in the Willows on his bookshelf today. After a few chapters he pronounced it "too poetic for his mood right now." : ) but not before I had read this:

Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.

It speaks to the way my yard made me feel today - especially the Wisteria. It is once again waking me up with its reinvention of purple. I want to memorize its softness, be just as vulnerable, remember that it isn't just this vine's mere two weeks of color that is impermanent. I want to notice the purple every day in my children. I want to see the moon in the sky in the daylight (even though I can't capture it very well for you here - it is there, floating an inch above the bowing Wisteria).

Random goodness in the rain

Jesse came into the kitchen, bouncing, asking us to guess what he just did.

"I blogged!" he announced, before we had a chance to guess. I read his post, a list of random things, and was inspired to do my own. We've had some heavy rain the past few days and lots of driving to do to get to violin and archery classes. These gray, tired days can hide the good stuff, if I'm not careful.

We watched the documentary about the wire walker who danced and played on a tiny cable strung between the twin towers in the 70's. Called simply Man on Wire, it just won the academy award for best documentary. It combines the wire walker's present day thoughts about his wire walking journey with home movies and media footage of he and his team back in the day. Philippe Petit's dream of making that World Trade Center walk began when he was a boy in a dentist's office, reading in a newspaper about the plans for the building of the towers. What power there is in a long-held dream, when accompanied by some crazy good friends and passionate preparation.

We finished reading The Island of the Blue Dolphins yesterday and watched Escape to Witch Mountain the other night. I remembered liking both a lot as a child. The book traveled better through time than the movie. Gillen has declared that it's his favorite book ever.

Having had a few weeks of lessons now, Jesse had been feeling frustrated that his instrument, the violin, sounded so drastically different from that he'd heard in the Manheim Steamroller concert. But yesterday both he and Gillen were feeling very musical and were awe-struck by their new ability to actually play something close to a song, not just notes.

All is well; I'm ready for spring.

Staying Close to Nature

Nicolas and the boys went to meet my father tonight at a Braves game.


I stayed home to catch up on stuff (as if that's possible) and to enjoy the quiet. Plus, the truth is, I am still a Red Sox fan and don't get so excited about the Braves.

I listened to Michael Pollan's book, In Defense of Food [yes, I did write down the wrong book title last night, if anyone is returning here. I am that unaware at times:>/ ], while I cleared out the kids' closets. I liked his Omnivore's Dilemma better, but that may because I had already heard a lot of what he is talking about in "Defense of Food" through the Weston Price information. One part of his message is - don't decide what to eat based upon the advise of the nutritionists (who so often are wrong - due to lots of factors that he talks about) but rather, pick your food based on the common sense of what your ancestors and you, knew/know to be true - lots of fruits and vegetables are a good thing, eat meat and dairy more sparingly, and savor your food rather than thinking of it as nothing but a source of fuel. Stay as close to the food's natural state as possible; avoid processed food.

I was so lucky to learn much of this from my mother-in-law, Helen, starting 15 years ago when I first met Nicolas. I had been one of those who avoided too much fat and thought that processed foods were fine if they had the right labels. I lost 20 pounds as a result of switching to organic food and quitting my low-fat diet.

But I know that those who read here may know all this. What I wanted to talk about today are my boys, and how inspired I am to trust nature (rather than the "experts") by watching them joyfully exploring and learning. They both woke up with lots of creative energy this morning. They each chose to write, right away, for at least an hour on the computers. They are both writing books. Gillen drew an Iris and finished his first crocheted bag to sell at the market.
Jesse made more cards for his game.The fact that they chose all of this was not unusual but was highlighted today by an unnatural learning experiment I tried last week, while helping Jesse with his project for the online "Road Less Traveled" science fair. The online fair was great (for them as well) despite my interference. And I once again learned about learning. They had both said that they wanted to write something for it on their blogs. Jesse wanted to write about pandas and Gillen wanted to write about why "organic" is better. Great. Except that when I was in the library that week, helping Jesse look for a kids' cookbook, I happened upon the science fair book section (who knew), and all that expert advise seemed way better than my common sense. I checked out the whole section. I'd never been to a science fair. The experiments, and the book covers, were so exciting. I looked through them with Jesse and encouraged him to choose one. His old love of dinosaurs and of everything that goes with that period prompted him to choose a puzzle of all of the continents that would show how they might have fit together when they were Pangea. Sounded fun. I got the big map of the world off of the wall and gave him tracing paper and a pencil. It was while I was preparing dinner for those visiting documentary film makers last week that he chose to do the tracing. He kept running into the kitchen, interrupting whatever conversation was happening with a rushed "excuse me, but you won't believe it!" And then he would describe to me what he had figured out about which continents had the same shorelines.

Days later, I was showing him how to transfer the tracings to white paper (since I have only dark cardboard that won't show his pencil marks if he tries to transfer the continents onto it). After just one continent, he was mooooaning. I helped him, but he continued with dramatic whimpering. I was also helping Gillen who was happily searching online for links to add to his project. Jesse's project had become a chore, busy work, a list of things still to do to finish the instructions in the hallowed science fair book. He had already experienced the exciting moments of seeing the connections, days ago. I was too busy knocking things off my list to just let it be. I finished the tracing and the cutting and he sat down with the paper continents to try to make a puzzle. Nothing connected. Not the pieces and not the mental light bulbs.

Finally, I stopped running around and sat down. We looked at the wall map and talked. It was fun. We went off on tangents about why there are boundaries between places, why if Europe is so small it "conquered" so much of the world, where we want to visit, or live someday, on this big planet of ours. I realized how sidetracked I had gotten, from what I know to be true, by some higher science fair experiment authority. I also saw how miserable I would be at the assigned homework thing, if they were in school.

"By nature people are learning animals. Birds fly; fish swim; humans think and learn. Therefore, we do not need to motivate children into learning by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do - and all we need to do - is to give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for, listen respectfully when they feel like talking, and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest." John Holt

Happy Earth Day.

Conscious of Their Roots

Southern roots, that is. This weekend, we got to visit with two talented Georgia natives who have had success in their fields and are grounded in a genuine concern for what matters.

As I mentioned in the last post, at the GO conference we got to eat dinner with Janisse Ray, winner of several book awards, whose poetic, wry memoirs have moved me deeply. She grew up in a small town in the south from which she couldn't wait to get away. She became an environmentalist and a writer, living as far away as Montana, before she felt pulled home to reconnect with her roots. Her literary non-fiction and activism has helped to bring more attention to the plight of her beloved Long-Leaf Pine and to other endangered plant and animal species. If I had my copies of her books, I would be quoting from them in order to let her writing inspire you to immediately put her on your list of writers to read. But as with my Annie Lamott and Kingsolver books, I've lent them to friends. My favorite was Wild Card Quilt but Ecology of a Southern Cracker is also laugh and cry out loud wonderful, and got more acclaim. I loved finding out the other night that she too was inspired to change the way she eats by the Weston Price diet and that her son goes to my alma-mater. It was wonderful to hear her read her poem and to talk about literary non-fiction. I even talked about one day maybe writing it myself (though then I'd have to write well, with a "literary" bent rather than a neurotic, improv., stream-of-consciousness-that-serves-as-my-therapy-bent, so maybe later).

The other southern-born celebrity of our weekend was Kyle Chandler, a friend of Nicolas' from high school. He, and his fantastically beautiful and interesting wife Katherine, came all the way from L.A. for two days in order to help raise money for a center that gives help to kids at risk for drug addiction. It was a small gathering at an auction in a rural GA town. He had brought hats and t-shirts from his hit tv show, "Friday Night Lights", and the big item of the night, which his wife won, was dinner with this "star." He got to see some buddies from high school, but he was truly there for the cause. He's not just really pretty (even more so than on screen) he is also a great father, husband and friend. And his show, despite having some football in it, is really a fantastically written,directed and acted drama about relationships, with good music and brilliant, moody lighting. It is the only series that Nicolas and I watch regularly without waiting for it to be on netflix (though Nicolas would love it to have more football;)

The thing that Janisse and Kyle share besides being down to earth and having big hearts is a beautiful southern accent (they're not all created equal) that just melts my yankee side and makes me more proud to call Georgia home.

12 hours later, I have visited my talented friend Stephanie's blog and have seen her latest creation, a video about a local southern restauranteur doing the right thing with local organics and making really delicious food in a very hip atmosphere. Stephanie is an amazing writer and photographer (among other things) and has that same sensual, mesmerizing southern accent, so I had to add her to the list. Listen to her on her video and let her voice welcome you up onto a big southern porch with Magnolia blossoms all around you, a sweating glass of lemonade waiting for you in your smiling hostess' outstretched hand.

Some bragging about Helen and Nicolas

Last night, at the GA organics conference, the annual Land Stewardship Award was presented to my mother in law, Helen, and to Nicolas, for their many years of tireless work for organics in Georgia. Nicolas and I had known that Helen was getting the award but didn't know about Nicolas! I got that news once we got there, yesterday morning. I'm glad that the kids and I took off and spent the day in Chattanooga, TN with Mindy and her kids (which was so wonderful) or Nicolas would have read the news on our faces. The kids and I were so excited.

Michael Tuohy, a very successful Atlanta chef who is very committed to local organics gave a wonderful introduction about Nicolas and his mom before presenting them with the award. I can not remember any of it. I was too busy watching them in order to witness that amazing moment when they would recognize that Michael was talking about them.

The GA organics conference has gotten huge! There were 650 people signed up for this one and it was sold out; people were turned away. Organics in GA has come a long way. I believe the credit is partly due to the amazing writing of people like Michael Pollan, who wrote Omnivore's Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. Good writing about the environment, when it isn't preachy, is powerful. There is a writer who changed forever the way I think about the ecology of the South. Her name is Janisse Ray and she was the keynote speaker at the GO conference two years ago. Last night, since she was starting the night's proceedings off by reading one of her poems, she was seated at the front table, as were we...! My excitement over talking to Janisse Ray was almost as huge as that I was feeling over Nicolas and Helen winning an award. It was quite a night. I'll have to write about Janisse in another post.

The key note speaker was the CEO (he calls himself CEIO) of the co-op that produces Organic Valley products. He was about the most down to earth and genuine CEO that I have ever heard speak. Sure, I would like to keep everything local and definitely not import from the other side of the world. He does all he can to promote local but sees that we aren't there yet and he brought up some good points about helping the cultures of those producing organic for us in China or South America. This guy's co-op is the real deal, especially as compared to that other big dairy business - Horizon.

Here is a page from GA Organics web site that has a great 5 minute video about organics (you can hear Nicolas, and see our farmers' market and farm in a few shots).

Things I am loving right now

This hand-made little elf that I bought at Melrose on Ponce in Decatur last Thursday night. We brought Jean-Pierre and Marie-Helene to an extended hours village shopping night. The owners of the store sang carols with instruments and an amp., easily convincing me to come drink their hot cider and buy from local artisans. We also bought a beautiful bird calender and some other small gifts there. We put our names in a hat for a door prize. Jesse picked the winning name and it was me! This leads me to another favorite thing - this tiny pair of bird salt and pepper shakers that I won:
I'm loving that we have delicious tomatoes, still. We have had them this late before, but never this good, this late.
This is "The Book Book", by an artist, written for children, with lots of inspiration for creating books. I found out about it at this SouleMama blog post. You can get it by clicking on her link to the side there - thus, in a small way, supporting her family - who are fabulous (as if you don't already know this). I was inspired (the kids are not quite as inspired , but are looking) to create a few Christmas gifts using ideas from this book and from Cathy's blog. Can't say more - you could be a recipient!
And I am loving the locked diary that I ordered online, to help Santa make one of Jesse's wishes come true. What a surprising request!

Gratitude, Day Three - Reframing

Today's gratitude came as a result of further de-cluttering. I took out all of the many board games on the living room shelves and we figured out which games could be passed along to younger friends and which should remain in our lives - rotated out, so they'll be noticed. The greatest part about this process is the rediscovery that happens. I love it when something old becomes new and exciting again, and when an old thrift store find becomes an absolute favorite.

Last month, I had been complaining to a friend that the once passionately loved board games, like our homemade Dino-bird-opoly, Clue and Life, had been completely usurped by game cube and computer games. But the other night, we sent the boys on a hunt for a full deck of playing cards and reintroduced them to Hearts and today, Jesse was once again excited about the old games and puzzles. They just needed to be seen newly framed, surrounded by some empty space. I think Jesse may have been trying to tell us this through his art. Jesse's creations always have lots of negative space. ;) Here's today's creation with rediscovered pattern blocks. That's it - finished.

Connecting through "Connect Four", with cookies and milk.

Jesse and the sun, both shining through.


A former favorite that has been re-framed this year for me - Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. We've listened to it on CDs from the library while we drive on and off all year. Through long drives, in traffic, seated in our comfortable car, we have experienced life on the prairie, in wagons, with loong day of endless chores, through the looong winter. Remember when Laura and Mary got an orange, a coin and a bit of Christmas candy in their stockings? Their tears and excitement were the definition of gratitude. It is so unexpected and wonderful that my boys love these books too.

Favorite Female writers; food facts

Favorite female writer of the moment - Barbara Kingsolver. Half of the thousand or so audience members at the Emory talk last night wanted their books signed. I used my old urban stride to make it to the front end of that line and got to speak to her. Here is the scary (not to mention fuzzy) picture that Nicolas took of me, with her husband Steve to the right. I look like the crazed fan that I was, and wish that I had taken a better look in the mirror (did I think to look?) before leaving the house. I did make fairly intelligible sounds towards her, including the fact that Nicolas had grown many of the foods in her dinner that night. She and her husband raved about the arugula.

Now that it has earned Barbara Kingsolver praise, I have to highlight it here:So good on a pastrami sandwich (or in a salad for those who are eating only locally and don't have a local pastrami maker :)

Here's one of the farmer who grew it:He's wearing the cool new shirt that we bought last night from GA Organics (one for me too). It says "I'm a Local" on the front with the GA Organics emblem on the back.

I hope that you get to read Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. If you don't (listen it took me months while it was one of seven must-read books by my bed, and I am that scary fan), then know that you can get great recipes at the web site that I linked. Eating locally is not just a dire, get ready for the end of the world as we know it, gloom-filled fate. It is also a way to get back in touch with healthy food that tastes good and to get to know where your food comes from, or have the satisfaction of growing it yourself. Kingsolver's family decided to eat only locally produced food for a year but she said that they didn't even notice at first when the year was up. In that year they made a paradigm shift that had them appreciating this way of life so much that they are still doing it.

We eat a lot locally but have never gone cold turkey on food that is produced more than 100 miles away. We are talking about some day soon taking on that challenge for a month. Speaking of turkey, she told great stories (she's very funny) about their Bourbon Reds - the same breed that Gillen is raising (down to two couples now, but they're fit and sassy and hanging out as boy/girl pairs).

Local eating doesn't have to be such a huge commitment. As her husband says, "if every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil EVERY week." He also pointed out that "because most of our food travels 2,000 miles before it reaches our plates.. [it went up 500 miles this past year when we started importing more food than we export] we're consuming 400 gallons of oil a month per citizen...for agriculture." This includes the production of synthetic fertilizers, tractors, packaging and farming machinery. But most of this oil is used "getting the food to our plates".

I got one more statistic from the book and talk last night that I want to share here. "Modern U.S. consumers now get to taste less than one percent of the vegetable varieties that were grown here a century ago. These old timers now lurk only in backyard gardens and on farms that specialize in direct sales - if they survive at all."

Off my soapbox now.

I realized last night that this was the third favorite woman writer that I was lucky enough to hear speak in the past few years. I also got to see Annie Lamott (so funny that I cried) and another amazing but less well known writer, and just as good - Janisse Ray. These three are great at fiction and at more political, personal journaling about our times. I feel so inspired by all of them.

Barbara Kingsolver; the rock star of my book world

Yes, Barbara Kingsolver, one of my top five authors of all time is coming to speak tomorrow night at Emory University. And I get to go! My love of her began with the book The Bean Trees, which I read about twelve or so years ago. It has been my favorite book to give to women, over the past decade. She wrote it as a result of having insomnia while she was pregnant. Rue Kream, who wrote a wonderful unschooling book, Parenting a Free Child, also wrote with the help of insomnia. This should inspire me to move to the computer in the middle of my insomniac nights, but it hasn't, yet...

I love all of Barbara Kingsolver's books. When I took that book quiz a few months ago I was defined as being her novel, The Poisonwood Bible, which made me so happy.

And now she is coming here, to Emory, to speak to the importance of eating locally produced, organic food. I only started reading Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (the book that has provoked this book tour) this week. I am loving it. She speaks to the dying art of valuing your family and your country through the culture of food; of how important a meal, lovingly made (and even grown) together as a family, no matter how busy we are, can be. The book has me ordering cheese making materials to make my own cheese using our local organic dairy guy's raw milk, for which I will make the hour long drive every two weeks to get the milk.

Barbara Kingsolver's talk is kicking off a week, in Atlanta, of celebrating eating locally produced food. Nicolas, his mother and Gillen's pictures will be displayed at Georgia Organics headquarters, for some celebration, along with the portraits of lots of other farmers, on Monday. We will have a booth at a farmers market to be set up at Emory this Friday. I so hope that Barbara Kingsolver gets the urge to come buy a local tomato or a pepper so I can gaze upon her reverentially, maybe even get my voice to make a few intelligible sounds in her direction.

Later: I found out that Ms. Kingsolver is being fed our farm food tonight for dinner, before her talk. Our arugula, eggs, beans, tomatoes, and some others that I can't remember. SO cool.