A few moments,

from the past several months:

In the spring, we noticed the local school kids at our public park having their end of year Field Day. Remember that awesome day when you get to ditch the routine for egg tosses and three legged races? Jesse decided that we should have a Field Day too. So we had a few friends come to the same field, a few weeks later, for kick ball, water balloon tosses, egg tosses and three legged races. They even made Field Day shirts. Next year, we'll have to make it bigger!





Another highlight was going to visit my sister, and friends, in Montana.

Hiking in Yellowstone National Park:




Skipping stones on one of the beautiful rivers in Bozeman:
In my sister's back yard creek:
Planning how to launch the homemade raft (we'd been reading Huckleberry Finn together):
Making the raft:Our intrepid host, Matt, not quite acclimated to summer water temperatures there yet.

Gillen was in ecstasy there. Fly fishing:


We even went to a ranch for a few days, where we got to ride horses several times in the mountains near Yellowstone and Gillen did some more fishing. He would like to be a cowboy one day.

A bright weekend

On Saturday, Jesse and I went with friends to a Tibetan Festival in Atlanta at a new temple there. We loved the food, the dozens of colorful prayer cloths shining in the sun, and learning how to make sand mandalas. There is a copper tool that is used to place the sand more specifically where you want it. In order to move the sand out of it, you vibrate this tool with a long copper bow. This creates a wonderful, calming hum while you work. I liked the sound and the mandala possibilities so much that I bought one there. It is called the chokpur. Elizabeth and our new friend Frances checking out the food:We liked all of the jewelry, journals and clothes that they were selling to help fund their temple. I especially liked Jesse and Eli in these hats:
Last night, the brighteness came from Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy and the dumb bell nebula (an exloded star) - all of which we saw down the street at the nature center. The Atlanta astronomy club meets there every month and they really seemed to love sharing their passion and their telescopes with us.

A few more colors from today, with friends on the trampoline:

WanderCRAFT book

About three weeks ago, right before going to the beach for a week on that spontaneous trip to Isle of Palm, S.C. to be with fellow unschoolers, I was quickly checking out some of my favorite blogs, seeking joy in places other than my long packing and cooking to-do list. On that day, I visited Sara, at Wandercraft, a crafty, dog-loving, great photographer in Boston. She revealed a giveaway for a small travel scrapbook that she had made. The winner would need to scrap a few pages of this book and blog about it and was given a more than generous amount of time in which to do so. Well, you know where this is going. I won! I came home from the beach to find this beautiful book and several scrapping accessories waiting for me on my table. I was so excited. I put it in my art room (a room that has seen far more food and Bananagrams than art lately) and envisioned all of the possible trips that I could scrap about. And, as recovering from the beach, new lives and early deaths took over, I conveniently blocked out the request to have a few pages scrapped for Sara's etsy store by this week. eek!

As it turns out, rediscovering this deadline last weekend was just the push my procrastinating, deadline-loving creative side needed. Despite laundry, cooking, knitting for fast growing new babies and planning and cooking for the next trip (in the mountains - leaving on Sunday), I rediscovered my art supplies and any printed out pictures I had on hand from past trips.

Here are the scanned images of the front of the book and of the first two pages (Sara created teh map cover and back and I did all the inside work - I love her sewn together book):
On the front of the book, I highlighted a few of the longer routes that we have taken (to Australia and Japan) on the beautiful map-cardstock cover that Sara had created.

The book will be a collection of moments from various trips over the years. It will live on our coffee table as a place to go to remember, and to find inspiration for the next journey.

Thank you Sara for these precious moments back in the art room. I never would have gone there without you.

Endless summer

My watermelon blog banner is in honor of how long we get to grow "summer" fruits and vegetables down south. I went up north again last week and I need to keep reminding myself of all of the perks of living down here, of which there really are many. I like being warm in September and October, while eating tomatoes and watching the guys spit watermelon seeds.

Due to some luck and spontaneity, Gillen and Jesse and I are getting to go to the beach in South Carolina with a bunch of other unschoolers this coming week. Unfortunately, Nicolas has to farm. But I think it might be nice for him to be alone for the first time in many months. We leave tomorrow. I have spent the last two days making soups and chili to freeze and take with us. I will spend my time there hanging with my boys and our friends, knitting baby things, and listening to the ocean.

We are so lucky. Even when the leaves have turned and the wood stove is lit, we will still be experiencing the freedom of an endless summer. Unschooling rules! (interesting oxymoron there)

Life and death

Last Sunday, the last day of our vacation, we spent half the day at the beach in Virginia. A few hours after getting there, the guys all still in the water, I lay on a towel in the sand reading The Unknown She, an inspiring book by my talented elementary school friend, Hilary Hart. I read these words, by Jackie Crovetto, a woman that Hilary interviewed in the book -

"Look," she says emphatically, "if I were told I had three months to live I would spend all that time with the ones I love. So why shouldn't I live that way right now? If you really bring in the reality of death, would you treat other people and yourself the same way you do now? Would you have made the same choices and decisions that you made today or that you are planning for tomorrow? When I listen to the news and hear about the rise of some dictator or the power struggles and atrocities we all at some time get embroiled in, I always seem to be left with the one thought - Why have we forgotten that we are mortal? Why have we forgotten that on the day we die all that we have grasped after, all that we have sought to control and have power over will be as sand flowing through our fingers? Many cultures have understood that one has to face death, know death and include death...As a society we are failing to provide for this primal need of our young men...[Women] have a deep instinctual understanding of death and how life and death exist in the same moment. We experience it in how we give birth, which is to stand on the very threshold where we cross into life and death, and through the cycles of our bodies, and the cycles within our daily lives. We know that life includes death, and we can live from this place of oneness! In tribal cultures people used to be so aware of death that they knew when their life was drawing to an end."

While reading this, I thought of another inspiring book about living fully - Patti Digh's book, Life is a Verb - essays provoked by having lived with her stepfather during his last 37 days of life. I put down Hilary's book and closed my eyes, burrowing my body into my few feet of Virginia Beach sand. The sun seemed to dance with the breeze against my skin. I was lulled by the sound of the waves and the families around me. I felt as if I floated above my body and pulled back into space, leaving my tiny frame back on the spot of beach where it lived for that moment. But then, in the next moment, I felt the deepness of earth's thick layers below me.

A few voices from behind me rose above the regular rhythm of the other beach sounds. They sounded panicked. I opened my eyes and turned towards them. There was something happening on the boardwalk next to the beach. I saw an upturned bike and a few people gathered round it. I imagined that someone had been hit by a bike while crossing the bike path. How awful. A few more people approached the scene. A girl who had gone there earlier to rinse off at the outdoor shower came running back to her mother next to me saying, "he is really hurt mom, come quickly." I resisted the urge to join those adding to the confusion around the accident and waited for Nicolas and the boys.

Twenty minutes later, the boys out of the water and ready to get in the car for our long trip to GA, the boardwalk crowd was even bigger. We rinsed off in the outdoor shower that was a few feet from the scene and looked over. There on the cement was a man surrounded by three EMTs, all working together to bring him back to life. His skin was chalk white. A guy standing near him turned back to someone he knew in the crowd. He held up three fingers on one hand and then held up six right after. This man had only inhabited this body for thirty six years. He wasn't especially big. He had been riding a bike. I suppose he may have had a heart attack. We quickly left the scene. We could still see that the ambulance hadn't moved once we had walked to our car, a few block away. At that point they had been doing cpr for over half an hour. I fear he never came back to life.

The kids were not disturbed by this scene, which surprised me. Gillen pointed out that he had seen a kind of grin on the man's face. Maybe they don't live in fear of death, as I did around their age. A few days earlier, while watching Billy Elliot on Broadway, Gillen had cried into my shoulder during a scene when Billy talks to his dead mother. Their awareness of death is less about fear than about grief. For now. I feel glad about that.

In about a week, my mother will have been dead for twenty years. She was 46. I do think she knew that she was going to die. I wonder if she felt like she had lived fully. She was such a vital woman, we all felt more passionate about life when we were with her. But there must have been much more choreography that she needed to give and she had only just begun sharing moments with Wilson, the love of her life.

I hope the 36 year old man on a bicycle had more moments of peace and joy than not. I hope he'd expressed much of what he most deeply needed to say.

Having a few reminders lately, again, of our common fate, has made being alive with those I love around me that much more vibrant, and sweet. Life is indeed about living.

Road trip north

Here is a slideshow of a few snapshots from our two week trip. They are from the Northeast Unschooling Conference, from our visit to Danielle and her family in Maryland, our visit to Hadley, Mass. to see Wilson and Anita, and our visits to NY and NJ. I didn't take any pictures of our time in Virginia Beach, nor many of the rest. I was too busy reconnecting with so many wonderful northern friends and family to take my camera out enough. There is too much to say and many too many things to do now that we are home. Mostly, there is baseball. Lots of baseball practice and games. I'll be reliving moments from this trip for a long time. I'll definitely share some here.

Weekend by the Suwannee River

What a wonderful weekend. There was a half-day spent floating down a river, loads of game-playing, and some of our favorite unschoolers. So much fun.

Jumping off of a giant rope swing into the Suwannee River:We shared a cabin with the Haworths which made for lots of good food (these were Ella's rice crispie treats):and much humor (how many European unschooling dads does it take to blow up an air mattress?)Jesse loved playing so many games. Here, he was playing his game, Creative Titles, with the older unschoolers. He was really excited to have stayed awake longer than his brother and his younger friends.
We stopped by Barnes and Nobles on the way home and bought yet more games. We've been loving playing games and watching movies for the past few days. I'll have to post a list of our favorites soon.

Fun with maps

I ordered a United States highway map last week. Its arrival on our table has prompted all kinds of realizations. The first was that I finally need reading glasses. Well, at least for this map. (I kind of like them. They make me feel wise.) It's been fun figuring out different possible routes for our trip to the northeast next month. Then there is the fantasizing about a future road trip to Montana; and the planning for next week's much anticipated short trip to hang out with unschooling friends at a state park, down south!

In addition, this map (as well as the road atlas and state maps that started to accumulate on the table) caused Jesse to pull out his old puzzle map. Tonight, after dinner, he asked us to hold this map and play a game of capital guessing with us. Turns out he's been looking at this map a lot lately. He knew most of them! Nicolas, hoping to do better in his world capital knowledge, then brought the world map off the wall. (I too have been humbled by this nine year old. Yesterday he beat me in Bananagrams.)The whole world in his hands:In awe of his Papa. : )

Visit to the Haworths

We finally made it back to north GA to see Mindy and family. Rocking out to their old tape-mixes in their kitchen while they cook us up feasts and cool cocktails (mojitas and Pimms this time) is so much fun. These people can cook. Can rock out. Can laugh.I also loved watching these two European-born soccer fanatics think (for a few sweet moments) that the U.S.A. team might beat Brazil in the world final.The nerf gangstas:But the highlight was a trip to a beautiful, waterfall driven watering hole in Tennessee:Good times!

A few Montana moments

The beautiful mama, Bhu. See her daughter Isha's sweet head? Doesn't it just bring you back to the smell? That new sweet smell that stops time and brings hardened men to their knees. Ahhhh.

Another bit of Isha that really got me was this sight - Isha in the Moby carrier (wish they'd made something this cool when I had babes) with nothing but her thick socks sticking out.
I really like her mama's hot pink sweatpants. Such a comfortable yet enlivening choice for those first months after having a baby. They should pass these out to new mothers.

Below - the fire starter, the dad, and one of the funniest men alive - Matt. Here he was cooking us up some Montana Rib-Eyes that Bhu's mom Elizabeth had gotten for us.
Elizabeth was fantastic. She cooked delicious meals and froze others for later. She did laundry. She even washed windows. It was really fun to be with she and Bhu for the few days that our visits overlapped. Thirty-one years ago, I was 14 years old and Bhu was still growing in Elizabeth's belly. I stayed with Elizabeth and my father that summer and was able to bond with my new baby sister for the first six weeks of her life. It is incredible to now meet her baby. sigh. If only Montana were a bit closer.

I've fallen in love.
One more thing - I just realized that two of my favorite parts of Matt and Bhu's cozy log cabin home are in this picture - the very long legged wombat that my brother and Naomi sent to Isha from Australia is to the right, and "Ashley", the red patterned octopus that my talented sister created, is to the left.

Next time I see her, Isha will probably be dragging these two around with her while she runs around exploring her world.

Home

In my opinion, there is not much that can compete with the joy of holding a six-week old baby. Isha is feminine, tiny and perfect. I washed our clothes yesterday but was careful to leave out the shirt that smells like her. It was hard to say goodbye to she and my sister.

At the same time, it was wonderful coming home to my guys, and to the newest blossoms from the farm:Today, Gillen, Jesse and I finally had a quiet day at home. I have been fully appreciating all that these eight and eleven year old boys are about. No more intoxicating essence coming from the top of their heads, but it is nice to sometimes know what they are wanting/thinking. I did not take my camera to Montana but my sister let me take a few with her's and will be sending me a CD. I'll get to wax poetic about Isha then.

Boston, part two

On Sunday, I met my friend Cary Godbey in Back Bay. In the seventies, she lived around the corner from me and we shared our long daily journey to Park School as well as our young latch-key-kid highs and lows. She brought me my homework for two weeks when I was out of school at thirteen with shingles. She introduced me to James Taylor and Pousett-Dart Band and Dan Fogelberg. She was cool, and full of life, and a really good friend.

Before I met Cary, I went to the front steps of my own building on Marlborough St. and then went around the corner to Exeter St., to visit my tree. When I was about seven, several kids in the neighborhood were assigned a square plot of sidewalk, its concrete covered up with soil, on which to plant a small tree. Here is my tree, about 35 years later. Sunday was a beautiful day in Boston. It was Mother's Day. We couldn't imagine that anyone would be home. But we managed to get inside both buildings and into both of our old condominiums. Cary's had the same owners that had bought her place from her mother and it had most of the same wallpapers and paint on the walls, as well as her mother's 1970's avocado-green colander and green glass jars.

We got inside of my bird-cage elevator, both crying and laughing our slow way up to my old landing. There is a sky light at the top of the elevator shaft, so as you approached my floor, the 6th, you would feel, looking up through the open elevator cage, like you were going to burst right through the glass, like Willie Wonka does with Charlie, in his chocolate factory. Several friends had shared that memory with me the night before.

We left the birdcage, climbed up some new-to-me steps in my old hallway and went through a metal door that opened onto the roof. This was where my family had gathered to listen to the Boston Pops, eat our annual lobsters and watch the fireworks being set off over the Charles River, every 4th of July. In the winter, it's one of the places where I'd built snowmen with my brother.
The trees are growing past the buildings! So cool.
Here is another view of Marlborough Street, below, but this one is through my old living room's window! Due to Cary's fiesty encouragement, I knocked, waking up a very pregnant woman and her husband. They were so nice about it and invited us in to explore.
Unlike Cary's, only its shell remained the same as 28 years ago. It has been modernized, with lots of doors added between rooms and a ceiling lowered in the living room. Everything was painted a stark white and the floors were all restored, and bare. I don't have many pictures. I missed the many avocado trees growing in big pots, the long paths of of ivy winding over the fireplaces and the colorful wallpapers.
It was fun to see the old place again. But I had no longing to be back. Without my mother, Jody, Ulle, my brother Kenneth and our German Shepard, Damien, it felt warehouse-empty. It was like seeing a loved one who has died - this body, too, was nothing but an abandoned snake's skin. The life had left the building.

A few hours later, flying home, my descending plane's video screen showed an interview with players from the Atlanta Braves. On the way to Boston, they'd shown the Red Sox. I'm not a huge baseball fan, but at the sight of the Braves, a lump formed in my throat. There is a nostalgic hold that Boston may always have on me.

This week, I was surprised by just how happy I felt to be living here, in the country. In this moment, with the boys, with a farm rooster simmering in the pot and Gillen and Jesse's garden through the window, I am so glad to be here now, and now, and now, as I was never able to be back then. Hopefully, my children are having that chance now too.