Wet grass

    

                This morning, I woke up and saw the apple tree branches bobbing up and down outside my window. I looked at my rows of beets, and peas, my containers of tomatoes and peppers and my strawberry blossoms pink in the sun. I walked out in my Birkenstocks and the wet grass soaked the leather under my feet and my bare toes. I let the chickens out and filled up their water and inhaled the smell of pine shavings and chicken, for which there are no suitable words.

     We eat peach butter, applesauce and pickles as my mason jars from last year are emptied, ready for a new crop. My gardening books get more and more wear as I pore over the perfect way to grow asparagus, how to tame strawberry runners and which weeds are perennial. I slow down by every farm, every person who is growing something, hoping to glean something of value, something I can take with me on my journey.

      All this time, I’ve been waiting for a farm and I never realized that I will have one wherever I go. I will grow things, I will nurture them and I will delight in their successes and sigh when the pea plants fall over and the carrots fail to germinate. I will haul bags of soil with my hands until, finally, on the third trip I decide to find the wheelbarrow. I will, inevitably, try to attach the hose sprayer while the hose is already going, thinking that this time, I might not get soaked. I will plan and I will dream of the day when I have space to let the chickens wander all over, space to plant my dreams, space to watch them come up from my kitchen window.  But while I am waiting, how glorious it is to know that these dreams lie within me as well, they come from my hands and so, cannot be separate. How wondrous to realize the life I’ve been waiting for is the one I am already living.

Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

Hard Questions

     As I look at the many titles strewn across the coffee table about slavery and civil rights, I wonder how far we have come. I try to explain to my children what it meant to be owned, to be told where to sit, where to eat, to be told you were not, by nature, good enough. I tell them Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was preaching and marching and changing our world while their grandmothers were in high school. This is an impossibility to them, that this part of our history could be so recent. They ask questions, not understanding the word “black” as it is used in some of the books, ask why there is only “black” and “white” when they see so many different colors. Some of their questions I can answer, some I can’t. The hardest question: “do people still feel that way?” “Some, unfortunately,” is the truth I tell them with longing that I could give them a different answer. I know the answer they want would be a lie, and I cannot tell it.

     My favorite question, though, and the one that gives me the most hope for the future on this eve of celebrating a man who changed the world, “how did people know whether someone was black or white?”  I love that I have no answer.

The Waiting Place

     Anybody who has read, Oh the Places You’ll Go which, I know for sure, is everyone my mom has ever given a graduation present to, has probably come to fear The Waiting Place. That anomalous page of the book shows what looks like people from Soviet-era Moscow waiting in a breadline, depressingly aware that they will not get any again today. I have seen that place in my nightmares; me sitting around, projectlessly twiddling my thumbs. I have fought long and hard against the Waiting place, preferring always to push on, push through even when I know it might not be the smartest or safest idea. Alternately closing eyes on a road trip to push on for a few more miles, check. Not stopping to put the paint lid back on so I can finish painting a bureau, check. As Dr. Seuss made clear, the waiting place was not for me.

     I am starting down the road to a realization, though, that maybe the waiting place is for me, at least sometimes. Maybe ripping up the carpet a week before Christmas is a bad plan, and maybe pushing that denim through the sewing machine despite the smoke coming out was also a bad plan. Maybe, just maybe, waiting would have been a better choice for both of those projects. Maybe waiting isn’t quite as bad as the fantastical Seuss has made it out to be. Maybe waiting gives us time to think, to reflect, to figure out what it is we really want, who it is we are. Maybe we’re waiting because the universe has not devised a plan yet, or maybe we’re waiting because our own plan is lacking. Either way, I think, on my way to 40, it might be time to accept that sometimes the waiting place is not a dreadful departure from forging on, but a necessary part of life. Everything cannot be now; paths cannot be laid out unceasingly. So, here I wait, at the crossroads, hoping to accept that the crossroads, too, are part of the endless journey. Happy waiting…

Gift horses

     Today, I have been given three beaded bracelets, one picture of a rainbow, help with moving heavy furniture from small hands and a copy of a New Year’s poem written by an eight year old where “future” is spelled “fucher,” (go ahead and try; it defies any non-expletive pronunciation.) I count these gifts and wonder how, at the end of the day, I could feel so tired, push so hard for bedtime to happen quickly, read one less book than requested and feel myself being spread so thin, stretched to the point of breaking.  How could I feel so relieved at being able to get on pinterest for a few minutes without someone needing a snack, needing to get wiped; needing, really, a small piece of me.

     Today, I have not been given more hours in a day than yesterday, more mental and physical energy or less on my to-do list. In this wonderful thing I like to call semi-large family living, I don’t think those things will be given to me any time soon. However, where I put that energy and how I spend those hours is up to me, every day. I can choose to listen to a seemingly endless but clearly important diatribe on eleven year old relationships, I can choose to sit in wonder at our poet-in-resident and her capacity for expressing emotions, I can choose to throw snowballs at their fort walls, and sometimes, I can and do choose to organize that shelf that has been irritating me forever, or read the new National Geographic for ten minutes with the door closed.

     In the last few days, my oldest has been watching home videos. In one of them, my now five year old was not quite 3. She was sitting on the floor of her room playing with a toy cell phone and putting her baby in a basket. Her hair was almost non-existent and she was lost in her imaginary world. I’m so glad I took the time to capture that moment, because that little girl has changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable in two years. I had almost forgotten those quiet times on the floor and the sound of her voice, so soft and malleable. I have read heartwrenching quotes about how quickly children grow since my oldest was a newborn, but there is nothing like the passage of time in your childrens' faces that will make you feel it in every inch of your being.  In addition to my much more practical and mundane resolutions at the start of this year, I have made another, more important one. I will not look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when those horses come bearing gifts they have made with their hands and hearts, because I am still, to them, their favorite person. I will still organize shelves and I will still have to clean the living room, but I will make sure I look in their eyes and accept what they give with love, because that is the spirit in which they were given.

Three weeks in and we need some new spoons...

    
     In the last three weeks, we have been to the library no less than 8 times. In the last three weeks, my two oldest children built a desk out of scrapwood for their younger sister by themselves. In the last three weeks, we picked apples on our break, made a giant color wheel out of magazine scraps under the trees in our yard and learned that mother octopuses take care of their eggs exclusively for six months, and then when those eggs hatch, crawl out of their holes and die.  In the last three weeks, we have rediscovered Bill Nye the science guy, wondered what exactly happened to the Neanderthals and made molecules out of marshmallows and toothpicks. Some of us learned how to spell archaeology, and some of us didn't. One of us even got told to stop checking work with "90's math." (That someone was me.) Two of us had a writing debate in a journal, three of us learned what abstract nouns are, five of us learned a fun rap about the continents that rhymed "Antarctica" with "back to the start-ica." (Thank you, youtube.) In addition to all of these things, one of us got slightly alarmed when we separated out carbon and hydrogen from a spoonful of sugar over a flame wondering if people might think our house was becoming a center of heroine production.
     These last three weeks have been the start of a new adventure in our lives endearingly entitled "homeschooling." So far, I have to say with all honesty, we love it. Since we made the decision, way back in January, so many people have asked why we were choosing this road and I have been hard pressed to answer them succinctly. And here is why...
     Firstly, we have a fantastic public school in our town, one which I have been happy to send my children to for the last five years. Not only were my children doing well academically, but I feel we were supported as a family and whenever we had an issue, it was addressed quickly and thoroughly. We did not choose homeschooling because of opposition to any current teaching standards.  I did not feel pressure to buy my kids the latest clothes or gadgets simply because some of their friends at school had them. I did not pull them out because of a lack of prayer in public schools, opposition to the flag salute or fanatical gym teachers. (Our school has two very lovely ones. )So, why then?
     Pace, time together, a little bit more freedom in our days, and the ability to focus on the amazing world around us as a family. I am looking at this year as a gift, one that we are giving to ourselves to see what we can achieve together. I do not know, yet, what will happen next year or how we will feel at the end of a full year of homeschooling, but I do know this. I will never regret trying something new, stepping back for a while and taking this time as a family. And maybe that, too, is one of the things our children will learn and come to value this year.

Marriage on and off the rocks

     In marriage, we are all geologists. We always know which stones are the heaviest, which are the ones which will shatter the most upon contact, break into a million tiny precedented bitternesses. We stand behind our fortresses, hurling with all our might and wonder at the destruction. Our partner in life and this slow war of attrition, hides down behind their bunker and we throw harder. Or, they come up standing, risking blow after blow to throw their own stones, the ones they know will hurt the most, have the longest history of damage done.

     But what if we could put down those stones? What if, when we empty our pockets and the deepest recesses of our lesser selves, we unburden not only our partner, but lighten our own load. What if we come out from behind our cairns and meet in the middle, leaving behind our past and step toward the future with empty pockets, hearts clean of scar tissue.

    The person on the other side of that bunker is your own personal geologist because they have seen the depths of you; they know the fires in which you were forged, the stuff of which you are made. And they’re still there, standing on the strata of previous battles. They’re still there. And what a beautiful thing to walk away from the carnage, hand in hand and pockets turned inside out with nothing left but hope.