Plant Catalogs and Tree Report

I’m thinking there should be a rule that the new catalogs should not arrive before the harvest is fully
in. Today, I got the Fedco tree catalog. It’s full of temptations, and I have
yet to know if round one of the trees will survive.

And how are the trees doing?On
 
The death role- one sugar maple and one David pear

Disabled list- One plum and the cherry tree look pretty bad. I keep hoping it’s because of fall, and not
because I didn’t water them enough or because the cow got a little too close to
them last time she was grazing that area. 
The mulberry tree got its top nipped off, and I know that’s not good, but the tree looks quite robust. My fingers are crossed.
One of the honey locusts looks peaked. The calf managed to push the tree’s cage over, and the tree just did not look the same after that. 

All of the trees need tending to get them ready for winter. I need to trim back some sucker growth. We need to put up some more cages to deter deer. We need to wrap the bottoms to deter voles. Then there’s the composting. 

For the most part, the trees have been a joy to me. The hickories, apples, and mulberry look awfully
good.  I can see that my plan is not crazy. 
Phaedra sighed longingly the other day; she was wishing we could have a tree lined street to drive up this time of year when the colors are so beautiful. I had not planned on lining both sides of the road, but there are little apples growing on one side. Now that I have this catalog on-hand, perhaps I should line the other side as well. Wouldn’t that be pretty?

A Little Experiment

So, we're trying life without the internet at home. It's been a bit of a challenge, but I would like to explain what the impetus was.

Many long years ago (many long year ago!), Jason and I went tv-free. It was a big deal, but we have been quite happy with the decision. Our first discovery was hat we did not have any time even without the television, and we wondered how we ever had time to watch it anyway. Over the years, we decided we just get more done and we talk more and we do more things together in the evening and we have time to make decisions as a team, etc. Now, for all you tv-watchers, there is no judgment here. These are just what we discovered for ourselves. As they say- your mileage may vary.

Way back in college, we had the internet. Jason used it for something or other, but I did not start using it until we began looking at listserves to learn about boxers and people's experiences with their dogs. Then, about the time Ezra was born, the list serves got "prettier" and more user friendly. We had cable internet and then whatever the fastest connection was wherever we lived.


When a friend gave up the internet briefly this summer, Jason and I realized we had had internet in our lives steadily for at least 15 years. We had discussed how it was just as "bad" a time suck as tv, and we thought about getting rid of it.

Then we did.

We still have email and Facebook, but only in a very limited way. Blogging is a bit of a challenge, but I want to keep doing it.

So, we'll see what happens. The first change I noticed is we go to bed about an hour earlier. And if you get up at 5:30, there is no shame in having the lights out by 9:30. There are frustrations like having used it instead of a phonebook, and now, we don't have all the phonebooks onhand that would be useful.

Maybe it will be a bomb, but you can't know if you don't try.

Sylvie Starts Kindergarten

 I am definitely in the better-late-than-early camp of education. The time, however brief, I spent as a Montessori teacher telling parents their six-year-old OUGHT to be able to read left an extra wrinkle between my eyebrows. It wasn’t hard to find the writings of dear John Holt and Rebecca Rupp and Charlotte Mason and Rudolph Steiner and David Elkind who all, to one degree or another, thought it best that children have a bit longer to play and grow and pretend  before being set to learn the alphabet.

When Ezra was kindergarten age, there was a new baby in the house, and it was easy to recite nursery rhymes and sing songs and tend house very purposefully to support his further unfolding. When Phaedra got to be kindergarten age, she wanted nothing to do with our “school” time and went off to play with her toddler sister in the simple land of early childhood. So, I deliberately did “kindergarten” things with Sylvie, like singing seasonal songs and doing simple crafts and taking walks, which Phaedra and Ezra also enjoyed.

Now, Sylvie is five, and she just wants to do whatever we’re doing. She has more friends than her brother and sister did at this age and she’s more socially aware than they were. She wants to do what she knows some of her friends and almost all of her cousins (there were 5 born in 5 months that year) are doing. And the cousins and friends are starting kindergarten and her siblings are back in their school routine. Sylvie wants to do that, too.

The problem is that Sylvie is a bit of a butterfly. It feels wrong to encourage her to sit quietly when I would even prefer she go off to play. Fortunately, I could see all this coming and I’ve devised a plan. We’re only one-and-a-half weeks into this plan, but it’s working so far.

I keep a lesson plan book, because it makes me feel good about myself, and in that book I’ve devoted a line on each page to Sylvie’s school work. If the book says we’re supposed to sing a song and recite a couple of poems and read a chapter out of Peter and Polly, then that’s what we do. Then I say, “You’ve finished your schoolwork! Would you like to dry dishes for me?” And she happily gets on with her day. Some days, like today, she ends up doing a page or two out of a workbook I got last year when I was at sixes and sevens with occupying her during school time. And that’s okay, too.

So, she can count past 100 and identify all her capital letters and copy words to send a brief letter, but she is satisfied with that. She has a day every now and then when she wants to learn to read or add or use the big chef’s knife. I make room in our school time to give her a lesson on these things, but if she wanders away, I let her. Five is really little, and this five-year-old is really airy. I think she and I will both enjoy more focused academics when her feet are a little closer to the ground. I like watching her fly for now.

Happy Anniversary

Fifteen years ago, Jason and I got married. There were the normal family dramas and the mix up with the bridesmaids’ dresses and all the false importance of each and every moment. But then, after a two-minute ceremony, we were married.

We had lived together for a few years at that point, and our finances were already joined and we had already had “The Fight” in which it was determined that we were in this in a forever kind of way. But the real dreaming did not start until after that day.

There’s the dream in which we open a cafe or a hostel, and we enjoy the life that passes through our doors. There’s the one where we somehow vanish into the wilderness and live on berries and love. There’s the one where we live in a funky loft apartment in an urban area. There’s also the one where we get some land and we figure out how to be farmers.

Tonight, as we sipped our cocoa and watched the moon rise with a thick ring of moisture and  talked about the weather, we toasted our anniversary. We celebrated this dream we’re living.

Then Jason said, “ What if we...,” and I knew I made the right choice so many years ago.

I Am Not Agoraphobic

I just like to be at home.

I can even see how it’s unfair of me. I can see how many of the people I love share this trait of liking home best of all. But when I weigh pottering about in my garden- or reading in my blue chair or rearranging the garage or hanging laundry or running the mower- against standing around at someone else’s house, I am often sorely tempted to stay home.

I have a couple of friends whose houses are easy for me, because I can do little jobs in their houses or I can knit without seeming rude. But when I meet new people (and I’ve met many in the past couple of years) it feels like I ought to visit with them in a having tea kind of way. A surprising number of people want to watch children playing when we get together. While I love my children and delight in their ways, I think we all enjoy ourselves more when they do not have an audience. Heck, I’ll even admit that I quickly get bored just watching them play.

It was easier for me to go visiting when I had less work to do, or when I was nursing a baby and therefore confined to a chair many hours of the day. Now, there is always something I could be doing, and I like almost all of it more than sitting still with a polite smile plastered on my face.

However, that polite smile is worth having old and new friends. Invite me over, and I’ll come, but if you haven’t heard from me, just assume I’m in the garden.

All I Don’t Know

Part of this life we now lead is the almost daily confrontation of all we do not know. We both grew up in the suburbs, so there are things like cow and chicken care that neither of us learned as children. Those sorts of things do not much bother me. (It does bother me that things like this seem to be slipping from common knowledge.)

What embarrasses me is my complete ignorance when it comes to knots or plant identification or simple plumbing skills. We are learning, and I have gotten very good at admitting when I do not know how to do something that I really ought to know. Still- I ponder why we don’t know.

For my part, many of these skills were not valued. I guess no one in my immediate family ever needed to tie down lumber or tighten a clothesline. One of my grandfathers was handy, and he stepped in when there were small repairs that could not be ignored. I think repair people were called in otherwise. 

In my childhood, the intellect was definitely favored over these skills. From where I am now, looking back, I wonder if too much got neglected.

Don’t get me wrong- I love it when Ezra tells me in a dreamy way about the nature of time or black holes or when Phaedra is completely captivated by the travails of a period in history. There are just some other things I want for them.

I want to help them feel confident they can at least approach any problem whether it’s a flooding basement, a trigonometric equation, or a thin larder. I want them to know how to get the information they need when an electrical outlet quits working or there is too much milkweed or they’ve missed their flight. It’s good to walk into a kitchen and know how to set it to rights and then use it to warm bellies and hearts. I hope they all learn how to get a window to open or a door to close, because then they’ll never get stuck.

Another Thing I Like about Hardwick

Today, the local coop celebrated its 35th birthday, and we all went to the party. One of the things they organize for the party is a clothing drop and swap. We took a few things the children had outgrown, and we came home with many, many things. I normally run a tight ship regarding clothes because storage is such an issue. With the chill in the air, I was able to remember how cold the house can get, and I picked up a few extra sweaters for everyone. And some boots to replace the ones I had to get rid of. And some socks. And a few things that I'll sew into something else.

It was wonderful in so many ways. These are clothes that would probably go into the waste stream, even though they still have plenty of life left in them. It's a way to save money in a place where you need vastly different clothes in different seasons. It also was quite social. As people (and let's be honest- it's was mostly ladies) sorted through the clothes on a table, they would talk with the other people there. We talked about what sizes we were looking for and whether something looked good and what our kids were doing and the weather and so on. Most of the people there pretty much knew each other, and we knew many and now know more of them.

After the clothing swap, everyone put together a potluck and different people provided live music. I sat on the grass marveling at the beauty of the day and the people we have chosen to live among.