miles under my moccasins

i’m lying with my eyes still closed, most of my head huddled under the covers trying to ward off hypothermia (rich opened windows in the middle of the night without knowing he did so, and also my hair takes 28 hours to dry and i had taken my fortnightly shower just before bed). i am trying to avoid getting up just yet, when i swear i feel a bird land on the piece of my head that is not covered. this is what makes me finally open my eyes, and when i see a bird actually fly across the room away from me, i keep them open, the covers now clutched under my chin, waiting for rich to come back into the room.

“honey? there’s a bird in here. it just landed on my head.”

somehow, in my sleepiness, i have determined that this falls squarely in his department, and with both duty and joviality (“i bet it thought your hair looked like a good nest”), he takes it upon himself to throw the sliding door open wide and usher the bird out. we laugh all day long (off and on, including via text) about how he is really outdoing himself with his wake ups and if monday was this creative, just imagine what tuesday will bring!

my wake up technician

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maybe because we live so rurally, rich and i tend to refer to any trip into town, in each others’ presence, as a date. i like it. you know, we don’t want to let the romance fade just because we are a year and a half into this relationship. some of the dates were what others might think of as dates, like watching shakespeare over dinner and a beer. others are borderline- watching fireworks from a bridge (two nights in a row) or swinging by the new maritime museum after perusing the farmer’s market. others are just plain excuses to be in each other’s presence as mentioned, such as sunday’s date: to buy a newspaper and a new lawnmower blade, and put gas in my car.

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the bird situation sorted, i head for work, where the child i nanny for (k) is finding out what the different textures of wood chips, rocks, sand, pavement and grass feel like under his moccasins, and seeing how much mileage he can get out of the word, “uh-oh.” quinn, meanwhile, is explaining to me the intricate details of how crabbing works, including tides and weather and timing and what comprises a “sunny night”, and seeing how much mileage he can get out of the word “technically.”

last wednesday morning quinn and i went to our living school for the day. he is now welcome as long as i am present, and we plan to go on wednesdays for the summer program, and see what will make sense for fall in terms of how much “enrichment” will feel right. i hesitate to make any pronouncements given that i have seen circumstances change rapidly and dramatically several times before around his schooling and my work life, but i will just say that i feel pretty happy with our current unschooling life and quinn’s world seems pretty enriched. quinn picked out his clothes the night before going to school: orange shorts with orange shirt, and red socks. this is an ewok outfit, one of several. he also quite calmly chose his underwear with luke skywalker and his blue light saber on them, the calm contrasting wildly to the controversy we experienced over them the day before. that day’s ewok outfit, a light colored hawaiian button down shirt with light colored sweatpants, had to be worn without underwear, because the luke skywalker underwear with the blue light saber were not available, and no threats about wearing other dirty pairs of underwear or not going to take care of k with me that day were able to goad me into extracting the special pair of undies from the laundry basket locked in the trunk of my car where it was being held in order to be laundered later that day. assuring him that he could wear them the very next day, just as soon as they were clean again, i allowed him to gradually come up against that disappointment, trying to place fenders in between the hard places so they didn’t hit too awfully hard, but knowing in my mama heart that handling disappointments smoothly is an important life skill, i allowed this one to unfold.

quinn brought with him a drawing he had done the day before to share for show and tell; it was a map of the zoo from the book goodnight gorilla. he explained to the class very thoroughly how he had drawn each animals’ cage, and how the zookeeper’s keys were color-coordinated to open the cage of the same color, and proudly showed the compass rose of his map. he went with the flow of the ritual as it has been established in the school, for how to ask, “does anyone have any questions or comments?” and then how to ask, “does anyone else have show and tell?” and then chose the next child to share. when he fielded questions, he would ask, “what?” instead of naming the individual asking, but that was the only piece of the ritual he needs to work on. mainly what i noticed was that he felt comfortable belonging in this group, even though it was a brand new group for him (a few of the kids are the same, or are children he knows from outside ols, but some were brand new faces for him).

teacher kelly prepared a lesson on independence day for the morning, and later quinn told me that the best part of his day was watching the battle of lexington and the shot heard ‘round the world (a reenactment of it on youtube). she showed the children a parchment replica of the declaration of independence and talked about what the american revolution was fought about. we also watched a reenactment of the ride of paul revere.

while quinn and the other kids were occupied on the play structure outside, i got to chat with kelly about handwriting curriculum, and the importance of correct letter formation. i think i have a better handle on the why behind that now, and the reading i’ve been doing on neuroplasticity makes me think there is something to it, that handwriting practice is not just tedious busywork. i left feeling armed with some new strategies of how to encourage him in beginning his letters from the top (he often starts from the bottom) and then got online and got even more insight from the handwriting without tears website. kelly explained the wet-dry-try method to teach a letter using a small handheld chalkboard, where i would write the letter in chalk, then he would use a small wet sponge to trace it, then a dry cloth to trace it dry, and then “try” it himself with chalk. i appreciate the full sensory approach to handwriting that this curriculum uses.

quinn seemed to be quite comfortable being back in a school setting, and i couldn’t remember if that was how it had been last year. in fact, i think it was more comfortable now, given the way we have spent the past year, including homeschool group and just being a kid in the world growing a year older. he sat on a bench with another boy at lunch, and proceeded to cover his face with berry juice.

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this year on the fourth, i have been feeling the miles that have passed underneath my own moccasins more acutely than in years past. holidays in general seem to call up previous holidays in my mind, along with whatever attachments they bring. this year i sifted through all the fireworks i could remember… the ones where quinn and i went to bed before the fireworks, the ones more recently when he has stayed up to watch them, the ones i watched 14 years ago from the deck of a schooner in the middle of new york harbor, the ones even earlier when i ran track at the empire state games. still farther back, the ones when i was a teenager holding baby cousins in my lap on a dock on a lake in the adirondacks and listening to their cooing voices exclaiming, “ooh, yay!” the ones in 2010 when i declared my independence from oppression. the ones in 2012 when i stood on a bridge with rich and watched fireworks together for the first of what will be many, many times.

the three of us joined our local adopted family for camping over the weekend. i baked my first rhubarb upside down cake in a dutch oven. quinn went with the rest of the gaggle of children to kids’ fishing day at the hatchery and caught his limit (3), two of which were “this big! 17 inches! too big to fit in any of the pans!” he helped tend crawdad traps, got married to snow white (you do a dance and have a hug) and wore a plastic bucket helmet on his head to fight battles all weekend. he was nervous about crawdads pinching his toes, but he still waded in the river and joined the other kids at the swimming hole which one of the uncles helped all the kids “swim” across. quinn’s bride is one of my favorite children, and she is the most warmed up to rich of all the children. she consistently calls him richard even though no one else does. she and rich could be found being “vampires,” both had on sunglasses and were alternately growling and giggling, and then she chased the rest of us with her vampire care bear.

quinn experienced porta potty sensory overload this year, and flatly refused to use it. i insisted he use it exactly two times, the rest could be handled in the great outdoors, but in his effort to avoid using it, he experienced a few close calls. i basically had to inform him that he actually had to go, even though he would insist he didn’t (dancing a jig all the while) and bodily place him inside the john, hold the door open for air, as he tried to decide whether to use his hands to cover his ears or plug his nose. the onslaught of sensory input in there was simply overwhelming, and really, i can’t say i disagree. i had the fun of “playing pioneers” with my friend one morning, washing a few sleeping bags and pajamas in the creek and hanging them to dry in the tree branches.

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sitting around a campfire with my sister-friends is always therapeutic for me, and it also occurs to me that i have grown enough as a person that i may actually have something to offer in friendship. the miles i have walked have not always been easy ones, but  i’ve come all this way for good reason. the more i share my story, the more i feel i gain from that sharing, and receive so many gifts in return: gems shared from their lives,  and of course, inside jokes about olympic hand holding. each time i try to articulate how it is that i have found a way to open up my heart to love again, i find it opens up even a little bit farther, sometimes so wide that a little bird flies in.