Tag Archives: farmer’s market

~thankful thursday~ glow slug

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~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

~thankful thursday~ flyer

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/24

I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/24

I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.

 

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/24

I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.

 

 

(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/24

In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/24

I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.

~thankful thursday~ everywhere and nowhere

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11/18/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

Today I’m feeling grateful for all the little things, the popcorn and cranberries that grow into long garlands of gratitude if you string them one by one.

 

11/19/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful for spontaneous dates to go outside and look at the moon. Rich handed me my jacket a little while ago and took me out on a moon date this evening. This photo is not from tonight, but from a moon date somewhere in New Mexico, waking up in a Rest Area and getting back on the road toward home.

 

11/20/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for good work bringing good food to good people. I am grateful for Saturday sun. I am grateful for my crew who sees to it that I take my break, eat my thermos full of chili, and hydrate. I am grateful for chocolate poblano peppers burnished past green to purple-brown and all the way to red. I am grateful for the architecture of each savoy cabbage leaf. I am grateful for roots.

 

11/21/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

I am grateful for a hike with Quinn, for frost pockets and cold creeks, for beaded webs and sunshine on son.

 

11/22/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

I am not taking this class for a grade so it’s fine if I cheat. November has some easy days of gratitude that I shamelessly capitalize on. November 6th is nachos. The 22nd is not the only day I dedicate to husband gratitude, but it’s a definite one each and every year. Every 22nd of every month is to be celebrated, whether we are celebrating our first date or our wedding day, and all the 22nds in between bear the title “dorkaversary” to keep things light. Today is the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate Ten Years Together on December 22nd.

This morning as we were wishing each other a happy dorkaversary, we recalled that ten Novembers ago, we were being helped along in our eventual romance by our yoga teacher, who decided it was high time for a partner yoga series! “Breathe with your partner,” she told us, as we sat back-to-back lengthening our spines and working out how to breathe at all, much less with our partner, oh my. “Now twist to the right and reach your right hand to hold onto your partner’s left thigh.” Do what now?! At this point in the narration Rich freely deviates from what actually happened. “That’s not my thigh you’re grabbing…”

He cannot behave. I will need more time to work on him! So grateful for the time we’ve spent together.

 

11/23/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

I am grateful for hope, which appears in this moment not as a thing with feathers, but with fur. A sea otter has been visiting our Oregon coast for several days! This is an event that for most people is probably cute and fun, but for me, it is a profound gift in a heavy time of loss.

I got into marine biology to save endangered species I loved. I became better informed about that over time, and I doubt very seriously that what I do is helping at all. What I do feels like a painstaking documentation of extinction. I know an awful lot about the very specific details of endangerment, how whole ecosystems have folded in on themselves, how our coastline here resembles what it was a century ago only on the very surface. I can take credit for saving nothing.

Sea otters were hunted down to about 1% of their historic population size. The last known individual sea otter swimming in Oregon waters was shot off Newport in 1907. Locally extinct ever since (a reintroduction attempt in the 70s did not succeed), they no longer exert control over sea urchins, which overgraze the kelp holding down the base of this ecosystem. Other species help in the role of maintaining kelp forests, though none to the extent that otters once did. Lately I lean over the edge of every far-out tidepool I visit, hoping and wishing to see a sunflower star, an important urchin predator in the absence of otters. But sunflower stars reached critically endangered status in December 2020, failing to make a comeback from the sea star wasting disease epidemic that began in 2013. Locally extinct now in the southern part of its range, sightings in Oregon are now vanishingly rare. I have not been able to find one.

I started writing gratitude posts as a way to pick myself up when the long shadows of the cold dark fall bring on familiar seasonal despair. But these last two years… despair has not been a seasonal condition. I have struggled with even wanting to bring it up this year, but my kid has still not come home to me, and this day, the 23rd, is his day the same way the 22nd is for Rich and I. I’ve been Quinn’s mom for fourteen years and nine months, and to only see him a few times a week on video and every other Sunday for a hike is… well, despair has been a steady state for this mama.

When he was little, Quinn would get into a cardboard box boat and bring a book in with him to read while he paddled, set crab traps, and coiled his ropes. One frequent book was A Lot of Otters. The premise: Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and her child are reunited.

And this is why I will never achieve any type of greatness in my field. I cannot separate this entire bundle of emotion and sadness and longing and grief and tenderness and hope from this one tiny furry being. Somehow, now, this otter is carrying on its belly, not just a tasty meal of sea urchin, but a whole load of other baggage I need it to carry for me. It is too much for one otter to fix a whole broken ecosystem, a whole broken society, a teen’s anxiety, a mama’s broken heart.

I got to see the otter for about thirty seconds yesterday. I stood there for a lot longer than thirty seconds. Waiting. Watching. My hands took a while to recover from the cold after I left, but I saw the otter. I am so grateful I got to see the otter.

This morning Rich asked, already knowing the answer, whether I would go back again today to check on the otter. I did not see the otter today. But when I heard a rumor that there was also an orca sighted in the area this morning, I knew I would stand there for a long time again. I did not see the orca either. I hope to see orcas someday. (Yes, I am crossing my fingers the orca did not see the otter…)

Maybe why I like marine mammals is that there is no guarantee of seeing them. Someone said aloud what I always think to myself about that gaze you get into when looking for mammals: that you look everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

It makes me think of one quote Joseph Campbell used about God, “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

The seeking is the thing. The waves are rough and the mammals are hiding, I’m standing there, looking at the whole wide circle of ocean, looking everywhere and nowhere. Looking for hope.

 

11/24/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am grateful for this sound.

~thankful thursday~ the helpers

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11/11/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for weekly date nights, for blackberries pulled out of the freezer and turned into syrup for date night cocktails, and of course for my handsome date. The photos are from other dates, we did not go to the golden gate bridge this evening, just to the Noodle Café, for which I am also grateful. But I do get to go to some very cool places with him when I am riding in the passenger seat, even when it’s not vacation.

 

11/12/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

I was having another one of those “grateful for husband/kitties/popcorn, again?” moments, wondering whether it was worth repeating all the same things over again that I am always grateful for. Then I looked back at my memories, as I’ve got a good pile of previous year gratitude posts to fall back on if I am already going to be repeating myself. I saw that one year ago today, my dad was spending the night in the hospital after a scary heart rate drop. A year later, he has a pacemaker and has re-emerged from retirement yet again and is back driving bus, but now with the proper number of beats per minute. My post from two years ago concerned butterflies and migrations and extra trips I had flown in 2019 to visit my parents, including the very last one I took there in October that year while my mom was having radiation. I am so grateful to be able to say that she is cancer-free and he is marching steadily to his new beat and in four more days they will both be boosted. My gratitude for my parents’ health is of course both amplified and shadowed by my husband’s loss of two parents in one year. But I’ve noticed that at least for me, this gratitude season always seems to involve looking into shadows, trusting that stories about shadows are so often secretly stories about light.

 

11/13/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

Grateful for a blue-sky farmer’s market day, a long evening nap on the couch by the wood stove, and bagels, the college roommate of nachos. (I took no good photos of my rainbow display today, so this one is from a few weeks ago; now there are more root veggies and fewer eggplants, but still colorful and abundant.)

 

11/14/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

While not vacationing in Oklahoma, I was grateful repeatedly for strangers who helped us take care of things. There was C, who reassured us that we were moving Nancy into assisted living at the exact right moment and not a moment too soon, and then texted me after her first night to let us know Nancy had enjoyed hot cocoa after dinner! There was E, who sat patiently with us in the bank, untying confusing paperwork knots and offering real sympathy, sharing her own story of loss even though we were randoms revolving through her office. There was J who sat with us in the funeral home, explaining the steps to this Advanced Adulting task over again when I got lost. She radiated sweetness, kindness.

And finally, I will be grateful forever for D, the nurse on 3 West at St. Francis hospital who could tell, without being able to talk to her, that Nancy needed her room a little bit warmer to be comfortable. D, who received word of decisions made in accordance with Nancy’s wishes to remove feeding tube, then a day later to remove oxygen cannula, and whose hands carried out those important jobs. D, who applied chapstick, and told us about Nancy puckering, appreciating the attention to her dry lips despite having maxed out the morphine drip. Into the isolation room she would hustle when the morphine drip beeped its “downstream occlusion” alarm, proclaiming, “it’s the song of my people!” And would joke along with us about how Nancy was just trying to get us to change the subject. D showed us her trick of being able to write both backwards and forwards with both her left and right hand. Instead of logging into the isolation room computers, she would write backwards on the glass doors, to be able to input her notes when she exited a room. D has been on the COVID ward since the pandemic began, so she has had time to perfect this skill. Concurrently with Nancy, she had two pregnant patients and was worried for them. She also had a belligerent patient who kept ripping off his cannula, who then signed himself out AMA. It’s no joke in there. When a patient from the psych ward was also COVID positive and on suicide watch, she would play tic-tac-toe with them using the dry erase markers, sitting on the other side of the window. She thought Nancy was “just a doll,” and shared about her work at the facility her Grandma had lived in. She understood dementia but it didn’t seem to get her down. She would ask her Grandma and her other residents, when they told her each incongruous story, “how old are you?” And when they said 39, or 56, it often made the story make marginally more sense. After two different days of D having a feeling “this might be her day,” based on Nancy’s vitals, she finally told us, “I’ll see y’all on Saturday,” the day before Nancy died. We did not see D on Saturday, but I’m so grateful for the days she took care of Nancy and of us.

 

(originally posted two years ago)

11/15/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

Still grateful about this.

Happy Monday, friends.

 

11/16/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

I am grateful for books! There are some gems in this rainbow of recent reads.

 

(from gratitude 2019)

11/17/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

Today I am grateful for the Ghost of Gratitude Past.

~summer shorts~ give rise

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“Some people have an aesthetic of delineation and symmetry, of keeping each vegetable distinct from each other vegetable. That’s great, and it works for them. My philosophy, though, is abundance. I want to draw people in with color, and piles of overflowing vegetables, spilling forth from cornucopias, piling into one another, blending into a rainbow.”

I stacked sopping wet bunches of carrots, cold water droplets sprinkling the multicolored veggie-print fabric on which I laid them. The new staff member painted by number, adding veggies to each basket I had laid out with a representative of what I wanted there.

Laurie had asked me to help refresh the vibe of our market booth. When she asked me to make a rainbow display, it flipped a switch for me. My pandemic farmer’s market year-plus has been a continued effort of showing up, devotion, doing what I believe in – food security, organic growing, getting food to the people. It used to be more about enjoyment than just devotion. I haven’t been making displays, much less rainbow ones. I have been letting the crew who handled the veggies handle the veggies, while I handled the money. An important job, but not soul-nourishing. Emerging from the pandemic has been halting and awkward, as predicted, but it’s been dawning on us that we can revive some things, like big, beautiful displays. The prospect of making a sweeping swath of veggie artwork before me, I was back to excited.

Cascading eggplants, purple onions, and purple majesty potatoes, purple carrots with their orangey-red lateral root scars. Fragrant basil, parsley, dill, and mint flooding green leaves around four kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, and broccoli. Pattypan and yellow summer squash the color of sunshine blending into goldenrod-hued sweet Italian peppers, their tapered tips and seductive shoulders peeking from a basket near the center, making their summer debut. A mountain of orange carrots, golden beets blending into red beets, red Norland potatoes, dryland (non-irrigated) tomatoes, concentrated red succulence.

While searching for the term for the lines on a carrot, wondering about that specific feature of rootiness, I stumbled upon a Plant Ontology forum (as one does) and learned they can also be called root periderm scars. I guess they have been called root lenticels, but it is now understood that they do not conduct gas-exchange. They are formed when lateral roots emerge and initiate a wound response in the periderm – the peripheral cell layers. Cells proliferate, heal over this wound, form a new layer. The plant ontologists decided a new name, root periderm scars, was warranted.

It makes me think about how forming new roots can inflict injury. How wounds can result in scars, in tissue that cannot breathe. But also how injury can give rise to new growth, new layers.

~summer shorts~ a list of emptied spaces

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One – sea urchin grottos

There is a cavity left behind when a sea urchin dies, and sometimes other things come in to attempt to fill it. They don’t fill the spaces in the same way; maybe they glue themselves to the ceiling of the empty grotto and extend fleshy tentacles when the tide is in; maybe they snail along the walls grazing any newly settled algae; but they aren’t the purple spiky echinoderm that is made to fill such a hole.

Two – cardboard box boats

I’m not sure what got Quinn thinking of Baby Kitty one night, but he was sad he couldn’t remember her very much, only where we buried her. I offered to send him some photos, and he liked that idea. The following night we talked about how kitty was in the background of so many photos of him, like one where he is in the foreground inside a box boat. I remembered him taking A Lot of Otters into his box boats with him to read. The child in the book is also in a box boat.

I pulled A Lot of Otters off the bookshelf and read it to him over our video call. The basic plot premise is that Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and the child are reunited.

“Mother moon was looking for her child…”

Three – my arms

That night I had a dream about hugging Quinn again, finally, when this is all over, and when I hugged him in the dream he was so much bigger than me.

Four – mothers’ hearts

A local mother delivered her baby still born. I imagine a fresh space prepared for this babe, like an empty sea urchin grotto painted pink, and now a closed door tries to hold back the tidal wave of love reserved for this little one it cannot be showered upon. Suspended in an impossible position, this mother whose face I know, this friend of friends, carrying this staggering weight of this love she cannot bestow, carrying breasts heavy with milk with whom she can nurture no one. Full where she should be empty, empty where she should be full. If my grief cries tears into the ocean to turn into stars to light my way to reunite with my child, her grief must be the kind that fills the ocean basin from bottom to top.

Five – guinea pig kennels

Quinn’s talk of pet grief seems prophetic and he is now missing one of his beloved guinea pigs. Ms. B and Squeaky came to him when he was seven. I couldn’t sit with him through the night as he held Ms. B in his lap and worried, or hold him the next day after she passed away. On our video call that night I read him a long meditation I had written in which a guinea pig stood on a bridge crossing over a stream, not knowing how else to bring him comfort from far away and defaulting to using my words as usual.

“You cannot see what is on the other side of the stream, you can only see that this side is very lush and beautiful, surrounded by forest, but a thick fog hides the opposite bank from your view. You can see little rainbows appear here and there as the sunbeams sneak through the trees and touch the fog. It’s a beautiful mystery on that other side.”

He turned off his web cam while he listened to the visualization of Ms B crossing the bridge to the other side.

Six – forests and homes

Oregon is on fire. The winds on Monday night took out trees and power lines and brought fire and smoke and landslides to even our coastal community where we can no longer take our position beside the sea in a rain forest for granted. Breathing carcinogenic air for days intersects with the health concerns we already face and I find that this situation is helping neither my breath holding tendencies nor my anxiety. I checked the folder with the important documents, though I will probably continue pacing my house, looking out at the orange sky, looking at items and wondering which ones I would grab if we were to be evacuated, too.

I know people who had to grab their house cats in the middle of the night and get out with their lives. There are so many more who I do not know. I try not to feel sorry for myself that my overnight backpacking plans with Quinn have been postponed.

Hundreds of geese huddled along the edge of the bay as we drove through foggy smoke after picking up pizza for date night at home. Robins had sat in the grass all day looking stunned. So much dryness. So much stillness after such a turbulent wind. The lawn crunched under my feet as I pick pears up off the ground, embarrassed by the plenty falling into my hands while others are losing everything, or still waiting to hear the outcomes of their everything.

The next morning I couldn’t take the pacing anymore and flipped a hundred pancakes for evacuees sheltering in a church.

Seven – farmer’s markets

Even when farmer’s markets have been canceled in the past, my farm would still show up, in full marine foul weather gear, and sell tomatoes and cauliflower and bundles of fresh parsley out of the truck as cold rain fell in sheets and we sipped hot drinks from thermoses. This week, we did not sell any tomatoes, the markets and even the harvest were paused while we all held our breath and prayed for that manner of rain to fall.

Eight – aquarium exhibits

Max lived thirty years – a long sea lion life – but it still makes me cry that he is dead now, too. My toddler would point him out to tourists back when we had an annual membership to the aquarium and went there regularly, and they’d remark on my son’s lengthy attention span and articulate commentary about Max’s activities during the daily feeding routine. Other children would peel off after thirty seconds and Quinn would stay, narrate, re-enact, commune with Max, beyond even the attention span of the adults. I wonder if Max is finally allowed to be released back into the sea, but I have doubts.

I can’t bring myself to tell Quinn about this fresh heartbreak.

Nine – my arms

I still wouldn’t get to hug him.

Ten – enough

I think I’ll leave this one empty.

~rainbow mondays~ nourish

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~rainbow mondays~ summer fresh

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~two months in the life of a lifelong learner~ anthropomorphization of vegetables

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lifelong holidays learning!

 

one saturday rich was working so i brought quinn to farmer’s market with me. i parked him in front of my display that i was building and had him put bundles of broccoli raab into a rainbow arch around the basket where the bell peppers would be going, and he got right on that. then after he finished that job, i showed him that the cauliflower would be going in a big basket, but kind of cascading out of it onto the cloth, and he was like “great! i can make a cauliflower cascade!” and just kept following my instructions and being legitimately helpful. he likes all the people i work with, and they all like him, so i would ultimately look around for him and he’d be helping someone else doing things. he helped put up the price signs and someone would tell him “cipollini, those are the flat onions.” and give him hints so he could learn what things were (he knows a lot but the farm has a LOT of veggies and some of them are hard to differentiate if you don’t know that, say, parsnips have an innie belly button and parsley root have an outie! actually he knows those two… and one of his favorites is romanesco! but some of the other turnips and roots and shallots… less so.) if he started needing my attention more than i could handle while i was helping customers check out, i would send him on a task. i had him fetch some empty totes and build me a side table and cover it with a piece of fabric so people could set their basket/bag on it while checking out. then i sent him to buy himself a pastry and get rich a cinnamon roll, it’s only about 100 yards away and in line of sight of numerous people who would throw themselves in front of a bus to protect quinn, but still… it is not lost on me that he is getting big and independent. then he went and picked up my coffee for me, including adding the milk “and about 3 blups of honey and 3 shakes of cinnamon.” i let him buy a honey stick and a small honey bear even though we have 4 gallons of honey at home. his final task was to figure out how many apples for his lunches he could buy with the money he had left over. he entertained himself really well reading his book, drawing in his minecraft journal (a graph paper composition book) and then he ate most of my lunch from the german food vendor, which was really yummy meatballs and mushroom sauce. he loved it and said he wanted me to figure out how to make mushroom sauce.

he brought home some interesting and unique vegetables like the cutest tiny jalapeno pepper… he and my friend rachel found it together, and were chatting (i heard later) about its cuteness and describing its attributes, and then he came over to me with it and asked me with a grin, “how do you feel about anthropomorphization?” and then giggled uncontrollably. i love how he knows what will make me laugh or surprise me or catch me off guard. he gets my humor, it’s almost like he’s related to me.

he was my farmer’s market elf when he was a toddler, and he is still my farmer’s market elf now as a big kid.  at the end of the market day, i tasked him with sorting the baskets by shape and fitting them onto the cart, a job we both have the right kind of brain for.

another day i brought him with me again, since the first time had gone so well, and he was very taken up with a project, so he helped a bit less, but was still delightful to have along. “i’ve just created a new runic language. if you want to take the oath to join my tribe, you can be allowed to learn the language!” again with the graph paper. i should buy stock in graph paper.

when we got home, i took a bath while he read and then we had leftovers and got ready to go to a play. the addam’s family was fun, and it’s entertaining to watch quinn watch a play. he gets so sucked into the plot but at the same time he can analyze what’s going on back stage, on how they made a certain effect: “i think the lever was just a prop, and they made the chains move from behind the panel” was discussed at intermission. he memorized his favorite lines “wednesday is growing up, before you know it, she’ll be thursday!” and so on. after the play he got a hug from his theatre camp counselor, who was a member of the cast. i love how he reads through the program now and finds all the people he knows…. it’s a small town after all.

 

in december, i had quinn for the very beginning and very end of the month, for christmas. this is our second year of doing a two-week swap around the holidays (we used this trick last summer as well) which has worked out very well. it is one of the things that i am proud of after the years of toughing it out with a difficult coparent, that on topics we once couldn’t handle negotiating at all, we have become rather flexible and win-win about the process. the biggest winner, of course, is quinn, who gets the best holidays in either household (solstice there, christmas here).

the one drawback on this end is that he misses a large chunk of the season of advent at our house, which has always been something he really savors. the anticipation and expectancy of the coming holiday has always been my favorite part of christmas time as well. this year we made the most of our one week of advent together, feeling a little more settled into dragon house 2.0 for our second christmas in residence here.

on that sunday, we slept in and had pumpkin pancakes. rich’s mom had given me a form that makes the pancakes into christmas shapes just the day before, so i figured i’d use it right away. we already had his playmobil and lego advent calendars out, sparkle advent stories and color-in calendar in use. since this day was turning out to be glorious, we figured we should get the tree now, while he could help pick it out and decorate it (as opposed to last year’s tree which we put up on december 23rd).

we took a drive to get our tree, and it’s out past where we camp in the summer, so on the way back we stopped at the campsite to see the river. at the tree farm, we walked up the hill, rich with his chainsaw in hand, and the three of us walked and pointed out trees of the right height. we told quinn that it needed to be not much taller than rich so he was looking back and forth between rich and the trees. then he got to one and it was the first one where he commented “ooh this one looks nice.” just then i heard a hawk screech and looked up to try to find the hawk, then started taking pictures of it flying over our heads. rich asked right then, “which tree should we get?” i said, “i think the hawk just told us.” and quinn said, “yes, this one!” so it was decided. i had quinn hold my camera while i held the tree and rich sawed it. quinn’s documentation is mixed into the photos above. then we carried our tree down the hill and took it home with us!

quinn got in his bed and spent the rest of the entire day reading calvin and hobbes.

i made my mom’s swedish meatball recipe but added mushroom soup to the gravy to make it mushroom sauce for quinn. also since he’s reading norse mythology i pointed out the connection there, and told him we have norwegian ancestry, but he said, “mom, magnus chase takes place in boston.”

after dinner rich went outside and then stuck his head in the door and said we should come outside and to bring my camera. so we went out to look at the supermoon. quinn went back inside because i sent him to check if his bathtub was full, and it was, so he didn’t come back outside. instead he read his trials of apollo book in the tub.

on monday morning taking quinn to school, i realized that i haven’t been at school much to pick him up or drop him off, it had been 3 weeks without me going there… his dad had him, then i had him for the thanksgiving week off, then dad had him again. so i’ll have him for drop offs and pick ups this single week in december, and then i won’t do it again until january! i was remarking on that as we walked up to the school, and i decided to be a dork and squeezed his hand more firmly and said, “so i’m going to do a really good job taking you to school this week! don’t you feel like you’re being taken to school well?” and he played along swinging our hands and we giggled the whole way there.

we spent monday evening putting on the lights, garland, and decorations!

he chose to finish waking up the next morning beside the tree.

and whooooosh! it was christmas. lots of fun presents were opened, and a modest family gathering revolved around playing risk and parcheesi.

in the department of books, he received wizardology, a minecraft book, 365 days of wonder (mr. browne’s precepts), and the mother-son journal called between mom and me. i wasn’t sure how his presents would be received this year… i felt as though i gave him a few that were organizational tools disguised as presents (a mallet holder, a music stand, and a karate belt display hanger). i thought he would like the book of precepts, having read and watched wonder in the early days of fifth grade, but i was not sure he would embrace the mama-son journal. then to top it off, he got a shirt, a hat and a scarf… clothes! but he was delighted with every single gift, and expressed his gratitude.

it turned out that he was very into the journal, and was excited to start working on it with me. i’m pleased he sees it as more than another writing assignment, and instead as a way for us to connect through writing. he does like to write, even if it isn’t his easiest subject, and opts to write for his own creative purposes frequently. one night at bedtime he was torn between reading his book (the second in rick riordan’s kane chronicles), writing in the mama/son journal, and drawing “because i just thought of a book series i want to write and a movie i want to make” with 5 minutes until lights out. the flood of ideas right at the time he needs to fall asleep is epic as ever!

i told him about thumbnail sketches and had him do a few for the movie script, then put down a jot list of reminders for the book series so he’d remember his idea, and we filled out our “guidelines” pages in the journal. “people who are close to us are allowed to know about it” is one of the guidelines, so i don’t have to keep it a secret. it’s a pretty good format. we decided how we’d keep track of where we are with a special bookmark (and when he misspelled special we added a guideline that we will correct each other’s spelling because i asked if he wanted me to correct him on things or let them go and he wants the spelling “100% perfect.”) the bookmark will need to be made but will have a green owl stamp on the left and a purple dolphin stamp on the right. and our address with “return to” on it, but written in pencil, so it can be updated as needed.

we still often lean on the “dolphin story” during bedtimes like these for relaxing and emptying his busy brain, but he shared that lately his best strategy to calm down alllll the thoughts, is to choose one thing to really focus on. at bedtime he will name it out loud “i’m working on the next chapter of my mage novel in my head tonight” and then he can drift off.

something dragon-related is happening here… on graph paper.

he and i played risk again, and he beat me as usual. then he became inspired to work on programming a risk game in scratch, on his piper computer. he started out by drawing a world map (divided into the proper territories for risk) out of shapes in the background, but realized he would need to start again and make each territory a sprite that could behave independently (attack, defend, be conquered). he did further research on the scratch website and played someone else’s versions of risk on scratch, a wwii version and a napoleon version, which he then plans to study for how to code his own. as he was playing, he ended up with the world atlas in his lap, studying flags of european countries. when i talk about using the screen as a tool (for learning/creating/accomplishing goals), rather than simply a platform of consumption, this is what i mean.

we talked a bit about his progress in khan academy, where he is going through the 6th grade math curriculum at school. he is plugging along, and he was explaining his latest lesson on calculating volume of a rectangular prism. we got to chatting about finding volume of spheres, pyramids, cylindrical prisms, and such, and he was having so much fun that we developed a math problem for calculating the volume of goods able to be carried by an oregon trail conestoga wagon.

brain surgery (still going strong with lunch-making!)

is it wrong to tell your child you will only buy them tangerines for their lunches if they write it on the shopping list in cursive?

one night we were driving to karate for open mat, and he let out a gigantic sigh. “hey buddy, keep breathing.” he said, “it’s just… the paper mill.” (we have one in our town…) “it makes me upset because it’s destroying the earth.”

what do you even say?

other worries he carries are… less worrisome.

“something that has been worrying me ever since the end of 4th grade is, if a fly is flying inside of a train car, is it still going the same speed, or is it going faster because of how fast the train is going?”

i gave him the “it depends” answer based on what frame of reference we are measuring velocity with respect to, the ground or the train itself, we discussed some high school physics definitions, and talked about how the math works, depending on whether the fly is flying in the same direction as the train is traveling, or the opposite direction. oh yeah, and mentioned that this was the type of question that inspired albert einstein to develop his special theory of relativity, bringing a big paradigm shift to the field of physics.

i came across a podcast called brains on that had an episode entitled the flies on the bus that further addressed his “worry”. he listened to it, and then proceeded to choose a few more of the brains on podcasts to listen to next (they’re great, i think the segment called “um” is my favorite name for a radio show segment ever) and his first pick was farts smarts; understanding the gas we pass. so you know, it’s rare, but sometimes he does act exactly his age.

i love finding new audio for him to explore, he is soothed by it. he can be overstimulated through his ears (with sound, water, etc), and yet that is also the sensory pathway that is easiest to reach him to help restore calm in him. it is not lost on me that my sound-sensitive one who used to flip out over the use of the coffee grinder or vacuum cleaner, is the kid driven to take up drumming. within the problem are the seeds to the solution, sometimes.  i wonder how many other sensory channels this can be said for, in other kids with sensory differences.

we had the delightful opportunity to offer quinn a chance to go to a winter wonderings 6-week saturday class on a nearby college campus, and be a poppy in a field of other poppies. he got signed up at the very last minute, based on his initial lukewarm response to the pamphlet that was sent home from school (you’re pre-approved!), and my uncertainty whether my coparent would drive him the 45 minutes to it on his 3 saturdays, and especially since we knew going into it that we’d miss the final week due to our upcoming trip. given that this was such a cool opportunity, though, i jumped on his last minute enthusiasm for signing up, and we made it happen. the clincher was really him getting on the phone and advocating for himself with his dad, which is an ongoing theme, and worthwhile lesson. i called the head of the program and although quinn’s top class choice of minecraft ancient civilizations was full, he was excited to try the outdoor survival skills class. i got him in just one day before he was set to attend the first one! and the first one went very well!

wake-up time with lisa kitty, a boy folded up in child’s pose on the couch, and another yoga pose of unknown identity while reading calvin and hobbes. (he’s pretty perpetually reading calvin and hobbes!)

 

these months in music: “there needs to be a way to write in the music for it to go in a circle.” like his insightful observation of “fourth person point of view,” quinn grasps yet another concept (the musical repeat, and the need for its notation in sheet music) before being taught the formal lesson.

now that we’ve been doing lessons and practice for a while, it is becoming trickier to keep him motivated to practice. writing his own songs definitely helps, and playing along with the practice cds, or with me on another instrument, is helpful. but sometimes it is as simple as me renaming “clair de la luna” as “luna lovegood” and he smiles and tries to play it. he has also arrived at the space where he cannot instantly memorize the entire (8-measure) song (of repetitive half and quarter notes), and must actually fail at the first attempt, and absorb the imperfection and go on to try again. even now, each song (now with 16 measures and more variation in quarter notes) may only take 3 or 4 tries to master, but that was the first high hurdle for him in his musical education. his perfectionism can be a huge stumbling block. after he mastered luna lovegood, he tried the next one… felt like he had failed, and had to be talked into trying again. i used the “be goofy” trick again and sang him the lyrics to “down by the station” which include the word “pufferbellies.” finally, he worked through the page of luna lovegood and pufferbellies, with the added bonus lyrics learned as well, and i think he is in a better place to keep learning increasingly difficult pieces.

back in december we also attended quinn’s school concert, and a good time was had by all.

karate practice in the sun!

 

 

this is the happy face i want to see after a long day of learning… there is one pretty spectacular title teacher at his school, and even though there is no tag program at school this year, she has her ways of reaching them all, including the way she made sure his pamphlet for winter wonderings came home, but also her time in the classroom is always something quinn looks forward to. he got so excited about learning origami after her lesson on making an octahedron! he was so on fire that i heard about it after school, on the day she introduced the project, when he had only reached the halfway point of his finished octahedron. describing it, he told me, “it has 6 vertices!” and other fancy geometry jargon. by the next afternoon, he was bringing it home completed, feeling accomplished, with a big smile on his face.

~rainbow mondays~ best of farmstand

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being out at the farm and hearing discussions of market display strategies a week ago, i realized i have been planning on sorting through to find some of my “best of” market displays, and just haven’t gotten around to it in the 3 years i’ve been working for gathering together. while some display strategies value symmetry and delineation, i tend to accentuate color and abundance. this post starts with one of my favorites from near the beginning of the outdoor market season last year, the season of peas and berries and cherry tomatoes! i always try to be the rainbow whenever the produce in season and other market constraints allow…

the “triple” is one of my favorite racks to build a display on, because i love how you can create a waterfall of abundance cascading down its 3 surfaces. the early bunches of spring veggies are well suited to this.

but mid-summer veggies work on the triple as well. summer squash and green beans help fill out the display when bunches are fewer, and berries can hide on the bottom shelf and help pop out the zucchini varieties when we only have a few berries to sell.

i have put in a request for more blue vegetables, by the way. it’s usually the only color i’m missing!

the “wall” is a favorite display of mine in summer, less so in spring and fall when it is full of greens and nothing else. i love to eat greens, but displaying them is not my strong suit. i really like to paint with peppers, though, and last year we found that they worked well in the wall of boxes, when we had so much other produce (melons and tomatoes) taking up the more horizontal surfaces. last sunday we got to hear the story of the wooden boxes that our farmer obtained from an old russian farmer from whom he was buying some other equipment.

but peppers can sell themselves off of any surface, really. what’s not to love about all that color?

for a change, i decided one day to display the few remaining corn cobs of the season in less of a “pile” format, as it is usually done.

when it comes to winter squash, the rainbow has the required blue, but i’ve also put in requests for red and purple squash varieties (they may not exist, but it never hurts to ask!)

sometimes black and white add a great accent to the colorful peppers. late fall roots are starting to take over for the dwindling summer nightshades in this display.

when it turns into beige veggie season (winter), i try to still find a way to bring some color (cut a watermelon radish in half – bam!). we always have a great leek crop throughout the winter season, and i discovered that the leek fan is a great way to draw the eye, and the customer over to the beige roots section and strike up a conversation about soup.

sometimes it can be tricky to display greens in a pleasing manner, but every now and then i pull it off. i liked this raab/carrot/beet situation from an early spring market last year. i would have been docked points for my tablecloth being out of level, but i did attend to symmetry with the veggies…

late spring rhubarb from this season lent itself well to the leek fan format. it sells itself, truly, but the display work is such great therapy, a great lesson in impermanence, and a great excuse to play with color!