All posts by GretchenJoanna

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About GretchenJoanna

Orthodox Christian, widowed in 2015; mother, grandmother. Love to read, garden, cook, write letters and a hundred other home-making activities.

Maps, juice, and puzzles.

children's books, family, nature, , , , , ,
  • 2016-07-05 17.30.57I’m improving my mind this week, as I play with the two grandboys whose own minds are soaking up knowledge about their world at a fast rate. I brought their family two large Lauri puzzles that our family of 15 years ago must have acquired too late for them to be of much interest to our own children. In any case, I hadn’t been called upon before to help assemble them, and I was frankly in trepidation about this Fit-a-State puzzle, because I don’t “know my states” very well.

I had forgotten that behind the unmarked pieces is an outline drawing of all the states with their names. Neither of the boys can read those, though, and they were better than I at some important aspects of jigsaw puzzling, such as having a good sense of spatial relationships.

I have always been on the low end of the scale for that kind of perception, and have noticed that many grandchildren are quicker. Laddie who is only two doesn’t even seem to be looking very hard at the spaces to be filled, or at the piece he is holding, but he quickly takes in the view and without hesitating places the piece in the right place.

detail map puzzle

The detail on this map is amazing. Every state is its own piece. Yes, even Rhode Island. You know we haven’t assembled the puzzle many times because neither Connecticut nor Rhode Island has been lost!

I think I’ve probably learned a bit more United States geography through this exercise. I like doing puzzles with the boys because although they are often rambunctious as you would expect healthy boys to be, they both are able to concentrate for long periods on detail work such as coloring and puzzles.

target puzzle

Yesterday I did some grocery shopping for the family and I  brought back something from Target’s $1 aisles for each of the older boys. Liam got a puzzle consisting of sticks to be laid side by side in alphabetical order. I knew it would be easy for him because he knows the A-B-C song perfectly. He soon wanted to make words with the lettered sticks, or to sing the song with the alphabet mixed up but the notes in perfect order. We did that together for a while to gales of laughter. And today we made some of our own “sticks” with extra letters so we can now form words.

ourpuzzle

 

Yes, we mix up lower case and capitals. Liam prefers the latter. I hadn’t thought of adding pictures to the new strips but he thought that essential. So I took courage and tried to draw a quail and a glue stick, which were the pictures he suggested.

Soldier and Brodie 7-5-16

Little Brodie is here, of course, lending his newborn sweetness to the atmosphere. At four weeks he’s healthy and growing fast, though he hasn’t yet reached his due date. He is a pretty “easy” baby at this point. Does it seem that third-borns are often like this? I think they like having all the noises of the other children in the house.

Perhaps the loudest commotion happens  when a fire truck leaves the station house a block away and turns on its siren. The boys drop whatever they are doing and run to the nearest window screaming like banshees, in hopes of seeing the truck wailing past.

I’m enjoying the neighborhood walks, and I’ve taken the boys up and down different residential streets every day. Every day I see something I don’t know, and/or a plant that I saw years ago when visiting this area. Soldier and Joy and our good friends Mr. and Mrs. Bread lived very close to each other back then.

For example, this plant that I think is an aloe of some kind…? Mrs. Bread probably told me before what it is. Every specimen I have seen is gigantic, and at first I called it the spidery plant, which made Liam laugh, but then I changed it to I’ve taken to the Octopus Plant. It looks to me like a good place for rats and spiders to breed.

2016-07-05 11.55.46Along the sidewalks where I push Laddie in the stroller and Liam walks, if flowers or foliage hang over the sidewalk we will take a sample to sniff. With the help of the Internet I identified a butterfly bush in Soldier apurple flowernd Joy’s back yard. They have a great yard for having a passel of boys — all the ornamentals are of the sort that can’t be destroyed.

A large flock of Canada geese hangs out at one park we have frequented. We have studied their herd movements and don’t understand them at all. Below you can see part of the group nibbling near the swings where Liam is pushing his little brother.

2016-07-05 11.24.21

So much hands-on learning is happening around here all day long. I brought bags of oranges from our family’s groves in the Central Valley, and my juicer, and one of the boys’ favorite things is to make the juicer go, and the juice to flow, by bearing down hard on the cut orange. While they are doing such real and necessary work they behave in a very grown-up manner and don’t squabble at all.

I brought a big basket from home full of some of my favorite children’s books, including Down Down the Mountain and The Maggie B. As I was typing this blog post last night I could hear Soldier in the boys’ bedroom reading The Clock by Esphyr Slobodkina, a book that I read to him in ages past.

Sleepy People by M.B. Goffstein has been loved. It puts even the reader in a somnolent mood with its brief but evocative tale of a family who “are always sleepy.”  Several line drawings depict parents carrying limp children in their arms, and descriptions of people whose eyes are closing as they eat their bedtime milk and cookies.One evening I was asked to read this book as we all clustered around Liam and Laddie’s beds, and we all smiled as our own yawns involuntarily happened, and before long our whole household was on the way to dreamland and restoration and energizing, for the explorations and challenges of another busy day in Monterey.

Out for a walk.

family, poetry, time, , ,

flowerMonteryThis morning I took Liam (4) and Laddie (2) for a walk in their new neighborhood in Monterey, on California’s Central Coast. It was foggy and cool — it never gets summery hot here — and we enjoyed the flowers in the gardens we passed. This succulent with wild magenta flowers is one I am not familiar with.

We stopped at two different parks with playgrounds, where we pretended the stroller was a train, and I taught them the Hokey Pokey.

Nothing monumental or philosophical happened, but it was very meaningful to me. The last time I took Liam for a walk in a stroller was when Laddie was the new baby. This time the new baby is Brodie and he and his mom were napping at home. I’m grateful to be involved in their daily life for a few days.

Last week I discovered this poem about a walk:

THE PINNACLE

Both of us understood
what a privilege it was
to be out for a walk
with each other
we could tell from our different
heights that this
kind of thing happened
so rarely that it might
not come round again
for me to be allowed
even before I
had started school
to go out for a walk
with Miss Giles
who had just retired
from being a teacher all her life

she was beautiful
in her camel hair coat
that seemed like the autumn leaves
our walk was her idea
we liked listening to each other
her voice was soft and sure
and we went our favorite way
the first time just in case
it was the only time
even though it might be too far
we went all the way
up the Palisades to the place
we called the pinnacle
with its park at the cliff’s edge
overlooking the river
it was already a secret
the pinnacle
as we were walking back
when the time was later
than we had realized
and in fact no one
seemed to know where we had been
even when she told them
no one had heard of the pinnacle

and then where did she go

-W.S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius

Happiness floats.

poetry,

As I drove away from the Office Max parking lot yesterday afternoon, “Scheherazade” was playing on the radio, and I crossed myself in a prayer, and immediately wondered why I did that. Why was I suddenly so full of joy and peace that I had to acknowledge the Holy Trinity and the fact that I was in His presence? It was a response to the beauty of the music, and a praise to the Creator of humans in His image, who are empowered to become co-creators after Him. But it was also a gift, unexplainable, this gladness to be alive. It is something to accept, and a place to live in, for however many moments I can keep it.

I have been reading a lot of poems lately. I want to say I’ve browsed through volumes large and small, collections by various poets….but I think a different word would be more honest, something like rummaged or skipped, or plowed. It doesn’t seem very respectful of the poets’ work, or quite civilized — until I find a poem to sink into, and then I am calmed and fed.

This morning I am sitting in the garden, listening to the fountain gurgle nearby. Also to the vague rock music coming through the walls of one neighbor’s house, and a saw sound buzzing over from another neighbor. After I finished breakfast I copied a couple of poems by Naomi Shihab Nye into my notebook, but this one I wanted to put up here instead, as it reminded me of that wonderful minute that I was given yesterday.

So Much Happiness

for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…..

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

Summer whites and lesser colors.

art, my garden, nature, quotes, wildflowers, , ,

gl 6 chamomilegerman.jpg 6-16I got confused about my chamomile. All I could remember was that one is perennial and the other annual. When I noticed that they are both starting to bloom now, I had to try to figure out which was which again. This is what I’ve found.

<< The annual German or Hungarian chamomile is the taller of the two, to 24″. From what I read it often self-sows, and I hope it will do that in my yard.

German: Chamomilla recutita syn Matricaria chamomilla 

gl 6 redpoppies

It’s growing near the red California poppy that I planted from a nursery pot, and whose flowers just opened this week. The white variety of this plant that I put in at the same time bloomed a couple of months ago, much less enthusiastically.

That makes me think about something I read in the Summer book I mentioned last week, a quote from Chesterton, from “A Piece of Chalk,” in which he gives an account of how he reluctantly tore himself away “from the task of doing nothing in particular,” and set off into “the great downs” of England with his brown paper and his brightly colored chalks, all on a summer’s day.

To his dismay he had neglected to bring any white chalk — and he begins to hold forth on how the color white, in art and in morals, is essential:

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals is this, that white is a colour….a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars….Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

Perhaps my spindly white wildflowers, just starting out and blooming faintly without any other color around them to contrast with (even their foliage was already faded when the buds opened), do not provide a fitting metaphor to match this principle, but it did seem like a good place to tuck in that quote about something I do believe in.

93e53-yellowcapoppy4-11So far I haven’t sown any seed for the standard orange color of our state flower because I am a little afraid of them taking over. The other colors are not as vigorous, but some of them are really special in their rarity and subtlety, and when I have had one re-seed itself or, more often, go dormant and hidden for the winter only to surprise me the next spring, I am thrilled. This pale yellow one did just that for several years in my old garden, but could not be saved.                                                                                                           >>

The red ones are my first variety that are both rare and bright. I hope they self-sow — but much of the garden is experimental. I’ll see over the next months what likes growing in this environment, and not fuss over the things that aren’t thriving.

Back to the chamomile… Just in case the Germans don’t bear children next year, I planted a perennial type, the Roman or Nobile. It grows half as tall and is sometimes used as a walkable ground cover, or part of an herbal lawn mix.

gl 6 Roman 1

<< Roman: Chamaemelum nobile syn Anthemis nobilis

An hour after I took this picture, I strolled past again and noticed that ten more buds had swelled enough to be noticeable. History in the making!

I had a house guest for two nights and a day – we spent a nourishing and relaxing time, even though we did no artwork or gardening or poetry-reading. We did eat and shop and update our family birthday lists. But now I have lots of garden work that needs to be done, before I go to see brand-new Baby Brodie next week. Here’s a yarrow bloom for you to look at while I am out tending to my beds.

gl 6 yarrow 6-16