Category Archives: family

They are playing all around.

family, nature,

Happily, there is more talk about playing, and how children’s play fits in with the lives of adults — and that doesn’t mean driving them to nursery school or to the soccer field. We are referring to normal play that is not structured or organized or planned by adults.

Jody at Gumbo Lily wrote a wonderfully descriptive post about how her own grandchildren play near her while she works. Of course it makes most of us remember our own childhoods and the kind of fun we had all by ourselves. If you haven’t already, I hope you will comment on her post or here with some of your memories along that line.

Of outdoor play, I remember in my own early years making dolls’ houses in the dirt under orange trees, and the classic mud pies. If the children are “entertaining themselves,” and the adults are taking the opportunity to get some work done, the vast majority of what children do with their time is undocumented, and likely unremembered also. Two more ways we don’t control it.

snail toys

And lest someone think that a big ranch is necessary for the kind of play we’re talking about, I’m posting the only picture I can find, other than what I put up on my last post, of me or my children playing alone. If they are occupied, and the adult is occupied, why, there is no one to hover with a camera.

This picture was taken just after we moved from the country to the city. When we had a huge garden next to a cow pasture and a blackberry bog, across the road from an abandoned orchard, we had no snails. So when we moved here where we now live, they were a new and fascinating object of play, which I definitely did not introduce as a science topic. I don’t know what all went on with those snails, but I had to laugh at the way every little thing can be a toy on what Jody call’s God’s playground.

Now read her blog, because her examples are nicer.

Mountain Air – smoke and writing

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I returned this week from a solitary trip to the mountains, where I stayed in a cabin off the grid for four nights. I could easily write a book about my five days of journeying and lodging, probably a philosophical novel. Or would it be a how-to treatise with packing lists and suggested activities and prayers?

I’m always saying, “I could write a book about ____.” And it just occurred to me that I am always writing, as I endlessly analyze events as to their significance, and organize my thoughts, composing and reworking the lines in my mind. If I have a pencil or keyboard handy and hands free I might scribble down some of it, often in a notebook or in the margin of the book I’m reading. But the process has begun long before that.

It wouldn’t be a lie exactly, when people ask me what I do, to say, “I write.” Because I’m a process-oriented type, I can’t see a book ever resulting from my work, but no pressure — no one is clamoring for a discussion of the things in my pocket or the interrelatedness of the last ten books I read.

I thought I might do some sort of scribbling during my getaway, but I didn’t make much visible progress on my “books.” Many things that are fascinating to my self-centered self consumed my hours and my thoughts, and I do want to reflect on some of that here, hopefully without rambling on and on.


Today I just want to mention one sad thing about my experience: Smoke. The brown cinders from that horrid Rim Fire, the largest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada, had drifted south and made the air murky around Our Lake. One day was so bad that my eyes and throat and head hurt from the pollution. But I didn’t have to come home early, because it cleared up a little by the next morning.


I can’t imagine what the landscape will look like, the next time we visit our beloved Yosemite and drive through the scorched forests. One thing I know: On August 25th the fire destroyed the Berkeley City Camp Tuolumne where my sisters and I as children vacationed with our grandparents.

It has been many decades since I did water ballet in that swimming hole in the Tuolumne River, or even visited the camp, and it won’t change my life that it is wiped out. But what a heartache for the people who spent dozens of formative summers in the context of that special place, and those for whom the rustic cabin life in an idyllic setting was a very recent tradition and expectation. I’m very thankful it was only smoke that invaded our family’s lake and village.

One cupcake on Saturday and treats all week long…

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My fortnight with lots of good company has come to an end. Of course I still have my husband who is normally all the good company I need, but it was a very wonderful thing to have our big house used for good purposes. Our guests were friends and family, and even strangers from Ohio and New York lodging here on account of a masters singing class held at my church. During this two weeks came the wave of heat.

One weekend Liam’s parents Soldier and Joy used our house for a birthday party for our little grandson. I love it when creative people decorate my house and take care of all the invitations and food for an event, and all I have to do is provide a relatively tidy environment and clean towels everywhere. In this case I even swept the floor because I knew the guest of honor would crawl all over it.

Frosting the lemon cupcakes

 
The Very Hungry Caterpillar was the theme for Liam’s party. His mother made the cutest treats and favors and lanterns relating to the story or the colors and shapes in the book. Liam didn’t notice most of it but he did eat most of a cupcake after the candle was blown out by his mother.

Their family had no sooner departed than Pippin’s crowd arrived with Pat. They had come south to enjoy more and different adventures before Pat had to return to MD. Pippin’s little ones are Scout and Ivy, so I was treated to more time with more grandchildren. So sweet.

Ivy scooted around on the floor, too, and tried to kiss the little girl in the dishwasher door.

The heat wave surprisingly extended to the North Coast beaches and we all trekked to one where there was no fog or wind. Barely any sand got into our sourdough bread and cheese and blueberries, and only Scout stood on his head in the hole that the cousins dug.

God gave us a rainbow in a cloud. It was even more brilliant than this but faded somewhat while I rummaged around for my camera.

 

I took the photo below for Jo in Tasmania where they call New Zealand Spinach warrigal greens. Its botanical name is Tetragonia tetragonioides. It seems to have naturalized here on the coast and this is the second time I’ve seen it on beaches.

 

 

Here’s the same plant that keeps volunteering in my garden, amongst the tomatoes and snapdragons:

On the bluffs above the beach, as we were parting with Pat, I got a parting gift in this pale yellow/white paintbrush display in the middle of a coastal flower show. These all were just a few of the pleasures of the early summer – I will tell of more soon.

Aunt Ida warns against haste in the blood.

family, history, quotes,

Over a year ago I shared here a few excerpts from old letters written from Central and South America by Aunt Ida. I still plan to transcribe them all and share some more stories, but I’m afraid have fallen right down on that job.

This week we’ve been struck by an unusual heat wave. No one has AC here, because it’s so rarely warranted, and my recent experiences of wilting and sweating made me remember this passage from one letter in which she writes home to her sisters about how to cope in the Panamanian climate. I managed to dig it up and offer it here for anyone who may have need of it.

Tues. a.m. Aug. 5, 1919 …I like this country. Talk about the lure of the tropics. It’s got me. You couldn’t pull me away from here. It’s warm but everything is built for it. And it’s always the same so you can get ready for it and stay ready. I sleep with a sheet partly over me every night, and it’s the same at 4 a.m. as at 9 p.m. Everything is built open like a porch and tightly screened and it’s comfortable. All you have to remember is to take it easy and not hurry. “Never hurry” …. A negro sewing woman said one reason why I was so warm was because I had “haste in my blood.” And that is right. If you even “feel” in a hurry, the heat just surges through you. But if you keep calm, you stay cool. This place would never do for Ma. She’d just naturally die. Because she has so much “haste in her blood” and she simply cannot learn to take it easy. You have to learn it or you perish. You know how easy I take things – well if I keep that pace I’m OK but just let me take a spell where I want to straighten up or do the least thing and I’m all “het up.”

May you all keep as cool as possible this summer, in every sense of the word.