Category Archives: family

Waterfall with Train and a Dipper

family, nature, travel, wildflowers, , ,

Over the weekend Husband and I enjoyed a trip together to visit Pippin and her family; this time it was a short vacation, not the grandma-only working visit. Though I must say I prefer not to split life into such categories; I like the attitude that we tried to take as homeschoolers: Always on vacation, always in school. When traveling, I always learn things, whatever you call it.

We were in too much of a hurry on the drive up for me to take pictures, but I have to at least mention that my eyes were sated with lupines, great spreading fields and banks and roadsides full of them, on and on for two hours. The farmland, once we got toward the center of the state, was impressive with plantations of tiny tomato plants, onions in rows, and clouds of wild yellow mustard filling the ditches and anywhere the fields hadn’t been plowed.

A smudge on my camera lens turned into a glaring spot on most of the photos I took (and yes, it was the real reason, I know now, for the mysterious brightness of that calendula I posted a while back), but we will just have to overlook this imperfection when it shows up, as in this shot showing how my socks happened to match the tiny violets that have sprung up all over Pippin’s back yard.

Four cats still co-exist in the household, where they line up for meals twice a day. The big eyes belong to Little Cat.

A highlight of the weekend was seeing some waterfalls that flow year-round. Near the parking area from which one sets off for the falls, we had to wait for a train to pass over the crossing, before we could get to the other side and leave our car.

Everyone thought that someone else had put the diaper bag and the baby backpack in the car, but no one had. We did without, and took turns carrying Baby Scout.

We had to walk close beside the railroad track for a mile to get to the scenic spot. As soon as we began hobbling over the rocky slope next to the rails, the train that had just passed reversed direction and slowly came back alongside us hikers. If I had any hobo blood in me, I’d have wanted to pull myself right up and go somewhere, anywhere, just for the romance of it.

The train was remarkably quiet, rocking gently on its tracks. Our boots made more noise crunching on the largest gravel I’ve ever seen. After five minutes or so of this unreal intimacy with the looming cars, they had rolled away behind us, and we could see the Sacramento River, down the mountain where the train had blocked our view. We looked back to see this image of the locomotive backing away behind us.

The falls come right out of the hillside, not from a specific creek or spring, and fall into the river, which bends into a curve at that spot, so that it’s not possible to catch the whole span of water falling. It’s even hard when you stand in the middle of the river downstream, as we learned from one who has done it. So my photo shows about 1/4 of the total waterfall.

Pippin notices birds. She pointed this one out to me after she’d been watching him for a while.

She’d also seen his kind before at this falls, and was pretty sure she’d seen it go under the water. When we got home she looked him up in the Peterson Guide and found out he is an American Dipper or Water Ouzel. And they do walk on the bottom of streams! My picture didn’t come out as clear, so I give credit to my daughter for this one.

On second thought, my photo is so different, I think I will show it to you, too. But it’s hard to see my guy in all the glitter of the water spray.

 

John Muir called this bird the Waterfall Hummingbird, and wrote a lot about it. The illustration below comes from his writings, and I assume is by his hand.

ec1e2-muirouzel

I never know what I will learn when I’m with my “Nature Girl” daughter. We looked at the cedars growing around the falls, and she showed me that some of them were Port Orford Cedars, which love shade and water. Their needles are softer and finer than the incense cedars that are more common.

The contented Grandma and Grandpa are walking back along the tracks
in the westering sun.

I learned the name of a brilliant bush that startled me several times on my journey earlier this spring driving this route, it was so dramatic popping out of the grey-green hillsides. Pippin told me it is Redbud.

Frequent sightings of Redbud cheered our way home again yesterday, and we weren’t too hurried to stop and capture it in one dimension.

It was a very full weekend. I haven’t told half of what I saw and heard–but writing this fraction in a blog I hope will help at least some of it stick with me a while.

I’ve Made More Doll Clothes Than Dolls

crafts, dolls, family

Three times I’ve made sets of clothes for store-bought dolls, not counting the ones I made for my own Barbie doll when I was nine or ten. (I can still picture those crude trial-and-error shirts and dresses that never fit very well.) It would be nice to make some more, and maybe I will, when I get the sewing room cleaned up. Well, then, why am I not in there this moment working on that? I’m tired, and need to rest a bit on my laurels, even though they are old laurels by now.

I did make clothes two years ago for a granddaughter’s Götz toddler doll. The doll is wearing her original outfit above.

I took my patterns from Joan Hinds’s Sew Baby Doll Clothes. First I sewed some overalls from a Hannah Anderson skirt I had found ages ago at the thrift store, and got the hat trim from my scrap bag–or I should say, one of my many boxes of scraps.

A checked dress started out as another thrift store find, a man’s shirt that B. decided he didn’t want. The fabric was in great shape, so I couldn’t throw it out.

Finally I made a nightgown with a pink fleece blanket and pillow to coordinate with both.

When I last saw this Doll Baby, she was dressed in one new outfit and had lent another one to her sister. They were lying together in their cradle, so endearing that I resolved to go home and sew more clothes. There were other scantily clad dolls lying around who tugged at my heart. But I went home and got distracted by other projects and haven’t sent any care packages to the doll family to this day.

Surprise South American Doll

crafts, dolls, family

I have made a few dolls in my lifetime, and my plan is to make at least a few more if God gives me the years. I’ll have to drum up the discipline myself, to go with my imagination. In the meantime I enjoy the ones I own, and want to memorialize them by posting their photographs here.

This knitted lady was given to me some years ago by the same daughter Pippin who gave me the last doll I wrote about. Rocío, as I have now named her, after a former neighbor, first gave me the impression of being from Scandinavian or northern territories, but I have been straightened out as to her ethnicity: she comes from South America–as Pippin calls it, “the llama/alpaca regions of the world.” That explains her sandals, which are like some I found today on a website that sells Peruvian dolls.

She is carrying her child in a sling on her back, and both Mom and Baby have hats with long tails.

Here you can see Baby Eva peeking out from behind her mother. I don’t know why I think the baby is a girl. Maybe because Pippin is a girl whom I used to carry on my back.

I persuaded the mom to lift her skirt a bit so you can see the detail of her knitted petticoat. That’s likely why she is looking so uncomfortably off into space.

This pose highlights her thick black braids that hang down. I did see online a couple of instances of headgear like hers on Andean dolls, but not one with her neutral colors, unusual in a land where bright colors are the rule, often contrasted with a black bowler hat.

You’d think Rocío’s black braids would have tipped me off that she is not European Nordic, but the truth is, I never until now examined her carefully or thought about her details–only fell in love at first vague impression.

God sent a robin.

birds, family, home, poetry,

A robin chirped at me this morning before I got out of bed, and what a lot he had to say!

First, he reminded me of his great-great grandfather, who had spent a whole spring and summer several years ago just bringing a message of love and care from my Father. In those days, every morning I woke to that bird’s song, and every evening as I chopped vegetables or washed dishes, I got used to his company just outside my window.

Not that I ever saw him–he hid somewhere in the trees, or perhaps perched on the roof above my head. I would leave my cooking and wander outside looking for him, because at the time I didn’t know what species the voice belonged to.

Pippin our naturalist had left a set of bird call tapes in her bedroom when she went away to college, and I listened to the two hours’ worth of sample bird songs, but didn’t hear My Bird. When she came home one weekend she heard him and said, “Oh, that’s a robin!” Today I can easily find this page online that might have answered my question then. Or this book with recorded bird calls, given to us by the same daughter more recently.

My 2010 Robin brought his greeting thus: “cheerily cheer-up cheerio.” At least, that’s how the birders describe it. I got the meaning rather than the sound, and it was clear enough.

And he said, “Attend!”, confirming my prayer of yesterday’s blog. I thought back to our first years of homeschooling and a unit study the children and I did. It was structured around character qualities, beginning with those most essential for learning. The first was Attentiveness, and the nature/science aspect of the unit was birds, because one needs to focus and concentrate one’s mind if one wants to notice birds in the first place.

We set up a tray feeder right outside our big window next to the dining table, and every day the towhees, finches and jays would visit and fascinate us. Nothing like that was possible to replicate when we moved to our present house, and any kind of bird feeder only made it easier for the cats to make a meal of any creature in feathers.

“Attend!” is a word we often hear in church, because even there we forget What is Happening and Who is Present. Of course the reverential tuning and turning of our hearts and minds is a key to the spiritual life, and it’s a habit I could despair of ever learning.

This morning I was almost afraid to get out of bed, for fear of getting swept up in the hurricane of decisions and dilemmas about what to focus on, what to do first. Should I phone my lonely friend a tenth time, hoping to get through and make a lunch date? If I don’t, what will I do with these quarts of soup I just made? Am I getting another sore throat? Perhaps I need to run downstairs and gargle first thing. Should I go to Matins, or the gym, or stay home and vacuum?

I did the only thing I could be sure of, and began my prayers before putting my feet on the floor.

O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,
Who art everywhere present and fillest all things,
Treasury of blessing, and giver of Life,
Come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity,
And save our souls,

O Good One.

At a time like this, free-form prayers are of little use. Besides, who could improve on the above? It’s a wonderful beginning for what we want to be A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, to use the evocative title of a book I’ve never read.

I was still there when Robin started in. One thing I heard was this discussion he had with another of God’s creatures:

OVERHEARD IN AN ORCHARD

Said the robin to the sparrow,
“I would really like to know
Why those anxious human beings
rush around and worry so.”

Said the sparrow to the robin,
“Friend, I think that it must be
That they have no Heavenly Father
such as cares for you and me.”

-Elizabeth Cheney