inspiration, presently

I have been stumbling upon little pieces of outsider art lately (I think they are always around, but in summer the pace slows enough for me to notice more). Take the broken necklace. When it snapped in two in the car on the way home from camp sending tiny beads flying, there were bitter tears in the backseat. Last night I found its parts tenderly reconfigured as eggs cradled in plastic popper nests.

What else? We've been eating well, thanks to our fantastic CSA boxes that always arrive nearly bursting with gorgeous produce. I've been roasting beets. The kids won't touch them, and a five year old friend of ours nearly gagged on one at dinner the other night, but who cares? Could there be a more beautiful, vivid color in nature?

These leftover roasted beets, dressed simply in olive oil, lemon, and crunchy salt, were simply brilliant. I ate them over salad greens, drizzled with hot honey, a new family favorite. A good friend of Frances's happens to be a relation of Mike, the maker of hot honey, so I traded Ava's mom a jar of granola for a bottle. (Sometimes I sell my granola; bartering is even better!)

Mike is studying botany this summer to prepare for a course he is teaching in the fall, and the children have joined him in learning and identifying the parts of flowers. Once it was established that flowers have ovaries, Frances asked if they also had penises and vaginas. A natural question, especially given the frequency with which we've been reading It's Not the Stork (thank you, Rachel, for the excellent recommendation). It's a great book for answering questions and talking about bodies, sex, boys, girls, friends, families, etc and has brought some sweet, cloud-clearing moments of clarity to Gabriel especially (So your birthday is the day of your birth? Really?).

We are also loving Looking at Lincoln, by Maira Kalman. If you love Lincoln, your kids, and Kalman's passionate, expressive work, reading this together will be a sincere pleasure for you, too. On a whim I put The Principles of Uncertainty (also by Kalman) on hold as well, and spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the library with the kids reading it. To myself. (That's another summer development: the three of us, in the hot heavy afternoon, all reading our books, spread out on my bed, or Gabriel's bunk beds, or the couches at the library. I could never have imagined this when they were babies!)

The book is an extraordinary journal, full of exuberant feelings, small and perfect observations from a passionate lover of this world. You won't really get the same effect from the following quote (it's different without her handwriting and evocative paintings) but apropos of our trip to New York, I had to share this passage:

If you are ever bored or blue, stand on the street corner for half an hour. 
I have a special love - old people who have difficulty walking. I walk behind them and quietly imitate their step. My heart goes our to them. 
Shall I follow for the rest of the day?
Shall I offer help?
Sit and read with them?
Clean their houses and make them lunch?
Step, step, step. 
Soon enough it will be me struggling (valiantly?) to walk - lugging my stuff around. 
How are we all so brave as to take step after step after step?


And what about you? What is bringing you inspiration these days?

continuity

By the time I left for college, my family had lived in four different towns, in four very different parts of the country. Oddly enough, I always liked moving--the sense of unknown possibilities was enticing. Living in different places probably helped reinforce our family culture and cohesion, but it also meant I didn't grow up alongside the same friends. I have no idea what happened to all the boys and girls from my kindergarten class (though I remember them vividly) and sometimes that makes me sad.

When my young family left Lancaster to move to Annapolis, we left a cherished weekly tradition, one whose absence was especially felt by then three-year-old Frances. How she missed Family Dinner! My heart broke each time she asked when we could have dinner with our friends. Mama, isn't anyone ever going to come over again...?

Over the weekend our Family Dinner friends came for a visit. Things are different now. Younger siblings are full participants (though older siblings occasionally try to shut them out). We live in different towns, with different jobs and different big kid parenting quandaries to face. But Family Dinner still really, really hits the spot.

Sometimes we parents would sit and watch Frances and Henry, spellbound. How could we not be flooded with memories of the two of them as toddlers together...? Their long thin arms as they sat shoulder to shoulder over some secret project recalled their chubby bodies in the shared double stroller that they rode in to toddler Montessori preschool class. They were so dear. And frustrating. And we were so new at all this.

Despite some unfortunate big kid clubbiness (the rule is NO EXCLUDING, you two), for the most part I felt a bittersweet joy seeing the two of them, marveling at how intimate they are, how different and yet how close. How their friendship (which has had some seriously rocky moments) seems to weather the distance. My heart aches for the babies they once were, and flutters with the hope that their special friendship can continue to grow as they do and transcend the boy-girl divide.

And do you see those little ones in the background? They didn't have the benefit of weekly Family Dinners to cement their friendship, but they seem to be growing into one nonetheless. Normally I deeply resent the child who wakes me before six am, but emerging from sleep to the voices of Gabriel and Aggie, talking earnestly in the bunk beds about past injuries (does it still hurt?) and planning what they'd like to play...? That was very, very sweet.

There is something special about a friend you've had since before you can remember.

I think it gives Frances (and Henry too, I hope) a sense of knowing, and being known. Her place in the world is unquestionable when she's with her friend. Things are as they should be. And the nice thing (at least this time) is that the feeling lingers, even after the good-byes. What a gift.

endurance

On Monday we returned home from an unprecedented trip: Mike and I spent three days and nights in New York City. No kids (excepting the mobs of adorable toddlers going about their days on the streets of Park Slope - but we didn't have to feed or bathe them). We swapped houses with a family who had a wedding in Annapolis, and our kids had a blast at their grandparents' while we did all the things we love to do: eat fantastic meals, walk for miles, talk talk talk, then eat and walk and talk some more, and so on, with occasional interruptions in the pattern (a great movie or museum exhibit).

We hadn't had time together like that for nearly (2 days to go) seven years! But we slipped right back into our city selves, feeling at home at once, surrounded by the Korean grocers, hipster bearded Brooklynite barristas, blank-eyed subway riders, elderly ladies curled over their vertical grocery carts, inching along the sidewalk, fabulous leggy women in impossibly stacked shoes, Cuban musicians singing and playing exquisite guitar on the subway platform. At first we were self-conscious about fitting in. After our years of suburban, comfortable living, were we good enough for the city? But then we realized that everyone is good enough for New York, and that is what makes it extraordinary.

summer muse

Today is the official first day of summer vacation (the weekend doesn't count) and already evidence abounds of the salutary effects of open time, boredom, and heat - most especially on our creative faculties. I found the above slip of paper abandoned, writing side down, on the living room floor.

Frances completed a fantastic first grade year at a school that encourages creative and intellectual growth. That said, I've become accustomed to piles of paper in the kitchen and elsewhere featuring word searches, color-by-number type puzzles, lined paper for handwriting practice, and spelling words. In the midst of all the shaping and the forming and the socializing (a night kitchen take on school: they put that batter up to bake a delicious Frances-cake), I wasn't sure if her inner outsider artist could still manage to find expression. But oh my. After about 48 hours of reading, swimming, and staring at the ceiling fan while draped across my big bed, moaning about the horrors of boredom, the muse returned and her strange, singular poetic voice is back.

As we left church yesterday, one of our priests shook Frances's hand and asked what she planned to do with the rest of her day.

"Read, for the most part."

Which she did, in her underwear. And when it was bedtime and she hadn't finished her novel (don't call them chapter books, Mama) I told her about one of life's more luxurious pleasures: she could leave the book by her bedside and pick it up when she woke in the morning. No school, after all! So around 6:30 this morning, on my way to the kitchen, I glimpsed her in bed with her book through her cracked door. Around eight she sauntered down the stairs with a grin on her face, walked right over to me, and said, "Finished it."

land of plenty

Our second CSA box arrived this week bursting with spring treasures: chard, kale, strawberries, asparagus. I filled our refrigerator with happy sighs of contentment. The next day put an end to what had been an awfully long neglectful season, and we turned our attention to the garden in earnest. After reclaiming the beds from the disturbingly tall weeds, I harvested snow peas and arugula and baby kale. And then, after a visit yesterday to a neighbor's extraordinary, vibrant garden to borrow tomato cages, we returned home with two bags full of spring greens, turnips, and salad. And then? Then my happy satisfaction was strangely colored with a touch of anxiety. What to do with all that green? How, exactly, were we to eat all the glorious bounty before it went limp and lifeless?

Yesterday might have been the most perfect day of the year: clear skies, sparkling sunshine, and blessedly low humidity. What's more, after the intensity of Mike's spring semester and a couple of weeks of traveling separately for various family commitments, we were finally all together on a Saturday morning with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Fantastic, right?