Paddle Away With Me

I slide the kayak off the roof racks and balance it on my left shoulder—it weighs less than the double stroller I heaved in and out of the back of my car for three years—and ease the boat into the water near the culvert. Bullfrogs thrum in the wetland across the road, and green frogs twang on the edges of the pond. A small painted turtle hovering in the shallows dives away at my approach, and I hope I've frightened it away from any ideas of crossing the road.

I bought this boat on a whim a few weeks ago. I was mad because I'd been made to work on the Sunday of Memorial Weekend, and the sporting goods store was having a sale. So I decided to treat my ill humor with a little retail therapy on my lunch break. Only it wasn't a whim, because for years I've thought how nice it would be to have a little kayak for exploring the ponds and bogs and swamps near my home. But I thought that if I had one kayak, I would need five, plus some enormous vehicle in which to tote both boats and family.

The boat glides through the tall rushes of the outlet channel and out into open water. Usually I like to paddle along the northern shore, nosing among the pickerel weed and lily pads and watching whirligig beetles twirl, but today I've been staring down a threatening thunderstorm, and now that the dark bank of cumulonimbus clouds has passed on, I have only half an hour before I need to hurry home, cook dinner, and drive kids to their soccer game. So I paddle straight across the pond, heading for the northern shore.

It's easy to forget, when you're a mom, that you can do things by yourself. By "can" I mean both "are cabable of" and "are allowed to." The latter makes some sense; after years in which peeing alone is a triumph, you tend consider the people you gave birth to extensions of your own body. "Whither thou goest" and all that. But the former is crazy. Motherhood is a job that requires the knowlege of a complete set of encyclopedias, the organizational skills of a NASA ground crew, the control of a drill seargant, and the patience of Mother Theresa. Yet somehow raising children makes us feel unequal to other tasks. How much of that feeling is inherent, I wonder, and how much dictated by society?

I paddle northward, into a wind that rumples the dark surface of the water, calling gelatinous core muscles into duty. This pond is only two miles from my house, and it's small, only about 22 acres in area and 18 feet at its deepest point. But there are only five houses on its shore, all on the southwest corner. With the road and the houses at my back, I might be paddling into the wilderness. The eastern shore is edged in hemlocks and, beyond, a wooded hillside. To the north stand the spindly forms of larch trees, rising from a sphagnum bog. Tree swallows perch on the bare upper branches of the larches, chittering and making forways over the pond to snap up bugs.

Sheep laurel grows dense along the boggy shore, bright with magenta blooms. Turqoise pond damsels dance along the edge between water and land. I nose my boat between two hummocks to get a closer look at a pair of alien-shaped pitcher plant flowers and notice a small pink blossom, then another and another and another. Calopogon orchids have come into bloom in the last two days.

I take photos and make a few quick sketches, but all too soon duty calls me back across the pond. I paddle straight and steady, the breeze now at my back, my abdominal muscles remembering that they once had structure. I lift the boat out of the water and onto the car, cinching it down tight, and drive home with the wind blowing through my hair.

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Weekend Things ~ Water

We had a quiet weekend, the last one with nothing scheduled for the foreseeable future. E and Z had a friend over Friday night and, after we'd finished the morning housecleaning (which I very meanly made them do, despite their friend's presence) I asked them what they wanted to do and the unanimous vote was to go swimming. Which I'm always happy to do.



We made our first trip of the summer to our friends' camp on a lake where we had the beach all to ourselves. I enjoyed sitting in the shade reading as much as they enjoyed swimming and dunking and being wet and the obligatory ice cream stop on the way home.



Sunday afternoon, we headed down to wade in the river, for the first time all summer.



C took underwater video.



E and Z chased fish and crawdads.

And I stalked dragonflies and damselflies (more on that tomorrow).



On the way home, C and E visited one of the garden beds and discovered two monarch caterpillars on a nearby milkweed plant—the first monarchs we've found in years! We brought them in raise in our butterfly jar (they have a better chance of survival inside, away from predators). And I'm thrilled.



Three more reasons summer is the best season of all—water, dragonflies, and butterflies!

Free and Fun

Free and Fun has become my mantra for the summer. I fully anticipate that this will be my only summer "off" with the kids (other than those two maternity leave summers, and, of course, last year's hiking summer) and I want to take as full advantage as possible of all summer has to offer. Unfortunately, since I've been "off" for a year now, we have to be judicious with the cash flow, and so I want to take as full advantage as possible while spending as little money as possible.



We got started right away with a trip to a nearby pond, two days after they got out of school (their first day off we spent running errands, which is neither fun nor free). It's a pond I've known about for years, but not one we've ever visited before, since the choice of public access is either the edge of the road or a short hike through the woods to a rock jump-off spot. Not exactly an ideal spot to take little kids, but perfect for big ones. I convinced E and Z that they wanted to try this new adventure by craftily inviting along their BFF.


The day was nice, the water pleasant and the pond just the right size for 12-year-olds to swim across. Their friend made several leaps off the rock, but only Z mustered up the daring to try it—once. Which is fine with me—I spent too many years as a lifeguard, where the dangers of jumping or diving into mysterious waters from heights were drummed in ad nauseam.



When Monday rolled along I threw around some ideas of how to spend the day. I wanted to go to the beach, mainly to sooth the rash from my brown tail moth run-in with cold saltwater. M wanted to do nothing, it being his day off work, though he proposed sending me grocery shopping while they played tennis. E's enthusiasm for returning to the pond overruled everyone else's ideas and so that's what we did, even dragging M along with us.



The rest of this week, E and Z went to a canoe and paddle board camp—also Free and Fun! thanks to our local conservation organization and a grant they have to get more kids outside. Now, looking ahead to July, I'm looking for more ideas of Free and Fun! things to do. Any ideas?

Weekend Things ~ Camp

We spent Labor Day Weekend at C's stepmother's camp, as we have every year for the last eight years.

Our summers vary from year to year.

Some years we go camping, some we take a big trip, some we go to one beach, some to another, others we spend more at the lake.

But we always start summer with our May weekend at Hermit Island.

And finish it with Labor Day at Toddy Pond.

The two trips make nice bookends to the season.

And both places serve as growth charts for the boys.

This year we had hotter weather than usual, and the lake warmer than the Y pool where I swim every other morning.

We spent more time swimming than ever.

There was also snorkeling (by people other than me who actually want to see what goes on under that dark water...I prefer remaining ignorant).

Paddling.

Fishing.

Eating.

I read two whole books (just-for-fun mysteries that were oh-so-good).

And did a little water color painting.

I even knit a row before the weekend was through (which I had to undo on the drive home because I knit the wrong row).

(Photo by Z to prove I actually exist).

Weekend Things

I was hoping to go to the beach again this past weekend, but an overnight houseguest necessitated houseguest-level cleaning and kept us close to home on Saturday. I started the day with a morning walk with Z.

I am ridiculously excited about this--peaches! On our very own tree! About 30 of them, for the first time ever, all starting to ripen. We each ate one of the first harvest Friday. Heaven!

I haven't seen any monarch caterpillars yet this season, and I'm getting worried about them.

Z and I did find these other caterpillars on some milkweed plants. Z thinks they're swallowtails. I took the caterpillar book back to the library, so I can't check. We were going to bring some of the leaves inside, but we forgot to come back later with a jar.

With the weekend's wonderful sun and a bounty of cherry tomatoes coming out of the garden, I solar-cooked and froze our first (and second) batch of pasta sauce (more on solar-cooking tomatoes here).

And I made this recipe for blackberry-blue-corn tamales, which I've been waiting to make, since I discovered it just after blackberry season last year. I was a little bit disappointed in the results ("Why did you make this with playdough?" E asked). It was definitely not an "worth waiting a year for" good, nor a "get all skun up picking blackberries" good. But on Sunday, I ate one cold with plain sour cream, and I liked it so much better. I think sitting in the fridge overnight improved the texture, and the flavors of the blackberries came through better cold, without the strongly flavored cream.

Sunday morning, I made this dress. C and I have a couple of weddings to go to this fall, and I thought I'd try to get it done in time for those, even though it's not very fallish. I was going to make it for Ireland, but that never happened. It turns out that maybe it's not quite the dress for me. If I were to make it again, I would use a dark (ahem, slimming) color, skip the pockets, which were a huge pain and also add width to the hip area, where I don't need any extra help, and make it about three or five inches longer. I do love those blue poppies, though.

The rest of the day, we spent a friend's island in the middle of a lake.

We get invited there once every summer, and the boys love the boating, swinging, fishing, and swimming.

M got to try his hand piloting a sunfish on his own.

And Z was in heaven trawling for fish. At the end of the day, he paddled back to the landing in a kayak, which he had tried last summer, only to spin in circles and necessitate towing by a canoe, but this year he made it the whole way, keeping in a straight line, and keeping up with C and me in our canoe.