In Search of the Sun

This hasn't been the sunniest of summers.

But we have had our best crop of sunflowers ever.

C and the boys planted them in a little circle of soil that used to be our strawberry patch, only it never produced much in the way of strawberries.

Our poor sunflowers are a little confused, though. The house and an old, half-dead apple tree block the evening sun, so most of them just keep facing east all day long.

I wonder if they miss having the sun on their faces as much as I do?

The Place Where I Live

I've been working on, and submitting, a few short nonfiction pieces that combine nature-writing and mother-writing. The first of these is up on Orion Magazine's The Place Where You Live feature.

If you'd like, go here to read about my little corner of the world.

Weekend Things--End of Summer Edition

We usually spend Labor Day Weekend at C's stepmom's camp on a small pond, but this weekend the weather forecast was dismal, and Saturday we woke up to rain. C and I didn't relish the idea of being trapped in a musty little cabin with three fractious children, M wanted to stay home and play guitar, and E wanted a full on Lego weekend. The only one who protested when we changed our plans, was Z, who would fish all day every day if given the chance, but even he didn't throw that much of a fuss, and our hostess, who just returned from a long canoe trip sounded relieved when I begged off.

It turned out Saturday, once it stopped raining, was partly sunny, hot and humid. The perfect kind of day to spend on a lake. Instead I spent the morning writing, with M in the living room listening to Aerosmith full blast, and Z in the kitchen playing "Alms for the blind" with a ukelele––I found that he'll actually let me take his picture if I put money in his cup. In the afternoon, I added to the heat and humidity by baking two casseroles and a peach-blackberry cobbler, roasting tomatoes, and making peach jam. Our peach tree decided to drop all its fruit on Friday night, and it was a race against the fruit flies to save it all.

Sunday started out rainy, too, with a forecast similar to Saturday's, but we decided to brave it, and spend one day at camp. E and Z got in lots of fishing and canoeing. M spent most of the time reading.

And I did all of the things I like to do on summer vacation: swim, sketch, take pictures. I even got to knit a little on the drive––until I gave in and read a chapter of Harry Potter to the boys. The only thing missing was a tall glass of lemonade, and reading in the hammock. But I did read in the bathtub after we got home, which is almost as good, even if it is a bit more of a winter activity.

Monday it poured rain all day. I left the boys to free range––they played Legos and watched a movie––on their last day of freedom before school, and I got serious about rewriting a story for my next packet. I managed seventeen pages––even writing the first three a second time after my computer froze and swallowed them up. I relinquished my computer to M for a while––he's very into writing music on garage band these days––and helped C with a little basement clean-out and re-org, mainly because he would have left the walls plain gray concrete if I didn't paint them. He's moved out of his office in town, while his company goes through a bit of soul-searching, and back home. 

Weekends have been so full and busy this summer, it was nice to have a couple of down days to catch up and regroup and relax. It makes me think every Monday should be Labor Day.

Back to School

The boys started back to school today.

I think we were all in deep denial about it until the moment the bus trundled up.

C and I were marveling about all the people who say "I can't wait until the kids are back in school."

School means a whole lot more work for us--racing around to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning, making lunches (please don't suggest I have the kids make their own lunches; everyone knows it's ten times more trouble to make a kids do something than just do it yourself), helping with/nagging about homework, parent-teacher conferences, soccer practices, PTA begging, etc., etc. You get the idea.

Plus, school means that summer is over, and fall and winter are inevitable, and I'm so not ready for that.

E and Z decided last week that they were going to homeschool themselves. What will you do for math? I asked. "Legos!" E said. "The mathematics of nature!" Z said. What will you do for science? "Legos!" "Nature!" What will you do for art? "Legos!" "Draw pictures!" What will you do for PE? "Run around outside!" What will you do for lunch? "PB&J!" "Hummus sandwiches!"

They had it all figured out. They almost had me convinced.

But in the end, they got on the bus. 

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.

40

So, yeah, it happened last week.

I turned 40.

It's one of those things you know will happen to you some day, but you don't really believe it until it does, kind of like having kids, getting wrinkles, or owning a minivan.* 

With all the hecticness that is life--working, rushing kids off to camp, doing homework, trying to maintain some semblance of household order (you know about life's hecticness, yes?)--I haven't taken much time to reflect on being 40. But it did occur to me, sometime on the actual day, that I'm going to die. 

Of course, I've always known that, haven't I? It just suddenly became real for the first time. Not that I'm dwelling on my mortality--hopefully I'm not even halfway there, yet--but it's just kind of out there now.

I always like to go to the beach on my birthday, but with my vacation time squeezed to the breaking point, I couldn't take the day off. So we did what I've been wanting to do for a long time.

We picked E and Z up from day camp (M was still at sleep-away camp), grabbed some sandwiches at the deli, and headed to the beach for a dinner picnic.

It was a beautiful, warm night, with a nice offshore breeze that made it pleasant for swimming and beach-combing and lying about doing not much at all.

So, it wasn't the MG Midget I asked for, but it was a pretty nice birthday.

*I don't actually own a minivan--yet.

Phenomena

Sunday, on our way home from camping, we stopped to pick up Thai food, and from the parking lot of the restaurant, spied this pair of sun dogs flanking the sun.

Later that evening, as we sat down on the deck to eat, we could still see one sun dog (the other one blocked by the house), and part of a halo around the sun (and, possibly, as second halo around that one).

And above that, an upside-down rainbow.

From The Cloud Collector's Handbook, we learned that the rainbow smile is actually a circumzenithal arc. All three phenomena occur when sunlight is refracted through ice crystals of high, thin clouds. My meteorologist friend says he's only every seen one circumzenital arc, so we're pretty lucky to have been smiled down upon by this rainbow.