Stand on the other side of a professional lens, that is…when I was a senior in high school. Even though I’ve not seen Natalie in years, it was as easy as pie to take up residence against her kitchen counter and catch up on the years between, cold drink in hand, one toddler occupied with toys not her own. After a delicious meal, her couch was temporarily relocated to a hayfield. Hazel and I lounged and read some of our favorite books, wandered around in the tall grass, sweated, spun, laughed, and sweated some more.

The results she has posted make my heart oh-so-skippy, and I can’t wait to see the rest! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Natalie!

…I have to show off this scrumptious Andrea-made cowl that was just delivered to my front door! Perfect color, perfectly cozy merino wool… maybe I will take it off in May. Maybe.

What can I say? The woman is a skilled knitter. And my grandpa is a skilled thrifter – he found the brooch several years ago :)

When I was little my cousins lived right across the road from my house (<— as in the former, and the latter’s husband, and their little brother). They lived in the bottom between the creek and the road, and I lived on the hill above them. I spent a lot of my time at their house following my boycousins into treacherous situations and falling into – or willingly entering – the creek. I genuinely loved this kind of play, but in retrospect I wonder if I spent so much time with them to keep myself – and my freakishly long hair – away from Jessie and her Dreaded Caboodle. She ALWAYS wanted to “do my hair”. The closest I’d ever come to “doing my hair” was tucking it into my shirt so it didn’t get wound up in the back wheels of my big wheel (…ever again).

Anyway -

Oftentimes when I’d fall (/jump) into the creek, my aunt would put me in Doug’s dry clothes and I’d wear them home. This thrilled me to no end because then I got to wear – and keep – BOY UNDERWEAR. Constrained to the land of hearts, stars, mermaids, and pink, I lived for the motorcycles and GI Joes making their appearance in the laundry cycle. My parents let me wear them (thanks parents!) and I distinctly remember sporting the motorcycles one day in first grade – the same day my friend Joey showed up in a brand new puffy painted MTV denim jacket.

Anyway -

That kind of stuff – the day I walked into the kitchen with a golfball stuck down the front of my (Doug’s) GI Joe briefs and said “look Daddy, they have a pocket!!” – that’s kind of the epitome of my mentality as a child. I wanted to be a boy. They had more fun, easier clothes, better toys. I went through phases as a pre-K aged kid where I made everyone call me Kevin, and then Josh. I wanted (and got) Tonka construction toys instead of Barbies. I wanted (and got) my first pocket knife at age six. I wanted to wear boy underwear, flannel shirts, and converse. No pink. No dresses. And don’t ever touch my hair.

When Meggan and I became friends later in elementary school she was always trying desperately to fix my hair. “Please just let me fix your bangs! They look funny! They are falling out of their clips!” She was a girly girl and couldn’t fathom my tomboy ways. She hooked me up with her cousin Greg in fourth grade (ha!) She sighed (in a loving kind of way) when I showed up for the first day of fifth grade in brand new mini hiking boots that matched my dads, she in her bright white cheerleading shoes with the colored tabs that you can switch out to match your outfit (which was red and white… on our first day of fifth grade). She did not understand things like my rock collection, but loved me anyway. I did not understand things like curling irons, but I loved her anyway. She was the first one to notice and freak out any time I adopted any new little bitty femme habit.

So she, more than most of my friends, giggled hysterically and completely understood the disconnect when we showed up at her parents’ pizza shop on Saturday night with Hazel sporting the new shoes she’d picked out and suckered her grandpa into buying for her (my dad cares very much that his granddaughter is well-dressed and that her hair is combed… it’s kind of adorable, but very weird to me). Sometimes I don’t know where this kid came from.

Hazel is lucky to have an Aunt Meggan to school her in the ways of makeup-wearing, getting poker-straight hair to do anything but, and everything other girly thing under the sun.

Except nailpolish. I do love nailpolish. But usually only… brown. Brown glitter. :)

Several years ago our friends Eric and Colleen started working out a vision of a new work farm / intentional community in West Virginia. Though Chicago natives, they had both served at Nazareth Farm and were modeling many of their ideas around their time spent there. Five years ago, all of their planning and praying and networking and connecting and money-saving and falling in love with WV paid off, and Bethlehem Farm was born. Their first baby.

This September they will welcome Miriam or Isaiah, their second “baby” and first child. Kelly and I took Hazel and Xavier down to the farm over the weekend for a blessingway for Colleen, to fit in a much needed break from reality, visit with the ones who are the friends – you all have these, right? – who seem to Have It All Figured Out And Do Everything Exactly Right And In The Simplest Possible Way. There is nothing these people do without first contemplating how it will affect their immediate community, the earth, and humanity in general. They know the origins of – if not the actual hands that grew or made – practically every morsel of food that passes their lips. They are humble and gracious and really stinking smart. Eric is a master gardener in every sense of the word, and Colleen makes quilts that could be sold at Tamarack. They are the epitome of People Who Have Their Shit Together. I’m pretty sure that, among other things, it has a lot to do with how little time they spend facebooking (or something like that). If I didn’t love them so freaking much I’d be insanely jealous and probably a little bitter. Which reminds me that, also, they are way better at our religion than I am… clearly. In sifting through photos to share I realize that I did not take any of THEM. Fail. Here they are with Kelly, PJ, and a freshly baptized Xavier. I miss PJ’s huge beard. Eric’s beard is not that huge these days, either, unless it’s just blending with his plaid shirt and looking bigger than it really is – neither is my brother in law’s. There is some kind of beard recession going on.

To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter; to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird’s nest or a wildflower in spring – these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
~John Burroughs

…just as fast as my feet can fly…

August, please don’t leave me as fast as July is seeming to slip through my fingers. How is it possible that we were just digging ourselves out of more than three feet of snow and now we’re making piles of stuff to pack for Clifftop, and this morning Maggie and I trekked to our favorite consignment shop to get fall clothes for our little ladies? How how how?

It has been insanely hot for the past couple of weeks, and over the weekend our godfamily came to stay over night as heat-refugees from their inferno of an apartment. We had a delicious feast that reminded me that in the summer, really all I want to do is roll around in the delicious food and mourn the fact that there is no rational / logical way for a family of drifters to put food by for the winter. We just… don’t eat tomatoes or strawberries for months on end. Will I buy a four-dollar pint of strawberries from California in December because my precious, fruit-fly toddler pleads for them with her big brown eyes in the grocery store? Probably… on occasion.

And also, I really just want to have another baby so we can have more compadres. They’re all the fun and awesomeness rolled up in love and funny of real family, but, you know… you hand-pick them. Ha!

(delicious little rainbow of tealights / PJ-homebrew and Kate-made butter / the essence of summer / a feast / ohmygod I love comparing the aesthetics of a meal on several different colors of Fiestaware / the g-fam)

Bring a song and a smile for the banjo
Better get while the gettin’s good
Hitch a ride to the end of the highway
Where the neons turn to wood…

- CCR

(I know that song is supposedly about draft-dodging, but really, I just feel like it’s about summer.)

Listening: CCR
(I am) Reading: Never Let Me Go (which so far I totally do not understand, but it seems really amazing in a The-Giver-for-adults kind of way, possibly…)
(Hazel is) Reading: Freight Train
Working on: random little things – I need to try to make Hazel a strap for her little toy banjo, but I’m still pondering this one. Sew? Crochet?

The past couple of weeks have been so busy and so strange and I feel so mentally unhinged that today I organized, purged, and then rainbow-ordered Hazel’s books as a means of destressing. It worked wonderfully.

EmmaLee & Hazey reading my current favorite & most perfect & wonderful book: All the World. I was so taken with the text that for the first twentysomething reads I overlooked the illustration of a breastfeeding mother (not uncommon for me to see in real life, so it didn’t register for awhile that it’s so uncommon to see in a BOOK). Also: community, various family arrangements, farmer’s market, old Volkswagen bus, dogs, peace and fiddling. What else do you need?

Slip, trip, stumble, fall
Tip the bucket, spill it all
Better luck another day, all the world goes ’round this way

I can think of about 47 adults off the top of my head who could benefit from reading this book :)

Meet Chris and Jodi. Super nice, super cool, musically inclined, tooth-achingly-adorable couple. They just moved into a new place together and had us over for supper last night. Partway through the meal we were talking about how our paths have crisscrossed over the past decade, long before we actually met many years ago… how Mikey used to know Jodi’s cousin… how she grew up with my best friend’s ex… how some of Chris’s family graduated with Mikey’s sisters… and lots of other small-world anecdotes. I tell them about the blanket, whose status I am now updating to The Blanket. Capitals.

About a minute into the tale I start to mention names and places, and Chris throws has hands out like a traffic cop.

“Wait. What? ………….. I know them. That’s my family.”

Different last name, family by marriage. He knows every single person involved. The blanket maker and her husband, the priest cousin of her husband… everyone. I showed him a photo of the blanket, and he said his grandma had one just like it in autumn colors. Well… of course she did.

“So wait, there’s more. We’ve also found out that Mikey’s dad went to seminary with this pair of brothers, Matt and John. How are they related?”

“Those are my dad’s cousins!”

So we think my father-in-law’s adolescent buddies are the blanket maker’s nephews, but we’re beginning to get mixed up in a web of cousins.

Kevin Bacon, you’ve got nothin’ on this woman.

Incidentally, thanks to these two lovely ladies for the blog mentions :)

It’s almost 11 a.m. on Saturday, and gorgeous outside. Hazel is still in bed because she is teething and has seen midnight come and go for two nights in a row. She is cuddled up to her Daddy, also sleeping, who I’m pretty sure didn’t come to bed until about 4:00 this morning after studying all night long.

I’ve been sitting at the computer for most of the morning thinking about the end of Harry Potter vs. the end of LOST. Dumbledore said, in book seven, pretty much exactly how I feel about the end of my favorite stories, including LOST: Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

That series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and now LOST. I mourn the end of fiction really hard, and after a conversation with Kelly last night, I lay in bed for hours thinking about how to introduce these things to Hazel and her future siblings.

It’s one of the most daunting responsibilities of parenthood. Don’t laugh.

I want her to enjoy Harry Potter (and eventually the other things) to their fullest. It was my only consolation when the I closed the last book – at least someday I’d be able to share it all with my children. How do I do that? Let her pick them up whenever she shows interest? Begin reading them to her aloud? Wait until all the siblings are old enough for a family reading? Will she be too old then? Read them all to each kid individually? What do I do what do I do?? It was no less magical because I started reading them in college versus childhood (when they didn’t exist), and had I read them as a kid I don’t know that I ever would have fully grasped the political and social implications in the stories, which are one of the greatest things about them, to me.

The only thing I know for sure is that Aunt Janet will read aloud the beginning and the end. Nothing is more magical than Janet reading Harry Potter. The voices, oh man, the voices!

Janet Potter, summer 2005.

The end of LOST is not going to be as emotional as the end of HP, but it’s going to feel so much more REAL because I have “seen” these characters with my own eyes constantly for four years, instead of just imagining them. They have voices and personalities that are common for all of us, and leave little room for what our brains can make up. I have dedicated so much time and brainpower to this show. I’m already really disappointed by this season, and when it ends it’s going to… well… it’s going to suck.

I remember when I first started watching it and we went out to dinner with Mario and Jenn, one of whom was hiding the season 1 set under their shirt when they arrived. I remember all of us wondering aloud where we’d be when the show ended. Would we all be watching it together? Would there be babies? Would Mikey and I still be in Canada, or off somewhere else? Would they be somewhere else?

And now we’re there. I’m pretty sure we’ll all be watching it together. We are home and they never left. There are two baby girls. How did we get here?

You’ve probably seen this at least once before, but I’m going to repost it because it just made me cry a lot A LOT. Written by Jenn, about the end of Potter:

Read more »

I think that ever since we’ve moved home I’ve had this nagging fear in the back of my brain that we’d just drift away from all of our good friends in Toronto, and that they’d forget about us, and that eventually we’d just never see them again. I know this isn’t true and it’s just a complex I have – it’s why, if we had a class or worked together six years ago I won’t say hi to you in Target because I just assume that YOU don’t remember ME, even though I remember kids who moved away from my town in grade two.

But, wonder of wonders, our friends do remember us and were above and beyond welcoming. I had no idea how much I really missed their stories and hugs and music and how much I was homesick for their kitchens and cooking and teapots. We had places to spend the night, places to take afternoon naps, we were fed, entertained, Mikey got school things accomplished, we had the perfect little compact stroller to use for the week (I really need to get one of those contraptions for when we’re traveling and have a backpack full of stuff to tote around every day in addition to a toddler), we had playdates and lots and lots of laughing. We talked about futures the past and Hazel was promised lots of “I’ll tell you about it when you’re older” stories. We trekked all over the city to see lots and lots of people and when we got tired of trekking we planted ourselves in a pub near John’s and everyone came to us. When Hazel started to melt down I took her the half block home to chill out and Mikey stayed for awhile longer visiting. I miss that sort of convenience of city life.

I want to go back soon. I wasn’t sure how well she’d handle the travel and the activity after six months of calm, slow West Virginia life (um, sort of), but she was a champ. She cried for ten minutes of the combined sixteen hours of driving. When we took her out to the bluegrass brunch at the Dakota Tavern on Sunday morning and then decided to stay for hours, she got tired and fell asleep in the ergo to the sounds of those boys singing just like she did when she was a baby. Because in case you hadn’t noticed, she’s not a baby anymore.

Sigh.

Listening: Hazel and Mikey chatting downstairs
(Hazel is) Reading: Green Eggs & Ham
(I am) Reading: new issue of Mothering
Working on: wedding jewelry and other custom jewels; furniture painting; new bead sorting; a new group blog; a million other things I need to catch up on

“i just sent your child SO MANY BEADS. her neck might grow wrong when she inisits on wearing them all at once. i apologize. also you should probably wash them in something. they may’ve been covered in beer / sweat / street.”