Shifting Seasons

It's August. I remember Augusts from my childhood as being insufferably hot, suffused with the certain knowledge that school was coming soon. Until I was nine, we had no air conditioning, not even a window unit, and I remember long, hot summer nights spent sweltering on my bed, patting my forehead with cool washcloths that soon became clammy and warm, while the exhaust fan in my room pulled all the hot air through the house in a roar that was the soundtrack of my youth.

Then we got central air, and I was allowed to close my bedroom door during the summer. My mother still has an exhaust fan in my old room. She runs it at the shifts in seasons, spring to summer, summer to fall.

This August in North Carolina we have been blessed by stunning weather. 80s all day some days. Cool mornings. Pleasant, almost cool, evenings. We've turned off the AC during the day for the last four days in a row (not today, though: the humidity snuck back in). Everyone's sleeping just a tiny bit later, now that the sun isn't up before 6. My friends with college-age kids packed them off last week. Earlier this week, my Facebook feed was full of photos of kids going back to school. Lots of firsts—kindergarten, nursery school, first grade. Not us. Not yet.

But this is a first, in a way, for me too: this is the first fall since 2005 that I haven't been starting up a school year myself. My kids aren't starting school again this fall either (though they will be starting at a home daycare in a month or so). Without a transitional moment to mark the season's change, we're lazily sliding into fall, with no lunches to pack, no new gear to acquire, no rush to leave the house in the morning. I'm still working a bit, but my work is mostly flexible and comes in fits and starts. That will change a bit in October, too, but for now I'm enjoying how it feels to glide slowly into fall's gentler light and air.

The boys have acquired a big pile of Lego from a neighbor, which means that most days we settle in for a massive building session.

Sometimes, it's easy. Sometimes, I get frustrated by having to help. At its best, an hour of building leads to hours more of playtime.

While the kids play, I am dreaming of the beach, where we spent two weeks this summer. If I could pick one place to live forever, it would be on a beach. The shifts in tides and sands provide enough change every day that there is always something new to discover: another angle, or shell, or trough of water to play in. No mosquitoes when the sea breeze blows, and the air is always (usually) moving, not settling down with the oppressive weight of Durham's most humid days.

 For now, I have the garden and the butterflies to provide variety and beauty.

And I have collections to gaze at when I want to be gone from the here and now.

Here and now is good, too. Fall is in the air. Even if we don't realize it yet, in our lazy, extended summer.

DIY PVC Play Palace

We had an alarming number of snow days this year, our first winter on the East Coast as a family. From what we hear, the weather we've been enduring is unusual. But we still had to get through it one way or another. I am passionate about getting my kids outside, but only so long as I am also comfortable. And I'm not yet comfortable for more than around 30 minutes in the cold and snowy.

This combination of circumstances led to a huge number of hours spent holed up at home over the winter.

Fortunately, Pinterest came to the rescue. I found too many fort ideas, but then stumbled on this one. I thought, hey, I can do that! Except instead of a square, I wanted a rectangle that could fit over a toddler bed so two guys could play in it, and so the bed would still be available in case Dash ever wanted to sleep in it (short answer: no, he'll never want to sleep in it. It's a train/trash truck/rocket, not a bed).

Armstrong and Aldrin on their way to the moon.

So I modified the plan and measured three times and then I went out and bought materials. In a downpour. At a Home Depot where most of the power was out.

And then we tried to follow the directions. And it turns out that (as I look back at Pinterest and peruse more designs that somehow didn't come up in my earlier searches) all good plans require some extra pipe. Or these things, but I couldn't find any at Lowe's or Home Depot around here. So we built a roofless fort and put it over Dash's bed, with curtains along the sides to make it feel enclosed.

The guys played "Buster Keaton" for a couple days on it (somehow, I failed to take pictures). Then they demanded that we take it down.

Last Saturday, we stayed in all morning for no real reason. So we re-worked the design with pipe cutters and extra fittings.

This is what our corners now look like: a three-way, 90-degree joint connecting to a 90-degree joint turned on an angle to connect with the roof. Above, a three-way, angled joint forms the corner of the rectangle.

The complete skeleton.

Roof joint.

The beam that runs across the roof has to be a few inches longer than the beams on the long sides to accommodate for the extra pipe on the ends. We had a lot of pieces of pipe hanging around, so we just trimmed one to fit and used a spare connector to attach to the longer pipe.

With roof.

After we'd constructed it, we moved the palace where it belongs, on top of Dash's bed. Now the fellas retreat there regularly with flashlights and toys to play all sorts of games. Total success (except when they wake up at 3AM to play there).

Permanent home.

Accept the Fluster

Sky at the Museum of Life and Science, Durham. There is so much amazing sky here.

Elizabeth Bishop writes, in "One Art":

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

This morning, as I was awakened at 5:45 by a whiny toddler, I lay in bed thinking about this poem. I have loved this poem for years, with its acknowledgement of how easily we lose things, how deeply we mourn them. I've been fortunate in that most of my losses have been of the "what-if" nature—and I am not one to dwell on things that didn't happen. I've watched friends suffer far greater, much more incomprehensible losses than I have.

Sometimes the art of losing means finding that some dear friends have been broken. Sometimes it's about the things gained in return for the loss. And sometimes (usually?) you find that something important has been left behind. 

I'm not talking about "the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent."

"Losing farther." That one's hard. Six months into our life here in Durham, most of what I miss the most is farther away than I would like it to be. Some of my friends, to my regret, I am "losing faster" than others. There is only so much time in the day to write and to daydream and the time change is a bitch. I have not yet mastered that art, particularly when I don't have that network here (yet, I keep telling myself, not yet).

Lost Garden

But my sorrow for them hasn't stopped the thrum of grief for what we've left behind. We're getting settled, have almost unpacked all the boxes. 

Sometimes, part of unpacking has been finding old, dear friends, ones we boxed up almost a year ago.

Books! We have missed you.

Back to Bishop:

places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

She's right. None of those will bring disaster. I've traveled some, enough to know that not traveling right now does not mean regret. I've lost some names (though Facebook keeps bringing them back).

I've lost "two cities, lovely ones" and that actually doesn't seem so bad—Durham has plenty to recommend it as a city.

It's the other stuff—the three Huichol pieces and two evil eyes we somehow left behind in the fluster, that didn't reappear as we tore through box after box.

Our realtor told us to take the little pieces down while we were showing the house, lest someone steal them. We tucked them in a drawer.

Those little things are gone.

I have taken those evil eyes to every home I've lived in since college, when I brought them home from a trip to Turkey with my best friend from high school. They've been in shared flats, studio apartments, my mom's house, upstairs and downstairs in the old house in California. Maybe I'm a bit superstitious, but I always felt like my home was safe and mine once I hung them up.

I don't even have pictures of the Huichol artworks; they show up in passing. They were some of the first things Geoff and I bought together, on a trip to Puerto Vallarta and Yelapa about six years ago. In fact (as Geoff reminds me), we came back from that trip on Superbowl Sunday—the one where Eli Manning won in the final play.

They're in a photo of the kitchen downstairs after we painted it.

Those tiny things between the shelves. Why am I so sad about these?

Over and over, blurry spots of color in the series of photos we took while I was pregnant.

Waaaaay back in the back. Yep.

This attachment to such small objects is grinding away at me, most obviously as a synecdoche for the loss I am still feeling for our old life. Possibly, too, it's on my mind after reading Donna Tartt's hypnotic novel, The Goldfinch:

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Those little pieces of art, with the story about how we looked all over town for them, a story about my kids' parents; the evil eyes, with a story about comfort, security, stability—those are stories my kids won't hear or take with them.

...It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Yep. It's not disaster. It's an art. Sometimes it's hard to master.

Leaving Home

We never planned to buy our house. 

View from downstairs porch

It just happened. I remember seeing the rental apartment advertised on craigslist six years ago; when we saw the place, we fell in love. Not just with the yard, the color, and the light, the built-in cabinets, the moldings. We walked in the door and felt that this place was a special place to be. We sent email after email, desperately hoping that no one else would get to rent the apartment. 

Ceanothus blossoms on the massive tree in our yard.

When we finally heard back, we were ecstatic. We spent the next few months getting to know our new neighborhood and enjoying the new apartment. We found commuting to our jobs easy—for me, a 20-minute bike ride, and for Geoff, a quick walk to BART. 

Persimmons

The persimmon tree in the backyard led to all kinds of culinary adventures, and we took a thousand pictures of it as the fruit matured and the leaves lit up. 

We ate apricots and plums, too; later, my husband made plum wine. There's a great mix of sun and shade in the yard, perfect for the cool and warm East Bay weather.

Plums, not ready to eat yet. But so beautiful!

Then, on the day before Thanksgiving, only 6 months after we'd moved in, our landlady knocked on our door to tell us that she was planning to sell the house. Would we be interested in buying it? We were stunned. We spent the whole long weekend talking about it, and got in touch with a realtor. We hadn't been planning to buy a house, hadn't even been looking at houses for sale. Our relationship was too new for that kind of long-term planning.

We bought the house. 

downstairs, back door.

It's a 1912 Edwardian (is that redundant?). And my husband and I found that what makes us happiest together is working on projects. Old houses have plenty of projects. We found a friend to rent the upstairs apartment so we could keep living in our apartment. We painted. 

before

after

We cleared out weeds.

We planted a garden.

Summer 2010

Our friend moved out. We moved upstairs.

We painted.

before

after

We painted some more.

before

after

We built raised beds for vegetables.

We got married. On our wedding day, we hid from each other in the two bedrooms of the upstairs—Geoff in his office, I in our bedroom. 

We spent lazy Sundays in the hammock.

We watched these twin hummingbirds grow in the persimmon tree as I grew our twins!

We badgered the City of Oakland into fixing the sidewalk in front of our house. 

The former "sidewalk." Note colossal puddle between tree and our yard, plus giant tree roots.

We updated the kitchen upstairs, putting in a dishwasher that has made our lives as the parents of twins much more sane.

We found great tenants who keep chickens, who tend the raised beds and mow the grass, who love our space as much as we do. They're so wonderful that they've offered to take our two cats when we move.

Yet we didn't know the value of our home until our twins came along. We met more of our neighbors in the first year of the boys' life as we ambled through the whole neighborhood at least twice per day. Some of them took our quinces and made them into the most sublime quince jam. We noticed more families with young kids walking around as our boys got older. Then, we discovered our neighborhood in a new way: we found Dover Park. 

The boys go there almost every day. There's an incredible community garden; my kids love to pick fruit and veggies. This year, we've picked fava beans, strawberries, raspberries,  peaches, white mulberries, and zucchini. 

In the Dover Park garden

We found kids the boys' age to play with (and their parents to empathize with!). New restaurants opened nearby; we started taking the kids out to dinner. We took walks to Sweet Adeline.

rainy day trip to Sweet Adeline

We have a ritual of going to the nearby Berkeley Farmers' Market every Tuesday. All our favorite farmers recognize our stroller and offer up delicious samples to our boys.

Sorbet sample at the market.

Our yard became a playspace,

an artspace,

a berryspace,

a place to delight in all things.

In the early morning, I look out our bedroom window and imagine we live in a treehouse. It's that serene, even with BART running nearby.

Who would ever want to leave? 

And there is the bittersweet part of this story. We never planned to buy our house, and we hesitated because we always knew that we would want to move back East once we had kids. Now we have kids, and we're feeling the tug of family, of making sure our children know their grandparents. So off we go to Durham, NC! There's an adventure story waiting to be told, but right now the story is about love and loss, grief over leaving a life we love. The kids feel it too. But I'm taking the long view now. Soon, we will call a new place home. May it be as rich and wonderful as the one we have now.