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.

Carolina Gardening: Year One, Part One

Last year's "garden," on our back porch.

If this spring was about changes and shifts in my internal and work worlds, it has also been about the kind of growth that happens slowly, under the earth at first, then out in the open. The garden we had back in California always felt like a paradise I escaped to whenever I could. When the boys were born, I didn't garden, because new-parenthood turned out to preclude gardening for me. I know, there are some parents who garden with their infants strapped to them or lying blissfully on a blanket nearby. Those infants were not my infants, and I could not have been that parent.

The Oakland garden at its best.

And now we've left that garden behind, and while I miss our California poppies and the 11 month growing season, I am learning to garden here in North Carolina.

All this grass was great for three-year-olds to push stuff around on at first, but when summer struck, much of it turned to hard-packed earth and weeds. There are some new aspects to my gardening here: for one, we could afford to do some hardscaping, so we did (ah, the joys of a lower cost of living!).

My favorite part of the brickwork.

Extra bonus: the hardscaping meant tons of pre-turned and pre-mulched soil, saving us most of the effort that it takes to start a big old garden from scratch. The dry creek lends structure to the yard and creates different planting zones: the hummingbird garden, the butterfly garden, the semi-shady but mostly sunny stuff.

And we made a space for the boys to play in while we work and laze outside, which makes tending a garden easier. The bottles, above, like the plants, are a long-term project.

No, the sand looks nothing like this now.

But the creek is always like this when it's wet.

As it turns out, our soil is somehow even more clayey than in CA. So some plants we can keep growing here—salvias, buddleia, agastache, and penstemon (below) all do well.

Berries also grow well here, and I've planted two varieties of raspberry and a thornless blackberry in the hope of recreating our years-ago bliss. And there are new things to grow, like blueberries! A tomato hornworm and a flock of cankeworms did some serious damage to one plant, but next year we should have a small, delicious harvest.

Other new discoveries: Pink muhly grass and easy-to-grow verbena (below), the latter of which somehow stayed green over a very cold winter.

The sun-drenched strip along the south side of our house is where I'm slowly building a butterfly garden to delight our eyes when we're looking out the windows. Across from that strip is another, wider strip which I haven't planned out yet; we got suggestions from our land design folks that I'm toying with, but I'm saving that planting for the fall. For now, I'm cultivating a fine collection of weeds and volunteers from my neighbor's yard. And some muhly grass (barely visible to the left below).

In the butterfly strip above right, you can see how wonderful my neighbors are: one of them gave me a ton of plants and seeds to experiment with last fall—the anise hyssop (foreground) and salvia (next down the row on the right) are doing splendidly. A month later (below), you can see the hyssop nearly covers the garbage carts, while the rest of the plants have started filling in nicely.

Not pictured in this post are the gorgeous red yarrow that I dug out of the same neighbor's yard this spring, and the thyme I dug out of another neighbor's yard. Everyone has irises to share, of course. And the brilliant carpenter who built our shed and gate has brought me a few lovely hellebores which will be beautiful early next spring. This kind of community is exactly what I was hoping to find here. Some people go to church. I stand around and look at plants and talk to my neighbors. Below, an aster that I pulled from a neighbor's yard last fall wakes up in April.

All kind of things have been slowly emerging in the last months. Some things take longer to reappear than you would think, if your main gardening life has been in always-growing California. Dormancy made me worry that all my plants were dead, when really they're just taking a long, long nap. And of course some actually did die. That's disappointing, but anyone who loves plants knows that a dead plant is just an opportunity to acquire more plants.

The same aster is the big thing center/rear-ish, above. The big tallish thing toward the front is an agastache. That mound of silvery stuff is an artemisia, which is hardly notable except for the fact the Nicky pulled the center of it out not once, not twice, but three or four times. I will no longer get annoyed at him for doing it—the plant certainly doesn't seem to mind.

I am glad that I'm inclined to wait and see if something's a weed before I pull it—if not for my magnificent procrastinating skills, I might have missed the tiny sage that I remember watching die almost as soon as I planted it last fall, and I might have pulled out the pomegranate tree that's now exploding with fresh, healthy growth.

Pomegranate!

I might have missed the minute signs that the Russian Sage, which looks so spare next to the lush verbena, is healthily spreading its roots. So I will keep waiting, sitting on my favorite step, watching the plants grow.

Russian sage, looking good.

The second thing to bloom in our yard this year: Gaillardia.

The most satisfying aspect of this waiting game is noting the small changes every day, in addition to the big shifts from April to June.

Summer Phlox ('Nicky' varietal—how could I resist)

Asclepias incarnata

Every bud, every tiny flower is a revelation, a sign that things are working. There are more weeds than I'd care to admit, but when it's 100 degrees for nearly a week straight, my focus is on keeping everything alive. So I kill wooly aphids with Dawn, water at dusk, and keep my eyes on the tiniest parts of the plants.

Gosh, it almost looks like a real garden! (asclepias, mistflower, rocks. Pawpaw in background on left)

This coleus. So cool.

Coleus bloom.

It's hard to wait, but the beauty of waiting is learning more and seeing what thrives. I've got plenty of time.

Setting a New Course

Sometimes, the universe is sending you a message and you refuse to hear it. Sometimes, you hear it and ignore it for a while, until the din is too loud, the message unavoidable. And even then, doubt makes you hesitate, even though every sign points to yes.

A couple of weeks ago, I told my colleagues that I wanted to let go of the unpaid work I was doing at the lovely school where I teach—I'm just over half-time and had taken on much of the extracurricular work of a full-time teacher, including establishing a new diversity program. Then we went on our trip. I thought some more. I feel proud of a lot of the work I am doing. I know I'm a good teacher, and I love working with adolescents, who are so eager to discuss everything. I hope the school is a better place for my having been there. And I know that my kids are better off for having been there. I'm a better parent, in some ways.

Having four-year-olds is easier than having toddlers, mostly: they can be remarkably independent and creative. Sometimes I get a break—they go into their room, into the brother zone, and play beautifully. And at the same time, they're equally, if not more, exhausting. That two-hour nap in the middle of the day, during which I would daydream, write, get some work done, and drink tea? It's long gone, replaced by wrestling with two energetic chatterboxes who can't sleep at night if they take a nap. "Quiet time" consists of my scuttling from room to room while they try to play on top of my head. Yet this age is so short. In a couple of years, they'll be in first grade, learning to read and write, finding deep interests.

Last Friday, I drove to school feeling certain. I taught my classes, sat down to talk with the high school coordinator about a diversity issue, then closed with, "Well, I guess now is the time when I say I'm not coming back next year." The clarity and lightness I felt stayed there until I told my kids' teacher. I have loved all the teachers my boys have had at this school, and nothing has made this decision harder than having to say goodbye to them. It is perhaps fitting that I'm coming around to this decision while I'm in the middle of teaching The Odyssey for the fifth or sixth time. That text never gets old, with its questions of what it means to be a good human being, and its pursuit of the peace of home in a world full of monsters and disasters.

My Facebook feed is full of everybody's real-life disasters and joys. If disaster visits me, shouldn't I have spent some time stretching away from the easy comfort zone of the familiar into new territories? I'm not sure that I'm quitting teaching—in fact, I'm considering shifting my teaching to a slightly different age group. I'll still be doing some work with teens, this time as a college application essay tutor. So let us say for now that I'm quitting this particular combination of joys and costs.

I don't know what I'll be doing this time next year. I don't know what the kids will be doing.

But I know a few things:

I am choosing rest.

I am choosing to connect regularly, not just on Facebook, with my friends.

I will be writing more, more often.

I will walk more every day, alone, and with four-year-olds to guide me.

I will spend 10 minutes sitting in my backyard every day watching the plants grow, and listening to the boys play.

I will make a Southern-style Wish Tree—call it a Wish in A Bottle Tree.

I will learn new things and find new ways to teach people.

I was on my way home from watching some of my students present their 8th grade projects a week ago, the evening after I'd declared my intention not to return to EWS next fall. As I drove down the winding, dark road from Chapel Hill to Durham, I found an old mix CD, cryptically labeled "Hip Hop," and put it on. A few tracks in, Aesop Rock's "No Regrets" played, with its propulsive refrain:

You can dream a little dream
Or you can live a little dream
I'd rather live it
'cause dreamers always chase
But never get it

It's time to live the dream, not just dream it. Here we go: more smiles, adventures, and joys unknown.

Riding in the Car with My Boys

When you decide to drive 765 miles away from home with two four-year-olds, you take it pretty seriously. We made serious preparations. At the end of the first day of driving, I thought: Hey! This was so easy that I ought to blog about it! And at the end of the return trip, I thought: Hey! This was so hilariously difficult that I ought to blog about it!

Here's what we did: We drove from Durham, NC to Jackson, MS. Here's what we didn't do, not once in the four days total we spent on the road: use a screen to entertain our kids. This wasn't a deliberate choice: We had a backup plan with plenty of videos loaded onto our computers. Our boys love watching videos of garbage trucks and trains. On the other hand, our children also turn into drooling zombies when they tune in to screens, so we thought we'd see whether things ever got so bad that we'd bust out our laptops. We were close. But never really thought of going there. Perhaps we should have.

That first day, we felt like champs. We'd purchased several new items, mostly variations on toys/activities they already had. This had worked for us when we flew cross-country with 2-year-olds. What could possibly go wrong?

Some of the best stuff we tried:

Mess-free drawing pads

Tubes that stretch, compress, and hook together. The BEST toys we bought.

Lift-the-flap books with few words for us to read, so they could "read" them themselves.

We doled out our prizes out slowly over the first day. The children played merrily as we zipped down the road. We felt smug. Some things didn't work, but the boys were happy to play with what they had. This was great! Traveling with kids is so easy!

And this leads me to Tip #1: Never assume that works one day will work the next day. Do buy a few new things. Don't buy too many.

We arrived at our first day's goal, the ACTUAL General at The Southern Museum, with almost an hour to run around inside, take selfies with the train, and enjoy some of the fine playthings there. Our boys LOVE Buster Keaton's film "The General," and we'd carefully planning our trip so that we could go see the real thing. They were delighted. Tip #2: Plan for a destination midway through the drive that will get you all moving/out of the car for at least an hour. Our stop at the General was necessarily at the end of the day, but the kids were so excited to see it that the anticipation carried us through. For subsequent days, having a longer break mid-day would have helped more than having a final destination.

Tip #3: Don't eat dinner at the hotel. There is a well-rated burger joint next door to the museum in Kennesaw. We didn't eat there. We regretted this decision for the rest of the evening as we waited ages for mediocre burgers, wilted salad, and lousy fries.

Tip #4: Book a hotel with a pool. There are people who will drive 12 hours in one day. We are not those people. We like to sleep all night. It takes longer, and costs more, but is so worth it. The pool was extra-pleasant: We got up in the morning and swam before we hit the road. After a day spent cooped up in the car, spending a while moving before we got cooped up again was great. Day Two started off great.

Then came the turn: about an hour into the drive, D asked, "what else did you bring for us?" We managed to put him off for a while. But eventually we went through our whole stash in a couple of hours. We tried audiobooks. Those produced screaming. With another two hours left before we got to Jackson, things were getting serious. We took a break.

The break shifted the air a little bit. We said things like, "Well, you can have the toys you have, or we can just put them all away." It wasn't pretty. Music helped, for a while.  But we arrived in Mississippi with about an hour of whining total over two days. We felt even more smug.

We had a great trip—got to go on walks together every night, spent lots of quality time with the family. The kids slept great, unlike the last time we traveled.

For the return trip, we aimed at Chattanooga and its many wonders (trains, aquarium, Lookout Mountain) as the endpoint of day one. Day one found the children totally onto our strategy: imagine colossal amounts of fussing and whining and frustration with every new variation on drawing/coloring/cheap stuff to play with. At one point we were walking around in the rain trying to calm down screaming children. That novelty addiction is serious stuff. We survived, thanks to an emergency, yet extremely frustrating, toy purchase (not pictured because it was so annoying. Instead, please look at this cute picture of the boys with those spinning sparking things. These were a brief, glorious hit.)

Tip #5: Always double-check that your "halfway point" is really halfway, possibly a little more than halfway. Also, please refer back to Tip #4: we took a swim as soon as we'd parked our car. It totally changed how we all felt about each other. Very little about driving in cars with small children over long distances is fun: they don't want to play I Spy, they can't read, and even the truck-obsessed become jaded about all the tractor-trailers. The boys didn't take a nap until 3:30pm, which led to a cranky wake-up and a late bedtime. But swimming with small children is a delightful opportunity to connect—no requests for food; no help with LEGO; no sibling fights. We didn't know, during that swim, just how unevenly we'd divided our days of driving.

As a side note, I would absolutely drive through Chattanooga again—the scenery was fantastic and there were plenty of fun things to do, had we chosen to do them. Chattanooga to Durham is just under 7 hours on Google Maps, but I can promise you it is a much longer drive than that at 451 miles: the scenery is amazing, but there are windy roads, tons of trucks, and a lot of stops to make. The kids continued to play with their frustrating toy, with varying levels of success. We were all wiped out from going to bed too late. We did mention to them that we would not be giving them new things every five minutes; perhaps I will look back on this trip fondly as the time they learned to deal with delayed gratification. Perhaps I will look back on it as the trip that made me give away all the toys.

The best rest stop I've ever been to we discovered just over the North Carolina border. This stop saved our sanity. I wish we'd had a picnic lunch to eat; we could have spent an hour playing here. Instead, we were looking for somewhere to stop for lunch. Tip #6: Pack lunches, or plan ahead for a stop you can tolerate. Don't hope to stumble upon a great place at the next exit. It doesn't exist.

Fresh air and room to run. 

We climbed trees.

All of us climbed trees.

Peace and bliss were achieved when the kids finally took a nap at 3:30 and slept until we were only an hour from Durham.

Tip #7: Keep your sense of humor and drink plenty of coffee. Happy travels!

On Winter, Spring, and Time

Time. So much has passed since I started writing a long post. Not that one I tossed out in February; the last one where I teased out ideas, turned them around, gave them shape. This sin't going to be a long one, either. It's a way of marking time, for now.

Dash has gotten into photography lately. Here'a photo of something I can't remember the name of. 

We've been making our usual kinds of messes. Not sure why all the books needed to be pulled off the shelf, but it was very urgent at the time.

We've been going for walks.

Building.

Exploring the snow. Winter this year felt LONG. Days and days of being stuck in the house with cranky kids, sometimes no power, not enough to do, and nowhere to go. We went out anyway. I'm still waiting for the day when my kids willingly go play in the snow, coming in only for hot cocoa and hugs.

And now, it's April, and we're watching things grow.

New things are growing under the earth; time will bring them to light. I love the sense of untapped potential that rides on the fresh green air of spring. Not everything bursts out of the ground with the crocuses. Some things take more time and sun and rain to reveal themselves. I'm waiting, maybe not so patiently. But watching the unfolding is delightful.