Waning summer

Here is our summer list we made just after school got out.
We've done everything except go to the Eric Carl museum and "minicher" golf. Maybe we'll do those next week. Georgia starts her school (she'll go 1 full day and 2 half days at the nearby pre-school) in three days on Monday. She's excited to see her friends but we're all appalled that this must mean summer is over! Lily goes back a week and a half later.
I'm so glad we've had some really hot sticky days so that my body actually knows that summer has come before it's gone. Last night the crickets were chirping and the stars were bright when I went out to pick a peach for an nighttime snack. I felt my way up the branch in the dark, testing peaches until I found a ripe one. I cut it up and put it in plain Greek yogurt with pine nuts and a touch of maple syrup. Yum!

Anyway. Rob had the day off Wednesday and we went to Perry pond which is a nearby frog-catching pond that's a little too slimy to swim in. Georgia loves it there. she really is besot by slimy living things. She's the one who put it on our summer list. This was our second time there this summer and things were muckier.





Here is Georgia's hairdo done exclusively by Lily! I think it's time for her to take over the girl's grooming!














Rob and the girls caught 2 fish (pumpkin seeds) 6 newts and I caught a little frog (leopard, I think)







Georgia paced around with glee.
Rob was a focused hunter. Pouncing with the net.
We both tried for the sneaky bullfrogs with their gold rimmed eyes, but they jumped and croaked loudly just before the net landed.


Here's a fish jumping right into the bucket!
And below a wriggly frog with collected lily pads and pine cones.






















Some lovely pond lilies blooming. I wanted to get closer, but decided not to plunge in. The pond is rumored to be teeming with snapping turtles.

Harvesting Hops

Here's Lily picking hops from the back porch this morning. They are so vigorous and sturdy; growing up the trellis that blocks our annoying neighbors. We're going to dry them and make sleep pillows for Christmas presents.

Canning peaches this morning

from our sweet 4 year old peach tree that is bending under the weight of all the ripe ready peaches.

It was fun to pick off the ripe ones and see the branch lift a bit as some weight was released.

I realized it IS hard to can food because you have to balance the fickle nature of fruit being ready and abundant with creating a time to focus as well as the time and ability to pre-organize and collect everything you will need in a very particular manner.

I did my best this time, with much less swearing and a bit more awareness of what step would be next. I was feeling proud and accomplished, calling Lily to come witness my Laura Ingalls Wilder triumph as I set the 6 quart jars of peaches with syrup into the huge canning pot filled with boiling water. I hadn't predicted that the jars would displace so much water or that the wave of it would splash menacingly, making Lily question my canning competence (rightly) and jump up the stairs. The tidal wave also put out the gas stove so I had to turn everything off, try and re-start the burner and then, after filling the kitchen with gas, I had to move the million pound searingly hot pan to another burner and get that one to light. Somehow the water had cooled enough during this fiasco for it to take 10 minutes for the water in the pot to boil again, meaning my peaches sat wilting in their hot syrup even longer while waiting for their 30 minute official and preserving boil bath.
When I finally pulled the jars from the pot the house was 115 degrees from hours of boiling. The peaches were a bit shriveled and floaty, but damnit; I did it!

Yelling Mom

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Lily and I had a blowout today. I don't think we've ever had such a blowout before....
She and Georgia were screaming at the top of their lungs about something foolish as I was trying to talk to Rob on the phone. I kept trying to escape them and finish my conversation about dinner, but they followed me out to the porch and then back into the kitchen. It ended with them both just screaming one note at the top of their lungs. Then Rob hung up! I was so frustrated at the inability to have a simple conversation without being hounded, that I yelled, which I usually don't do. I threw the paper Lily had handed me in the midst of the chaos, onto the ground as I yelled, "Enough! Enough! Stop it! Stop yelling!'

Nice modeling Mom. But I lost it.

I didn't know the paper I threw down was a precious drawing she had done of owls sitting on a branch in the moonlight.
She was so upset she yelled, "I hate you! You are the worst Mama ever!" and ran out.
Well!
I almost chased her out on the porch and grabbed her by the arm; I had a vision of pointing my finger close in her face and yelling, "Don't you every say that to me again!"
But, I took a moment. Maybe because I was glad to finally have quiet. I thought, "She doesn't even know what that means. She just said it to hurt me; to have impact."
I tried to get a little space and get away from them, but when I went dump the compost, Lily mumbled from the stairs, "I feel like you hate me." Uggh. It made all the fury and the unjustness of the situation fizzle out of me. I went and sat with her on the stairs and we had a talk, a "I will never hate you. No matter what." talk.
I then processed what had happened: hungry rushed family, no one feeling listened to, me demanding space and not getting it, Lily feeling fury and not knowing what to do with it. But I don't think it helped Lily.
I suggested, "How about next time you are so angry you yell, "I am so angry!!!"? She looked up from her sniffly dejected stance and said, "No, I don't think that would help. I feel more comfortable saying I hate you." Hmmm. I figured we hadn't gotten too far and we'd better stop talking.
I don't want to have a relationship where my kid says "I hate you!" but I also know I'm pretty uncomfortable with anger in general. I've been feeling other mothers out about this one since yesterday and most are reporting their kids say it to them sometimes......
Except for Nancy at work tonight who said, "No oh no, she can never say that again. She'll say it so much it will come true. That's what happened to my sister and her daughter!" Hmmmm
That is what I feared someone would say.
But I don't think that's true.
I think it will be fine.
But it did make me want to read a book like Your seven year old from that series I never bothered to read before.

And it did remind me again that sometimes a mother needs time, space and quiet and she just doesn't get it. But she has to be a kind mom anyway. Hard.

Pickles and Toadstools

Finally we made pickles.

Canning food is very important to me; it symbolizes many intangible things made tangible in a glowing jar: providing, caretaking, making beautiful things out of fruits and veggies, being independent, honoring the Little House on the Prairie series of books I grew up on, being an organized, practical sturdy mother and weirdly, somehow, surviving even if the world goes to hell.
(I can just see me clutching a jar of homemade jam as I run to the basement and seal the family in, using duct tape and plastic as the nearby nuclear plant's informative calander tells me to do. Ugggg. More on that in another post, I guess)

I bought all the supplies and had my first go at it last year. All I did was make a batch of dilly beans (pickled green beans) although I had bought tons of jars in many sizes.

During last year's canning episode, the family was kicked out of the kitchen and I could be heard swearing from the steamy room. I had some questions, "Why do the jars tip over and fall on top of one another? Why does boiling hot water sneak down this canning-specific tool I have bought and scald me when I try to move the jars that have fallen? Why are the beans floating and making it difficult to assess my 1/4 inch headspace? Will I kill the people who eat these at Christmas time? Will it be a slow death in the ER or will they just be found sitting around my jar at their kitchen table, cold and stiff?" After I finished the process I emerged, hot and burned onto the porch. Rob asked one of those questions you sometimes ask your spouse when they are totally crazy but you can't directly mention it. He looked at me seriously and wondered "Was that fun for you?" I swore at him.

He was not looking forward to canning season this year.

Tragically, my dilly beans failed last year. Salt somehow appeared on the outside of the jars after they had cooled. My canning friend called her expert canning mother in Alaska . She gently told me the verdict; I had to refrigerate them and eat them all in the next week. I was frustrated; it took time, precision (well, a goal of precision), sweat, and lots of beans to make dilly beans and I ended up throwing most of them out.

Thankfully, yesterday I talked to Jenny, the farmer at our CSA (as I was greedily packing pickling cukes into a plastic bag to make pickles, wondering when I could steal 3 hours of kitchen swearing time during the busy coming week) She said, "Oh you don't want to do all that work and have mushy pickles. Make sun pickles. We've got the recipe on this week's website." She was right. I did not want mushy pickles. (That horror had never occurred to me.) I made sun pickles with the children. We did not burn each other. They look gorgeous on the windowsill where they are to sit for 2 days in the sun. Rob said, upon entering the kitchen after work, "Those are beautiful. Did you get a picture?" Why, thank you, yes I did.
I'll let you know how they taste!


SUN PICKLES1 gallon jar
sliced cukes to fill it
Two thirds water to one third vinegar (6 1/2 C water, 3 1/4 C vinegar)
1/2 C - 2/3 C pickling salt
garlic - one clove, or more
dill heads or fresh dill
other spices you like

Fill the jar with cukes, top with other ingredients, Then leave it in the sun for 2 days, 3 if cloudy. Refrigerate and eat for up to 2 weeks.

Feeling fresh after our quick and painless pickle experience we all headed out to do "trail maintenance" on a trail Rob had discovered. (He is training for an intense cylocross seaon come fall and he needs a place to ride in the woods and I'd like somewhere to jog off-pavement.)


We were all astonished by the mushrooms. They were amazing; all over the place. I took photos of only a tiny fraction of what we saw growing.

Lily spray painted the roots that stuck out in odd places. Rob had a hatchet and clippers to cut branches that had overgrown the trail. Georgia and I spotted and admired mushrooms.

It was lovely and quiet; I felt a tiny bit of trepidation. Although I have deep cravings to spend time in the woods, I usually don't. It is the same hushed woods where I saw the Luna Moth and the Scarlet Tanager earlier in the summer (that I wrote about in here). It has a feeling of deep thrumming energy. I kept looking up to see if there was something there, moving behind the tress, just past where we stood. Georgia was also was reticent to enter and demanded I hold her hand the entire time, but again, we don't spend much time in the woods when evening is coming....

The mushrooms were bright and welcoming and made me think of the mushroom researcher who believes all the interconnected fungi beneath the ground has its own sort of consciousness.

His name is Paul Stamets and his book is: Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. The article I read in The Sun about him was really crazy and cool.

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/386/going_underground

There was a quote from it I liked:

"Biological systems are so complex that they far exceed our cognitive abilities and our linear logic. We are essentially children when it comes to our understanding of the natural world."
















Anyway, we had a good time outside and enjoyed the mushroom's company. The mosquitos finally swarmed and we all ran for the car and the creamie.

Mass MOCA outing

My parents, the girls and I went to Mass MOCA in North Adams today for a belated Mother's Day gift to my mother.
We saw the Sol LeWitt's wall drawing retrospective.

http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=27

The girls were mighty unruly in the exhibit. A child's instinct is to sprint around the open bright rooms, running their hand along the colorful walls, which, of course, is not allowed. So there wasn't that much contemplative gazing. I didn't read any of the information provided, we just moved quickly through the rooms and between the decorated walls.
It was beautiful, odd and interesting
It will be there for 20 years so we'll go again someday when writhing has decreased as a frequent behavior.


Here they are at the end of the day, finally eating the ice cream I held over their heads the whole time. They are not in the best of moods. The ride home with all of us squished into my CRV was taxing.
But once we got home and I saw the photos, I was happy wed had an adventure.

A Tiny Plum

from our tiny plum tree. Georgia really likes plums right now so she sneaks down there and picks them while they're still sour.