Category Archives: spring

Maybe this year

Imagine, if you will, an enormous industrial stovetop. Six back burners. Imagine every burner with a pot on it, every pot asimmer. The whole kitchen smells like waking to somebody already cooking breakfast, like Thanksgiving, like a happy childhood. Yeah, so those pots are the stories I want to tell here. Nothing’s ready to eat yet, of course. Shall we stretch this metaphor to the very edge of its usefulness? Can I say I guess these stories really do need a good long braise? Shall we turn around and look out the kitchen window while we wait?

Because y’all, here at our house near the salt marsh, it is spring. Spring! Spring is better than winter! It looks a lot like you might expect, especially if you also live in the Northeast. The daffodils opened up a few weeks ago, and then I saw the roadside maples with their blood-red buds, and then it was just BAM! BAM! BAM! Magnolias! Forsythia! Sandals!

And then there is all the stuff that feels so particular to living right here, surrounded by wetlands, supported by the summertime crowds, waiting for vegetables. Most of the ice cream shops have opened back up, for one, which I really should have said before all that bosh about back burners. The crab shacks and seafood markets are open again too. We’re still waiting for mini-golf and the bread stand, but the peepers are singing their lovesick chorus and my husband is turning all that winter cover crop back into the soil and so we know it can’t be long. My brain is racing happily: When are signups for swim lessons? Can my kids stay awake for the Friday night frog hikes in the trails around the lighthouse? Can we help tag horseshoe crabs this year? The pear tree behind the oldest barn, the one loaded with a welcoming committee of juicy fruit when we moved twenty minutes up the road last November, went from tiny green buds to full bloom in the span of just a couple days this week. We didn’t do much more than cram the pears into our mouths during our first walks here last fall, but maybe this year there will be jam or pies or something poached.

Here’s to my own gentle simmers and to spring’s wild rumpus!

Weekending

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A week ago Sunday I made myself a second cup of coffee and settled myself not into my spot at the end of the couch against the bay window, and not onto a warm patch of bayside sand while my children splashed, but into a patio chair on my friend’s terrace in the East Village. It was the last day of a sweet and chockablock week in the city, and after so much time climbing slides and eating bagels and chatting with strangers and boarding ferries and buses and subway cars, it was good to exhale. My son finished up his second bowl of corn flakes inside and called out to me his plans to make Minecraft weapons from an old egg carton. My daughter stacked and unstacked and restacked flower pots. I sipped my coffee and lifted my face to the hot May sun and took in the Sunday morning sounds of the East Village (church bells, bus brakes and engines, mourning doves, my son’s spoon clanking merrily against his cereal bowl). It’s easy to forget that the city ever slows down, but it does.

My friend’s terrace looks out over the inside of the block, a motley vista of fire escapes and ivy and air conditioners and unlikely trees. It’s such a comfort to me to look out over these bones and muscles of city living. It’s not a quiet place to live, of course, and daily life with small children anywhere is full of questions and bumps and tears and fart jokes and throwing, so much throwing. But sometimes there’s a moment when the exigencies have been deftly met or benignly ignored, when your children are immersed in their own work and you are not needed. I guess that’s going to keep happening, isn’t it?

Sunday though, I didn’t fret about how fast they’re growing. I looked at bricks I’d looked at a hundred times and wondered for the first time whose hands had laid them. I noticed a pigeon in a flower pot and wondered if she had a nest there. I saw an empty six-pack on a fire escape and smiled, thinking of that passage from Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn about the people who go to early mass:

Oh, what a wonderful day was Saturday in Brooklyn. Oh, how wonderful anywhere! People were paid on Saturday and it was a holiday without the rigidness of a Sunday. People had money to go out and buy things.They ate well for once, got drunk, had dates, made love and stayed up until all hours; singing, playing music, fighting and dancing because the morrow was their own free day. They could sleep late – until late mass anyhow.

On Sunday, most people crowded into the eleven o’clock mass. Well, some people, a few, went to early six o’clock mass. They were given credit for this but they deserved none for they were the ones who had stayed out so late that it was morning when they got home. So they went to this early mass, got it over with and went home and slept all day with a free conscience.

We’re home now. Horseshoe crab spawning season, one of the most magical and curious times of our year, is upon us. I wrote a post a couple weeks ago but never finished it and thus didn’t post it, in which I talked about how much I like easing past the first lusty weeks of spring, all frogsong and snowdrops and cracked open windows, and into spring proper. But in our week away another shift happened. The daffodils that were just past peak are now fully wizened on their stems. There’s a fine film of pollen on everything and we keep the windows open 24/7 except when it rains. And of course the farm goings-on are full tilt.

Here’s to spring’s wild rumpus! Here’s to my Mother’s Day breakfast in bed and a long solo morning, to our favorite beach bar opening back up, to muddy kids and hungry red knots and strawberries just around the corner. To picnic dinners at the bay and all the baby pigs and even to mosquitoes. To the familiar feeling of it all. To home!

(I may pop back in here and add some of our NYC photos, because I know I’ll be glad to look back on them. But for now: hello again!)

(joining Karen and company)

October strawberries

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For two or three months this spring and summer I kept my camera close at hand in the kitchen and on the farm, with every intention of joining back up with Heather and others in the This Week in My Kitchen blog hop. I love the idea of these simple everyday photos of what’s happening in our kitchens – a record of what we’ve been cooking and eating, and inspiration for times when I have no idea what to cook. For someone who loves to cook and whose family pays the rent with farm income, truth is, those times strike pretty often. And as to my memory of what we cooked for dinner four days ago, much less this time last year? Burned off like so much early morning fog. Even a partial log of what we ate, of what worked and what didn’t, is truly helpful.

Thing is: I post here so infrequently. If I joined up with the blog hop every week or or even every other week, this website would fast become less about that hoary search for home and belonging and more about my abiding love for pancakes, frittatas, porters, and roasted anythings.

Still, I snapped away. And – inspired in equal measure by the blog hop, by the food logs I kept for my midwives during both my pregnancies, and by Jenny Rosenstrach’s dinner diary – I started keeping a list of our meals and snacks. I am not highly organized or disciplined, and I suspect this effort will fall by the wayside soon enough. But that’s okay. The blog hop photos I’m not posting and the food log have taught me a lot. I’ve learned we eat a lot of mid-day breakfast sandwiches at our favorite deli, where they know us all by name and come to chat with us at the counter when the lunch rush is over. I’ve learned I really do drink a lot of coffee. I’ve learned I don’t have much of a grip on lunch. I’ve learned rock star days in the kitchen beget more rock star days in the kitchen. I’ve learned that salmon no wait just-picked strawberries no wait pulled pork no wait homemade bread no wait tomato sandwiches with mayo and basil no wait a giant bowl of buttery salty green beans with a poached egg on top no wait PEPPERONI PIZZA is my favorite thing ever.

Also, I learned that I did not squander strawberry season, which made me very cheerful.

Some of you might remember that last year we lived on a farm with vast quantities of rhubarb that I looked at longingly but didn’t manage to eat very much of. When my dear friends from Norway were visiting we made a simple rhubarb grøt (Porridge! Delicious plain or with a little cream. We spooned leftovers on top of Molly’s everyday cake and that was very, very good.). I half-remember making a pie for the Fourth. I know I drank a startlingly good rhubarb buttermilk soda when I was out to dinner once, one I wanted to try to recreate at home, but instead I just think about it all the time. I digress. Last year was very hard and despite the fields of produce staring at sad old me at every turn, I just didn’t manage to dig very deep.

My May and June 2014 food log tells a different story, I am happy to report: Alice Medrich’s buckwheat shortcakes with sliced strawberries and maple sweetened whipped cream. Strawberries with granola and yogurt. Strawberries on waffles, on pancakes, on French toast. Strawberries in salad. Roasted strawberry buttermilk ice cream. Strawberries on my mother-in-law’s famous poundcake. Runny but perfectly good strawberry jam on toast with coffee (PSA and Note to Self for Next Spring: making jam in the slow cooker is awesome, especially if you have little people about, and Pomona’s Universal Pectin is awesome, but ne’er the twain should meet, because the Pomona’s needs a boil to set the jam). Strawberry cake, twice, at my son’s utterly disarming request. Strawberries in my Gordon’s Cup. Strawberries straight out of the quart box in my lap on the drive home. Strawberries straight out of the fridge at the farm stand. Strawberries straight off the plant. Strawberries for daaaaaays, and days and days and days. It was awesome.

The story of how I came to farming has a lot of threads. For the purposes of this post it’s pretty important to tell the part of the story that begins along a sunny stretch of chain link fence in the courtyard of a shelter in southeastern Queens, where for a few months in 2004 I ran a gardening project with some families. We grew tomatoes and flowers and herbs in containers along that fence, and the kids conducted taste tests to compare supermarket and farmers market produce. The most formative part of the experience, for me, was the interviews the kids did with one another, with their families, and with some of the staff at the shelter. As they took careful notes about favorite foods, childhood gardens, and old family recipes, I began to understand that the dangers of food insecurity swell far beyond the physical. When families lose the intimacy of the family table for weeks or months or longer, when parents can’t teach their children how to make their famous rice and beans because they’re not allowed in the kitchen, when no one has the chance to ask for seconds or thirds of something delicious because dinner is always a thawed tray from an institutional freezer, warmed by someone who may be kind but is never family – the damage can be quite severe.

I began to wonder: is there a confluence of the family support work I’ve been doing and, well, growing stuff? Can gardening or farming support families who are struggling? I’d spent years working alongside families, but my ability to judge the maturity of a zucchini was about as refined as my ability to perform a root canal, teach Arabic, or gut a chicken, which is to say, I was completely incompetent. I decided to take a sabbatical. I wasn’t sure how it would all play out, exactly, but I imagined I’d spend a year – two, tops – working for farmers, before returning to the city to try to bring all these experiences together into some kind of job. I spent the spring of 2006 helping out on some smallholdings in France and Ireland and then landed at a working vegetable farm outside of Washington, DC.

I still remember the sweltering August afternoon when I walked out of the repair shop with some tool I’d been sent after, probably another nut driver or some hose clamps for an irrigation repair. I glanced north toward the hoop house, where this guy who was leasing some land from my bosses worked with his crew, sorting pony baskets of sweet peppers for the next day’s market. His brown arms moved fast and his easy laughter carried across the lawn. He worked with dispatch and good cheer and I realized how little I’d understood about the satisfaction of physical labor. Uh oh, I thought.

Leaves fell. Snow fell. The next spring I found a job on a livestock farm the next county over. By the end of that year we’d decided to marry and to become business partners, and a few months after that we closed on our own farm. We built a greenhouse, and laid out our fields, and hired a crew, and started a big CSA, and sold at markets, and had a baby, and watched him grow, and fed him from our fields, and put down roots, and wondered if the deep joy of building a community around our own farm was worth the financial struggles. I never forgot about the kids in Queens. But helping to keep our business afloat and parenting very small children took everything I had.

And now, well into my ninth year on a farm, I am finally catching my breath. My children are still quite small, but I’m not working on the farm anymore. I’m looking at it all – my plans, our plans, the merits of local agriculture – with a little bit of distance. And I am beginning to think we place too much import on seasonal eating.

Of course it’s meaningful. A tomato I picked right before lunch, an egg my chicken laid this morning, or the lettuce your farmer woke up long before dawn to pick in time for market really does taste better. And while, officially, the jury is still out on the matter, for me there’s no doubt that the nutrition in that dead ripe tomato I just picked is superior to the nutrition in a tomato grown in a hothouse in California, picked green and hard as a rock, shipped across the country, and gassed with ethylene so that it is a uniform deep red when it’s unloaded in the stockroom of my local ShopRite. The strawberries I ate in the field in early June made me smile the way you do when you remember a kiss. The giant strawberries in the 2-lb clamshell my son reaches for now at the supermarket taste flat and make me grumpy.

What a privilege! I can put the clamshell back down and tell my son October strawberries don’t taste very good, and we can drive to the farm where my husband works and pick sugar sweet Nelson carrots right out of the ground, or select a couple butternuts from the farmstand for our favorite soup. Or, for Pete’s sake, maybe I’ll just buy the damn strawberries. I’m sure the nutritional gap between those perfect June fruits and these October understudies is just a sliver, compared to the chasm between either one and the donuts or Goldfish he would also be quite content to wolf down. Do I fret too much?

It’s impossible to avoid these flights of contemplation as I survey the autumn bones of our garden or walk the farm, coffee in hand. Summer’s dewy flush is long gone. A few tomatoes will hang on until first frost, but their leaves are yellowing with blight. Most of the fruiting crops have been mowed and turned back into the soil, and my husband is planting grasses and legumes, to hold the soil in place, replenish nitrogen, suppress weeds, and improve tilth. The farm, so lush not two months ago, is about to get very brown and very muddy. Even so: autumn eating is my favorite. I could eat my weight in winter squash and sweet potatoes and kale. Stews and roasts and braises fill me right up. On the days when I manage to think about what’s for dinner before 5pm (which, frankly, is pretty hit or miss), I can start that soup in the slow cooker, or put a roast in the oven, or spend five minutes chopping cabbage and carrots for this braise (throw some chicken thighs and drumsticks in there too), and then boom, dinner cooks itself. I love that!

It seems silly to ignore the pleasure that autumn ingredients and cooking methods bring me. It seems silly, too, to ignore the easy bounty of fresh produce that is always available to us. I think all families can provide something wholesome or formative for their kids, something that comes easy. Maybe you live in the woods and only have to open the door to get outside. Maybe you live in the city and there is no way for your kids not to take in all those bodies and colors and voices and kisses and think of them as normal. Maybe you have a great relationship with your in-laws who live across town and they watch your babies while you work. Maybe your husband is a farmer and the countertops are always heaped with whatever is growing. You know?

Also: I’m deeply proud of my husband’s work, and I deeply miss what our family life looked like back in our Virginia days. Eating the vegetables my husband grows, when he grows them, is a way to celebrate him and also the way we became a family.

This food feeds us, belly and soul. I know that. And yet – I don’t think it can feed everyone, and I know I feel uneasy about that. Without turning this into a sob story, I think it’s worth acknowledging that most small scale farmers struggle to make ends meet. But we’ll always have food on the table, which is just not true for so many people. Right now I have way, way more questions about food and hunger and community than I came to farming with.

Look: I know I’m speaking from a somewhat ragged place. We left a farm that couldn’t pay our bills, and I’ve written over and over again about how hard it was to leave our land and the rhythms our family life took on there. But I lost my community too: CSA members, farmers market customers and staff, fellow farmers with whom we shared equipment and shipping costs and pest control strategies and so, so many meals. I think I’m only just now understanding the cost of losing those daily relationships.

Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The thing that’s so hard about moving, the thing that makes it worth forging through six pounds of CSA eggplant week after week, the thing about teaching your kids how to make your famous rice and beans: we belong to each other. In a chapter of my life when I’ve known a lot of loneliness, in a world where so many people are displaced by disaster or avarice, in a time when so much online grandstanding and so many incomprehensible injustices make it feel easier and safer to retreat than to reach out – I choose belonging.

And so today I went to the grocery store with my kids and I bought some coffee and cheddar cheese and three kinds of Halloween candy. And then we stopped by the farm for carrots and sweet potatoes and leeks and turnips. We drove home, and as we turned onto our street, we could see our friends from New York, here for the weekend, unloading their car. We hugged and carried the babies and groceries inside. My husband grew some delicious food, and tonight I put it in a pot with some oil and salt and heat. My friends handed me some braised beef they’d brought with them, the last roast from their own cow, and I added that too. Later we moved the pot to the kitchen table, grabbed some bowls, grabbed some beers, and ate. Together.

No fretting.

And that explains March.

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Two months! I did not expect to stay quiet so long. The short version of events is that I spent February very pregnant indeed: exhausted, contemplative, huddled against the chill and snuggled up with my boy in our last weeks as a dyad. For a time it seemed I might be pregnant forever – but instead I had a baby, and that explains March, I think.

I don’t intend to write too much here about about the final weeks of my pregnancy (which were more intense than I expected) or my labor (which was more beautiful than I expected) or our first weeks together as a family of four (delicious, but also something I want to protect). But I’m home with just the baby this weekend, and the day is stretched out before me in a blissful haze of nursing and nuzzling and coffee sipping and probably a misty walk to the bay. I think I’ll have to wait for this sweet fog to dissipate a bit, or at least until some semblance of a nap rhythm emerges, before I return to writing here in earnest (I have so many ideas for this space!) – but I want very much to check in, and also to yoke a few words to these fleeting weeks.

I can’t think of a single thing analagous to bringing a baby into the world, and appropriately, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the last five weeks thinking Enormous Thoughts. Did I really grow AN ACTUAL PERSON inside my belly, again? Does my body really make food for her? Are we qualified to usher these tiny exquisite people through this scary and beautiful world for the next twenty years?

Much of the time, though, I am just here. I hold my babies close, and I cheer on the melting snow, and I watch gulls soar high above the surf before dropping clams onto the rocks below to crack them open. In the evenings, I crack open one rich and malty porter and I lean against my husband’s shoulder and we start another episode of Breaking Bad (and I look down at the sleeping newborn on my lap and whisper to her: dream of mama milk and big brotherly love instead of a suspicious old RV in the desert outside of Albuquerque).

And I eat. Man, there is nothing like pushing a baby out of your body and then feeding that baby with your body to make food taste otherworldly. Here’s just some of what we’ve been eating:

this pulled pork with ancho, cinnamon, and cocoa, which remains one of the best things I have ever eaten
these lamb shoulder chops braised in garlicky tomatoes and a bit of white wine
this cauliflower roasted with thyme and parmesan
bowl upon bowl (upon bowl) of this oatmeal (I like it with yogurt and half an apple, diced)
these scones with prunes, caraway, and olive oil
these blondies (twice!)
an amazing pecan sourdough boule from Kathya, and many bowls of this popcorn on Sunday nights when we watch David Attenborough documentaries as a family (my mind is still completely blown by what I’ve learned about monotremes), and a not insignificant amount of chocolate sent in the sweetest care packages by friends who understand me
a freezer full of sturdy stews and casseroles – a true labor of love on the part of my mom and dad, who don’t even eat much meat, but who figured oh so rightly that the sort of dishes that usually grace a church potluck table would also be deeply appealing to a woman who just had a baby and her farmer husband

It’s a delicious, if fairly monochromatic, list. Hearty fare. The right sort of stuff to see us through The Winter That Would Not End. But I’ve been thinking about coaxing spring indoors with these pea shoots, and down at the farm, the greenhouse is filling with seedlings, and the chickens have started laying again, really laying. I’m really excited about fresh food. More importantly, I feel like I’ve made it through, am more or less on the other side of something really hard: leaving our farm, leaving New York, letting go of the pregnancy and birth I had expected, soldiering through a long winter. I don’t know what this spring holds, but I do like these blue skies.

In the meantime

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Round-lobed hepatica, liverleaf, or liverwort/Anemone americana. New York, April 2013.

Sakes alive! I have about 19 posts writing themselves in my head right this minute, thoughts on spring and motherhood and loss and gingerbread. But I’m struggling, a lot, to figure out when to write. Any magic tips or loving guidance?

I’ll be back here soon. In the meantime I highly recommend you make yourself and a pal some mint juleps and go raise your glasses in the evening sun. It’s not the answer to everything but it sure does help.

Springdrunk

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A couple weeks ago the spring peepers launched headlong into their moony chorus and I don’t want them ever to stop. A few years ago I found a copy of The Gardener’s Bed-Book: Short and Long Pieces to Be Read in Bed by Those Who Love Husbandry and the Green Growing Things of the Earth at an estate sale, or maybe it was at a fantastically Hogwartian junk shop near our old farm. Either way: I find it a (largely) addictive and delightful little book, even if author Richardson Wright does refer to the “infernal squallings” of the peepers. Me, I say their song is about the prettiest and most heartening thing I know. There I am, plodding along in my slippers, shoulders hunched in cold self-preservation over another cup of coffee, cracking the front door to check the weather and wondering if I can summon the wherewithal to suit up self and child for a bracing evening walk – and there they are! When I hear them I know for sure that we are on the other side of winter’s worst. (Did you know though that the cold-blooded peepers can tolerate sub-zero temperatures without dying? Whoa! It’s a pretty complex process; more here.) And they do most of their eating and, umm, merrymaking after dark and throughout the night – which is to say: they sing us to sleep.

So it’s moony peepers and moony me. Last week the forsythia woke up and this week it’s just exploding, fountains and fireworks of it everywhere we go. I don’t know what made me think we’d moved too far north for magnolias, because we haven’t – they’re everywhere too and instead of making me feel homesick they are just making me feel at home. Inside the high tunnels where we’ve been gleaning scraggly kale and rosemary, the greens are bolting and the herbs are flowering and the heady smell of it all makes me grin so wide I can hardly speak. And I’m not sure what’s redder: the maple buds against a sky that is one hour thick with thunderclouds and the next a blinding blue, or the robin’s breast in the pear trees behind our house, or the barn in the setting sun??

And the skunk cabbage! It’s huge now, up to my knees nearly and bright bright green, and as I walked in the marsh behind our house yesterday and the day before I saw that wherever the skunk cabbage is growing, nettles are too. Nettles! I will wait just a little longer, and then I will put on some gloves and get to work. I want lots of tea, and I want the buttery nettle soup a friend made for me in France 10 years ago this summer, and I want Nicole’s nettle tart. The marsh where they grow, half frozen just a few weeks ago, is carpeted in thousands upon thousands of tiny cotyledons. Is it too much to wonder if some of them might be watercress? This marsh habitat is so new to me. I don’t know its calendar yet at all.

Oh, friends. It has been a very long winter. This is how I am finding home.

“The Peace of Wild Things”

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

On bright blue days delight comes easy.

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At three and a half, our son seems to be doing that “kids are adaptable” thing with aplomb as he settles in up here amongst the stone walls and glaciated ridges. At three his feelings are also acute and immediate, and this long winter of preparation and packing was not easy for him. But now that we’re here and our days have some semblance of normalcy to them again, he seems to be taking in stride the loss of so much that was familiar. He’s so here, so now, and has just gotten right to work building up a brand new familiar. Of course the move means enormous changes for my husband too. But his days here are busy and new, and he’s the first to say he’s very much looking forward to a year without his nose buried in QuickBooks.

Me? In truth I half feel like I’m still treading water. I’m not melancholy. It’s nothing like October, when the decision to leave our farm was still so raw. But it’s not July yet either.

Case in point? This Hudson Valley winter. This, friends, is going to take some getting used to. No, it’s not Arctic. It’s not even New England. But it is COLD. And brown. And icy. And long. Perhaps I’ve been coddled by too many easy Virginia winters – because I did grow up in Pennsylvania, and I did live in New York City for much of my twenties. I’m confident that in time the heady southern springs will be less the thing I yearn for come March and more just a part of how we tell our son about the place where he was born. I remember that in the first months of my pregnancy in 2009 I thought I might burst with vernal delight, that clamor of blossoming trees and all that green seeming to cheer on the tiny new life in my belly. I suppose that bit of magic did set the bar for spring pretty high.

But I’m confident too that, soon enough, the northern bellwethers will come to be just as comforting as those Virginia redbuds and dogwoods and wisteria. Look at that amazing skunk cabbage in the marsh, two photos up – do you know it makes its own heat, upwards of 60°F above air temperature, melting its way through the frozen ground, confidently and without complaint, to thrust its speckled burgundy spathe through the mud?? Geese are everywhere, filling the skies with their glorious racket. And who could’ve expected I’d come to be so enamored of mud? If our boots are crusted with it and our floors splattered and smeared, can it be too long before I linger with my coffee at sunrise on the back deck?

If I’m half homesick, missing blossoms and Kaffeeklatsches and our land, well then, I am also half drunk on my own delight in all that is new. When were those stone walls built? What kind of rock are those cliffs carved from? Those evergreens are enormous – what are they? If these hardwoods ever get leaves again, will I know them by sight or will I need to go on long walks with my Peterson guides? What’s this – oh, ouch! It’s a chestnut! Right there in the yard! And look at those marshes! And all those ponds! And those vast black dirt onion fields! Of course there are people here too. They run diners and ice cream shops, and they know how to make the kind of bagels and pizza I’ve been missing for years, and they invite us over for breakfast, and they tell us where the playgrounds are, and the good Indian lunch buffets too, and how on this sweet green earth one can procure a library card. (You might think this would be easier to procure than, say, raw milk, but you would be wrong.)

From such diverse and abundant raw material we are beginning to piece together our days. Sometimes the skies are too grey and the winds too fierce, and my resolve to get us outside in all kinds of weather just doesn’t stand a chance against my kid’s grumps. On those days we bake, or we keep unpacking our books, or we take long and winding drives. But sometimes the skies are blindingly blue and so we tug on our boots and zip our coats and off we go. I tell him about cattails and we laugh as the dogs leap the creeks and I swear one day last week we startled a pheasant up out of the rushes. We stop at luncheonettes for bagels and coffee, and the waitress at one already knows that my kid would like two crayons, one red and one blue please, and she cuts the straw down to size for him special. We are missing our own vegetables like the dickens, but we need to eat fresh vegetables just the same, and it’s lots of fun trying new cabbages and squashes from the big Asian market. There is a great spot for coffee just down the road – I have not had a lovely little luxury like that since my NYC days. We’re looking up swim classes (what with all these ponds), and while I haven’t found a great spot yet for bulk grains and spices, buying fresh milk is as easy as going to the farm and paying for it. We’re trying out a weekly parent-child class at a small Waldorf school. On weekends we sometimes stick close to home but more often, so far, we are taking advantage of what seems like unbelievable good fortune: living within easy driving distance again of family and old friends. If things work out here, my son will grow up knowing his cousins and with loads of aunties both kith and kin.

So here we are. On bright blue days delight comes easy. On harder days I am trying to take cues from the skunk cabbage, burgeoning through the frozen mud, and of course also from my resident bodhisattva, who cries when he is sad, eats when he is hungry, laughs when life is funny, and gives the best hugs.