Time now

to go home.

See you soon! Thanks for reading.
tt

Friday Happiness

Hello, Friday! This week has flown by, of course. And this will be my last Friday here in Maine...by next week it will be all about back to school, and back to work, and looking forward to our September show. Next week I'll start telling you a little about some of the artists who are a part of Public Bookstore. I can't wait to share some of the wonderful work that will be included in our first collective volume.

::

Today, another show begins; this one at Nahcotta, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and although we can not make the opening reception tonight, we are planning to stop on our way home and check it out. I can not wait! I've wanted to see the space and the show since I first laid eyes on the extraordinary work of Jennifer Judd-McGee. Go check out the list of artists, here. There are so many names on that list that I'm looking forward to finally seeing (their work) in person.

::

For now, for a few more days here, it is still all about tea in the morning and the beach in the afternoon. Good bread from the bakery down the road, walks through the wooded path, watercolors, and Our Daily Red. Snuggling on the porch, and collecting rocks.

And finding that your favorite flowers right now seem to be something you grew up calling a weed. But loving them, nonetheless; finding them everywhere, and appreciating their prettiness, despite their ordinariness.

Isn't that what it's all about, after all?

Quotidian beauty.

More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt

It's too easy.

If you get to go to lunch in a place as beautiful, and pure, and perfect as Chase's Daily, and you happen to have been lucky enough to bring with you a proper camera, and you walk into the back room and see all the glorious bounty grown in a place called Freedom...
Well, it's too easy.

Here are the photos. But I really can't take credit. I give all the credit to the Chase family.

And to Tim, for being the most patient man in the world. Not only back then on that day that we went and spent two weeks grocery money on a proper camera. But also for today, when he held a box of leftover thin-crust eggplant pizza in one hand, and a highly spirited four-year-old girl in the other, while I fell in love with some cabbages.

And just in case you are all tired of the lovely pictures of Anna sniffing flowers and what not, here's the darling now, in Chase's Daily.


More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt

All things being equal...

...I might never leave home. What ever house I am calling home at a particular place in time, that's where I most want to be. I want to make meals and clean up after them. I want to smooth a fresh tablecloth over the table, and switch the laundry, and sit in a favorite chair. I want to bother the girls to straighten their beds, and ask Tim if he, too, wants another cup of tea. I want to sweep up the floor, and have a glass of wine, and go to bed early, and read a bit of my book. I want to be home.

Tim likes to be home, too. But fortunately, he sees the need for one of us to be a catalyst for movement, and he will most likely be the one to get us out. Get us up, and out, and doing something.

I've made love to this house with my camera since we've been here, taking pictures of our days, and our cups, and our beds, and our walks.

But, today we drove the sixty-five miles to the closest surfing beach, once again. Oh, yes. We can skip down Pink Street to the dock, or shuttle over to the Drift-In beach. These photos are from the lighthouse a stone's throw from where we're calling home.

But for Tim to surf-for the girls to body surf!-we need to drive back down the coast, to the single most spectacular spot we've ever been. Where Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. Where the waves are big, and the beach a mile long. Where it's just us, and maybe twenty others, on the last day of August.

Today, I did.not.take.my.camera.

I just wanted to be there. And I was. I said about twenty times, "I can't believe I didn't bring my camera". The light was perfect, the waves were huge. Anna sang and danced on the shore, while Tim caught waves like his teen-aged self, and Lindsey buried Callie so deeply that she couldn't get up. We laughed so hard, we nearly couldn't dig her out.

But not a single picture was taken.
And that's alright with me.

Because I was there.

More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt

Into the woods

It's all cold rain and wind today, perfect for staying inside, making cookies and soup, reading, playing games, and napping. It's a chance to live a bit of late-fall up here in Maine, where we've only known summer, before.

The last day all of us were together here was hot and sunny and perfect, and we took a long walk to a path through the woods, at the end of which lay the spectacular expanse of the sea.

Having reached my limit of near-death experiences for one vacation, I quickly ushered us all away from the cliff and back into the woods, where the kids commenced making fairie houses.




It's a hard and fast truth of life that if we had planned to have the kids spend a happy two hours in the woods building structures out of sticks and moss, it probably would have collapsed into a whine-fest. But when they fall into an activity organically, they get into a rhythm of their own making; they laugh more, complain and criticize less, encourage and collaborate with each other.




It's a beautiful thing. And when it happens, I'm grateful for every minute of it. I know right then that this is what we'll all remember.

These are the days. Thanks for reading.
tt

Friday Happiness::Pink Street edition

::waking up to a taste of fall-cool air, tea ready in the kitchen, toast and honey on the table.
::taking a long walk into the woods, finding the sea at the end of the path.
::discovering the "hidden" cabinet filled with all the essential cookware. (Better late than never.)
::Maine blueberries-in ice cream, in pancakes, in pie.
::the kitchen radio on in the background all day-classical music, classic rock, and The Writer's Almanac-Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
::going to bed early; watching The Godfather movies in installments, like a mini-series.
::reading The Passion of the Hausfrau. It feels like I'm hanging out with a friend who gets it, and can make me laugh about it, too.
::weeds and flowers growing along the side of the road; vases filled every day.
::bookshelves in the dining room; forty years of books on the shelves.
::No plans, no hurry, no trouble.

Enjoy the weekend! Thanks for reading.
tt

I'll tell you right off the bat that she's ok.

Anna fell off the dock yesterday.

Anna fell off the dock yesterday, without her life vest on.

We'd all been down there for a couple of hours already. Blue skies, warming in the sun, eating crackers, goofing around, jumping off hand-in-hand (not me!), paddling about around the dock. The girls kept coaxing Anna to come in, telling her it's not that cold. Making her laugh by counting to three and then all leaping in. But she wasn't buying it, this day. She stayed on the dock with Tim and me, the whole time.

All good.

We were getting ready to go...collecting towels and flip flops and life vests: even the big girls wear them down there, sometimes. Just for fun: they're all strong swimmers. But Anna, she puts it on in the house and wears it all the way down Pink Street, and all the way back home.

We have it all gathered up, and have even turned to walk towards the ramp.

And then:
Callie shouting "she fell in!", and me, still thinking she had the vest on, not even moving quickly- smiling, even, thinking Anna must have decided to finally go for it.
The sound of Callie jumping in, and the sight of Anna, her head above water now, but with the duckie towel wrapped around her, pulling her down, even as Callie was holding her up. Grabbing on to the dock while gripping underneath that little shoulder. Wrapping her up in dry towels and cradling her like an infant, holding my breath as she coughed out water and started to cry.
Callie collapsing next to me, still in her wetsuit, and looking stunned.

And Anna's next words, and all of us laughing: Callie was wrong. The water is too really cold today.
Everything is ok.

::

A few years ago, when Lindsey was six or seven, we were on Block Island with my family-brothers and parents and cousins and all. Anna was an infant, and Tim and I strapped her in the Baby Bjorn and spent a few hours walking around the island while the kids were all together with the rest of the family. When we came back up the hill to the house, my niece was waiting in the driveway with the news that Lindsey had been hurt and we had to go to the medical center immediately. She'd been with her older cousins at a make-shift petting zoo, and had been bitten by one of the animals. She'd lost part of one of her fingers.

The horror I felt when I first saw her hand is with me to this day. I didn't let her out of my arms for the next several days, and by the time we'd returned home, I'd blamed myself so completely for this accident, for not being there, that I could barely tell people what happened. Everyone told me not to think that way, that it wasn't my fault. But Tim and I knew: if we'd been there, it wouldn't have happened. We just knew.

::

We were wrong. As parents we all have a catalog of near misses, tragic events and dangers-real and imagined-that haunt us. And I know that when my kids were little, I, for one, really believed that if only I could be with them all the time, I could keep them from harm.

But now, even as I know I'm doing all I can to keep them safe, I know that there's only so much I can do.
Even as I'm keeping them close, I know its as much my job to let them go.

I just don't know how to balance the terror of what could happen, against the freedom of watching them grow.

::
Obviously, the thing with Anna yesterday is a different case. We're still not sure why her life vest got taken off-something about wanting to wrap up in her towel, like her sisters. We know that it is our job to keep a four-year old safe around water. We know that Anna can swim well enough, and certainly if not Callie, some one of the seven of us would have gotten to her in time.

But.

Last night, long after everyone had fallen asleep, and before the lobster boats started revving their engines at four thirty or so, I went in and scooped up that little girl, and brought her in to our bed, and lay there just holding on.

At least I can still do that, for now.

More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt

Pink Street, day five.

Hello. I have a moment here, where the house is quiet, and the computer is beckoning me. That hasn't been the case much, for the past few days. I've been doing all sorts of wild and crazy things, instead.

Like reading. And sitting and staring at the ocean. And taking walks.

But...
I don't want to give you the impression that it's all peace and relaxation. There are six kids here with us, after all.

Listen, I do love it here, and I do love the enthusiasm and joy that the girls bring to being on vacation. And,mostly, I love that something about this house, and the air here, and the water all around us, conspire to make the things that drive me nuts at home easily tolerable.

But...
I'm still doing four loads of (sandy) laundry a day. I'm still patrolling the kitchen like an armed sentry-particularly since one little marauder could take out a key ingredient for a meal, and the closest place for suitable provisions is a forty minute drive away. The kids still quarrel- although to be fair, not very much.

So, why, then, do I feel different here? I feel like I have more space: space around me and space in my head.

There is that fact that the big girls have a whole house to themselves: a barn-like structure attached to the house by a breezeway, with a sleeping loft and couches and music and games. Anna's in the "dorm" room in the house with us. Next week, when we're down to just three girls, the other two will move in with her. I'd feel funny having just two of them all the way out in the studio.

Like everything else in our family, it's a numbers thing. Six is a lot.

There, I said it. It's a lot.

It's a lot of people to keep track of, and to keep happy. It's a lot of personalities to accommodate and a lot of bodies to clean up after. It's a lot of food.

Please understand, I'm not looking for sympathy, and I'm not even complaining. I just want you to know that no matter how many pretty pictures I post, or in how many ways we are the luckiest family on earth, it's a lot.

And maybe the first person who needs to recognize that, and give me a bit of a break, is me.

Being here all together-and we've "made it" to day five beautifully-has made me appreciate both sides of things perhaps more than I have been lately, in the thick of "real life" back home.

Things are wonderful, and things are hard. That's just life. And that's more than fine.

And now, I have to go. Anna just dropped a bucket of beads all over the floor, and I can hear the marauders girls coming back from the dock in search of lunch.

I can hear them coming down Pink Street, and they are laughing.

More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt

Greetings from Pink Street.

Things are good. Very good.

There will be more, but this is all for now.

More tomorrow. Thanks for reading.
tt