Weeds and Kids

Construction for critters and keepers

2011-09-17T15:13:00.007-04:00

It isn't quite square, and it wouldn't pass any building code inspections...but here is our bunny hutch, for nighttime use. Daytime, they romp around a fenced-in area of the basement; today we found Cecil in the dollhouse, watching TV in the living room. They don't like being caught in the evening, so I might have to cut off the legs, but I like the fact that I can sweep under it as it is. Emily and I built this together in the days right after we got back from seeing bunnies at the State Fair. (I don't know why the photo below keeps turning sideways for me, but here it is, anyway).

While we were making rabbitat, the days got shorter. The chickens have stopped laying, started a moult (feathers everywhere!), and are making more frequent visits to the front door. Are they jealous of the indoor animals? Or do they just sense that the people and food are all inside?Brian, meanwhile, has been working on human habitat outdoors - patio and back deck repairs. His work, considerably neater than ours, is worthy of showing off. As a reward, we got him a gas grill for his birthday.

I wonder if it is possible, with all of our animal poo, to bottle enough methane to cook dinner? Roast chicken, anyone? (Kidding!)

Animals indoors and out

2011-08-26T21:37:00.004-04:00

My intentions with our daughters are always to get them outside, more. I don't always get out as much as I should, but I am *always* happier when I do. This summer I went to morning swim practice, and returned to spend days gardening, helping Brian rebuild our deck, mow, manage rainwater, and tend critters.

But Tiggy, our kitty, always liked being with us for these activities. So, despite me knowing full well what all the rescue organizations and many responsible cat owners say, we let Tiggy out with us. She would follow me to the back of the yard, and wait while I swam, and walk back up the yard with me afterward. While we worked on the deck, she would lay nearby. When we went out, she would meet us by the front door upon our return, and she always came inside with us when we came indoors. Until early July, when she went missing. Nearly two weeks later, Brian found her a couple of blocks away, addled, blind (we soon discovered), and not herself. She's back to about 95% of her former self, but now, an indoor cat, no longer our companion in the garden.

The chickens, of course, continue to be outdoor animals - albeit mostly cooped. Again, though, we have tended to let them out of the coop to explore the plants and bugs in the yard, while we're home gardening and working. And again, they have always enjoyed it, producing bright-yellow omega-3 rich eggs from their varied outdoor diet. They haven't gotten lost, at least not yet. However, the chickens have developed a couple of bad habits - one, working their way into the garden and pecking at our heirloom tomatoes (as Brian noted, we both like homegrown tomatoes more than we like eggs), and digging up the soil in our newly planted raingardens. Lately, they're losing their freedom, not only because school is starting and I can't be home to chickensit them in their wanderings, but because I can't trust them to keep to the mulched beds and pine needles and lawn. A pen is clearly a necessity, but in the meanwhile, I'm realizing freshly that free-range chickens in the suburbs just don't really work that well (at least, not as free-range).

Finally, the latest critter in the mix - bunnies. After years (decades?) of wanting a bunny, I have finally got a bunny - two, even! - to cuddle, at least when Emily and Hazel let me get a hand on them. Though we drooled at the Kentucky State Fair, we succumbed at the Animal Rescue League, where Cecil and Gigi came neutered, healthy, cuddly, and ethically (it's like an animal thrift store! what's not to love? recycling *and* lifesaving, all in one). I've met many rabbits in my life, 98% outdoors - wild, in hutches, or loose at the University of Victoria. But as I learned in the adoption process, an indoor rabbit does not a good outdoor rabbit make. The hutch Emily and I built is now indoors, with a pen in front for exercise, and a lot of unwanted garden turnips making themselves useful as rabbit forage. They'll live a good life, and we'll enjoy them - but once again, they won't be our companions outdoors.

I'm typing this in the playroom with Bella, crazy kitten, playing nearby with a marble. The hamster is running her wheel. The bunnies are downstairs in their pen while Hazel and a friend play dollhouse nearby. Tiggy is upstairs with Brian and Emily, laying nearby while they read or play computer games. The chickens are roosting for the night. The garden is outdoors, waiting for tomorrow, but meanwhile we are now a household where nature is both outdoors and in. Animal husbandry may not be farm-style around here; between nearly losing Tiggy and really losing chickens to a fox back in 2008, we've had enough lessons about nature being red in tooth and claw. Instead, we're learning about responsibility, the inevitable conflicts between love and freedom. We're learning about lots of different kinds of poop. And I sleep a lot better knowing all the furry critters are safe, as long as I don't go all Lenny on them and pet them too much.

Rotational intensive badminton

2011-05-27T15:41:00.003-04:00

Last fall, I was lucky enough to find an intact, well supplied badminton set at a thrift store, and was able to initiate the girls into one of my favorite sports from my high school days. (My friend Conley and I played many hours of badminton in gym, demolishing the birdie with whatever clique or boyfriend-related aggressions needed outlet at the moment.) For the winter, the set simply sat in the yard, tolerating the snow and waiting for better days ahead. The lawn was none the worse for it.

This spring, we've come to rely on this $6 find for entertainment much more than I would have guessed. It turns out to be good for all the ages in our household, good for short or long moments outside, good for relaxation or, as I found in high school gym class, for peacefully working out more - shall we say - intense emotions. We're wearing out the rackets and the birdies both, and I think replacements will be in our future before long.

What I didn't anticipate - but should have - was wearing out the turf. This is a subject I think about by day (teaching in sustainable agriculture class about rotational intensive grazing or talking with local field managers about complaints over soccer field rest periods), and a subject I thought about occasionally as a child (our front lawn sported two matching bare spots where I caught or batted while Dad pitched). I've sometimes heard myself telling the girls to switch spots for their soccer goalie practice, so as not to compact the soil - poor children! But I'd never really thought about it much.

Brian and I both see that the ground is too wet for the turf to handle this kind of abuse. We've moved the net a couple of times (note the matching worn spots a few feet apart in the photo above). We've tried to put it in the least-soppy areas - a challenging task in a relentlessly wet spring. We both try not to stand in the same spot all the time, though the reality is that setting up in a central part of the court is critical to badminton success. In our own rather vague way, we're still trying to rescue the poor grass from its doom.

If I were a real scientist, perhaps I would take this as a learning opportunity. I could try to experiment, to find out how many hours of play and how much recovery time is necessary to maintain healthy turf under badminton pressure. I could do treatments to see whether aeration or modified mowing treatments helped abate the damage done by our competitive feet. But really - it's a *backyard*, and the whole reason I wanted one of these silly grassy spaces was for the kids to *play*. They're doing it. I really can't complain.

Because in reality, we're having a great time. It's a lot of fun to play. The game is compact enough (unlike tennis) that you can still talk (without shouting) while lobbing the birdie back and forth. It works for the beginning player (Hazel, who does a charming lift of her opposite foot each time she swings) and the take-no-prisoners grouchy spouse or moody 11 year old. At the same time, badminton is hard to take too seriously, and there's nothing quite so humorous or humbling as a noisy, swishing whiff followed by a birdie hitting the ground, unhit, at my feet.

So we have some bare patches, and some very mortally wounded grass in our backyard. Big deal. It's less to mow, and represents a lot of fun in progress. It's just irritating enough to make me wish for a really compaction tolerant weed to come in and make itself a home there. At least that way I won't get muddy when I slip and fall while trying to whack a line drive at some poor member of my family.

Mind games with trees

2011-05-17T10:57:00.006-04:00

Since we have moved to this house, we've been proud of ourselves for keeping up a regular pattern of tree plantings. We've planted at least three oaks, an ash, a maple, three red buds, a couple of spruces (one died, though), a tulip poplar, and two sycamores. Also, Brian has germinated some burr oaks, none of which are big enough to call trees yet, but they're thriving young saplings in the mulch next to our swing set. We're on track for roughly two trees per year in the suburbs, and we certainly plan to keep it up.

Lately, though, I've started wondering if our tree planting - and the idea of tree planting, for Earth Day or carbon credits or self-congratulation - isn't a bit of a self-delusion. We buy the trees from the garden center or nursery, but meanwhile, we keep mowing the lawn, we keep weeding the garden, and each action prevents a number of willing young volunteer trees from reaching their full potential. We have ash trees volunteering beneath our pines; I have oaks volunteering in my snap peas; each will be trimmed, or pulled, or otherwise cut short in their efforts to repopulate Pennsylvania's forest primeval.

I'm treating these trees as weeds. And while that seems eminently justifiable for Ailanthus, or Norway maples, it seems strange for natives like ash (threatened by emerald ash borer - could one of our seedlings be resistant to the pest?) or the hard-wooded oak, shade tree extraordinaire.

Back in our little woodland, volunteer trees get a better welcome. We celebrate that a volunteer oak has finally stretched its buds above deer browsing height, the improving architecture of a wild-sown crabapple, and we watch with interest to see whether any young sassafras will take hold among the jewelweed, pokeweed, goldenrod, and dock within the understory. I've been tolerating Virginia creeper and training some wild grapevines onto our dying ash trees, as we're afraid to cut them down outright, and risk the black cherry or mature sassafras trees in their midst.

Taking credit for planting trees is further complicated by the question of provenance. If we buy a 5' sapling from a nursery, do we get to take credit for tree growth, or does the nursery? If we plant one tree, while weed-whacking down dozens of volunteer seedlings, have we done a net harm, or a net good? Does pruning branches occupy a separate moral sphere from cutting a tree at its base, and if so does size matter for each? Does it matter whether the wood goes in our brushpile to rot slowly, or whether it goes in our copper-pot grill to help set the mood for a backyard campout?

The whole situation reminds me of the difference between midwifery and obstetrics. My cousin Brigid, a midwife, refers to her task as "catching babies", while obstetricians usually refer to "delivering babies". The midwife's catch is a more passive action, a response to a projection performed by another person's muscles, while the obstetrician's delivery (falsely, in my opinion) implies that the transport from the womb is instigated by the medical professional (whose contractions were those again?). Similarly, I have a beekeeper friend who also encourages wild, native bees to live on her property, a process she calls "hosting" rather than "beekeeping". The language is carefully chosen, reflecting her welcoming passivity in the process of providing habitat for the wild fliers.

In our suburban treetending, we're both midwives and parents, keepers and hosts. We welcome some wild-sown trees, relocate a few, and pull others. We purchase, we foster, we germinate, we trim. We pat ourselves on the back. In any case, a little more humility is unquestionably in order for us. The trees, after all, are doing the largest share of the work. We're just the ones with shovels and saws in hand, ready to take whatever credit we can.

The Weedy Outsider

2011-04-29T23:13:00.003-04:00

Early next week, I'll travel by train to Middletown, CT, where I'll visit with a college friend and speak about the wonders of weedy lawns at the Jonah Center for Earth and Art. I'm halfway packed for it already, and really psyched to go, in part because of the train ride (rarely all that convenient from here) and visiting with my good friend (who I've known longer than my spouse), but also because I'm reaching a new career milestone there: the outside expert.

Here in Pittsburgh, we have experts in most any area of environmental study - not many marine biologists, perhaps (besides Rachel Carson, who left our city before fully developing her expertise in that field) - but solar energy specialists, wind energy pioneers, urban forestry experts, scientists of Marcellus Shale, founders of the field of environmental oncology, the original citizen's air quality group, dozens of environmental engineers and consultants, a topnotch university sustainability coordinator, and lots of darned good environmental educators. But we have a running common complaint: when someone wants a speaker for a big event, they usually invite the Outside Expert.

At her worst, the Outside Expert assumes that she has been brought in because no locals know half as much as she about the topic of interest. S/he takes the podium, and tells us how the brilliant, faraway people of California or New York solved the same problem (which we also have our own solutions for), and that with inspiration from her/him, we can finally rise out of ignorance and learn to solve our own problems just like they do in her/his perfect city. (Meanwhile, local experts sit seething, imagining what they could have accomplished with half the money it took to fly, pay carbon credits, and compensate the know-it-all on the podium.) The Outside Expert is standard fare among invited speakers, and I suppose the only justice is when the local expert gets to become the Outside Expert for some other city.

The folks at Jonah Center are no strangers to environmental lawn care. My friend, who has done work on prairie restoration, knows far more about ecology than I do, and is certainly capable of saying all of what I'm going to say. Further, others in her community definitely know the benefits of a biodiverse lawn - Kim O'Rourke, especially, who has helped lead Project Green Lawn, has already written about how tolerating weeds is an important step in creating healthy pesticide-free lawns.

So it is an open question whether anyone in the audience next Tuesday will learn anything they haven't heard before: I'll certainly give them my best shot. In any case, I get a lovely train ride and a good visit with a friend, I get to show off a display of Sheila Rodgers' beautiful weed photos, and I'll hopefully reduce the overstock book population of my office by a bit. I get to be the Outside Expert for the first time, kindof a fun milestone for someone a few weeks into age 40.

Maybe, if I play my cards right, I'll also gain some really awesome new friends and colleagues in the process. And then, when I need to invite an Outside Expert to Pittsburgh someday, I'll know exactly who to call from Middletown.

Weedy wheat overtakes suburban lawn

2011-04-19T17:17:00.002-04:00

Last fall, Brian and I did some re-landscaping of the backyard, leveling a bit of space behind the house so we might be able, one day, to put out a table and eat dinner with the chickens for company. The process involved a truckload of topsoil, moved via wheelbarrow, then topped with grass, clover, and wildflower seed mix...and covered with straw.

Straw, in the classic sense, is grass stems, the part left over after the seed has been harvested. If it has seed in it, that's a bit of a shame, because that seed isn't needed for the function of straw. Straw is horse bedding, to be used and pooped on and mucked out. But for whatever reason, the straw we used had a fair number of heads still on it, with live seeds.

I watched the wheat seeds germinate, beneath the straw covering we so lovingly provided. I watered them, hoping to just get some ground cover before winter hit. Since we did the landscaping fairly late in the summer, we probably even followed the wheat planting guidelines, which is to plant the crop after the passing of the Hessian fly free date, meaning that our wheat crop shouldn't have any infestations of a fairly brutal insect pest. The wheat - and the lawn grass and clover - grew well, and through this winter we seem to have lost very little of all that soil we brought in. We definitely succeeded in establishing this new bit of lawn.

But the wheat is an odd sort of problem. It's winter wheat, now ready to grow like - well, a weed - to set seed and harden up, oh, about midsummer. And though I have my vegetable garden nearby, this spot wasn't intended to be food, it was intended to be lawn - just more exercise for me and my reel mower. Instead, I have this food crop, growing not only in the back of the house, but near the boundary between us and the next door neighbors (not the nice ones, either), and at the end of the driveway. I've mowed it twice so far, reluctantly, feeling vaguely that it must be some sort of sin to mow a food crop when plenty of hungry people don't have enough to grow wheat on purpose, much less enough land to try to grow decorative grasses for leisure.

This week it is rainy. Perhaps it will keep raining (climate change models do predict increased rain for this area), and perhaps I won't be able to get out and mow again, to do my suburban duty on time. Perhaps I'll be forced to watch the wheat grow until it is too tall for us to tackle, and we'll get a citation from the zoning board for our overgrown lawn.

I would be forced, then, to testify in court one of two absurd positions: 1) the wheat, one of the staple crops of world agriculture, is a weed, and I was negligent in allowing it to exceed the legal 8" height for lawn weeds, or 2) the wheat is not a weed, and I had the audacity to grow a grain crop in my front lawn. Either way, the legal implications of prosecuting me are fascinating; the story could be front page world news of the weird, either way, about the craziness of the U.S. and our insane culture of lawns and food.

It's rather fun thinking about it while I watch the spring rains outside.

The Crazy Weed Lady Walks the Neighborhood...

2011-04-04T14:55:00.004-04:00

Weather lately is a bit crazy, and I have never been a fan of mud (my definition of bad weed: a plant which leaves me with mud). Today it is warm and lovely, interspersed with thunderstorms and wind. I donned raincoat, and headed out for a walk.

First stop: the Community Center, to adjust my kids' days to match their friends'. While there, I talked to two friends who work there; one offered me a book she'd just finished, which I left at the desk so I could pick it up on my way back.

Next: Down the road for my walk. En route, I took a couple of side streets, looking for spring beauties for Sheila to photograph (that's her wild garlic, above). Passed an abandoned gray Abercrombie sweater on the roadside, and left it while I walked, but picked it up on the way back. Picking up litter, or stealing? Does it matter how many times it had been run over? Looped through a couple of favorite neighborhood streets, turned around, and walked back. Picked up the sweater en route (if you know the owner, I'm glad to return it, washed gently...). Stopped back by the community center, now feeling a bit odd, carrying sweater, book, and watching the clouds threatening.

But one more important stop called, one I'd been meaning to make for at least a couple of years: the bulb garden, which we planted for Emily's birthday back in 2005. Some of the bulbs are thriving, others not, but more importantly, I needed some wild garlic.

This weekend, our friends S & R had us over for dinner, and served leek and potato soup. It was amazing. I was inspired. So this afternoon, I gathered handfuls of wild garlic at the community center. I didn't get the roots - whether I was saving some wild garlic for the next person, or failing to complete a job of weeding, well, you be the judge. Feeling raindrops (it is now thundering, 30 minutes later, while I type), I scurried back around the pool fence to home.

I've never made this soup before. I've got out Laurel's Kitchen to the page with potato-cheese soup, but have already started diverging from it, using milk, vegetable broth, and parsnips, in addition to potatoes. The handfuls of wild garlic are draining in the sink while I type. Hopefully it will end up tasting good.

I do like thinking of myself as the neighborhood eccentric, the chicken lady who writes weed books. Today, I was a bit more so, heading out for a walk (that, eccentric enough by local standards, even in dry weather), and returning with a roadworn sweater, a book about hedgehogs, and a large handful of weeds for dinner. The only thing I was missing was Birkenstocks.

Going to seed...

2011-03-18T14:35:00.001-04:00

An impossibly delicious Over-the-Hill 40th birthday cake, given to me in sustainable agriculture class this morning. The chef apologized for not having any weeds growing on it, but with soil this yummy, weeds are hardly necessary.

California weeding...

2011-03-08T10:18:00.004-05:00

I was just in San Francisco this weekend visiting family, and got a chance to confirm the geographic range of the weeds in Good Weed, Bad Weed. Aunt Jackie immediately found most of her lawn weeds from Wisconsin; and a new friend from San Francisco opened the book and recognized her lawn weeds as well.

And while I wasn't near many lawns as we walked the neighborhood of North Beach, I found woodsorrel and chickweed hugging tiny soil patches near the street trees. (I thought about eating the chickweed, but decided that I had no idea what it might have soaked up from passing dogs and cars.) Even better, in front of the U.N. building, the only lawn space we saw, English daisies were in full bloom, making a festive scene under the trees.

I think my family were rather amused by my obsession. By the time we got to the Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building, I didn't bother pointing out the dandelion greens for sale. And if I had a dollar for everyone in California who thought the book title was about that Other Weed, I would be very rich!

Winter greens

2011-02-21T11:36:00.003-05:00

It's that time of year again, at least for those of us with the cold-rain version of February outside: weed foraging. Our next door neighbor just told me her mother's secret for dandelion greens, which is to harvest now, with the early spring cold rains. The interesting thing about this is that whether you're harvesting dandelion to kill it or just to eat it, this is still one of the best times, the time of the most tender, least-bitter greens, and also the time when the plant is relatively weak, and vulnerable to being pulled.

Garlic mustard (see Sheila Rodger's photo at left) is also at its best time. With garlic mustard, my goal is definitely to kill it (and unfortunately for cooking demos, I think I succeeded last year - I don't have many rosettes of it out back this spring), but using it in February or March yields strong garlic flavor with less bitterness.

And then don't forget the winter annuals - chickweed, cuckooflower (another Sheila photo at left) - perhaps not at their largest yet, but definitely at a good stage for some "spring tonic", as the first greens of spring used to be called, back when lettuce wasn't a year-round staple at the grocery supercenter. Red sorrel, overwintering at ground level, can give some oxalic acid-punch before the rhubarb is up yet. Your wild garlic is out there now, just waiting to masquerade as the freshest chives.

I worry about sounding like a salesperson when I talk about weeds like this, and yes, if you want to find these plants and don't know what they look like, of course you could buy my latest book, and I'd be grateful. But whatever education you need is your own business: the weeds are out there, if not *in* your yard then close by, just waiting for you. No one is going to mind if you take them. Call it your own personal grocery self-checkout line, with no line.

Good Weed, Bad Weed: It's Here!

2011-02-15T19:54:00.002-05:00

I got home today to find a stack of boxes in my garage: the long awaited copies of my latest weed book, Good Weed, Bad Weed, from St. Lynn's Press. The timing is just right for spring - before the lawn trucks begin their trolling around for customers, before the new weeds take off, before the garlic mustard begins growing...and the same day I saw the first daffodil shoot poking up in front of our house.

Not long before it's time to go out and collect Japanese knotweed shoots for strawberry-knotweed pie, too; the first weed recipe for spring!

Hickory nut holiday

2010-11-28T20:31:00.005-05:00

This Thanksgiving, many traditions went by the wayside in service of trying to keep the holiday low-stress. At my parents' house, mom served sweet potatoes, rolls, snap peas, cranberries, and tenderloin; I think our holiday meal with Brian's family was pizza, topped off for me with a Blue Moon beer. We had plenty of family meals, but none of them involving a turkey.

However, the tradition we didn't ditch is actually my favorite: the family hike. I've historically thought of this hike as the one where I either walk off the meal, or, as during grad school, the one where we walk off the all-day drinking we did while we were cooking and before the bird is ready. This year, the only association between the hike and the food was incidental.

But the hike ended up being all about food, anyway. We set off on a trail near Boston, Kentucky, up a half mile from the Bluegrass Parkway to a 2.5 mile loop. We like this hike (this was our 3rd time), because it seems to have it all: woods, a hill with good views, a stream, and fossils. In August, the wildflowers were excellent. We have yet to see another hiker on it, which is an extra appeal. The length is just right for us - enough to be pleasantly tiring, but not long enough to have any drudgery to it. I'd packed snacks.

We noticed lots of lovely moss, including one patch which I thought had an old washer on it, but actually featured a crinoid stem (fossil) instead. Both girls found geodes. We found the views to be all that winter hiking has to offer. And Emily found her own food.

I'd kept wondering why Emily wasn't asking for the packed snacks. Instead, she had picked up a bunch of hickory nuts, which must have just fallen, as they were perfectly sweet and fresh. She found a couple of stones, and cracked them for all of us (see above), and still she carried home more.

If I'd served hickory nuts at the Thanksgiving table, I have no doubt she would have refused. If I'd made pecan pie, she would have turned up her nose at it. But Emily made her own meal, found food outdoors, for herself, in a season none of us expected it. We topped it off with a few fallen wild grapes. Who needs turkey, or even a table? Emily found what the harvest season had to offer, and enthusiastically gathered and prepared food for the rest of us, for Thanksgiving.

Cloudy with a chance of bright spots

2010-11-18T09:48:00.004-05:00

The loss of afternoon daylight hits hard for us, with all of us getting home right around dusk from afterschool and work. Emily, in particular, hates that walk home in the dark, and I am struggling these days to remember a flashlight or lantern for her for the route home. I am glad to still be woken up by sunlight, and am trying to be mindful of it because I know soon I'll be waking up in the dark again, as the days continue to get shorter. The chickens don't seem to mind too much, but they tell us about the short days in other ways; lately we get an egg a day at best. I'll put up a light for them soon, but for now I confess I'm enjoying the respite from our summer's egg-based diet.

So our mornings are literally a bright spot. Brian recently went out one morning and took some photos of our frosted lawn. Foggy mornings aren't quite as cheerful, but have the advantage of not being quite so nippy. On more leisurely mornings, frosty or foggy, I let the chickens out for a while, and they forage while I work upstairs in our brightest room, the office.

This week, we have one other bright spot in the house, too. Back in February, 1996, Brian brought home a blooming plant to celebrate a new job I'd gotten, coinciding also with Valentine's Day. He's tended Miss Clivia and now her daughter (he helped her self-pollinate and raised babies) ever since, and though in some windows she bloomed yearly at best, her current home seems to be her favorite so far. Anyway, she's blooming again now, and I can't think of a better time of year to have a little spot of sunshine in the house.

Front yard chickens, yeehaw!

2010-11-04T11:03:00.007-04:00

I find it hard to believe we've now only had these chickens in their coop, outdoors, for a year, as it feels like our lives here have always included chickens. However, a year it is. This Halloween, the hens feasted on pumpkin guts, dug nests in our new mulch, and seem to have truly, finally discovered the front yard.

I only let them out when I'm home (or making a run over to the community center), so they don't have time to go exploring widely through the neighborhood. During grape season (our downhill neighbor grows grapes along our boundary with her), in early October, they seemed determined to wander into the "bad neighbor" yard (see December 2009 and January 2010 postings, if you're new to the blog, to see why we call it that); I don't know if they were trained away from that behavior by my hose sprayings or by the end of grape harvest, but they don't do that now, mercifully. They wander a bit uphill - into friendlier neighbor territory, though I do try to discourage them. They wander down toward the pool, but seem content to search for bugs in the woods, rather than trying to head across the parking lot for farther pastures. They wander a bit in the side yard, but so far, they have explored very little in front.

I have been glad of this, generally, because I am enjoying having the chickens so much, and I don't want to cause trouble by having them be public (somehow, the blog doesn't feel public, don't ask why!). I've been slow to come out of the proverbial chicken-keeper closet, at least in some contexts. But lately, it is almost as if the fear and anxiety about getting a variance (which was awarded last January!) have finally abated. The coop is still in the backyard, but I've stopped trying to keep them out of sight from the street.

In part, we have a new chicken keeper in the neighborhood, and though I won't out her here, her arrival gave the excuse for a chicken-keeper get-together, at Susan's house. (I hesitate to call it a "chicken dinner" because we didn't even eat eggs) So now we have a community, rather than just two crazy chicken-keepers. Emily has finally told her friends at school, rather than trying to hide the chicken-facts from the upper-cliques. In a further act of self-outing, I invited the garden club conservation committee over to meet the hens, so I've outed myself to the demographic most likely to think me a low-brow Kentucky girl. This is a part of my identity - our family's identity - no longer needing to be hidden.
Oh, well, and one more reason - Gabby, who had been undergoing a particularly unattractive molting season, is finally getting in some new feathers. She's still a bit funny looking, but at least she no longer looks half-plucked.

So let the chickens roam! This Kentucky girl may be unspeakably ashamed to be from the state which elected Rand Paul (if only it were RuPaul instead!), but I'm darned proud to have hens, their companionship and their lovely eggs.

(I think I'll wait at least another year, though, before I try for goats)

Emily's 11th Birthday, on the cheap

2010-09-26T20:03:00.006-04:00

We didn't intend to make this a bargain birthday, and in fact, the planning process felt rather extravagant. Outdoor adventures can be, like Everest or a trek on the Appalachian Trail, something for only the rich or richly sponsored; at the same time, they can be the cheapest form of family entertainment. I'll spare the credit card advertisement about priceless, but you get the idea; $16 for the shelter reservation and a few more dollars for grilled cheese and cake fixings, and we had a party I'm pleased to remember, even while still recovering my wits.

But luck was with us, too. The dry summer yielded just enough to make campfire-building easy, but not dangerous. The moon, just a couple of days past full, made the late-night bathroom trips less scary and more beautiful. The cold made the mosquitoes go away, and made it possible for all the girls to sleep in tight quarters, rather than having to spread out and split up for ventilation. We had enough experienced campers to make the experience not-too-scary, but enough inexperienced campers to add the wonder and awe and excitement.

I'm exhausted. I needed caffeine today in a bad way. I hated unpacking our backpacks and putting the things away, and I hated, as every weekend, putting away the mountain of laundry (not all done yet). But there was not a single moment of the party when I wished to be anywhere besides where I was, when I needed space I couldn't get, when I wondered whether we'd bitten off more than we could chew. Even when Brian was helping the girls use the saw to get firewood, I felt glad to be where I was, and comfortable enough with the first aid kit close by.

Next week, all of the 5th graders from Emily's party will head off for a week at school camp. I know some kids there will be camping for the first time, and Emily will be camping the first time without me, and probably every kid going is somewhat anxious about *something* - who isn't, even before the best camps? But I'm hoping that turning 11 while outdoors overnight at a state park, in the company of family and 6 good friends, gave the birthday girl a good start on her tweens, some extra confidence to carry into the darkness of puberty, middle school, Camp Allegheny, and whatever else the next few years might throw at her.

Natural Bridge, naturally hazardous

2010-08-29T20:24:00.005-04:00

One of the aspects of Kentucky which I particularly love is that, in general, people are still able to swim, fish, climb in the craziest spots, not separated by fences or CYA legalese signs posted all over. It gives the state a bit of a Darwinian feel - as in Darwin Awards. And there is no place where this is more obvious than Natural Bridge.

As you can see in this photo, Hazel is standing by a sheer dropoff with no guardrail, in front of the bridge we'd crossed, moments before, also with no guardrail (after climbing some stairs in a spot aptly described as "Fat Man's Misery").

I wasn't ready for any rock-climbing or anything like that (frankly, some of the stairs on one trail terrified me, though that was partly because they were rain-slick rather than because they were actually all that scary. But this was a pretty good thrill, even on a misty day, when I could as easily imagine thousands of feet empty below me as hundreds, or tens.

It's been a good summer for scenery, and adventure, and confidence-building. Between scary steep scree en route to the Burgess Shale, high winds on bear-laden mountains at Lake Louise, and finally this last jaunt at Natural Bridge among steep rocks and by a copperhead (Brian bravely took this photo; I was long gone up the trail after a quick look). Of course, none of this adventure kept me from my standard week-before-classes nightmares (forgetting to go teach class, cartoons infecting my powerpoint slides), but maybe it just help keep us all agile, young and old alike.

I like to think that after facing scenery like this, mean girls and school bullies, assignments and assemblies all seem smaller. If you've walked up to a sheer cliff face and peeked over, just to see the view, surely anything that happens at school is just a proverbial walk in the park.

Cross-training, with kids

2010-08-01T18:46:00.004-04:00

About a month ago, I tried to convince Emily to sign up for the local kids' triathlon, which she did last year and seemed to have a good experience with. However, the moment she gave me a firm "No", I realized who really wanted to do a triathlon in the family: me.

Having completed a couple of short tri's back in Ithaca in the late 1990's, before children, I knew the experience to know the agony and the ecstasy of it: the glory of that fast-dry bike ride after swimming, the pain of that first half-mile of running after a long bike ride. I'd accidentally exposed myself swimming backstroke in open water, so I knew what clothing would be needed.

The only problem, if you can call it that, was that between parenting and work - even just getting some writing done on the upcoming weed guide - time was short for training. 600 m swim, 20K, bike, 5K run, all in a row. Improvisation was in order.

I'd spent the early part of the summer keeping up with the growing grass with my reel mower (beloved reel mower), so that had to count as training. The 12 mile hike to and from the Burgess Shale had to count for something, too - presumably stamina training, and hill training. Swimming training was easier - adult swim is just long enough to complete a 700 meter swim, and with a few extra laps I could manage some safety net for extra stamina. During trips to Ohiopyle, I fit in one 20 mile bike ride. I literally ran circles around the girls while they played at Squaw Valley park, getting in a run or two.

The best part was Thursday and Friday, when Brian and I took the girls on a trek from Ohiopyle to Confluence, 10 miles one way on rail-trail, camped overnight, and rode back. I don't know how to count that kind of interrupted ride as training, but like I said, this was improvised training.

I've talked to a couple of dads recently who do longer triathlons, and they spoke of generous partners and flexible work hours, all the better with which to fit in 4-6 days a week of (!) 2-3 hour workouts. Listening to them I've felt envious. I can't do that kind of time, and what's more, I like to think that my training is part of family exercise. Sometimes the exercise is separate, like my 20 mile ride while Brian played with the girls in the water at Ohiopyle; but at the same time, my getting out is related to the whole family getting out.

A recent Wharton School study found that women who participate in sports as youths have better rates of employment, and I love knowing that our daughters will benefit from school and neighborhood sports programs. Thinking about men and women in triathlon, though, I have to wonder - when moms train, is it possible that their kids get more workouts than when dads train? Do moms often do this kind of improvisational family-training, involving children in workouts simply because that's the only way the workouts can happen?

In any case, the race this morning went well. I didn't carry a watch - it's been too long since I did this, and I wanted to be listening to my body rather than constantly berating or cheering myself with split times - so I won't know my times until they're posted on the website. But I finished running hard, didn't drown, didn't wreck, didn't puke, and was ready to come home before they posted my official results. This is the biggest difference for me between doing this now and my race 12 years ago, before daughters - I've got someone waiting for me at home, and I was awfully glad to see them, so we could go out for some adventures.

Early harvest?

2010-07-30T21:11:00.003-04:00

This year, determined to get some more of our own pumpkins for Halloween, I planted a lot of them...Yes, there is room in the garden also for kale, rhubarb, some herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, and snap peas (alas, now gone), plus a random assortment of weeds which I've kept for photographic and culinary purposes. But maybe not as much as we'd like.

In any case, though, the having pumpkins for Halloween thing is clearly not going to happen, because they're all getting ripe, right now. I finally harvested them, seeing they were more likely to rot by October than get bigger, so it looks like pumpkin pie is in my future/freezer sooner than I thought. Global warming? Or poor garden planning? (and I know the eggs aren't directly from the garden, but I love that basket and couldn't resist including them)

Not-so-lazy river

2010-07-22T13:53:00.003-04:00

One of the many must-do activities we hadn't done yet since coming to Pittsburgh was rafting or kayaking at Ohiopyle. This seems to be one of the main activities at the park, and we've always wanted to do it each time we watched the rafts go downstream. Hazel is turning 8 and is now a decent swimmer, which made us eligible for tours we hadn't been able to sign up for earlier, so the time was ripe.

It surprised me how long that 1.5 hour drive feels at 8 in the morning, but still, we only hit the river at 10:30 or so. We paddled, and coasted, and worked our way off rocks. (The guide who gave our safety spiel explained about letting your feet float if you fall out, to prevent foot entrapment. She said at the time there was no such thing as "butt entrapment" but after all those rocks I got stuck on, I beg to differ.)

It was 3:00 before we reached our takeout spot, soaked, a bit stiff, very hungry (note to self: pack more lunch next time), but also very happy. Ready to do the whole thing again, before long.

Motivation and memory

2010-07-17T21:04:00.006-04:00

I don't know what the girls would have said if I'd asked in advance, because I didn't. Last winter my mother-in-law asked if the girls would be able to handle a 12 mile hike to see the Burgess Shale, and I impulsively said yes, without asking them. They'd never hiked that far before, but why not? Plus, with a lunch break and a fossil hunting break in the middle, it should be OK, right?

As it turns out, the kid-led (with adult supervision) kids' hike to the Burgess Shale, one of the most diverse sites for fossils from early in the history of life, was a gorgeous, well-run trip, and easily within the kids' capabilities. Hazel and her cousin Thea were the youngest on the trip, but Hazel was hopping along even at the last mile. The adults were, well, a bit sore in the knees and toes by the end, but nothing beer and Advil couldn't fix (or simply cold packs, for my MIL, but that sounds less fun, doesn't it?). (The photo at left, alas, was not from the Burgess Shale hike, because we weren't with them for the hike - we were staggering along 30 minutes behind, since only 10 or so people can be on the Burgess Shale at once - that's from Mt. Revelstoke instead.)

I think for Brian and his brother, who knew best what to expect, the fossils were perfect. For me, as for the girls, they were a bit, shall we say, subtle - smudges on rock, easily enough mistaken for chalk drawings or rock fracture lines, at least to the uneducated eye. Emily said afterward that the hike was great, but the rocks were not worth all the effort. No one argued with her on that point, though she did acknowledge that the mountain goats, at least, were pretty cool.

I often wonder, during these family vacations, what the girls will remember. Will they remember the roadside grizzly, grazing shrubbery, or the view of Emerald Lake from the Burgess Shale? Will they remember the hotel pool at Lake Louise, or the stream behind our campside on the Kicking Horse River? I know I have ideas of what I hope they remember, and I'm sure that these ideas don't always match up with the reality.

This summer, though, I think what all of us adults noticed was how capable these kids are (our two and their two cousins). We hope that what they remember is that they climbed a mountain, crossed rockslides with ease, and scampered down afterward with nary a scratch. I myself had to take deep breaths and control my fear in places which they didn't think twice about. And maybe, whether they remember it or not, they'll carry with them a sense of physical capability. On the way down the mountain, Emily told her younger cousin about what a good job she'd done that day, and asked her if she knew the word "endurance." I don't quite remember how she explained it, but she explained it well, and when she finished explaining the word, she told her cousin "You had endurance today. You were tired but you kept on going anyway."

I think it might have even been fun, too, but I didn't try to convince them of that at the time.

Riding along

2010-07-02T10:06:00.003-04:00

Yesterday we packed the car with bicycles, drove to Washington's Landing (an island in the Allegheny, near 31st St from downtown), and took off down river. Hazel has a new-to-her bike, courtesy of one of Emily's soccer friends who outgrew it, and we took our first voyage with it. We arrived on the island, crossed one street, and *voila!* we were on bike trail for the rest of the afternoon.

The journey: across railroad bridge to the North Shore, along the river past lots of trees and weeds (japanese knotweed galore), past the old Heinz Plant, past the Warhol Museum and the hipster downtown condominiums, past the kayak rentals under Pirate Stadium, past Del Monte, Heinz Field (Steelers Stadium), the Science Museum, and finally past the casino. (Emily: "Why are they playing loud music the casino?" Me: "So gamblers can't hear their inner voice saying to stop losing money.")

But we made lots of stops, especially on the way back. First, we stopped just past Del Monte, at the water steps, which feature a tempting and apparently illegible sign saying "Slippery surfaces: Swimming and wading prohibited." It was clear from the number of children in swimsuits that many had brought their children for this particular purpose, so the girls waded in, cooling the biking grime from their legs. (I confess, I dipped my feet in, too) Then we stopped for pizza, just outside Pirate stadium, an early dinner which, had Emily had her way, would have turned into a full-evening activity, Pirates-Phillies game included. Among the trees, Emily spotted ripe mulberries (4 stops) and apple trees (2 stops). The mulberries were eaten on the spot, the slightly-green apples went into my backpack for a pie, later. A stop for looking at the river from an old boat launch, which gave me this view of 3 weeds together: purple loosestrife, covered with hedge bindweed, getting crowded out by japanese knotweed. Competition in action: the Pirates have nothing on these three plants.

Back up the ramp and across the bridge to the island, past the houses, past the restaurant/bar - I'd joked with Emily on the way out that if she exhausted me I might have to stop for a drink on the way back - and back to the car. We loaded up, stopped for grocery store pie crust on the way home, and recovered with apple pie, Brian, and a backyard campfire before bed.

Seen from various trails

2010-06-29T09:41:00.008-04:00

We've been back over a week from our first Kentucky trip of the summer, and the good news is that we've played a lot since then, with the side effect that I haven't blogged much. I've been working hard on a weed guide (St. Lynn's Press, 2011), with photos by Sheila Rodgers. Next spring, when anyone wants to see all those lovely (and unlovely) weeds I discuss in A Weed by Any Other Name, I can just send them to this guide.

Jessica Walliser, though, has already told us about the good bugs and bad - well, insects, since "bug" is something of a technical term. My in-laws, for example, are hosts of a bee tree in their yard, which was full of activity during our visit (see above, definitely good, both the bees and my in-laws). Not far from Bardstown, near the even smaller town of Boston, KY, we found a new hiking location, which featured these millipedes (yes, that's Emily's hand holding one of them - no crawly-phobes in our family!), lots of wildflowers, and even (drum roll, please) Fossils, with the bonus that it is a 3 mile loop with no crowds. No, I'm not telling where it is, exactly. (OK, I would if you asked nicely)

(See how this butterfly's head is out of focus? That's why Sheila is taking photos for the weed guide - she's good! She doesn't take photos like I do.)

Back here at home, the tomatoes are ripening, the kale is still surviving the heat, the peas are still luring the girls to eat a vegetable (if only "on the wing," since they don't eat them cooked). The chickens are laying, and the squashes and pumpkins are taking over the garden. Midsummer, with all its lush excess, is upon us.

Hunting and gathering

2010-06-06T07:47:00.004-04:00

The season of harvest may well be autumn, but June is definitely a season of plenty in its own way. While the garden bears a few early snap peas, plenty of well established herbs, and kale I can put daily into my ration of eggs, the wild outdoors has its own delights, even beyond the strawberry plants we have hidden around the yard.

I grew up with a cherry tree across the street, and June, then, was the season for gathering cherries and making pie. Near Ithaca, one of the state parks on the lake featured several mature cherry trees, and while Brian climbed for their fruit, I would stand on picnic tables and gather on tiptoe. Those cherries, too, went home for pie. Perhaps Brian has kept his eye on this tree earlier, but this week when I arrived at soccer practice, ten girls and Brian were off on the edge of the field - not looking for a wayward ball, as I first thought - but cherry picking. Some of the girls weren't too sure about it, but they believed in their coach, and were soon talking (tempting?) their younger siblings into trying the fruit, too.

This week, too, Hazel got her own idea of gathering. She recently attended a birthday party at which the party favor/craft was making little aquaria, with plastic toy inhabitants but real water, in small containers. Since then, she had the idea that she wanted a real fish swimming in it. Years ago, Brian and I kept fish - hand-me downs, I think, from some departing student - and still have the aquarium, though the residents departed (some to friends, some to the earth). I'm not actually keen to keep fish again, but I also figured that letting the girls try to catch them with nets would be relatively harmless, and might give us a resident fish for a week or so, when we could re-release it.

Don't hold your breath - we haven't caught anything, yet. Recent rains have made the streams so fast that the water bends our nets even in the deeper, more slow-moving sections. The pond, meanwhile, has plenty of fish too smart to be caught 3 feet from the bank, and even Emily seems too squeamish about the muddy bottom to go further. But the process itself, in my view, is the goal - ideally to wear them out on the idea of having fish, but keep the nets as a gentle way to hold whatever critters we might find.

And, starting now, we've entered the season when I know we will find plenty.

Gardening at the playground

2010-06-01T09:03:00.002-04:00

The pool opened this weekend, and for two full days it was hot, sunny, and perfect for swimming. We could hardly complain - I was actually relieved - when the clouds rolled in Monday afternoon, the thunder clapped, and the rain poured down.

What I didn't expect, but was really happy about, was that when we got home, the girls immediately put on their raincoats, grabbed their scooters, and zipped down the street to their friend's house. Though A. is in kindergarden, the only problem with her is that Emily and Hazel compete for her attention. Both of my girls seem to crave the chance to be big-sisterly with her.

When Hazel got a call for a playdate elsewhere, that left Emily with A., and I took them to the community center playground. The mulch was wet, everywhere, and the thunder boomed distantly. They took shelter under the play structure, and soon had built a little house (from larger mulch pieces), a wall (from sweetgum balls), and a garden (from transplanted maple trees and grapevines, growing all over the playground).

In reality, these plants will probably wilt from lack of water, not this week, certainly, but by August. But perhaps, I can imagine, someday the play structure will feature a swinging vine and some wild grapes.

Favored weed patches

2010-05-10T17:11:00.006-04:00

One of the odder aspects of our family's lawn is that every year, some weeds are given a month or so to show their stuff - to rise above the lawn and bloom - before returning to mowed anonymity the rest of the year. Right now we have two flowers granted this reprieve - King Devil and bluet. These are both in the backyard, though I am considering whether we can get away with having a similar patch in the front yard, where some yarrow grows but has never been allowed to bloom.

This puts us in questionable legal territory with our township. Weeds, township law states, are not allowed to grow higher than 8". But of course, we all know by now that if I love the plant, it isn't a weed. I assume in the backyard these patches go relatively unnoticed - our next door neighbor has clearly mowed around his bluets for decades - but I wonder what would happen if we let something similar happen in front, outside the flower beds. My repeated tendency - to look up the law and then try to find my way around it - may seem familiar to readers who accompanied us through the acquisition of a variance for our chickens. (And again, why am I surprised when I see this trait in Emily?)

I haven't quite set the yarrow free yet, and there is a tempting bull thistle rosette right next to the yarrow. Should I put a fence around them so they look official? Should I just let them go free and call it professional research? The possibilities are enticing. If suburban teens fantasize about sneaking through windows to go dancing at forbidden bars and clubs, this suburban parent has milder aspirations: sneaking through legal loopholes to let the weedy plants grow tall and flagrant. It might be that I need to get out more.

Now streaming, from your local watershed...

2010-04-30T15:59:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, as this coming one, weather predictions involve both rain and sun, and though we all tend to hope for perfect weather for our own plans, I do like for it to rain during springtime. It sounds silly to say that - it is going to rain, or not, no matter what I prefer - but I like to have it on the table that rainy days aren't all bad for outings. Sure, I'm not a fan of cold rains, and I'd rather not have a cookout in the rain. But except for when I've lost a rental car key in the ocean and I have to wait outside for a locksmith, most of the time getting wet doesn't bother me much.

So Sunday afternoon, we headed for a favorite local park, even though dark clouds were gathering to the southwest. We started walking in the stream, which was not at all pristine, but we could at least see the rocks to step on, and headed upstream until I heard thunder. Unfortunately I, being the grownup, had to make the very boring and responsible decision that we would turn around and head back toward the car.

As it turned out, we decided instead to head to the picnic shelter when the rain came, and huddled under the center of it, listening to and watching the storm. I wouldn't have minded being a bit warmer while we watched, but in any case it was a great storm to see from a dry spot. You probably can't see the raindrops in this photo, but let's just say that the fountain wasn't really wetter than anywhere else, for a good 30 minutes or so.

Afterward, the girls wanted to head right back to the stream. We'd seen a water snake we wanted to look for again, and I'd wanted to go past the place where we'd wisely turned around when it thundered. The stream, however, had other advice for us - I was immediately reminded of Bridge to Terabithia when I saw it, and once again, making the boring, grownup decision was left to me: no more walking in the stream. Reasons, that we couldn't see rocks to step on, just for one, were asked for by the intrepid Emily, but reason was pointless. I wasn't going in there, and the girls weren't either.

I'm sure all streams get muddy in a storm, no matter how healthy they are. And in our neighborhood of Pittsburgh, I'm grateful that the storm and sewage systems are separate, so when I see muddy water like this, I can reasonably assume that it really is, at least mostly, mud, rather than something far more foul to write about.
The bottom photo, taken very close to the top photo, is the same stream, minutes after the storm. This is a stream we couldn't play in, one which made me feel icky just thinking about touching, even though I'm not easily icked out. If only I felt really confident that mud was the only issue!

At a regional water authority meeting I attended a couple of months ago, I raised a bit of a debate by suggesting that our goal, in water treatment planning, should be that I should be able to take my kids to any stream in the area and let them play in it. And someone from the water authority tried to clarify, Did I mean except not during or after a storm? Her guess was not accurate. Of course I have no intention of letting either child get carried downstream and drowned. But yes, I meant it, and I explained that I might not be exactly normal that way, but I think during a rainstorm is a fine time to play in a stream, because you're already planning to get wet, so why not?

So last Sunday, I was just a bit bothered. Muddy water and wet clothes, fine - but, what else was in that water? I can judge, easily enough, the safety of the water for crossing, and if drowning is the fear, then once you walk away from the stream safely, you can take a sigh of relief. What creeps me out is the invisible problems, the pollution which, when we walk away from the swollen stream, is still with us.

Bare Necessities

2010-04-25T19:15:00.005-04:00

Since about last September, we've had our eye on kayaks. Though it didn't - and still really doesn't - fit into our budget, with the beginning of summer we decided to test the water, so to speak, with one kayak.

I would like to be able to say we "need" kayaks. Pittsburgh is blessed with a number of great waterways, and though hiking through them is fun, some spots can't be accessed that way. Apparently 2nd grade is when the concept of needs vs. wants is discussed at school, so I recently got to look at this question through Hazel's eyes. Hazel's list of Needs includes a tent - above dictionaries and soccer balls and watches and calculators, all of which are hardly luxuries, but still are categorized as wants in her view. Can I justify thinking of a kayak this way?

Still, kayaks are not tents. Tents might, for example, represent a bare-minimum form of shelter. Hazel probably thought of them that way for this assignment, but that doesn't take away my joy at the idea that at some level, camping might be a necessity rather than a desire. Camping is a skill, and a tent representative of it, which implies self-sufficiency and ability to get along without all the other objects we normally have access to in our homes. (The girls used to ask me if we were rich, sometimes, and I would always answer that by any reasonable worldwide standard, we are indeed very rich, no matter how our homes might compare to others nearby.)

Whether it was necessary or not, today we got to test out the new kayak, the latest luxury item in our home. It was a long-anticipated event, and even though we're still a long way, equipment wise, from being able to pack up the family and head downriver together, this is a good start. I still feel like I "need" a new reel mower - the beloved Brill, despite my adjustments last summer, doesn't work, and I have my eyes on Fiskars' Momentum, a new model of mower. But the kayak is something for all of us to enjoy, if only, for now, one at a time, so the mower waits its turn, for a little while at least.

Chicken bath

2010-04-14T19:24:00.004-04:00

Finally, for your amusement, the bath. Yes, that's 4 chickens in that pile, because baths seem to be a group activity. Perhaps it is the Roman Chicken Bath.

Dirty Birds

2010-04-11T20:24:00.048-04:00

With the nice weather lately, some people get into spring cleaning. While spring cleaning never interested me overly much indoors - why do anything indoors when the weather is this beautiful? - I've cleaned out the coop, and am getting ready for gardening. Spring cleaning *outside* seems like a wonderful idea. I've even pulled a few dandelions, just as something to do while watching the chickens forage, even though I rather like their yellow cheeriness and uppity persistence.

The chickens, too, seem to be inspired to clean up. Of course, they can't do anything about their coop, alas, but for some reason an onion bed full of rich, peat-moss soil seems to be their favorite spot for a good old-fashioned feather cleaning dirt bath. The first time I saw them do this, it looked like they were having seizures, but now that I've watched how much they love the process, it no longer looks so involuntary - more like self-indulgent. This afternoon, I sat in the yard, Tiggy lolled in the sun, belly up on the back porch, while the chickens lolled in the garden. Some of us were twitching more than others, but all of us were enjoying ourselves thoroughly.

Last one out's a rotten...

2010-03-19T15:22:00.002-04:00

ooops, I didn't mean that. Sorry Swallow.

The last few days when I visit the coop, Taylor and Gabby are quick to take advantage of the open door, leap on the bottom of the door frame and head out to find worms, dig up my garden (no rototiller necessary), and explore. Both of them have easily figured out that the door I use is the opening for them, too.

It is often said that chickens aren't smart, but I'm laying it on the line, so to speak: some chickens are less smart than others. Now I'm not saying this is an IQ test or anything, but Selena and Swallow do not get this door thing. Sometimes I take pity on them and help them out. Sometimes Swallow, in the process of trying to fly out the top of the covered coop, lands in the doorway and gets out. But so far, neither of them has figured it out, and both of them will pace around, against the side of the coop closer to their adventurous sisters, and act like they have no idea how to get to them. I'll give them credit - the doorway does require hopping or stepping over about a foot-high frame. But still - they can see over it, if they stand up straight.

So anyway, it's time to go let out the chickens again, because it is so fun to watch them. And I'm going on record with this statement: no matter how many degrees I have or what fancy schools I attended, no matter that I'm a professor and an author, I am perfectly capable of loving a creature who is really not too bright. At least if that creature is as cute as a chicken.

Little alligators

2010-03-15T20:50:00.006-04:00

This past week we were in Florida, doing a sweeping ecological tour of Keys and Atlantic Beaches, the Everglades, and our ever favorite, Ocala National Forest. Despite my newfound affection for mud season, I was terribly happy to be in sand and sun.

One of our favorite tasks, as parents, seems to be scaring the children. Despite our best efforts and several panther crossing signs, we did not get to see a Florida panther in the Everglades. Nor did we get to see any bears in Ocala National Forest, despite bear crossing signs there.

But we did see alligators. In fact, a lot of alligators, including some really hopelessly cute baby alligators. At Anhinga Trail, I couldn't tell if the buzzards were waiting for an alligator to die or the alligators were waiting for a buzzard to get careless, but they were certainly wary of each other. At Ocala, we saw a stingray in a spring pond, and all of us snorkeled above it, treating it with much more deference than all the other fish who swam away from us.

Wood storks, egrets, tricolor herons, swallowtail kites, anhingas, cormorants, white pelicans, a purple gallinule. A really wonderful tern signal at Coot Pond. Birds are all common enough in south Florida, but completely exotic to us. Crabs and man-o-wars. All respectable critters in their own ways. But still, the scary animals are the most fascinating ones.

So I spent a lot of time this week remembering Quickfoot and Lightfoot, Maurice Sendak's little alligators, the quarreling siblings who were fascinated and repelled by the big hungry alligator. And often, I felt like their Mama Alligator, fruitlessly trying to keep them out of trouble with her warnings.

But at least I got to learn that baby alligators really are every bit as cute as the ones Maurice Sendak drew.

Mud season - woohooo!

2010-03-08T14:02:00.002-05:00

I generally enjoy snow, and of course I love flowers, summer, even a good rainstorm in its time. But usually, my least favorite season is mud season.

Mud season follows snow season, though in a mild winter sometimes the mud season doesn't even have snow as an excuse. It is often drab, feels dirty, and it generally isn't all that warm. It is tough on good shoes and makes even routine yard tasks seem, well, icky.

But this year, I am unspeakably happy to see mud. Mud means the snow is over, if only for a now, and mud means soon I can start planting kale and peas. It doesn't hurt that this year, mud season is beginning with sunshine, and that I'm particularly excited to have a whole new spring with our chickens.

Ask me in a month, and I'll be tired of it, tired of sweeping it and vacuuming it and squelching through it. But for now, mud represents snow melting, the change of colors from all-white to anything else, even if it is just brown for now. But there's hope yet. Maybe after spring break I can start enjoying crocuses, and anticipate the daffodils, if only while wearing boots.

Letting it beat me

2010-02-27T16:07:00.003-05:00

Scarcely two weeks ago, I was in Kentucky, visiting my folks, and about to hurry back - to see the biggest snowstorm to hit Pittsburgh in decades. We came back to a week of snow days, and for a few of them I was pleased: pleased for the girls to get the kind of Big Snow experience I remember from the late '70's in Lexington (6 weeks straight of no school!), pleased to get to wallow in winter, pleased even to shovel - at least when I looked behind and saw the space of clean driveway behind me.

Two days ago, I got back from a short trip to DC - where I saw pansies blooming and some bare patches between piles of dirty snow. Since then, we've had another snow day, and two occasions for shoveling the driveway. I'm glad to get the exercise - always - but golly, I am tired of this single form of it.

We've basically hunkered down. My two young vegetables, I mean children, have watched four movies in the last 2 days. They have read. Hazel has even done math sheets, voluntarily, for entertainment. Even the chickens seem to feel cooped up. (sorry, couldn't resist) When I see a blade of grass sticking out next to our sidewalk after I shovel, it is cause for excitement, because I feel I can hardly remember life before snow - even if the blade of grass is not exactly vibrant green.

And I have to keep reminding myself: it is still February. It is fine to have snow in winter, because some years we have very little. I should enjoy it, because who knows how long it will be until there is another winter like this one? So in a few minutes, I am going out skiing, and darnit, I'm going to try to enjoy this.

Because really, winter is almost over. Isn't it?

Snow excavation

2010-02-11T13:12:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure Brian or I has ever experienced a single snowfall like this one, though for both of us it brings back memories of other great snows: central Ky, winter of '78; Boston, May '93; Ithaca, yearly (OK, partly kidding).

But for Emily and Hazel both, this is new territory. Sledding in the yard doesn't work, because the snow is too deep. I can't x-country ski through it. Even Brian's snowshoes, which we tried for the first time ever, didn't quite work, though I know that's probably because of our inexperience rather than the depth of the snow.

One activity which works perfectly (besides shoveling! That's going great, I tell you....) is snow-caving - right next to our own driveway. So yesterday, after we got out driveway clear enough to be functional, we made two forts: one tall, and tall enough for Hazel to stand inside; one long, twice my body length, with entrance, exit, and an escape hatch for safety.

Because as much as Brian and I feel like we've done this before, we haven't - not with the girls, of course, but never with our own driveway to shovel, our own snowpiles to shift and tunnel on our own. I'd helped make a decent snow fort or two in my life, but never one which required a head lamp and a sled to see and reach the interior.

Hazel and I saw a sign on a snowpile on our way home from grocery shopping: "Snow for Sale". I guess we don't need any more, but I bet I could buy some more, real cheap, and we could make more tunnels. If we needed to.

Fearless and jacketless in January

2010-01-23T18:40:00.005-05:00

Today was the winter festival at a local park. Last year when we went to this festival, our visit was cut short because Emily managed to find a hole in the pond ice with her leg, so we had to go home and get warm. This year, in contrast, the ice wasn't solid enough to trust, because it has been warm all week, culminating in a sunny day in the 50's for the Winter Festival. I joked about it being a Global Warming Festival instead.

Anyway, lately I've been working on a proposal for a new book, this one about women and girls playing outside, or perhaps about how we don't play outside enough. I've been thinking especially about fear - of the dark, of assault, of animals, or even of sullying our clothes. But I realized today that one of these fears is one I am more familiar with than many: fear of my own clumsiness.

I found myself following a gaggle of girls (OK, just four, two of my own and two friends), crossing the stream. Last in line, I realize too late that Emily, in the lead, is already three-fourths of the way up a climbable, but muddy and steep, hill face, while I might have thought we'd travel the boring but reliable stairs instead. Hazel is right behind Emily, and one of her friends is with her, racing to the top. I've climbed this before, though I wasn't planning to today, and so when the last of the girls was just ahead of me, I followed her up, encouraging her en route and feeling proud of myself to manage not only not to fall, but also to be right behind the child I was helping, stable enough, I hoped, to catch if need be.

At the top, I might have sighed with relief, had I not been struggling to keep up with the herd. The girls were bounding ahead, at first trying to outdistance a boy they encountered en route, then simply with the joy of having a trail to follow after weeks playing either indoors or hindered by snowpants.

We reached the woodland fort without incident - a spot probably built by local teenagers, on park land, but with a hammock, fire circle, and treestands demonstrating relative permanence compared to the many stick-teepees and huts scattered in other spots. The girls played for a few minutes before I suggested that their parents didn't expect us to be gone long, and we headed back, them bounding before me again with a speed and grace somewhere between deer and young bears. I don't care to think of what animal I resembled, but I was not bounding.

Twice, Emily tried to lead short cuts downhill, and I have no doubt Brian would have simply followed and encouraged her. First, I called her back to the trail because she was venturing down trail-less hillside; while I have no fear of getting lost in this park, I did not want to lead other people's children to the edge of any sheer drops, of which there are a few. The second time, Emily started downhill in the spot where we'd scrambled up, a spot where by any reason I should know we could get down: if you can climb up, you can always climb down backwards.

And I debated there, for a moment, almost letting Emily and Hazel and the more fearless friend down. They, certainly, would be fine, and I could walk with the less certain climber, down the stairs.

Somehow, though, between my own fears for myself and my own feelings of responsibility for the other girls, I balked at this. The girl who would have walked with me wanted the company of her friends; I was not confident in my own ability to lead her down as safely and fearlessly as we'd gone up. Though heights, per se, don't bother me, the idea of me climbing them does: I can't seem to trust my own climbing skills while simultaneously having to see the route I might fall.

So I forced the whole group down the stairs. Only Emily really complained, so it wasn't torture, and all the girls were off playing before I even reached the bridge back across the stream. It was, at some level, just the kind of boring judgment call which parents make all the time: safety or fun, pushed toward safety, once again.

But, hours later, I'm still thinking about it, with regret. I'd rather remember this afternoon proudly, with a memory of me helping the uncertain climber conquer her own fears instead of reinforcing them with my own. Could anything realistically have happened to us, besides mud or a few scrapes? And have I possibly infected all four of them with the seeds of my own self-doubt, dooming them all, in their 30's, to take a boring route with their own children when a more challenging climbing route was offered?

Next time, I'm going down the steep way.

Chicken education

2010-01-18T15:53:00.005-05:00

Today Emily and Hazel's afterschool program came over to visit the chickens. None of the chickens was busy laying this time, so the kids got to hold them, chase them, watch them - many of them for the second time, since when the chickens were younger I'd taken them over to Boyd to play one day in fall. The chickens had grown a lot, and I've learned a lot about them in the meanwhile. I still know so little about them, perhaps about how much as I knew about horses back when I just took riding lessons but still hadn't talked my parents into buying one for me. I'm definitely still a novice.

This is our third time raising chickens, and the first time we've ever gotten to the laying stage. When we first got eggs, before Christmas, I was so excited at the eggs themselves - the size, the little shape variations, the speckles on some. Now we have four layers, and what interests me these days is the laying process.

***
She circles restlessly, forcefully and repeatedly scratching at the ground as she turns, stopping occasionally. Sometimes when I watch her beak is open, as if she is out of breath, but usually her face reveals nothing, saving perhaps some inner concentration. If I am quiet, she doesn't stop work to notice me, though if I make a sudden movement she'll stop her circling and walk over a bit to look at me, curiously, before going back to her restless scratching and circling. Her tail is up, and sometime the feathers fluff and seemingly strain with the effort. If I watch the tail feathers, it is as if I can see the hen breathing there at her backside, the feathers softly moving in and out, sometimes faster paced, and sometimes slower, like a yoga breath. As labor progresses I get an occasional glimpse of egg peeking out under her tail feathers. She will pick up bits of straw in front of her and put it next to her side, but such small quantities that it seems to make no difference in the nest; she is just restlessly moving it around. After somewhere around an hour (I've not yet literally clock watched, but it is more than 30 minutes, more than 45, less than 2 hours), eventually she will stay still and focus her efforts.

If Taylor is the one laying, she'll stand and squat, body at 45 degree angle with head up, but Selena, Gabby, and Swallow seem to lay from a horizontal squat, body basically parallel with the ground. When the egg pops out, she'll stand for a moment or two, seemingly uninterested in the output, but resting. Then she'll hop down to join her sisters - drinking, eating, scratching the dirt. The sense I get is not so much of relief as just "OK, now I've taken care of that, what have I missed down there?"
***

Emily and her friend watched Selena lay an egg this weekend, standing by the coop in the melting snow, quietly, for at least a half hour. I've often bemoaned that for urban children, the most animal reproductive life they see is squirrels frenzied by spring rut, or male ducks tussling over a mate. In other words, they see the chase - what might be thought of as the fun part of reproduction. Rarely do they see the results of that chase. Most animals, sensibly, give birth in dark, quiet places, and only occasionally - not with the clockwork regularity of a chicken's daily labor over her egg. Even breastfeeding is something which my own children see rarely, though I cultivate friendships with moms who are likely to feed their children this way, and urge my friends not to hide the activity from me or the girls.

In the last seven years, I've had less and less contact with birth, myself. I loved the girls' births in a way that few women have the luck to love their children's births: two six hour labors, with good support, no pharmaceuticals, healthy outcomes, and an almost complete lack of fear (mine, my spouse's, or the attendants) present in the birthing room. But no matter how good my body is at birthing, for a human, I have nothing on these chickens. They have no fear - they almost seem excited about it, the way they tussle over the favored nesting corner. They are clearly doing something instinctive, which demands full focus, and they don't seem to worry about it, or fear it. The sound of their scratching suggests that the sensation is intense, but intensity is the only word for it. With these chickens, labor is aptly named - it is the work they do.

I have read that cats are the best animals to have present in a birthing room, because mother cats bear their young so easily, purring. I've never seen a cat birthing, and I suspect few people have - cats are so secretive. Not many people these days have seen chickens laying eggs, either, but it is a lot easier to watch - it happens daily, and they let you watch them doing it. I'd argue that more children should get to see an egg laid. Our education about births is coming from the wrong places; even our doctors often learn about birth first during their ER rotation in hospitals, and their birth education is focused on managing complications. Midwives have better training in normal birth, but how can we know they exist, if most of our friends used the nearest OB at the biggest maternity unit in town?

Birth education, for Emily, has been all verbal so far, and who knows if she listens to me, or when? But this Saturday, I know Emily learned something wonderful about labor and birth, because she watched one of our own chickens in labor, giving birth to an egg which Emily will eat in cookies or banana bread or spoon bread or french toast. And if Emily, 20 years from now, spends her labor walking circles in a nest of her own choosing and delivers her baby while standing on her own strong legs, I'll be pleased to think that she learned not from me, but from a chicken.

Skiing through trees

2010-01-09T13:17:00.002-05:00

Although I've had cross-country skis for about 10 years, and although I visit Kentucky every winter, I've never brought my skis here, because I was never sure if there would be snow. But when I knew I had to come down and help my parents this weekend, the one pleasure I could afford myself was to bring the skis, and take them to the U.K. Arboretum.

It was a tad warm - right at 30 - so in spots, the skis stuck. But generally, on the beaten-down trail, the ride was smooth. The hills are gentle; I had a nice chat with a woman from Wisconsin who clearly had affection for the sight of cross-country skis.

And I had an opportunity I will hopefully never have again: to ski (safely) right through a tree. This lovely burr oak, standing throughout my childhood but now resting prone, didn't hurt me a bit.

Gazing at the snow

2010-01-07T21:35:00.003-05:00

I've had a bunch of people ask me how chickens do in the cold, or what they think of the snow. They don't like walking on snow, but they like eating it. Generally at night they snuggle up to each other for warmth, but during the day they just do their thing - not visibly any differently than they did during the warmer months.

But I really liked this scene, tonight, because they look to me like old ladies on their porch, fussing about the weather. They want to be inside, but right on the edge of it. They look like how I feel on a snowy night - I love the snow, when I have a good view of it, and don't have to have my toes in it.

Praise for Mr. G

2010-01-05T00:29:00.003-05:00

Back in summer 2005, when we moved in, Brian was the first to appreciate the virtues of Mr. G. Though a confirmed resident of the "Show-Me State", a skeptic, Mr. G is not from Missouri, but he does remind Brian of the best traits of his two grandfathers. Mr. G doesn't believe in evolution - or dinosaur bones, or people landing on the moon - which you'd might think would be a problem when he lives next door to an evolutionary biologist.

But Brian knows better, knows that good skepticism is actually close akin to what he does at work all day himself. So a mutual respect developed, and the girls and I were soon in on it too, partly because I respect anyone who spends his days outside enjoying the scenery, doing his own yardwork: grass, leaves, and snow all three. I respect him because his teenage grandson lived with him a couple of summers. And I like Mrs. G because she's just sweet, nice as can be to the girls and out walking with a broom for support whenever she can. Mr. G is the neighbor who loans his tools when he sees Brian might need one, without being asked. We talk about gardening together, potatoes and tomatoes, and about raking leaves without leaf blowers.

This fall, Mr. G got shingles. We couldn't tell at first, because when we talked to him he kept on seeming cheerfully skeptical. Eventually, though, we noticed he was hardly out at all - his driveway remaining snow-covered for a day or two instead of his customary hour.

So before tonight, I hadn't even asked Mr. G if he would come to our hearing. I thought - we all thought, though silently - that this would be too much to ask, and that if he wasn't well, the zoning board would have to take his silence for support.

Anyway, we ended up with a lot of supporters: Amy and Adam and children (a courageous act, taking 3 children to a town zoning hearing); the family who chicken-sat for us over the holidays; a dad who lives across the street; Shelly, chicken-keeper herself from across the river, a brand-new friend who came just because I asked. A local (zoned agricultural) cattle farmer came, and gave me his card afterward, offering to take in our manure to his zone-certified composting operation if we had an issue. Our lawyer came, as a friend and civilian, just to listen to the action in case of future need, and I hope she won't be offended if she is paid in the style of old-fashioned community service people, with a couple of eggs from our best laying hens.

But no question, the star of the evening was Mr. G, who charmed the Zoning Board with his jokes about his own hearing loss, and then explained how his bedroom window is 30 yards from the coop, and he can't see them through the trees, and how no other neighbors have a right to an objection because they can't see the coop at all. He said he's lived here 45 years, and he thinks these chickens aren't causing anybody any harm, and he thinks we should get to keep them.

The vote was 2-1 in favor of our variance. Chickens are still not broadly allowed in O'Hara township; a variance would technically be required for any coop. I don't think we could have gotten a 3-0 vote, ever - zoning member 3 was determined to keep O'Hara R-2 safe from livestock, period. He wasn't nasty about it, but he was determined, no question. And I in no way imagine that the other two votes were categorical approval, either - they were fine with *our* coop, with exactly 4 chickens in it, in this particular location. They warned us that they knew more requests would be coming, and that we needed to maintain a model coop to make this work. The summary comment was "Now if anyone comes to us next with a pet cow, the answer is going to be 'No'."

As it turned out, what we needed was exactly what we got: 2 out of 3 votes, from 3 gentlemen of a certain age, with the weight of township history and esteem behind them. And tonight, thanks to one highly respectable gentleman, Mr. G, we have 2 happy daughters and 4 legal chickens roosting peacefully in their backyard coop.

Like mother, like daughter, like chickens?

2010-01-03T18:25:00.003-05:00

I've been too preoccupied with our upcoming chicken zoning hearing to blog - we've traveled, we've been sledding, I let Emily try my cross-country skis, but I've also been researching chicken laws and the zoning hearing process. I've been thinking a lot about a comment a friend made: "You fit in just fine here, you're just a non-conformist."

I like the idea of being a non-conformist; to me that's a compliment, though I'm sure some of my students see me as way too much of a conformist. I live in the suburbs; I have two kids and a husband; I drive a Buick. I'm not sure I can claim the non-conformist label; but one thing certain, I'm not not exactly a rule follower.

Local ordinance states that "no agricultural animals shall be kept...except children's pets shall not be prohibited." I read this ordinance over 3 years ago, after the first time we brought home chicks from the Kentucky State Fair. However, our learning curve with chicken care - especially the fox incident - have meant that we had no reason to analyze this language until now. Clearly, if we didn't have children, I would be in questionable territory with the chickens. Clearly, I have found the pet which sits right on the legal line, and we as a family will be defending that choice tomorrow evening.

I have often commented to Emily that she is a kid who listens to the rules, hears the line, and then stands on that line and says "Can I step here?" Years ago, Brian and I watched the Festival of Animation, and in one short a boy's harried father tells him not to use bad words, and the boy quickly starts asking "Can I say ___? How about ___?" and then finally, over and over "Can I say 'bum'? Can I say 'bum'?" I am not sure, but I think the cartoon ended with the father screaming.

This is how I often feel Emily behaves. She's smart, she knows there are limits, but thanks to my parenting or her character, she knows the limits have interesting edges and sometimes shady boundaries. One of her consistent jobs in life is to test these boundaries, and as she knows, this testing drives me bananas.

And until today, I confess, I just assumed this was Emily, the way she came out, without questioning how she got this way. But today, when Emily was given permission to watch a movie, and interpreted the permission as applying to computer games, at first I got mad. It seemed like just one more example of Emily not thinking, of Emily deliberately refusing to understand the point of my words.

Then, I realized that what we are doing at the Zoning Board tomorrow is testing the limits of their permission, testing the point of their words. We have interpreted Zoning Code our own way, without asking them first, and now we're insisting that we're right. What right do I have to get mad at Emily for this, when we're doing the exact same thing tomorrow night?

I don't know what good it does to realize this about Emily and me, tonight. Emily, recently, has proven that she realizes a sincere apology will sometimes blunt our frustration with her limit-testing. Maybe, if I remember to approach this hearing with a bit of humility, a bit of I'm-sorry-sheepishness with my legal logic, I can at least not giving the Zoning Board the impression that I was *trying* to flaunt the boundaries of their rules. Because even though I think we'd win on appeal, even though I'm fairly certain we're in the right, I'd rather keep this process simple.

I'd rather go home tomorrow evening with the happy knowledge that we already have the pets we want. Because I fear that with people like Emily and me, the alternative would be going home and trying to figure out what other exotic non-agricultural animals we could keep in our chicken coop. Geese? Rabbits? Guineas? Perhaps I'd better ask for a list of acceptable animals tomorrow night, if the chickens are denied. At the same time, I'm not sure I want to know, because my fear in this neighborhood is that one of the species which is absolutely forbidden is me: a person who doesn't like following rules. At least, though, if that's the list, Emily and I are in this together.

Snowfort, aftermath

2009-12-22T19:22:00.005-05:00

We started out piling snow by hand, but Emily wondered if we had any buckets...so with a snow shovel and 2 buckets we whipped out this fort in about an hour, despite having only about 4" of snow on the ground. The snowball fight afterward lasted about half as long. I don't know if the fort will last the holidays, but now that we've got the method down we should be all set for the next little snow, as long as we don't need any zoning permits for it.

Of course, within seconds of coming in the house, it looks like a war zone by the door. But, still, it is pretty colorful, and in the absence of a mud room, this is as good a way as any for everything to have space to dry out.

The First Present of Christmas

2009-12-20T08:50:00.005-05:00

Friday night we had our first big snow of the year, which beautifully reflected our holiday lights, the first we've put up outside. The chickens, for the first time, stayed in the indoor upstairs of their coop despite having the door open and being free to go out. They didn't like the snow on their feet, though they pecked snow from snowballs, as eagerly as a child eats a snowcone (though presumably without the ice cream headache from the cold on their top beak).

Also yesterday, I put in a box - a nest box - with a fake blue egg in it, to encourage laying. I'd read about this in Storey's guide to raising chickens (apparently the classic on the subject), and figured it couldn't hurt to try. Gabby had been acting for days like she was ready, digging and sitting, squatting when I raised my hand above her back to pet her.

This morning when I went down to given them their cracked corn, check that their water was still unfrozen, I did a double take, because I thought at first that the blue egg had been moved, and then I wondered who would have put an egg in the chicken coop to fool me. But when I picked it up, it was still warm, already dry, and with bits of leaf litter stuck on.

I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever presents I get this holiday - I always do, having never been a finicky gift recipient. But I think this one will be hard to top. I've never gotten a Christmas present from a chicken.

Walking in the dark

2009-12-10T12:46:00.002-05:00

Since beginning this blog, I have noticed that December is my most challenging time to write about being outside. Though by January I've gotten used to it being cold and am sometimes able to muster up some energy to go outside, in December I just want to stay in. I get outside during the day at work, but just because I have to cross campus, and many days I like the sunshine through my office window enough that I don't even care to head out. The slanting sunbeams are beautiful, even if they do bring the unwelcome news that by the time I see my daughters, it will be dark.

Lately, my routine is this: I get home at about 5, or 5:30. I put the chickens' water and food up into their indoor coop for the night, move their ladder, and, once they have roosted - right at dusk or soon after - I close the door and hope they can keep warm. Brian improved their quarters with a light and an extension cord, so that they now have a source of heat in addition to their well-feathered bodies. They seem content (and recently, I found Gabby roosting right next to the others, suggesting that they have finally accepted her, or perhaps that she isn't quite the bully by night that she is over food, by day).

Though I'm mentally done working by the time the chickens roost, Emily and Hazel don't want to come home until 6, when afterschool is closing, their teachers and friends leaving. So even if I walk there in the dregs of daylight, I generally wait there for them, and we walk home together in the dark.

I don't want to overstate the distance or adventure of this walk. We're not out there long, and the total distance we cover would only be considered exercise for a toddler at best. Still, I'm realizing how rare this is in modern childhood: a regular, nightly walk in the dark.

At first, I brought headlamps or flashlights. Then, eventually, I realized that we might be *more* likely to trip with these, because the shadows are stranger. Better to learn the footing, and get used to what we can see.

To Know The Dark
by Wendell Berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

And, at first, the girls complained, just as they did this time last year. "We are *walking* home? You didn't bring the car?" But I never bring the car, and they know it. The complaining lasted only the day or two of the shock of how early dark comes in December. Last night, Hazel and I walked alone, Emily already gone to prepare for a choral concert, and Hazel hardly changed conversations as we went outside, except to notice the wind for a moment. She didn't grab for my hand. I noticed last night that walking home in the dark was now normal for her.

I still haven't made myself go out for a run in the blowing flurries of today, nor did I go out for exercise in yesterday's ferocious wind. I still want to just hole up in my house, and eat comfort food and write in the abstract about how great it is to be outside. But at least, my seven year old is not afraid to walk home across an empty playground, by her favorite child-sized woodlands, through her own backyard, on starless windy nights.

Short-term Theology

2009-11-29T18:43:00.004-05:00

I had a number of thoughts about this:
1) Are the tests God gives Spelling Tests?
2) Is the economic crisis so bad that we're disparaging people who take our jobs at temp agencies?
3) Does this mean that all temptation is temporary?

Mostly, though, I just laughed, and was Thankful for visiting family over the holiday.

Fowl Pets

2009-11-22T19:12:00.007-05:00

Yesterday was a lovely day, starting with a soccer game on a new team for Emily for winter, and filled with looking forward to the end-of-season party for Emily's usual team. In the middle, though, the day got ruined with a certified letter from the township. Shockingly enough, we're not in trouble for growing weeds, but for the "building" our chickens are living in.

Today, I spent way more time than I would have liked writing the township a response letter. The girls drew pictures of their chickens to support the point that these fowl are friends, not food. We went in the yard and played with them (as usual for a weekend), but this time I took my camera for documentation.

Emily found a woolly bear caterpillar, and shared it with Hazel. Emily obligingly loved on Swallow for the camera. We played hide-and-go-seek.

Free-way chicken

2009-11-16T17:23:00.003-05:00

In our neighborhood, a truly free-range chicken is a dead chicken (even yesterday, while the ladies were having a jaunt in the backyard with me nearby, a dog got loose and was caught by its owner just 50 feet away, way too close for comfort). If free-range, under government regulations, means a couple square feet of outdoor space per hen, we're all set, but with chicken wire on all sides and vittles brought in by hand, this ain't my grandfather's kind of free range.

But freeway chicken we have. Last week I engaged in an act which would have seemed unthinkable to me last time we got chickens, when I thought keeping them would be easy, that I wouldn't need to take too much trouble for them. Hazel and I drove over an hour south, to meet a colleague and his wife, who agreed, very kindly, to take in our rooster, Bolt, in exchange for a quieter (possibly) hen. Bolt was clearly going to a home where he could live his days out in poultry heaven, a ladies man to a couple of dozen hens; meanwhile, we took in Gabby, an 8 month old Delaware, as a pet to join our small flock (photographed from our porch, just next to and above the coop).

Gabby is adjusting well, leading our flock in and out of their indoor enclosure at night, keeping the others in line when they cross some mysterious chicken behavioral boundary or perhaps simply her personal space. No one is laying yet, but they seem content, making the most of the fresh fall leaves we add for them to shuffle around each day. No one is getting pecked, and if Gabby is less catchable for the girls, well, I can hardly blame her for having the sense to know trouble coming on two feet.

Most of me just feels so grateful and glad to have found a home for Bolt before his crowing got us in trouble with neighbors, and to have again an even number of chickens for our two children. I do have to wonder about the carbon footprint of my transaction: environmental ethics might have suggested that Bolt be served as dinner, locally, rather than driven by car an hour away so he could eat grain and grass for a longer lifetime with my kindhearted colleague's family. But the heart has its own logic, and mine has the logic of two 7 and 10 year old girls, whose chickens *are* pets, the consolation for a coopful of heartache in the past, whose chickens will help us learn about life, death, eggs, and nutrient cycles. In this household, driving a chicken on the interstate is just the latest strange escapade in trying to nest in our own home range.

Unveiling The New Coop

2009-11-08T20:17:00.004-05:00

Two months ago, my colleague loaned us a book on chicken coop designs, and before we even knew we had three roosters, we were plotting which one. A year and a half ago, I was wishing we'd built a better coop before letting our flock outside where the wild things are. But now, I think we finally have it together.

It is a three-part unit, currently bolted together, but easily separated for transport. (We can just barely carry each portion between us, but we can, so that makes it mobile.) Chicken wire on all surfaces, stretched to make music when you pluck it. But there will, we assume, be no other kinds of plucking going on. These three hens (and the soon-to-be-evicted Bolt) may not be terribly expensive, but a lot of hours have been spent on their home.

Chicory and Bluebird, the Japanese cochin roosters, were moved along, generously taken in by Blackberry Meadows Farm, so we are currently down to four, and Bolt is promised to a colleague's sister, who is breeding Brahmas. But now, chickens may come and chickens may go, because we have space for them.

Now we can settle in and wait for an egg.

Making it through the week

2009-11-04T20:50:00.003-05:00

Last night Brian and I were out late, and didn't need food when we got back from driving the babysitter home. This morning, opening the fridge was a bit of a shock, but I had to laugh. For a moment it was almost like being back in grad school.

This week, besides Halloween, I've been busy with attending the Agronomy meetings and academic advising. I've enjoyed lower-carbon hybrid commutes (car/bus on Monday; car/bike on Tuesday, both avoiding downtown traffic with different methods), and learned that a car/bike commute can be the best of both worlds (30 minutes door to door, no waiting, no traffic jams, no parking fee, biking only on riverfront bike trail, no hills to pedal). On the other hand, the car/bus commute required more exercise than I might have thought and took a full hour and a half, including my one-mile run/walk with a heavy bag to make it from the end of the bus line back to the shop where the car had gotten inspection, in time to get the girls from afterschool.

I really could have used a broom.

Taking breaks, taking stock, playing goalie

2009-10-25T10:52:00.007-04:00

The last two weeks have been thick with activity, from grading midterms, meeting with school administrators, and fitting in a weekend in Ithaca to celebrate Brian's advisor's retirement. Meanwhile the roosters are crowing - not enough to wake us two floors up from their garage home, but enough that we fear they will not be welcome in the neighborhood as soon as our coop is finished - today? tomorrow? Progress slowed with our absence last weekend, but we're getting there. What next for Bolt the Brahma and Chicory and Bluebird, the strutting but diminutive Japanese cochins? We are clearly beyond the point of these being meat birds, but we can't quite grapple with the reality that roosters are a relatively unwanted commodity.

Having raked leaves and scraped 4" of snow off our car in the last week, I'm entirely too aware of the season changing. Yesterday the girls made a fort of leaves in the yard; last Sunday, visiting Ithaca, I felt transformed back to autumns long before our children. I wouldn't alter the course a bit, even if the trip through 36 hours of nostalgia and a lovely drive across the southern Tier expressway were welcome breaks.

Coming back this week, I missed meetings I would like to have attended, and attended meetings I would rather have never heard of. I turned in midterm grades, and made a couple of students happy while making others anxious or worse. I thought of blogging tens of times, and just made it to the computer this morning, still wondering what I could say but only knowing for certain that I have a few images to share.

Yesterday, Emily played beautifully in a tough soccer game, facing down two penalty kicks in a row (the first she caught; the second went wide of the goal under her stare). In the second half, her teammate played goalie and also stared down and then chased down a penalty kick, leaving us 3-2 against an opponent who ended the game with far more shots on goal, but just one fewer shot in the goal.

If I get through the next month without dropping any balls myself, I should be as elated as Emily was yesterday. There have been a lot of shots on goal against me in the last week, and it remains to be seen how many have been blocked.

Decision at school: not final

2009-10-14T21:41:00.002-04:00

Apparently the school board is still trying to make a more final decision on the schoolyard herbicide application. Ask if you need more information on who to contact in our district, but seemingly they want a decision within the next couple of weeks - my guess is they're trying to fulfill the terms of their landscaping contract. A poor excuse for exposing children to an organochlorine pesticide, in my humble opinion!

Upward progress: chickens, coop, and a young squirrel

2009-10-12T16:43:00.005-04:00

We've been up late at night, Brian and I, working hard on a long-overdue item: a winterized coop. Now fully walled and insulated, we're still working on a door (we have one ready, from Construction Junction), a roof, and screening in the base - an old desk, which had sat in our garage, acting as a home for mice, until Emily suggested we repurpose it as a coop.

Meanwhile, Bolt has started crowing, while Swallow, the lovely white feather-legged hen, continues to be a very cuddly chicken. Taylor (at left, poking her head in the picture) shows her personality daily, and is the first to come and watch whatever we're doing nearby. The little roosters, Chicory and Bluebird, are tiny but amusing in their aggressions, at times leaping in the air to try to assert their dominance over other chickens 3 times their size. They remind me of the pillbugs in Bug's Life. All of them cuddle together wearily in their cage while Brian and I use loud powertools nearby, preparing their more permanent home.

I remember, long ago it seems now, trying to treat chickens as wild creatures, which need outdoor space to roam. I'd love to give these that option, and we take them to the garden on outings as much as we can. But 1 fox, 1 dog, and 28 dead chicks later, I've realized painfully that chickens are no longer wild birds, and that they need our protection. I am sorry it took me so long to see it, but when I zipped through Bob Tarte's Enslaved by Ducks and got to his passage about bird loss to raccoons, I knew at least that I wasn't the only one to hit this realization slowly.

I was thinking about that today, even before I heard a scuffle and a squeak in a pile of leaves just beyond our backyard, and I quieted my steps as I came closer. Up the tree before me came this adolescent squirrel, eyes closed and still ridiculously top-heavy, climbing back up the trunk of the tree, to a worried looking momma above. I almost walked away before I realized I still had my camera, so I had to walk back to the tree for this photo - no zoom needed at all.

I was tempted, I confess, to pick the little squirrel off the tree, and try to tame it. Brian's grandmother had a pet squirrel for a season before it went free, and I remember it fondly; I have no doubt the girls would remember this one forever and think me wonderful for bringing it home. So it took some restraint to walk quietly away, wishing I could see it make its way up to the nest, wishing I could stroke its fur and take it into my care. But a baby squirrel isn't the same kind of pet as a chicken, and I have no desire to discover another kind of animal which I can't care for adequately without training. Chickens, a cat, and two daughters, for now, are plenty.

However, the rooster situation has led us to make plans, in the near future, to attend a local event called a poultry swap. We don't think the roosters will go over well here, so we're hoping to trade - someone, somewhere, may prefer a couple of young, well-handled and lively roosters over a couple of elderly, quiet hens. But I've heard about the temptations of these kinds of events. I'm not sure next time I will get to walk away so quietly.

Update: Reprieve!

2009-10-09T15:33:00.001-04:00

The application got cancelled after all - examination of alternatives to begin. I don't know what the next steps will be quite yet, but in any case, a whole lot of moms yesterday kept on calling when I had all but given up.

Back to rolling down grassy hillsides, as scheduled.

Safe schools

2009-10-08T14:53:00.004-04:00

I often joke about being the crazy weed lady, but in the last 24 hours I have really felt like one, a peel-me-off-the-ceiling nutcase, angry and frustrated and inarticulate. 2,4-D will be applied at my daughters' school this weekend.

This weekend is fall break, and apparently the timing (kids out of school for an extra 24 hours) and the urgent necessity of destroying clover have driven the groundskeeper to what, supposedly, has been an once-annual lawn herbicide application. Bees, evil hymenopterans, may indeed enjoy clover - but has anyone ever proved that kids playing on fields with clover were more likely to get stung?

And why should my head be spinning out of control? I can't even articulate the possibilities succinctly, but Beyond Pesticides offers a good start.

Without website links, I'd love to be articulate enough so that every parent who called the grounds department today wouldn't have felt so lost, when the very reasonable-sounding manager answered their questions. I'd love to be able to say in a single sentence why it is that the National Pesticide Database doesn't - and can't - "prove" the safety of any herbicide, especially this one. I believe science can be understood by anyone, and I teach my classes with that belief firmly in mind, but I can't do it in a day, or a few emails.

No matter how persuasive I think I am, no matter how calm I can try to make my strained voice, no matter how many wonderful parents tried today to express their concerns to the district, in this country I am left with this one reality: 2,4-D, legally, is innocent until proven guilty.

This is a great principle for humans. Our justice system fails most dramatically when it breaches this ideal for individuals, whose actions and innocence must be assumed even while the grand jury gathers evidence. I'm even willing to grant this principle to herbicide company employees, golf course managers, and the landscapers who will apply herbicides this weekend, because each human, at the most basic level, is a creature of nature, made by God or Goddess or conception or whatever we believe.

But this principle can't apply to the works of our hands. Over a year ago now, I built a chicken coop. I should have assumed it was flawed, until I tested it and determined it safe - I didn't do that, and the chickens were killed by a fox who simply gnawed the edge of the door off its hook. Product testers and crash test dummies are proof of the wisdom assuming human inventions to have weaknesses, until we prove otherwise. Herbicides, thanks to Rachel Carson and - oddly enough - Richard Nixon, *are* tested, but the paltry and short-term testing we do is such a poor substitute for proof that even the herbicide company scientists know that the correct language, at best, is "no health effects were detected."

But herbicides are still merely human products, and the law about innocence isn't designed to protect them. The interests of industry, Adam Smith wrote, are not in alignment with the interests of the people. Our children, my fellow parents wrote today, like to roll in the grass, and we want them to be safe. A bee, a clover, a dandelion, all are natural risks of sorts, fellow beings which might also be fairly enough determined innocent until shown to be otherwise. But the herbicide is not a natural risk, and it is therefore not a risk I have any interest in taking.

Birds and birthday

2009-09-26T16:12:00.005-04:00

Last night we celebrated Emily's 10th birthday, a sleepover in the backyard, complete with new tent courtesy of Grandma Becky. I'd wanted to do this for a while, but had always feared that the kids wouldn't sleep well, so I wouldn't sleep well, and that I'd end up having to return some poor scared kid home in the middle of the night.

For sleep, at least, the tent made all the difference: our first non-yard sale tent, fully dry (important since it began raining this morning early), with a big main room for the party girls, plus an alcove for shoes and a side room for little sister and friend. I slept blissfully in a separate tent, the best of our old ones, dry too but miraculously so given its age. It was the best sleep I've ever gotten for a child's overnight of any sort, much less camping.

For play, though, the hit of the evening was the chickens, now big enough to be safe from most handling accidents, still small enough to be cute. Swallow fell asleep on one guest's shoulder, her head resting as comfortably as she does on her sister chickens' backs. Taylor enjoyed affections from the friend who helped name her, and proved herself queen of the flock by enjoying a strut on top of the swing set.

Also a hit was Brian's invented game, remarkably not ending in disaster: bowling for worms. One girl got a good push on the rope swing, while the others, the "worms" all hovered underneath it and tried not to get hit by the swinging missile. Every girl begged for all 3 of her turns. It was, by the way, so dark that none of my photos of the event worked out, the motion and lack of light proving too much for my poor camera.

Whatever the reason, I was very happy at the result. We all woke up dry with rain pattering on our fabric roofs; we all slept for at least 7 hours; no one was injured, despite our best efforts to risk their health with tent guy-lines and rope swings. I came indoors in the morning to a clean house, ready to make breakfast for the adventurers.

A short chicken post, inspired by Susan Orlean

2009-09-23T23:08:00.002-04:00

Much as I don't like to think of chickens as a trend, I must share Susan Orlean's article in this week's New Yorker about her little flock.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_orlean

Though it reads a bit much like an ad for the Eglu - or perhaps I'm just jealous that she, unlike me, actually has a coop! - I was sucked into her troubles with predators, and her choice to euthanize her suffering chicken...I, too, have sobbed inconsolably in the vet's office after chicken euthanasia, and at least she has the grace (or income) not to be sobbing over the bill as much as the loss of life.

And I'm desperately hoping that we get to eggs, that we get our coop built soon, and that Susan Orlean is right about this trend's future: "The chicken, that thing with feathers, always sunny and useful, will endure."

Marooned explorers

2009-09-23T22:41:00.006-04:00

Since June, we have been reading a lot here about Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, 7 books so far. The one currently on the bedside table is Secret Waters, a tale in which the Swallows are left well provisioned and marooned, by their cheerfully supportive and adventurous parents, on an island in an archipelago which they plan to map.

Last weekend, we took this book for car reading en route to Pymatuning, for Brian's departmental retreat. There, we stay in cabins, enjoy campfire and volleyball, and canoe, depending on the wind, either simply out and back or all the way to the islands distant but visible through the waterlilies at the shore. Sunday morning, while Brian was at talks, we joined another canoe-load of explorers and paddled to distant shores.

I kept wishing I had my camera, though later I was glad I did not. First, the other mom and I filled a bag with pirate gold (remarkably resembling U.S. coinage) and a provisions (granola bars). Then, the kids drew an outline of the island in the sand while I buried the treasure, and then upon my return marked it on their sand-map with an X. They went on an expedition, found the treasure, divided it up, and played a while.

Then, the other explorers had to begin their trek back to pack their belongings, while the girls and I stayed a few minutes more. Bored of just watching them, I told them they were marooned and I paddled around the island a few times, and each time round I pretended to attack, and Emily pushed me back out to sea. Finally, I told them it was the last round.

I don't canoe as much as I'd like. I've so rarely had a chance to do it alone I'd forgotten how canoes don't like solo paddlers in their sterns. Three-quarters of the last loop around, I found myself turning in a breezelet, and suddenly blown over, capsized. Let hurt than embarrassed, I lacked the grace and good humor to laugh with Emily at myself but instead put much of my remaining energy into bailing water using the oar and my hands before it was light enough to tip out on shore. I was *so done* with the adventure, which had finally stopped being a play adventure and become a bit more real than I'd wished (a theme common to the Swallow's stories as well).

I didn't, like the Swallows, become heroic in any fashion, unless you count me becoming a peg-legged, hook-handed Blackbeard telling the other pirates grumpily to bail with me and climb aboard. We did get back, though, and the treasure was saved, and the camera, safe in the cabin, wasn't missed after all - it would have been destroyed in the wreck.

The next day, my arms were still shaky with fatigue as I was writing on the chalkboard during my classes. My knee has a bump on it still from the gunwale of the canoe, a reminder of our adventure at sea. I only hope that what the girls remember is that I got them there, that the adventure was rather realistic and still fun, and not that mommy turned into the ugly side of Captain Hook for a moment. Fiction and real life met briefly, and the real kids and the fictional kids won, while the friendly native, as the Swallows and Amazons call their mothers, may have proved herself to be an enemy after all. I would like to think that Ransome would be pleased anyway.

Friends and falls

2009-09-14T22:56:00.003-04:00

Just a week ago today, the pool season ended with a dreary Monday, the day after a glorious Sunday final party. In just a week, it seems, the nip is in the air for good, and the season has shifted. You might be able to just see in this photo that Brian is in his jacket now, but that Emily's mood is still celebratory. Our friends are visiting from Austria, and this weekend we saw Ohiopyle in a new light, camping two nights there in neighborly next-door yurts.

We didn't raft, we didn't rent bikes, and our hiking was all of the sort easy enough for 2 year old Emma. What we did: cavort under Cucumber Falls, eat at a family-friendly pub, talk, drink from wax-paper Coke cups, make dinner together, eat breakfast at a picnic table, build fires, roast marshmallows. Brian took both of the older girls back to Pittsburgh for Emily's soccer game, where they once again got to be teammates for a day, and then got them back to camp for a night walk with glow sticks and flashlights. Emma permitted me to babysit her, as long as her sister was nearby, while her parents toured Fallingwater. And then we returned to an evening of recovery and good companionship with more friends, all of us glad to have the companionable emmigrants back.

Camping isn't what it used to be for our family. The $14 a night tentsites we used to frequent with Jo, Donovan, Hannah, Tim and other friends during grad school have been morphed into buildings with refrigerators and bunk beds. The liquid refreshment isn't as elaborate, and we get to sleep earlier and wake earlier, with small people rousing us to begin their own energetic days. But camping is still good bonding and reunion, and my only regret is that we don't do as much of it now, and that all of our friends lives are generally too busy to take a night away, much less a weekend.

While the big girls were away at their game, and the 2 year old was putting her parents down for a nap, Hazel and I snuck away for a walk around the camping area. We collected bottle caps for their art project at Boyd afterschool; we inspected the cabins; she collected acorn families. We returned to our yurt by a different path, and I saw movement in the undergrowth. Hazel and I got to watched a weanling spotted fawn at the edge of a clearing, which peeked back at us with large eyes but seemingly little fear. Eventually the fawn wandered away daintily, and we scurried quietly back to our own campsite.

Chicken Kennywood

2009-09-05T15:16:00.010-04:00

Though we still have the chickens in their indoor (safe from predators) garage cage with a brooder light for warmth, they - and we - are getting more intrepid about being outside and exploring together. This morning the girls put them in a variety of different spots around the garden, and declared the activity "Chicken Kennywood," named after a local amusement park.

Chicken Gymkhana might have been a better name, as they explored nasturtiums; balanced on fences, sunflowers, onion seedheads, and playground rings; and wound their way through obstacles ranging from tomato plants, human hair, and skort edges. (The girls wanted me to take a photo of each of them with a chick hiding under their skirts, but I really didn't want to publish that one.)

I might have been more inclined to protest, last round, when I never knew if Emily or Hazel really understood how small and vulnerable the chicks were. But the girls, despite these shenanigans with Chicken Kennywood, are gentler this round. Each of them moves more slowly, grabs less, and makes more effort to keep them quietly happy rather than letting them peep in fear. Emily has recently declared interest in becoming a vet, and while I have no idea if she will indeed follow through, I can see it in her: both the confidence to handle the animal, and the gentleness to care for it. I don't see her wildness gone at all, but I see her growing into it, finding her own reasons to control it, perhaps finding channels and ways to make peace with her own enthusiasms.
Or maybe she just loves animals, and they bring out the best in her. Either way, I'm glad to get to witness whatever colors of feathers emerge.

Trying again

2009-08-29T22:30:00.008-04:00

Whatever sense of crazy excitement or optimism August brings, I usually associate this time very strongly with new beginnings, having had an academic-year schedule for at least 32 of my 38 years. So when we were down in Kentucky last week, perhaps we were drawn to the boldness of the idea of another new beginning, this one by choice. Or perhaps we just couldn't resist. But we are, once again, raising chickens.

At left, you see Emily cuddling with one of the most cuddly chickens I have ever met, one belonging to Louisville garden writer and commentator, Jeneen Wiche. This chicken was practically purring while the girls held her, having been hand-raised by Jeneen's niece. That was Wednesday. Thursday found us at the Kentucky State Fair, looking at chickens of all sorts, plus a few odd pens of chicks, at $3 apiece. I was thinking how I wished we could try again, when Emily came up to tell me "Daddy said we could get a couple of chicks!" Given that it was Brian who witnessed the fox's massacre last time, if he was ready, I could be ready.

Each girl picked out two, Hazel two black ones - Japanese cochins, the farmer told us; Emily two yellow, with brownish marks, which she hopes are Ameraucana, like her favorite chicken from our last group. I took it as a sign of both remembrance and healing that these choices reflected their favorites from our last batch.

We did not find out the genders, which would have been nice, but a friend, Stacey, who had just ordered 25 hen chicks for her own daughter offered to share a couple with us (see the tall one at right, plus a black one for Hazel), a bit older than ours. So we know now that each daughter has at least one hen. All 6 chicks (say that quickly now) are safely peeping and chirping in our garage pen.

The best surprise has been the outpouring of cheerful well-wishing support. In addition to Stacey's addition to our brood, a colleague down the hall loaned me a book of chicken coop plans, which the girls and I have drooled through and picked out some likely options. My friend across the hall from my office has offered to help me build one of these coops, hopefully next weekend. Boyd community center's fall offerings include a fall gardening class, which will tell us how to "get the chicken coop ready for the long winter ahead." The girls' friends, some of whom never met our first brood, have come over and enthusiastically introduced themselves, after having heard so much about how much Emily and Hazel loved having chickens before. If we fail in this attempt - our third - it will not be for lack of support. The phrase is now so well used as to be trite, but I have learned it in a fresh context: It takes a village to raise chickens.

I picked up a book today, by Bob Tarte, entitled "Enslaved by Ducks." I could hardly resist, and lamented only briefly that this probably means I can't now write one called "Enslaved by Chickens". I love these silly feathered creatures already.

Gun-toting girls

2009-08-25T15:19:00.003-04:00

Despite my general pacifism and despite my distaste for gun culture, I believe that a bit of education about firearms has to begin with the idea of them being tools, like fire itself, useful and wonderful when used in a controlled and safe manner. While in Arkansas this summer, I failed to convince Emily to participate in skeet shooting, because she connected it with hunting and she's quite a softie for animals. So when my in-laws got out their old BB-gun air rifles last week in Kentucky, I was thrilled. Even more so, when Emily tried it, and as you can see, liked it.

I know she won't be shooting squirrels for supper any time soon, but still, I want her to know how to point it, and load it, and handle it. When I was about 9 a game officer came to my elementary school to talk about gun safety, and though I don't anticipate that happening here, I'm glad the girls can at least get this education from a loving lap, shooting holes in Coke cans and shooting golf balls off a perch. You never know what skills might come in handy.

Beginning a new trail

2009-08-13T19:07:00.003-04:00

Among the activities new students at Chatham will engage in this fall during orientation, one will be an activity that I myself did for the first time just a tiny bit ahead of them - last week. Kerri and Lynne, ever the energetic outdoors-women, are kindly crediting me with the idea of a perimeter trail at Eden Hall campus (I scarcely remember saying it, though I *do* really like the idea), which we'll begin with new students. Kerri took the photo when it was ready to walk, and it looks inviting, enchanting, though the end of the trail is just out of sight.

The symbolism here is rich. College is a journey, and sometimes, like now, the faculty are just a step or two ahead of you on the trail. During their four years, they'll find their own path, and hopefully do some marking en route to make it clearer for those who follow. There will be downed trees and poison ivy on the way. There will also be meadows glowing with golden sunlight at the end of sections of dark foliage and thick branches. Blah, blah, blah.

The reality is this: Kerri and Lynne and I worked together for about 2 hours to make perhaps 100 yards of trail, with hoes, clippers, saws, our feet tramping down the path, our hands picking up litter. We laughed and chatted, a merry beginning to a 5 mile job, roughly 528 woman-hours of work to be done. We had a good time and felt proud of ourselves, academics for once doing a job with satisfyingly concrete and visible results.

Darn the rules

2009-08-09T21:36:00.004-04:00

OK, so this isn't me swimming this weekend. But someday, I want to be part of a hardcore swimming scene this cool, so I did some vicarious versions:
1) Emily participated in a Kids' Triathlon on Saturday morning, completing a 50 m swim, 1.5 mile bike, and 0.5 mile run. Lots of fun race bling, including a pair of free Pirates tickets.
2) I swam laps at the pool this evening,
3) I looked up information on a sprint triathlon which was today, but registration was closed already,
and
4) I did open water swimming at Moraine State Park, from friends' dock to a little island nearby, and back.

Now, note the photo again - what are these swimmers wearing? Caps, goggles, numbers, and suits. NO LIFE PRESERVERS. Therefore I found it very rude when the park safety patrol interrupted my fantasies of triathlon training grandeur by telling me I had to stay within 15 feet of the dock and wear a life preserver. I'm 38, not easily mistaken for a minor, so that wasn't the issue. It is just the rule, for every single person on the lake.

I believe in seat belts and bike helmets for all, and even life jackets for kids - no matter how good of swimmers they are. But sometimes the whole lawsuit-crazy-culture thing really bugs me, because it stops me from doing something - fun? exciting? risky? stupid? who cares which? - all by myself, at my own risk.

It was one thing when, back in 1995, a park ranger chased Brian and I around the park to tell us we couldn't look down Taughannock Falls by laying on our stomachs on the rocks at the top. We were young and foolish then. Now, I'm older, and perhaps wiser, and my idea of a thrill is to put on goggles in lake water and swim freestyle, and even that, it turns out, is illegal.

Ah well. Emily, in contrast, got to break some rules. After her 50 meter swim, the race volunteers were encouraging her, cheering her, to run to the transition area to get her bike. On concrete. Right past the lifeguard chair, from which, on any other day, you'd hear a lifeguard blowing a whistle and shouting "NO RUNNING". She got to bike on streets, full speed, with sane adults telling her to go faster. She ran in shoes with no socks, without even putting shorts on over her bathing suit, and I didn't warn her about blisters or even about making her shoes stinky.

Triathletes have all the fun.

Fun book publicity from the Post-Gazette

2009-08-06T08:43:00.002-04:00

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09218/988785-34.stm

Scientist says eat your weedies. :) by Patricia Lowry.

12th grade reading exam, revisited

2009-08-02T18:47:00.002-04:00

Today's wildlife sighting was this lovely snake, which Emily found on a rock wall - no joke - exactly 1 minute after she asked me "Are there any snakes up here?" and I said "No, just climb on up." Clearly she had a wisdom about this spot which I lacked.

When I was a grad student in weed science in Kentucky, we had up on the wall a joke reading exam for another Southern state, which shall today remain anonymous:

MR Snakes

MR Knot

SAR

CMEDBDI's?

MR Snakes

(clue: read the letters aloud, don't try to make into words)

Brian sent me an article from today's NY Times about how kids today don't know what happens when you lick a banana slug. The fact that Emily asked me about a snake on the wall makes me really happy; she's got her snake reading skills down pat. Next step is clearly going to be learning to trust her own judgement, not mine, because between her bear sighting yesterday (proven by print) and today's snake finding, she's proven herself to be a good naturalist, one whose judgement - at least about animal sightings - is clearly superior to mine. I can tell you that the weed in the foreground is purslane (Portulacca olereaca), but I don't know the snake, and would never have seen it without her eyes.

(Translation of test: 'Em are snakes. 'Em are not. Yes, they are - see them itty bitty eyes? 'Em are snakes.)

Battle, berries, and bear - oh my!

2009-08-01T19:24:00.007-04:00

Today began slowly; we managed to leave the house at about noon for our Saturday adventures. We aimed for Bushy Run State Park, site of one of the critical battles between British and Native Americans in 1763. As it turns out, we arrived just in time for their annual battle reenactment, a type of event I've heard and read about plenty of times, but never seen. In addition to hearing lots of muskets fired with blanks, and looking at lots of men in costume (and a few women), we hiked a bit and looked at the wares and the tent encampment.

But no stream. Though there *is* such a creek, called Bushy Run, our walk hadn't yet taken us to one of the day's goal outings - water. So after a couple of hours in 1763, we returned to 2009 Pittsburgh, to a stream running by the parking lot of an indoor soccer complex 10 minutes from home. En route, we picked a half-cup of blackberries - we left wanting more - and headed downstream.

Two bends in the stream later, Brian commented to Emily this would be a good spot to look for wildlife if she were quiet. Emily takes a step or two around the bend ahead of us, and tells Brian, "I just saw something..."

Brian: "How big?"

Emily: "This big..." (arms wide) "I think it was a bear."

So we splash downstream to where she pointed to get a look. (The girls expressed some doubts about our wisdom at this point.) And here is the print we saw, with Emily's foot for comparison. I have definitely never seen a print that big, and needless to say we all believe now that Emily saw a bear.

Dodging rainshowers; Happy Birthday Hazel!

2009-07-27T11:39:00.011-04:00

This weekend Hazel turned 7, and we continued our celebratory week of "Brian is done with his grant proposal," starting with playing at Ohiopyle. We set out with full expectation of getting rained on, but it didn't happen, and didn't happen. I went for a run on the bike trail; Emily and Brian both found the natural waterslide calm enough for a run (though both have backside bruises resulting); we picnicked; we found a playground we'd never seen.

Sunday dawned with a threatening sky; Emily and Brian got soaked during the pre-party shopping expedition, and the pool party wasn't looking so likely to be a great plan. I frantically gathered art supplies together. Finally, an hour and a half pre-party, I looked out and realized we were going to at least get a clear patch in the weather, and though we had some chilly kids for the first hour (not tooo chilly to throw water balloons, though), the sun warmed us up toward the last hour, and we ended up staying at the pool until dark.

And finally, we had a garden triumph. Though I have planted sunflowers every year we've lived here (and got one volunteer sunflower from the chicken's feed last year), this was the first time I planted them within the garden fence, and I was rewarded with this bloom, which is so high up that I had to photograph it blind, my hand holding the camera as high as I could reach on tiptoe. I love how the center of it looks like the pattern of spirograph.

Sun and rain don't always cooperate with human plans, but this weekend we got really lucky. Happy Birthday Hazel!

A croissant, a fallen tree, and thou...

2009-07-20T10:00:00.003-04:00

Though we had plans to go camping with Ser at the midpoint between us, she's been spending her energy these last weeks 1) gestating and 2) moving, not to mention the normal chaos of parenting two healthy, energetic boys. So Saturday we found ourselves driving her way, arriving in time to play in the yard, eat burritos and drink beer (OK, Ser's husband and I had beer), and put the kids on a movie so we could catch up. We slept in sleeping bags, after all, but on a comfy mattress with no raindrops and no need to rebuild the campfire before having our morning tea.

Sunday, after a couple of boxes were unpacked, we walked a few blocks to the bakery for elevenses, as the Hobbits would say, and meandered back to their new house via a lovely woodland park, complete with an elderly fallen oak. In our old neighborhood of Hyde Park, fallen trees indicated lack of maintenance to many, but fortunately, this is a neighborhood where a fallen tree is left out of respect, to be admired, not removed as debris. (I hope that when I get old and fall down dead, there will also be children playing on my gravesite.) It was a happy spot, a place where our 4-9 year old mix of boys and girls could climb and show off in the shade on on a perfect summer day.

Slip and slide fun

2009-07-17T12:39:00.004-04:00

For slip and slide to be fun and comfortable, it has to be really hot, and yesterday delivered. Here's Emily proving that sloped (weedy) lawns really are more fun - especially with a bar of soap and a slip and slide! Bonus: she was sparkling clean, afterward, too.

Babies, babies everywhere...but not here

2009-07-14T10:13:00.007-04:00

I have long joked that I was promoted to my level of incompetence when we had our second child. I love babies, love my two daughters, loved every moment of the nursing and cuddling, and at the same time, for now, my love of babies is at its best when it is vicarious.

This weekend at the zoo with our friends was no exception. We saw a two baby elephants, a baby sea lion, baby beavers, 3 fawns, and a young penguin (full-size but with fluffy plumage). Also, we were there with a charming 2 year old and his parents, long-time friends who were among the first to hold Emily as a newborn, nearly 10 years ago. (Erika, now the mom of the aforementioned toddler, actually declined to hold Emily out of fear at the time, as she looked so new and fragile)

With the exception of the rather scruffy, absurd-looking (teenage) macaroni penguin, all the young animals we saw were Awwww-inspiring and adorable. I would have loved to pet them, but even the orphaned deer in the petting area were out of reach. Meanwhile, Emily and Hazel were not only admiring the animals but competing over the attentions of our young guest "I got 8 hugs from Connor!" followed shortly by "I got 9 kisses!" or "He laid down in *my* lap!" The poor boy hardly got through a diaper change without being handled, though I confess even I managed to wrangle out a hug and a kiss before he left.

At our house, no babies are resident anymore. Hazel is now a slim schoolgirl, even the baby-belly gone. But still, I manage to sneak in some kisses and hugs, and we have some snuggle time for everyone curled up with books at night. For me, this is enough, and come morning I'm glad to see them off to camp or play, laughing and happy to be in their own world, knowing I'm here and ready when they need a retreat.

Algae or vinyl siding: one of these is a problem

2009-07-08T22:26:00.004-04:00

Over the four years we have lived in our house, one of the features I speak of the least - because I can hardly stand to think of it - is our vinyl siding on the top half of the house. The movie "Blue Vinyl" explains in detail why I dislike it, in part, although I recognize that it is low maintenance. If I had a green building home, obviously vinyl siding would have no place in it.
But we have it, just like we have my husband's grandfather's Buick, and it is just as functional, and it fits our budget because it was just handed down to us from the previous owners. I figure the only worse thing than having it would be wasting it, even if we had the money to replace it with some wonderful, asthetically pleasing, recycled wood alternative.
Recently, the front (north) side of our vinyl siding had become spotted with algae. I like to think of algae as just another one of our pet weeds, but I had to admit, the stuff was unsightly. Frankly, it was making the rest of my weeds look bad, because it made our property appear generally unkempt, rather than selectively maintained, as I like to think of our diverse lawn.
So Tuesday, Brian got out a ladder and helped me get set up, and I gingerly climbed up (using all the nerve I gained by ziplining and climbing at Horseshoe Canyon) and washed off the algae, section by section, using plain white vinegar. The whole job took perhaps an hour, including a number of trips down the ladder to rinse out my washcloth with more white vinegar, pouring the old on the grass...
Perhaps you see where this is going. Today I noticed a brown, crinkly patch of grass, strangely enough right where I was emptying my bucket every few minutes. I've heard before about the herbicidal effects of white vinegar, and I obviously believed them enough to use it to clean algae, but I figured it was just a quick burn, a household-safe, non-suicidal version of paraquat. I really didn't think it would kill my turf: hardy, diverse stuff that it is.
I *think* the grass and clover will come back, but I'm not sure. Former certified pesticide applicator that I am, I can't read the label for vinegar, because there isn't a label for it. I'm happy to take bets, though: will the algae on the vinyl siding come back first, or the grass?

Paddle faster, I hear banjos...

2009-07-04T15:55:00.009-04:00

but perhaps, actually, I just hear whinnies, or bleats, or laughter. We're just back from our Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky sprawling family trip, centered at Horseshoe Canyon Ranch, but with good stops on the way there and back. No cell phone, limited internet, but horseback riding, farm critters (goats, kittens, dogs, chickens, ducks), wild critters (rattlesnake, 5' black rat snake in the laundry room), shooting skeet, river swimming, canoeing, rock climbing, ziplining, a street fair, plus way too much good food. In other words, durn near heaven, except just hot enough to make you know it can't be *that* place. When a fellow ranch visitor was bent over, grinning, voluntarily getting his back jeans pocket hot-branded with the initials HCR after the final cookout, the laughter was definitely of the earthly sort, and wonderful for it.

There is a lot of magic in a vacation like this, including cousin bonding for Hazel and Thea, the new friendships (we came home with an address list of all our fellow ranch-visitors), and getting out of the routines and burdens of home for a bit, while getting to see a whole host of family under conditions perfect for shared memories but not shared irritations. What we all talked about was how we were all pushing ourselves a bit: I finally climbed with a top rope, shaking with fear more than exertion, and rapelled down, having already watched my daughters and husband and knee-braced mother-in-law face the same rock. The rock I topped was called K-rock (Kindergarden Rock), but no matter. Emily jumped from a 15 foot rock cliff into river water. Brian - well, he's fearless, but even he met a rock or two which he admitted gave him a struggle. A woman who had climbed far higher and farther than me rode her horse in the ring, with terror in her eyes, and faced down a pair of young steers, who retreated into their pen before her. We each faced at least one demon, and won.

This was no Fear Factor, or Survivor, or any other sort of elimination tournament. All events were voluntary, and the cheering crowds of fellow guests and wranglers knew, by week's end, what scared you, and rewarded you with praise proportionate to the fears you'd topped. After all, we're all scared of something. Like the Great Gilly Hopkins, we all faced off our fears, in some fashion, and as it turned out, none of them were silly fears anyway (heights, snakes, and crazy horses are all reasonable thing to respect).

Now if only I could get such a good cheering section to help me over my fear of facing my work emails and the housework here, I'd be all set.

Pollinators at work

2009-06-19T09:54:00.004-04:00

The last two weeks have somehow been far busier than I hoped or planned - I've been losing track of my schedule and forgetting obligations, I fear leaving a trail of let-down colleagues in the process. My calendar isn't that full, but somehow with the lack of school schedule, I just can't keep track of it all.

Meanwhile, though, I've watching the crazy-rich blooming in our yard. I can hardly count the little bees on our spirea and sundrops, and by the time we get back from vacation, the oregano will be in full bloom, attracting all the pollinators who will have, by then, finished up with the current wave of blooms.

They're almost biblical, not sowing, but reaping, thriving, and working constantly nonetheless. If they fail to pollinate it is because we've poisoned them, not because they got scheduled somewhere else nor because they woke up and forgot to check their calendars. They do one thing, and do it well. Their mindfulness which reminds me of how Laurel's Kitchen's authors recommend that we knead bread, or cook, or garden, or whatever it is that calls us at the moment. It reminds me of times when I used cookbooks as reading material, not as emergency instructions to stave off the hunger looming at our family like a Wild Thing.

My mind at this time of year is scattered. But perhaps after some rest, some play, a break from cell phones, when I come back I might be able to focus better. On July 13, I'm helping lead a hike in South Park (no relation to the cartoon), part of a series of hikes called the Interconnectedness Series. I'm looking forward to it. At the moment, it is just something on my calendar, but my hope is that by mid-July, each day will have its tasks, and I'll be ready to do my own work again, whatever it is at that moment.

Not many weeds, but a beautiful place anyway...

2009-06-09T15:12:00.009-04:00

I just got back yesterday morning from taking the girls, seeing my cousins, visiting with old and new friends, and attending a conference in Victoria, BC. We saw a weedy animal - feral rabbits - reducing clover populations at the University of Victoria; I can't tell you how many times in the last few days I've heard "Mommy, can we have a bunny?" We spend many lovely hours at a neighborhood beach, just down the street from a neighborhood grocery and coffee shop, all walking distance from our university housing.

In terms of my life as a gardener, though, the undeniable highlight was Butchart Gardens, two-bus ride away and worth every second of transfer time and curb-sitting we spent getting there and back. I've seen gardens and arboretums (arboretae?) in many places, but never one with green roofs on the snack shacks, green roofs on the trash cans, and flowers which could inspire my children to take 300 photos within a 2 hour span. (The flowers shown are a bed set in the top of a waste receptacle - I can't even bring myself to call it a trash can)

I only had one regret about the place: the lawns were absolutely even, grass-only, and golf-course perfect. Clearly, undeniably, sprayed. The lawns were the only bit of wasted space in the whole place. I've never been anywhere, never even imagined a place, where I'd like the trash cans better than the lawns, but at Butchart Gardens, that's not even an insult.

Summer on the lawn

2009-06-02T14:14:00.008-04:00

Last fall a strip of our yard got torn up by the township, while they were fixing pipes underneath, so I had a chance to start from scratch on seed. Purchased: bag of wildflower mix, bag of loose Penn State grass seed, bag of white clover seed. Here are a couple of the little highlights. The little white cluster of flowers is some kind of spurge, I think, but I have no idea about the little lavender star shaped flower. Unfortunately it is going to get regular mowings, and unfortunately my reel mower is reelly dead - I think it has stripped gears. It is only 3.5 years old, and a Brill, but I don't know that they intended it for regularly mowing 1/2 acre lawns...so I need to go dig out the warranty.

It is summer. We find ourselves on our own lawn, admiring the garden flowers as well as whatever is hiding in the grass. My roses don't demand anything sharply - or else they know I would just trim them to the ground - and I don't have any throaty cabbage calls, but the tomatoes are fighting with the potatoes, and the snap peas are threatening to pull down their rabbit fence. No matter, because they're all growing wildly, loving the frequent rains we've gotten. For the girls at least, school's not out officially, but that never stopped me from turning off *my* brain at the end of May. Time to stop thinking and start watching what grows.

In case you missed it, more shameless self-promotion...

2009-06-02T03:42:00.002-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/books/review/Gardening-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&hpw

and tomorrow I am posting photos of a new lawn flower, as yet unidentified by me, which came up from a wildflower seed mix I threw in a couple of months ago.

The girls and I are off to Vancouver Island on Wednesday for the ASLE (Literature and the Environment) conference. I keep trying to explain to them that although we'll see beaches it will be too cold to swim, but since we're taking swimsuits just in case, I don't think they believe me about the cold. Some lessons are fine to learn the hard way!

You know the economy has gone south when...

2009-05-28T10:59:00.004-04:00

lawn weeds are described as trendy food by the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124338226000356493.html

Tcamp shared this with me - I stopped my WSJ subscription a couple of years ago. I'm not really craving greens right now, with a garden full of planted ones and a fridge full of CSA greens from a friend on vacation. But the nice thing about those lawn weeds is that they will be there all year, even when my garden lettuce has gone leggy and bitter, and many of them even in winter. Food just doesn't get any more local than the front lawn.

And plus, that's the only kind of leafy greens my kids will eat and consider it fun. They don't get enough to count for a daily vegetable, but at least they'll try them without a fight!

Count me out on the pokeweed, though. I think that if you have to change the cooking water, the plant's secondary chemistry might be just a little to challenging for my system. I'll let it grow, and if someone needs if for the food bank it will be there.

Declaration of Camping Sentiment: I love my can stove

2009-05-22T21:11:00.006-04:00

I returned from a too-short but very satisfying trip to Raccoon Creek State Park with 13 other women, 12 students and 1 other instructor. I posted back in winter about how fun it was to run farm equipment with no men around to tell us how to do it, and we had a similar experience with this trip. I love that when some of the young women express fear of mice, spiders, or snakes, it isn't just some tough guy saving them, but instead a bunch of other women showing the others that we're fine out there, and we'll all make it back.

In truth, this was a great group, and we had great hiking, shared fire-building, peaceful sleeping and a lot of laughter.

But the fire-building does hit on a part of this camping trip which I particularly appreciate, my camp stove. The official camp stove in our family, a lovely whisperlite, is my husband's, and wonderful as it is, it seems a bit like a fancy car with lots of gears. This may not be fair to the whisperlite, which I know is a well-loved item by so many campers. But this is my stove, the one I made myself and which I know how to run. It is the one which I can recycle if I break it, the one my friend Kerri taught me to make. One of our students forgot hers, and picked up a new can on the roadside near the trailhead, and used her pocketknife to make a new stove when we got to the shelters. I have an odd amount of affection for this particular one, but at the same time I recognize that its worth is clearly in the emotional energy I have given it, not in its component parts.

Add denatured alcohol, a match, and a pan of water, and Voila! Mealtime on the trail, rain or shine. Add good company and a trail, and it is a party of sorts.

Refuge

2009-05-11T18:57:00.003-04:00

My mother's day was spent exactly as I requested it: a bike outing at Ohiopyle State Park, riding the rail trail there. The experience increased my craving to go on a long-distance bike ride - an overnight, plus - but also increased my realism level about this.

First, no matter how fun I think it is going to be, no matter how happy I am, there will still be whining. Despite the fact that Emily first biked at age 4 and Hazel at 5, despite their general intrepidness, they still were far happier to stop at streamside than to keep on biking to new and beautiful scenery.

Second, the importance of preparation. We learned early that kids can be lured anywhere with a backpack full of food, but beyond that, though I had a tire patch kit, Brian had to take Hazel's tire to the river to find the hole. Next trip I'll have liquid soap for that; next trip I'll have kid-size innertubes, too.

The trip, whether I manage to plan it for this year or next, will involve difficult moments and triumphs, and nature will be both the fun and the refuge. Emily, above, was grouchy at the long distance (0.5 miles in) and sitting alone. But below, 3 stops later, she's happy again. We fixed the flat on Hazel's bike; we stopped for ice cream; we went farther than we thought they could. We all won, especially me.

Home and away

2009-05-08T08:36:00.004-04:00

In A Weed by Any Other Name, one of the occasions I write about is a garden bed at Boyd Community Center, where we held a bulb planting one September in honor of Emily's 7th birthday. It sounded good on paper: we had dirt cake (the photo wasn't ours; we were too overwhelmed to take pictures), gave the kids shovels and bulbs, the party favors included flower bulbs and pretty kid-sized hand trowels, and they planted a flower bed which continues to give our family, and perhaps others who visit the community center, a great deal of happiness each spring.

But in reality, the party was hot, and the ground was hard, and the kids' interest level in the featured activity was slim to none. I ended up digging most of the holes, the kids whined about "how many more do I have to plant?", and I ended up replanting a number of bulbs which didn't quite make it underground.

The more long run problem is that since then, the bed had become infested with Canada thistle and wild garlic. (both infestations are discussed in the book, so I won't repeat the descriptions here) I have tried to interest the girls in helping me maintain the beds, but they have expressed Zero Interest. I figured that was my fault, for being too pushy.

But yesterday evening I was at Boyd for another event, and the director told me a story that made me think better of all these memories. At their afterschool program, the children are putting in a vegetable garden (which they will continue to maintain with their summer camp program). The director had come in to explain which couple of weeds the children should pull, and first, Emily breaks in to say Shouldn't they pull the wild onion too? And then Hazel breaks in to say We'll need gloves to pull the thistle, because it has prickers. A little while later, Hazel beckons the director over, and shows her the long root she got from a thistle plant she pulled, and they marvelled together at it.

I looked at the bed, after hearing this story. There are still patches, and it is still infested. But Hazel wasn't kidding when she told me that she pulled a lot of thistle yesterday. And apparently they don't mind weeding, as long as it is in good company, and they can be the resident experts, instead of mom.

Not neat and tidy gardening

2009-05-03T15:28:00.008-04:00

Despite my membership in the garden club, my gardening veers more toward the surprise style than the orderly beds of lines and patterns. Surprise means that I plant the seeds, vaguely remembering what I planted last year in that spot, and then fail to label or record the seed types afterward, meaning that whatever comes up is a surprise.

Some years, I think I just end up with an edible mess. Last year, my fencing didn't go up until after my snap peas had been beheaded by deer. I planted potatoes as an afterthought, and chard, and tomatoes, all of which did well, but I was determined to do better. This year, I have thriving potatoes and dill, onions and a few lettuce (plants gone to seed last year), thriving snap peas within their fence, rhubarb, and sunflowers - all before tomato planting, which I will dare to do next weekend, a few days before our frost-free date (I'm betting on global warming giving me a few extra days).

In most of my beds, too, there is also something else coming up - weeds? Oddly enough, I don't know what the seedling is, but in addition to the identifiable friends, there is another I don't know, but hopefully will soon. It might be pokeweed, given that the compost I use has some large pokeweed specimens growing nearby, and which I have never watched growing from seed. Whatever it is, as soon as I identify it, I will have a lot of weeding to do.

Waiting, weeding, and hoping: these are my tasks in the May garden. Waiting, to see what the heck I planted. Weeding, as soon as I distinguish friend from foe. Hoping, that the garden will offer something newly appealing to my picky girls, that they will finally try my purple potatoes, that they will understand the appeal of onions, or that I can coax them into eating strawberry-rhubarb pie before they dissect the rhubarb out of it. Hoping, that the disorder will become something magical, the predictable miracle of food growing from soil.

Toad Prince

2009-04-26T13:15:00.003-04:00

At Squaw Valley Park this morning, we found a number of toads, including this lovely one, who decided Emily was just his type. You will notice the way his arms are wrapped around Emily's hand. For those wishing to give their children a different version of the birds and the bees, this position is called amplexus, and precedes the male fertilization of the female toad eggs.

As you can see, I think it is as fun for Emily as it is for him.

Monkey bars in a skirt

2009-04-24T15:18:00.004-04:00

Ser has written about how Henry has his own distinct taste in clothing, and Hazel is a lot like Henry in this respect. When Emily was little, she generally accepted my choices for her clothes, but further, I tended to view dressing her with the same practicality I use in dressing myself. Matching meant neutrals with bright colors; appropriate clothes for play were overalls and tshirts. Emily either tends to agree with me due to her own native instincts, or I have pushed her into it - I like to think we are just alike.

But Hazel is an Oursbourn, like her paternal grandmother, and clothes which match to her don't follow the rules I know. At first, when she was 2 and insisted on wearing dresses everywhere, I thought, mistakenly, that perhaps Emily was my outdoorsy child. But that was narrow minded of me; Hazel has taught me something different.

Girls who run and get muddy, girls who stomp in puddles at the bus stop, girls who climb and swing on rope swings and do monkey bars: these are not tomboys anymore, as I once happily considered myself. Hazel is a Girl, and she plays Outside. She has taught me something I didn't know about nature and nurture, and about self-expression and identity. Being a girl doesn't mean putting your dresses on the hanger before playing outside.

Dresses, too, are washable.

Earth Day

2009-04-22T20:13:00.000-04:00

This morning and early afternoon featured classic Earth Day weather in Pittsburgh - cool and wet. But, as you can see from the sky in Emily's photo of her sister's south side, by sunset the skies were clear, and the late afternoon was beautiful for a trip to the playground. I am such a wimpy parent about homework on evenings like this, when it seems that being outside just can't get all the time it deserves. Tonight I have given up on Emily working on her book report - we are saving it for Sunday afternoon, apparently, given our schedule between now and then. I'm hoping for cold rain on Sunday, beginning about 4 pm., lasting until that book report is done. Even if it is on Shel Silverstein, and he does deserve better.

Turn off the TV week?

2009-04-17T20:13:00.001-04:00

Today Emily brought home a flier from school, with fun facts (average 2-11 year old child watches 1000+ hours of TV a week?!) and a signup for Turn off the TV Week. I have so many thoughts about this, I hardly know where to begin.

First, last week might have been seen informally as Turn On the TV Week for my daughters, since they spent a week with grandparents, and therefore had access to TV. They watched all their favorite shows and several new ones, familiarizing themselves with the modern genre of talent shows. I see this as an important aspect of their education: cultural literacy. In addition, as you can see, this enables my dad, even when he is only home from his rehabilitation hospital for a couple of hours, to catch up on the world of Emily's thoughts. He does this with the same willing acceptance he showed when he listened and enjoyed music with me in my teenage years.

Second, the irony of the timing could hardly be greater, because on Monday I have an appointment with their principal for me to be a complainer. I have spent 4 years now hearing about indoor recess on any remotely wet or cold day, or "blacktop recess" if it was wet yesterday and the ground is still muddy. This is, to me, outrageous, especially on a safe, clean school campus of at least 20 acres, with lots of open, green space to play. I have spent the last year waiting for the new principal to change this problem, after making a very gentle comment at the year's beginning, but I've given up waiting and hoping and am now about to be demanding, with scientific papers and books and the power of persuasion which I may not have, but have to try out.

Tuesday Emily will take her turn off the TV week form to school, with my signed commitment to have our TV off for the week. Not too hard - we just got a TV at Christmas, but still have no stations, no cable. I can't claim screen-limit virtues - we watch plenty of movies at home, and the girls play computer games and watch pirated TV on YouTube. But I can say this: I am very happy that the TV on is still a celebration for the girls, while TV off is the state they take for granted.

Spring break in Kentucky

2009-04-12T22:44:00.000-04:00

One of the only real bummers of all being in school - either teaching or learning - is that there

are at least 2 different times for spring break, ours and theirs. The bummer, though, is all for me and Brian, as the girls get to have something I always wished for in childhood, and rarely got: uninterrupted spoiling by grandparents. This past week the girls were down in my favorite yard on earth, with daffodils in bloom and spring in full swing, while their parents stayed here and worked.

It wasn't all bad for us, with dinners and evenings to ourselves. We made the best of it, all things considered. But these girls made out like bandits, with a midweek sleepover with neighbor friends, shopping, an early egg hunt, and a whole lot of playing outside, rain and shine both.

I went down to pick them up this weekend, and got to catch up with in-laws and with my parents. Dad is doing much better now - walking well, clear-headed, and with lots of physical therapy at a good rehab place. Even he got to come home and snuggle and play dollhouse with them. I got to go to the Arboretum, though not as much as I'd have liked. Pittsburgh is my present: exciting, beautiful, with good jobs for us and school for the girls. But Kentucky continues to tug at me, with nostalgia of my own childhood, and with the joy of watching the girls make a place for themselves there, too.

I've got sunshine...

2009-04-03T17:04:00.000-04:00

One of my fondest spring memories of childhood was when I was about 8 or 9, and my BFF (before the term existed), Conley, invited me to her family cabin in April near Cumberland Lake. That trip was incredibly rainy, as April should be, and one of the outings of the weekend was to a place her grandmother, "Beans", called Daffodil Hill.

It was classic spring weather, just like today in Pittsburgh: rainy, blustery, cool. If I didn't know better, I'd call it dreary. I wouldn't say I was enthusiastic about the walk in the woods, but suddenly, the woods were lit from the ground by what seemed like millions of daffodils.

Since then, I have carried that image in my mind as a garden to aspire to. I'll probably never go back to Monticello, Kentucky in April and see that particular spot, but I have tried to recreate it. Before we had our own yard, I described the image to my in-laws, and they have planted probably a 1000 daffodils in their own little woodland - which unfortunately, I don't get to see at peak bloom nearly as often as I'd like. But in turn, they have helped us stock up our own daffodil population.

We're not quite "there" yet, with "there" being the image I still carry of that solid swath of buttery yellow under a wet, grey sky and dark tree trunks. But progress is being made. This year, colonies of bright daffodils peek out from the wet brown leaves, under the fertile, dripping spring rain, and I can see little bits of Daffodil Hill, to share with my own daughters. I've heard people calling this weather dreary, but I don't really see it that way. The sunshine is just in a different place today.

A Weed by any Other Name...

2009-03-26T19:02:00.001-04:00

I got my very own book in the mail yesterday!

http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2070

It isn't yet in the bookstores, but you can order directly from Beacon. Just in time to cancel your lawn service! Or to feel virtuous as you watch the spring's crop of weeds emerge in your garden and lawn. (Though I have to confess, I've already been pulling a few from my flower beds, while I've been sowing clover seed in other places.)

So near, and yet...

2009-03-25T21:06:00.000-04:00

This weekend, Emily and I took a trip down to Lexington to visit my parents. Unfortunately, the occasion was Dad, in the hospital, with a new episode in a mysterious series of foot infections which have taken away our favorite activity together: walking.

He continues to get better at what I view as an impressively rapid pace for a 73 year old man. We had a good visit, with lots of hugs, lots of talking, and lots of just being together, knowing that sometimes just being together is the hugest gift we can ask for.

Sunday, Emily and I walked together to the hospital, through the U.K. Arboretum which my parents have supported from its first imaginings. It was a lovely walk past the fallen bur oak, along woodland trail, filled with invasive vines and honeysuckle but also with early spring wildflowers. I allowed Emily, who had earlier carried a vase of home-grown daffodils to Dad, to pick a spring beauty from a yard en route to take to him. In the background of this photo, you can see the building, the hulk of brick which is the hospital.

A few moments later, Dad, formerly president of the neighborhood association, who fought the expansion of this hospital tirelessly, who helped make them plant trees and prevented the loss of several houses, was helped by the physical therapists to walk out of his room, slowly, carefully, perhaps painfully, to the end of the hall. From the window, he peeked around the parking garage and saw the corner of the Arboretum. He knew where he was, then, even when he returned down the fluorescent-lit halls to his mechanical bed. He was *almost* at the Arboretum.

These are hard won battles, then and now, both fighting the hospital's cancerous growth into our neighborhood and fighting his own battle with his own feet, his own immune system. And somehow, despite the fact that neither battle was completely won, I admire him all the more, just for continuing anyway, for each step ahead down that hall, for each tree he could see from his hospital window, for each day we get with him. I'm sure at one time he would have foresworn ever setting foot in that hospital, and yet, in the battle, he made it a better place to be. I hope when I am old and infirm, I can say the same.

Watching, like, a hawk

2009-03-16T17:04:00.000-04:00

Today, while walking around the track at the girls' school, waiting for them to get out and walk home with me, I noticed a red tailed hawk, peering down from the football goalpost. It flew away before I could get a good photo myself, but I still felt graced, somehow, just being near this fierce bird. And hopeful - after all the insults we threw at this bird (guns and DDT primary among them), given the slightest chance, it came back.

Not everyone, or every animal, can take advantage of second chances. Today's National Geographic announced that the fungus which may be responsible for extinction of many frogs is becoming better understood, and offering a twinge of hope; but still, I will never see a live model of the golden toad from Monteverde, which my cousin Brigid has a photo of from the year of my birth.

My wish today is for people to soak up some of the fierceness, focus, and resiliency of this gorgeous bird, and put all of that energy into giving as many second chances as we can. That way, the hawk can stay focussed on catching the mice I scare out of the grass in the school's field.

Property boundaries

2009-03-10T08:50:00.000-04:00

Having grown up with, and always lived in, a neighborhood with sidewalks, I could hardly imagine when I moved here what the consequences would be of living in a neighborhood without them. Even on our dead-end street, however, walking seems more hazardous than it should. This affects local culture more than I'd like it to: I can probably count the number of walkers from the girls' (700 student) elementary school with my hands and no more than one foot's worth of toes. We live closer to the elementary school than I did when growing up, and yet we rarely walk there either morning or afternoon.

On Monday afternoons, I pick the girls up straight from school (other days they go to their wonderful afterschool program), and they are walkers on those days. Walking actually brings them home sooner than the bus. But the crossing guard is a grouchy woman who seems not to want children to walk, and so we have taken to avoiding her. Rather than go along the roadside, Emily and Hazel walk through the school athletic fields and then cut through between two yards.

It is a nice little walk. But it breaks one of the cardinal rules of my own suburban childhood: don't go in other people's yards without invitation.

In principle, we have permission. Once, early in our time here, I did knock on the door and ask the neighbors if it was OK, but I can't remember their names and I still feel like I need to be super-careful to preserve the privilege. I probably shouldn't feel guilty at all, because our own yard has the semi-official neighborhood trail leading to the pool from all streets uphill. Ours features a concrete paver pathway (pavers donated by our next door neighbor) with mulch I spread for our own benefit and to suggest a welcome to pedestrians. Occasionally we worry about security - our hammock and tire swing were cut down late in October, 2 years ago. But mostly, I'm really glad to encourage walking, and to be a friendly face to neighborhood teenagers who pass through in groups and greet me politely if I'm out in the yard.

These unofficial, common law pathways seem to follow one rule: they occur on the boundaries between properties. Property boundaries are interesting to me, because weeds of all sorts are often tolerated in them, because they seem to be our only neighborhood paths, and because, unfortunately, they seem to attract trash. If you look in the multiflora rose (officially illegal in our township) on the left-hand yard in the photo, you can see a sun-bleached cardboard beer case. The empty bottles are resting inside. This particular spot is actually a meeting of three property boundaries: two homeowners, plus the elementary school.

The weeds, of course, hardly bother me, though multiflora rose is the worst of them, both because it is invasive but also because its spiny shoots grow over trash and makes cleanup painful. Other weeds, though, are the plants children can play with, without bothering anyone's garden, the forts children can hide in and the trees which might one day become climbable. I'm also grateful that property boundaries offer rights-of-way, making walkable routes in a suburban landscape with no official sanction of foot traffic (even the crossing guard seems more a deterrent than a sanction).

But the trash is a problem I can't figure out how to fix. In a state with deplorably low landfill tipping fees, you would think proper trash disposal would be accessible to all. But a drunk teenager typically doesn't just bring home the bottles and expect praise from her parents for recycling, and the ubiquitous disposable packaging which carries our food hardly seems worth the chase when it blows away from our hands or the garbage can. Pennsylvania's wild spaces are thick with trash, far more than the Arboretum woodland near my childhood home in Lexington, Ky. and far more than any of the parks we frequented in upstate NY. Pennsylvania's wild spaces are filled with trash of a volume almost like I used to see off roadsides in 1970's and 1980's rural Kentucky, where signs which said "NO DUMPING" were almost always the backdrop to an unofficial garbage dump.

But at least we can walk there. And if I just remembered to carry rose-nipping clippers and a garbage bag with me more often, I could maybe make at least one or two of these paths look a bit better, like a place I'd want to go walking with my children.

Zoos for children

2009-03-02T11:19:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I helped Emily get even with her sister, who last year had gone with me to Washington D.C. Both girls accompanied me on a trip, ostensibly to take a pair of students to Powershift, but also to visit a college friend and get a sampling of the city of museums and monuments. Our first stop was the National Zoo. Is it irony that our National Zoo's most exciting feature is a collection of animals from China? Or is it simply a reflection of what parents know, that everything our children love here in the U.S. comes with a "Made in China" label on it?

I've always had mixed feelings about zoos. As a horse lover from early childhood, I recognized the frenetic pacing behavior of zoo animals as a sign of boredom and small space - though the cheetah pacing next to the zebra pen at the National Zoo on Saturday may have had other motivations. And yet, I would have to spend weeks and countless pounds of carbon to see meerkats, zebras, Prezwalski's horse, lion tamarins, red and Giant pandas in their native environments. I don't like the concept of wild animals caged, but I still love seeing the animals.

In the last several years, zoos have done a much better job of linking animals to children in an empathetic way. At Chicago's Lincoln Park zoo, a log crosses the glass between apes and children, and primate cousins play, seemingly together, on the same tree. Here in Pittsburgh, tunnels under the meerkat exhibit allow children to crawl underground and pop up in the center of the meerkat community, to the seeming mutual entertainment of both species. At the National Zoo, bamboo-lined spaces and fences delimit the boundaries of children and pandas, for the safety and entertainment of both. (Also in D.C., the meerkats delighted Emily by appearing to try to climb up her jacket from the other side of their glass - as a National Geographic editor once noted, "You can't have too many meerkats.")

Such entangled mutual restrictions between animals and children go beyond zoos, though. What is the difference between wilderness and zoo? Is it the size of the field or the pavement on the sidewalk? The narrow path from our backyard to the community center is just as bare, just as compacted, as the dusty ground the cheetah paced just beyond the wary zebras. My daughters' home range in Pittsburgh, while large by the scale of D.C. children is still far less than the miles open to children of previous generations. My daughters' outdoor cage, much as I try to expand it with trips and hikes, is almost certainly still too small.

Testing the waters, again

2009-02-22T11:33:00.000-05:00

It seems Emily is just wired this way. Wherever the edge, she will find it and explore it - whether the edge consists of rules or limits or spaces. Despite her experience a few weeks ago finding the soft spot in the ice, yesterday we went to Squaw Valley, and again, the ice was seemingly irresistable. This time, too thin for skating, but still tempting to poke at with a toe, trying to see how strong it is, what it would take to break through.

Testing the limits isn't all bad, of course. This is exploration, too - pioneering, if you will. Yesterday I managed to convince Emily to explore with just one foot, but at the same time I couldn't help being proud seeing her lead her sister into the fun. Because Hazel, despite being all into dresses and clothes and all things pretty, is pretty daring herself. They don't get it from me - I nearly always let my fears get the better of me - but perhaps that makes it all the more fun for the girls. I walk safely around the track at the park, observing plants, with their roots holding tightly to a single location. The girls, meanwhile, were looking for adventure, and yesterday they managed to find just the right amount. Each went home with muddy, wet shoes, but dry socks; with dirt on backsides and knees, but warm dry skin underneath. It was a perfect outing.

Girls' basketball, indoors and out

2009-02-15T14:26:00.000-05:00

The weather report from Pittsburgh this week has included flurries, rain, sun, mud, and frost. The path from our house to the community center is nearly impassable with mud, and the ice patches are gone. Frankly, I miss the snow, though I'm not sure the girls do, because with it melting, the driveway is clear for dribbling.

The highlight of the week is definitely basketball. Much as I believe in free play, I often see that a particular sport is what draws the kids outside in the first place. This week, nearly every time we went outside to play, a basketball was motivating the action.

Emily's team features a full handful of very skilled girls and two mom-coaches who clearly love the game. Her lack of experience shows compared to many, but she is learning and motivated. Hazel participated in clinics run by the high school girls' team, and ended her season recently with 2 halftime dribbling shows by the Lil' Hoopers. I credit this clinic with convincing Hazel that basketball is centered on dribbling skills, because so far she can't hit the bottom of the net, much less the hoop. Nonetheless, Hazel loves her basketball, and she's gotten noticed for her ferocious drive to dribble around the court during Emily's practices and games.

The most exciting revolution about this for me is that for my daughters, basketball is a girls' sport. They have been to high school games, and a college game, and played their own games, but the only games they've witnessed have been played by women and girls, dribbling, running, shooting, sweating, scuffling, reaching, and fouling each other in their eagerness to get the ball. At Emily's games, players' brothers wait on the sidelines for their turn to shoot a few hoops after each quarter. In my world in Kentucky, it was the girls who went out at the quarters, in cheerleading outfits with pom-poms instead of balls. But here and now, when the ref blows the whistle, it is the girls who run out on the court for the real action.

Snow Retreats

2009-02-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I spent my morning with a group of students on retreat for the weekend out at Chatham's farm. I was invited to give a plant ID walk, and we modified it to a tree ID walk due to my uncertainty about my ability to identify brown seedy stalks reliably. I intended to take the girls, but they have declared themselves tired of snow (despite snow tubing last weekend and Emily being outside with a friend right now, sliding on ice refuges at the pool parking lot). I went alone, driving past muddy hillsides before reaching the farm, 16 miles north of home.

As you can see, I had reason to wish I'd taken my skiis. But it was, in fact, perfect weather for a winter tree ID walk. We found, or at least I *think* we found, all the particular trees on our list: hickory, maple, oak, birch, beech, spruce, hemlock, and poplar. (The one I declared hickory was long-dead, which I pointed out was perfect because it would never again grow leaves to contradict my identification skills.)

And though I'd complained about giving part of my Saturday for this, I was honored to be included. For a moment, I got to join in a moment of running gravity-fed and young down a sunny snow-covered hill. Because they let me.

The Times on Dirt

2009-01-28T11:14:00.000-05:00

Two friends have posted this article on how dirt is good for our immune systems, and it is, for me, cause to celebrate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?_r=2&em

I know about the various diseases we can catch from dirt, soil, or animals: salmonella, toxoplasmosis, simple gastrointestinal distress. And yet, I'm enormously pleased to think that my laissez-faire attitude about dirty children might be paying off. The once-a-week bathing, for example, might just be the thing for development of a healthy immune system.

Now, I'd love to apply this attitude to what we do today, but we are looking out our windows at a cold drizzle falling on icy snow, and I'm thinking that to find any good dirt today we'd have to get a pickaxe. And unfortunately, snow days make me feel like I have to clean up house a bit or I'll go insane with the clutter. But now I know reason #2987 for playing outside, as soon as I can find an outdoor activity that matches with wet rainy sleet and slick puddly snow.

Fickle ice

2009-01-24T15:39:00.000-05:00

This week's activities featured ice skates, sleds, snowboard, cross-country skiis, and alas, a big end-of-week melt. Yesterday at this time I was heading out for a walk in the warm sunshine, sans gloves or long underwear; last night the temperatures dropped again, just in time to make the Winter Festival feel truly like a winter festival. As you can see, even without skates on the pond was a major feature of interest, even while competing with horse-drawn wagon rides, a band, roasting marshmallows, and free pizza and hot dogs.

But here we are, at 3:45, back at home indoors, because Emily was baptised today in another ancient winter rite of passage: her leg pushed through the ice when she stepped on a thin patch hidden by snow. She got herself out and we came right home - she's fine. I guess we can say that she has a new level of empathy with the polar bears. And any of my readers who know Emily know that she can always use a lesson in caution, given her personality. Although I witnessed her playing - to all appearances being cautious enough - she is just the kind of kid who would find a thin place on the ice, just to see what it was like to go through.

Two firsts: one outside, one inside

2009-01-17T20:09:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, despite the fact that Emily's basketball team lost their game (after winning the first 2), we all had reason to celebrate, as Emily made her first basket, a nice little layup at a moment when her team really needed her. We got home, got some food, and then, at Emily's request, went to the pond at a nearby park to ice skate.

Last night we went skating indoors at a rink crowded with teenagers and with music to urge us on, with a snack bar steps away, skate lessons to watch, and young hockey jocks to dodge. I think of this as the normal way to skate, since I had never, before tonight, been skating outside. It isn't something children growing up in Kentucky learn to expect, and plus, I'd never had my own skates. But it has been so frigid, and this park's pond is a shallow little water body which we've slid on before during the local winter festival, so we had a good idea it would be safe.

Another family was out tonight, too, a dad with two boys, complete with hockey sticks and pucks. I suspect the older boy was 5, a wickedly good little skater already. None of us is a great skater, but tonight we all got better. Hazel figured out how to propel herself forward without me or a wall - it seemed easier without so many people around, and also easier perhaps because the ice wasn't so smooth and fast as indoors. Emily, despite literally having two left skates due to my taking advantage of an end of season "bargain" last year, was whizzing around the pond, and had a great time skating fast and crash-landing into the snowbanks at the edge of the shovelled "rink".

It was fully dark when we stopped. I feel like we've finally participated in an ancient rite of winter, linking us to children we've read about in history, whose only concept of ice skating was outdoors. And though I've known for some time that I love snow in winter, tonight I finally learned to appreciate bitter cold spells, for giving us thick, safe ice for a chaos-free skate in the brisk night air.

Seasonal overdose

2009-01-16T10:02:00.000-05:00

Back when I was in my 20's and fitness came easily, I would often get into a nice summer exercise routine and then drop it like a rock when cold weather came. In grad school, with friends there, I started cross-country skiiing, my first regular winter exercise, though I wasn't too regular about it. Then, in Chicago, I had Ser, a native Alaskan, to prompt me safely through a season of winter running, and the standard was set. I learned to give up on the same routine working in all seasons.

That's not to say I always manage to successfully develop a routine. This fall I lost track of exercise, mostly, despite many beautiful days and the once-weekly biking through October. Winter is always challenging, but finally last weekend we got snow - not much at first, but now settled into about 4 inches of squeaky-cold white stuff, just right for skiing.

Saturday, the girls and I went sledding with a friend of Emily's, despite cold rain which threatened to melt the snow out from under us, but didn't quite. Sunday, we went downhill skiing at Seven Springs, with Hazel and I pairing up on the green slopes and Emily and Brian going for slightly bigger challenges. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday I cross-country skiied, and hope to go out again this morning once the sun has had a chance to warm up a tiny bit. I go right down our yard, across the snow-covered pool parking lot, and to the flat field and hilly power line at the Community Center. I try to go about 2 miles, though I'm not measuring exactly, and as you can see, on Monday I had to work to keep from melting the snow beneath my repeated ski tracks. (This is not a problem today!)

Barbara Kingsolver and other responsible garden writers extoll the virtues of seasonal produce overdoses. Today, I extoll the virtues of seasonal exercise overdoses. Swim and mow the lawn in summer, run or bike in fall in winter, rake leaves in fall, dig the garden in spring, ski, sled and shovel in winter. At the end of summer, I am infinitely relieved to see the end of growing grass; at the end of fall, I love to see the last leaves tucked safely in a pile. I'm not sick of skiing yet, but I might get there. If I do, I'll be proud of myself for making the most of the weather, for making the best of the season, and for making it through winter, perhaps no thinner, but at least still in good enough shape to keep every pound I carry moving.

The long haul home

2009-01-09T19:08:00.000-05:00

Several times before, when there's snow on the ground, I've picked the girls up from the community center with sleds in tow. It's a relatively short walk (0.2 miles?), and mostly flat, so they don't really need the ride. However, it is undeniably fun for them to get a ride, and I can generally use the exercise.

Tonight we're in what may be our first real snow of the season - Emily's basketball game for tomorrow was already cancelled, in fear of it. We weren't out for long - perhaps 40 minutes, total? But in that time we made good progress on icing down our driveway with smooth, fast sled tracks. (I felt really funny reminding Emily not to scrape the snow off the driveway with the sled...perhaps not the best advice if we plan to drive tomorrow.) Cheap fun on a Friday night, with the full moon haze showing through the clouds and deer bounding across the backyard, just a few feet beyond the end of our sled tracks.

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas (not!)

2008-12-30T21:40:00.001-05:00

Just as one can rarely blame smoking for one *particular* smoker's lung cancer, any one day's warm weather in a single location can hardly be called evidence of global warming. I spent many a childhood Christmas in Kentucky without a flake of white on the ground, and a white Christmas is more of a novelty there than a department-store Santa Claus.

All the same, as snow covered runways and roads from Portland OR to Chicago to Boston, I couldn't help feeling that Kentucky alone was bearing the evidence this holiday season of how winter precipitation goes wrong with temperatures just a few degrees warmer. Hazel looks happy enough, to be sure, and I know my sister-in-law and her family were glad that the southern half of their impromptu drive from Chicago to Louisville was ice-free. I'm glad to make the most of any weather, and 220 floating golf balls, harvested from nooks and crannies around my in-laws' 5 acre garden/playground, were evidence of a good time had by 4 cousins and 8 muddy boots.

One of the predicted hallmarks of global warming is more striking extremes of weather in any location. Next summer, if the last several years are any evidence, the area pictured will be cracked and dry, the gardens given I.V. irrigation to survive. I hope that all of these cousins, throughout their lives, will continue to be able to make the most of what the weather brings, with good shelter and family for company, and the imagination necessary to make appropriate use of golf balls or any other flotsam and jetsam they find.