Everything else: the play, soccer start up, WV weekend, potatoes and more...

Brace yourselves, so much for a September lull! Here's all the other accumulated items all lumped in one post. I'm starting this following today's cheese workshop (the first of 3 this fall) and before an evening hike with a friend. We'll see how far I get!

The big news: Kali decided to audition for EMU's fall play Pride and Prejudice and she got in! She will be starring as Miss Bingley, the most rich and beautiful woman in the show! Alida is eager to see her in a frilly pink dress with a train. As are the rest of us! She is working on her British accent and her younger sisters are always eager to run lines with her. There will be six public shows in November and two for school groups. In November, for 19 days out of 21, Kali will need to be at EMU for anywhere from 4-6 hours each day!

As you might imagine, this has drastically altered our family's fall schedule. To date, she has needed to be at EMU about 3x a week for practice and that will ramp up as the production dates near. We have decidedly not gotten into any kind of groove yet but are taking the schedule week by week (as it comes out) and working to adjust my work schedule and home life to accommodate and support Kali in this. We are so excited for her! I'm so exhausted by the constant running (or what feels like more trips to town that I've made in many months previous to the last few weeks). I had to reassure her on the way in for a recent practice that I'm so glad she is doing this. After a rather stressful departure where we had left Alida and Terah in tears and Jason with a long evening list of tasks, she was doubting the wisdom of adding this to our family life. I know actions speak louder than words so the verbal reassurance was a start, and we are working to tweak other things to be able to not just survive the next two months but enjoy them! Seeing her practically skip out of practices definitely makes it feel worth the extra effort!

The mostly old news: The girls are playing soccer again. Kali again on a co-ed high school team but this season there are more girls than boys in the league! So that's a change. Alida is with the same age group but decided to go with the all girls division this time and is enjoying it. The new thing is Terah is signed up for mini-kickers. Sadly she missed the first for our WV trip, she missed yesterday because she was sick, and she'll miss one coming up due to a wedding she wouldn't even consider missing! So that's 3 out of the 6 weeks. Let's hope she gets to enjoy the other three as she is very excited to try out the cleats and shin guards she is borrowing for her first season! On the first game day we used the brief break in between games to take a dash to the Green Valley Book Fair for the girls to use a coupon from the summer reading program (thus the picture here).

The annual WV trip: We enjoyed a lovely weekend in WV with 3 generations of friends! This was the 7th annual Myers Benner Showalter Godshall weekend at the Mountain House of Hope! As kids get older, they play so well independently and without needing to work around naps we are also free to go on outings all together. We enjoyed delicious meals together, hikes, walking to the labyrinth, playing at the swing set, painting rocks, playing games, singing, blowing bubbles, wild cranberry picking, exploring rocks and climbing trees, all of us making it to the top of Seneca Rocks, and then cooling off in the swimming hole there after a picnic lunch. A rejuvenating and fun weekend!

The annual potato digs: Upon seeing low 40's in the forecast, we knew it was time to get the sweet potatoes out of the ground. And the black beans in the potato patch were harvested and drying on the racks in the garage, making it also time to get the white potatoes dug. So we planned two family work days in a row this Thursday and Friday and did a whole lot of digging! It tried my patience and my muscles to try to extract sweet potatoes from our dry, hard rocky soil on Thursday. But the yield was satisfying, other than the ones that voles had nibbled circles around. Why can't they just pick a tuber and eat the whole thing?! Friday's digging was much easier with the recent hilling loosening the soil around the white potatoes. The yield was less satisfactory there. So more sweet potatoes than ever this year and less white potatoes than last year.

A few food snippets: We have gotten into some fruit drying this year - thanks to more apples than normal and gifted pears from friends! An odd power outage resulted in me drying apples in the solar dryer which was a huge win (I was in the groove of using the electric one and am a bit chagrined to admit that it took the electricity not being an option to go the other route)!

Tomatoes are coming to an end. We are getting a handful every other day or two but I believe canning is done. This was probably the last beautiful tricolored plate of them!

While harvests are slowing up, we still have meals with this kind of fresh goodness! The pole beans are still giving. We are eating as much summer squash as we can. There are various greens to enjoy alongside eggs with bright orange yokes.

Jason planted our ginger and pineapples plants outside. They are huge AND the pineapple plant has a fruit. :) 

I love the fall colors! The bright yellow golden rod and the burgundy amaranth is breathtakingly beautiful!

And finally, an animal update: I'll start with the sad news. For anyone that read the "PIGLETS" post, I am sad to report that we lost the little boy piglet. He was the one who seemed off since the beginning but we were hoping he might pull through. So we are left with just 3 girls who are spunky! Yesterday they started trying to eat some weeds and this morning I got to see one try to dig in the dirt with her little snout and then her back was itchy and she found the side of her house and was scratching her itch just like the big ones do on the side of the house. SO cute!  The only silver lining in this is that Jason won't have to attempt castration now - something he was ready to attempt and maybe he was even eager for the opportunity to learn (so maybe I'm just glad he won't have to do it).

And we haven't reported on the ducklings of late. As you can see here they are hardly small ducklings anymore but mostly fully grown ducks! The three mamas are still with them and the two grown free range ducks normally stay close by. So they are a content family of 12 who love foraging around together whenever Kali considers it safe to let them out. Most recently we have had a number of fox attack attempts so she often goes out to let them out with her computer in hand to work on writing while they roam around. 

IF you have made it this far, congratulations! I'll sign off for now and enjoy one last summer walk with a friend before we welcome fall officially tomorrow (and hopefully soon more fall-like weather).

Great Aunt Eleanor's visit

It may be awhile till I work down my list of "bloggable" items, but some things just need a post of their own and this is one of them! Every time we've savored a visit from my great aunt it has always felt too short, for her and for us! So sometime this summer I hatched the idea of her coming and spending some time in my parents' quarters when they were not using it. As one should when hatching ideas that involve other people, I floated the plan with her and she liked it! So it went from idea to a scheduled visit that we all eagerly anticipated! I tend to be someone who looks forward to things so much that when the actual event happens I can feel disappointed that it doesn't live up to my dreamed up expectations. Not so this time around! I had so many "heart full" moments in the 9 days she joined us at Tangly Woods. I'll share just a few snippets here!

We enjoyed a lot of good food together! At Tangly Woods we revel in seasonal fresh foods and it is always a source of joy to share them with others who appreciate good food and also understand the work that goes into taking something from a seed to a meal on the table! We were grateful to two of Eleanor's daughters who provided transportation for her on either end of her visit and on the front end, we got to enjoy a meal all together. The meal was rushed for me and Kali as we had to head into town for Kali's practice (see future blog post for that news!!), so we didn't get to sit and savor the apple pie and peach kuchen. That said, it is notable in that we have enjoyed enough of both fruits this year to make things with them (the clay spray is starting to pay off we think)!

In some ways I felt like I didn't have as much laid back time for visiting as I had hoped (due to changes in Kali's schedule and my own work schedule), but it felt like such a gift for our girls to get so much quality time with their great, great aunt! My sense was that it was equally savored by all. It seems to me that Terah and Aunt Eleanor enjoyed a special connection, despite Terah sometimes being very hard to understand. They seemed to be able to connect without words just fine! It was cute how a couple of times during the week Terah would just disappear. I wasn't worried but after a period of time, it seemed the responsible thing for me to go and check on her whereabouts. Here's what I would find: 

 or:

In those moments, it was as if I could actually feel my heart swell! There was coloring together, putting puzzles together, reading books and looking at blog books together, shelling seeds beans, etc... all the while interspersed with getting to hear stories from Aunt Eleanor's life. So many treasures!   

She was so in tune with both the beauty and joy of living in a place like Tangly Woods and the incredible amount of work it is. That seems to be a unique combination! At one point she commented about something we were up to that she didn't even want to look at that much work. I also learned that her recurring bad dreams are about doing laundry or cooking for people. When I learned that for a long time she did laundry by hand every day, I was not surprised that she has nightmares about doing laundry or that getting in touch with immense amounts of work is no longer all that pleasant!

That said, she was so happy to pitch in here and there and we pretty much had a resident dish washer for the week! She washed so many dishes for us!! 

During the week, we also enjoyed a visit from one of my second cousins - Eleanor's granddaughter - and her little girl for brunch. It was a fun time of connecting and having them enjoy Tangly Woods for the first time. It felt like a week of truly savoring family connections across the generations. I also found myself feeling so grateful for the plans to have my parents age at Tangly Woods. I have to admit to experiencing some sadness thinking of the many people that are growing old in nursing homes and retirement communities that may wish to be closer and have their lives more intertwined with family. I can't help but wonder what we are losing as a culture and as human beings when all that wisdom and stories and love is partitioned off from us other than occasional visits. I'm not trying to simplify something that is clearly complicated, I just found myself grieving something that many of us seem to be missing out on (deep connections with our elders)! 

By this time in the growing season we don't have a lot of time for experimenting or adding anything to our daily lists. And, since I'm not a huge fan of black walnuts, we seldom do anything with the hundreds of walnuts falling from the tree in our yard. So how fun that the girls got to help bring them to Aunt Eleanor and learn from her how to bust them open and take out the nut. All the while, she would share how they did it other times and how much easier it was before they started rotting. My guess is her fingers still have lingering stains on them, reminding her (hopefully positively) of her visit! This is the only picture I got where she might be scolding me a bit (see the hand on hip) as I think she realized that I was taking a video. :) I could not help myself and she assured me to go right ahead if I was enjoying myself. I certainly was!!

There was large blocks of time where we didn't see each other and I think she had ample time to read books, snooze, look out at the mountains, and stroll around the property. But I think even the 9 days wasn't long enough to see everything so I'm hoping there will be another visit on the not too distant horizon! She helped me gain a greater appreciation for the place we live, a deeper gratitude for the work of planning out and living inter-generationally, and a desire for more time to hear stories and learn from her experiences and wisdom.  

 

One morning when we were chatting she was noting what a special time she was having and she told me, "You are adding life to my life." The feelings are so mutual! Can it get any better than when our relationships with each other add life to each other's lives!