Nora's 12th Birthday!

Before I call it a day, I'm going to put up a third and final post. Then it will be high time to give my eyes a break from this screen. I do not believe I stepped outside at all today and have spent 10+ hours on the computer. This reflection will be a nice reminder of the hours spent in the beautiful outdoors yesterday! I can now focus on this since our littlest has given way to slumber. She had to give all sorts of reasons why she wasn't sure she would be able to fall asleep, but once she stopped the laundry list of reasons it only took about 3 times through Alida's lullaby and her grasp on my hand loosened and she was out!

Tuesday I was determined that I would truly take off Wednesday and be with my family (not just physically but mentally and emotionally too). It made Tuesday a rather trying day in some regards, and today as well, but I mostly kept to my commitment for yesterday. Due to last minute details to attend to for the blood drive, I was online for snippets of time, but did my very best to ignore work-related items. Again, mostly successful! I always feel like the way I can honor Nora most on her birthday is to give my full attention to Jason and the girls and soak up their presence in my life! Nora would have turned 12 yesterday so it's been 4, 8, 12 and 16 years since the births of our four girls! I felt the passage of time more keenly than I do on some birthdays, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I had walked up to Hensley's Pond a few times recently with others and found myself marveling at the changing leaves and wanting the rest of the family to get to experience it as well. For our family it is no small feat to get out of the house by 9 a.m. and we didn't quite meet our goal, but we were heading down the lane by about 9:30 or so. We had a happy and energetic trio of kids (and hoped that would last for the duration). We had the jogger along as back up, which were were grateful for when Terah tripped and twisted her ankle. As she was crying about it, she said "but it's pretty common." Somehow it seemed she felt some reassurance in telling herself that nothing unusual had happened to her. She also needed to keep making sure we knew that she was still sad that it had happened. But by the time we got back to the gates she was hoping to climb, her ankle had healed!

The pond did not disappoint. The ripples and the leaves and the clouds making for interesting reflections... I only wished we could have sat there much longer. Had we, though, and I'm pretty sure Terah might have ended up in the water. We got away with only one foot wet!

 

We pulled ourselves away to get home and make a pretty quick turn around. But I took with me the little space being out in nature had created inside of me. The hike was a much needed part of this day of remembering, and provided a time for a little bit of memory sharing as we walked and talked. I love that Kali ascertained that orange was Nora's favorite color. It's a wonderful color for anyone with a fall birthday. The world is glowing in yellows, oranges and reds right now. It was the little yellow leaves that really drew my attention and as I held them I also noticed my turquoise fingernail, reminding me of another Norah we were remembering and honoring on this day.

A number of people were curious yesterday how long we have been doing this so I just went digging. We held our first blood drive around on Nora's birthday in 2012. We have done it every anniversary of her death and every birthday since so this makes 15! And I don't see the tradition ending anytime soon, though it has changed over time.

This was our second drive at the Keezletown Ruritan Club  - they have been so generous in letting us use that great space for the last two drives! It was also our second with the Red Cross - we worked out a lot of bugs since the last one and this one flowed so smoothly. It was also the second time that we were remembering both our Nora and our friends' daughter Norah who died this spring. We were not wishing for another family to join us in this way. But also grateful for a space and time set aside to honor her and hopefully support them in a very small but tangible way. In the face of such immense loss it often feels hard to know what one can do to provide any comfort.

 

There was also a first for this blood drive. Kali was old enough to donate, with parental permission! Once again my daughter surprises me - she wanted me to add her to the schedule! Her nervousness was definitely on the rise as the drive approached, but her resolve to give it a try was also strong! As it turned out, by the time she was getting checked in, I was in the chair donating and so I was not able to be right by her. But it didn't take much to see that she was visibly shaking from nervousness. She passed the check in with flying colors (surpassing my 12.8 hemoglobin levels with her 14.4 - she has some extra to give)!

  

 

 

They had to give her some extra time to try to calm down. Grandpa was there giving her breathing tips but her whole body was trembling. Then we suggested that she say some of her lines from the upcoming play she is in. Before long she was reciting one of their common warm ups: "Betty Botter bought a bit of butter. But the bit of butter Betty Botter bought was bitter. So Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter and mixed it with the bitter butter to make the bitter butter better." That did the trick. Before long she was rolling and seemed a bit surprised at how easy it ended up being. Phew! Great first time experience!!

There were lots of old and new faces - some have given at many blood drives in the past and some were new to join us and were new to donate. It was a mixture of members of our community and of Eric and Peggy's, as well as some overlap. 

 

A highlight for me was most definitely having a sweet 7 month old little one to snuggle and play with while her parents donated. She is the age Nora was when her little body tuckered out. I so enjoyed interacting with this vibrant, sweet little person.

So many people contributed to making the event a success. We had volunteers sitting at the welcome/registration table. Many people contributed a whole smattering of amazing snacks. We had some drop in just to give hugs and support. And lots of kids were available to provide a much needed distraction at times. And then all those that came to donate blood - we surpassed any previous drives with over 35 successful donations (I don't actually know the final count but we had 44 of us on the schedule, 3 that cancelled late or didn't show up, and a few that didn't meet the iron mark...). The staff were incredible to work with, excellent at what they did and really caring and fun! No complaints! It was a very long afternoon/evening for our family but we came home in good spirits around 8:30 p.m. (Kali had left for play practice at 6:30 p.m. so we even managed the transition home without her help!).

Before leaving, Terah and Alida got to tear around for a few minutes dancing in the empty hall! Oh, and dancing reminds me - the purple outfit! Terah has fallen in love with this beaded shirt and skirt. And it just so happens that it is the very outfit that Kali wore to Nora's memorial service where she danced while a group from Shalom sang, "Nothing is Lost on the Breath of God." I learned today that one of my students lost loved ones on October 30 many years ago. Now Nora's story is intertwined for me once more with additional stories of love and loss. We are not alone - in our need to celebrate, to grieve, to care for each other, to honor our stories and the stories of others, and to work at making the world a more beautiful, just and loving place!

Teaching cheesemaking, October's family outing and piglet update!

It's been a particularly difficult month to conjure up the emotional energy and carve out time for blogging! But that doesn't mean that life doesn't keep trucking along and providing plenty of "blog-worthy" moments! So here on this Halloween night, with the storms rolling in, Kali doing dishes, Jason tucking squashes into the root cellar for winter, Alida cleaning up from her Halloween costume preparations and Terah searching for my knitting needle so she can "knit," I will attempt to share a few recent highlights!

Since September, I've done 3 cheese workshops for different groups - apprentices from Radical Roots farm, second year fellows from Allegheny Mountain Institute (AMI) and students from CJP. Yes, it was maybe a bit much, and ended up being a tad stressful as it coincided with a dip in milk availability. I was wondering up to the last minute if there would be enough milk to "play" with! It all worked out fine and was really fun! On the last one we went all out and made ricotta cheese, mozzarella cheese, cheddar cheese, farmers cheese, yogurt and butter in 4 hours! I was entirely too busy to also photograph these events. This is one of the only pictures I snapped...

The AMI fellows joined us for a full day, so in between steps making cheddar and mozzarella we attempted to give them a taste of other things on the homestead they wanted to learn more about. They didn't help narrow down the options as they were interested in everything from seed saving to chicken breeding to cover cropping and crop rotations, to humanure composting. It was a whirlwind of a day! Another not well photographed day but a good one. The girls seem to enjoy having others around from time to time and since the working title for my cheese workshops is "how to make ____ with a kid under foot" it is probably good that Terah filled the role well of the "kid under foot!"

And then there was a very different kind of day for us. This one requires a bit of background. Our girls love the summer reading program. It especially motivates Alida to read a lot and this year she put a whole bunch of extra reading slips into the pot to win a trip to the Massanutten WaterPark. She won! I think I never thought she would win so didn't really think through the repercussions of that possibility. It didn't feel good for just one of us to take her and not let Kali and Terah enjoy the outing. But if we took Terah and Kali then we needed both adults to manage the age differences and thus differences in what kids would enjoy doing. So that meant a family outing to the water park - Jason willingly gave up his choice of October family outings to make this be that (as we knew we couldn't add anything additional to the month)! 

Let's just say the water park is pretty strategic in their giving of free coupons. It works out really well for them. It wasn't until we were at the cashier that we learned Alida's free ticket was a "twilight" ticket meaning it was for evening-only. So we could "upgrade" it to an all day pass - anything is possible if the "price is right." We certainly planned to go all day if we were going to go at all - I was hoping we might at least attempt to "get our money's worth." After forking over about $175 we entered. You more or less need a locker to store your things and you pay $25 and then get either $10 cash when you return the key or $15 towards their arcade. I tried to not think of all the schemes for getting more money of people and turned my attention to enjoying the time we had there as much as possible. 

We did pick a perfect day to go. It was a school day. We went for the whole time they were open (about 12-8 p.m.) and we enjoyed very little waiting for any of the rides. It was no wonder Terah fell soundly asleep on the way home! It was a mega dose of stimulation for all of us for sure! Alida found her favorite slide and Terah found hers and they went around and around. Jason, Kali and I got to enjoy going in pairs with each other to the big slides at various points. And Jason and I each took a few short stints in the over-18 hot tub. For me the biggest benefit to the day was that I was away from my computer for over 8 hours. That was a treat!

 

 

Let's circle back to Tangly Woods and end with a piglet update! They are over a month old now (going on 6 weeks) and they have discovered their appetites! They now relish their mama's milk and also the scraps from cidermaking we have, weeds we bring them and are now even diving into the slop - and I mean that quite literally as they are too short to reach over the pans so they normally just jump right in! They enjoy play fighting with each other and they tear around their house. The one day when we were watching one piglet took off one direction and another the other way and they both came around a corner and ran right into each other. The short video at the end will show that they provide a good deal of entertainment and giggles!

 

Watching Things Fall - guest poem by Jason

This goes with the September 22, 2019 post - it's just taken this long for Jason to have some writing time to put his thoughts together from our time together!

My wife’s Great Aunt Eleanor came to stay. She cut the ends off the beans I brought in from the garden, she jumped up and washed dishes after every supper, she stooped to gather chestnuts and sat on the ground to smash the hulls off of walnuts.  Though she says her hands are starting to look a little funny, they and her back don’t hurt her. For that, she said, she is thankful. 

She is nearly the last of those she knew. Her mother, she told us around our Virginia dinner table, died after birthing her sister, who had to be sent to live with her grandparents. Eleanor was about three, she thought. Our youngest is three now. Over the nine days of her visit, they spent hours together watching trees: on the porch swing under the walnuts, or at a picnic table by the chestnuts. “I like to sit,” she said, “Where I can watch things fall.”

She grew up in Pennsylvania, just miles from where I did, but fifty years earlier. One evening she described for us the world she knew there; things she hadn’t remembered in a long time: There was the brook where she would lie on her belly in the water and feast her eyes on pebbles. The slate sink with the hand pump in the kitchen. Everyone sitting at the table with a heap of black walnuts to be shelled. Fun, she said, was not part of their family life. But shelling walnuts together was something she enjoyed. 

She recalled walking in the door to the scent of a chicken (a real chicken) cooking in a pot; errands to where the butcher had a shop over the hill; a time the children gathered there to watch workers slaughter a steer; the way his head was pulled down by a ring installed through his nose and tethered to the floor; how his blood spilled away. She remembered the waste pipe running underground from the shop, emptying its red fluids into the stream where the children used to splash and wade. “It didn’t hurt us any,” she said.

She never could swim. “I’m not proud of that,” she said. “Everyone should learn.” Some eighty-five years after it happened, she recounted to us the fear of a boy tossed into a pond by his friends: “What a terrible thing to do to a person!” If he survived the war that may have come for him; if in his own late years there has been someone to hear his stories, has he told of the day he was hauled from the water—coughing and flailing—by the same laughing boys who threw him in? Did he mention (did he notice?) the small girl clinging to a wire fence, looking on with pity, the water up to her neck?

Our eight-year-old had a friend over one of the evenings, and that time we could hardly finish a sentence for the noise of giggles. We apologized, but Eleanor said don’t worry, that girls sound the same everywhere, and told of the Catholic teen she had known, at whose home she’d spent the night once after their shirt-making shift. Their giggles after dark drew shushes from the Irish parents on the other side of the bedroom curtain-wall.

Those giddy girls! Could they have known their peril? Each would step or lean or fall into her future; it’s a past now, rendered simple in the telling. Eleanor is 94: So much has come to her--8 children (she’s still plagued by stressful dreams of laundry), a true marriage long and joyous, faith and optimism through the decades, open-eyed contentment and a wealth of love--since those two girls walked out together from the factory, their laughter brilliant in the waning light.

Jason Myers-Benner, September 2019

A wedding, fall harvests/planting, AND a birthday!

The sun is shining in the front windows, Terah and Alida are playing happily in the living room together, Kali is out taking care of her ducks and Jason is working on cover crops. I've got plenty of pictures downloaded and ready to share. I will mostly let the pictures speak for the events of recent days. Beautiful times with beautiful people in the beautiful world outside. And while I've been able to be present to some of it, due to stress of an unprecedented nature at my work, the last 10 days have been pretty painful. For that reason, my mind and heart has often not been where my body is. So I'm most definitely putting on the "family scrapbooker" hat right now and will do my best to share here for the record a glimpse of the wonderful highlights of recent days!

Last weekend we got new neighbors! We are so happy to welcome Jonathan and Christen to Happy Valley Road. They not only moved in, but also hosted their wedding and party at their new home all in one weekend! It was fun to be able to host a meal for some of their family and friends Friday evening and then Saturday was a full day of ritual and celebration as they committed themselves to each other and the land and we to our relationships with them. A beautiful and emotional day. We look forward to sharing life together in this place and hopefully growing old together!

I provided farmer's and cheddar cheese for the wedding party. I decided to cut the rind off my cheddar rounds for the occasion as some seem to really like the cheddar rind and some think the rind is not edible and leave it on their plates. I didn't want lots of rinds going to waste so I cut them off ahead of them. Then I had LOTS of cheddar rind so it seemed the time for an experiment: what would happen if I dried all the rind down and then pulverized it? What I hoped was that I would get a very flavorful parmesan-like cheese. I did. Yippee!

So one weekend a wedding and the next weekend a birthday. And our littlest was sure eager to be 4. The numbers lover in me was also eagerly anticipating that we would then have 4, 8 and 16 year old girls. I think it is pretty cute that 4+4 =8 and 8+8=16. Our last fun combination was when Terah was 2, Alida 7 and Kali 14 (2x7=14). I haven't figured out if there are any fun ones coming down the line. More than the numbers, I'm enjoying each of our girls at the unique ages and stages they are at.

We gave Terah one of her presents (her very own pruners and flower trimmers) the day before her birthday as we were pretty sure she'd like to try them out for the final corn and squash harvests of the year. She did! Jason and I marveled at the large winter squashes we pulled out of the patch. After the horrendous start to the season, we were bracing ourselves for very little winter squash. I am once again nothing short of amazed at plants!

 

On the eve of Terah's birth we had fun all laying in bed together and looking at pictures and videos of Terah as a baby and then we cracked open the folder of photos of her actual birth. Due to the fact that I lose all sense of modesty when laboring, those pictures are only for family viewing but Terah got to see herself being born and we talked through the labor. At one point I said something like "I was working pretty hard at that point." As we flipped through the pictures, Terah piped up, "But it was worth it." Oh, it was so worth it!

As we flipped through pictures, we had this very fun realization: On the eve of Terah's birth, Alida was wearing the exact same footie pajamas that Terah had on at that moment (the eve of her fourth birthday).

There was no sleeping in for Terah on her birthday. I was still trying to wrap up a few work things and so she got busy splitting apart garlic cloves for planting later that day. It took considerable effort to keep her occupied with other things until Jason was done chores and Kali was up. She was eager to open some presents!

So the day was a mix of specific birthday fun and family gardening (which was also fun!). We got our hard and soft neck garlic planted, harvested the ginger and brought in the pineapple and amaryllis. Terah enjoyed her new sewing cards and paints, helped me make the cupcakes for her birthday, savored the extra attentiveness of her big sisters to her every whim and then we welcomed Aunt Christie who joined in time for her birthday dinner and was staying with us for the weekend. It was a good day and her party was not even until the next day! At breakfast we had started eating before she reminded us, "You didn't sing Happy Birthday to me." We fixed that immediately! And lest one questions the picture of her vacuuming below, this gal is EAGER to be grown up and do things she could not do previously so operating the vacuum solo is a sign of her grown-up-ness, as is using sharp knives in the kitchen!

Yesterday was her second day of minikickers and I was able to be with her for this one. She was mostly attached to me for the hour and still would not play freeze tag. On a few of the activities, she got comfortable enough to let go of my hand for a few minutes. I've noticed that she almost always sticks her tongue out when kicking the ball! She seemed to mostly enjoy it but is still hesitant to fully engage. There are a number of things about the set up of the whole thing that I think could easily be tweaked to increase kiddo comfort.

Following soccer for all three girls, the attention turned to party time! Terah along with 21 others who love her dearly celebrated together last evening over a meal of all her favorite foods - though she mostly just ate the boxed macaroni and cheese - and a birthday egg hunt and some pin the tail or bow on the bunny. She was still going strong after 9 p.m. Her mother was not! She seemed to feel loved and celebrated, so I'd say her 4th birthday was a success! Currently, as I write this blog, she is enjoying her new sticker activity books from her aunts!

 

P.s. And, in case anyone is wondering, the piglets are still cute!