A Running Collection

This morning a friend popped in for a cup of coffee, a chat and to bring me a phone to replace my cracked, decrepit retangular device with an apple with a bite out of it on the back. That's about all that was left of it. We were chatting on the front steps soaking in the sun while Amelia sat and worked on some math problems. My friend is a graphic designer and photographer. She is passionate about taking beautiful paper and string and graphics and creating invitations, notecards, business cards, stamps, paper pads, and all things paper and designing beautiful presentations. When I've opened an invitation from Krysten, I feel like I need to sit down and have an experience with the texture and font and color and style. She gives thoughtful, beautiful, artistic presentation to paper and picture. We were explaining presentation to curious Amelia in between math problems. She went on with her work and we moved on in our conversation. This afternoon, we began our weekly writi...

She’s figured out where the eggs come from. She knows that we collect them in a basket and put them in cartons. She wants to do all of it. Her careful face leans in close to Amelia and begs for a chance to move an egg from the basket to the carton. And to see them all lined up! Hannah wants careful, but if we don’t stay right with her, she opts to dump and destroy. She’s practicing egg collecting taking simple steps with Amelia to guide them into their little spot. She’s Amelia’s little apprentice. And the piggies are her friends. They trolley over to her to chat without much grumbling since they know she doesn’t bring them food yet. But she found an empty bucket, and worked with it from the porch to the pasture. In the quiet afternoon, there was a little tug and bump and lag of metal and leg and ground. She marched that bucket along the fence line looking for a place to give them imaginary feed.  And when she had finished her job, Hannah stopped to chat.

 She collects bundles of sage, lavender, and rosemary and ties them together and hangs them to dry from an old pole she found in the yard. She finds succulents wherever she goes and knows she can snap off a little piece and stick in some soil and grow into a mighty plant. She knows their names. She takes little clippings and gently places them in little glass bottles and lines them up in the window.  In the middle of it all, she has a beautiful collection of shells. Organized (as long as Hannah hasn't visited her room) by type, color, and size. I love to look at it. Beauty she's found in the world she walks.  She tends her plants like she tends her chickens. She's figuring out the best light and temp and moisture.  Amelia took her birthday money and went to Tallahassee Nurseries and bought cactus dirt mix and some plants and herbs and made containers out the back door.  Her room is her green house. Dirt. Green. Grow. Learn. Being...

  --> Ten pound weight sits on my chest. The beast. It heaves and pounds and pulls and groans at the pile of laundry, the cluttered floor, the mountain of dirty dishes, the whining one year old who is a. teething b. has an ear infection c. has the rotavirus or d. all of the above, the unfinished, one hour long math lesson that should have taken 20 minutes, the child that doesn’t want a nap and needs one so badly, the child that thinks that his sister is being bossy so he is sad and forlorn, the husband that is tired and wants to be heard and loved and appreciated and fascinating, the lack of sleep, the coffee orders and egg deliveries, garden to tend, the meal to make and the toilets to clean. Is anyone in this house listening? The house that needs pressure washing.   I need a new computer. The cards to send. The people to call. The appointments to make. The emails to respond to. I can’t get to the dentist and it’s been a million years and ...

 Bubbles. It started on George Wilder’s birthday. A friend brought his gigantic bubble maker. The kids danced around the yard whirling and twirling and tumbling after bubbles. They were mesmerizing and slightly terrifying as large as they were – that it was possible to see something otherworldly float before your eyes and hang there, silent and mystifying. Exactly the kind of thing Amelia finds captivating. The next morning, she had out an old fishing pole and a stick and with the bubble solution our bubble making friend left behind, she set to work to create her own bubbles. We’ve been gifted several gallons of solution and all the kids have found multiple ways to create bubbles and bubble experiments.    George Wilder did a little research on bubbles and learned about their molecular structure. They have figured out that if you wear a rubber glove and cover it in wet bubble solution that you can stick your hand through a bubble and it won’t pop. You’ll pr...