A Running Collection

I was feeling bad.  I can’t really say what it was. I just didn’t feel like myself. Then things were happening like major cramping and pulling and pushing in my abdomen. I was so uncomfortable. Thought maybe I was dying. Then I googled it and google confirmed it was probably just ovarian cysts.  So, I went with my self diagnosis to the doctor and he said I was wrong - shocker! My uterus wasn’t happily situated anymore after carrying four very large babies. The doctor said I would feel a lot better if he took it out.  He took it out.  Right before I had surgery, a few women who had experienced the same thing told me they felt so much better afterwards. They said, “It was the best thing they ever did.” They said, “I didn’t even know how bad I felt…” Now I say all those things.  The healing process was horrible. Pain and more pain and exhaustion and weakness. My mom came and spent 10 days doing all the things I do. I sat and...

 She makes these colors from ant hills, collard greens, polk berries, chalk, dirt, ashes, rust. She mixes and mashes and moves them from container to container. She even made this paper with sweet forever friend Aida while we visited her over the weekend. She would create all day everyday. She wants to weave, and spin. She wants to hammer and nail. She wants to cut and piece together, she wants to sew and knit and stitch. She recently learned about silk and wants to find a cocoon and try to take it apart and make thread. She loves to read and read and read. She wants to talk about all things and learn about all things.  She fiddles and acts and she tells her brothers what to do. And she still has her chickens and loves to watch the birds.

The weather was glorious and cool. The children all found exactly what they wanted to do and did that thing all weekend. 

 We put in lots of extra nails in the roofs. We nailed doors shut, we got stuff situated and we waiting. We lost electricity for 5 days. It was hot and muggy, but we were so very thankful that we didn't have any damage. We cleaned up the mess and left it at the road and the city picked it up. Neighboring towns' electric companies worked in our neighborhood. One young man gave William his hat. He ended up being in the newspaper!

My friend, Claire, posted pictures of her kiddos tree houses that they created in the heat of summer. We were twiddling thumbs one afternoon and I grabbed supplies. Days of creation.

Hannah hits a wall about 10:30 in the morning. She needs a snack and some serious dedicated attention.  She helps herself to little tangerines about this time of day and 3-6 later, she’s ready to explore or do something specific and thoughtful.  Picking flowers, planting seeds, picking greens, shelling peas, walking. . . Real things. This is not the time of day for blocks or dolls or books, it’s the time of day for real things.  On day, I really didn’t have any ideas for what that time would look like. The pool often has worked as a real thing to do, but she is done with that and the water feels a little cold to her.  So, I thought we might collect acorns. It worked! We hunted acorns for an hour and gathered them in a glass bowl for display.  Besides needing time to do real things at 10:30 and eating pounds of oranges and food in general, Hannah loves words. She rolls words around and plays with them. Recently, William and I we...

Every month, we study an artist. Of course we look at the classics, famous painters and popular ones too. We just finished a study of Vermeer's art.  He uses the same colors and, if you look really closely, the same floor, the same table cloth, the same maps, and even the same outfits in his paintings. The same black and white checkered floor appears over and over. The Girl With A Pearl Earring is really intriguing, but his artwork tells the story of a culture obsessed with travel and music and color and class and his paintings tell the story of a man of very little means, piecing together, with what he could collect, the story of his society. I have to admit, I was ready for something more modern. I’ve always known Jackson Pollock was the splatter painter, but that was really all I had up my sleeve. I figured he would be fun to study. It turns out that, when we took the time to really study his paintings, we found stories and songs - He often painted to Gershwi...