The arrival of Joy and Thunder

My first glimpse of the newly named Thunder (the kids named him on the way home; blame Mary O'Hara), in the trailer




















Joy (we've decided to abbreviate her triple-barreled registration name) and Thunder get a first look at their new home; Thunder follows his mother very closely, and doesn't need a lead just yet,






























Our original horse, Sioux, an aging black Standardbred, at left, below; she is as curious about her new corral-mates as Joy is concerned about protecting her colt and her privacy. The cattle on the other side of the fence came over for a look-see, too.















The cats, however, are unimpressed. As usual.

The perils of the rural auction sale

Yesterday morning around 10, Tom and the kids left me at home washing windows to attend a farm sale an hour or so away. Tom had his eye on a smaller tractor, one we could use for rototilling around the shelterbelt trees, that was listed in the auction flyer last week.

Well, when they finally rolled in nine hours later, after an afternoon spent eating cups full of homemade beef-and-barley and chicken noodle soup and countless pieces of pie (one of the benefits of the rural auction sale is the food at the concession stand), the kids reported that Dad didn't get the tractor. They seemed unusually giddy.

"But we got HORSES!"

It turns out Tom was the winning bidder on a 14-year-old gray Paint mare and her gray colt, and the mare is supposedly in foal (stay tuned next Spring), a bargain for $550, even without the baby-to-be. If the kids were giddy last night, it didn't compare to this morning while they were getting ready to hitch up the trailer to go with Tom to bring home the new horses.

Pictures to follow.

Cow, girl, cowgirl

This one has been halter broken. And thoroughly spoiled.
(The one on the left, that is.)

Cows, boys, cowboys

Interestingly, the black heifer in the top three pictures hasn't been halter broken. She's just an unusually placid and patient young cow, who seems to enjoy being around kids.

Poetry Friday: the week that was

Harvest started this week with swathing (cutting the crops -- the row they fall in is called a swath), and the first killing frost arrived Wednesday night. The second one, last night, and the furnace kicked in for good measure. Goodbye tomatoes, cosmos, and zinnias, and hello, happy pantry and busy days. Or busy pantry and happy days. My week in numbers:

Poem for Poetry Friday: one, and it's a short (anonymous) one:

There was once a young lady of Ryde
Who ate a green apple and died;
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented,
And made cider inside her her inside.

Oh heck, make it two:

A maiden caught stealing a dahlia,
Said, "Oh, you shan't tell on me, shahlia?"
But the florist was hot,
And he said, "Like as not
They'll send you to jail, you bad gahlia."

HipWriterMama is hosting today's Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, HWM!

The rest of my week in numbers:

Apples and crab apples picked in the past week: 15 boxes

Cider we pressed ourselves the other night on the deck: 16 four-liter pails, stored away in the deep-freeze

Evans cherries picked Wednesday night before the killing frost: three four-liter pails. Today I'll make cherry preserves, to use later on as pie filling or sauce for ice cream or cheesecake.

Vases full of cut flowers from the garden while I can still enjoy them: eight

Apple pies baked: two

Roasts cooked: three (two chickens, and one enormous pork roast, served with homemade apple sauce)

Boxes of tomatoes in my kitchen: three, one with green tomatoes, one with red ones, and one half-and-half, on the way to red, one last big box picked before the first frost.

Remaining cucumbers and zucchini left on the vines, discovered before the frost: one each.

Pumpkins we are trying to keep warm and growing: three

Number of meals featuring freshly picked or somehow preserved apples and/or tomatoes and/or berries: all of 'em

Enormous "Farmer Boy"-style meals prepared to feed the swathing crew, around the kitchen table and hauled to the field to be eaten as a tailgate supper: three

Evening meetings out of the house: two, last night and tonight.

"Nice Matters" award from Frankie at Kitchen-Table Learners: one, which made my week. Thanks, dear. It's always nice to be nice, especially when people in town seem to be giving you sidelong glances because your fingernails look black (but are really stained from chokecherry juice) and your palms are green and smell funny (from picking tomatoes), no matter how hard you scrubbed with the nail brush and half a cut lemon.

Our late summer visitor

I noticed this morning while feeding the chickens that all eight roosters were outside in the pen. This is unusual because the four at the top of the pecking order generally stroll around the pen, lording and swanning around, while the four at the bottom of the pecking order quake and cower on the roosts in their little coop. But they were all outdoors this morning. I neared the door, to fill the feeder and peer into the semi-darkness.

And there I saw a bird on the roost. It didn't look roosterlike, though. It was much more straight up and down, with its head tucked in its shoulder. I whistled, and it raised its head. It was a hawk. In my chicken coop. I quickly and quietly closed the door, and when we got back to the house, instead of proceeding with the chokecherry syrup odyssey, phoned the Fish & Wildlife office in town. I've learned to do a lot of things since moving to the farm, but catching raptors isn't one, and I have a healthy respect for their talons.

An officer turned up on our doorstop before too long, and the kids were all excitement to tumble into the truck and show him our visitor. (I grabbed the digital camera so Tom wouldn't think I'd been hitting the sauce, chokecherry or otherwise, in his absence.) The officer headed toward the coop with a net,























and quickly and easily netted the hawk. Then the untangling,





















and identifying. I had thought from my brief glimpse in the partial dark that it might be a young red-tailed hawk but it was a ferruginous hawk (Buteo regalis), and regal the young male was. Ferruginous hawks aren't quite as common around here, since their range is a bit further south, usually the southeastern corner of the province. The ferruginous hawk dives for prey from high soaring flights, which is probably how our visitor got between the squares of the page wire over the chicken pen.

And then the best part, when the Fish & Wildlife officer asked the kids if they'd each like to hold the hawk. Davy kept his distance and said no, thanks, but Daniel and Laura were eager. The officer helped them grab the bird's legs (thank goodness for kids who keep work gloves at the ready) and then let each child hold the bird alone. Daniel got to go first,
















Laura went next



















and later got to release the hawk, I tried to snap pictures as quickly as possible, and then the cautious Davy got to ride partway home in the officer's truck and sound the siren and the lights (needless to say, more than one of the kids has added "Fish & Wildlife officer" -- or junior falconer -- to the list of possible desirable occupations). After Laura released the hawk, throwing her arm up high and steadily as instructed, our young friend took off for the trees at the edge of our corrals to rest and recuperate from his adventure,























It's almost enough to make me sorry that the kids aren't headed toward a regular classroom next week, so they could answer the old question: What did you do on your summer vacation?!

All roads lead to home and hard work

"Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them."
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), quoted in "The Case Against Adolescence" by Robert Epstein

I started Farm School two years ago in part because I blathered on for much too long on the subject of children and independence at L's blog Schola. Independence, self-reliance, and responsibility are among the values Tom and I talked about teaching children when we thought about getting married. And these values are a good part of the reason I decided that it would probably be better to raise children on the Canadian prairie than Manhattan's Upper West Side; I'm not saying it's impossible (I think my parents did a fabulous job), but 40 years on it seems rather easier in this neck of the woods.

While we didn't start homeschooling with the idea that it would be a good way of further inculcating those values, it didn't take Tom and me long to realize that this educational experiment is as ideal for our child-rearing purposes as it is for our academic ones. And I'm always keen to read anything that supports our rather old-fashioned notions when it comes to raising kids.

So I was more than interested to learn a couple of months ago, at Susan's blog Corn & Oil, about the new book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen (Quill Driver Books, 2007) by Robert Epstein, a psychologist and former editor-in-chief of Pyschology Today magazine. The idea behind the book is that (from the front flap)

teen turmoil is caused by outmoded systems put in place a century ago which destroyed the continuum between childhood and adulthood.

Where this continuum still exists in other countries, there is no adolescence. Isolated from adults, American teens learn everything they know from their media-dominated peers -- "the last people on earth they should be learning from," says Epstein.

Which, in my case at least, means the good doctor is preaching to the converted. While I tend to think that part of the problem with the way kids are being raised is that they are being raised by advice from books rather than from parents' hearts or instincts or the way they themselves were raised by their own parents (somehow that all seems too easy...), at least there seem to be some better parenting books to choose from nowadays, including Dr. Epstein's. And as you can see from the bit above, The Case Against Adolescence contains echoes of Hold On to Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Mate, another book I like, though I don't find mention of the title or authors in the index.

But I've already found, just partway through chapter three, mention of the two home education gurus, former New York public school teacher John Taylor Gatto and the late John Holt; a peek at the index shows three mentions of "Home Schooling" toward the end of the book. Dr. Epstein notes that Gatto addresses "quite explicitly, ... the artificial extension of childhood" in his latest book, The Underground History of American Education (an excerpt of which was published in Harper's Magazine in September 2003, and which I saw the very week I hit upon the alternative of home schooling for Laura. Yes, I took it as a good omen).

The Case Against Adolescence owes a considerable debt to Jean Liedloff's 1977 classic, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Lost Happiness, which I read while pregnant with Laura, after coming across a secondhand copy at a library book sale. Indeed, the CC website's main page features glowing quotes about the book from both Dr. Epstein ("This book is the work of a genius" in Psychology Today) and John Holt ("I don't know whether the world can be saved by a book, but if it could be, this might just be the book.")

Just last night, I read Dr. Epstein's handy summary of Liedloff's two years with the Yequana Indians of Venezuela:

There is no distinct separation between childhood and adulthood in the tribe; instead, there is a continuum of activities, behaviors, and expectations. Expectations are modest when children are young and increase gradually and smoothly over the years, but the goals are always clear: the development of self-reliance and the full integration of the child into the world of responsible adulthood. Responsibility and authority are never forced on anyone, but they're given freely as soon as a child shows an interest in taking them on. Independent decision making is encouraged, because "leaving the choice to the child from the earliest age keeps his judgment at peak efficiency," and the child's "self protecting ability" is trusted to keep him or her from serious harm.

In contrast, she says, we weaken and damage our children by overprotecting them; we even impair their ability to make reasonable decisions and to protect themselves.

And then, still mulling over the development of this "self-protecting ability" this morning, I happened upon today's New York Times article on claims of possible child abuse in connection with Kid Nation, a new show to air in September:

The ads promoting “Kid Nation,” a new reality show coming to CBS next month, extol the incredible experience of a group of 40 children, ages 8 to 15, who built a sort of idealistic society in a New Mexico ghost town, free of adults. For 40 days the children cooked their own meals, cleaned their own outhouses, formed a government and ran their own businesses, all without adult intervention or participation.

To at least one parent of a participant, who wrote a letter of complaint to New Mexico state officials after the show had completed production, the experience bordered on abuse and neglect. Several children required medical attention after drinking bleach that had been left in an unmarked soda bottle, according to both the parent and CBS. One 11-year-old girl burned her face with splattered grease while cooking.

The children were made to haul wagons loaded with supplies for more than a mile through the New Mexico countryside, and they worked long hours — “from the crack of dawn when the rooster started crowing” until at least 9:30 p.m., according to Taylor, a 10-year-old from Sylvester, Ga., who was made available by CBS to respond to questions about conditions on the set.

I also came across a Los Angeles Times article from last week, "Kid Nation" parents: What were they thinking?, where three women were interviewed to "respond to the critics condemning them for allowing their children to participate in the CBS show". Said one mother, about her 10-year-old, an only child,

He does live in what I call a sheltered environment. He goes to a small school. Most of the schoolmates and friends that he knows he's known almost his entire life. I thought that this was a good opportunity for Zachary to experience some independence and learn some self-reliance. And if he was able to do this, I thought that was a very good way for him to build confidence in himself.

I worry that in today's world kids don't realize things they might have to face in life that might be difficult because, I think, as baby boomers we tend to be very protective of them. And I want him to know that he has the capability to be out in the world and be independent and self-reliant.

All this of course after I've spent the past few weeks on and off delightedly wallowing in Mildred Armstrong Kalish's charming memoir, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Unvarnished and homespun, these are the stories, words, and advice of a real grandmother eager to share her own part of a disappearing world, and to let later generations know the lasting value of pulling up your socks and putting your nose to the grindstone. As I read through each of the chapters, from her earliest reminiscences to the recipes to her later life as detailed in Epilogue, I realized that Mrs. Kalish has written about a happiness and freedom in childhood, and a contentment in adulthood, that today are sadly rare. From Little Heathens,

The summer after I graduated from eighth grade I ... was delighted to go to work as a hired girl on a large farm south of [the town of] Garrison. The family consisted of Cecil, Anna, and their two girls and four boys, ranging in age from one and a half to eleven. Cecil hired one or two extra men in the summer. That meant that Ann and I cooked, set the table, and did the dishes for at least ten people, three times a day.

Anna paid me four dollars a week for my work on the farm, and I was especially proud of that for my closest girlfriends and all of my other friends were being paid only three and a half dollars. Of course, we all received room and board, too.

Here I should report that we were also accepted as full-fledged members of the family, for hired girls were not treated as maids. In fact, I was the only one in this family who had a private room. Located at the top of the crooked stairs, it was about five feet wide by ten feet long, and it had a window overlooking the huge vegetable garden. To me it was a palace.

During those summer months we rose at five-thirty A.M., unless it was haying or threshing time on the farm; then we got up at four-thirty. Anna and I timed it so that we got up just after the men, who immediately disappeared to the barns to do the morning chores. Anna built a fire in the iron kitchen range, while I put the copper teakettle on along with the gray, graniteware coffee boiler and got the bacon started. As the kitchen filled with the delicious fragrance of the bacon crisping and browning, I carried jam, a whole pound of butter, sliced bread, a large pitcher of milk, and a smaller pitcher of heavy cream to the table, which was already set for ten people. Then I carefully broke twenty eggs into a mixing bowl and waited for one of the boys to report that the men were ready for breakfast. At that point I poured the blow of eggs into the gigantic iron skillet and fried them to perfection in bacon fat, sunny-side up.

If there was a delay, or if the men had an especially busy day before them, I might make an applesauce cake -- the very one I described in an earlier chapter. Here again, the family training in thinking ahead and always doing more than was required stood me in good stead. I could whip up that cake in just a few minutes since I kept a ready supply of homemade applesauce in the pantry; it would bake while we were eating breakfast and would be ready to eat with our second cups of coffee.

I could handle almost every task in Anna's household; I could even make gravy without lumps, for heaven's sake. There was always something to do on that farm: cakes, cookies, and pies to bake; potatoes, radishes, beets, carrots, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, and beans to pick, wash, clean, and peel; chickens to kill, scald, pluck, singe, draw, and disjoint; dishes to wash and dry; clothing to wash; laundry to be hung on the line, then taken down from the line, folded, and ironed. And every day, we made beds for ten people. Everything I had learned in my early years [up until eighth grade] I put to use as a hired girl for this family.

The children all helped in as many ways as they could. They would make their own beds, wash vegetables, carry wood and water, set the table, dry dishes, and gather eggs and apples. Like the children I grew up with, they understood that hey played a part in making the family work.

We had fun with one another. There was a lot of joking, laughing, and good-natured teasing. And often in the evening, on those occasions when we had somehow managed to finish our chores as well as our supper before dark, the kids would hep me with the dishes if I would agree to come outside afterward and play with them. We played hide-and-go-seek, touched-you-last, and may-I. Some evenings we would have water fights, tossing pails of water on one another. Or we might just sit out on the front porch and sing.

Or, as The New York Times article on alleged child abuse concluded,

“Everyone usually had a job,” said Mike, an 11-year-old from Bellevue, Wash., who participated in the show. Among them were cooking, cleaning, hauling water and running the stores, where, he said: “It was hard work, but it was really good. It taught us all that life is not all play and no work.”

Taylor, from Georgia, agreed. “I learned I have to work for what I want,” she said.

I'm sure both Mrs. Kalish and Dr. Epstein would approve. Pass the applesauce cake, please.



(Very likely more thoughts to come on The Case Against Adolescence, and Little Heathens, in upcoming posts.)

Country fair time!

The latest Country Fair of Homeschooling is up and ready to go. Meg is hosting this month -- thank you, Meg!

And I'm a day late with the news because I've been busy with our real life country fair, now celebrating its 101st year. The kids and I were at the work bee on Saturday, at the exhibit hall arranging and tidying yesterday, and tomorrow I'm at the hall all day helping to accept and arrange entries. The kids are busy today with last minute Lego creations to enter, the boys finished their wood projects last night, the sheaves are tied and ready to go. The fair opens Thursday, and we'll be at the fairgrounds bright and early to drop off our pen of five chickens and Laura's heifer, then we race back into town for the parade, then back to the fairgrounds for lunch and the chicken show. And that's just part of the first day.

So I'll be scarce around here until after the fair. It ends Saturday night, then we rest and recover Sunday, then back to the fairgrounds Monday for the volunteer clean-up. Tuesday I'll probably have to clean the house and tend the garden. And did I mention it's still hot? Yesterday we hit 35 degrees Celsius, and I heard our province was the hot spot for Canada for the day.

And in between everything, I'm sneaking peeks at Little Heathens, which finally arrived in yesterday's mail...

In the garden and around the farm

The kids' frog farm, with tadpoles and baby frogs found in the ditch by the house. Tom says he's never seen as many frogs as we have this year because of all the rains. Odd to think as children that I did more tadpole hunting, albeit at the Bronx and Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, than my country husband.







A closer view of one of the older frogs. Yes, one of the kids thought that the frog needed some lettuce from the garden.









The neighbors' derelict barn, amidst the (genetically modified) canola...

Little Heathens and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in The Christian Science Monitor

From today's Christian Science Monitor, from Marilyn Gardner's column, "A harvest of virtues as well as sustenance", with the subtitle, "Two new books remind readers how closely most Americans used to be connected to the land":

If spring is the season when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, summer is the time when a former Midwesterner's heart fills with a different kind of affection – a romance with the land.

For some of us, that romance is three-pronged. First, there is the love of the landscape itself: The way the horizon stretches endlessly, stitching together blue sky and black soil. The way silver silos glint in the sun. The way dairy cows graze in velvet pastures.

Then there is the romance with the bounty of that land, as reflected in the proverbial fruited plain and amber waves of grain. This is the month when the corn is supposed to be knee-high by the Fourth of July, and next month as high as an elephant's eye, at least in the view of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Finally, there are the bedrock values that spring from this fertile land, beginning with the virtues of hard work and cooperation that are required to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops, fruits, and vegetables.

This summer two authors offer reminders of those virtues. In "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," Barbara Kingsolver describes her family's year-long experiment in self-sufficiency. Their locus is Appalachia, not the Midwest, but the values are the same. ...

For Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of "Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression," rural life brought other lessons. ...

As Americans have moved from farms to cities, two profound changes have occurred. Younger generations have little knowledge of where food comes from. Many people have also lost an understanding of – and an appreciation for – hard physical labor. The poetic description of the Midwest as the nation's bread basket masks the intense labor and economic uncertainties farmers face. ...

Kingsolver knows that most families cannot replicate her family's experiment in self-reliance. Likewise, Kalish is not sentimental about the economic strains her family faced.

They understand that there is obviously no going back to a more rural way of life. But both books suggest an intriguing question: In a sophisticated urban and suburban culture, built on the premise of bigger, better, faster, and more expensive, is there value in encouraging a greater appreciation for simpler living, closer to families and the land when possible?

Kingsolver and Kalish both make eloquent, persuasive cases for answering in the affirmative. Sustenance, after all, comes in many forms.

Read the rest here.

Gosh all hemlock!

I'm enough of a Luddite that I found it more than a bit disconcerting earlier today, when bringing up the Amazon website to look at a book, to find the main page welcoming me with "Science Picks for Becky". But disconcertedness turned to intrigue when the first cover's illustration, and then its title, caught my eye: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, just out in May and just thirteen dollars and twenty cents. And the cover is adorable. A glowing five star review from someone who didn't seem to be related to Mrs. Kalish. Hmmm...

Then I went Google hunting and found Elizabeth Gilbert's glowing review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. On the front page. From which:

Some of what follows is unsurprising. You’ll never guess it, but these kids were taught to work. They planted potatoes, tended livestock, hayed fields and were beaten for any lapses in judgment. They did without luxuries (electricity, leisure, heat) and were never coddled on account of their tender youth. (“Childhood was generally considered to be a disease,” Kalish recalls, “or, at the very least, a disability, to be ignored for the most part, and remedied as quickly as possible.”)

For anyone from an old-school farming background, this is familiar territory. “We were taught that if you bought something it should last forever — or as close to forever as we could contrive,” Kalish reports predictably. Or: “When one of us kids received a scratch, cut or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.” If all that “Little Heathens” offered, then, were more such hard-times homilies, this would not be much of a book. But this memoir is richer than that, filled with fervency, urgency and one amazing twist, which surprised me to the point of a delighted, audible gasp: Mildred Armstrong Kalish absolutely loved her childhood.

It’s not merely that she appreciated the values instilled by the Great Depression, or that now, in her older years, she wants to preserve memories of a lost time (though all this is true). No — beyond that, she reports quite convincingly that she had a flat-out ball growing up (“It was quite a romp”) and her terrifically soaring love for those childhood memories saturates this book with pure charm, while coaxing the reader into the most unexpected series of sensations: joy, affection, wonder and even envy. ...

Later in life, Kalish became a professor, and while the foundation of her writing is still English-teacher English (orderly, with perfect posture) her old pagan rhythms seep through every disciplined paragraph. “This was our world,” she writes, but one gets the feeling that Garrison, Iowa, was really her world, which she experienced with the awe of a mystic. In the violet dusk of a cornfield, in the cool mornings on her way to chores, on the long, unsupervised walks to school, in the decadence of eating bacon drippings, heavy cream and ground-cherries, Kalish’s simple life routinely aroused her to an almost erotic extreme. (Then again, this was the only kind of eroticism available; the poor girl was never taught even the starkest fundamentals of human sexuality, regretting that “in those days, we were supposed to get such information from the gutter. Alas! I was deprived of the gutter, too!”) ...

Kalish is wise enough to know that the last link to the past is usually language, and rather than lament what’s been lost, she stays connected to her youthful world by using its gleeful, if outdated, lingo. (Tell me the last time you heard someone exclaim, “Not on your tintype!” or “Gosh all hemlock!”) She admits self-deprecatingly that there were certain expressions she heard spoken so often as a child that she grew up mistakenly thinking they were each a single word: “agoodwoman, hardearnedmoney, agoodhardworker, alittleheathen, adrunkenbum, demonrum and agoodwoolskirt.”

Memories too can run together like this, becoming mishmashed over time. Not with Mildred Armstrong Kalish, though. As a natural-born memoirist (by which I mean not only “one who writes an autobiography” but also “one who remembers everything”), Kalish has kept her memories tidily ordered for decades. Now she has unpacked and worked them into a story that is not only trustworthy and useful (have I mentioned the recipe for homemade marshmallows?) but is also polished by real, rare happiness.

It is a very good book, indeed.

In fact, it is averyveryverygoodbook.

Sounds delightful, and perfect for Summer. Sold. And great good luck to Mrs. Kalish.

Pssssst:
The book's website is here. Complete with farm recipes. Oh, and you can wet your whistle with a preview of Chapter One.

Also, this charming article, "Her stories of farm life could fill a bestseller: Hopes are high for debut by local grandmother", from The San Jose Mercury News.

Earth Day: Wild in love with the planet we've got

The frogs are singing loudly now from the ditches, dugouts, and sloughs, the ducks -- especially the goldeneyes -- are pairing up, the grass is greening, gophers are running about, hawks swoop around overhead, and the prairie crocuses are up.

I missed Poetry Friday again -- too many visitors here and places to be there. We had our mandated semi-annual home school facilitator visit (who last time told us, "I can see there's a lot of learning going on in this house," one reason I like him so very much), art lessons, cleaned our not-so little pioneer heritage museum, closed up since last fall, went to a working ranch horse sale where Davy was disgusted to leave without buying another horse, and worked on halter-breaking Laura's 4H calf.

But in time for Earth Day, here is yet another poem from Frances Frost's The Little Naturalist, 1959:

Valentine for Earth
by Frances Frost (1905-1959)

Oh, it will be fine
To rocket through space
And see the reverse
Of the moon's dark face,

To travel to Saturn
Or Venus or Mars,
Or maybe discover
Some uncharted stars.

But do they have anything
Better than we?
Do you think, for instance,
They have a blue sea

For sailing and swimming?
Do the planets hills
With raspberry thickets
Where a song sparrow fills

The summer with music?
And do they have snow
To silver the roads
Where the school buses go?

Oh, I'm all for rockets
And worlds cold or hot,
But I'm wild in love
With the planet we've got!

Poetry Friday: A post for my father, who thinks I fell off the blogging earth

Written in March
by William Wordsworth

(from our copy of Favorite Poems Old and New, selected by Helen Ferris and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard)

The cock is crowing,
The stream is flowing,
The small birds twitter,
The lake doth glitter,
The green field sleeps in the sun;
The oldest and youngest
Are at work with the strongest:
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one!

Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill;
The ploughboy is whooping -- anon -- anon --
There's joy in the mountains;
There's life in the fountains;
Small clouds are sailing,
Blue sky prevailing;
The rain is over and gone!

----------

With apologies for the extended absence and lack of posts -- in the past and no doubt to come for at least the next month or so. Spring is springing, there are bluebird nesting boxes (and museums) to clean, pianos to tune, windows to wash (and new ones to order), mud to wipe, cows to calve, sweet peas (and 900+ new saplings...) to plant, noses to grindstone, plays to rehearse, great books to read (and converse about), swim clubs to restart, morels to hunt, lambs to visit, cinnamon buns to deliver to neighbors, bicycles and cap pistols to retrieve, 4H projects to complete, fairs to plan, birthday cakes to bake, and, as the kids would no doubt add, forts to build and holes to dig. Preferably in aforementioned mud.

Add a little more poetry to your family's life next month and for the rest year. Here are some of my poetry posts from last year at this time. And don't limit your kids, or anyone else's, to Young People's Poetry Week, the third week of National Poetry Month. Be a sport and give 'em, at the very least, the whole month. When my sister and I were children celebrating Mother's Day and Father's Day, we'd always ask about Children's Day. To which my father quite rightly always responded, "Every day is Children's Day". So should it be with poetry.

Snow snaps

Drifts
(abandoned barn on neighbors' adjacent property)














Tom clearing snow with the tractor so we can get
in to the corrals to feed the animals (as of 6 Feb.
2007, the snow in the ditches now forms a wall
at least eight feet high on both sides. The kids
have taken to calling it the Great Wall of China.
I call it claustrophobic.)





















Blizzard boy (Daniel at -30 C)





















A band of merry tobogganers (from left,
Daniel; Davy, kneeling; and Laura); with
their favorite present from Santa, who knew
just what to bring for a snowy Christmas).
I moved this photo here for Dawn's upcoming
Frosty Field Day, to put all my Frosty Fotos
in one place.

Digging out

We're in the midst of another snow storm, and we'd be in big trouble if it were any colder; luckily, the temperatures are right below freezing. It started snowing again yesterday, and the wind started yesterday evening, so by 3 pm Laura's voice teacher reluctantly decided to cancel the recital. They'll try again next month. Overnight the snow continued and the winds picked up, so this morning we treated to even higher and more amazing drifts than before. Snow and winds still falling and blowing, respectively, with whiteout conditions. Tom and the kids set out for the corrals with the pickup truck after breakfast to do chores and as expected couldn't go all the way with the truck. They set out on foot, but the drifts are up to Tom's chest so it was quite the quarter-mile walk. Davy had the easiest time, since he's the only one light enough to be able to walk on top of the drifts.

I stayed home, futilely shoveling in front of the house and probably equally futilely making meatballs for tomorrow's 4H Christmas party and potluck dinner, which will probably be canceled (but then I'll have some tasty last-minute meals in the freezer), and listening to An Oscar Peterson Christmas.

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Digging out after a three-day snowstorm about 1913: "Standing on the roof of the James Ward home, Milton, North Dakota, Mrs. James Ward, Nellie Ward, James Ward, Hugh Ward"; photograph by John McCarthy from The Library of Congress

Since Saturday

Finally made it to Staples on Saturday for our fun school supplies, mostly for Davy, who is overjoyed about starting first grade: oversize (5"x8") index cards with primary ruling for beginning writers; Laurentien's new best quality "Studio" colored pencils (not as pricey as Prismacolor Juniors which are more than Davy needs right now, but better than the usual store brand -- even he noticed a difference, and Laura our colored pencil expert said they compare favorably to the Prismacolors); Crayola IQ Sketching markers; oversize index tabs long enough to peek out beyond the plastic page protectors; yet another package of aforementioned page protectors; new binders for Davy (orange, because purple and green have already been claimed); stickers for everyone (Hot Wheels x 2, and farm animals x 1); a new Mead "Upper Class" student planner for me (where I can write each day what they actually did for the day rather than what I planned for them to do); the Staples "house version" of the Desk Buddy (Desk Jockey? Desk Buddy?) with 10 slots (three of each -- how did they know I had three kids? Plus the one extra in the middle for my own stuff) that will make it easy for us to keep pencils, rulers, erasers, etc. on the table and corralled while the kids do their seatwork; and an impulse buy from the Teacher's Aisle, a $10 Multiplication Songs CD.

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The leaves and the sun, sadly up later and down earlier, not to mention the geese and ducks gathering together in droves, are all saying "autumn", but the air temperature, still near 90, is saying "summer". Rather a nice if unusual combination for the prairies, all in all. No rain either, good for harvesting and for leaving sneakers on the deck, but the trees are starting to get pretty thirsty again.

Tom decided to celebrate Labor Day and the good weather by inviting some family and friends to say goodbye to our incubator-hatched wild ducks -- once and for all identified as blue-winged teals. After chores on Monday morning, he and I boxed them up, and then we all drove over to our pond, where we released what I still think of as my eight babies. I suppose I expected them to waddle out of the tipped over cardboard toward the water, but as soon as the lid was lifted, all of them took flight and circled around the dugout, practicing their takeoffs and landings. The kids gasped and giggled and said their goodbyes. For the past few mornings, the kids and I have taken part of a loaf of bread to feed our former babies, and while we can't tell which ones of all the ducks swimming around are "ours", they all seem to be more than happy with the treat. We wish them goodbye and goodspeed, literally and figuratively, in evading the arriving hunters and heading south.

We ended the day rather differently, by the side of the road 10 miles north of home, the kids and I standing by in the dark with pails of water, a shovel, and a fire extinguisher while Tom welded one of the bearings that had piled up (this is apparently a technical term) in the swather, the part on the tractor that cuts the grain stalks and lays it in a tidy, erm, swath. All the fire precautions, including moving the tractor out to the side of the road from the field, were to prevent a stray spark from the welder causing a fire in the ripe grain, which is after all just dry grass. Think tinder. Tom finally got everything fixed by 9:30, and if the kids hadn't needed showers before we left the house, they certainly needed them on arriving home. So much for my grand plans of an early bedtime before our first day of school.

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All the more reason, along with our early harvest, to start yesterday's back to school efforts gently, and with lots of coffee. The day began with the "goodie bags" I started a couple of years ago, when I realized that I didn't really want to squirrel away the really fun books, art supplies, and CDs I had found over the summer: the American Girl Kaya story collection and the AG school planner for Laura, a few Jim Weiss CDs, some DVDs, a Timex learner's watch with the dinosaur strap for Davy, a couple of Robert McCloskey books for Daniel, a couple of small Lego kits for the boys. The kids each did one lesson of Singapore math and some penmanship, we looked after the animals, then headed to town after lunch for the first music lessons with new teachers, piano for Laura and Daniel and voice for Laura. Both of the teachers seem personable and pleasant, and I needed to make some changes to keep Laura interested and inspired in lessons.

Today we did some more math, penmanship, and managed to read aloud some of the goodie bag books (George Shrinks, Lentil) before Tom spirited the kids away to work on the new-to-us grainaries at the corrals. This morning Daniel asked for a spelling test, so we may start spelling tomorrow, then grammar and history in next week, and science the week after that.

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I'm predicting a pretty slow day tomorrow too. Tom didn't get in with the kids until almost eight, and after a quick dinner and necessary baths, they're all unwinding by watching the "Bridges" volume from the goodie bag DVD, "Building Big" with David Macaulay (did you know that there's an activity/experiment with the kids from "Zoom" at the end of "Bridges"? I didn't). Or I could just consider that the science lesson for the day and go ahead and check it off my list, knowing full well the kids will attempt the activity on their own tomorrow...

Autumn is a-cumin' in

Saturday evening we headed for town to help celebrate our little town on the prairie's 100th birthday. Not a great age compared to many, even in eastern Canada, but quite an achievement and a thrill for the kids especially to be a part of the occasion. There was a big dance followed by fireworks, then more dancing, and oodles of food throughout. And a chance to remember the pioneers who started it all with their hard work, and those who carry on. To whom we all say a well-deserved thank you.

Speaking of thank yous, Tom arrived home on Friday with a case of very, very ripe peaches. I've come to be very wary of this sort of gift when I'm least prepared and usually up to my armpits in some other garden preserving activity, and I've told Tom in previous years on various occasions that yes, dear, I will buy and can cases of peaches and pears -- Davy calls them "hot sugared fruit" -- but on my own schedule, dear, since that I had planned to deal this weekend with the last of the green beans, rhubarb, and a few other housekeeping projects. The peaches were well on the way to beyond ripe, so I had to do something fast. And quick and easy, to, which meant one cobbler, one pie, and peeling, chunking, and sugaring the rest for pie filling.

The leaves on the Virginia creeper have turned bright red already, harvest is in full gear in the fields around us, geese are honking and ducks gather on the dugouts and sloughs and the hunters from the U.S. are starting to circle too, our neighbor's famous end-of-summer "corn supper" is next week, and though it's still unusually warm for this time of year (we watched the fireworks at 10:30 pm in light shirts), the light definitely looks like autumn. I'll miss the carefree summer weather and schedule, my garden especially -- I'm enjoying great big blowzy bouquets right now, zinnias, cosmos, hollyhocks, cornflowers -- but there's something exciting about the change in seasons, especially this next season. Autumn usually means a withering and a decline, but as someone who always loved school (Tom and I decided to homeschool Laura in part because we wanted her to love school and learning as much as we had), this time of year to me signifies not only an ending but also a beginning, marked by kraft-paper covered books, new knee socks and art supplies, the excitement of new friends and activities. Now that the days are dramatically shorter -- it's getting dark before nine now -- even the kids are starting to show a bit of curiosity and interest in our new schedule, not as freeform and out-of-doors as it's been. Where and when will the 4H meetings be held? What will the new piano and voice teachers be like? What new books will be using? It's all part of the new adventure!