A good weather Valentine from us in Colorado to...well, almost all of you

I find the weather this summer terrifying...the current horrific heat in the central states and the Northeast, the raging fires, the flooded river basins, and dust storms of the type I teach about as an environmental catastrophe occurring safely back in the Depression era. Since reading Bill McKibben's Eaarth last fall, I have felt gnawing fear at the realization that this is the new normal, that we've altered the earth sufficiently that these are the kinds of climatic extremes we and our offspring will face for as long as any of us can imagine into the future of human history. Who knows what it will mean for the ecological balance of the places we know. And that's provided we don't make it worse. When I think of the girls suffering whatever is to come, I can hardly stand it.

Those are the bleak hours. In better frames of mind, I try to remind myself that in the moment, so many of our family's hours are lovely and good. It's not a story we hear much when we log in to the bigger global news. Even as I read of terrible weather and sobering crises seemingly everywhere, if I had no access to news outlets, I'd know only that summer in the places we've spent it on balance has been beautiful. Here in Colorado we've seen sunny mornings and scattered rain and thunderstorms almost every afternoon--the typical summer pattern, we're told--so that the mountains are green and the wildflowers are blooming. We don't have air-conditioning and don't need it; if the house is a bit stuffy by day's end, we're under the comforter with a cool breeze blowing over us when we awake. Yesterday we drove up to the continental divide (a few miles west of us) to try a new hike with the girls on the opposite side of Pike's Peak. When we got out of the car at 10,000 feet it was chilly; I was thinking we'd need long-sleeved shirts or jackets, which we hadn't brought. But after about twenty minutes the clouds cleared, and we enjoyed a gorgeous afternoon at maybe 80 degrees. 

I post the pictures not to lord it over all of you who are suffering, nor to suggest that we are somehow exempt from larger global realities, but perhaps an antidote to all the sobering news (meteorological and otherwise) and as a reminder to myself not to borrow too much trouble. Here are some images and updates in case anyone else needs to be reassured, like I, that there are still places where lovely things happen each day, where the air is temperate, where people treat each other with compassion, where humans want to build up rather than tear apart, and where life is good, today, at least.

I. On Crags Trail, Divide, Colorado

The girls explore a meadow for likely camping sites, as Edith wants us to do some overnight camping before summer's end. There are some obstacles to overcome--like lack of supplies, for starters.

Alice reports back

 We run into friends/Tom's coworkers on the trail--what are the odds? Before we part ways, the kids have all splashed each other in the creek and clambered on rocks together, and Tom and I have learned that our friends run a free camping gear loan program as part of their job at our church.

  

II. New Life in the Backyard

Remember the potted beets? I figured that even if the scheme wasn't as  half-cocked as most people suggested, which it probably was, then the seedlings were doomed by my being out of town for four weeks. Lo and behold, caretaker Edith proudly showed me this when I got home. On her own volition, she had removed the screen I'd placed over the pot once the plants got too big, then gotten Tom to move the pot to a shaded patio down a flight of open steps, where she reasoned critters couldn't easily get down to bother it. Of course, putting it under the shaded porch meant the beets needed watering by hand, and she tended to that as well.

A young bunny has made its home in our backyard and is remarkably unafraid when we go out there to play tee-ball or water the plants. As long as we have grass to offer, it's happy. In the front yard we usually see a mature rabbit around dinner time--and are grateful that it makes a meal of our dandelions.

III. Fourth of July in Small-Town America

I thought I was taking a video of the Precision Lawn Mower Brigade but found I didn't have it on my camera at the end of the day. This solo act brought up the rear. Alice now pushes her doll stroller around and announces it's a Smoking Stroller.

After the parade, the whole town trooped across the railroad tracks and out to the old camp meeting grounds for a crafts fair, a local brass band bravely tackling American classics, and 20-cent hot dogs.

The field from which I got to watch the fireworks. It was actually the backyard of a local church, and the free potluck preceding the fireworks was the most abundant I've attended in 35 years of church potluck experience (including the summer of 1998, which featured nine straight weeks of church potluck dinners from Virginia to California). The dessert table alone must have had 200 options. And who needs to look beyond the dessert table?

IV. Vacation Bible School

Meanwhile, back in Colorado Tom and the girls were attending VBS. Edith's initial reaction was that it wasn't as fun as in New Jersey, where the kids got a token for a key chain collection every day. But in the Springs they did a different service project every day, and by Friday when she got to deliver homemade pet food to the local animal shelter, she had changed her mind. Pictures by Edith:

Milestones in due course

The girls have been making great leaps forward this summer. Do you recognize something different about Edith below? (Apologies for the lousy photo--she was on the move.)

Edith came home from school one afternoon this spring, threw herself on her bed, and sighed, "Mom, Nola is like, the Queen of Tooth Losing." Though not yet in line for the throne, on July 14 Edith nevertheless joined the ranks of the gap-grinned elite. I made the mistake of commenting after a few days that the loss of a bottom tooth hardly made a difference in her appearance, since her lip usually conceals the hole. At which she pranced and preened in front of the mirror saying, "Yes, it does. It makes a big difference. Can't you see? My smile is so much cuter." May we all be of such a mind in our 80s and 90s.

Since Edith's tooth fell out of its own accord while she was playing, I am hoping this bodes well for her body's ability to shed that which must be shed when the time comes. None of my baby teeth fell out without assistance either from my father or--at age eleven when most of them were still in there and things were getting a bit desperate--from the oral surgeons. Hopefully Edith's road to dental maturity is smoother. And as (1) I am in the humanities and (2) never studied human anatomy, I'm prepared to make a wild analogical leap and anticipate that as go the baby teeth so go the babies. To wit, maybe any children Edith bears one day will similarly decide to enter the world on their own and not wait it out until evicted by modern medicine. Then she'll be two up on me. (The doctors reading may now feel free to rein in this flight of fancy by explaining the different chemical and physical processes whereby teeth fall out and labor begins and the utter lack of connection between the two.)

***

Meanwhile, a lengthy separation seems to have done the trick the second summer 'round, and 2 1/2-year-old Alice appears on her way to weaning, where 1 1/2-year-old Alice was not. She was ready to nurse when I returned from Kentucky, but when I told her there might not be much milk at first and Tom chimed in more emphatically that the mommy milk was all gone, Alice took this suggestion seriously. (At least, after proposing that we get more mommy milk at the store.) She nurses for awhile in the mornings as she wakes up, but in the evenings she curls up in my lap for songs and tells me the mommy milk is all gone, without giving it a try. In between she doesn't even mention it. She doesn't seem upset by the change, and so it appears we've arrived at a moment when she's psychologically ready to wean.

Could this six-year chapter in parenting really be ending? Whoa.Wow. And with sincere thanks for the gift of it all, hallelujah.

It reminds me of Edith's potty training: We'd tried various recommended methods a number of different times, but they never worked. So we'd back off for awhile. Then one day Edith's preschool teacher looked at her, smiled, and said, "I think you could wear Pull-ups to school now. What do you think?" Edith was tickled, wore a Pull-up the next day, and was potty-trained, day and night, from that moment forward. No doubt she could have made the switch a day or a week earlier. Or maybe a month or more. Who knows exactly when she was ready? But once we were in the window where she was psychologically prepared to use the toilet, the simplest of suggestions worked where all the more elaborate methods had failed before. So, too, with weaning.

Once again the take-home lesson for me is: Trust your kid's internal timetable on the developmental milestones. They'll get there.

Unless they're settling in for a 43rd week of gestation or registering for middle school with a mouth full of baby teeth. Sometimes, just maybe, they'll need a firm nudge.

Update 1: Beach

Your regular correspondent is home from Kentucky and now equipped to offer some summer updates. In mid-June, we enjoyed a week at the Carolina beaches--still the best in the world, for my money--with Mor-mor and Grandpa.

Edith confronts evil

In books. Of course. This is the kid, after all, who when I call home and ask about her day, gives me play-by-play accounts of the story in the last two movies she has seen and an equally detailed account of the imaginary sharks and whale at the bottom of the pool at day camp, and how she got away from each. (Since this history of the pool marine life was offered with relish rather than fear, I felt comforted that day camp on balance had added color and not terror to her week.)

Indeed, Edith's reading recently has had her engaging with the forces of good versus evil in all their fantastical, melodramatic splendor. Remember this post just five summers ago? How much has changed!

We've already mentioned her tour with Tom this past winter through Lord of the Rings. Although their process through the first book continues slowly, they watched the movie trilogy a full (ahem) five times in a row before taking a breather.

As summer began we decided to try Harry Potter. Edith had been apprehensive about it, but the minute we started the first book and encountered the Dahl-worthy horribleness of Harry's relatives, Edith was hooked. She has finished the first two books, and we're trying to decide just how far we can go before it gets too frightening. On the one hand, dramatic myths of Good versus Bad speak to something in Edith--the same something, of course, that has made children across time reach for fairy tales and fantasy stories. She's far more frightened by realistic dramas in which an ordinary child seems poised to get in trouble with grown-ups for a minor infraction than she is haunted by Orcs or Voldemort. Nevertheless, we've been warned that the death of good guys is coming in subsequent volumes, and that might violate her sense that It All Turns Out Okay. So we'll see.

Meanwhile, I started listening to Frankenstein in the car last month, never having read it and having seen it available on CD at the library. I began turning it off when Edith would join me in the car so that we could converse, but of course, in the few seconds it was on she gathered it was a story, and soon she wanted to listen. I filled her in on what she'd missed, and she urged me to play it whenever we were in the car. To be sure, early 19th-century prose tend to be somewhat beyond the 21st-century child's grasp. But that didn't bother Edith. She'd listen for a few minutes, then ask me to stop the CD and explain. So that became our pattern. Sometimes she'd let me know how much she'd understood herself, and sometimes she'd wait for me to fill in everything. Oftentimes I felt like one of those translators in a sketch comedy routine, where one speaker talks for a full minute, then the translator turns and grunts two syllables. "Really? That's all that happened in all that time?" Edith would ask. "Nineteenth-century authors liked to use a lot of words," I'd say.

We didn't finish the book before I departed for Kentucky, so Edith had me fill her in over the phone in the evenings. On the day I finished, I related the end, the tragedy of both Frankenstein and the monster bent on killing each other, yet both alone and heart-broken, really living only for each other.

"Yeah," she said, "sometimes when you lose a thing or when a person dies, you only appreciate after they're gone how much you really counted on them."

I asked her how she'd become so wise.

"Well, you know," she said. "That's the way it is in books."

Indeed. My own daughter proves my conviction that reading expands not only our exposure to places and events but our sympathies as well. Well-wrought books enlarge our capacity to understand others' perspectives, I believe, far more than daily life alone will ever give most of us a chance to do.

Then there are books that offer too much knowledge. In addition to battles between good and evil, Edith still loves horses, and there are horse books aplenty in bluegrass country. But the books here may be overmuch for the young horse-worshipper-from-afar. You start to get an idea of the kind of place you're in when the first display in the big local bookstore features such hits as The Complete Book of Horse Bits, Guiding Your Mare through Her First Foaling, and Hoof Care for New Horse Owners. Then there are biographies of individual horses whose names evidently are supposed to be advertisement enough (and I don't mean just Secretariat and Seabiscuit), and detailed guides to bluegrass horse farms. I passed one family leaning over the table and scanning the index of such a book to see which of their friends had made it in.

All of which is to say, while Voldemort is best encountered in the pages of a novel, for the average Jane there probably are some things better experienced in person than in print. I wish Edith could be here.

Happy Fourth!

A Fourth of July post by all rights should have plenty of pictures in it, of small-town parades and kids in red, white and blue eating hots dogs and corn-on-the-cob. But as your regular poster is currently away from home without the requisite cord for uploading pictures from the camera to the computer, and the other some-time posters are less reliable (ahem), this is a quick text-only update.

As a family we've been getting our fill of Landscapes We Miss this summer. The Rocky Mountains are stunning indeed, but they don't have it all. We all traveled to North Carolina last month for my grandmother's memorial service, followed by a week at the beach. There are plenty of lovely pictures from that trip awaiting uploading later this month. Edith proved herself a true waterbug, venturing eagerly into the ocean every day with her partner-in-crime, Grandpa Jack, for as long as anyone would let her stay out. Alice was less sure about the waves for most of the week, finally deciding at the end of the stay that they were giving her bum a high-five and saying hello.

Tom and the girls have since returned home, while I'm doing some archival research amid that other landscape that comes hard in Colorado Springs--grass. Specifically, the land of the bluegrass. Not knowing what to expect of the small town where this archive is located, I find myself in a picturesque spot, with red-brick, white-trimmed college buildings lining the length of the main street through town. There are about a dozen businesses along Main Street, and then you're out into horse country, where the black and white board fences running along grassy hills and the absolutely beautiful horses grazing are all worthy of postcards.

I am sorry I can't upload a video of the best Lake Wobegon moment in this morning's parade--and I say that in the warmest sense possible, as a devoted fan of Garrison Keillor's. Along with the obligatory fire trucks and Boy Scout troops, there was a lawn mower brigade. Comprised of men in white button-down shirts, khaki or plaid shorts, and John Deere caps, the brigade performed "precision" formations along the length of the parade route, while pushing their mowers. Not to be missed.

After my eight hours in the archive every day, I'm also catching up on sleep, evening downtime, reading, knitting, driving around playing tourist without anyone in the backseat complaining, and lots of NPR time. I do miss Tom and the girls and hope they'll update you about some of their doings, but if one has to be away from family, there are fringe benefits.

Plenty of pictures to come in a few weeks!