Missed Sap Seasons

 Its Sugaring Season here in Southern Connecticut. Yet again, I have considered but then skipped tapping the maple trees here on our city lot. Only one of our trees is a sugar maple but we have several other maples, red and Norway on our city lot and any maple, as a learned a couple of years ago, can be tapped for sap! Maybe next year. I have to buy a few spiles and buckets and stop making plans to run away to the tropics screaming during the exact week that the sap runs hardest where I live. Heh. We leave for Florida soon.

 We are taking a class at one of the local nature centers (the kids and I, although I have to admit that I am a tag-along and the class is supposed to be for my sons) and today it involved a hike through the snow and sparkling sunshine to inspect the woods, chew birch twigs together (Mmmm!!!! Wintergreen!) and take peeks into the first few filling sap buckets. Next week we are promised tastes of maple syrup since they will be hopefully getting enough sap to start boiling it down. Even without any action, it was super fun to visit the sugar house and pat the stove and sit together on hay bales around it. Maybe next year is the year that I will put on my giant canning stock pot and keep the stove at a simmer while I lug buckets of pale golden water indoors triumphantly. I'm quite keen on the idea....I just keep forgetting every year. Maybe I should put a reminder in my electronic calendar that will go off mid-January and tell me that I want to tap trees. "Order Spiles and Scrub Out Canning Pot" it could say. Laura Ingalls, move on over.

 The boys and I got out our first big teeny piece jig-saw puzzle after dinner tonight. I was giving them lessons on sorting out the edge pieces and examining the cover illustration for small clues on the gray shag rug in front of the fireplace. So much fun. Dee took to it like a duck to water, I had to pry his little engineer hands off the project when it was time to take a break for the night. A's family are great puzzle lovers and my ended family love puzzles quite a lot although my own natal family group didn't do them much at all. I think my Mama found them tedious or boring or maybe the baby was always losing pieces and the dog was always eating a few and somehow that rattled her..... Anyhow, its kind of a new pasttime for me and I feel really happy about bringing some piece of A's childhood into our family activity.

 Joke books are huge this year, especially with our newly confident reader who is suddenly devouring everything written within reach. He's incessantly reading his new joke book that he got for Christmas and loving his new handwriting book which has him doing jokes for copywork. Such a hilarious, brilliant otter idea for a kid like mine.

Well, its time to go to bed. The quilts and down comforter are calling and my good man is waiting. I hope you all have a snug night and wake to a day full of challenges and excitement, little gifts and new lessons. I am thinking of you out there as we pass the middle of the week, as my tiny nephew recovers from his surgery this morning, as my garden sleeps under the snow, as I plot lesson plan in my mind, as the mending sits waiting in the downstairs closet and as we all recover, rest and rejuvenate under the half moon. xoxo!

What Do You Call An Egg With No Shell?

Check out this egg that one of my hens laid.

Pretty, right?

Pretty weird!!!!

Its an egg with no shell....just the thin, skin-like membrane that normally lines the inside of the shell. Reading a list of reasons why this could occur isn't particularly enlightening (stress, low calcium, too much salt, immaturity, old age). I am going to bet on stress as the most likely cause. Its hard for me to tell which hen laid this because the shell color is my normal way to tell any given hen's eggs from another but I'd venture to guess Pearl is our most stressed hen after her recent recovery and I'm in the process of putting together a whole new coop with lots more space in the house and the yard because I think all the girls are a little too short on room and that could be stressing any one of them.

Nature is strange and sometimes beyond believing. Time to fire up my drill and get that coop together lest our eggs keep arriving in little skin sacks!

Choose Your Marinade

Its a quiet day full of small things like egg gathering, working on the laundry, helping people sound out words in comic books and expressing awe every time the thunder booms outside the window. I have been to the mechanic to fix the random piece of plastic hanging down under the front end of the car (Zip ties? Alright!), have been to the bookstore to pick up the book I have been pouting about missing with my book club a couple of months ago, so that I have travel reading (The Orphan Train) and have made one last playdate/mama hang-out session appointment so that we leave town with our social tanks all full.

I have been learning in the past few months how important it is to accept your negative emotions but to not live in them. Learning to step outside of how I feel and observe it objectively is a really astoundingly life-giving skill. I'm still not super good at it but its in my toolbox. I love knowing that nothing I feel defines me, that emotions are real and important and yet they pass, that the weight we give to things is the weight they carry, and that I am mistress of my own ship. I can choose how I feel and what I focus on, and I can also solve the problems I feel badly about. Validation + Empowerment + Optimism. 

Any little small-time, rainy day can feel gloomy, closed-in, overwhelming or lacking in life, like a place where problems and hard feelings stew until they are your own private marinade, a flavor you own. Instead, I'm living deep, being brave, feeling peace, slowing down, looking my boys in their twinkling eyes, reading stories, dreaming up some new painting ideas and flipping through travel guides for The West Coast. 

My beehive swarmed which, basically means that the whole flock up and flew away because the queen said to. There's no telling why exactly, maybe they felt cramped, maybe they hatched a new queen and she was a rolling stone, maybe the girls didn't like the new plastic, comb frames I put in before I left for Michigan. This is disappointing, but its also a good reminder that we only give shelter to bees, we don't really "keep" them. They are wild animals and not really controllable in the sense that we normally reserve for livestock. 

The six chickens in the backyard are giving my five eggs a day, and just to keep themselves all in the running, they are rotating which lady hen is taking a rest that day. I feel slightly annoyed but if I step out of entitled ego, I realize that rest is good for bodies, even chicken bodies and I can chuckle imagining a chicken council with the elected madame being given her daily pass in rotation. Maybe they are holding out until I buy the larger coop I am saving towards!

May your day be full of quiet empowerment. May you know the power of validating your own feelings and the strength of stepping outside of them to see gratitude. May your marinade be peace and may humor cover it all. 

I'm off to start packing! 

A Seed Box Murder

I have been trying to put plants into the garden, some starts from the nursery and some seeds (with varied success). I had an unfortunate mishap with my stash of seeds which kind of put a damper on my productivity. I was happily gardening, my seedbox open next to my raised beds and my favorite hand tools all arrayed around them,my fingers muddy and my mind a dusty haze of happiness. Suddenly, I had a Cinderella moment and realized I had gardened away more time than I thought and needed to run madly to pick up my boys from kid's club. I threw the youngest two into the car and cleaned my hands with 5,000,000 wet wipes at various stop lights as I zoomed through town and dusk fell. By the time we were home again, all that was on my mind was corralling all the boys into the house and cleaning and pajama-ing them up for bed, every thought of my interrupted gardening wiped from my mind.

Sadly, it rained that night....it rained cats and dogs. I went dashing out that morning and tore open a few of the sodden packets in the continuing drizzle, trying to shake the damp seeds into the proper places in beds, planting dejectedly and frantically until I had to go running back inside to make breakfast. There was a solid inch of water in the bottom of my seed box and the many remaining packets were floating in a mini lake.

The viburnum hedge between us and the neighbors.

I never cried, and I have been trying to let go of the disappointment and see it as a chance to have a clean slate. I did just tell myself that I was going to try to buy more of my starts instead of starting things from seed as they take more time and often I sacrifice actual plants for my idealism. Still, the loss is real and every time I am in the garden I am fighting a feeling of general discouragement and an air of defeat. I haven't felt brave enough to throw out the seeds yet. I'm just holding onto the mildewed collection for a bit and trying to convince myself to let it go. Maybe once I have all the beds full of real plants I will be able to call it a day and pitch them, or maybe just writing about them is enough moving on and later tonight I will bury them in a shallow grave in the compost pile and chalk one up for minimalism.

Our first black eye. Must be Spring.

In other news, spring is incredible. I can't ever quite believe it is this tremendous and never really believe it will come or be quite so pleasant and delicious and stunning as it really is. The layered scents of viburnum, lilac and iris is enough to make you delirious. The perfume is unbelievable round about dinner time when the yard is softly golden and the sun is streaming in our open dining room windows. Everything you could possibly eat goes with the scent of blooming flowers. I want to linger over every single supper even if the kids are squawking so loudly that A and I can hardly hear ourselves think, or someone has say, brought a toy bow to the table and is shooting other diners with it, or perhaps if someone has begun throwing the peas instead of eating them....hypothetically speaking, of course. Spring makes it all worth it. Dead seed collections, and insane boys, I can hack it all with a floral smelling salts to keep me lively.

A Lion And Some Chickens

The golden, warm weather of yesterday's January thaw has gone and now we're having a wild blustery day up here on the hilltop. Lots of reading, lots of sorting through the seed bin, lots of dreaming about chickens (we're getting some!) and a little plotting about new bees (our hive bit the dust). Its a homestead dream day. I have been researching chicken coops and planting dates and talking to beekeepers on the phone about what I might have done wrong. After I push "Publish" on this post I'm off to the upstairs to rummage around in my homesteading book department and fuel the dream. This weekend I am hoping to put up a hoop house or two over some of our raised beds to get some early cold weather veggies started.

While I dreamed and researched and scribbled notes the boys have been having a playdough, graphic novel and drawing, drawing, drawing kind of day. Lots of interesting masterpieces making appearances. I am kind of smitten with this lion Ru created. I love his cheerful face, his humpy back, his tassely feet and his brush-bottle tail.