Interesting video here about the origin of America's public education model.

There's definitely some bias, but the facts and quotes themselves are accurate.

summer, cultivated

Do you remember those long summer afternoons, when there was no more school, no more homework, no friends in town, and...nothing to DO?

After hearing us whine about how boooored we were, how there was noooothing to do, and so on, our mother would often hand us each a plastic pitcher or bucket and send us away to pick blackberries. "Pick me enough to make you a cobbler!" she'd say cheerfully as she pushed us out the door.

We lived in what would someday be a subdivision, but, since we were the first people there, all we could see was woods. There were two gravel roads that ran on either side of our property, and on their sunny, dusty margins grew the blackberries. And so we'd go, clutching our buckets, and brave the thorns, poison ivy, chiggers and Japanese beetles to secure our tasty prize.

With experience born of long years of blackberrying, I could tell by feeling a berry whether it was ripe. If it pulled off the stem just so, if it were just such a hardness. And whether it was too far gone, squishing in my hand, smelling faintly alcoholic. I could always tell when it would be a shame to lose a berry of just this ripeness to the oblivion of the cobbler, and I would take it as the miller's portion.

We wore long sleeves and pants to avoid too many scratches, and waded in to those thorny patches fearlessly. Our fingers and mouths eventually became stained a dark purple, as we'd pick all the berries in this patch and move on to the next one. We knew without searching where the best patches were. I could tell you where they were today.

And so we spent those long boring summer afternoons, up to our chins in brambles, talking and laughing together, children with a common purpose and a simple joy. Soon evening would fall, our pitchers would get full, and we'd sprint for the house to strip off all our clothing and shower the chiggers away. All the laundry went into a hot wash, even the underwear (I found out one summer to my great, and itchy, sorrow).

Years passed away, and I became a horticulture student at college and learned the joy of Cultivated Varieties. I discovered that the tiny wild blackberries we'd prized so much had been carefully bred to produce bigger, more prolific berry bushes, with bigger, more delicious berries. So when I procured a house of my own, one that had some area around it, one of the first things we did was fix up an old fence and plant blackberries.

Now we go out to our side yard every couple of days and haul in bucketloads of huge blackberries. I pick down the row with my children, and we talk quietly and eat as we go. I'm reminded of those long summer days I spent with my siblings out in the blackberry patches near the dusty roads. And I am glad to be able to share this experience, this memory, with my own children.

But I chuckle to myself at the way things have changed. The brambles are carefully tied back and pruned. Each berry is a large mouthful, and some of these bushes don't even have thorns. I think fondly of the mad dash for the shower that we don't have to do every time we pick blackberries, and I am thankful that things have happened this way. But I can't help but look down the row at the children and think, in some self-satisfied part of my person, hah. They've got it pretty soft.

hot chicks in a pool

Bright and early Thursday morning we got the call from the Post Office, "your chickens are here".

Aside from the fact that I wasn't expecting them for another few days, and had to scramble to get their baby pool, feeders, food, etc. all ready for them, things did all eventually come together in favor of our newest babies. And now, in the red light of a hanging heat lamp, they're chirping happily in the basement.

And OH, what fun baby chicks are for the kids. They're soft, and little, and "just so adorable". The kids get the biggest kick out of scooping one up and loving it for a while. (Although what the chick is thinking is probably not as lovely.)

We have Ameraucanas, which lay the green eggs, Araucanas, which lay white, Rhode Island Reds, light brown, and Cuckoo Marans, which lay chocolate brown eggs.

So everything's set, and wonderful, except one thing. Puppies become dogs, and cute baby chicks will eventually become full-on chickens. And we had to order 25. Five are spoken for already by someone else. But doing the chicken math, that leaves us with 20 + the three we already had.....

Hm. Anybody need a place to get rainbow eggs come spring??

the wild rumpus

...and an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Martha, and she sailed off through night and day, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year to where the wild things are.

And when she came to the place where the wild things are, they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, till Martha said "BE STILL!" and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once, and they were frightened and called her the most wild thing of all...and made her the queen of all wild things.

"And now," cried Martha, "let the wild rumpus start!"

"Now stop!" Martha said, and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper. And Martha the queen of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved her best of all.

Then all around from far away across the world she smelled good things to eat, so she gave up being queen of where the wild things are. But the wild things cried, "Oh, please don't go-we'll eat you up-we love you so!"

And Martha said, "No!"

How come this story doesn't say anything about how the wild things felt after that? The Queen of all Wild Things left us today. After two and a half beautiful summer weeks of Aunt Martha picking berries and swinging children around and cutting out a hundred paper crowns and cleaning the kitchen over and over, the wild rumpus has come to a rather melancholy end.

We stood out in the muddy water at Fort Yargo and marshalled kids together, and kissed bruises and swept floors and kept Jess up way past his bedtime talking, and it was the best couple of weeks I've spent in a long time.

So, to Martha, you are beautiful and patient and gentle and brilliant and understanding, and I understand why you had to leave us but still...

Whenever you want to come back to us, the position is always open.

magenta

Some experiments turn out well.

And then there is the experiment entitled "beets".

One of the advantages, I thought, of having a garden is getting to grow things you've never eaten and never thought to buy. So, back in the late winter when I was captivated by the seed catalog offerings, I decided to make a foray into the world of beets. I had never tasted beets. Jess assured me they weren't worth tasting. I bought a pack of seeds anyway. (He's been wrong about stuff before.)

Fast forward to this spring, when the half-a-garden-box of beets I'd planted came up and made, well, beets. We dug one up, dusted it off, and said, "huh". Chopped it up, threw it in a salad and said, "whoa". Most vegetables take the soil and transform it somehow into something that tastes delightfully different than what you know they're made out of. The beets didn't bother. They tasted just exactly like the mushroom compost that bore them. Ugh.

But wait! All the nutrition experts say that highly colored foods are really healthy for you, contain cancer-fighting agents and all, right? If that's true, then beets have got to be a vitamin gold mine. I couldn't cut them without coloring everything in the kitchen bright magenta. I couldn't boil them without a pot full of deep fuschia water to show for it. Throw one grated beet in a stir fry or casserole and the whole thing becomes an intense, violent pink. So we pressed onward. Healthy food is difficult to turn your back on.

Jess, who had decided from the outset that he was right about the beets all along, kept wrinkling his nose whenever I'd present a bright pink dish at dinner. And I had to admit he was right. I tried and tried to like them, using such positive adjectives as "earthy" or "robust" to describe them, but it just wasn't working for me.

And I still had about fifty beets out there I had to do something with.

So, in a last ditch effort to avoid wasting "perfectly good food", I dug them all up, washed them and boiled the whole lot. Peeled, pureed, and froze them in 1-cup portions. And this morning, threw one cup in a bowl of pancake mix, made sure I had enough granola for a backup breakfast, and held my breath.

It looks like we've found the one thing beets are good for. They make fabulous "pink pancakes". The kids were thrilled, they ate every one, and I sent one for Jess to test. His assessment..."not horrible." Yeah! Success!

So I breathe a sigh of relief, resolve not to buy a pack of beet seeds next year, and wash my hands of the whole matter. Hm. I think they may be stained pink for a while.

glow

Gabriel, at sunset, on Stone Mountain.

four

Did I hear somebody ask for more pictures of my babies?!? Okay, twist my arm. Just one of each...