September Girl

I find a lot to love in any season. Winter is skirts and my flat heeled riding boots.  It is curling up with books and a blanket and hot tea from Upton's.  Of course spring is planting and shorts and open windows.  Summer is bare skin and my own schedule and tomatoes.  Glorious tomatoes.

But fall is perhaps the best.  It is the start of things for me.  As children we start the adventure of school in the fall and repeat it every year right up through college.  I still do since school is my present work.  But I see more than just school when I think of fall.  It is a season of anticipation.  At this time of year, even now, if I try, I can already smell a difference in the air in the morning and at dusk.  A crispness that was not there just two weeks ago.  This smell is the herald of changing leaves and geese in the sky.  It hints at wood fires around brush piles, at grass crunchy and glistening with frost, at baking bread and pots of stew again after a summer of salads.    It is the promise of holidays to come.

Perhaps for me, I think of fall the best because it has been my own private bringer of good things.  That cusp between seasons was when we had gotten over the shock of knowing we would be parents and had moved into the enjoyment and anticipatory part of us having Isabella.  We dared to start baby shopping and name planning. Years before that, September was also the season of last minute grass planting and wedding dress fittings.  Cake trials.  More dress fittings.  Finding a house and making it our space. And years before that, it was skipping a class for stolen outings, treks up mountains in September mists. Lordy, I get teary just thinking about all those things. 

I do not know what this September will bring.  Icky stuff like homecoming floats and evaluations are looming.  Jack has a lot of travel coming up.  Girl Scouts is gearing up. Another year older.  Our tenth anniversary . . . I am just glad it is almost here, this month of mine.

Saturdays should be Lazier

Good Little Bee, Just Working Away

I slept last night.  Slept deeply and long without interruption.  Yet, I feel as if my body is slogging through chest deep water.  I have a twinge of  a headache this morning, and though the farmers market is probably bustling with good things and interesting people, I need to just be home today.  

Early morning found me, still in Jack's cast off shirt that I have claimed as pajamas,  in the tiny garden plot picking tomatoes.  Even from the top of the hill, I could hear the hum of bees from the pumpkin patch that is spreading over the slope toward the road.  I don't usually get to visit the garden in the morning.  Just not enough time if I am going to get us to school and our separate buildings and all that jazz.  But morning is when the blossoms are open and the bees are making their rounds.  I know that people go on about clover honey and lavender honey.  I wonder about pumpkin honey.   This morning I was reminded once again that we fooled around and never found hay to mulch out the grass and weeds.  I could live without the stickers and grass, but I don't feel so bad about these little blue things that have popped up in the pumpkins.  There are actually some in the flower bed that I allowed to stay.  They are just too pretty to evict.

I think it is already hotter today than it has been all week, but I am so excited that fall is coming.  If it were a bit cooler, I would persuade Jack to go do outside things with me like pile up brush and we really need to walk the land just to see what shape it is in.  I so want to go out in the canoe some more too.    I always think that Fitzgerald had it right in Gatsby when Jordan says "Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall."  

I think today will be a putter-about-clean-house sort of day.  I am roasting another batch of garlicky, herby tomatoes to be used with pasta later in the week.  The house is already redolent with garlic and oregano and basil wafting about.  Somewhere in this day I need to get some papers graded and recorded.  A few hours of work with that should have it covered. Shopping list to make for tomorrow.  The bathroom needs a scrub and clutter needs dealt with.  But I do not think I will work out today.  It will be a day of soft clothes and iced coffee if I can talk Jack Dear into making another pot for me.   And thanks to Misti, I feel that I am going to be thinking Campbell-esque thoughts all day.

Babies!

PUMPKIN BABY

Every evening I have this routine.  I fix supper, wash the dishes, then go outside.  I might have a load of clothes to gather off the line.  I almost always need to give the tomatoes a drink.  But best is always last.  Before coming to the house, I always walk the pumpkin patch.  I look at their  strange vines that only grow in an easterly up hill direction or straight north and south.  I look for bugs.  And lately, since we have had blossoms for a week now, I look for babies.

This evening had me dashing up to the house.  Jack was piling up brush to be burned (someday when we aren't in a ban) and I told him to guess  what I found. He guessed a horn worm.  Then he guessed correctly and I made him come and see.  He said I was as bad as Isabella, but I was just that excited.  He sent me to the house for the camera.  I know, I know.  Who gets this excited over a pumpkin?  But it isn't just any pumpkin.  I brought the tomatoes with me when we moved. We planted some grass in bare spots.  I also brought the cucs and peppers.  But these?  These were planted and watered and transplanted and fertigated, the whole nine yards, right here. We did also find squash bug eggs that will have to be dealt with tomorrow.  And there was a mysterious and beautiful and dangerous-looking red beetle.

TINY BIRDHOUSE OR BOTTLE GOURD

Those don't matter though.  Today, it just matters that there are pumpkin babies and gourd babies, some as small peas and some already as big as ping pong balls.  There are about 150 plants out there, all blooming.  Today we only found perhaps 10 or fifteen tiny bulges hiding beneath the blossoms, but I bet there are more to come.

Breathing Again

One week in and we have had to reinstitute Margarita Mondays.  I will not sugar coat this and say I love my new job.  BUT I will say that I think it was the right choice.  It was good for the family, I will grow as a teacher, shorter commute, yada, yada, yada.

I am slowly getting into the swing of things and wrapping my brain around teaching from a totally different game plan than I have ever used before.  But most of all, I am just going with it and enjoying the moment of cool.

We started the day with tears because I am not able to homeschool Bella.  I stayed late to do get some planning done with another teacher. My kid cried all the way home over a baloon that could not be found. I frantically got supper on the table because I have a crazy early lunch time and was starving at 5.  Of course it is Monday.  How could we have skipped it?

But then I snuck out to the yard by myself and wandered through the rows of pumpkins and gourds.  Some of my gourds have the prettiest delicate white flowers.  They remind me of what my grandma always called moon vine. I inspected the tomato plot.  Poor things are nearly naked from the onslaught of grasshoppers but  are just covered in tomatoes.  We had almost an inch of rain over the weekend and it seems as if the yard is just singing out in joy.

By the time I came in, Jack and Bella had walked up to check on the folks for the evening.  That means I got to have a shower in silence.  Bliss.  And then as if that were not enough, I grabbed the iPad and a robe and sat outside in the cool of the evening and read up on all that had gone with the other bloggers in the past week.  I was reminded of how wonderful this age of technology is.  I can sit outside on the porch with Nora Jane the abnormally hairy cat and learn that Misti has a cool house again and that Cindy's fall stuff is sprouting.  All the while, I could just breath.  Breath that fresh cut grass scent from Jack's mowing.  Breath the calm.  Breath that hint of autumn in the air.

Good Bye Farmgirl, Hello Mrs. Rucker

This week is the beginning of our lives as Elgin Owls.  It is funny really . . . We have Cyril phone numbers, live in Fletcher's district, have a Cement address, and felt like those variants were not enough so we topped it off with school in Elgin.  I had the first of two days of teachers' meetings Monday.  I had met the principal, asst. principal, and the woman whose position I was taking while she became the librarian.  That is it.  I had not met any of the English teachers. Needless to say, I don't like to be at that sort of disadvantage, but that has not stressed me as much as I expected. My stress manifests itself in grouchiness, not sleeping, and eye twitching, among other OCD behaviors like obsessive house cleaning.  Last year, my eye twitched all summer over school.  It has not twitched yet this summer.  I really have not been too worried.  I have this general attitude that I will just do my best.  It will either  be enough or it will not. But anyway, I walked into that meeting not knowing very many people.  

I was one of the first people there and all the tables were still vacant except one that was totally full.  I picked a table and sat.  And sat. And sat.  After what seemed like eternity, but was really only 15 minutes, the librarian showed up and joined me.  Soon two more friendly ladies sat down and I had made my first three friends in Elgin.   The handful of women who made it a point to be friendly made my day so much easier.   At some point in the day, one of my table mates had put a ceramic owl (not tacky cutesie but definitely funky cute) and an Elgin t shirt on my desk.  It is way too big, but that is not the point.  When I saw them, big fat tears welled up and I just wanted to race back to my old lunch bunch in my old school where I knew the lay of the land.  It was just the nicest gesture, but it made me want to run back to a place where I did not need nice gestures quite so badly.  The bestower of gifts has the room right across the hall and I know I am going to like her a lot, though there is no replacing the friends I left behind.  I had been with them so long, some were family.  As it turns out, I will be a class sponsor with owl lady.  One thing I know for sure about her is that she has the best laugh.  It is like listening to Misti.

Today was the first day of class.  Bell and I got to the high school early so we walked  to Bell's building with the owl lady and her girls.  There is a lot of construction going on so we wanted to find the safest route for our kids and find a meeting spot for the kids so after school they could all walk back together.  There are 20 some elementary kids that belong to high school teachers, and we were hoping the older ones could escort the younger ones.

Bell was deposited and my day got busy with assemblies, going over school handbooks, passing out forms . . . You know all that boring first day stuff.  I even had lunch duty today, though I returned from lunch to find a box of "good luck" fortune cookies waiting for me.   The day went pretty smoothly even though I had to rely on the other teachers to keep in the loop since I cannot access my email yet.  Then last hour arrived, and with it came the first kids of the day to challenge me.  When I offered to let them have bottled water, they argued about wanting to have Gatorade.  Then it was why could they not have chips if I did not mind gum.  Hopefully, they now get the idea that if they get mouthy, they get nothing.  I am sure they were just testing me, but I had to dig out the Wicked Witch of the West routine nonetheless.  

At the end of the day, one of the fellow teachers once again reached out and made me part of the group. We had planned on a student aid going to the elementary with a list of the kids to make sure they got back okay since this was the first day, but thankfully, one of the teachers decided to go instead. Apparently when she got there, there were so many other kids waiting on moms in the same area as our children, that our kids could not find each other.  She found all our babies, including mine.  In the meantime, I had realized they were late and headed over my self.  By the time I got there, Suzanne had found a safer meeting place for the kids and gone over the steps of where to go when and what to do if they couldn't find the group.  I was really touched that she made sure she found Bella.  I know, I know.  It is just what any mom would do, but still.  It was important.

I am not even going to think tonight about the vocabulary lessons I don't have or any of that.  This week is busy enough.  There is a command appearance for us to be at the school ice cream social tomorrow evening.  Friday is a much needed back adjustment and a birthday dinner for Harold.  The vocabulary will still be there next week.


 

What we did with my last Friday of FREEDOM

So I would love to tell you that I am just in a dither of excitement at school starting again.  I really would love to tell you that, but since Bell was in trouble for fibbing the other day, I should be honest.  School?  You mean no boxers all day?  I might need to find the mascara?  I cannot schedule my workout between Words with Friends at 7 and iced coffee at 9?  Okay, so I am not excited.

beautiful, just beautiful

I deeply enjoy my time puttering at home in the yard, in the dirt, in the house, with Bell.  But, school is beckoning, on Monday to be exact, so we took one last day of fun on Friday and went exploring.  Jack has been wanting to take us to Red Rock Canyon for a year and we just have not had time, but now that we are at Fletcher, it is only an hour away.

Our plans had been to go last week and then got postponed until the middle of this week and then again until Friday.   It was perfect that we did not go until then because it was not hot.    No joke, it was never hot enough to be miserable . . . around 3 the thermometer at the pool just said 90.

frog spotting

We drove around and scouted things out, then headed up a trail for a geocaching.  We did not make it to the top because some small person grumbled about being too tired and thirsty and hungry.  It was like that Animaniacs episode with the kids in the car.  The whining one.  So we headed back down and had a picnic lunch.  Then, with a happy child, we picked an easier trail that was more walking than climbing and started off again.  Let me tell you, this place was beautiful and superbly maintained for a state park. We saw frogs, tadpoles, bluebirds, and bugs.  Isabella had to get some horsetails.  We walked over rustic bridges and saw box canyon pools.  The entire time, we had a little breeze and were in the shade.  The trail was a good mix of flat and stairs so it was a little exercise for me without being too taxing on the Animaniac child.

higher than she realized

We hit the park swimming pool for a few hours.  It was old and shabby, but not dirty.  It was  mostly empty the first hour and at its busiest probably only had 9 other kids. It even had a water slide.  It definitely cooled Bell off.   She played hard although I could have lived without the part where she tried to  drop a june bug into my top.  I think we are all a little red eyed from chlorine and got too much sun.

handholds are just too far apart

Jack then took us to a very cool box canyon area where handholds were dug in the rock face.  He had made it across the wall to a ledge, but I chickened out half way across.  Bell and I loved a tree that was growing sideways about four feet off the ground.  We saw this giant pile of spiders on the canyon wall.  Now these were not big spiders really, just smallish bodies with long skinny legs.  They reminded me of daddy long legs.  They were in this huddle of hundreds.  It was bizarre and cool but creepy too.  At a distance we thought it was paint on the wall.  Then I thought it was fungi.  And then the edges moved!

puddle of spiders

 It really is a beautiful place to go, right here in Oklahoma.  I am hoping we can go back in the fall, but I know how our plans go.

tree sitting

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Fun and not work

I really should be winding down from two days at the Oklahoma Women in Agriculture Conference.  Instead I am winding down with a glass of wine from a day of hiking and swimming with Jack and Bell.    I feel guilty that this is what I chose and I think Jack wishes I had gone.  On the other hand, I did not think I could handle the stress I knew I would have felt if I had gone.

Months ago, I met a woman from OSU who invited me to the Women in Ag thing and I promised myself that I would go. I hate driving in the city, and though this was in Norman, that was still too much traffic for me, so Jack had planned on going too and doing cool stuff with Bella all day.  But then last week we had company, it got too hot to be in the city dragging Bell around, I discovered that my new class room was  a wreck, and I found out that my grandparents would be down visiting at their cabin on my folks' place.  We meant to take Bell for a single day of fun somewhere and did not get it done last week.  I still could have registered for the conference this week, but things just got crazy.  In addition to really feeling a pressing need to see the grans, my cousins from Montana were at my folks' for one evening. I managed to get out to see them and then worked in another visit with the grans at the cabin.  I had a chiropractor appointment . . . But I canceled at the last minute.  Somewhere in there, I thought my other doctor would finally want to see me about my messed up hand (I really feel too young for carpal tunnel but I seem to have it).  I wanted to get the  house really in order and all my work clothes ironed . . . I know, silly right?  Who stresses about ironing?  Oh, and I thought Jack's brothers would be up visiting this weekend for his dad's birthday.


It was all just too much with the Ag thing included . . . So I chose grandparents (Grandma just turned 78 and there won't be many years left), cousins, clean house, and a day with Bell.  It did not all get done.  The classroom is better, but still needs work.  I am going to dust tomorrow and clean the cars.  But I had today with the two greatest things in my life and that is good. Why, I also saw a giant pile of spiders which was creepy but cool. It was all worth the sunburn.

So maybe I will go to the conference next year and maybe it will not be 3 days before I start a new job.  Perhaps I missed meeting some vital contact or missed out on a grant opportunity.  I just know that even though Jack's friend said it was a great conference, my eye is not twitching yet and that is a good sign. I am okay with all this.

Bliss

I have been giving bliss a lot of thought lately.   More than usual.  There are a lot of contributing factors.  Misti is deep into school again pursuing a dream.  Chris and Cindy moved to a new city in pursuit of dreams.  Talaura is pursuing dreams.  It has just repeatedly hit home over the past few years that maybe I was not doing what I really wanted to do.  And now we are deep in the midst of change in so many ways.

I don't think anyone had ever exactly said to me "Follow your bliss" until I met Dr. Frankland.  I don't know how many times she told our class that and I know at least a few times she said it to me directly.  I used to really worry about bliss because I thought it meant to just do what I wanted and I was always torn over knowing what I wanted,  but over the years I have been mentally compiling a list of factors that contribute to or at least have to do with bliss for me.  I doubt my list applies to everyone though.

*Do no harm.  I don't have to make others happy, but I need to at least consider others' feelings and try not hurt them.

*Count the cost.  There are consequences and risks inherent in any endeavor.  Am I willing to face them when the time comes?  If not, is this really bliss?

*For me, bliss will never be a thing that my conscience cannot accept. It won't be anything that goes against my God or following him.

*My bliss is allowed to change as I change.  I am not static.  I am allowed to try to change my course, even if that was the course I thought I wanted 20 years ago.

*Do not abandon my past lightly. It is what made me who I am.  Do not discount the new.  Change is sometimes good.

*My bliss is actually doing something, is a lifestyle, is everyday choices I make in supporting doing something deeply.  It is not tied to a person, but my actions.



I think bliss is pursuing a dream, being in the moment of pursuing that dream.  Today those dreams mean I am teaching now while we work toward a  more independent future when we can someday farm. They are every day trying to instill in Isabella all things we think are important while reveling in her joy in life.  They are digging in the dirt when I can and really loving the little moments like the hummingbirds at the feeders or Jack's delight that the cactus bloomed.


That dream, that bliss,  can be shared with someone, but it cannot BE someone.  Jack shares my dream of a farm.  He shares my dreams for the way we raise Isabella.  He shares my dreams of our life as a couple. We certainly do not agree on everything, but we share the dream of our life as a whole.  Somehow when Ann told me to follow my bliss, I don't think it had anything to do with marrying the man of my dreams.  I think it meant doing something pasionately that I personally found fullfilling.  I am just blessed that I have someone to do it with me.


Marrying the man of my dreams?  That was something else, in ways bigger, in ways just different than bliss  Not sure what is bigger than bliss.  Maybe just love itself is bigger.  I just know that a person is not what we should use as fullfillment.


Every year there is some kid that I just want to pull aside and tell to follow his or her bliss, but there is not always the moment for an aside.  I surely cannot tell a whole class of 16 year olds that.  Some are not mature enough and would take it as permission to persue every hedonistic desire that popped into their heads.
  
So this thing of bliss.  It is what I think about as I consider how much of Thoreau I will teach this year.  How much I will emphasize the path of the individual when we read Emerson.  It is what I think about while I watch Jack sort out fertigation for the pumpkins and while I wonder how many more years I have of still enjoying teaching.