Life and butterflies

Sorry to have disappeared for a bit.  Our last two months were filled with a lot of things-- travel, snow, holidays, illnesses, celebrations, and of course homeschooling.  I also finally finished painting all the wooden furniture as a protection against future mold.  While I prefer the color of natural wood, I will admit that I am really liking the bright new colors.  Lime green and turquoise make me smile.

In my last post I mentioned a possible move on the horizon.  In the end, we decided not to take the job offer up north.  Making decisions about our future is often agonizing-- weighing all the pros and cons, ifs and whats.  I often feel like we're living in some alternate retelling of the Grimm's tale The Fisherman and His Wife as we weigh things like cost of living, location, homeschooling environments, and lovelier views over the landscape.  And where does it all stop?

I'm not going to deny that, like the fisherman's wife, I have often wished I could control the rising sun.  However, I don't think this makes me any different from the other people on this rainy island.  At the end of winter we're all a bit sullen and desperate for warm sunshine.

As luck would have it, these early days of March have been quite sunny.  The kids and I are loving sitting in the sunshine every morning.  It's a bit blinding at times, but I'm not complaining.  I feel like a bear unfurling from her wintery sleep.  It's amazing how a few days without clouds can be so rejuvenating.

Inside this den, my days have been so busy.  Homeschooling my three has definitely become more than a full-time job.  I know that others manage to homeschool even more children than I have and still find time to blog, but for the life of me I can't figure out how they do it.  I have some theories (mostly involving gremlins), but suffice it to say that I wish I had more time in the day to share the wonderful things that are happening over here.  These children continually leave me awestruck by their growing minds and abilities.

We've also taken a couple of field trips with the not-quite-local homeschooling group.  One of which was to the little butterfly house in Stratford-upon-Avon.  I'm not sure what I loved more-- seeing all the amazing butterflies or being so warm that I had to take off my sweater.  It was a nice change!  The last time that happened we were in Italy.

This is the life!

Speaking of change, there is more of that afoot.  I'm reminded of a card my mother-in-law gave me while we were sorting and packing for our move to Switzerland five years ago.  It said, "If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies." --Our lives are so full of transitions, I think of that card fairly often.

Einstein recently received some grant funding that necessitates a temporary move to Italy for some unknown quantity of time this summer, and he has also been invited to apply and subsequently interview for another job-- this time on the mainland.  It's almost funny.

All of these transitions definitely make me think about butterflies-- do they know what's happening when they closet themselves up?  Are they cognizant of their own form metamorphosing... of what their future holds?

I watched some of them emerge bleary-eyed and soggy from their chrysalises, and they didn't quite seem to have it all together.  I can relate to that.  Some of them found a perch where they could drip dry, but some of them didn't.  They fluttered about in a wild panic, but were weighed down by their damp wings.  They hit the stone walkways with an inaudible whack and just lay there stunned by their own predicament.  One minute they are a fat caterpillar, the next minute they're stewing in their own soup.  And next thing they know? They are airborne into a completely different creature. What am I?  Where am I?  What has happened to me?

Again, I can relate.  Moving overseas with children has some stinging similarities.  So I hung around the chrysalis cage for awhile and gingerly picked up my fallen comrades.  Not all of them were going to make it, but a few of them gave it another try.  They latched onto a branch and hung there in stunned silence, feeling the heat warm the last few drops of soup from their bright wings.

My own wings have finally dried out after this last move, and it definitely shows.  We have been getting a ton of homeschooling done lately-- meaningful, artistic work that leaves me speechless at times.  In our enthusiasm we are making huge progress.  It's the kind of progress one can only make in times of complete stability.  Who knows how long that will last around here, so we're making the most of it...

Kind of like these cute ants.  Steadily onwards.

The tamest fox in the world

And then I was bitten by a fox.

You know how you plan out your week, and usually, it goes fairly well with only minor bumps along the way?  And sometimes you have other weeks where every effort at progress is thwarted and nothing goes according to plan?  By Wednesday it had been that kind of week.

Luckily, I have a sense of humor.

Monday and Tuesday were spent swimming upstream.  Figuratively, of course; it's far too cold for swimming just now.  Because we're juggling so many balls, both in homeschooling and as a family, I decided to put one of them down.  The pigeon.

In the midst of lining up a cat/rat sitter for an upcoming journey, we realized that the bird posed a bit of a problem.  Leaving the cats and the bird unsupervised in a room together for hours on end, even with metal bars between them, left us all feeling a bit uneasy.  So I made a few calls, and we decided to take our little pigeon to a wildlife rescue sanctuary.

In one sense, it feels awful to pawn the pigeon off on someone else, after all, it was my beast that attacked it.  I feel this overwhelming sense of responsibility.  On the other hand, I knew in my heart that it would have a better chance at a happy recovery surrounded by other wood pigeons instead of lurking cats.  So off we went.

The place was absolutely amazing, and the volunteer staff was fantastic.  I was happy to see that they had loads of pigeons.  They not only had pigeons, they were just short of a zoo.  They had so many different kinds of animals, it was astounding.  They had owls and parrots, ferrets and rabbits, snakes and lizards, ducks-- just wandering around.  There was even a tame doe walking about trying to set the reptiles free.  They even had foxes.  Tame foxes!

Or so I was told.

We love foxes.  We have some in our garden, and each time our motion lights click on at night we run to the back windows hoping for a glimpse of the foxes.  So you can imagine the excitement when we arrived at this place, and the man announces that we can pet a fox.  The tamest fox in the world.

The man went on to tell us how this fox was hand-raised by someone and subsequently dumped.  He took her in and loved her, and she has been just as sweet as can be, like a dog.  Apparently she's so tame that she has done loads of television and film work, so she's not only tame, she's a bit famous as well.

He brought her out and Einstein and the kids started to pet her.  I snapped a couple of pictures, and then reached my hand in to have a little pet.  And that's when she bit me.

Perhaps she thought I was paparazzi, and I should have asked her to sign a release form.

While a small pool of blood was welling up on my hand, the man continued to assure me that this particular fox was completely harmless.  Apparently she just plays a little rough, like the time she almost took off his nose.  It was a love nibble.  She rarely does that.

Which I suppose means that I'm one of the few... one of the painfully chosen ones.  What luck!

If you want to pretend you were there with me, this is what you saw:

And if you want to play a game of guess the owls, here they are:

  

  

Did you have a productive week?  Or did something unexpected happen?

I can see for miles and miles

We recently took a drive and went exploring in Somerset where we enjoyed some absolutely gorgeous views.

We stopped off in Glastonbury to see the sights and ended up spending the entire day there.  What a neat town it turned out to be!  Aside from being the rumored burial site of King Arthur, my knowledge of Glastonbury was nil.  As it turns out, it's a hippie town.  It was like some strange English version of Moab, Utah and Eugene, Oregon rolled into one.

Oddly, we felt right at home-- except when we walked into the nudist healing well: darkness, candles, water, flesh... but that's another story altogether.  Otherwise, the alternative shops and music and veggie restaurants held such a familiar quality.  I will readily admit that we nearly cried at the offerings in their large healthfood store-- by far the best I've seen yet in Great Britain.

The kids were more interested in climbing up the hill to see Glastonbury Tor than seeing the abbey ruins.  So after browsing around the town, we set out to find our way to the hill.  And then we climbed up, up, up to the very top.

It's considerably flat where we live in England.  Flat and green.  We see a lot of trees, and only once in awhile when we're out taking a drive in the country do we get a glimpse of a view.  Like when we lived in Texas and Indiana, the lack of a view is something we've had to resign ourselves to, but of course we still have that longing to see off into the distance.  There's something magical that happens when you can look out over the land and take it all in.  You really get a sense of where you are in the world.  Time and space all come together and it just lifts you and transforms you in that moment.

So imagine my delight climbing this hill.  Halfway up, the view was splendid.  All the way up?  At the very tip top of the hill, high enough for the wind to catch us in its grasp, it was ridiculously amazing.  We could see everything.  Far, far off in every direction.




I just stood there and turned in circles and took it all in, swallowing every bit of the landscape.  I had the sudden urge to sing at the top of my lungs:

I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles... oh yeah!

Now that I've managed to reference a song from The Who, courtesy of the soundtrack of my childhood, I'll let you in on a little secret.  I'm turning 40 this week.  If I were to stand on the hill of my life, presumably, I would be somewhere in the middle.  Far off in the distance behind me, I can see glimpses of my former self eating mud pies and skipping rope and kissing boys.  And if I look ahead, of course I can't see a thing.  What's to come is still in the shadows.  It's a mere haze of ideas of what life might hold, but I can't get a real sense of it.  We never can.

I think that's why we're so pulled in by these places that give us such a vantage point over the landscape.  It's the only time we can really see what's off in the distance... where we've been, where we are now, and where we're going.  My life has been filled with so much change and upheaval, I can't say where I'll be three years from now, much less forty.  I'm pretty sure it won't be naked in Glastonbury in a crypt full of candles and water, but honestly... how would I know?

So I appreciate the view where I can get it.  I may not be able to see off into the distance of my life and get a sense of what's to come, but if I'm still skipping rope and kissing boys... perhaps I haven't yet crested the summit.  Perhaps I'm still on my way up.

 I'm so thankful to have these lovelies along for the ride.

~~~~~~

So where do you go for a view?  Where do time and space collide for you?

Seven days of summer

We just experienced seven days of sunshine here in England.  I feel a petty and ridiculous need to document it, but there it is.  Our summer sunshine finally came.  It lasted for seven days.  Then it started raining.  Again.

I think something must happen to a person's brain when they're required to live through three and a half months of crappy, wet weather that encroaches into the middle of summer.  It's no secret that it rains in England; you can sense it in the British mindset-- keep calm, carry on, stiff upper lip and all that.  But this year, even the locals are weary.  When we heard the jet stream shifted and there was the barest glimmer of hope that England might actually see some sunshine, the locals hesitated.  They only spoke about it in whispers, as if mentioning the possibility aloud would jinx it.

I can't blame them.  England had floods and tornadoes and Texas-sized hailstorms this year.  I kid you not.  Hail the size of baseballs fell on Leicester, a city that has me stumbling over the pronunciation like a true American.  We had hail at our place too.  Not rip-the-roof-and-siding-off-your-house-and-crack-the-birds-out-of-the-trees hail, like the kind that destroyed our house in Texas eight years ago.  Leicester got that kind.  But still, our hail was big enough to shred the carport roof.

If truth be told, that was my last straw with this England summer and the impetus to pack bags and head to Italy.  England saw rain the entire week we were gone, and the weather was just as miserable when we returned.   It was oddly validating, that weather.  But remarkably, a week later the sun came out.  We went from mid-60s to mid-80s, and there was nary a cloud in the sky.  It felt unprecedented.  All that complaining and whining and pouting was for naught.  Summer came, and I actually felt guilty for running off to Italy.  I felt guilty for my impatience with England while everyone in the US was enduring sweltering heat.  I felt guilty for my indulgence.

Well, seven days of sunshine does not a summer make.  While the clear skies held out just in time for the Olympic opening ceremony, the weather turned chill yesterday.  The dark clouds rolled in, and the sky opened up.  Surely  it was all that drumming at the ceremony.  If anything was going to beg for more rain, why not that?

Now that my Italian-holiday guilt has passed, damped down even further by today's intermittent downpours, I'm ready to share a few more pictures of our week in Italy to bring my tally of sunshiny summer days to a whopping grand total of 14.  After leaving the medieval, hilltop village we boarded two trains and stepped off the tracks in a very special place.

Venice, the city of light.

It was also a city in the possession of immense power and influence during the late middle ages to the renaissance, so it was a bit of a homeschooling field trip to boot.  But I'm not going to feign that my intentions were purely educational-- it's Venice!  It has been on my list of places to visit for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps it was a combination of the sun and the wine and the reflective quality of the water, but it left me speechless.  I'm not even going to try to capture it in words.  And the pictures hardly do it justice.

Venice by day.

Venice by night.

We saw the sights... including the Piazzale San Marco.

We saw the gondolas... and then had a little ride.

 It even rained once, and hard, for about fifteen minutes.

But even that wasn't terrible.  We hid out under an alcove and waited for it to stop.  And then the kids splashed happily in the Venetian puddles.  Without wellies.  A week without wellies felt celebratory, indeed.

Accidentally showing up in the middle of the Venetian Festa del Redentore means that Venice comes with fireworks.  Completely unplanned.  Incredibly amazing.  Fortuitous and resplendent.

It made up for the terrible English weather and then some.

Destination: sunshine!

You know the weather is bad when you wake up in the middle of July and need to put on your jacket to cut the chill before you stumble into the kitchen and make the coffee.  And while you’re making said coffee, you realize that you can’t remember the last time you didn’t need to wear a jacket and shoes in the house all day.  And try as you might, you just can’t remember the last day it wasn’t raining.

I have never experienced a summer quite like the one we’ve been having in England.  Growing up in the desert, I've lived through countless ones where it was so hot I thought I’d die —the kind that necessitate swimming pools, tank tops, and a truckload of popsicles.  It was never exactly fun when the temperatures sat between 105 and 115 F for weeks on end, but heat was just part of the summer recipe.  We expected it.

But this cold and the endless rain?  Our England summer is an imposter that I'm completely incapable of dealing with.  It’s more like fall, as if we skipped a season entirely; it just feels wrong.  Summers are for playing outside and relaxing, letting our minds sleep a little in the hot sun so they can rejuvenate themselves.  The sunshine and warmth brings such a balance, not only to the seasonal cycle, but to the spirit.  Honestly, I have never felt so out of balance in my life.

We decided if the summer sunshine wasn’t going to come to us, we had to go find it… So we loaded up our backpacks and hopped on a plane to the nearest sunny place we could think of: Italy.

I am pleased to report that the Italian weather did not disappoint.

Our first stop was to visit one of Einstein's colleagues near Lago Maggiore, an Italian lake near the border of Switzerland.  He lives with his family in a medieval village overlooking the lake.  It was built in the late 10th century as a kind of fortress village on a high rocky outcrop-- a sheer granite cliff surrounded by forest.  It boasts just a handful of privately-owned homes and a magnificent old church with well-preserved frescoes from the late middle ages to the renaissance.

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  That’s what I thought, too… but of course there was a catch.  This village is really hard to get to.  We had to take a long bus ride from the airport, then we were picked up by car and taken to buy groceries (because there isn’t a market anywhere near the village) before being dropped off on the main road.  From there we had to hike on foot, up a winding, craggy hill carrying both our luggage and groceries.

The hike itself is all of perhaps 20 minutes, and fairly steep at times, with railing keeping you from sliding off into the abyss of the ravine.  We were advised not to bring anything with wheels, so we stuffed half of what we'd normally take on holiday into backpacks.  It was definitely an exercise in learning to pack light and purchase only the groceries you will absolutely need.

The village is so secluded, that passing by on the main road below, you would miss it if you blinked.  From the main road, with my camera zoomed in, it looks something like this:

As we got closer, I started to really get a sense of the place.  It was like nothing I had ever imagined, not even in my wildest dreams.

 

Once inside the village, we were treated to other views, including the old church, dedicated to San Gottardo.  If I'm remembering correctly, it was built in the 1300s and then later expanded to hold about 70 parishioners in the village's heyday.  Both the outside and inside are covered with frescoes which were covered in mortar or plaster when the plague hit the village in the 1600s.  The frescoes were long forgotten, and they weren't discovered again until the 1930s, when the church fell into such disarray that the plaster began falling off.  The church has since been restored, and it is such a wonder to behold-- both inside and out!

 

 

Though not comparable to the beauty of the church, the rest of the small village held its own kind of charm.  There were only perhaps three skinny streets, or passageways, in the entire village.  They were stone-tossed and old as old.

 

Inside was a different story.  Some of the houses boasted modern conveniences-- flush toilets, sinks, stoves or hot plates-- while others looked vacant and in various stages of disrepair.  The most remarkable part of the house we stayed in was perhaps the old servants' kitchen and the view from the uppermost floor.

 

Because it’s only reachable by foot, and the path is not for the feint of heart, you can imagine how safe this village felt.  The kids ran barefoot in a wild pack-- sneaking around corners and having water fights, playing chess at midday in the shade of the church, and scaling the rickety ladder into the belfry.  How many children can fit in belfry at the same time?  All eleven of them, apparently.

All of the kids spoke German, and the girls were delighted to speak with them and so thankful that mom has been encouraging them to keep up with German lessons.  It certainly paid off.  We even picked up a few words of Italian while we were there, thanks to some remedial lessons from a gregarious, trilingual five-year-old.

In the late afternoon we made our way down the hill to the lake, and the children had so much fun splashing around in the cool water and canoeing with their new friends.  They played until the sun set, and then we put our shoes on and hiked back up the hill to cook dinner.

We packed so much into such a short time and enjoyed ourselves immensely.  It was absolutely breath-taking and amazing— the village, the views, the church, living in a medieval house, the lake, the Italian weather… all of it.  Our short visit there was exactly what we needed— sunshine, new friendships, easy conversations, and beautiful views.  I left feeling completely rejuvenated, and as expected, we cannot wait to go back!