Quick, build an ark!

As our trip to Switzerland was winding down, the rain was intensifying.  I remember lying in the tent our last night and listening to it beat down with ever-increasing strength.  It was so loud!  Just when I thought it was raining really hard, it would start raining even harder.

By morning the ground had become completely saturated and was running down the little street in rivulets.  Once out of the tent, all the children became completely soaked.  As if the rain weren't enough, suddenly water started pouring out of the ground in our old backyard/garden.

Remember when we first moved in and I blogged a picture of the back garden?  And then I mused about the drain in that picture?  Well, now we know what the drain was for...

It's too bad it didn't work!

Farther back in the garden is some kind of manhole cover.  It wasn't there when we first moved in-- or else it was only grown-over with grass.  Sometime during our first year it suddenly appeared, and we wondered over the purpose of that too, just like the drain.

On our last morning visiting, with the rain still coming down and the cow field squishy beneath my boots, suddenly the manhole started pouring out water at an amazing rate.  One minute I was standing at the gate to my old garden talking with the postman, and the next minute water was gushing everywhere.

It ran down the small incline and flooded our old back porch and the entire ground floor of the house.  The water piled up and everyone had to think very quickly what to do.  Boards were pulled from the porch walls, buckets and brooms were used to move the water into the street, and finally a dam was built to divert water from the house.

It was incredible how quickly everything happened, and heart-warming how everyone quickly came together to help in a crisis.

By lunchtime the rain had subsided a bit and the flood had been successfully diverted.  We managed to dry all of our children off and pack up our very wet and muddy tent.  After a hearty lunch, all our neighbors and friends gathered together in the street to wish us farewell.  The sight of them standing all together waving madly as we drove off really touched my heart.  It wasn't the tearful goodbye we had shared a year earlier, but a joyful one.  I was reminded of the words from a circle song we used to sing with a Waldorf group in Texas before Kitty Bill was born and when the girls were still very small:

Merry meet, and merry part.  And merry meet again.

Unfortunately, as we made our way down the road we saw that our little farm wasn't the only place that had succumbed to flooding.  The fields and allotment gardens were a terrible sight!

 Can you imagine?!  So much water...

Although it doesn't even begin to compare to the devastating floods seen in other countries this year, my heart broke for the families who work these allotments.  It's confounding to think of the damage that just a few days of hard rain can do.  And to think that we camped in that rain... and somehow we didn't float away.  It's just crazy!

Camping in Switzerland

We made it home after an exciting week away, and the children immediately started coming down with some kind of virus.  One lone sneeze led to another and now all three children are at various stages of sickness--- coughing, sneezing, fevers.  As usual it's the price we pay for taking them out into the world.  It was worth it though, because it was a really fantastic trip.

Our time in Switzerland was jam-packed with so many activities, there was hardly time to catch our breath.  It was so wonderful to see our neighbors and friends again, and they all gave us such a warm reception.  It was truly like coming home.

Everything was just as we left it-- the farms, the fields, the horses, the cows...

The weather wasn't nearly as cold as predicted, but the relentless rain made up for it.  As each day progressed the cow field became soggier and soggier.  Aside from the fact that we were sleeping outside, it wasn't much different than living in England.  However, that didn't stop our neighbors from worrying about us.

We brought plenty of gear (or kit, as they say in England) and were fully prepared to cook all our meals, but between friends and neighbors we hardly had to cook anything at all.  We were treated to so many lovely meals-- homemade bread, Indian food, salads, pumpkin soup, pumpkin spaghetti, apple pies, and snacks of all kinds.  We felt so loved and well-taken care of.

Oddly enough, we spent quite a bit of time at our old house.  The new tenant was the first person I met upon arriving, and he immediately invited us over for coffee and to have a peek around inside.  It's such a strange feeling to walk through your old house filled with someone else's belongings!  But it was comforting to know that a nice family had moved in after us.  He has turned our old porch into a workshop where he makes the most exquisite wooden bows and arrows.  He talked us through the process, and all of us were so impressed.  Kitty Bill was especially taken with him and kept asking for permission to go have a chat and offer his help.

Sunburst was absolutely thrilled to be back.  She spent our entire last year in Switzerland volunteering at a horse stable every morning and afternoon.  She was so determined that she would set her alarm and wake in the early hours and be out of the house even before Einstein and I had risen from bed.  She mucked stables, swept, fed, and ran to watch every time the farrier or vet came to call.  Aside from helping in the stable, she also helped with the cows-- mending fences, corralling cows, attending births, and finally helping to nurse an abandoned baby cow.

So once again Sunburst set her alarm and rose in the early hours to help in the stable.  This time she took Moonshine with her, and they were up and gone at first light.  The smile on Sunburst's face every morning said it all-- this is where I belong!

 

In between stall cleanings, horse riding, and visiting, I had a walk through the Goetheanum bookstore and took the kids for a day trip into the big city-- Basel.  We hit all our favorite spots, and the kids were so happy to see that the Heisse Marroni (hot chestnut) vendors had already set up near the Rhine.  We also managed to attend the Jugend Zirkus (youth circus) one night.  One of our homeschooling friends had joined last summer, and it was so fun to see her transformation into a circus performer.  She gave us a little behind the scenes tour of all the circus wagons.  It was so fascinating!

Twenty children participate in this circus and travel around from town to town, not only performing but setting up and taking down their circus tent.  They have a team of wagons pulled by tractors, and the kids live together in the wagons during circus weeks.  They even have a kitchen wagon and a bathroom wagon.  The whole idea was so interesting, and of course so foreign to anything I grew up with in the states.  Of course Sunburst immediately wanted to move back to Switzerland so she could join up.

And if that wasn't enough excitement, on our very last day we awoke to a hard rain and flooding.  Nothing says camping vacation like flooding!!!  No wonder the kids are all sick...

It's time for me to make more tea and wipe more noses, but I'll be back tomorrow to regale you with pictures of the flood.  For today, I'll leave you with pictures of the new angel sculptures outside the Goetheanum.  Aren't they lovely?!

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!