the big move

We’ve been moving for the past week and a half. I have brown paper boxes dancing through my head at night. Flip the top, peer inside.

At first, I was very good and labeled everything, but that was when I was packing the easiest of things: books and books and books, fabric, yarn. Stackable things. Bricks of food: cereal, canned soup, sacks of flour. These things were easy to unload too; as long as order was kept going in, order was kept going out.

We’ve now reached that terrible part of moving where the sofa and beds and the like have been moved out, and now we discover all the little trinkets that were scuffed beneath. We have two large dogs, and two large dogs leave behind large dust tumbleweeds, ones we could felt together to make a comfortable pouf. Our garage and basement look as if, perhaps, an earthquake jumbled up all the contents without damaging the surrounding structure. Moving while maintaining two mortgages is a bit more leisurely, but probably inadvisable for a number of reasons, most of which involve those terrifying dollar signs, but also have something to do with puttering and goggle’d eyes.

The past two days have been mostly about throwing things into emptied boxes and getting them out. So now I open one up in our new home only to shut it again. No, I don’t know, can’t face it. The first few days in the house, we had moved the most important things, the things that make up the centers of us, so things unfolded fairly neatly, and now we’ve got the little extra bits, the mismatched socks, but it’s good for the soul of the home to have a good shake-up like this. Eventually, things make their way into the donation bins and the house gets trimmer.

Before anything was moved into the house though, I wanted to move some of the most important symbolic objects we have: in my hands, in the above photograph, is a repotted seedling from the maple tree we planted in our backyard not too long after we moved in. That maple was to replace the one our dog gnawed a ripe wound into, and this one stuck. And grew and grew and grew, and our daughter loved, loved climbing in it. And for a girl who isn’t always as graceful tethered to the earth (she shines in the air and water), a good climbing tree is awfully important. So we gathered this one, and later, two more, of its babies and planted them in three spots in the front yard, and I hope one of them takes. It’s a tough time of year to transplant, especially little twigs like these, but we’ll pack some oak leaves around them for warmth, and hope for the best. We also transplanted my grandmother’s hostas, and they looked awfully unhappy at the uprooting, so I may have made the wrong choice in bringing them along this time of year, but when her dahlia bulbs refused to push through the earth this summer, I had to bring this part of her with me.

She’s gone now, about a year ago this time. We went to her home on the lake every year for Thanksgiving for a good while, and this is our first we stayed in Minnesota, and the first we ever hosted. The first thing we cooked in our oven was the turkey!

I started to keep a kitchen journal this past weekend too. I was inspired by another maker’s recipe diary, in which she kept notes of things she’d tried and adaptations, and I thought, with my narrative urges, why not make it a little bit more journal-ish? Before my parents left this evening, they wrote a little something on the menu page, and my daughter drew a turkey and some corn and a pumpkin (which reminded her of a tiger, so she drew that too, along with a seedling being watered), and we have our first entry towards more purposeful consuming in this home.

Since losing my grandmother, evidence of life—handwritten notes, knit objects, recorded music—has felt so central to me. I started keeping a diary again, writing my way out of a dark period in my life and into new hope, which has included a new career and now this, our new home, a building that we hope will be the place my children become young adults and we will grow just a bit older in.

autumn break

For public school teachers, it's called MEA break. For us, it's just fall break, as Montessorians have conferences themselves, and I think for many of us, the idea of heading into that convention center with all the brightness and chaos is a bit crippling.

Instead, my family and I drove down to Austin, Texas, to meet the newest member of our family: Maya and Finn's cousin Traver, named for my sister and my grandfather, who was much adored by both of us. My favorite thing about the first few minutes after we walked in the door? Finnegan was the one who begged to hold him first. My little three-year-old, who has asked me questions about what life will be like when he becomes a dad, or a mom (my kids have asked some interesting clarifying / philosophical questions on what makes a "mom" and a "dad," which is fun to discuss when your kids grow up asking, when finding out someone is married, whether one has a husband or a wife).

We stuck close to home, mainly because life with a seven-week-old is pretty hectic and those little globs of adorable want mama and milk and rest and most of the time all three at once and now please. So we enjoyed the blessing that is their big backyard, which is rich with a variety of southern trees, ones we will likely never see in our Minnesota climate, and Maya immediately took it upon herself to gather as many unique seeds and pods and snail shells as she could find. She also impressed us with her ability to write her brother's name. (She's resisted academics a bit and this fall, we're seeing a breakthrough, which we're not trying to undo with too much enthusiasm--just the right amount of peacock-pride.)

Austin has its old reliables: fried avocado, grackle cackling, the rescue zoo. The baby is new and probably my favorite part of the whole adventure, though it's nice to know you've been down enough to have favorite things. We even snuck into a used bookstore and I brought home a stack of pedagogy books and a few Eyewitness books for the classroom.

A peacock took a shine to me, and a rooster sang to us as we had food from a truck and those syrupy flavored ice cones. The peacocks have shed their tails this late in the year, though you'd never know it wasn't summer by the weather. (Unless, of course you are native to Austin, in which case you say, thank goodness the weather has finally broke.)

Maya has been begging for a turtle for her "surprise birthday party," so she bonded, and below is a frog named Finn.

Maya also bonded with a goat. And a deer. And some pigeons. And a lion. If this girl doesn't end up with animals as a part of her daily life when she's an adult, I will be incredibly surprised.

I loved watching my sister being a mama. It reminded me so much of myself with Maya--she has the same relationship with her son as I did to her, that strapped-to-chest velcro kind of closeness, the roughshod sleep, the utter stars of gratitude, the constant hunger, the sweet doe eyes. I certainly felt grateful to witness it. And her husband is a great papa, though these are those fourth trimester days, where nothing else is the same as mama, and that will change. For now, everything cocoons around this little boy.

Of course, my children didn't miss a beat in telling stories. Sharing little things found, informing about habitats and plans for little beds for little bats and building a fort in that one special corner.

Grandma and Grandpa flew in on Saturday, but we only got a few hours with them. So Grandma got to glory in the little bit of time of three grandkids at once, and then we began the long slog home.

Thank you, C + C + T for the wonderful southern hospitality. We cannot wait to have you introduce your son to Minnesnowta, and to return again and again. And when you find out how to fold the map a bit so we can be closer together, let me know.

I've been busy because (our first month on Instagram)

It's been so long since I've sat down to putter about in this space, and it isn't for lack of attention on the subject but instead a profusion of thoughts--so much that I have no time left to slip a few of our experiences between the digital pages for pressing. So here are a string of Instagram photographs I've taken, and you can see the movement from our camping just before the school year began to moving into the classroom to our first days to a robust rhythm, which we kick on and off of at intervals. I hope to settle in and reflect soon, but these days, I'm really just getting my footing as a first-year Montessori teacher (many-year standard-order teacher, mind you) and there have been far more wondrous things that have happened than mildly discomforting things, and I ought to also point out that all of the trickinesses I've tallied up are all fantastic learning experiences--I'm learning to troubleshoot and to figure out root-causes and then set up an environment and experience that will allow the children to succeed, and I'm loving it.