hok-si-la

When you've finished illustrating your new album pages, and it involves flowers and seeds and physics and even multiplication on the bead frame, you know it is time to get out of the house and collect yourself a few mosquito bites, which is exactly what we did this afternoon.

This little park is miniature perfection: you drive in through a swampy grove of trees making the perfect tunnel of green, there's a campground and woods, then down a gritty path and onto the beach of Lake Pepin, where we collected fish bones and shell kernels, twists of seed pods, and driftwood bark (ideal for when we do stems in botany to show those layers of growth).

Finn asked to go deeper, please mama, and deeper, please? So mama, who wore a long skirt today, went deeper, and it felt like seaweed licking around my calves, and the kids found a log and it was summer:

Maya has these eagle eyes and she spotted the skittering school of polliwogs you can kind of see in the below photograph. We scooped up a few for closer observation before returning them to the lake, and we realized that this was one of those afternoons we'll look back on in the thick of winter ice, and we'll say, oh yes, Minnesota does summer so nice. It'll come back again, and we'll dig deep and be patient and think of Hok-si-la.