​Monday, January 16th

Tomas and I took a brief vacation from the current Pacific coast apocalypse to attend a soccer camp in southern Florida. Now we’re headed back West on a United flight, hoping to time our arrival just right between earthquakes and torrential storms. No, seriously, the three weeks since the start of Christmas break has been a rosary of alternating shakes and wind gusts and rains. The wind howls at night, moving the house with the strongest bursts. We’ve had three power outages, the longest lasting three days, outdoing our solar battery, and resulting in a tower of unwashed laundry and children. It’s been exhausting, and it’s been nice to have a break from it. Now we’re heading home. Just so you can picture my current arrangement, at his insistence Tomas the Prince is seated comfortably by the window, where he’s buffered from the world by his Beats and by his mother (that’s me), who is wedged in the middle seat, carefully keeping her elbows to her sides while Tomas occupies one armrest and the aisle seat lady needlepoints aggressively with her dominant left arm (the one next to me). I’m afraid of being stabbed.

With amazing luck and a break in the weather, we left Humboldt County last Thursday and flew without a hitch to Miami, where we spent a night with Chris and Cara, good friends from grad school in Ann Arbor. (Chris and Gary shared an apartment that lacked a bathroom door during our first year of the PhD program. That’s when Chris wasn’t living in a tent on a farm outside of Ann Arbor, which he did on and off.) Fellow field biologists, they’ve spent lots of time in the jungles of French Guiana (Chris’ field site) and Paraguay (Cara’s). I’ve wondered for a long time how they can manage to live in Dade County, Florida. My entire understanding of the area comes from careful and extensive reading of Carl Hiassen’s novels, and, with this reliable reference material in mind, it didn’t seem possible that these hearty outdoorspeople and conservationists could live in such a place. We spent Thursday night with them in their little cottage in Coconut Grove and toured Chris’ nearby project site, a botanical garden of native plants and tropical collections on the former estate of David Fairchild, a tropical biologist. (Both Chris and Cara are faculty at Florida International University, which owns the property.) Between their white stucco house, set back from the street and shaded by a wild tangle of palm fronds and vines populated by vociferous crickets, and the Fairchild property, which the explorer named “The Kampong” after his years studying botany in Indonesia, our friends have found a piece of jungle for themselves in Miami. Hiassen and my favorite character of his – Skink – would be pleased with the mangroves and blossoms and dirt.

Tomas loved the tropical feel of Miami and couldn’t get over how much our friends’ narrow street, lined with giant fig trees loaded with happy epiphytes, looked like our street in Bogor. Tomas also liked Chris and Cara, especially loving how Chris slips into a Latino accent after running into Argentinian friends and into a French accent after chatting with French colleagues; he was the same in grad school, our student chameleon. I’m pretty sure he once returned to Ann Arbor in a cravat after a trip to France. I was happy to introduce Tomas to more of our old friends, and I was so pleased when, after we left, he said to me, “Mom, you and Dad’s friends are good. I’m excited that in college I get to make friends like that.” By good he didn’t mean close, though that was implicit, too. He meant we have good people. I agree, and I’m glad Tomas sees it. He asked where else we have people, so that we might visit universities in those places and so that he’ll know good people wherever he ends up. It was so sweet.

On Friday, after our tour of Chris’ project, Tomas and I picked up our rental car and drove the Tamiami Trail across southern Florida. Tomas began to see alligators in the canal next to the road as soon as we were out of the city, and we stopped in a park to walk a boardwalk and see more. The beasts snoozed contently in clear, shallow water while gar glided past them and anhingas sliced gracefully through the pools. We continued along the ramrod-straight road through sawgrass prairies for a couple of hours, then through an endless series of strip malls, to our AirBnB in Naples. In search of dinner, Tomas and I were in awe that all the roads are three-lane highways. To go to dinner, you take a highway. To buy groceries, you take a highway. We never did make it out of the strip malls that night, settling for TexMex in one so busy it was hard to find a parking space. Where were all these people from?

Saturday and Sunday Tomas participated in the soccer camp, which was led by coaches from some good universities in which Tomas in interested. On Saturday the wind howled all day and it was very cold. (To think I packed a swim suit!) In exhaustion, that night we settled for take-out Thai. Sunday was, thankfully, warmer. While Tomas was in the morning training sessions, I spent the first part of both days looking for nature. It was hard to find. Hurricane Ian damaged the coast so badly that many parks are still closed. Hotels and private mansions line the coast, and all of them seem to be under construction; a port-o-potty, contractor truck, and heavy-duty fencing are prominent features of each property. After a few misfires, I found a beautiful beach called Clam Pass on day one – the shells, pastel pink, yellow, orange, were lovely and a huge mixed flock of terns and skimmers rested on a spit – and a decent one on Gulfshore Drive on day two. I watched the afternoon scrimmages at the soccer camp on both days, chatting with parents from Minnesota, Georgia, New York and watching Tomas do his thing. Tomas was pleased at the level of play and had a great time. The kid loves soccer.

Over the weekend, Tomas and I cemented our commitment to finding something other than highways and strip malls. Where was the REAL Naples, the old part, the original town? Turns out it’s in the southern part of the city, a 20-minute drive from our place. Sunday night we made our way south to the Naples core along the three-lane Tamiami Trail, found a place in a parking garage, and headed out to explore. Tomas was in charge of navigation and wanted us to aim for a cluster of restaurants on his Google map in an area called Olde Naples, with an E, of course. We found real neighborhoods with real streets – albeit very fancy ones – and eventually arrived at cluster of orange dots indicated on Tomas’ phone screen. OMG. Super high-end designer shops, all pink or orange or yellow stucco, lined the streets. The restaurants were filled with very finely dressed people drinking wine out of nice glasses in perfect lighting. I should have known from the E in olde. I was in sneakers, Tomas in shorts and a sweatshirt. We decided that this part of the original Naples wasn’t where we were meant to have dinner, and we headed back toward the neighborhood where we had parked and which had seemed a bit more lively and loud and, we hoped, casual. As we walked, Tomas said, “Mom, that reminded me of The Good Place.” He was totally right! It was like the fabricated, movie set neighborhoods in a Netflix comedy series about a sort of purgatory or holding place people go to when they die. Such an apt comparison! After an hour’s walk to The Good Place and back, we found the perfect restaurant a block from where we had parked – an Italian pescheria full of families and laughing and outdoor seating and delicious-looking dishes on people’s tables. We were seated immediately. Our table was wobbly and nobody cared about Tomas’ shorts, so I knew we had found our place. When I came back from the restroom, I found a waiter speaking with Tomas about the Italian’s underwater sprint routine, which he had used to train for futbol in his village on the coast of southern Italy. He was animatedly describing, with anatomical references to his own legs, which thigh and calf muscles this regimen had built up. The waiter had identified Tomas as a soccer player in a glance. It was sweet and funny. Tomas loved his pear salad and grilled salmon, and I loved my glass of wine and squid ink gnocci. The dinner was the highlight of the adventure and Tomas and I congratulated each other on finding an actual neighborhood to explore.

Tomorrow I start my fourth and final semester of nursing school. This year has been a dramatic improvement over last. Our teachers are excellent and are handling much better than last years’ the mayhem beget by Covid and the general underfunding and understaffing of nursing programs. Last semester I did a rotation in mental health, which I was surprised to enjoy as much as I did. It was eye-opening to learn about the deep and strong connections between trauma, substance abuse, and mental disorders, and it was frightening to learn just how poorly equipped our country is to help people stuck in this Bermuda Triangle of suffering. Once I graduate, I should probably work in a hospital for a while to build a full skill set in nursing, but I think there is a good chance I’ll eventually end up working on these issues. As it stands, it would be hard to avoid it on some level – both suicide and fentanyl are massive problems in Humboldt. Tomorrow I start a rotation in our Public Health Department; no further info yet!

Everybody’s doing well. Phoebe is in seventh grade at Saint Bernards. She played volleyball and soccer in the Fall, is doing great in school, and talks to me a lot about the challenges of being a middle school girl. It doesn’t sound like it’s changed since I was in middle school, and I feel for her. She’s tall and smart and looks great and is the target of some real bitchiness. I’m glad she seeks my advice (rather than keeping quiet), and she seems to understand that all the meanness is a way that some girls practice wielding power over others and that it’s not personal. Tristan is in fourth grade, loves school, begs to stay at aftercare as long as he can, and refuses to have his hair cut. Somehow he’s able to see through his bangs, like a Puli dog. He played soccer in the Fall and continues to do karate, now back in group classes with a few other brown belts. He had a school play in December and loved being on stage. He says he wishes he had more stage time. Tristan, Phoebe, and I ride the horses together, though not as often as I’d like since winter and crappy weather have set in. Tomas is a junior, between his high school and club soccer seasons, and working hard on a bunch of AP and Honors classes. He continues to obsess (in a fun way) over colleges, and Princeton is still at the top of his list after his soccer camp there last summer. Tomas has made a really nice group of friends, also soccer players, also nice guys who seem to have their heads in the right places. He likes to cook, is creative and talented with a skillet in his hand, and sometimes cooks for his friends. He’s driving now, a 1992 Volvo that I felt incredibly cool cruising in on the occasion that I borrowed it. Gary is planning a short sabbatical from work starting next month and looks forward to working on the farm – poor guy, I have a list for him – and having a break from early morning trans-oceanic Zoom meetings. A couple of months ago he made his first trip back to Indonesia since Covid hit; he was happy to reconnect with colleagues and friends and put into place his plan for the sabbatical.

We have an hour left in this flight. I made it a mission while in Naples to drive along a three-lane highway to a strip mall to buy the very first Carl Hiassen book. I want to revisit this important reference on southern Florida (which I haven’t read in 25 years), compare it to my recent experience, and refresh my understanding of corruption and environmental destruction in the Olde Sunshine State. Settling into my book now…

Photos below: kids, Gary, horses, a new puppy named Little Bear, the fruits of the summer and fall garden…

​Tuesday, August 9th

Tomas and I are in the fancy United Club lounge in the Newark Airport. Tomas is clearly in his element, comfortable and assured that all is as it should be. It’s not his fault, poor kid – not his fault that he is sure he wasn’t meant to live on a goat farm, where the rest of his family borrows his nice Adidas slides sandals to feed the chickens and gets chicken poop stuck to the soles. He spent most of his first five years living like a prince, after all. I used to catch one of our helpers, Ibu Tini, piggybacking him home from school, and our other helper, Ibu Mimin, spoonfed him whenever she could, in the ancient Indonesian tradition of pampering and spoiling children as long as possible. (Indeed, the international school in Bogor had to pass a policy banning nannies from spoonfeeding their charges at lunchtime through the school fence, where the preschoolers would line up with mouths open like baby birds, waiting for fried rice and Indomie – ramen noodles – to be deposited. It was a policy hard to enforce without constant vigilance; those nannies were good at darting in with a well-aimed spoon.) Tomas had friends whose parents owned homes in both Indonesia and a European country or two, large boats, fancy horses. Nevermind that his parents didn’t own anything anywhere and rode the angkots (public minibuses) to get around, it rubbed off on him. So, goat farms and chicken poop are not his thing. Airport club lounges and big cities, now we’re talking.

As part of our quest to restore Tomas his rightful place in this universe, he and I are just completing a trip to the East Coast to check out a few colleges. We started in Princeton, where Tomas participated in a two-day “ID soccer camp” with Princeton University’s coaches. The camp was fabulous – the coaches learned the kids’ names in just a few hours and gave valuable feedback to them, and Tomas scored a beautiful goal that earned him a compliment from the head coach. (I almost managed to film it on my phone, but I got so excited as he approached the goal that the focus of the camera bobbed up into the trees beyond the field. Epic mom fail.) Tomas and I toured the campus and the town (including a drive past my childhood home, high school, and middle school, and lunch from Hoagie Haven, a Princeton institution for at least 50 years), and we bought the requisite baseball cap. Tomas took in the stone mansions set back behind long driveways overhung with ancient oaks and sycamores, the private prep schools that ring the town, and the beautiful arches and masonry of the campus; he loved it all.

We stayed with our good family friends (truly family, really), the VanRaaltes, with whom I shared many Adirondack summers and ice-skating sessions on Carnegie Lake as a child. We had lunch at PJs Pancake House (another Princeton Institution) with my childhood babysitter Donna; it was Donna who took Nikki and me to see Grease at the Garden Theater when it was originally released, a life-changing experience. Donna had an impressive collection of colorful pompom socks that I envied enormously and cute boyfriends who rocked up to our house on Moore Street in jacked-up trucks. Our visit also coincided with one from my high school best friend, Katherine, and we were able to meet up. All of our friends offered Tomas home-cooked meals and whatever he might need, should he show up in Princeton as a student two years from now.

The soccer camp finished up on Sunday evening, and Monday Tomas and I took a morning train to Manhattan. As we emerged on the escalator up from Penn Station, we were blasted by the shear New Yorkness of it all: chatter in five or ten different languages; a jackhammer; horns; sirens; shouting workers; scaffolding; crowds; traffic; and, now, sweltering heat and drenching humidity. Tomas seemed to be taking it all in. “It’s a lot,” I said. He nodded and grinned: “Yes, it’s a lot. It really, really is a lot”. We checked into our hotel just around the block from Penn Station, admired the view from our room on the 25th floor, and headed out for a few hours of tourism. Tomas chose to take us to Times Square, where we enjoyed the company of a gazillion other tourists, found a big soccer store for Tomas to drool over, ate lunch, and took photos with The Naked Cowboy (with whom Tomas, who knows everything that has ever appeared on social media, was already familiar). (He also happened to recognize a famous YouTube cooking celebrity walking on the street.) Tomas seems to have a GPS and a compass implanted in his brain, and he led us around adeptly.

We returned to our hotel in the early afternoon to drink water, dry our sweat, and drop our body temperatures to a range acceptable for proper enzyme function for a couple of hours. Mid afternoon we headed out again to take the subway uptown to Columbia University, where we were scheduled for a 4pm tour.

We began by buying a hat, as is customary for us. If Tomas doesn’t end up going to college, he’ll be able to sell his impressive university hat collection and live off of it for…well, at least a few days. Hat on, we followed our tour guide around the majestic campus from 4 to 5. It was 94 degrees. Tomas claimed to be unaffected by the heat (further testament to his genetic superiority), but I would be lying if I claimed that my focus wasn’t affected. Oh my god it was hot. Tomas liked the campus, but, despite his frequent claims that he belongs in a metropolis, he seemed sort of “meh” about Columbia. Toward the end of the tour he said, “You know, I could really see living in Princeton and hopping on a train now and then with my friends to catch a game in the city.” So, Princeton won, at least this round. He LOVED it! And, while I’m happily committed to my mountaintop on the northwest Pacific coast, I’d be overjoyed to bother Tomas frequently in Princeton, catching some of his games and teaching him to do his laundry on the coin-operated machines in the dorms. Or wait, the machines are probably endowed too, and he probably won’t need any coins. But he will need help, unless something changes soon; so far laundry independence is in the goats-and-chicken-poop category.

Following the tour, Tomas and I met up on campus with my wonderful, funny, handsome friend Luca, who is Chair of the Computer Science Department at Columbia. Luca is Italian, and Tomas wore his Juventus shirt in Luca’s honor. Luca walked us around campus a bit more and told us about this building and that, but he’s a soccer addict and the conversation quickly veered in that direction. He took us to his home on Riverside Drive, where his wife and my good friend Meika was waiting for us. Meika, who is from Brazil, was a graduate student at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate there, and it was with Meika and another Brazilian grad student, Albert, whom I spent a semester in the Mata Atlantica, the rainforest along Brazil’s east coast, in 1993. We made dinner while Tomas indulged Luca in soccer chat, including in a description of his awesome goal at the Princeton camp. (It’s a shame there was no video to support the description.) Luca asked detailed questions about distances and angles and which foot was involved, and Tomas commented later that Luca reminds him of Nagypapa. Anyone who knows my father will understand his commitment to detail and the interrogation techniques necessary to obtain said detail. And it’s funny, Luca, who met my father years ago, commented on how much he enjoyed his long, late-night conversation with him (which surely involved details and interrogation, perhaps symmetrical in nature). It was a wonderful evening, and Meika and Luca, too, offered their support to Tomas should he end up at Columbia. Tomas and I subwayed back downtown to our hotel, showered off the caked salt, and went to bed for a super-airconditioned sleep.

I last wrote in January. The rest of the school year was long and tough. Nursing school was all-consuming. I loved the learning – throughout my undergrad and grad, I was a committed organismal biologist, and now I’m having a love affair with molecular and cellular biology – and I enjoyed the clinical rotations, but I was stretched pretty thin. Gary took on a lot of kid transportation, which is more or less a full time job of its own. Friends who live right behind Tristan’s school let us drop him there every morning 20 minutes before the start of school so that Gary could get the other kids to school on time. It was a very smooth system, so smooth, in fact, that once these friends went on vacation and we didn’t know; Gary continued to drop Tristan there, and Tristan let himself into the backyard like usual, sat on their back porch until he judged it was time to go to school, and walked himself over to Garfield Elementary without incident. Ooops. Nobody has called CPS, at least not yet.

Tomas ran track during the Winter season and continued to practice occasionally (when we can get him there) and play games with his competitive soccer team in Santa Rosa. He busted his hump in school and did great; I’m proud of his ability to balance school and sports. I don’t think I would have had the maturity to do that if I had been playing sports as intensively as he is. Phoebe finished out her sixth grade year and underwent huge transformations while she did. She shot up in height, started caring about clothes and hair, and had a few crushes. Thankfully she still loves goats and reading and being a farm girl. She encountered, full-on, all the things that make Middle School the depths of human existence, and we talked regularly about what it means when someone claims to be your friend one day and rejects you the next. I encouraged her to take on the mantra “F*#k it” – well, not really those words, but the spirit of them and the idea that one can’t take these things too seriously. She gets it, more than I ever did at that age, and I’m proud of her. Phoebe also mastered raising one eyebrow, and she likes to use this form of expression (skeptical, questioning) in religion class. Tristan loved third grade and being back in school. His teachers sent me emails now and then about ​how ​they adore him and how helpful he is in class, and their adoration turned out to be useful when we forgot him at school a couple of times on early dismissal days that we failed to note were early dismissal days. Again, nobody has called CPS. Yet. This summer Tristan decided he likes folk tales, and he read three tomes by himself – Russian, Norse, and Grimms. After he did that, he read aloud to me and I realized he might be a speed reader. Great for him, but it’s hard to listen to someone speed read aloud. I couldn’t keep up.

Phoebe’s goats always deserve a paragraph to themselves. In October she bred her three adult does to our handsome bearded bucks. Throughout the winter the girls ate and ate with gusto and we watched their sides expand. Jolene in particular (Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeeene) grew in width to absurd proportions. In February we waited on tenterhooks, often dashing outside in pouring rain in the middle of the night to see if anyone was delivering; as the due dates approached, Phoebe and I set up a schedule of alternating checks at midnight and 3am. Phoebe even stayed home a day or two in case things got moving during the school day. In the end, Sugar dropped beautiful twins, dark brown Black Coffee and black-and-white Half & Half, at a very civilized time of the evening. Cowslip had black-and-white twins, Dixie and Moonflower, on a sunny early afternoon while I was home and Phoebe in school; I got to deliver the second one. Jolene, always above and beyond, had five (FIVE!!!) babies during TV time. She was a week late and so wide we were worried that she might explode. It was a special night, with Gary, Phoebe, Tristan, and I all there to “help”. (Jolene didn’t need help.) Tomas, for whom the goats are a bewildering attraction that he does not share with his weird family, was upstairs doing his homework. Jolene popped those babies out like a popcorn maker drops a shower of popcorn, with only a few minutes between each. Phoebe, Tristan, and I dried the tiny babies off with old towels. Gary dashed back and forth to the house for more towels and molasses water to fuel Jolene’s heroic efforts. Every time he’d come back, we’d say, “Dad, she just had another!” Seriously, the whole thing was pretty unbelievable and Jolene is, in my eyes, a caprine goddess. Phoebe sold kids and goat milk, and I made some chevre and froze lots of milk to make more later. Phoebe reinvested her earnings in another registered doe, and Gary is thrilled that SOMEONE’s efforts on the farm are doing something other than simply absorbing every penny he earns. (I still think we should name our farm Bleed Me Dry Farm, though now Middle Sister Dairy Goats is in the running.)

After the school year, I was desperate for Summer, and it’s been a good one. Phoebe, Tristan, and I rode the horses a lot. We’ve made some trips to the river for swimming. Tristan has been to summer camp for a week, and Phoebe is meant to go next week. We had our annual summer visit, better than ever this year, from my friend Tanya and her niece Saysha; we horseback rode in thick fog every day. Also, Tomas’ friend Alex visited from Madrid. We dedicated ourselves to feeding him hamburgers and enabled him to compare and contrast Spanish bullfighting in Madrid, which he has seen, with American bullfighting, which we could provide for his entertainment at the Fortuna Rodeo. The icing on the cake of his American vacation was the Quadiators competition at the rodeo, in which teams of young boys on quads race around trying to smash and pop balloons taped to their opponents’ heads with plastic bats. In June I had a short vacation when I flew to Colorado to ride an endurance event in the Spanish Peaks with my friend Tanya. I rode her 18 year-old Arabian mare, a rescue horse with an unknown history that Tanya has only had for a few years, in a 25-mile race. Luna loves these races, likes to go fast, and knows what she’s doing. I sat on her back and she took care of things, which is good because I don’t really know what I’m doing, and we placed in the top ten. Then, at the end of July, I rode in my first ride-and-tie, which took place at Cuneo Creek, a gorgeous part of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In a ride-and-tie, two humans and a horse are a team. The humans take turns riding the horse, and the rider, who is usually faster, ties the horse and leaves it for the runner while jogging off ahead. The runner reaches the tied horse, hops on, and the cycle starts again. The humans can take turns running and riding as often as they want or as often as the terrain warrants. I did the 22-mile event with my friend Lauren on her cowpony Goose. It was brutally hilly but an absolute blast, and we came in second in the small field of four teams. I won my first-ever belt buckle! It’s big enough to serve appetizers on. Twenty teams completed in the 36-mile event, and we shared the course with them for the first 12 miles or so, so for the first chunk of the race it was a good crowd of excited, dancing horses and tough cross country runners. Goose was very level-headed; he didn’t mind being left tied to a tree here and there, and he trotted most of the 22 miles at a steady pace. His job on Planet Earth is usually to round up cows, so I do think he might hav​​e been wondering at which part of the course he’d find the cows, but he didn’t complain.

Now, summer is coming to a close. I’m truly sad to have it end – sad that I’ll have less free time with the kids, sad that there will be less riding, sad that Tomas will soon disappear behind his desk. I’m excited about my second a​nd​ final year of nursing school, but also dreading being consumed by it again. Sigh.

Tomas and I are halfway across the country by now. I’m in the middle seat, engaged in a careful fencing act to avoid shoulder contact with the aisle seat guy, who swabbed down his whole seat and tray table with Chlorox wipes just after boarding. I can tell he REALLY doesn’t want to touch shoulders. Tomas insisted on the window seat, where he would be buffered from contact with strangers by me in the middle seat. The middle seat is miserable, and if Tomas had the life he deserves, we’d be in first class, I would not have to shoulder fence with a stranger, and Tomas would be able to stretch out his muscley soccer player legs while sipping an iced mocktail and watching a movie on a decent sized screen. Poor Tomas. It’s all so unfair. I’m sure some day things will be as they should be for him – a life of airport clubs, first class, and his own slide sandals that nobody else borrows and walks through chicken poop in. I hope he doesn’t read this until he’s old enough to know that I’m mercilessly taking the piss.

Monday, January 3rd

Dear friends & family,

Happy new year! A new year in this new world. I wish with all my heart for it to be a good one – for the coronavirus to become no more of a nuisance than the flu, for us to get our heads out of our asses (to paraphrase Ariana Grande in “Don’t Look Up”), and for hope to grow. It’s hard not to feel a wave of hopelessness wash over now and then, sometimes more often than that. Hoping for some glimmers in 2022!

That said, the five of us have stayed relatively safe, busy, and excited about the things in our lives since I last wrote in April. More than ever, I’m thankful that we live on top of a mountain, with plenty of room to run and scream and breathe, and with opportunities to sometimes forget about the rest of the world. Tristan, Phoebe, and I finished up their year of home schooling last Spring with lots of reading in front of the fireplace, early trips to the river for freezing cold swims, and our own homegrown ag curriculum. With enormous dedication and perseverance, Phoebe mastered the milking of Jolene, the goat whose babies she and Tristan delivered in April. Jolene was not particularly interested in being milked, but, with the help of Phoebe’s brothers, who designed creative distractions like playing guitar and doing umbrella dances in front of the stubborn doe, Phoebe procured many gallons of beautiful, rich milk. We made, and are still making from frozen milk, gobs of chevre. It is, by all accounts, delicious. (Sadly, Tomas-the-foodie refuses it, after having seen where it comes from.)

Spring (not wet enough) melted into Summer, and we planted our garden in new gopher-proof raised garden beds. (The gophers had won too many battles over the last few summers, so it was time for an overhaul.) Gary busted his behind to bring truckloads of horse poop and old hay to the new beds, and the garden was a roaring success, with an astonishing harvest of plump cherry tomatoes, delicata squash, green beans, corn, sugar pumpkins, parsley, and enough kale to feed a nation of vegetarians for a year. Phoebe planted flowers throughout her herb bed, and they exploded in colorful waterfalls that poured over the sides of the box. Our fruit trees also went berserk this year – the apricot tree was loaded with golden fruits, the plum kept on giving, and we had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of apples. The kids and I made jam, Gary brewed gallons of hard cider, I donated apples to the food bank, and our horses were thrilled to eat a slightly bruised apple with each meal for a couple of months.

We had some smoky days that got in the way of outdoor fun, but the smaller kids and I still fit in a lot of horseback riding and all of us had a good number of hot summer days at the river. We bought three goslings in May and spent the summer watching them grow, taking them out to graze in our orchard / garden, and learning their amazing gestures and calls. They greet us at every morning and every afternoon feeding with a complex routine that involves bowing their graceful necks, beating their huge, beautiful wings, and, of course, squawking and shrieking. They live with Phoebe’s bucks; known to be excellent livestock guardians, their job is to keep foxes and mountain lions away. Indeed, I can’t imagine any wild creature wanting to approach them when they are in full chorus. Tristan has come to be our chicken, duck, and goose-minder, and the geese absolutely love him.

During that brief pandemic pause in the summer, when numbers were down and it seemed safe to see friends, we had several sets of visitors, including my good friend from grad school Tanya and her niece Saysha, as well as our friends Peter and Laurel and their grandsons. Saysha rode horses with our kids, and Peter and Laurel’s grandkids enjoyed three nights in a tent with Tristan, giggling and wrestling til late at night. Tristan and his good pal Cassidy had a sleepover on our porch. When plans to camp in Lassen National Park with my friend Jackie and her girls were thwarted by wildfires that closed every route there, Phoebe, Tristan, and I instead enjoyed time at Jackie’s family cottage on the Van Duzen River.

A highlight of the summer was the arrival and set-up of a new tiny house, which we have perched in a quiet spot between the house and the stable where it overlooks the nearby coastal hills and, in the distance, the tippy tops of the Trinity Alps. Now we have room for guests (it’s tiny but has a loft and can sleep four), a place for kids having sleepovers to hang out without annoying siblings, and a quiet study spot for me. My parents visited in the Fall and took it for its maiden voyage; my father reported that it was quite excellent, which I was happy to hear, as he provided the loan to me that paid for it. I’m doubly happy to hear the good report, as getting it to our property and into place was a bit of a fiasco: the truck hauling the tiny house couldn’t clear some trees at the top of our drive (my fault, poor planning) and plugged up our driveway until our forester neighbor saved the day with his chainsaw. This delayed the final placement and leveling of the tiny home until nightfall, which induced great stress in the driver, a six-foot-four ex-Marine who was afraid of the dark, flying insects, and spiders. In the end, rather than driving down the mountain in the dark in his shiny new cherry-red truck, he drank a lot of vodka with us, spent the night on the couch, and left in the morning with a very big tip. So, to make the driver’s stress worth it, I hope you’ll all find a time to visit and stay in the tiny house!

Gary worked hard over the summer on his treehouse, a multi-year project that he has undertaken single-handedly. When you come to stay in the tiny house, you will see and appreciate from the tiny house deck how phenomenal this undertaking has been. Straddling two thick branches of a three hundred year-old pepperwood tree, the tree house is an architectural feat. With floating brackets that allow the house’s platform to move with the wind (which is no joke up here) and a hexagonal design, it’s AMAZING. I anticipate that Gary will soon move into the treehouse, I will move into the tiny home (we’ll wave to each other as we sip our morning coffee), and we’ll leave the house to our three children and the dogs. I should teach the kids how to cook and vacuum in anticipation of their imminent independence.

We lost Lucy the dog over the summer, which was particularly hard for Gary and me. We adopted Lucy, whose mother was a street dog in Jakarta, 16 years ago. We knew Lucy before we knew Tomas, and Lucy knew us when we were still young and relatively carefree. She was with us through all kinds of shit and through massive life changes – our car accident in Jakarta, having kids, moving to the US, having another kid, building our farm – and it was hard to see her go. She was ready though, and we all held her at the end and told her it was okay to leave us. Now we like to say that she is happily dumpster-diving in West Java again, her favorite activity when we lived in Bogor. (Kneeland was always sadly devoid of chicken bones and rotten food for sweet Lucy.) To honor her, Tristan re-wrote the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” to this new theme – it was something like “Lucy in the sky with dumpsters…”. He typed the whole thing out on his computer.

Tomas’ summer was…insane. He finished his Freshman year at Eureka High School with excellent grades and new friends made over the final few in-person months of school. His summer schedule was packed full of soccer events and camps that he was looking forward to. In July, he and I headed down to San Diego for a tournament he would play with his competitive team in Santa Rosa. We arrived early, with half a day to walk around the UC San Diego campus, which he loved. We bought the requisite hat. The next day the tournament began. Fifteen minutes before the end of the game, Tomas’ ankle connected with a mighty kick, meant for the ball, from an opponent. He played the rest of the game, but, as soon as he was off the field and his adrenaline began to ebb, the ankle started to hurt. Tomas couldn’t make it back to the car, and our carpool friends had to bring the car around for him. He said it was cramping and he needed a hot bath, so we went back to the hotel, but it wasn’t long before we were in the Scripps ER. The x-ray didn’t show anything, so Tomas was given a splint and a prescription for Norco and sent packing. The pain was tremendous and barely, if at all, touched by the Norco for well over a day. It did lessen enough by day 3 that Tomas felt he could go back to the fields to watch his team play their final games…but within half an hour of arriving on the sidelines the swelling began again and the pain was excruciating. Poor Tomas, who wants attention as much as he wants a hole in his head, had to be fireman-carried off the field, golf-carted to a car, and lifted into it. Back to the ER, where x-rays still showed nothing. Tomas was given a shot of Tramadol, a new splint, and sent packing again. I tried desperately to get the attention of the ER doctor and our nurse, to explain that Tomas’ level of pain was very real, not a play for attention, and was at a totally unacceptable level. They didn’t give a crap. “It’s gonna hurt,” the ER doc said as she turned away from me. I was reminded of a study that was published a few years ago about the solid statistical evidence demonstrating that people of color are not given the same amounts of pain meds that white people are given in hospitals. Gggrrrrrrrrr.

Tomas and I spent another three days in the hotel room, Tomas struggling through the pain, until he was well enough to fly home with crutches and airport wheelchairs and the whole deal. Eventually, multiple MRIs showed a break through the growth plate of his tibia, as well as a badly bruised talus. The swelling and the distribution of bleeding looked so weird to our local orthopedist that he sent us to consult the oncologists at UCSF. You can imagine how fun that was for Gary and me. Fortunately, unlike most folks, I have my own personal family pediatric oncologist on speed dial; the absolutely amazing love-him-to-death Dr Sabnis got us right in with all the right doctors, who quickly put us at ease, both about cancer and about the fractured growth plate. Long story short, Tomas was on crutches for over a month, and then slowly and carefully eased back into walking, then jogging, then, finally, hitting the field again. He went to every practice and every game of his Eureka High School soccer team, helping his coaches on the sideline and cheering for his teammates. Mid-season, he began to play again, carefully, slowly working his way back to full speed. His coaches noticed his dedication and his skill, even at half speed; at the end of the season, Tomas was awarded All County, an unusual honor for a Sophomore. Tomas was very surprised and pleased – he deserved it.

Here’s the really crazy part of the story: Tomas was scheduled to fly to Spain a couple of weeks after the injury to spend two weeks in August with his friend Alex and the Brickle family. The Brickles were neighbors of ours in Bogor – Nick and I worked together at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Anna taught at an international school in Jakarta. Alex and Tomas are the same age and have been friends since they were babies. The Brickles now live in Madrid. Somehow, by some miracle, and with a delay of only a few days, Tomas still made the trip. It never occurred to him not to go. All alone, on crutches, off he went. He even weathered a 24-hour delay in the Newark (the NEWARK!) airport, poor guy. Now, a 24-hour layover in the Singapore airport could have been quite fun, as Tomas knows (movie theaters, laksa and satay, swimming pools, and shopping-lah), but Newark sucks! In Spain, the Brickles adjusted their plans, scrapped the hikes, scheduled in more tapas, and gave Tomas the ground-floor room in the beachside villa they rented in the North. Tomas, though wishing he wasn’t on crutches, had a marvelous time. The kid loves to travel, and he feels like he belongs in beachside villas.

Tomas just completed his first semester of Sophomore year, and Phoebe and Tristan both started at new schools this year. Phoebe is in the sixth grade down in town at St Bernard’s, where she is co-Class President with an opponent with whom she tied in the 13-person class vote (complicated, I know), an enthusiastic participant in Drama Club, and about to begin rehearsals for a play in which she got a part. She loves the school, is happy for the things a bigger school is bringing to her, and is making new friends. Tristan is in the third grade at Garfield School, a little red schoolhouse at the foot of the mountain. It’s a small school, but bigger than Kneeland School. He loves his teacher and is outrageously happy to be in a class of 24 second and third graders. Both kids couldn’t wait to get back to school today after the Christmas break. Tomas is working hard, with an AP class and two Honors classes. He just completed his online driver’s education course and will soon get his learner’s permit. The joy and freedom of having a car and driving is a bright star ahead for him.

Today I had my first quiet day alone in two weeks, and my first quiet day alone with NO studying to do in five months. I just finished my first semester of nursing school at our local junior college. It was an enormous amount of work and had its moments of frustration, but I loved it. I’m thrilled by learning the physiology, and I enjoyed the eight weeks of clinicals we had in the hospital during the latter part of the semester. Each of those weeks, we spent two days in the hospital caring for only one patient, a luxury I know I won’t have again. Each patient had a story worth hearing and worth telling; most of the stories weren’t very pretty. Four of the eight were diabetic, three were meth users, some were both. I’m glad I met every one of them. On the rosier side, my clinicals cohort was a group of ten women, including a very pregnant pastry chef who curses like a sailor, two cannabis trimmers, and a doula, and one guy, and they were all fabulous. I made particularly close friends with a woman who has a Masters in psychology and who hopes to be a mental health nurse; each week Kelly eagerly snapped up the patients with dementia or who were in alcohol withdrawal, while the rest of us squabbled for nasty wounds and unexplained bleeding. Kelly’s got kids exactly Phoebe and Tristan’s ages, and we made a habit of meeting to study in a cafe while the kids drank cocoa and played games at another table. I’m looking forward to next semester, and even more to starting work after I finish the program.

I love the photo below. In it, I have just finished the physically-challenging and sweat-inducing task of applying compression stockings to the legs of Ryan, the sole male in my group, with the aid of talcum powder produced circa 1975. Those things are damned hard to get onto oneself, and almost impossible to apply to someone else. We were in hysterics. Fortunately, it’s not all compression stockings and changing sheets – in a couple of weeks we’ll begin learning some fun stuff like IVs and lectures will include things like the body’s acid-base balance, which is incredibly cool. I recommend the topic for anyone looking for good reading in 2022!

Finally, just a few words on Christmas: it was very, very loud and included wonderful food. We spent three nights in San Francisco. On the first, the grown-ups plus Tomas-the-foodie attended my 50th birthday dinner, which Chris organized at an AMAZING restaurant in Bernal Heights. We all dressed up for it, which meant for me a trip to Ross, where I found a fake-mink-trimmed black cloak that was perfect for the occasion. Tomas was very handsome in a sports coat and batik shirt, Agi was glamourous in pearls, and Nagypapa wore suspenders. The following day Agi took the kids to the Nutcracker with her cousin Michelle and her twins. Chris and Agi also treated us to the Lego sculpture show, which was terrific, a strangely emotional experience with sculptures entitled “Despair” and other very un-Legolike themes. Christmas Eve was a madhouse of kids and wrapping paper and Felix with a blossoming ear infection. I think it wasn’t fabulous for Feli, but the rest of us had a ball.

We came home on Christmas Day, spent the evening with Gary’s mom, and had 15 inches of snow dumped on us over the next two days. Now, with steady rain in the forecast for the next week, we start the new year. None of us has Omicron, all three kids are vaccinated, Gary and I are boosterized. Onward!

And more photos…

Friday, April 30th

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We started a dairy goat herd during the pandemic. I mean, who didn’t? It was the natural thing to do. We call them our COVID bovids. Actually, Phoebe has had a few pet does for about two years, but during this year at home we decided to go full throttle, with a plan to breed a bunch of does, make goat cheese, and sell goat kids.

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In January, Phoebe, Tristan, and I made an epic journey to the Central Valley to buy a couple of fancy baby bucklings who will be our herd sires. Our trip was loads of fun, including a one night stay in a hotel in Vacaville, where we booked a time slot in the hotel’s swimming pool, ate crappy take-out food from the Olive Garden, and watched bad TV in our room. The kids were in heaven. The goat farm we visited was amazing, and Phoebe oooed and ahhhed at their set up. Both kids enjoyed a half hour of sitting in a pen with twenty or so baby goats who climbed on their shoulders, chewed on their hair, and ran around the pen bucking and jumping. Who wouldn’t love being swathed in baby goats, really.

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Then, in late February, I bought a pregnant doe named Jolene. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeene. If you haven’t listened to that Dolly Parton song, do it now before you read on. Our Jolene does not have flaming locks of auburn hair, eyes of emerald green, or beauty beyond compare, but she is fabulous. Jolene came home to us a month before her due date, and she ate, and ate, and ate, and ate. Her sides expanded laterally until she appeared to be off balance, a problem made worse by the locomotory constraints posed by her swelling udder, which eventually no longer fit between her hind legs. Jolene began to waddle. As the big day approached…and then passed, home school became an extremely unfocused experience; the kids and I jumped up every ten minutes to check Jolene through the living room window as she grazed in front of the house. We had a few false starts, during which we texted everyone we knew to say that our Jolene was going into labor, but we were wrong and Jolene simply continued to eat and expand. It was torture. Hoping it might induce labor, several times we serenaded Jolene with Dolly Parton’s song, crooning along to the track as loud as we could. Jolene simply looked at us sideways and continued to chew her cud.

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Then, finally, a day came (ten days after we expected it) when Jolene ate less than usual, bellowed more than usual, and crabbily pushed the other does around. We continued our halfhearted attempts at schooling, punctuated by frequent looks out the window and visits to Jolene. Still nothing. At 4:45pm, I made my usual run down to the foot of the mountain to deliver Tomas to Gary, who would take him to soccer practice. On my way back, five minutes from home, Tristan called. Breathless and hyper with excitement, he yelled repeatedly into the phone, “Jolene’s having her babies!! She’s already popped one out!” I put the pedal to the metal, flew home, parked the car behind the house, and sprinted to the goat enclosure in the front yard…to find that the kids had fetched the birthing kit Phoebe had carefully assembled in the previous weeks, slapped on blue medical gloves, delivered a second kid, wiped the twins’ nostrils clear, and placed the babies on a fresh towel for Jolene to lick clean. My kids were over the moon with joy, grinning from ear to ear, with blood on their cuffs and goo on the fronts of their jackets. Jolene, ever steady, was unfussed about sharing her babies with Tristan and Phoebe. She cleaned the newborns from head to toe, let Phoebe help them stand to nurse, and began to eat again. It was the most marvelous experience, and I’m so happy it happened the way it did – with my kids home alone for a full COVID bovid midwifery experience.

In the Fall, we’ll breed our new bucks to three of our does, and next Spring we’ll have a bunch of babies to sell and does to milk. Phoebe is so excited, but I’m not far behind her. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to be a farmer. Now I get to enjoy raising dairy goats via Phoebe!

Rural living has many perks. For some rare souls, these might include pooping in the woods, doing the dishes with a hose in the yard, and having bucket baths on the porch. For others, those activities might fall into the category of downsides of country life. That’s alongside of things like cooking on a hotplate and going to bed at 8:30 to beat the cold. Wait, let me back up.

A few weeks ago, we broke the expensive ceramic glass in the door of our woodburning stove. For a while, we managed with the cracked glass. Then, the piece fell out and we could no longer close the flu without filling the house with smoke. So, we quickly burned through the rest of our firewood. No flu, fast burning. Once the wood was gone, there was no excuse for not taking the stove door to have the glass replaced, so off it went down to town. Without the woodstove, I cranked the propane-fueled forced air heat while Tristan, Phoebe, and I continued to home school. (While Eureka is in the full swing of Spring, pointelist buds dotting all of the trees, at 2700 feet we’re still having frosts most nights and the house is cold most of the day.) Turns out heating your house all day with propane burns fast through the stores in your tank. Huh, go figure. The burners went out while I was cooking dinner, long before we were set up for a refill. I called our propane company; it would be over a week before they could deliver. Pandemic delays, of course.

But that’s not the end of it. Oh no, there’s more. Then our septic system died. And, boy, there’s nothing like a Yellowstone geyser in your bathroom to, well, make you reconsider the perks of rural living if you happen to be someone who prefers not to poop in the woods or bathe or your porch. A new low point in my life was when the propane truck arrived to deliver gas right when the Roto Rooter guys were busy pumping. Cliff, the propane guy, took in the sight of digging, destruction, and heavy equipment around our yard. Then he looked at the propane gauge. “Wow, looks like you’re empty here,” he said, his voice full of profound sympathy for his sweet yet ridiculous customers who were clearly both pooping in the woods AND cooking on a hotplate. Long story short, after roughly ten days without plumbing and a lot of money down the hole (literally), we have a muddy yard, a new septic system, a thorough understanding of septic system anatomy and various types of leach fields, and a great respect for our new set-up, which we will treat like a queen. Queen Kaka, we hereby pledge to divert all of our grey water to the yard. Anyone who flushes a baby wipe into you will be blood-eagled. (If you don’t know what that is, watch all six seasons of The Vikings. Yikes.)

It’s been a helluva school year. Tomas diligently stuck it out at his desk upstairs for month after month, the monotony thankfully broken by frequent trips to Santa Rosa to practice (masked and socially distanced) with his competitive soccer team. Things got lots better in the Spring, when Eureka High School opened again part-time, and when Tomas tried out and made the high school soccer team. The team played a short, intense season, with practices five days a week and games twice a week. Tomas, a Freshman, started and played most of every game as center mid. He’s so shy, but the Juniors and Seniors on the team took him under their wings, were kind to him, and encouraged him. He had an absolute blast. He also did fabulously in his classes, mostly on his own; he rarely asks for help. He definitely understands the value of keeping all of one’s doors open, and he can’t wait to leave our mountaintop and head for taller skyscrapers.

Phoebe, Tristan, and I continued our home schooling, most of the time in front of the fireplace (until we broke the glass door and then ran out of firewood). Tristan, who’s in second grade, blasted halfway through fourth grade math, with his own bizarre way of calculating things that I can’t follow, and Phoebe read stacks of books, did beautiful artwork, and wrote a fascinating report on what the first European settlers brought with them to eat and how screwed they would have been had indigenous peoples not introduced them to native foods and fed them. (She and I plan to plant a “Three Sisters” garden bed this summer.) I taught the kids a bit of mammalian osteology and some phylogenetics, and they invented beautiful creatures for whom we constructed evolutionary trees. We made a few trips to the beach to survey tide pools, visited our local zoo to walk through its new Redwood Skywalk, and did various small research projects of the kids’ interest; with Tristan I learned how helicopters fly, and with Phoebe I learned more than I could ever hope to know about goats. More recently, the first hour or so of “school” is consumed with trying to milk Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Joleeeeeeeene, who is not wholly committed to being a dairy goat. Despite being comfortably perched on a milking stand that Phoebe built on her own with a drill, Jolene bellows and bucks and knocks over the container and makes it clear that she would much prefer to being chewing her cud with her fellow does. Jolene, I’m beggin’ of you please don’t kick over the milk again…

Outside of school, Phoebe, Tristan, and I completed the 2020 Virtual Tevis Cup – horseback riding 100 miles in 100 days. Phoebe rode her young mare Dolly while Tristan and I rode together on my mare Bella. I think it might have been the highlight of this crazy pandemic year for me, and I have so many treasured memories of our rides. On some I read to the kids on horseback, on others we listened to music on my phone, and on others Phoebe sang to us. It was amazing.

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Thanksgiving and Christmas were quiet affairs, with just the five of us, and they were wonderful. On Thanksgiving, Tomas cooked and carved the turkey. On Christmas, Gary and I were bewildered that suddenly things weren’t rushed or crazy anymore. The kids were happy to take the gift-opening slowly, and they savored and appreciated each thing, one at a time. It was so lovely.

We had one and only one decent snow and enjoyed an incredible day of sledding, during which we put into use the Flexible Flyer sled that had appeared under the Christmas tree. Best sled ever!

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Recently, Tristan got his brown belt in the kids’ kenpo karate program at our local dojo. He is the youngest ever to do so at Lost Coast Kenpo, and he did it so competently and capably. He said such kind things to his instructors at his test, the five-stripe blackbelts almost melted.

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We continued to have outdoor playdates with friends, either on sunny days or around a bonfire. Phoebe’s February birthday, usually gloomy, fell on a sunny day. We had only recently brought home her baby goat bucks, and the party featured goat racing for the kids and bloody marys for the moms. You would be correct if you imagined that it was uproariously funny.

Now, as the weather improves, home schooling (and probably schooling everywhere) is wearing a bit thin. We’re ready for summer, and sunshine, and riding horses again. I also feel ready for the kids to be in school again next Fall; Phoebe will go to Eureka’s St Bernard’s, where she is excited to do all nine hundred of the extra curriculars offered, and Tristan will go to the little red schoolhouse at the foot of the mountain, a good school called Garfield. In addition, I’m gearing up again to go to nursing school in the Fall, assuming that the kids will be back in school. While this was an amazing school year and I’m so thankful for the opportunity to spend so much time so intensely with my kids, we all need something new come September! Over the last month or so, compounded by septic failure and propane burnout, Tristan, Phoebe, and I, who have been together in the living room for a year, have decided we’re done with the pandemic. Go away, COVID.

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​Sunday, October 4th​​

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“Well,” Gary said, “this year hasn’t been what I expected.” Um, yeah. While in the back of his mind he was referring to the general clusterfuck of disasters brought by 2020, he was at the moment speaking directly to the specific disaster-of-the-day: our realization that the solar system we just finished installing over the summer doesn’t power us during PG&E outages that coincide with days when the sky is orange-purple with thick wildfire smoke. Go figure! The outages, we predicted. No sunlight at midday, we did not.

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Indeed, this year is full of big surprises, a Spirograph (remember those?) of intersecting disasters and unexpected life changes. We’ve all listed them by now with awe and concern: the current presidency and the looming election (with Trump’s new Covid infection twist); racial unrest; the crumbling economy; the burning of California, smoke so thick on our mountain that we’re stuck inside for days at a time; and the stinking pandemic, making life so damned WEIRD. No hugs for friends, masks everywhere, six foot spacers and one-way aisles in the grocery store.

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Our family’s newest big surprise is this: I’m now homeschooling Tristan and Phoebe. I don’t mean distance learning with our school. I don’t mean Zooming with their teachers. I mean real, honest-to-god homeschooling. I NEVER imagined I’d be doing this. I grew up having the fairly mean misconception that homeschooled kids wore potato sacks, had long greasy hair, and were pretty weird. These days that image has melted away, and I know plenty of homeschooled kids who are neither badly socialized nor badly dressed, but I still never figured I’d have my own.

We lasted three days this year at our tiny school on the mountain, which is able to be open in person thanks to its small numbers. After that, for a combination of both pandemic-related reasons and others entirely unrelated to Covid, I realized that it was time to leave the school. (It wasn’t the first time I’d had the thought, and suddenly we had reached the tipping point. I’m guessing the global monthly average of tipping points has risen sharply during the pandemic.) Gary and I have been big fans and devoted supporters of our tiny school for almost ten years, and I was really upset about how things went pear-shaped at the end. I called several other moms of families who chose to leave the school over the last few years, including one who had moved on to homeschooling. The women I talked with gave me wonderful support and the consolation I was looking for, as well as advice on how to start homeschooling. I filed the State’s private school affidavit (which enables one to homeschool by opening a “private school”; the kids named our school Happy Raven Homeschool, despite my push for the decidedly less granola-toned Treeline Farm Homeschool), and early the next week, after a weekend visit to Oma and Nagypapa full of beachcombing, we were up and running.

Yes, of course there was heartbreak for the kids. They love the school, and they love their wonderful friends. But staying at the school was impossible. I really struggled with this, but I finally realized that there was nothing I could say or do that would take away the pain the kids would feel, other than to make our Happy Raven fabulous and arrange as many outdoor play dates with the kids’ friends as possible.

To my great surprise and delight…homeschooling is wonderful! I absolutely love it, and the kids are happy. I love the flexibility. All of the State content standards are accessible online, and I know what both Phoebe and Tristan are supposed to cover this year…but WE get to decide how to do it!

Math seems to be the one area where there’s a need to be at a particular, concrete place at the end of the school year. The kids​’​ math workbooks were easy to get, and I figured out how many lessons we need to do a week to finish the grade level by the end of the year. Tristan is a full grade level ahead already in math, which pretty much takes any stress off. He’s one of those lucky kids whose brain is simply wired to do math, and he literally does math in his head that I have to do on paper, sometimes faster than I do it on paper. In addition to the State-endorsed books, I found a whole math workbook online that is entirely focused on food and cooking – Phoebe is delighted with it! Anyone who loves cooking as much as she does is only too willing to multiply fractions to double or triple a recipe. Tristan likes it, too, and was happy the other day to fill out a party-planning worksheet listing the food items he will serve and calculating the total cost of the menu.

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Phoebe’s love of cooking inspired an integrated, multi-subject project for both kids: I pulled out all of my cookbooks, had both kids hunt for a recipe they wanted to try, took them to the grocery store with clipboards, had them find the ingredients and calculate the total cost, and brought them home to cook. Tristan, who loves fruit and is also very efficient at keeping things simple, chose a Finnish fruit smoothie that had only three ingredients. Phoebe made churros. Both dishes were delicious! Over the following week, the kids researched the countries of their recipes – Finland and Mexico – and then created travel brochures, complete with colorful photos and fancy fonts (with some help from me on formatting). Tristan and I were especially thrilled to learn about the 5:2 ratio of Fins to saunas and the Finnish tradition of “wife-carrying”, an annual obstacle course race in which men carry their wives slung from their shoulders and over their backs; we’re planning a post-pandemic trip just to see it. Phoebe’s brochure was bursting with color and featured chihuahuas, quinceañeras, and The Day of the Dead.

Language Arts are easy to cover. Both kids started writing novels about dragons this summer and are happy to work on them whenever given a chance, and they are both doing lots of writing in other subjects; spelling words and handwriting practice just spill out of these. Phoebe is reading the Wings of Fire series and Tristan is working his way through the Calvin Coconut books.

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For Social Studies, inspired by The 1619 Project, I’m reading out loud to the kids An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and we’re jumping around National Geographic’s Atlas of Indian Nations. I’m learning so much and want so badly for the kids to understand much earlier than I did how this country was born and how so much of what we’re seeing right now is related to its historical treatment of Native Americans and Blacks. As I read them the Introduction of Dunbar-Ortiz’s book the other day, the kids were both enthralled and horrified, and they kept drawing parallels between the treatment of Native Americans and the many conflicts among dragon tribes in the Wings of Fire series (which is full of metaphors for human atrocities and their associated psychological traumas). I think we’ll turn that into a writing project for Phoebe. Honestly, it could be a PhD: Genocide of the Leafwings, Enslavement of the Silkwings, and Appropriation of Rainwing Territory by Nightwings in Tui T Sutherland’s Wings of Fire as Metaphors for the Settlement and Development of the United States. Or, Psychological Trauma in Wings of Fire: PTSD in Dragonet Veteran Soldiers of the War of Sandwing Succession With a Focus on the Cases of Sora, Icicle, Carnelian, and Flame.

Geography is much more fun than I remember it being. I think we did very little of it outside of US states, really. The fifth grade CA content standards require the kids to memorize the US states on the map and learn their capitals. While I think that memorizing state capitals is a really stupid requirement, we’ve been having fun making a game of it (I’m almost there!), and learning the states has lead to all kinds of fun; I discovered a website (Seterra) that has dozens, maybe hundreds, of map quizzes. Tristan is obsessed – he learned the states in under a week and is on to Asia now. Phoebe is not quite as inspired by maps, but she likes the map games as well. Honestly, I don’t care if she doesn’t learn all the states. I can’t break 86% on the quiz myself because the sea of unidentifiable Midwestern states and all those tiny Eastern states are baffling. Who decided to make Vermont and New Hampshire upside down identicals of each other? But, I love that she’s picking up one or two every time she plays and I know she will develop a general and useful sense of the map from the exercise. Also, we hung a giant world map in the stairwell and are pasting colorful labels on places of interest that come up; of course, Hungary, Italy, Indonesia, Singapore, Finland, and Mexico are already labeled. Just arrived in the mail is a map to Native American language groups that we’ll hang next to it.

The kids requested to learn Bahasa Indonesia, so a few times a week we sit in the living room while I write words like anjing, kambing, suka, mau, lapar, and pergi on a whiteboard and the kids make up silly sentences about how much they love goats or about being hungry for lunch.

Science is enormously fun. I can find gobs of short lessons online, and I love finding things to teach that I know nothing about so I can learn something new; last week we dabbled in Earth Science and plate tectonics. I’m clueless about Astronomy, so that’s in our future plans, as well.

But of all, Biology is the best. We began our first day of homeschool with a drive to the coast to go tidepooling. Both kids were absolutely delighted at the hermit crabs and starfish and anemones and explosion of green and pink seaweeds. We made bar graphs of sea creatures we counted in one tide pool and came home to make tidepool art out of patterned scrapbook paper. On another outing, we hiked in our woods to look for owl pellets, hoping to identify mouse and vole species eaten by the owls. Alas, we didn’t find any pellets that day but were thrilled with the pile of deer and cow bones we collected. Treasures, to Tristan. We went to the zoo with clipboards and worksheets I had made and learned Linnaean taxonomy, performed animal observations, and make sketches of some critters. We dove into the human body with lessons so far on the digestive, circulatory, and respiratory systems. (Next: the immune system.) The digestive system inspired a comparative anatomy art project in which Tristan diagrammed the guts of a chicken in colored pencil, Phoebe cut and pasted out of patterned paper the (amazingly complicated!) digestive system of a goat, and I took on the human digestive system. We’ve started learning about ecosystems – Tristan went to the lowlands to focus on savanna while Phoebe climbed the Andean peaks to learn about cloud forest – and about keystone species found in those ecosystems. Tomorrow we’re heading (literally) to the coastal redwoods to talk about ecosystem roles and to find examples of producers, decomposers, scavengers, and consumers. And on Friday, when the tide chart tells us that low tide will be at the perfect time of 11am, we’ll hit the tidepools again to see if anything has changed in a month. There is simply no end to the excitement and fun of spinning one Science project off into another – I​’m really enjoying it.​

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Each day is intense and fun. Phoebe and Tristan sleep as long as they need to, eat breakfast, and then we start learning. We work hard, and then we’re done and, if it’s not smoky, we go ride the horses. We do not do school for six hours a day. Also, when the kids have had enough of one thing, we do another, or we’re simply done. I love the flexibility in timing, and the flexibility on what we chose to study. I love that I am learning, really for the first time, how my kids learn best, and what doesn’t work for them, how to make this the best possible experience for them. I love that I am figuring out how to help Phoebe rebuild the confidence in math she lost last year. She is a smart kid, but she gets frustrated and flustered when she doesn’t understand something right away, or when math is boring and she doesn’t understand why she needs to learn a particular thing. I was so excited last week when I figured out that if I turned the boring word problems about lengths of wood and the weight of coins into ones about goats or about cooking, she had no trouble doing them. I love Tristan’s eagerness to learn, and I love that I can always give him more when he wants more. And, best of all, Phoebe and Tristan are happy and like how we’re doing things.

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I don’t know what will happen next year. I have Tristan and Phoebe on the waitlists of two out-of-district schools where they may be able to go if school is back in-person. If not, I really don’t want them sitting on Zoom doing remote learning. They don’t want that either. I’m still hoping to start nursing school. We might need to hire someone to help them through homeschooling three days a week while I’m at school myself, if the schools are still doing distance learning.

Tomas. Poor Tomas. To be 14 and stuck at home with your mom and much younger siblings. He’s on Google Classroom five hours a day, five days a week. I feel sorry for him, but he’s doing great. He’s very self-motivated. Every day, he gets himself up, fed, showered (he has to make his hair perfect before class), and onto his computer. He pops downstairs for lunch, then back up to his room again. His grades are great. Best of all, every once in a while he asks me for help on Algebra, which I love. Soccer has been up and down, with local air quality frequently too poor to allow for outdoor sports, and with Santa Rosa fires making travel down there dangerous and often axing those practices. Once or twice ​a​ week he’ll have friends over, either Noah to play soccer or Elisha to strum guitars and make music in the outbuilding where Gary set up drums, a keyboard, and a sound system. Tomas isn’t overjoyed with the current situation, but he’s hanging in there. This weekend he’s rearranging his room (which is truly un-rearrangeable) to stir things up a bit in the place where he now spends most of his time. Ugh, poor kid.

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A sad note: a couple of weeks ago, Camp Okizu, the AMAZING, free, beautiful camp near Oroville for pediatric cancer patients and their siblings, burned to the ground along with the neighboring town of Berry Creek. All three of my kids love Okizu, and I really like the family camps I’ve gone to. All three were meant to go this past summer, but didn’t because Covid prevented the camps from happening. All three were sad to hear that it’s gone, and Tomas was stunned at the post-fire photos we saw in a CNN clip. Camp Okizu and Family House, the non-profit that works alongside UCSF to house families of pediatric patients, have the best fundraisers in the universe, so I’m sure they’ll rebuild. Nevertheless, it’s devastating that it went up in flames.

And finally, a bit of birthday news: last week, Tristan turned eight. He had a birthday cake with an 8-shaped snake on it. One of his best friends, Ora, and her family came over to celebrate, along with Noni, Gary’s sister Tina, the kids’ cousin Olivia, and her partner Abby. We prepared pizzas on a picnic table and passed them indoors to Gary to bake in our pizza oven. Tristan was thrilled with the whole thing, and I was enormously pleased that we managed to pull off a pandemic birthday party. Poor Phoebe and Tomas might not be so lucky, as February and March are positively dreary up here and outdoor birthdays will be tough. Of course, who knows what February and March will look like. “Expect the unexpected” is a particularly scary thought these days, as my range of “unexpected” is now considerably wider than it was seven months ago.

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Tuesday, September 1st

Woah. I’m alone at home, maybe for the first time since early March. It feels pretty good! Good enough that I’m tempted to nap here on our outdoor couch, in the shade under the walnut trees. Nap or write, write or nap…? Maybe write, then nap. There’s much to tell.

I last wrote in the Spring, as the kids and I were immersed in both the Humboldt fog and home-schooling. And now, Summer has ended, the kids are back in school, sort of, and the break was totally full of events and adventures and stories, despite the cancellation of absolutely everything.

The kids finished up school during the lockdown just fine, really. Tristan and Phoebe had lots of fun and creative take-home projects from school, and we organized many outdoor play dates, usually on the tarmac of our local tiny airport, to ensure that they didn’t suffer socially. Phoebe made her fourth grade honor roll for three trimesters of excellent work. Tomas went about his online schooling totally independently. Apparently his parents’ negligence in overseeing his work was no biggie – he was named salutatorian of his eight grade class. We attended a belated, mid-summer graduation at St Bernard’s, where the masked graduates sat far apart and the audience was seated in family clusters separated by lots of lawn. Tomas was presented awards for being one of the top students in four subjects. He, too, continued to see one of his best pals, Elisha, for regular biking and skateboarding dates up at the rarely-used Kneeland Airport. Only once, in all of these airport play dates, did the parents have to grab their lawn chairs, round up the kids, and sprint off the runway to allow a helicopter to land.

Summer was definitely not what we had planned, but…maybe it was even better? By early last Spring, the June-July-August calendar was chockablock with plans involving long drives all over California, different kids in different places for a week or two at a time, and even an international trip for Tomas. None of that happened, of course. Instead, the summer was filled with trips, dozens of them, once four days in a row, to our local swimming hole on the Mad River. It was delightful, and reminded me of all the summer days spent at Princeton’s Community Park Swimming Pool when I was a kid – but better, because it’s a river. We often met friends there, and usually took snacks or a lunch. Tristan and Phoebe became strong swimmers, paddling across the river or diving for toys that I’d toss into the water for them. Phoebe’s sweet little Quarter Horse filly came back from the trainer ready and willing and cooperative, and Phoebe, Tristan, and I did dozens of rides together, often with Tristan behind me on my mare. Phoebe and I signed up to ride a virtual Tevis cup, with the promise of t-shirts and stickers upon completion. The “real” Tevis cup is a 100-mile, one-day endurance race ridden every year in California. It won’t be run this year, thanks to corona, but has been replaced by the virtual one – 100 miles in 100 days. We’ve ridden about 30 so far, nice and slow, and it’s been a great way for both Phoebe and her young horse to gain experience.

Tomas often comes along on his mountain bike when we ride; he is not interested in horses at all, showing instead a growing interest in skateboards and bikes. He sometimes joined us at the river for our summer swims, but, in his new, teenage form, he seems to be suffering from the perception that his family is indescribably humiliating. He often declines to join, choosing instead to bike, or work on his bike trail, or train for soccer, or teach himself guitar and ukulele. He is incredibly self-driven. I definitely wasn’t like that at 14, and I’m sort of in awe of him.

Tomas’ summer also included some soccer in a surprise turn of events that really might have saved the vacation for him. Reflecting, I think, a general confusion about state mandates governing youth sports during the pandemic, while Tomas’ local soccer club was not practicing together all Spring and Summer, an elite competitive team in Santa Rosa got county-level permission to do so. Tomas tried out for the team (all in socially-distanced, no-contact tryouts), and was invited to join after just a couple of practices. Gary and I took turns driving him the four hours to practices; while Gary drove Tomas home late at night afterward, I took whichever kids I’d brought along to visit my parents for the night in San Francisco after each practice. The coach is truly excellent and Tomas loves the team. It’s not clear whether they will ever, any time soon, get permission to really play, but this is way better than nothing. Currently the practices in Santa Rosa are on hold while the air is choked with wildfire smoke, but by some stroke of luck Tomas’ local club is beginning socially-distanced practices in small cohorts today. So, we’ll patch things together and keep Tomas playing in one place or the other.

Summer also included a camping trip with two other families on the 6000-acre ranch of one of them. We slept in tents on the banks of the Van Duzen river, swam, drank delicious/deadly frozen margaritas, barbecued, and watched the gaggle of eight kids splash, look for marine fossils in the river bed, and build forts. On another weekend, I was invited to join the same ranching family in a round-up. They patiently tolerated my total lack of experience in Western riding (“Ya might want to use a longer rein on ‘er,” drawled my friend Lauren’s cowboy brother Jake), showed me how to tie a half hitch (“Let me show you how to do that right,” said Lauren’s mother as I sloppily wrapped the end of my lead rope around the saddle horn; we don’t even HAVE saddle horns in English riding and I don’t have the faintest idea how to tie anything to one of them!), and gave me simple jobs to do while they did the hard work of cutting calves out of the herd (“Toni,” they said, “why don’t you sit here on Princess Patches and make sure those cows don’t try to get back in through that gate to their calves” – the cowherding equivalent of playing right field). Despite my many deficiencies, which I attribute to having been raised on the East Coast, I had an absolute blast on the portly Princess Patches and am hoping I was useful enough to be invited back for another roundup. It was incredibly fun!

We had a series of visits over the summer, all involving tents and efforts to limit contact and shared air as much as possible. Chris and Agi brought the boys up in mid-June, after they were sufficiently nuts in their Ocean Beach apartment. Ori and Chris camped in our orchard while Agi and Felix slept in Tomas’ room. Tomas slept in another tent outside of the kitchen door. We ate, drank, caught up, and enjoyed seeing the kids play together. Felix, who is more or less a pandemic baby, was mildly horrified to learn that more people live on this planet than his parents, brother, American grandparents, and aunt. He seemed to adjust over the three days they were here.

In late July, my parents came, also for three days, also to sleep in a tent in the orchard. We, too, ate, drank, and chatted. We made a trip down to the river to swim together, and we had our first meal in a restaurant since March at Eureka’s Bayfront One, where hearty Humboldt County residents and their visitors can eat sushi (or pasta or burgers) on the waterfront in fog so thick you can slice it with a knife. Nagypapa did some electrical engineering with Tristan, Phoebe demonstrated her riding skills to her grandparents, and Tomas enjoyed their company in his quiet way.

Last week we had unexpected visitors. We had just returned from our camping trip on the Van Duzen when my friend Kinari called. [I’ve known Kinari for almost 20 years, overlapped with her in Indonesia for many years, and worked with her both in Indonesia and the US when I was associated with Health In Harmony. She is the doctor who founded the organization. Kinari now lives in the East Bay with her wife Stephanie and a young woman named Kahayag, who I knew as a child in Bogor. Kahayag’s parents worked with non-profits in Indonesia, and her mother had an office across the street from our house. Kahayag was stranded in the US when the pandemic began and thwarted her attempts to head to the Philippines, where she has family, and to Europe, where her parents now live. Kinari and Stephanie took her in.] Kinari was calling from Ukiah and sounded a bit desperate. She is pregnant, and four days earlier she, Stephanie, and Kahayag had fled the smoky East Bay for cleaner air when Kinari was having trouble breathing. The smoke, however, followed them to Ukiah, and they were looking for fresh air further north. “Come,” I said, and they showed up late that night. They, too, stayed in tents in the orchard. The weather was fabulous and we ate every meal outside. It was a wonderful time of catching up, getting to know Stephanie, and re-connecting with Kahayag. They weeded my garden, which I had all but abandoned to the monstrous pocket gophers that felled most of my vegetables, helped Gary buck hay (which means load it into a truck and bring it in from the field, for you deficient East Coasters out there), played with the kids, and generally gave us an absolutely fantastic close to our summer. Alas, we have our own fires burning nearby, and the smoke eventually settled on our mountain. After a week, our fire refugees moved on to camp on the farm of other friends in Corvallis, Oregon. They might be on the road a while, as the rains won’t really come until October. What incredibly crazy times. Over dinner one night with our evacuees, we began calling these times – times of pandemic, fire, racial unrest, election fears, climate crisis – the pre-apocalypse. Too over-the-top? I dunno.

Our pre-apocalyptic but very fun and full summer was punctuated by a sad, and also happy, and important event. About two weeks ago, Gary’s father passed away. He had become very ill, and there were many difficult weeks toward the end. But, the end itself was the best anyone could hope for, very peaceful and quiet and loving. Gary’s father spent his last few days in a hospice in Eureka, with French doors open to a beautiful, tall, shady redwood grove. He wasn’t in pain, and he was surrounded by family. Gary’s mom held his hand and talked to him about their marriage and their life together, and he smiled as she spoke. Gary, his sisters, and his mother were all with him when he passed. Gary has written a beautiful obituary that was published in our local Times Standard, our online Lost Coast Outpost, and Gary’s Facebook page.

The last month had some ups and downs for me. I both watched our local Covid counts carefully and waited anxiously for news from the kids’ schools. Would Eureka High, where Tomas is starting his Freshman year, open in person or go online? While I can’t imagine the disappointment of starting high school online, did I want Tomas mingling with 1200 other teenagers every day? Would the tiny Kneeland School, which stated from the get-go that they would be in-person, commit to teaching outdoors while the weather is still good? Although Tristan is strong and healthy now, I’ll never be totally at ease about what his immune system can handle. On top of his cancer history, he’s had pneumonia five or six times and always sounds scary-terrible when he has a cold. And nursing school – what would happen if the kids ended up at home mid-semester? After a lot of angst, I decided to defer nursing school for a year, which guarantees me a start in next Fall’s class (versus risking having to drop out mid-year this year, which would mean having to reapply and waiting another two or three years to start). I’ve been pretty sad about the delay, but I think it’s the right thing to do, and the decision to do so will ultimately mean that my stress level will be much lower during the upcoming months of uncertainty than otherwise.

Tomas’ high school ended up opting to start online. It’s unclear if that will change, as Humboldt’s corona numbers keep bopping up and down. Kneeland School is making an enormous effort to be outdoors as much as possible, and I’ve decided that Phoebe and Tristan can be there for all outdoor portions of the day. With nursing school set aside (and no job at Humboldt State, as I didn’t expect to be able to teach while in nursing school and didn’t put in for a lectureship), I’ll ferry the kids back and forth. Yesterday, the first day at Kneeland, was a big success: Phoebe got to stay all day, as her class never went indoors, and Tristan came home only for a short bit of the middle of the day. Both outdoor classrooms have shade canopies. Both dealt with new challenges, like papers blowing away in the wind and sun glare on computer screens…but honestly, these seem like small annoyances compared with the dangers of sharing air indoors. I’m so happy with and proud of our tiny school for making the effort. Who knows what the November rain and fog will mean, but, for now, we’re happy.

Shoot, I’m out of time for that nap!

More photos, of course…

Tuesday, May 19th

 

Our seasons run late up here – we often have frost in May, and our hot summer runs into November. But Spring is finally in air! The wildflowers are blooming in the meadows and in the forest, our grass is growing green and tall (so much so that sometimes our horses don’t come in for their dinner), and, most significantly, our lone male duck is trying to hump our hens. Springtime!

It hardly seems worth writing about anything pre-COVID, from that other universe where we shared air with strangers and were free to cough, sneeze, and wipe our noses on our sleeves without inciting terror. I last wrote around Thanksgiving, so in between then and the start of the new world there was Christmas, New Years, and the beginning of a new semester. There were a few trips to San Francisco, including one to UCSF for a check-up, and Tomas and Gary made a trip or two for Tomas’ Olympic Development Program soccer. That pretty much covers the interim period.

 

And then there was corona, which we sometimes call “the ‘Rona”.

We went into lockdown in mid-March, and now it’s mid-May. I have so many feelings about the new state of the universe, and they are mixed, and they are all strong. I’m sad that so many people are sick and dying, I’m devastated that more people yet are hungry while farmers cull their herds for lack of operational processing facilities, I’m scared that so many people are angry, and I’m in dismay about our president. (I mean, I couldn’t have imagined how much worse it could get, but it sure has).

On the other hand…I absolutely love being at home. Life has been very, very busy, but so much simpler.

Locking down was no biggie. Honestly, most of the residents of Humboldt County are ready for armageddon on a good day. Between fires, power outages, being locked in by landslides on the only three roads that allow access to the south, and other regular disasters, a good majority of Humboldt folks have armed themselves with large freezers, generators, and um, actual firearms so that, should the end of the world come, they’ll still be able to barbeque, watch Netflix, and protect their grows. While we may not be THAT armed, we do have a big freezer and a sizeable pantry, both of which Gary and I stocked at Costco, Safeway, and our Co-op.

Putting my teaching at Humboldt State online was slightly more of an event. I taught two mammalogy labs this semester, to about 45 students total. I love teaching these labs because I love playing with skulls and bones – it’s like a game, and I enjoy teaching undergrads the game. Also, now that I’ve done it a bunch of times, it’s easy! I get out my old notebook, now perfected, and skim over my notes to prep. That’s it! I often took Tristan and Phoebe to my extra office hours on weekends before exams, and they loved the game, too. COVID was just becoming a conversation topic when I administered the second lab practical in early March. As the students handed in their exams, a tissue-clutching, sniffling young woman lamented how hard it was to take the exam as sick as she was. Gross. I was obsessive about hand-washing as I graded the stack of germy exams. That was the last lab, as the students were thereafter dispatched on Spring Break, and they never came back. The other lab instructors and I worked to create the remaining online labs, and they were fine, but they were nowhere near as wonderful as handling mammal skulls and learning the tricks of distinguishing them in hand. It simply wasn’t a fun game anymore. Also, creating the labs, and then grading the exercises was WAY more work than playing the mammalogy game in lab, and that was tough on top of home-schooling…

When the lockdown began, the tiny Kneeland School, where Phoebe and Tristan are students, prepared a two-week packet for home study for its fourteen K-8 students. The first two weeks were SO HARD. There was a TON of work, and I spent four or five hours a day struggling through it with the kids. Gary joined in to help Phoebe through her math, which has suddenly become a stress. (How did she end up with Girl Math Fear??) I was tearing my hair out to juggle the online labs, and two online classes I was enrolled in at our junior college, and the home schooling. By the end of those first two weeks, it turns out, the teachers had received the universal message that it was too much. They scaled it back enormously and, since then, it’s been really enjoyable. I’m happy to be more in touch with what the kids are doing in school, happy to play a part in teaching them, and really proud of how they tackle their work and (mostly) like doing it. Phoebe has a fabulous running project that involves writing a story every Monday, having it edited on Tuesday, re-writing on Wednesday, designing a cover on Thursday, and submitting it to her teacher on Friday. The best part is, on Monday she blindly picks the hero, the villain, the central event, and the place out of plastic baggies provided by her teacher, and then designs the story around them. They’ve been brilliant! Tristan has been chugging through lots of math, which he LOVES, but we both agreed, by the time we finished the English system and the metric system, that we never wanted to measure anything again. One of his assignments was to keep a Quarantine Journal for a few weeks; his short entries were very sweet, mostly lamenting how much he misses his best friends and fellow first graders, Ora and Cassidy. The school has been brilliant about not overdoing the Zoom events, using them only to do a once-a-week Zumba class for all of the students and a once-a-week story hour with Linda the librarian. The kids love both of these.