First day of school.

Last Wednesday was the first day of school. They do it up big at our school... a brass band, a huge crowd, lots of noise and fun. Our kids took it in stride - Grace is a veteran of first days, and Peter has been at the school often enough to feel perfectly at home. We'd met their teachers, lugged in their school supplies, and found their classrooms, so the first day mostly involved finding their spots on the playground, milling around, and then watching as each class in turn marched into the building. The kids got quiet and purposeful, the parents got a little teary, and then it was Game On.

I spent their first few days in Minnesota at a conference, but they reported each day on the phone that school had gone well, and they seem perfectly settled in and happy to be doing their respective kid jobs. We're sad for the end of summer but excited for a new school year to be underway. I start back on Wednesday, and am not quite ready yet, but the day will come and I'll get my act together.

Bess Streeter Aldrich and our venture into small-town Nebraska.

We went today to Elmwood, Nebraska, the longtime home of writer Bess Streeter Aldrich. She started publishing as a married adult and mother, then got serious about her writing when her husband died and she had four children to support. We haven't read much of her work - only an article from 1933 first published in the Ladies' Home Journal - but that short bit suggested she's witty and funny. The kids' school is named after her, and we've been meaning to visit her home this summer, and today was the day. There's a (large) mural of her in town, and the house was donated in the mid-1990's to a local organization that also runs a small museum dedicated to her work. The house was beautiful; she designed much of it herself, and it's full of charming details like closets and built-in cabinets for china and a second bathroom (apparently unheard of in 1922, when the house was built.) The garden contains every flower mentioned in any of her stories, and much of the furniture is original. Students in a local school figured out what her china pattern had been, bought a set, and donated it.


I was most struck by her desk. The house is fairly large - the bedrooms are upstairs, and the main level includes a sunporch, a living room, formal dining room, a more informal eating area, a good-sized kitchen, and then her "study." In most houses, I suspect this would have been family space; it was a beautiful room with a great fireplace, and quite large. Her desk, complete with hidden typewriter compartment, dominates the room, and the guide told us she positioned it so that she could keep an eye on the children while they played outside as she wrote. This was a serious writer, who took her writing seriously. We played outside a bit, and then drove home - we might go back at Christmas, when the house is reportedly very beautifully decorated.

Tomatoes and cosmos and sunflowers, oh my!

It's August, which is, officially, Tomato Season. And we are Tomato People. The bowls you see here are each a random day's gatherings, and minus what the teeny bunny who lives in our garden eats (she's not so bad, and we can spare the toms.) We still love tomatoes, and all is good.

Gracie's cosmos and Peter's sunflowers are also looking gorgeous - it's funny to see something more than ten feet tall that started as a seed (and in the case of the tallest sunflower, a seed casually flung in the middle of a tomato cage.) They're blooming like crazy and we're really enjoying these last few weeks of summer. Next year, I think we'll be a bit more organized about our gardening - fewer misplaced seeds, more variety, some raspberries, that kind of thing. It's always the way of things - next season calls to you even as this season is doing its wild, crazy, bountiful thing.