We are hawkish outliers.

We attended our second Hawk Festival today, and although there was a Boy Scout whose mother is a member of the local raptor rescue group who was clearly well-versed in things hawklike, it is safe to say: we were the only family sporting a much-loved toy perigrine falcon, plus a hand-made, custom-ordered pink perigrine falcon tshirt. (There were many, many raptor tshirts, but not on children, and not pink.)

The kids enjoyed the finale, which was the release of a golden eagle back into the wild. She was gorgeous, and fierce, and huge. I've never seen such a big bird up so close. The nice folks from the raptor rescue group are grooming the kids to take over that task when they're adults, and honestly, that seems like a really cool job. Although I am not ready to have raptors in my basement just yet, thanks very much.

It was Grace's third encounter with a real perigrine falcon, and she was delighted.

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.

Don't touch the fence! Or, how we learned to love the quilt auction.

We went today deep, deep into Nebraska. Only about half an hour from our house, but in terms of tradition and land and How Things Are Done... it was amazing. We went to a local summer camp, beautiful and much-beloved, which has a fundraiser every year. All year, women quilt (and occasionally crochet and knit) projects, and then they donate them to the camp, and they're auctioned off. The camp counselors, several of whom were my students (including the young woman carrying the quilt in the photo below - it was next up to be auctioned), help with the auction and then open the pool and the waterfront. Thrown in barbecue lunch and a couple dozen horses to see, and we had a very family-friendly event.

Grace was most impressed by the horses, and Peter was most impressed with the possibility that the fence surrounding them was electric. He was very, very serious about the possibility of any of us, or any horse, being electrocuted, and we all stayed very clear while watching the horses.

But the real fun for me was the quilts - several hundred were auctioned off, and another hundred were sold by silent auction. They were absolutely gorgeous. Dozens of different patterns, and such a wide range of aesthetic approaches... it was so interesting to compare one quilt with another; even though they were all beautiful quilts, made presumably by women working with the same basic materials, they varied widely in style, colors, patterns, size, etc. Many of the quilts sold for upwards of $600-700; we only watched a bit of the actual auction, but the crowd got really into the action. Mike attended this event a few years ago and saw a quilt sold for 11K. In that instance, and several times today, the winning bidder offered the quilt to the person whom they'd just outbid, for the amount of that person's last bid, and then donated his or her own winning bid to the camp. So the camp gets nearly twice the winning bid, and the person who lost the auction gets the quilt after all. Win, win, win.

What surpised me was how many people we knew. Some folks from church, some students, a Lutheran here and a Lutheran there. Someone from our church bought several quilts, and another woman from church made a gorgeous crochet bedspread which sold for around $500. We didn't buy any quilts this time, but I think I'll tuck some money away this year to buy one at next year's auction.

Next up, re: our tomatos... wowza. They're coming in.

Acorns and snails and the Missouri River...

We went for a modest hike this weekend, and collected acorns, spotted a snail, dipped our toes in the Missouri, and startled the same little fawn twice. The river was really full - we've had rain, and are getting more - and so instead of wading in for a few minutes as we did last year when we hiked here, we mostly just stood on the muddy bank and marvelled at how high the water was. Both on our way down and our way up, we scared a little teeny fawn, complete with spots, who could run like anything but seemed unwise in terms of choosing hiding spots. (Under the boardwalk? Not so private, little deer!) It was fun to have a conversation about the Latin terms for plants and animals, however, and see Grace's face light up... fauna... like a fawn! Yep!

Next time we go we'll consider insect spray (instead of the largely unnecessary sunscreen we used liberally) and we'll plan to stop in the visitors' center to investigate further. I think we need some more books on Lewis and Clark, too, since Grace found the signs describing their adventures very interesting and read them all aloud.

The white tube with the leaves inside is the protective housing for an oak tree - in an effort to rebalance the species in the woods, they're clearing out enough trees so that the oaks can get some light in which to grow, then planting oaks grown from acorns collected in the area, then protecting them from... I guess deer, but maybe also rabbits? with the plastic tubes, which come off eventually. They were unexpectedly beautiful, and it's interesting to see that kind of forest management at work in a relatively small patch of woods.

Going to the Sun

During our time in Montana, we drove up the Going to the Sun highway the first day it was open, in early July. The snow was (as you can see) still impressive, and the kids had a great time slushing through snow and icewater in their sandals.

The road itself is treacherous and scary, but the views are amazing.

We had a car picnic at the top, with Peter in his booster seat and Grace snuggled up in our gear and the adults mostly standing around with their sandwiches.