Peoples was gettin' DOWN!

I spent over twenty hours on the road, between Wednesday night and Friday night in pursuit of a Black Crowes concert in Northampton, Massachusetts. (NO KIDS!) What a great couple of days. Got to spend hours in a car chatting with a very fun, intelligent couple who we don't get to see enough of. Stayed at a lovely B&B so close to the park that we could hear the sound check from our bathroom window. Got to spend hours drinking, dancing and yelling "Whooooooooo-hooooooooo!", also with said couple at The Pines Theatre. Here is a link to some footage of a Wilco concert there - you get a great sense of the initmacy of the place. Imagine us down in the front row, close enough to spit on Chris Robinson (who looked ancient and coked out but man, he can give 'er):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJT82bjDQqo
Suzanne had a long spontaneous conversation in the washroom "It's good to be back". In America, a land where people talk to each other.
Our first stop in Massachusets was of course a gas station/McCafe complex thingie but there was a farmers market stand right out in front of the MacDonalds! Fresh local blueberries, eggplant, chard, peaches, organic garlic and more more more! And a big pile of cool fresh juicy apples glowing with a nimbus of just-pickedness. Fresh! Macs! Not last years apples! God they were good.
Then we stopped for lunch at a greasy little roadside joint. The beer was cold, the food was piled high and the conversation was of great books, heavy on the CanCon. We felt like had arrived.
After the concert - which was over by 9:30 (is this not a dream vacation for an almost 35 year old mother of two? crazy but not toooooo crazy)- we rolled down to a pizza joint operated by a Turkish family - Morgan kept asking them for Turkish words and I just couldn't get my head around them - Meg - I need some lessons.
The next morning we slept in - sweet hallelujah - and then went for breakfast at the Cup and Top Cafe in Florence. Yummah! Local suppliers! Fresh yoghurt! Fair trade organic beans!Great coffee.
A couple from Vermont thanked Morgan for his enthusiasm at the concert. And assured us that they had not voted for you know who. "Sometimes it's just embarrasing to be an American."
On the way home, a herd of deer, a huge double rainbow and a fingernail moon hung low.
We're doing it again next year!

googirl goes up

Up the steps. Very pleased with herself. Pounds the step below with her little feet. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump. thump. thump. Checks to make sure I am watching. Grins. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump.
Goes down the stairs.
Goes up the steps. Looks back over her shoulder. Grins.
"Duh, da da da da DUH!"
Scootscootscootscootscoot. Stop. Eat something off the floor.
"What are you eating little girl?"
Grins.
Scootscoot mom is coming to stick her finger in my mouth scootfasterscootfasterscootfaster.

clothes make the monkeyboy

We are putting p.j's on, the ones with the green and blue stripes.

monkeyboy: "I'm not BEING Cinderella right now, I' m just me, but when I put these p.j.'s on, I FEEL like Cinderella, all over."

Happy, happy monkeyboy.

reading is dangerous

Because it makes me want to do things. So because I am reading "Animal Vegetable Miracle" I have made this pact with myself to can a big whack of peaches and tomatoes while they are lolloping all over the produce landscape. And I have read all of these books on home schooling this week (I am a crammer) so I am trying that on mentally and today was not a good day for the home school game. 0 points to home school today. Never attempt to envision home schooling while on the first day of your period, a first day home, alone, with two cranky kids tired from vacation and junk food, dirty kitchen, laundry up to your ears kind of day. On that day you should envision a deserted beach, a deep lounge, a large fruity drink, a pile of novels and no door to be knocked on. And then you settle for pizza and snuggling up to watch Cars for the 400th time. Not a bad compromise, really.

babies

I know a lot of you tune in in hopes of hearing a bit about monkeyboy and googirl - i promise lots about them in the next post.
For now - sleeps.

wings

But don't be satisfied with poems
And stories of how things
have gone with others.

Unfold your own myth,
Without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand
the passage "We will have opened you."

Start walking toward Shams (the great teacher)

Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you've grown
lifting.


-Rumi


I read Eat Pray Love last week and I was expecting to really hate it but I have to admit that I loved it. I laughed and laughed and kept interrupting smith's reading to read bits of it to him. And it opened me up, got me thinking about what I want, what I REALLY want - not things, not what I want to do, but what I want to BE. In it, a Balinese medicine man describes the theory of the universe as a circle, with both heaven and hell being the same destination, the outer ring, but the journey being different - getting to heaven you pass through seven levels of happiness and getting to hell you pass through seven levels of unhappiness but you end up at the same place - love. I KNEW IT!
So universe (and beautiful people out there in cyberland) keep sending me your thoughts and i will keep sending you mine. Oh this post seems oh soooooo flaky but that's where I'm at and I am sending it out to yoooooooooou!

Im still on the homeschooling visionquest thingy. Alternating between reading books about homeschooling with reading a Sophie Kinsella novel (which is pink, of course.) Oh, yeah and some, er.. Kierkegaard and stuff, eh? Yeah, sure. Just about to dive into Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. A book about food and our world, big and small.

Speaking of food - when I went to pick up our beautiful organic veggie box this week there was so much bounty! The baskets were full of purple peppers and big juicy garlic bulbs and beans, tomatoes, greens, swiss chard, potatoes, hot hot peppers, more ground cherries, beets (two kinds!), big buckets of sunflowers and piles of fresh aromatic herbs. As monkeyboy says "MmmmmmmmmmMMM! Kim grows such nice food!". The harvest season is upon us people - go forth and fill up on local. I saw the birds starting to flock yesterday. A chickadee, three bluejays and many starlings in the space of five minutes all over my lawn - i will just whisper it...(fall! yay!)

be brave

So I'm reading this book about homeschooling and I get a very nervous feeling. My pulse is up and I have butterflies and I wonder if it is because I have stumbled upon something that I truly desire: to live with my kids every day, answer questions deeply, let them follow their interests, follow my own. September is looming and it is so loaded that I can hardly breathe. Back to work for me and back to school for monkeyboy. I hate the idea of us each in separate classrooms, learning about how to manage and be managed. Our summer has been so rich and full of detail. And space. Any discussion or thought of institutions this week - school, church-has put me so on edge, made me drive my heels in. Oh universe, send me some reckoning. Tell me that I am not just summer crazy, but deeply lucid. As I wrote this, three fire trucks came to stop on my street, silent,but blazing with lights.