I mentioned before that we were planning to plant a tree in memory of Nana and in celebration of Earth Day. Well, the four of us had a brief little memorial ceremony, and it was lovely.

* barley, to sanctify the earth

Dear Tree,

Blessed be.

* libations of water, to water the tree and signify our pure intentions

Nana’s favorite color was blue, not pink, and in her later years she wore more gray and silver than anything else. But Nana so enjoyed Easter, and I think she would be pleased with this pink dogwood because it will always bloom in springtime. May it live a long and happy life like she did.

(Many thanks to Starhawk, Diane Baker, and Anne Hill for their inspiration in the ceremony, which was adapted from Circle Round. Thanks to Ian for digging the hole.)

Easter in the Woods

This dawn when the mountain cherry lifts

its frail white bloom among dark pines,

and chipmunks flash small happy paws

along old tumbled boundary lines,

this golden morning when the vixen

nuzzles her five young foxes forth

to roll in ferns in the Easter sun,—

again the woods know soft green birth.

Snuffed by a puffball infant rabbit

are yellow violets by the spring;

among half-opened apple buds

a wood thrush tilts his head to sing.

Risen is He! And they are His,

who scamper under warm blue skies,

who nibble little fists of grass,

and gaze on earth with shy glad eyes.

—Frances Frost

O thou with dewy locks, who lookest down

Thro’ the clear windows of the morning, turn

Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,

Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!

The hills tell each other, and the listening

Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turned

Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth,

And let thy holy feet visit our clime.

Come o’er the eastern hills, and let our winds

Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste

Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls

Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.

O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour

Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put

Thy golden crown upon her languished head,

Whose modest tresses were bound up for thee.

We’ve had a very rainy, floody spring, but finally some plants in my garden are really starting to look good again. Some spots still look like hell; naturally, I don’t feature those in photos. This area above, where we planted ground covers last spring, took a beating both from the summer heat and the flooding rains. But these little plants seem to be trying to make a comeback. This is called chocolate mint ajuga.

I have one, solitary California poppy and I love it. These come back year after year and I’d love to have more of them.

This spectacular flower is a fancy poppy—oriental? I don’t know for sure. I planted a bunch of seeds last spring, but it seems only two plants grew. Still, this is a showstopper and I’m inspired to try again.

My white dogwood is getting big. This picture was from a week or so ago. Now the tree’s blossoms are fully white and big. I love them in all of their stages, though. I thought this tree was going to be a pink dogwood and it took a few years for it to start blooming and reveal it’s true nature. As it is not a pink dogwood, I have resolved to have another pink tree in the backyard.

My two purple robe locust trees are blooming like mad now, and the biggest, fattest black bees are buzzing around them constantly. These trees grow so fast and tall—I like that in a tree, given I’m not fond of waiting.

Mint. Some people hate the stuff, but I think it’s so pretty and useful. It’s wonderful to walk outside and pluck some leaves for iced tea or lemonade, or for a special garnish. My children walk past this plant and pick leaves to munch on.

This is my new dogwood, which we are planting for Earth Day. It is, in fact, very pink. The variety is called Cherokee Chief.

There’s other stuff blooming as well, like Spanish lavender, which is a great investment for its extended blooming time, and azaleas, which bloom only in March/April/May. The scarlet verbena is blooming nicely now, but I have to admit the hens’ scratching about has made the verbena look a bit scraggly. My watercolors rose is gorgeous, and the hybrid teas are in bud. All of the daylily transplants I did seem to have taken off. They’re still small, but surviving! This is great news for me because I have lots of mature plants that can be split and spread about into blank areas of the yard. This was my first time dividing them and I’m encouraged to do more of this. Free flowers!

We did a lickety-split Earth Day art project today. This is a quick, fun project for all ages. It couldn’t be easier and chances are pretty good you have these items on hand.

Materials

paper coffee filters
washable markers
spray bottle with water

Tutorial

Using washable marker pens in blues and greens, color your coffee filter with continents and oceans. Although it can be fun to think about the shapes of the Earth’s real continents and try to draw them accurately, this isn’t at all important. You just want to create a “blue-green marble,” like our planet as seen from outer space.

Marker ink seeps quickly into the coffee filter, which is meant to absorb moisture. You don’t even have to worry about the white space in between marker pen strokes.

When you are satisfied with your continents and oceans, lay your coffee filter down flat on your table surface and spray it lightly with water from the spray bottle.

The ink will begin to run together and spread, like a watercolor painting.

I recommend that you don’t spray too much water on the earth; if you do, the colors may get very mixed and muddy. Stop while you’re ahead, as soon as the earth is saturated. This is difficult for children, because spraying is so much fun! My kids kept picking up their earth. I think this contributed to their colors mixing so much.

Leave your wet earth on the table top to dry. We did ours outside and they were dry within 20 minutes or so. As they dry, they may try to blow away.

As soon as your earths are dry, they can be taped up in a window. If they are too wrinkly for your taste, gently iron them on medium heat (and without any water spray or steam). Of course, you may wish to make a whole solar system, or perhaps yet-to-be discovered planets of your children’s own invention. Have fun!

Earth Day is Friday, April 22—tomorrow! Even if this holiday isn’t something you grew up celebrating, you can bet that your kids are aware of it and eager to participate. Over the last few years, we’ve been doing a bit more to honor the ideals of this day and our kids just eat it up. Here are a few ideas from our family to yours.

1. Plant a tree: This is every bit as appropriate on Earth Day as Arbor Day. This year we’re planting a tree for two reasons: My great-aunt Nana passed away last fall, and we will plant a tree in her honor and in honor of Earth Day. We have chosen a beautiful pink dogwood for our back yard.

2. Make a terrarium or a dish garden: I wrote a tutorial about how to make a moss terrarium for Little Acorn Learning’s April Afterschool Enrichment Guide, which is full of amazing activities, recipes, poems, and much more. You can find it here: http://www.littleacornlearning.com/.  Here is an in-progress shot of the dish garden we made yesterday. We used moss we collected on a recent trip to the foothills and wheat grass seeds. Lucas included a spiral of small stones we found in our yard. We are adding beeswax bunnies and Easter eggs to it.

3. Go on a hike, take along a trash bag, and pick up any garbage you may spot along the way. (Kitchen or latex gloves come in handy for this activity.) Recycle those things that you can. Note: don’t let children pick up certain kinds of trash, especially anything that looks like it might be medical waste. Many communities have park or creek cleanup days that need volunteers.

4. Do a science experiment. For young children, seed projects are great because they are fast. Here’s what we did last year. Some of our pumpkin seedlings even survived the transfer out into our summer garden and we harvested pumpkins in the fall from our Earth Day experiment! I don’t know about you, but I love cycles like that.

5. Start a worm farm: All you need is a boxy container (a styrofoam cooler does the trick nicely—I know styrofoam is lame, but it works well for this project), and a container full of red worms from the bait store, or else dig up the worms yourself. Put some normal garden soil into your container, shred some newspaper into small strips, wet it all down, and add your worms. Poke a few holes into the container for air circulation. Then put in your vegetable kitchen scraps daily. Stir once in a while and keep it moist but not wet. Before long you’ll have loads of worms (and worm babies!) and great soil for your garden. (It helps to have a plastic or metal container underneath the whole worm bin, to catch any drippings. These drippings make excellent fertilizer.)

6. Learn about the weather or the water cycle. Check your local parks and recreation department for children’s nature classes or day camps. Try this page of links at The Water Project for science experiments for kids.

7. Read books about caring for the environment with your kids. Last April, I wrote about quite a few children’s books we recommend for Earth Day. Adults can check out the works of Richard Louv, Rachel Carson, David Sobel, Robert Micahel Pyle, and Bernd Heinrich.

8. Start a vegetable garden! Good Friday (also Earth Day this year) is a traditional day for planting seeds and seed potatoes. Lucas is outside preparing his garden plot. We have worked into it our soil full of worm castings  from last’s year’s worm farm. That should give our garden a good start!

9. Make space in your yard for wild creatures: add a birdbath, places wild creatures can use for cover, and plants that attract bees, butterflies, and birds. This spring I’ve seen birds actually bathing in and drinking from my birdbath. It was very cool!

10. Take your recyclables in and redeem them for cash; donate your family’s proceeds to a charity such as NRDC or National Wildlife Federation, or any number of other worthy charities. Better yet, if you can support wildlife and habitat restoration efforts in your own community, do that.

That’s 10. I bet you can think of dozens more. If you have a nifty idea to share, please do so! Happy Earth Day!

We got to go caving last weekend! Thanks to a dear friend who wanted to celebrate her birthday underground, we had a spectacular day. We went to Black Chasm, in the Sierra Nevada foothills near Jackson, California. Ironically, our family went there exactly a year ago.

The cave is gorgeous and very well lighted so that the rock formations are shown to best effect. This cave has some rare formations called helictites (top photo), which seem to defy gravity because they grow any which way. In the first photo above, you can see the dragon head formation that the cave uses as its mascot; it’s sticking out farthest on the right.

The trip was fantastic, not only because I adore caves, but because we got to go with some of our very favorite people and celebrate Ritsa’s birthday. Isn’t she cute?

We picnicked on goodies and the children got to ramble in the woods a bit. I love how doggedly Asher tags after the bigger boys. He’s every bit as tough as they are, just not quite as fast or sure-footed.

It was chilly, having snowed the day before. Everywhere we looked the stones were covered with a beautiful carpet of moss, thick and brilliant green. We followed some directions to find the Zen Garden Trail and, I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it in California. It looked so much like a set from one of the Lord of the Rings movies, as though we suddenly had been transported to New Zealand and should expect orcs to come trundling around the corner at any minute.

This place was heavenly and perfect for exploring. We rambled up and down boulders and in between huge, monolithic rocks, all draped in lush moss.

Here we are, minus two beloved photographers who managed to avoid being in most of the pictures. Many thanks to Tate for letting me use some of his photos. Happy Birthday, Ritsa!

More adventures, please, darlings! I love them so!

In Washington D.C. they are celebrating the National Cherry Blossom Festival, called the Sakura Festival.

Here at home, there is a fantastic Japanese cherry tree right outside the third and fourth grade classrooms at my son’s Waldorf school. It’s magnificent.

Mrs. M, the Eurhythmy teacher, was inspired to have a little cherry blossom  poetry festival with our third grade to celebrate spring. On Friday, the last day of school before spring break, the third graders wrote poems about springtime and cherry trees and hung their poems in the cherry tree.

Cherry blossoms feature heavily in Japanese poetry. The blossoms, sakura, symbolize the beginning of spring, purity, and also a kind of melancholy, for like the blossoms, life is short and beautiful.

The people of Japan have been on all our minds and in our prayers lately, although I’m not sure how aware the third graders are of the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It’s hard to think about it. One tourism website I looked at had this to say: “This year’s cherry blossom season will be overshadowed by the tremendous loss caused by the recent earthquake. However, we believe that the blossoms will serve as symbols of hope and resilience and a source of motivation along Japan’s road to recovery.” 

There’s no doubt that these blossoms are exquisite and ephemeral.

Life is such a sweet mixture of joys and pains, celebrations and disappointments, and even exultation and tragedy.

Sometimes it hurts to live life fully; to do so means opening ourselves up to all the beauty and pain around us. It hurts to be human. It is a joy to be human.

I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had a lot of time to write lately. But while I’ve been working, spring has sprung! I did sneak away with Asher last week to visit the Sacramento Waldorf School farm in the late afternoon.

We wanted to see the black butterflies on the yellow flowers …

the seedlings in the pyramid greenhouse …

Princess the pony, grazing by the American River …

rows and rows of glowing lettuces …

Honalea, the school cow …

calla lilies growing in the shade …

But most of all, we went to see the baby lambs, Milkshake and Licorice. Asher says, “They are a-DOH-able.”

Happy spring!

With a little break in the weather, we were able to let the chicks out to graze a bit. This was only their second time outside in this pen. The first time we could only get six of the nine of them to come outside. The others were being too chicken.

This is pretty Buttercup (“As you wish!”). Remember how I used to despair that we would never be able to tell Buttercup apart from Sunshine because they looked so similar? Well, look at the top photo. Sunshine has a much taller, redder comb and the beginnings of red wattles. Buttercup’s comb is still yellow. I sense trouble of the cock-a-doodle-doo type brewing.

And this one, Chestnut, isn’t very chestnut-colored anymore. The feathers are coming in black and white. This bird is extremely aggressive (loves to play the Jump on Your Head game and bumps chests with Sunshine), which makes me wonder if this might be a male, too.

I put these blankets atop the pen for two reasons: I don’t want any hawks getting any big ideas about eating my chicks, and also, I don’t want my chicks flying out of the pen. I don’t think it would be very easy to catch them back up again and I don’t know if they have sense enough not to run off.

Whenever I go to the chicks’ pen inside our garage, Lightning flies up to sit on me. Many of the chicks gather around me or jump up on me. Perhaps some imprinting has happened.  Lightning always wants to cuddle.

Firefly is still sequestered in the house. She is doing great and seems recovered, but she’s still much smaller than the other chicks, so we don’t feel she’s ready to be with them yet. I am hoping she will grow, grow, grow. Ultimately size isn’t everything when it comes to a pecking order, as sometimes tiny Bantam hens can be bossy, but it’s often a factor—or so I read.

Here’s another roundup post, which is all I can manage at the moment.

But first …

“Knock, knock”

“Who’s there?”

“Ding-dong!”

“Ding-dong who?”

“Floooooo!”

That’s Asher’s joke du jour, or rather joke of the week. We hear it a lot these days.

It’s raining. The thunderstorm the weather folks predicted is right on schedule. Holy hailstones! We are getting a wee bit sick of the rain, here in Northern California. We’re far more used to dire predictions of drought and onus of water conservation than full rivers, threatened levees, and flooding. Ian’s been running about in his galoshes, tending to pumps vigilantly to keep the water moving from our backyard, where it wants to stay, out and around to the front yard, where it can go on its merry way toward Arcade Creek. The neighbors generously give us all of their runoff, and our drainage—which I swear is like 100 percent better than it used to be—cannot keep up.

Speaking of Arcade Creek, I’m wondering if there’s a place where we can go and visit it—some kind of public land or easement where we can see and appreciate it. You see, all of our neighborhood drains say, “No dumping! Protect Our Creeks … Drains to Arcade Creek.” Asher has memorized this very important message and is keen to point out every such oval placard he sees on every storm drain in the neighborhood. This makes me happy; he’s getting an environmental consciousness at a young age. Don’t you think it would be good if we were to actually find Arcade Creek and explore it a bit? I’m betting Arcade Creek is plenty full right now.

Now, a paragraph ago I mentioned Ian’s galoshes. He’s very practical, you see. His galoshes are all black and he and bought them from Home Depot on one extremely rainy day in January. I’ve decided that I need a pair of galoshes, too—not so much because I slog about in our flooded backyard, fussing with pumps and worrying about our house flooding, but because I am, as you may know by now, a chicken farmer. If you don’t believe me, you can read here on my blog about our chickens, our chicken coop, and the ten baby chicks that we’re raising. Or, you can head on over to The Wonder of Childhood, a new online magazine published by my friend Lisa Boisvert Mackenzie. Lisa is bringing beautiful articles and inspiration on the topics of parenting, education, nourishing, living, and story, with a flourish and all the seasoning of her experience as a Waldorf childcare provider and mother. If you click on “Living,” you’ll see my article, “Raising Chicks,” detailing our chicken farming adventures. Many thanks to Lisa for letting me be a part of her inaugural issue. I’m looking forward to being inspired on a regular basis by The Wonder of Childhood. (Thank you, Lisa, for including me!)

Okay, so back to the topic of galoshes: Dang it, I need my own! Because chicken farmers, like me, need to walk into mucky chicken runs to feed hens, collect eggs, and scatter oh-so-yummy scratch for the girlies. Said chicken run was delightfully dry and clean last July when we built it. But now, almost eight months later, it’s a muddy, poopy mess. I’m really looking forward to things drying out around here! So, galoshes. I have found a colorful pair I want to by for $39.95 and a black and white pair I could live with for $29.95. What do you think I should buy? Wellies style in paisley or black and white, William Morris floral?

Okay, I’m done now. Generally speaking I’m too keen on writing about stuff, even though I admit I really like stuff. I try not to make it my focus in life.

So, on to other things…. Did I mention that it’s raining? Today, Lucas’s third-grade class at Sacramento Waldorf school was supposed to shear the sheep. Unfortunately wet fleece doesn’t shear well or easily, I’m told. I have been asked to take photographs of the third graders shearing the sheep, which is thrilling on so many levels. Although, I have to admit I’m not sorry today’s shearing was canceled because of the weather. Although the sheep probably don’t care much about the rain, and third graders (in my experience) don’t care a lick about getting wet, my camera prefers to stay dry, dry, dry.

And now, it’s dinner time. Bye!