Faery Riders

When the moon is round and white

The Faery Riders shake the night

With song and laughter going by:

I love to hear the noise they make,

The pine trees hear it too, and wake;

It fills the room in which I lie.

I hear the trumpets long and loud,

I hear the voices of a crowd,

I hear the horses prancing by:

All night they pass, and pass, and pass,

But not one little blade of grass

Is trampled down or turned away.

If I could see their faces plain,

Or run beside the bridle rein

Of Mab the Queen, as she comes by:

I might know all the Faeries know,

And follow, follow where they go

Before the sun climbs up the sky.

But though I hurry might and main

To look out through the windowpane,

I never see them passing by.

Just when I reach the window sill

The music stops and all is still:

Only the wind is passing by.

—Ella Young

(I wrote this last night and then my computer hiccuped and I gave up.) Happy Belated Father’s Day to my dad, who is a marvel and a rock. He is always there for me. I love you, Dad! I didn’t get to spend Father’s Day with my dad this year, but I know he’s having fun right now.

We did spend part of yesterday with Ian’s dad and Mimi, and had a marvelous lunch. We enjoyed Ian’s amazing grilled chicken (cooked on his new-for-Father’s Day grill), strawberry almond green salad, corn on the cob, and oatmeal raisin walnut bread. GG and Mimi brought the salad and a homemade apple pie that was to die for!

And for the record, there’s no one else in the world I’d rather be raising children with. My beloved husband Ian is a wonderful father in every way.

I love to paint. So far, I paint only wall murals and eggs and the occasional watercolor. But I have a dream …

My loves pooled resources recently to buy me a spot in an oil painting class for my birthday. I mentioned my desire to take this class a few weeks ago and, although I didn’t know I was doing it, in hindsight I realize I was saying out loud what I want—and doing so despite the considerable cost, or the impracticality of it, or all the million and one other reasons not to do it. It’s quite amazing and I am (repeatedly) blessed to find that often when I do that, someone is listening, and ultimately I somehow get what I want. I never dreamed that my darlings would do this for me and was/am totally awestruck by the thoughtfulness of the gift.

Me. Oil painting.

I have wanted to do this since I was 9. No kidding.

This week I popped over to the gallery/art studio and paid for my class. I have six evening sessions (6-9 p.m.) to use over the next four months. I have a materials list in hand, and some cash left over from my patrons to put toward the supplies I’ll need.

The painting teacher is on vacation now but will return at the end of June. So next month, I will be painting. With oils. On canvas. And if it is even half as sublime and satisfying as I’ve always imagined it to be, I will rejoice. Even if I suck.

Thank you.

May and June are my happy garden months. There’s enough water and temps aren’t yet crazy hot—usually. This year, I’m enjoying some reseeded plants that have popped up all on their own. Since I enjoy their parent plants, these babies are making me happy.

Reseeded calendula is popping up all over this flower bed. I also have a bunch of baby dusty millers, too.

Summer is time for the hydrangeas to shine. I have six of these now and each is a different color.

I recently planted two delphinium plants. I’m reading that they can be somewhat fussy, but their blooms are spectacular, so I thought I’d try them. The star jasmine is blooming now and it makes the whole backyard smell sweet and wonderful.

I created these wish flags for a craft project and article I wrote for Little Acorn Learning’s June Enrichment Guide. I love them so much that I have made many, many more. I even opened it up to friends and asked if anyone had a wish they wanted me to add to my wishing tree. I’ve now got everything from general prayers for love, happiness, and abundance to specific wishes for healthy bedrest/birth and specific fall classes for friends. The flags are fabric rectangles with wished written on them. For the last few flags, I need to drag out the big ladder because I can’t reach the higher branches and the lower ones are pretty full!

This summer we are targeting for improvement this area near our patio. We have in years past planted our vegetable garden here with some success. But the trouble with that is that it’s an unattractive area for a good part of the year. So we’re putting in perennials with some spots of annuals for punch. The big area of pink poppies is one plant grown from seed—one of only two poppy seeds that took last year. But, I love it and it’s a showstopper. I’ve put in a couple of roses for some height, a golden coreopsis and an amazing peachy verbena (below). Still to go in are two types of salvia, some nemesia, a muticolored wallflower, and a rock rose. This should help make this part of the yard considerably prettier.

A Flickr friend thinks this bird is a female American Goldfinch. She is perching on a stalk of chard (left) that has bolted. This crazy plant has lived in my yard for two years now. We eat bits off it and leave the rest. As a result, I have tons of baby chards growing everywhere. I plan to eat those, too. It may be that the Goldfinch has similar designs on the chard.

Awesome, isn’t it? I’ve had purple and scarlet verbena before, but never this color. Charming.

I have all sorts of flower seeds in the ground, with some nice little seedlings coming up. Nasturtiums, morning glories, cosmos, and other goodies. In the veggie garden we have tomato plants growing, cantaloupe, beans, corn, pumpkins, butternut squash, basil, one zucchini, and one eggplant. (Most of this is Lucas’s garden. I only planted the stuff he’s not interested in eating.) My fingers are crossed!

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Here are a few more ideas of how to celebrate the summer solstice. Please feel free to check out the first installment here. I guess perhaps it was the very cold, very wet spring we had this year; somehow this year I’m extra motivated to bask in the sunshine. I’m so looking forward to the summer solstice. It feels right to go big this year.

Make a Sun Mask

The mask you see above is one that Lucas made in summer camp a couple of years ago. It’s very simple—just doubled paper plates painted with copper and gold metalic paints and decorated with a few sequins. It’s iconic and it speaks to me, so it’s still on display in my home office. Your sun mask could be more elaborate, if you like, but a project like this could be enjoyed by even the smallest members of your family and for little investment in materials.

Make a Sunshine Banner

For me, Father’s Day and the summer solstice are two sides of the same coin. (That’s not the case for everyone; in China and Japan, the summer solstice is when the divine feminine forces are celebrated.) I guess I always think of Mother Earth and Father Sun (or Father Sky). Anyway, here is a project that Lucas made a number of years ago with his summer camp teachers. The kids and I are going to do this again for the solstice this year, only this time, we’ll have both Lucas’s and Asher’s handprints to make our sunshine. We’ll only need some fabric, twine or ribbon, a twig or dowel, and some washable tempera paint. And soap!

Crochet Sun Medallion Necklaces

I wish I was good enough at crochet to write a proper tutorial for this, but I fear I’d get the vocabulary wrong. I’m just a beginner, you see. But I managed to work out how to create a flat circle that looks sunshiny. I think I used single and double crochet stitches and just felt my way along, endeavoring to keep the sun round. When it was approximately 2 inches in diameter, I started chaining a chain. The acrylic yarn is leftover from another project, and it’s stretchy enough to just pull over the head to make a necklace. I’ve made two of these for my boys, and promised two more to some friends. This worked up in about 30 minutes, so someone who actually knows what they’re doing with a crochet hook could probably quickly pound out these sun medallion necklaces. Wear them at your solstice party!

Find more of my solstice ideas (and tons more) in Little Acorn Learning’s June Enrichment Guide. Click the button to go there.

It’s the end of the school year. There are four more days of school left and then it’s twelve weeks of summer vacation for Lucas. Normally at this time of year I’d be panicking, wondering what the hell we are going to do during twelve weeks “off.”

OK, the truth is, part of my brain IS doing exactly that because I am both full-time mommy and full-time professional editor. Try as I might, I have yet to figure out how to be fully effective at doing two vastly different jobs at once.

Twelve weeks. Somehow the camp options are fewer this summer, and I just know that there are going to be yawning weeks of hot, drawn-out days. You’ve heard me sing this song before. That’s not why I’m writing now.

Just now. This is why I’m writing. This exact moment I’m so awestruck by my child. My 9-year-old has me feeling just boggled, and not for any one thing, but for all of him.

Today he brought home some of his third-grade schoolwork. Not reams of mimeographed math problem practice sheets, but his own watercolor paintings. His crocheted potholder. His hand-carded, handspun and plied yarn.

While Ian was preparing dinner, Lucas was out in the backyard, shooting homemade arrows at targets with his most recent handmade bow.

During dinner, Lucas told us the story of Moses and the Hebrew people wandering the in the desert. This was a treat for us because he doesn’t always want to talk about what’s going on at school. I marveled at how parts of the story were so well-crafted, as if he had absorbed whole phrases of the narrative word for word because the pictures in his mind responded to them. He also told us he got to shovel manure today—and that he’s aware he’ll be doing a lot of that sort of thing next year because the fourth grade does the animal chores on the school farm. We discussed how interesting the Norse myths will be next year.

After dinner tonight, he played for us a piano sonatina. It has three movements and is about six pages of music, with plenty of repeats and codas. His sonatina is not perfect. Some sections are played faster than others. There are rough patches that we hope he will iron out through practice before his next piano recital in a couple of weeks. But, damn! My kid just made music out of nothing but his knowledge and skill and feeling.

Who is this capable being standing before me?

I cannot promise to be the perfect, carefree mom all summer. I will not promise to keep him entertained through the dog days. All I can promise is to try to meet him where he is now, which is most certainly not where he was a year or a month ago. Now is new, and brave and capable and lovely.

“It is summer,” said the fairy,

“Bring me tissue light and airy;

Bring me colors of the rarest,

Search the rainbow for the fairest

Seashell pink and sunny yellow,

Kingly crimson, deep and mellow …

Bring me diamonds, shining brightly

Where the morning dew lies lightly …

With an art no fay discloses

I am going to make some roses!”

—Mary F. Butts

Inspired by SouleMama {this moment} – A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.

Happy Equinox! Happy Mabon! Happy Last Day of Summer!

It was a busy day. I had originally planned to celebrate the equinox on the 23rd, but when I looked closer at the exact time of the equinox, I decided it couldn’t wait till tomorrow. (Tomorrow we can celebrate the First Day of Autumn!)

We’ve been watching for signs of Autumn around here. Mama’s been scoping out all the garden plants with a project in mind….

After a quick, $9 trip to the craft store today, we came home with a flat twig wreath base, some floral picks (wooden picks with a small amount of wire on one end), and some green floral twine, which we ended up not using. We wandered around our front and back yards and clipped little snippets off trees and shrubs, including liquidambar leaves (still green), flowering plum leaves (purple), mallow, Chinese elm, Japanese maple (purple and green), redwood sprigs, pittosporum, and lantana berries, heavenly bamboo fruits, rose hips, lavender flowers, and the spiky flowers from some ornamental grass. We also walked up the street a little ways and gathered fallen bits of live oak leaves.

While the vegetable soup was cooking I tried to get the kids interested in making the wreath with me. At first they couldn’t be bothered because they were too busy chasing around the backyard. But after I got the first layer on the wreath base, it caught Lucas’s eye and he came to help me. He did a great job of adding to the wreath, and especially enjoyed using the floral picks to wire items without strong stems into the wreath.

We pulled some deep orange/bronze seed lanterns off our goldenrain tree, plucked a touch of dusty miller, and added some rosemary from our herb patch. We added in a few acorns we had gathered from the neighborhood yesterday. Basically, if it was interesting and sturdy enough to be stabbed into our wreath, we used it. I’m delighted with all the colors our wreath has! I had feared that not enough foliage had begun to turn fall colors yet, and that it would be bland.

Here is the finished wreath, sans baby toes and with a few sticks we had gathered and displayed last spring. Ian helped us hang our equinox wreath above our nature table (which is really the top of our upright piano) in our great room. Since these plants are largely fresh, our wreath will wither and wilt over time. It may begin to fall apart, which in itself will be symbolic of the seasonal changes. I’m interested to see how well or poorly it lasts. I’ve never made one of these before.

Lucas then chopped our “finger salad,” mere raw zucchini rounds into halves, symbolizing that today the day and night are perfectly equal. While he did, Ian asked him math questions, which was fun.

Our backyard equinox table setting (blue plates for night, yellow plates for day, of course). I didn’t take a photo of our yummy vegetable lentil quinoa soup. (I’m no food photographer!) We ate homemade bread and soup and zucchini halves, and talked about what summer things we were thankful for (swimming lessons, swim team, Waldorf summer camp, play dates, our anniversary trip to Seattle, Burning Man—particularly because we came home with four noses, eight eyes, eight ears, 16 limbs, and 80 digits!).

We finished our celebration with pumpkin pie! Asher helped with making the pie crust and Lucas mixed up the filling and helped me roll out the crust.

And now, the holiday is done and I’m beat! Good night, and may the many blessings of the season be yours.