how we all dance.

I won’t have photo abilities for a few weeks, I guess. Does anyone remember when we sent film away… went back to the store with selected negatives… mailed duplicates to faraway friends… huh.

While I muse on days gone by, you can enjoy these pics from a few weeks gone by. Summer has finally arrived in Maine after passing us over for a few years! We’ve had a perfect and longed-for balance between rainy days and crazy hot ones.

East End Beach in Portland.

Uh oh, we’re sliding! We’re sliding!!!

There go the big ones. We don’t need them anymore anyway, we’ve found cute replacements.

Most recent Little Ninja belt ceremony. We don’t go to all of them because they are pretty frequent and sometimes ill-timed, but I have a blast watching all these kids, and when the older kids have their belt ceremonies it’s truly impressive. It’s kind of like a night out for $2.

Helper chick:

Attentive respect for Kyoshi:

miniature:

Up front, showing them how it’s done:

Up front again, great form.

And…. bedtime. Sneaking out early, missing the dance party at the end. Oh well, she has years to build up her stamina!

I had a weird week a while back, and got caught up in a peak of coincidences that probably meant nothing but didn’t go unnoticed. Bret was off on the other coast and I had a friend come rescue me from myself and my four kids for one of the days. We had some typical conversations and the day should have followed standard rhythms, but something was off kilter. There was an effervescence in the air and it was palpable to me.

It may have started with “Sheila’s” panic attack, which is very unlike her. She came out of it and realized that she had been experiencing a side effect of some new supplements she had just begun taking. Of course then the whole health discussion ensued, and we drifted out to the side porch to take in the beautiful and unusually warm early spring day. We got to the point of examining the causal relationship between some methods of birth control and seemingly unrelated health problems, and hoping our kids don’t destroy their own bodies with unnecessary, potentially damaging hormones; then again, while hoping that they abstain until they are very, very old and probably married, we can’t be naive, so what do we do about that?

We didn’t know.

Then the conversation suspended in a way that it usually doesn’t with Sheila. The air was likewise suspended, which is unusual in this neighborhood. We are accustomed to a coastal north wind which is purposeful and harsh. It blows down the street almost continuously on most days, in all seasons. It was quietly absent on this day.

60 seconds later, while we were still in our lull, another friend walked up the driveway, “Toni” with her ebullient personality and savory red hair to complement. She was uninvited and unannounced but always welcome, and I waved her to join us on the porch with a big “how ARE you??” She proceeded to tell me just exactly how she was: her 6th grader will continue to homeschool; her 8th and 10th graders will start at the public high school; her 16-year-old will be getting married and having a baby.

My immediate instinct was to think, “how wonderful!” against social mores, yet the congruity of the moment felt like a knock to the skull.

Toni had dropped by because she doesn’t want her grandchild (!!!) to be vaccinated, and she figured I had ammunition she could pass on to her daughter. Smart lady. I went upstairs for a huge stack of mid-90s Mothering magazines and some similar literature for her to take home.

Then the 13- and 11-year-old girls giggled past us with their arms full of American Girl dolls and accoutrements.

Brewing has moved outside. Bret’s trying all-grain and it takes a bigger pot over a big propane burner. It’s nice to sit there watching it cook. Keeping it simple on a Saturday. Missing are the blurry photos of Bret drinking brown ale while brewing an IPA.

Arioch responds to live music far differently than to recorded stuff. I suppose everyone does. I don’t play the piano, I just pretend. Persephone is having real live lessons this year.

The day I took these photos was the first day he started to sing along with the music. After 27 recursions of King of the Fairies, on my left hand no less, he fell asleep. What do you know! I’ve been employing the piano as pacifier regularly but I think everyone is sick of my hornpipe.

I also pretend to homeschool my children. This photo proves it. Seriously though, they were having a fine time on this afternoon. I heard shrieks of laughter while the older kids were discussing… ready for this? The Histories of Herodotus. My mother overheard them reading aloud from the book one day and accused me of child abuse. But Mum, I’m giving them the experience of bonding via torture! Not only that, they are holding a baby and tolerating a four-year-old. Serious living, you can’t get this stuff in school.

I love New England. We have great delta of climate here. We call it weather. It’s that simple.
Carrabassett, Maine, last week/weekend of March:

Hampton Beach, NH, first weekend of April:

Introducing……

Arioch*

*not his real name**

**but wouldn’t that be a great name???

I recently sent a couple of my latest homebrews to a friend in the Tahoe area. He took one out for a hike to enjoy along with the fresh mountain air:

IPA travels to Tahoe

Yes, that’s a real photo, no photoshop tricks here… I’m jealous, now my homebrew gets to travel more than I do!

The description for this, my latest IPA titled “New Year, New IPA”, is:

A boat-load of hops in a moderately malty wrapper.

It came out quite well, but next time I need to use whole leaf hops for the dry-hop to avoid hop sediment in the final product. I’ll be brewing again today with some slight modifications to the hop profile. Hopefully that will come out just as well or better…

When you have a newborn baby…

and you take dozens and dozens of photos in those first couple of weeks so that you will remember how tiny he is, and how intent on living he is…

and then it’s another day and you hook up your camera to your laptop to upload yet another batch of photos….

which makes the first two weeks of photos disappear….

you wish you could turn back time just by five minutes. Just five minutes. You wonder if it is real? You wonder if you could possibly have lost all your precious brand-new little person images in a split second? Are you that foolish?

Your mind flashes to the passage in the gospel about not storing up earthly treasures since they will only rot away anyway and earth isn’t your eternal home, but can that really apply to photographs? Photographs of brand new babies?

You call your husband, who is off skiing for the day, to tell him what you did, and surprise yourself by bursting into sobs – which is weird because you just never really cry – and he says he will see what he can do, they must still be there somewhere.

You spend the rest of the day assuming the worst, that the photos really are gone, and that you will not remember just how tiny and sweet that baby was in the first few days of his life.

Then your husband calls back and says that he was able to find the photos (yes from his phone while skiing) and that you just shouldn’t touch anything, your computer is just having trouble recognizing some data. So you don’t touch anything, not for another two whole weeks.

Then your husband spends most of his day off work locating things that need to be located, synching up things that need to be synched up, and the brand new baby photos are restored. And he is your knight in shining titanium.