Home

I realize that I haven't been writing as much here lately, and it's true that I've been very busy...but I've been saying that for a while now. I think my life is fuller on the outside, leaving somehow less need for me to dig around on the inside. That's nice, for a change. I was getting a bleached-out navel from all this gazing!

We are now comfortably settled into our new home, and I can already feel our pattern shifting into what was meant for us. We have more discovering to do, but this is really home. Many of the things I always imagined doing and being with my family are starting to happen. Some of this is because we're all older, but some of it is, I think, because we've found a really appropriate spot on which to build our dreams.

We are living in a large, old-but-renovated farmhouse. The space carries sound in pockets, giving all of us enough privacy and connectedness, depending on our mood. The kids have their own little corners, and nowhere do any of us yet feel overwhelmed by an abundance of things everywhere. Little perfections are emerging: just the right place for True's photos of the Australian coastline off Cairns, a lovely ledge that holds all our family pictures, just enough room to chase each other around the dining room table. We threw a big party last weekend, and discovered that it is a perfect house for even a large party -- everyone found a good spot, and the music carried just right.

In this house, Doodlebug is beginning to wake in the morning and fearlessly emerge from her room to find us. Both girls are starting to set their own places at the table, since there is room here for their dishes and flatware to take up an entire child-height drawer, just for them. Little Shmoo runs triumphantly from front to back door in search of where we last left her shoes, then hands them to us, grinning and asking "Outside?"

And, mmmm...outside!

Our back yard is a glorious garden handed to us by the couple who lovingly cultivated it into a low-maintenance Eden. Of course, there's weeding to do, and pruning, and some personal touches to add, but the flowers and greenery are spectacular. I'll post some photos later, but there are multiple phloxes (phloxi?), lillies, flowering hostas, clematis vines, tall stalks of daisy-looking things in white and yellow and purple, small pink bell-like flowers, bleeding hearts, and hosts of green ground cover I can't identify. There are also aggressive wild violets, which my gardening friend says I should kill but which I love and will not.

And there's a huge grape arbor, with abundant not-yet-ready grapes. If we can figure out what they're for, we'll have a lot of whatever-that-is: jelly or wine or small green marbles. It climbs charmingly over a nice patch of garden, and then has wound its way around an otherwise ugly chain-link fence. It goes nicely with the blueberry and raspberry bushes, which both girls have discovered and around which they spend much of their outside time, begging for me to keep looking, there MUST be more ripe berries, please can they have more?

We've been sharing a CSA farm share this summer with friends, and often, our kitchen smells like new, fresh things cooking -- sauteed kale, and berry pies, and mushrooms with fresh herbs, and even garlic scapes. Every Wednesday, there is also a farmer's market in the park two blocks away, where we've gone for peaches and company. Inevitably, we meet friends and neighbors there and end up staying a good long while.

The elementary school where Doodlebug will go in the fall is undergoing a leadership change, and the PTA president lives a block from us. I am excited about the prospect of getting involved in the school, of working with this very diverse community and learning more about it as the years pass. Doodlebug will walk to school every day, with me and all our neighbors. Little Shmoo's daycare/preschool is two blocks away as well.

This is the life I imagined for us. It's a comfortable home where love has room to grow, where it is possible to go days in the summer with no need for a car, where within a block are a half-dozen young families ready to play in the dirt with us, where we can find a community that makes it easy for us to be who we are -- whatever that turns out to be. Now, I think we really have the space to find out.