Mosquitoes: The War on Summer

“Why did I have to be born so tasty?!?” my daughter wailed, raking her fingernails across her shins. “I hate summer!”

In our neck of the woods, summer – which should be a season of backyard barbeques, kiddie pools in the yard, hours spent in the garden, and late nights chasing fireflies – is mosquito season. Before venturing outside, we slather on bug spray, don hats and inappropriately warm clothing, light citronella candles, and position fans by the picnic table. Those who don’t take these precautions, who treat summer like it’s a carefree time to wear shorts and tank tops and flip-flops, are condemned to scratch the itchy red welts covering their bodies.

And there are those, like the aforementioned daughter, who deal with summer by refusing to leave the house.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

The Summer of Patience

The summer of 2016 may hereafter be referred to by our family as: “The Summer of Patience.”

Ah, patience! Defined as, “the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset,” patience seems to be on the wane in 21^st century America. Sure, we give respectful lip service to patience and toss around platitudes like, “Patience is a virtue,” but the truth is that our entire culture is increasingly constructed to discourage the practice of patience.

We have apps for everything. Want groceries? Restaurant reservations? Taxi service? Up-to-the-nanosecond traffic updates? Gasoline delivered to your car? A potential life partner? All these and more can be acquired with the touch of a finger. (It’s not even accurate to say, “With the click of a button” anymore. Buttons have been replaced by button icons on a flat screen, possibly because the effort of pressing an actual button wastes precious time.)

Remember when two-day delivery was a luxury? (I believe that was sometime last year.) Now we expect two-day delivery, and my Amazon.com account allows me to request same-day delivery for everything from diapers to dog food.

“Seize the day!” “Strike while the iron’s hot!” “Grab the bull by the horns!” These are old expressions, but they seem particularly relevant in our fast paced and competitive culture – a culture in which self-help gurus exhort us to “Be your best self, TODAY!” and nobody bats an eye.

The result of all this efficiency is that we begin taking it for granted that life will be as quick and easy as a drive-through Starbucks. Our collective capacity for patience has shrunk, and it shows.

Click here (or just touch your flat screen’s button icon) to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Marching on Memorial Day

“Can we march in the Memorial Day parade again this year?”

Out of nowhere, one of my daughters popped this question during breakfast on a morning in mid-April. Memorial Day was over a month away. We were all the way across the country from Vermont, on sabbatical in Berkeley, California. And I hadn’t even finished my first cup of coffee of the day.

Such is the place that Middlebury’s Memorial Day parade occupies in the hearts of my children.

At long last, Faith is back in Vermont! Click here to continuing reading about Memorial Day parades, freedom…and libraries, in this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in the Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: Some Lessons of Sabbatical

I was not exactly looking forward to our family’s sabbatical in Berkeley, California. Our five-month sojourn was a year-and-a-half in the planning, so my mind had plenty of time to run through every nightmarish scenario imaginable. I worried that we couldn’t possibly find a comfortable and affordable home for a family of six. I worried that I would be stuck in this uncomfortable and expensive home all day long with four bickering children and no breaks. I worried that I would miss our life back in Vermont and become depressed.

Yet, even as I worried about these things, here’s how I expected the narrative to unfold: We would arrive in Berkeley, and everything would be fine! All of my worries would prove unfounded, and – as has happened repeatedly in the past – I would say, “I don’t know why I worried so much!”

Imagine my surprise, then, when in fact everything I’d worried about came true – and then some! A few weeks into our sabbatical, not only was I depressed, missing Vermont, and stuck all day in a cramped and expensive rental home with four bickering children, I’d also been blindsided by unexpected setbacks. I hadn’t expected to fracture my foot on our second day in California. I hadn’t expected my husband and children to miss Vermont as much as I did. I hadn’t expected to find the Bay Area – where we’d lived for five years – infinitely more challenging than I remembered because we were no longer used to city life and lines and traffic. I hadn’t expected our California friends to be so very, very busy that it would take months to see some of them.

“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” I told my husband tearfully. “I worried, so everything was supposed to work out.”

It took nearly the full five months for me to realize that sabbatical was an enormous gift to our family.

Click here to continue reading about the lessons I learned from our sabbatical in this week’s “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical” column in The Addison Independent. (This will be the FINAL California edition of this column — actually filed from Oregon, where our family is on vacation before heading back to Vermont!)

California Sabbatical: Goodbye To Berkeley

As we prepare to leave Berkeley, California and return home to Vermont, here are some Berkeley stories from the past five months of our family’s sabbatical:

It’s late January. We are a few weeks into our homeschool curriculum, and for science I’ve been taking my daughters on nature walks around our neighborhood to observe West Coast flora and fauna. This particular morning, we’re squatting on the sidewalk sketching a Bird of Paradise plant, when a nearby house’s door opens and a man emerges. I’m concerned that he’s about to chase us away, but he asks what we’re doing in a friendly manner.

Then he says, “My wife sent me out here to offer you some lemons.” He gestures towards the lemon tree in his front yard, laden with lemons bigger than my fist (he tells us they’re Eureka lemons.) He cuts down four lemons, one for each of my daughters. We thank him and take the lemons home; later, we will use a recipe from The World of Little House, a companion book to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of pioneer memoirs, to make delicious lemonade from these lemons.

For more of our Berkeley adventures, click here to continue reading this week’s California edition of “Faith in Vermont” in The Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: They Paved Paradise

It’s late afternoon, and I’m looking east through the big picture windows of my favorite café in Berkeley, California. I’m used to seeing the Green Mountains when I look east, but today I see the Berkeley Hills.

There’s no confusing the Berkeley Hills for the Green Mountains. The slopes of the Berkeley Hills are covered with more houses than trees; the electric lights in those houses are blinking on right now, and will outshine the constellations tonight. The hills’ summits are ridged with cell phone towers. And to see the Berkeley Hills I must look across a parking lot, past six lanes of traffic and the BART train tracks, and beyond a network of power lines and street lights.

A refrain runs through my head that’s been haunting me since we arrived in Berkeley for my husband’s sabbatical. It goes like this: What have we done?

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical” in The Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: Where The Heart Is?

When friends and family from Vermont ask how we’re doing during our five-month sabbatical in Berkeley, California, I usually answer, “It’s been a good experience. But it’s not home.”

The funny thing is, it was home.

I’ve been contemplating this concept of home: What is it that makes one place clearly home, and another place – a perfectly nice and familiar place filled with beloved friends and family – so clearly not home?

Obviously, home is where your house is, in the physical sense. But I am talking about the more spiritual sense of “being at home.”

The old platitude claims, “Home is where the heart is.” One of my daughters drew a picture and captioned it with this saying. When my husband asked, “Where’s your heart?” she didn’t miss a beat: “Vermont.”

Click here to continue reading my latest column, “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical,” in The Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: The Surprising Joy of Homeschooling

Husband: I was thinking we could go to Berkeley for the second half of my sabbatical. We have family and friends there, and I could do research in my old department at UC Berkeley.

Me: Sure, that makes sense.

Husband: And we’d enroll the girls in school in Berkeley for the spring?

Me: Oh no, I’ll just homeschool them while we’re out there.

And so, over burgers at Park Squeeze in Vergennes in the spring of 2014, some very major decisions were made very quickly.

Click here to continue reading about our homeschooling adventure in this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: Journey to Points South

In mid-February our family left the house we’re renting during my husband’s sabbatical in Berkeley, California and drove south for eight hours.

Our destination: Orange County, a sprawling collection of suburbs just south of Los Angeles.

Our purpose: To visit my husband’s brother and his family…and Disneyland.

Click here to continue reading the latest update from California in my “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

California Sabbatical: Sing a Song of Traffic

The other day, my daughters were playing on the brick patio that constitutes the backyard of our rental house in Berkeley, California. As two of them scooted around on toy cars belonging to our landlords’ son, I observed the following exchange:

Bringing their vehicles to a sudden stop at right angles to each other, one daughter said, “You go ahead.”

To which the other daughter responded, “No, no, you go ahead!”

After they’d repeated this several times, I asked, “Girls, what are you doing?”

“Well, that’s what you always say, Mommy!” they explained.

That’s when I realized the degree to which my daughters have absorbed the anxiety and general distrust I feel while driving in California.

Click here to continue reading my latest “Faith in Vermont, California Sabbatical” column in The Addison Independent.