Clowns vs. Love

On Thursday I received an email from the principal of my daughters’ school. This email was sent to all parents in order to reassure us – and, by extension, our children – that we should not be afraid of clowns. Although reports of clown threats and suspicious clown sightings across the country had been whipping our nation’s population (especially its younger members) into a frenzy of fear, our principal dismissed the uproar as a hoax. No threats, he went on to say, had been made against any school in our district.

Then on Friday, the news broke that Donald Trump, the Republican Presidential candidate, had been recorded on a 2005 videotape speaking about women in shockingly offensive terms and laughingly boasting about making unwanted sexual advances.

As a parent, as a citizen, as a human, what do I do with these things? How do I explain to my young daughters that they don’t need to fear clowns, but the real danger is simmering underneath the surface of our country? That the scary clowns aren’t the ones in white face paint and red noses, but are instead running for the highest elected office in our land? That I am bequeathing them a country in which power continues to rest unequally with the white, the male, and the rich, and where this power is defined too often as, “You can do anything you want?”

The question running through my head throughout that weekend was: What is happening to my country? This question was followed closely by: What even IS my country, and was it ever mine to begin with?

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

First Things…and Wedding Rings

My immediate thought, after my three-year-old daughter swallowed my wedding band, was: Well, I guess there really IS a first time for everything!

This past month has been full of firsts for our family, which is typical of early September. There were the first days of the new school year, with one daughter entering a new third grade class, one daughter beginning kindergarten, one daughter starting part-time preschool, and the remaining daughter resuming homeschool. We visited new classrooms for the first time, packed our first lunches, navigated the first day jitters (and completely forgot about the requisite first day photos!)

Three weeks into the school year, and everything still feels new as we struggle to find our footing, figure out who’s going where and when, sign up for extracurricular activities, and help our exhausted daughters transition out of their lax summer sleep schedule.

We are experiencing additional firsts since moving to a new home in early August, figuring out how things work in this house and how our land is best managed.

And, in less happy news, one of our daughters is undergoing treatment for her first bout with Lyme disease.

So many firsts, so much newness! But the wedding band incident trumped it all.

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

The More Things Change

At the end of August, as has been our custom for the past three summers, our family spent a weekend at the Highland Lodge, on the shores of Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vermont. Travel with four young children is never easy, so when we find a location that works, our tendency is to return to it again and again. We began an annual pre-school stay at the Highland Lodge shortly after the birth of our fourth child, and it has become one of our happy places.

Returning to the same vacation spot year after year provides the comfort of knowing what to expect. It provides a coherent chain of memories: Remember what we did here last year? And it provides an encouraging sense of perspective and progress: Every year the children are older, easier, more self-sufficient. Remember those things we were so worried about the last time we were here? Everything turned out okay!

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

Of Ticks and Fear

“Mommy, is that a tick?” my seven-year-old daughter asks. She’s looking in the bathroom mirror, pointing to a small black speck under her chin.

Our family’s move earlier this month from the woods to the fields has not only entailed a change in scenery, but also a change in the pests that plague us: We’ve moved from Mosquitoland to Tickville.

Click here to continue reading about ticks — and how they relate to the current election cycle — in my latest “Faith in Vermont” column for The Addison Independent.

Decisions, Decisions

Our family moved last week.

In fact, it would be more accurate to say that our family has been moving for the past year.

It all began with a dream: What if we lived with a little less house, on a little more land? What if we grew and raised more of what we eat?

After six months of searching, we found a little less house on a little more land. It was a mere six miles from our current house – six miles closer to town. The price was right. And the house was a mess. Although it wasn’t an old house – the first section was built in 1995 – it had undergone two tacked-on additions, had a wet basement, needed a new boiler, and appeared to be mid-way through a haphazard renovation: walls were half-painted, windows were without trim, most rooms lacked light fixtures, and (as I repeatedly pointed out to my husband) none of the bathrooms included towel rods.

“Mommy, I don’t want to live here,” my eldest daughter whispered to me as we walked through the house.

“Don’t worry, honey,” I whispered back. “I don’t either.”

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

No Child of Ours

Last week — the week when Alton Sterling was fatally shot by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile was fatally shot by police in Falcon Heights, Minnesota — I had my monthly book club meeting.

The two events may seem entirely unrelated: Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were both young black men in their 30s; my book club is comprised of seven white women in their 30s and 40s. But this month, our book club was discussing my reading pick, the book Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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

(I was actually all set last week with a “Faith in Vermont” column about pediatric dentistry in Vermont, and then I came home on Thursday night — after a brutal day of getting ready to go on vacation in two days and getting ready to move houses in three weeks — and I had to write this. I wrote it very tired, very raw, and way too late into the night. I think it may be one of the more important things I’ve ever written. But don’t worry — you’ll see the pediatric dentistry column in the near future, too. Because, in my circles, pediatric dentistry is a pressing issue….)

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.