Uncomfortable?

Would you let us be YOUR neighbors? (Outtake from last year’s Christmas card photo).

My latest article in The Addison Independent, in which I tackle the topic of race, or: What’s it like to be a multi-racial family living in the least diverse state in the nation? Click here to read.

Adding It Up

And then there were three: two smart ones and a lucky one. (The doughnuts were a little post-trauma treat, not a regular occurrence!)

Brinkley killed one of our chickens last week.

Here’s how it happened: For those of you who don’t know, Brinkley is our neighbor’s Golden Retriever, but we’ve “adopted” him to the point that our neighbors looped their electric dog fence around our yard. So Brinkley has the run of our yard, and we love him. Since July, when we first put the chickens outside, Brinkley has shown admirable restraint — he’s been interested in them, but until lately he never made any aggressive moves.

We keep the chicken coop inside a fenced yard. Here’s the weakness: because our yard is so rocky, we can’t sink the fence deeply into the earth to keep predators from digging under it. The fence is chicken wire strung between metal posts, but the chicken wire sits level with the ground. So last week, when Brinkley started digging under the fence and pushing up the wire with his 80 pounds of doggy energy, he won. I’d caught him inside the chicken yard several times, but luckily no harm was done.

Then, last Friday, as I pulled into the driveway with Georgia (the other two girls were in preschool), expecting a quiet, uneventful afternoon, our neighbor from across the street came up the driveway. She was watching Brinkley while his owners were away, and had caught him with one of our white Leghorns in his mouth. She saved the chicken — who was a little slobbery and wobbly and traumatized, but otherwise unhurt — and returned her to the chicken coop. I went to check on the chickens — and found only the lucky Leghorn and one of our Rhode Island Reds inside. That left TWO chickens unaccounted for.

My quiet afternoon turned into a frantic chicken hunt. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but it appears that three of the chickens may have escaped their yard by squeezing under part of the fence that Brinkley had warped with his digging. Once they became totally free-range chickens, they were also fair game for Brinkley. Amazingly, the OTHER Rhode Island Red eventually fluttered down from a tree branch above the chicken yard, where she’d taken shelter during the chicken massacre. As for the other Leghorn, all I found of her was a pile of feathers and a dismembered leg.

I wasn’t totally devastated; it’s pretty rare for a chicken to die of old age. Although I’d have liked to have gotten a few eggs out of this hen before she became Brinkley’s chew toy, chickens don’t usually inspire deep affection. They’re not cuddly creatures; even as chicks, our chickens hated to be held, and now it’s almost impossible to catch them. They’re nervous, flighty creatures whose main interest is food.

But I felt worse than I expected. Those chickens were my responsibility. I was prepared for them to die at some point, but it was still my job to keep them alive as long as possible. If you were looking for someone to pin the blame on in this situation, all evidence pointed straight to: ME. It was hard to be mad at Brinkley; he was just a dog being a dog. And the chickens were just being chickens. But I was the one who’d wanted the chickens to begin with, and I was the one who’d invited our neighbors to include our yard in Brinkley’s fenced run. I’d brought a hunting dog and chickens together, and when the inevitable happened, I had only myself to blame.

“You just keep adding and adding and adding,” my mother said to me during her latest visit. She was concerned after we told her that we were thinking of getting a dog of our own. And she’s right: three children in four years, four chickens, our neighbor’s dog, and now possibly our own dog. I DO have a little problem with adding things to my life. But here’s why: I think it’s almost never bad to add something else to love. Don’t most of us add and add? We form new relationships, get married, have children, acquire pets. Isn’t love the motivation behind all of those things?

I have a hard time saying that I love our chickens. I got them because we go through at least a dozen eggs a week, and because I thought it would be nice for the girls to have some animals around to watch and care for. But I raised them from chicks, I feed them and clean their coop, and I guess that’s a form of love.

Here’s the scaly underbelly of love, though, the thing we try to fool ourselves into forgetting: nothing lives forever. My husband, my children, my chickens, Brinkley, myself — we’re all going to die. When we add things to our lives, we’re adding present-tense love, with the promise of future-tense pain and loss.

So why keep adding at all?

I thought about that while I checked on my lonely Leghorn all that afternoon — a chicken who’d just suffered shock and loss herself, and appeared about as depressed as it’s possible for a chicken to be. I thought about that when Brinkley came running up to me proudly, carrying a mouthful of white feathers. I thought about that when I told my two oldest girls that Brinkley had killed one of their chickens.

Guess what the girls wanted to do after I picked them up from preschool? I am absolutely not making this up: they wanted to go play hide & seek in the cemetery. So we did.

And then I thought: we can live with loss. We can feel the pain and learn from it and work through it and heal. But I cannot, I cannot, live without love. So I will keep adding.

Also, I will reinforce that chicken fence.

There is a Season

One of our favorite fall views, from the top of the treehouse at Happy Valley Orchard.

We’re sleeping with the quilt on almost every night. In the mornings, we wake to the sound of acorns crashing onto the roof as squirrels busily gather them from the oak tree. The sunlight has turned a deeper gold, and our eyes are peeled for new, colorful patches of foliage. Our second fall in Vermont is beginning.

When our family moved from California to Vermont, everyone assumed that our biggest adjustment would be the weather….

Click here to continue reading this, my latest column for The Addison Independent.

Chancy Cows

Badlands-Cow-in-the-Road-1-a25147417 — Badlands Cow in the Road #1, by Jim McKinniss

I never considered that, when I became a parent, a major part of my job description would include fighting death. But it’s true: at its most basic, parenting is about trying to keep your kids alive into adulthood. No easy task, that. Every day I fight to keep my children and myself alive. I know it’s crazy to think that I have any control over death, that it’s something I can “fight.” I know that death is inevitable. But, inasmuch as I can control anything, I want to see my daughters flourish during the time that we all have.

And it’s not just my children and myself; these days I’m also responsible for the lives of three houseplants, numerous garden plants, four chickens, and one monarch caterpillar.

I’m starting to feel like my resume for 2011-12 should read: Anti-Death Warrior. [Anti-Death Warrior is a deceptively glamorous term for a job that, most days, involves managing food on one end and poop on the other. But still.]

I’ve had varying degrees of success in my attempt to keep the living things within my orbit alive and prospering. Thus far, I’ve been most successful with the girls. The garden plants are doing well, although truth be told they receive the least of my efforts. I may have managed to kill one of our houseplants, a gift from my parents with the promise that “It’s IMPOSSIBLE to kill.” It’s not dead yet, but it’s pretty brown around the edges.

And a few weeks ago, it looked like things were really falling apart for the chickens and me.

One of our new chicks started limping for no obvious reason, a development that filled me with the alternating emotions of fear (Could it be a disease that would wipe out the whole flock?), guilt (Was it something I did, or failed to see?), and indecision (Do I take her to a vet? Or just wait and see?).

And then there was me.

You may recall that, about a month ago, I was treated for Lyme disease. It now seems that I didn’t have Lyme disease, after all, but during the last few weeks of August I wished I did. Compared with what I was going through, Lyme disease looked simple, clear-cut, and treatable.

I’ll spare you all the medical details, except to say that a second round of blood tests for my Lyme-like symptoms — joint pain, headaches, fatigue — revealed elevated muscle enzymes, suggesting that my muscles were inflamed, possibly to the point of breakdown. In an instant, I found myself in medical hell: during the course of ONE WEEK, I went back and forth from the hospital for FOUR separate rounds of bloodwork and a brain MRI. I received daily voicemail updates from my doctor, including reassuring statements like, “By the way, I’m very concerned.” I alternately hugged my girls too tightly and snapped at them. I teared up at the smallest things, like Fiona saying, “Mommy, this winter I’m planning to make a HUGE snowman!” And I learned that sometimes, the more medical attention you receive, the sicker you feel.

My medical drama happened during the SAME week that our chick started limping. Everything was crashing.

I’d like to tell you that I handled all of this like a rooster in a sack: by getting still and quiet, meditative and contemplative. But I handled it more like a stressed hen: flapping and fighting and squawking. I cried so hard in that space-age, clanging MRI tube when the Coldplay song “Fix You” was piped in over the speakers from my iPod, that the technician came over the intercom to ask if I’d fallen asleep: “We’re getting some motion in the pictures.” I was furious at God for what was, in my humble opinion, his terrible timing: I have young kids, Erick’s semester was about to start, and this put a stop — either temporary or permanent — to various plans we’d been making. I was terrified that the tests results would turn up something truly awful, but I was also terrified that they’d turn up nothing; that all this drama and trauma would leave us just as stupefied as we were now, that I’d be achy and exhausted forever with no clear reason. I wanted a reason, I wanted a treatment, and I wanted a NAME.

I also spent inordinate amounts of time out by the chicken coop, watching our limping chick and wondering what I should do. “Why is Mommy always with the chickens?” Fiona complained to Erick when she came downstairs one morning to find that I was out at the coop again.

Then, that same week — the week of the limping chicken and my elevated enzymes — I just happened to read an article in the June 25 issue of The New Yorker by Jill Lepore, about Barack Obama’s family history. It turns out that when Obama’s grandfather, Stanley Dunham, was a young man, he was supposed to go with some friends to the movies. His grandmother kept him at home, and his friends’ car swerved to avoid a cow on the road and crashed into a tanker truck, killing all passengers. Lepore concludes: “Every family has a chancy cow or two roaming the meadows of its past.”

It’s a beautiful thought, but that week it struck me as a massive understatement. No, I thought to myself, it’s more like every PERSON has a HERD of chancy cows roaming the meadows of their life. By “chancy cows,” I mean things that could have happened but didn’t — or things that DID happen but might not have — due to something that seemed insignificant at the time. Like a cow in the road, or a grandmother’s decision.

Even right smack in the middle of that crappiest of crappy weeks, I could see chancy cows all over the place.

For instance, the reason I was being sent to the hospital for repeated lab tests, instead of sitting at home wondering why my knees were still hurting after I’d finished the antibiotics for Lyme, is that we just happen to live next door to a doctor — an experienced diagnostician whose practice is closed to new patients. And we just happen to be seeing a lot of this doctor lately, because he happens to have a Golden Retriever puppy named Brinkley whom our girls have adopted, so the doctor often has to trek through the woods to our yard, to retrieve his Retriever. The other week, when this doctor came to take Brinkley home, Erick just happened to mention that I was being treated for Lyme. “Well,” said the doctor, “you need additional tests. Call my office and I’ll fit you in.”

See? Chancy cows everywhere. And if it sounds like I’m saying that a Golden Retriever puppy might just be an agent of God, it’s because I am. Chancy cows are like God’s fingerprints; they reassure me, even when everything seems to be crashing at the worst possible time, that I’m part of a larger story that’s still unfolding. There’s a reason why we all love those movies in which seemingly random, disparate plotlines turn out to be connected at the end; I think it’s because we know, deep inside, that these movies are a lot like life.

Where life and movies diverge, of course, is that movies usually have neatly tied-up endings. Life, not so much.

Later that week, Fiona called to me one morning: “Mommy? I think that chick’s walking just fine now.” And she was right; I can’t explain what made our chick limp to begin with, or how it got better, but out of nowhere it made a full recovery.

On the other hand, our monarch caterpillar spun a gorgeous sparkly green chrysalis, and then never hatched. This happens — the monarch dies in utero — and it’s been happening a lot more lately now that farmers are spraying their crops with NPV, which is a deadly virus for caterpillars.

And me? After a clean MRI but continuing funky bloodwork, my doctor referred me to a neurologist up in Burlington. Last week I drove an hour in order to have little needles stuck into my muscles, and to be told that it’s still unclear what’s going on. I have no answers, just orders for MORE bloodwork and another MRI.

Driving back from Burlington, through the cow fields (seriously!), I decided I didn’t care anymore about finding a name for what ails me. I’m tired of doctors and tests, and I’m satisfied that whatever’s going on, it’s nothing life-threatening. I’ll do this next round of tests to humor my doctor, and then I’m going to stop and accept that my “new normal” may include some aches and fatigue.

I’m okay with all of that. I may not have answers, but I know I’m not in a free fall — there are two many chancy cows wandering around for that. Who knows? Looking back, this whole episode may turn out to have been just another chancy cow.

Sorry, folks…

For those who subscribe to receive posts from this blog, I goofed — which is what happens when you have a child yelling that naptime is over, and you hit what you think is “Save” but is really “Publish.” I accidentally published a partial, very unfinished draft, tentaively titled “Chancy Cows,” that I hadn’t meant to send out until September. Please ignore. Sorry for the confusion, and the fact that this is the second time I’ve done this! Perhaps naptime is not a good time to write….

Ch-ch-changes…

A few exciting new goings-on here in the green summer woods:

The new chicks are here!

We returned from a week at the beach to find that our rooster had started crowing. Or rather, our rooster had been taught to crow by one of the men painting our house. This being a small town, the crowing coach is also the uncle of two of the girls’ best friends, and he lives on 25 acres of land with assorted free-range poultry. So I operated on the age-old rule: You teach my rooster to crow, it’s yours. Off went our rooster to the country — although the beautiful thing is that, in this case, that’s NOT a euphemism for putting an animal down: the country really IS the country, and it’s just down the road.

Finding a good home for our rooster neatly coincided with a friend offering us some extra chicks. So, on Campbell’s birthday, we picked up two Rhode Island Red chicks. The girls used this as an excuse to shuffle around the names of our chickens; we now have two white Leghorn hens named Daisy Flower and Sunny, and two brown chicks named Scaredy-cat Simba and Grace. We’re fairly sure that they’re all hens.

The new chicks are really, really cute, so they’ve been girl-handled quite a bit. I’m hoping that’ll make them a little more cuddly than the Leghorns, who are still pretty flighty.

We’ve got a new venue!

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to have a regular, bi-weekly column in the online edition of our local paper, The Addison Independent! I’ll be writing about life in central Vermont from the perspective of a mother of young children who’s a recent transplant to the area — in other words, I’ll be doing pretty much what I do here, it’ll just be a little more Vermont-y. (Just like how, when I write over at On the Willows , it’s pretty much what I do here, just a little more God-y).

I don’t expect that this new gig will significantly change anything here at The Pickle Patch. In fact, I’ll likely be re-using some of my more Vermont-focused material for the Independent column. As I do with On the Willows, I’ll post a link on this site whenever I have an article over at the Independent.

The new chicks and new column are both very happy things. But for whatever reason, life usually doesn’t hand you pure, undiluted joy — at least, not for very long. I’m not quite sure why it seems to work this way — that, when you’re given something, something else is taken away — but in my experience it’s usually been a good thing. Helps keep you from getting too full of yourself, if nothing else.

Which leads us to:

A tick made me sick (maybe)…

I’ve had to slow down quite a bit over the past couple of weeks, because I have not been entirely well. You may recall my mentioning the pain in my knee joints that started out of nowhere on our trip to Maine. You may even recall my joking that I assumed it was either Lyme disease or Lupus; if you expect the worst-case scenario, it can’t possibly be the worst-case scenario, right?

Turns out that’s not always true. The pain didn’t improve, I started feeling it down my arm and into my hand, and by the time we got home from Maine I was crushed by exhaustion. Not the normal, I-have-three-young-kids exhaustion, but an exhaustion so intense that by the end of the day I could barely lift my arms. All of which gave new meaning to the headaches and vague feeling of not-rightness I’d been having on an almost daily basis.

This is Georgia impersonating Jack Nicholson. (It’s a cuter picture than sick me laying on the couch).

So, I went to my doctor, who took four vials of blood out of me and began treating me for Lyme disease. (In our area, if doctors even suspect Lyme, they go ahead and begin treating it with antibiotics, because the cost of NOT treating it quickly can be the onset of chronic Lyme). The conclusion? My bloodwork came back completely clean: negative for Lyme and all other suspects. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t Lyme, because the test for Lyme is notorious for giving false negatives. Whatever the ultimate culprit — and my doctor thinks it could be another tick-borne bacteria that isn’t picked up by the Lyme test — the GREAT news is that I’m starting to feel better. A few days after beginning antibiotics, my energy returned to its normal level of exhaustion. The joint pain seems to be taking a little longer, but I’ve started to have some good days in that regard. (And honestly, I’ll take a little joint pain over the fog of exhaustion).

There are, of course, other changes brewing around here: summer is on its downslope into fall, Fiona and Campbell will start preschool in a few weeks, Erick will go back to teaching next month. And change, as we all know, can be difficult and disorienting. But this go-around, I’m trying to handle all these changes like a rooster.

Yes, like a rooster. The aforementioned rooster, who started crowing and had to be sent away, showed me how to deal gracefully with change.

The best way to transport a mature rooster is in a burlap sack. The rooster has to be enclosed, or else they’ll flap and fly all over your car. But a cage isn’t a good option, because they might bang around and damage their comb. So, when it came time to bid our rooster adios, we caught him, put him in a burlap sack, and tied the neck of the sack with twine.

I expected drama. I expected squawking and flapping and fighting and feathers flying. But instead, our rooster, who up to this point has spent his days posturing and crowing and bossing the hens around, got very still and quiet as soon as we placed him in that burlap sack. No noise, no movement; we could have been lugging around a bowling ball.

The rooster was nervous, of course — probably even terrified. But I think that this is how I’d like to handle change when it comes in my life: not by squawking or fighting, but by getting still and quiet. Change is like being shoved in a burlap sack and driven to an unknown destination; you’re never quite sure if you’ll be dropped off at the Purdue slaughtering plant or 25 acres of bucolic free-range countryside. But fighting this change is pointless, and it just makes the ride unpleasant. I’d rather be still and quiet, like a rooster.

Trapped!

Although they’re obsessed with the Disney princesses, our daughters have not yet watched any Disney movies — nor will they until I’m totally convinced that their active imaginations are tough enough so that watching these movies won’t result in weeks of sleepless nights. So far, the girls have acknowledged that they’re not ready for Disney movies; they “get the shivers” just from reading the companion books. Because the Disney stories are scary. There’s the vain queen in Snow White who transforms herself into a poisoned apple-hawking crone; the vengeful fairy Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty who goes down fighting as a fire-breathing dragon; the tentacled and power grubbing Ursula who ends up impaled on a ship in The Little Mermaid; the sinister lion Scar in The Lion King who speaks with the voice of Jeremy Irons.

But in my opinion, the sickest minds at Disney were the ones that dreamed up Cinderella. Here we have a heroine who sleeps with mice. Not only that, she makes them little clothes, sings to them, and lets them help her get dressed in the morning. And we’re supposed to find this CHARMING?!?

It’s not just Disney; have you ever noticed how many children’s book protagonists are mice? There’s Stuart Little and various Beatrix Potter characters and Angelina Ballerina. Don’t even get me started on Kevin Henkes; he writes brilliantly sensitive children’s books like Sheila Rae, The Brave and Wemberly Worried and Lily’s Purple Plastic Purse, but every single one of his characters is a mouse. And then there’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, which I admit I did write about fondly in this blog. But let’s stand back a minute and consider what really happens if you give a mouse a cookie. He doesn’t ask for a glass of milk to go with it, that’s for sure; ooooh no, he’ll build a nest in your roof, have tons of babies, and poop all over your house.

I OBJECT to this cultural brainwashing that tries to convince my children that mice are cute, cuddly, friendly little helpers. And yes, I do want my children to lead lives of love free from fear. Just NOT when it comes to mice!

So, I have this little problem with mice. I’ve tiptoed around it here for a while, because I’m basically a happy person, and we’re basically a happy family, and we’re basically thrilled to be living in Vermont, and I want this blog to reflect that. But I’m feeling like today is a down & dirty honest day, so I’ll just say it: hands-down, the WORST thing about our move to Vermont is that there are mice here. Lots and lots of mice.

“But Faith,” you might say, “you live in the WOODS. Surely you expected mice.” Actually, I didn’t. Up until this year I had shockingly little experience with mice. I grew up deep in suburbia, and the first time I saw an actual mouse I was about 8 years old. That experience is burned deep into my memory, and has influenced all of my subsequent dealings with mice.

I was visiting my three cousins in New Hampshire. We were riding bikes up and down their street when I looked down and saw it: a dead mouse, right there on the asphalt. Since this was the first actual mouse I’d ever seen, I mentioned it to my two older cousins. Sensing I was shaken, they decided to have a little fun with me, not knowing that it would scar me for life.

“Hey, guys, did you see that dead mouse back there?” I asked, trying to be casual.

“Yeah,” answered Michael, “I saw you run right over it.”

“WHAT?!? No I didn’t!”

“I don’t know,” teased Martha, “I saw a tire track running right down its stomach.”

When you’re 8 years old, that’s all it takes. I lay awake all night, picturing the flattened mouse with a tire track running down its stomach. By morning, I was not only terrified of mice, but I was convinced that the only thing worse than a live mouse is a DEAD mouse.

Flash forward a couple of decades: we moved into our Vermont “dream house” to find that the previous occupants, the elderly couple who built the house, either didn’t realize or didn’t care that they had a massive mouse situation. We found droppings everywhere; I spent the first couple of months here in a permanent stoop, scanning the floorboards for fresh mouse doo. Worse than that was the nightly tap dance over our heads. Our house is constructed in what’s known as “post-and-beam” style, which means that there’s lots of exposed wood. There’s also no attic over the main part of the house, so in our master bedroom we have a steeply-pitched exposed wood ceiling that is the underside of the roof. Basically, it acts like an amplifier for whatever is running around on the roof; our first night in this house, it sounded like mice the size of elephants were about to burst through the ceiling right over our heads.

As in any marriage, ours functions based on a system of roles and duties. In our case, I will raise the children, cook the meals, clean the house, tend the yard, and fix leaky faucets, but I will NOT do mice. Thankfully, Erick has embraced his role as household exterminator. He began by doing what he usually does when faced with a challenge: research. This led him to what he swears are the most amazing mousetraps in history: T-rex Snap Traps. We have about 50 of these traps strategically placed around our house. Erick does both the setting and the disposing, since the only thing worse than a live mouse is a dead mouse. The first time he prepared to empty some traps, he wore: rubber gloves, a face mask, goggles, and — I’m not kidding — a hard hat. I’m not quite sure what he was expecting from the dead mice, but since I would’ve required a full hazmat suit, I really couldn’t laugh at him. (Too hard).

Between these traps and some bait stations outside our house, the mice are mostly under control. But about a month ago, I looked out our front window to see a dead mouse. A dead mouse right on our front lawn, just a couple of feet from the house. I mentioned it to Erick, but such is the life of a first-year professor that he promptly forgot all about it, and I didn’t have the heart to nag him. I decided the time had come to face my fear and take responsibility for the dead mouse myself, like a big girl.

And then it rained, and then it snowed. The mouse was covered up for a couple of days, but when the snow melted it was still there, looking a little bit squishier and worse for wear. Scooping it up with a shovel no longer seemed like a good idea. At this point, I figured it was best to take the natural route, and let the mouse become one with our lawn. Free fertilizer, so to speak.

The problem was that the mouse refused to become topsoil as quickly as I’d hoped. Whether some freeze-drying had occurred due to the snowfall, I don’t know, but every morning I’d look out the window and it was still there. I cursed the high standards of the dozens of owls that live in our yard: What’s wrong with a slightly aged mouse corpse, owls?

One thing was for sure: as the weather turned warmer and our girls started playing outside again, I didn’t want them to be scarred for life by the sight of a dead mouse, the way I had been. (Or, worse, to step on it and track dead mouse germs into our house). So, one naptime, I got the shovel, took a large scoop of mulch from our mulch pile, and, standing a mere 3 feet from that mouse, threw the mulch on top of it. For good measure, I tossed on a few dry leaves. A burial, of sorts. I felt very brave, and very innovative.

Until the other weekend, when the girls were tearing around our yard with a couple of friends. They knocked on the front door to request more snacks, and when I opened the door: THERE WAS THAT DANG MOUSE. AGAIN. Somebody must’ve kicked over my burial mound, and the scraggly mouse corpse was lying exposed in the sunlight, like my fear staring me in the face.

I did the only thing I could do, the thing I should’ve done weeks before: I called for Erick. He took a plastic bag and went outside (minus his mouse-fighting gear — so brave), and within minutes the whole ordeal was behind me.

I guess no matter how grown up you are, there will always be some things that you never grow up from.

Oops! Sorry!

We were out of town all weekend, and apparently my computer felt neglected.

So, when we returned this afternoon and I sat down to start work on a little post about our trip, my computer decided to get passive-aggressive on me. I typed out the title, “Keeping it Weird,” and my computer froze up. I pressed a couple of keys in an attempt to get things started again, and instead got a message congratulating me on publishing my 50th post.

“NOOOO!” I cried, and frantically tried to bury the evidence. I thought I’d succeeded, but WordPress is fast. Very fast.

It was my parents who let me know, of course. Apparently those of you who subscribe to receive updates from The Pickle Patch all got messages saying that a new post, “Keeping it Weird,” was up. But when you visited the site, there was no such thing. This was not an early April Fool’s joke (wish I’d thought of it!) — there just was no post to see.

I assure you that there WILL be an actual “Keeping it Weird” post to read in the near future, and it will be worth the wait. I apologize for any confusion.

The good news is that there will also be an actual new post for you to read tomorrow. It discusses our children’s irrational behavior. Stay tuned.

Spring (blog) Cleaning

This was the winter I fell in love with writing again.

I have always, always loved to write — and my mom will be happy to tell you about my elementary school librarian who once predicted that I’d be a writer. The thing is, whenever I get a little time on my hands, I end up writing. The last time this happened was when Erick and I were living in New York City; he’d just been accepted into the PhD program at UC Berkeley, I had just finished a master’s program in photography. Our days in New York were numbered, so I was tutoring and doing freelance photography to fill the remaining time. Except I mostly ended up writing.

Well, now I have a little bit of time again. That may sound counter-intuitive, because I’m a busy mama. But I have two good nappers (and one horrible napper who goes to preschool 3 days a week), the kids are in bed before 8 every night, my husband is busy, and I’m not working. Enter writing, stage right.

I just wanted to explain why you’re now getting an average of 2 posts a week from me, when I promised only that I would post a minimum of once a month when I started this blog 9 months ago (In case you’ve been thinking, “Good God, WHY won’t she stop!?!”). Back then, I didn’t realize how much this blog would feed that part of me that needs to think things through in writing, I didn’t realize that it would become an outlet for the adult conversations that I’m not able to have during this season of life, and I didn’t realize how well writing would fit with my current life. (Also, some people have said nice things about my writing, which of course only encourages me to write more. So really, it’s your own fault.)

Inspired by this new outlook, I decided to do a little spring cleaning on the blog. You may have noticed some minor tweaks to the format. For instance, it now has categories. And a snappy new tagline: “Life. Motherhood. Vermont. (Not necessarily in that order).” But I also figured that I needed a new icon to represent The Pickle Patch, not just a snapshot of our family.

So recently, when the girls were napping — and clearly it was a LOOOOONG nap — I started thinking about an icon that would represent everything The Pickle Patch stands for. I looked down at the creeping kids’ stuff all over the Sun Room floor. Conveniently, all of the play food had migrated down from the Rec Room and was spread out across the carpet. Inspiration struck, and here is the new Pickle Patch icon, which is probably visible as a thumbnail somewhere on your page:

What do you think? Too much?

(Postscript: I should have made a “making of the icon” video, but didn’t think of that until it was too late. Instead, you’ll just have to picture me Scotch-taping a toy pickle to our Sun Room window).

Little Pickles in the Big Woods

It took a while to get their beds unpacked....

We have now been residents of Middlebury, Vermont for almost 3 very happy weeks. We’ve all loved settling in to our new house and exploring the area, and the girls could not have had an easier transition. Herewith, five lessons from our first month as Vermonters:

1. We live in a small town. During our first couple of weeks here, it was necessary to have assorted contractors in and out of the house. It was almost impossible to end one of these visits without having become acquainted with the life history of the plumber, painter, glassman, etc. Perhaps most eye opening was the realization, while conversing with Bronwyn the decorator during one of our recurrent visits to Countryside Paints, that the contractors had all been talking about us! So, in a relatively brief period of time, we’ve apparently acquired a reputation as “The Gongs who need some work done on their house.” I guess there are worse reputations to have, and I hope we can avoid them!

As many of you know, I wasn’t sure how we’d cope with the complete absence of any of the chain stores (i.e. Target) upon which I’d come to rely during my time in urban areas. We are coping quite well, and have logged in some productive visits to the town’s enormous Hannaford’s grocery store, a couple of lovely hardware/paint stores, the dollar store, and an amazing Ben Franklin’s (basically an old-style 5-and-dime). But last weekend we did take a trip up to Burlington (the “big city” in Vermont, pop. 42,000) to visit a mini-mall that boasts Wal-Mart, Bed Bath & Beyond, and Home Depot, among other things. It was an hour drive each way, through the most amazingly pastoral farmland you could imagine. And we were almost giddy to see so many stores in one place that we used to take for granted. We were also happy to head back home. I think we’ll try to make a monthly pilgrimage to Burlington, but it’s nice to live elsewhere.

One nice side of small town life is the friendliness. Within days of our moving in, many of our neighbors had dropped by to introduce themselves. I’m already seeing the same families at the library and around town. Whenever we go to Sama’s Deli for lunch or ice cream, we ALWAYS run into one of Erick’s new colleagues. And on Father’s Day when we took Erick to breakfast at the local diner, we found ourselves seated in between both sets of our next-door neighbors.

2. We live in the woods. For some reason, perhaps because we were house hunting in early April before there were many leaves on the trees, we didn’t realize the degree to which our house is located in the woods. I don’t mean that there are some trees in the yard; I mean that we’re actually located within the administrative boundaries of the Green Mountain National Forest. (Apparently that means that the government can decide to buy the land back if it wishes, so please keep it quiet!). If you look at a satellite photo of Middlebury, there is our street and then there is the vast green swath of forest that sweeps up the Green Mountains. We are pretty much the end of the line out here. And it’s absolutely beautiful. Here’s the daily drive home:

And here’s our backyard:

Notice the little shed, which is meant to be used for useful storage but of course has been claimed by the Gong Girls as a play house.

So far, our little Bay Area girls have been intrepid explorers of the forest.

They’ve already seen so many chipmunks that they’re not even excited by the sight anymore, and they caught a toad in our driveway.

But there are some drawbacks to life in the woods. Build a house in the woods, and pretty quickly the woods will start demanding to be let back in. Our yard is filled with hundreds of little saplings that need to be pulled whenever I go outside so that they don’t turn into large trees someday soon and overtake our residence. And we’ve had to come to grips with the fact that pest control will be a regular part of our lives. Everyone has numerous mosquito bites. We have wasps’ nests.

We have ants. Now, those of you who live in California are used to small ants that travel in armies and march endlessly across a surface. These ants always caused me a great deal of panic, because it seemed like they’d never STOP. Well, Vermont ants are a different breed altogether. They travel alone. They are slow. And they are HUGE. Here’s a sample:

I’m sure there’s some sort of metaphor there about the difference between the East and West Coasts, but I’m not sure what it is.

And, yes folks, looks like we’ll have to deal with my favorite pest of all. But as Erick says, “Mice aren’t pests when you live in the woods.”

3. Owning a house is a LOT of work. This is one of those things that we knew intellectually, but just like “Having kids will make you tired,” you don’t REALLY understand it until you’re living it. I would say that this house is roughly equivalent to having a fourth kid, except that kids occasionally repay your efforts with hugs and smiles. We are essentially first-time homeowners; our only previous experience with ownership involved a 1-bedroom Manhattan apartment on the 28th floor of a building with a full maintenance staff. That just doesn’t count. We now have a 4-bedroom house, complete with a yard. It’s the perfect house for our family and we love it, but it’s kind of kicking our butts. It was by no means a fixer-upper, but we have learned that even a non-fixer-upper will need continual fixing up. Never in my life did I think we’d be up on ladders painting our kids’ room “potpourri green,” but that is exactly what we did one week ago. (And we liked it! We’re painting another room this weekend).

Because we live outside of town, we have our own well for water and our own septic tank. We now have to think about things like replacing the roof, staining the deck, and spraying annually for carpenter ants. Thankfully Erick, the logical economist who places a high value on “utility costs,” is fixing us up with technological tools (like Toodledo, our new way of managing the to-do list) in order to organize our new life. He does this when he should be mowing the lawn, but I’m sure we’ll be more efficient for his efforts in the long run!

4. Vermont is a lovely place to live. I’m sure reality will kick in at some point, but right now it feels like we’re living in some sort of extended camp vacation. The beauty of this place, the slower pace of life (we’ve noticed that there’s NEVER a traffic report on Vermont Public Radio, because there’s simply no traffic here!), and the overabundance of year-round outdoor recreation all contribute to the sense of holiday. And in so many ways, it’s as if someone designed Vermont to be as absolutely family-friendly as possible. Just about any restaurant or store seems to have a basket of toys and books handy. And when we visited the town courthouse to get our drivers’ licenses at the mobile DMV station, we were greeted by security guards who gave the girls pencils, stickers, and coloring books and then directed us to the TOY ROOM across the hall (and after all that, it only took Erick and me 20 minutes to obtain our licenses)!

One of the highlights of the past week was our first visit to Lake Dunmore. This is a pristine lake about 20 minutes from our house, surrounded by quaint cottages and campsites. At one end is a public park complete with a lawn, beach, and playground. The girls splashed to their hearts’ content, and then we had a picnic dinner on the lawn, followed by ice creams at the Kampersville Deli on the way home. It doesn’t get much better than that.

5. We love our family and friends.It was a huge logistical endeavor to move the 5 of us across the country. We could not have done it without the love, support, and prayers of numerous family and friends. Tommy & Celeste Stinson were up way too late with us the night before the movers came helping to disassemble furniture. Several gracious friends dropped by meals at just the right times. Erick’s parents hosted us in their house for 10 days while all of our things traveled cross-country. Aaron & Jessie Beck opened their house to us and enabled us to get our East Coast Minivan (now named “Greenie” by the girls, because it is – you guessed it – green). And then there was our East Coast move-in crew, without whom we’d still be living out of boxes!

Nana and Boom, scrubbers of windows, walls, and ceilings!

Uncle Chris (actually my cousin) -- furniture lifter, painter, and clearly an outlier in our family re. height!

Finally, we feel so grateful for our three girls, who treated this massive life change with an incredible sense of fun and adventure. They amused themselves while their parents were stressed out and distracted by the logistics of the move, they behaved well on a cross-country flight, and they consented to sleep just about anywhere (including all together on an air mattress on the floor) until we could provide them with actual beds and mattresses. Perhaps most of all, our sweet little Georgia, who had the dubious distinction of being born 3 months ago, just when all of these changes were taking place, has been an amazing trooper. She’s grown so much since we got here, and now wants to stand up (holding our hands, of course) more than sit. Much to everyone’s delight, she’s now busting out huge smiles and laughs, and is in serious danger of being spoiled by her sisters.