The tree is now in its third year. The tradition is to be seven years, if we can keep its pieces for that long. Marcela works away at an old lithograph or cuts the new holiday cards we have just finished. The weeks in which we hoped to slow down have continued to present us with more to do. Is it a busier life here in Florida? It is too early to tell. This week Noah's pre-school class put on a Christmas pageant. Ms. Daughtry, Noah's teacher pictured here, announced that this was the end of her 38th year as a pre-school teacher in this school. That makes her first graduating class two years older than I am. Noah is in the center of the photograph, a little-dour faced in his reindeer antlers. He decided he did not want to be only friends with Elizabeth that morning. This had led to some bad feelings. That's Elizabeth to his right, who got her way, mostly. Noah is still full of interesting questions. This morning after he and Maxim had sung Twinkle Twinkle Little Star a couple of times, he asked me, "Daddy, how did they do that song?" "How did they what?" "How did the people make it?" He wanted to know how the song was written. "They made it up, like we sometimes make up songs." "Oh." Yesterday I had to do some work on campus and they joined me so Marcela could have some time to do her own work. At first they did not wander very far, playing in their tent and wandering to the edge of a nearby pond. After a while I looked around and realized they were nowhere to be seen. I walked over to the pond, no sign of them. My heart sank as that instinctive parental panic sets in, I scanned the horizon. There they were. They had decided to climb Mount Eckerd, a 40 foot pile of dredge material covered now in three years of successional growth. Later they disappeared into the Palm Hammock, a five acre successional hardwood forest on the west side of campus. Same situation, I worried and went after them. They were on the far side, following a transect ("We were following the pink flags, Daddy," Maxim told me matter-of-factly"). They came home exhausted and we had a barbeque with some of our new friends. Maxim's school also had a holiday pageant. Maxim was the first candle of Hannukah. The kids sang almost a dozen songs and then all the kids and parents ate cake together. It is quite a crowd of five year olds. Maxim has many friends, but the kids are also still at an age where they bounce around and sort of recognize each other. Three girls sat together like friends for a few minutes when we started eating the brownies. After a few minutes one of them said, "What's your name?" "Dominique. What's your name?" "Amanda." "Hi." "Hi." "What's your name?" "Maxim." "Hi, Maxim." "Hi." Later the three posed with Ms. Wester, Maxim's teacher. We watched video of the kids when they were younger. The are fascinated, we are amazed at the rapidity of their growth. Just yesterday, It seems, they were helpless babies. Now they wander fearlessly around the wilds of Eckerd College campus. How quickly they grow.

It has been far too long and too many things have occured since the last time I posted. Silence can sometimes mean quiet, calm, unhurried, perhaps inert. Not so, however, for us; we have been more than busy during the whole stretch. Classes and running around with two growing kids and starting a business...we have barely had time to take a relaxing breath; our weekly visits to the beach had to stop as every possible second got swept up in a mad frenzy to survive the first semester and plan for the holidays and get through the final weeks of classes and deal with the new things going on almost all of the time. We did survive, however, and we are better people for it. We have missed you. Let's try to get caught up. ** On the "big decision" front, we have decided to invest in a small home-shop/studio for Marcela. She spent weeks on the web and on the phone getting prices, comparing shipping rates and quality. Her first press, an antique, arrived broken and had to be sent back for a refund. This is her second book press, 180 pounds worth of cast iron and grease. She also found a used board cutter in Canada for a very good price and a new nipping press, hand made out of maple. A beautiful piece. She has work already, although not enough to make her comfortable, yet. At night, now, like when we were in Buenos Aires six years ago, she sits up in her smock late at night and slowly caresses the dirt off of fading lithographs. She stands and looks for long stretches; how should this repair proceed? What do the tears and smudges tell me? There is a rhythm there that suits her. The work will come. She was contacted by Eckerd's Art Director to act as a consultant on a book arts independent study that one of his students will be doing this Winter Term. We will look for a house with ample space to build a real workshop. Our minds are made up about this. Our hearts are set. We are certain. ** It is every parent's prerogative to feel boastful about their children and so we do with ours. Our gifted daughter Maxim continues to astound us. She has taken to the camera and snuck almost a hundred shots in the past few weeks, mostly a series of beautiful portraits of her brother, who loves to be photographed. She has learned the fundmentals of reading and is quite skilled and will be joining the first graders during reading time after the holidays. She misunderstood when Miss Wester told her what was going to happen and so she came home believing that she was being promoted to the first grade half-way through kindergarten. She was disappointed to learn the truth. In late November, just before Thankgiving, she played a little girl in the party scene of the Nutcracker. Long rehearsals for a couple of weeks leading up to the show, but a very professional production from the participants point of view; we knew what they wanted her to do and when and how to help get her ready; a sharp contrast with the experience we had in Massachusetts. She really liked getting all dressed up and she especially enjoyed seeing all of her friends in the audience during the second afternoon matinee. ** Noah Manuel is more of a character every day. He came from school today telling Marcela, "I asked Mrs. Daughtry if she knew Templeton {the rat in Charlotte's Web which we are now reading at bedtime}. And she said she didn't." There was pause. "I told her that's ok." He asked me a few weeks ago, "Daddy, where do... what are the... how do dreams go?" He asked Marcela a few week earlier where his thoughts went when he wasn't thinking them. He's an interesting boy. Very gregarious at times, engaging in long conversations with perfect strangers. He does seem to believe everyone is somewhat interested in the things that have happened to him that day, this week, since moving to Florida. He is still very much enamoured of superheroes, especially Spiderman and Batman. And he was for some time convinced that Troy Cott, one of the other Daddys among the parent set at Eckerd, actually HAD a Batman cape with which he could actually fly. This was one the tidbits he shared with people, perfect strangers, for quite some time. "My friend Troy is Batman, and he has a cape and he can fly!" He doesn't seem to be boasting, so much as offering them a chance to be part of such exciting company. When he was in Maynard he used to recite, "I love my Mommy, and I love my Daddy, and I love my sister, and I love myself!" and then give himself a big hug. I would not call him arrogant, however, but rather full of self esteem. ** For myself, it has been quite an adventure this semester. I survived. I think I even taught a few young adults a few things they didn't know they wanted to learn. I have a stack of final papers and exams to grade and I will be able to put my first semester on the tenure track behind me. I sidestepped a few unmarked mines and I think I managed to salvage a class on its way to the bottom of the north Atlantic. Time will tell, as evaluations get passed out in January. I shift my own energies from the frenzied hurry of one class to the next to the more gradual pace of house and family and book about mining. I am, without too much extra emotionalism, proud of myself. This was what I wanted. And now I have it. Life is wonderful sometimes; persistence and steadiness towards a goal, it turns out, is the best gamble.

"Spiderman." That's the answer to just about any question in Noah's world these days. "What's your name?" "Spiderman." "How old are you?" "I'm spiderman." Here he is protecting his sister from dangerous photographers. Notice the web technique. Very important. Tomorrow night he will have to take these techniques on the road as we go trick or treating in the warm Florida evening. Being spiderman has been important to him as we make our transition from New England to New Spain. Maxim has done even better. She takes life as an adventure and worries really only where her parents are next. She is sounding out words and beginning to read. Her favorite thing to do it to have me hold her hands when she jumps in the air and lift her farther. "Jump me, Daddy." She says, meaning, lift me up in the air. She has made new friends in school and one in particular through our parents' collective at Eckerd. Still, she misses her friends from Massachusetts. They both often mention Maynard and we all think about the north a lot.

Florida! We have been quiet here on our blog, but not because our lives have been quiet. What a set of changes. Let's see... Let's begin with the children. Noah is at last in a pre-school, a place called "Lad -n- Lass" where, as his teacher told us after the first week, he acts like he has been going to school forever. At school his best friend is a girl named Elizabeth. "I don't like the boys," he told me, "they're too rough." This is our Noah - cautious and certain. Two weeks ago, Marcela bought him a Spiderman costume for Halloween, mask and all. He feels complete. His face was aglow when he saw it come out of the box. He puts it on to sit on the couch and watch movies. He puts it on to be "savey." We enrolled Noah in gymnastics and three weeks ago the teacher, Coach John, promoted him to the next level. He said that Noah was excellent at listening and following directions. I said, I don't think he got that from me. Noah is still just small enough to be picked up and want to be picked up, still snuggle-able. He refers to himself as a big boy, but he always makes a beeline for my lap when he gets up in the morning. "I will miss you, Daddy," he says to me when the family drops me off for my 8:30 class on Tuesdays and Thursday. "I love you." Of course, my heart melts. He is a loving and compassionate soul. We are blessed. The girl, our Maxim, is no longer small enough to snuggle. She is growing in leaps and bounds these months. The Florida sun seems to cause her to grow faster. She is light enough to hold, but she is all bones and growing muscles, long stretches of body and limb with pointy angles and edges. She has my hip-back rotation, causing her belly to jut out slightly, and my skinny thighs, which will wear much nicer on a girl than a boy. She loves kindergarten and has great fun learning hand-clapping games and rhymes from the girls in her class. "Welcome to McDonalds, Let me take your order, fit fat chitter chat, ice cup, milk shake." She informed us that she has a boyfriend, Nathan. "Finally!" she exclaimed, as if it had been a concern of hers. She has learned to swim underwater and was herself promoted in the gymnastics classes to the next level. She is also taking ballet nearby and will be among the cast for their Nutcracker show in late November. Her newest accomplishment is the ability to read. They have been doing phonics in school and she got it, like we knew she would, in no time. She has already read a short story for the class and written a short story on my dry erase board in my office. Marcela and I are exhausted. My work is demanding and adjusting to a new set of students (I had really just gotten used to the Emerson crowd) is more work than I anticipated. One can write a syllabus, but when it gets executed by real people, you realize the challenges of communication. Now that I am tenure track, I do not have the luxury of ignoring faculty meetings and school social events, of which, lots. Who knew they would cut into my time so deeply? But, we are getting there, me and my 71 students. Marcela is busily making contacts and meeting people who work in and around book and paint conservation. St. Petersburg and Sarasota have several impressive museums with various interesting collections. She is nervous about being in the limnal stage of things, and anxious to have something decided, but excited about each new thing she finds. She is also running the household practically without my help at all, an enourmous job to which she devotes a lot of love and attention. And sometimes, when we are lucky, we have a stolen moment to exhale and say hi and remember each other. It has been a crazy six weeks since I last wrote. The semester ends on December 14. We're at the halfway point of the first big push. They say it becomes easier as the semesters roll onward. We believe that.

Sunday, September 10, 2006
The existence of these seemingly endless beaches out at the western edge of land is the saving grace for what would otherwise be a less-than-inviting town. St. Petersburg itself has a distinct quality of landscape. One drives along the main thoroughfare and tries to decipher the mysterious architectural codes of a culture forced inside by heat and insects and thunder storms and hurricanes. Is that a gas station? No, it's an art gallery. Is that a supermarket? Nope. A church. We find the hidden gems slowly, for they hide them well here in western Florida. Noah is becoming his own kind of naturalist of late. "Bumblebees," he explained to me after watching one buzz around for a while, "Daddy, the bumblebees ate their broccoli at night so they are really strong." We have been convincing him to eat his vegetables at night by telling him how strong they will make him. It is important for him these days, to be strong. It is the high virtue of the three-and-a-half-year-old, to be strong. Noah has started gymnastics with Coach John here in town and in addition to talking his ear off throughout the entire class - "Was that a good one, Coach John?" or, "Those bouncey things are for the big kids, not for the little kids, right Coach John?" - he gets the coach to tell him he's strong, "Was that a strong one, Coach John?" Maxim continues to enjoy school; she is begining to work on phonics and writing and dates and time. She asked Marcela to buy her a watch so she could begin learning how to tell the time herself. She also started ballet at the Ballet Academy two blocks from the house. She practiced her first and second positions for days.There is still an ongoing transition issue, however. Whenever she comes home from school, and often when we come home from visiting with others, she and sometimes she and Noah, behave horribly. They talk back, they hit, they yell at us, they disobey, they scream. We think a lot about adoption in these moments. Just kidding. But getting from being in a social situation to being in a private situation at home seems trying, or perhaps, the social stuff is trying and then we, the folks, pay for it when it is over. Nevertheless, Maxim is growing up quickly. She gets her own cereal in the morning and gets dressed all the time by herself. She misses her friends in Massachusetts. But as she plays more times with Iris and Becky and Maggie and Alexandra and Emma and as she finds more in common with some of the girls at school, she seems to be settling nicely into the rhythms of our new life. I promised clouds, and there were plenty this week again. They towered on the horizon, grabbing the eye, pulling the imagination as they create well-needed afternoon down pours. Without them, this is a desert, this verdant peninsula, this Florida. I had my first week of classes this week. It flew by, but also did not. It felt nice to be beginning. The waiting was starting to wear badly. I presented an introductory and first real class for all three courses. The introductions fell out on Monday and (earlier than I anticipated on) Tuesday. I was busy, but I succeeded at remaining relaxed about school. The students are earnest, so far. In the first time through any course as a professor, you feel like you are driving at night without your headlights on. There is a familiar road ahead, and you know your vehicle well, but the curves are impossible to navigate. There is no worry about getting to your location, but you move with extreme care so as not to careen off the road altogether. I am advancing cautiously, feeling the road as I go. We found a delightful Italian restaurant in Gulfport last night. We ate fish and lasagne under a palm-frond roof as the sea breeze cooled the evening air. Our life is settling into regular rhythms, it seems. The semester has begun.

What I haven't mentioned enough are the clouds. This week, I have no pictures. Next week, I promise to post some. The clouds are majestic here. Towering into the stratosphere through the afternoon and catching all of the various reds and oranges as the sun falls behind the curve. I find myself dangerously turning my head as I drive along the highway to see spectacular erupting water vapor. I went back and looked at some of the Maynard My Backyards and decided that this back yard photo has to go. There are other views that make more sense. Tune in next week for that one (and, btw akb: escribo una vez cada semana...o, voy a prober, [wink]). This week has been a good one. We attended a pot luck for faculty and students Sunday night. On Monday, the emergency committee at the school initiated an evacuation order - NOAA was saying Ernesto would reignite as a hurricane on the other side of Cuba. On Tuesday, they rescinded. Ms. Wester said the public schools would evacuate on Tuesday or Wednesday in the event that the hurricane winds returned to Ernesto and he was heading toward us. They didn't, he wasn't. He saved his biggest fury for the mid-Atlantic states. On Thursday, we dropped off Maxim at school and Ms. Wester wasn't there. When Maxim discovered that she would have to be in a classroom with other students and only a few of her own classmates - they split the kids up among the other kindergarten classes - she panicked. She cried and grabbed Marcela and said she wanted to go home. Marcela, bless her heart, overcame her Italian mother instincts and told Maxim she would have to stay, that this was real school now and that they expected you to be there every day. Then Maxim's friend Jada arrived and the two took their new desks together. I was proud of both mom and daughter. For his part, Noah seems a bit out of sorts. He is staying home all day and there aren't young kids in the neighborhood. When Maxim comes home from school, she is often either crabby or feeling a need to boss someone around and either way Noah gets the brunt of that. Quiet play never last more than a half an hour and then the fussy whining and aggressive fighting begins. We are thinking up ways to get Noah into playgroups. On Wednesday after school we all went to the beach in Pass-a-Grille. The water was a touch warm, but everyone had a great time. Noah's floaty suit ended up irritating his underarms and he howled for a while at the end, but we got to see laughing seagulls - they look and sound like their name - and what I am pretty certain was a ruddy turnstone (you can see it in the background of the gull photo). Friday, Lloyd Chapin, the Dean of Faculty at Eckerd, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Devil Rays/Mariners game - given their names, this one should have been a cinch for Seattle. The school got a bunch of free tickets and everyone decided that the game would be more fun than the Tavern, and we went with hordes of students and faculty. We are suddenly part of a vibrant community. It is nice, but also exhausting. We lived a relatively quiet life in comparison in Massachusetts. On Saturday, Marcela, her parents and the kids went to the St. Pete Museum of Fine Arts, which Marcela reports is a very good museum all things considered. Marcela said that the kids did well for quite a while, but eventually started running and jumping on things in the museum causing one woman to ask the docent to ask Marcela to take the kids outside. At the end of the day we took a drive to Ft. De Soto Park, a Pinellas County park comprised of a couple of keys and a long stretch of beach. It was just stunning. Maxim is learning to navigate waves and starting to swim underwater. Noah is getting even more used to the water. We are in the midst of a life transition, we all feel a little bit lost and anxious to have our bearings. But we are grateful to have arrived amidst the people and in the landscape where we are. We miss our home in Massachusetts and our friends and the pattern of our life, but we feel a growing sense of home among the cabbage palms.We have also discovered the quiet secret of St. Petersburg, Florida; it contains more New Englanders than just about anywhere outside of New England itself. The largest cohort of freshemen at Eckerd, after the Florida cohort, are from Massachusetts. If I could just get over the fact that there is no soil anywhere. It is one huge sand pile from start to finish. And for the second time, the Rays won a game that I attended by driving in a walk-off run (2-1 in 9). They should pay me to go to the games. Until next week...

Yes, it rains in Florida. This week the common late afternoon rains returned with regularity. I knew it was time to close my computer and head for home when I heard the distant rumbling of the arriving storm cells. Another week, another class prepared. One more to go, and then school starts for me. (!) Marcela has been busy putting together a class on book binding to teach this January, if it is accepted. The kids have been busy being kids. Maxim has organized each of her different collections of dolls and accessories in their various places around her room. She will sit sometimes for more than an hour taking off and putting on doll clothes, building houses out of the modular doll house, and fixing hair. Noah is still on his Spiderman kick. He had his mother take out a spiderman comic novel when they got their library cards on Tuesday night. I have been trying to read parts of it to them, but it is really for adults. Lots of violence. On Thursday morning we drove in to Tampa and picked up los Abuelos at Tampa Internation airport. They will be here through September 20. They are sleeping in our room and we are on the air mattress in the kids' room. It is much roomier than when the family visited us in Hull, but an air mattress is an air mattress. We keep asking ourselves when our adventure is going to end. On Friday night we all went to the Tavern, the gathering place for Eckerd faculty and their kids. Faculty have a beer or soda, the kids ride their scooters around the huge adjacent parking lot. From there, we set out on what proved to be a futile adventure trying to find some place to eat in downtown St. Petersburg, a town seemingly designed to be navigated from a Hummer. One of my colleagues, who admitted that she was bad at directions, gave me directions to get to a kid-friendly place. After an hour and fifteen minutes of parking and walking and parking again and walking, we headed for home, defeated. Not only was the named restaurant nowhere to be found, but there were simply no other adequate venues. We met with much more success on Saturday. In the morning, Paco and Natcha went with the kids to their gymnastics class. We ate a pasta lunch and then everyone napped for almost three hours. We dressed and headed out to St. pete Beach, the ocean, to have dinner and take in the sunset. We returned to a place we have been to twice, but will not go to again. Nevertheless, the food was fine. Better still, the ocean was serenity. The sunset, divine. I am posting pictures at Flickr. As you can see from his posture, Bones is happy that there are two more cat lovers in the house and is especially glad that he no longer has to move around in a cat cage every few days. He decided to shed almost an entire second cat's worth of hair since arriving in Florida, but he is generally content and eating well and even enjoying the outside a little bit. The rain this morning kept people from the weekly jaunt to Passe-a-Grille beach, but we are already prepared. We got our own beach umbrella and goggles for the kids. The first hurricane of the season, Ernesto, has gathered south of the Dominican Republic. They say its headed this way, generally speaking at this point. We hope it either misses us completely or passes us by peacefully. For now, we'll enojy the cooling effects of the late summer rains.

Well, the first full week of school for Maxim went without a hitch. Marcela drives her in in the morning and either she or I pick her up. She is doing a lot of activities and says she is enjoying herself. The worry I felt last week about her having a tough transition have faded. She will do fine. We have her on the waiting list for two other schools that offer Spanish langue instruction, but it is likely that nothing will change until next year. The first grade has more seats to fill and one often has a better chance in the school choice lottery - the last noun is really the only important one to understanding how school choice works in Florida at the moment. We also decided to keep Noah out of pre-school for the time being. We were not thrilled with the set-up or the teacher at the place where we had reserved him a spot. He is next on the waiting list at a closer school, but they also have an intermittent drop-off program which may work better for us this semester. For the time being, he's quite happy being home with Marcela most days. Marcela had an interview with the fine arts program director at Eckerd early in the week. He would like her to design a bookbinding course for Winter Term this coming January. There are still some budget questions - he has no bookbinding equipment so things will need to be purchased - but she is enjoying thinking through a course and putting together the proposal. We are still trying to work out how to get to all of the places we need to be in a day with only one car. I took the bus one day, but the buses are not wed to the schedules they print, so you never know if you just missed a bus or if one is about to come. I missed the bus one day and waited a half hour for one another day and then yesterday I put air in my bicycle tires and will try riding to school as another option. Yesterday the kids started gymnastics with coach John at Gold Medal Gymnmastics, a one-person gym facility for children. Half of my colleague's were there with their kids too. Which is the reflection of the sort of group we have fallen into, professionals with children our children's age. People with like concerns and similar interests and the same dedication to their children. It is, of course, too early to tell, but we are pleased so far. This morning we will go to the beach for the Sunday morning swim.

Has it been two weeks since we arrived? The time has passed in a strange way, seeming to go by fast, but being so full it feels as if we have been here much longer than two weeks. Maxim has already made two friends at school - Jada and Amanda. And she says she loves it, although she does have stories about eating too slow in the cafeteria and having half her lunch thrown away. We are having her practice eating fast at lunch time at home to help her get up to speed; they aren't as relaxed about timing in elementary school as they are in pre-school. We took Noah to an open house at his new school and decided we were glad we put Maxim in public kindergarten. It will be fine for Noah for pre-school (although Marcela has put him on waiting lists at other schools). Marcela has been hard at work finishing up unpacking the house and setting things up. We are literally down to a very few boxes and some storage decisions. The living room needs a new piece; I am going to make a shelf similar to the others I made for our Maynard living room, but bulkier for the televisions, VCR, and DVD players. (Marcela also wants me to make a puppet theatre for the kids, which I think is a fine idea.) Speaking of the kids, they also have a great set up here and everything is unpacked. They can even put up the small yard tent in their inside play area. The down side of having this large a space behind the beds in the room is that one or the other of them wakes up in the night and is frightened by the dark. We don't mind nightly visitors, but they are getting so big it does start to crowd out the bed. We spend a lot of our time in the kitchen, sitting at the table, standing around the island (peninsula?), preparing food. Marcela set up this room first and it has been our comfort zone ever since. We do like the living room and use it more than we did the living room in Maynard, but the kitchen/dining room is the center of the house. It all gradually begins to feel like home.

It has been a comedy of errors and a few missteps, but we seem to have achieved success in getting our next tier of arrival matters in place. We got high speed for the house - but not cable. Our [semi] expensive stereo, which had stopped working when we lived at Sudbury Street, has begun working again (?), so we have radio. Last week while admiring the new 2006 Prius driving in front of me on 34th Street North, one of the main secondary arterials in St. Petersburg, I ran into it. First accident ever. Tuesday, when we drove halfway to the next county to get our car registered in Florida and to exchange our Massachusetts licenses for Florida licenses, Marcela failed the vision test at the counter. Yesterday, as Marcela was having her eyes checked by the optomitrist making small talk about how we were trying to decide whether to put Maxim in pubic school or to stick with the private kindergarten, we learned that school began Tuesday...two days ago. (Oh, and it turned out that Marcela's eyes were fine. (!) ) By the time we got home, the schools had closed for the day, so we decided to enjoy the evening. We harvested the last pineapple of the season, boiled some pasta, and tossed up a delicious lima bean and cottage cheese salad. (By 'we' I of course mean Marcela, except for the pineapple; I harvested that.) After dinner, we scrambled to do our research on the Pinellas County School web site (it's a 'school choice' community; about which, more later.) and this morning it happened. Maxim began kindergarten at Lakewood Elementary School. We'll post some pictures on Flickr later on today. We were heartened by the fact that her kindergarten teacher, Miss Wester, is a native of Leominster, Massachusetts and a die-hard Red Sox fan. Noah doesn't begin school until Monday and my classes will not begin until Labor day, so Maxim is our pioneer into the wider St. Petersburg life. We are very proud of her.