Soft focus
Since school has ended for all of us, the rhythm of the home has transformed. One could say it slowed, but that would be incorrect; its energies have been re-focused. Where we once scrambled out of bed and rushed in our various directions and took or taught classes and tried to get our work done on time, we now sleep in just a few more minutes and begin our days with a little more graduation. We nap, too, in the afternoons, if we find it necessary. But this does not mean repose. No. For example, the Edible Peace Patch Garden was left to grow for a few more weeks. This was a fruitful time during which cucumbers and yellow squash, zucchini and pole beans, watermelon and sweet potato, and more tomatoes than anyone knew what to do with thrived and ripened and fed teachers and students and even us. But the time has come to close it down and so we four have been working two or three hours in the garden each morning, once we get moving. There we have pulled bolted lettuce and broccoli. We have remixed compost and turned soils. And we have begun covering the beds (to preserve the soil) for the summer.

The kids have taken to baseball, and so at least once a day, I am recruited as a pitcher for hotly disputed and often tearfully lost six inning (708 Field rules) games of real-pitch T-ball. Noah is tough to strike out anymore. Maxim too. They always want to play twelve or fourteen innings, but Marcela and I usually turn to some long-neglected yard task before too much time has passed. We have replanted many of the orphan vegetables from the school garden. Marcela has pulled most of the dead material from under the beach sunflower in the back garden. And we have been raking and composting the leaves, sticks, bark, and fruit lying about in our backyard. I hosed down the front porch and mopped the spring dust away, vacuuming the kids toys while I was at it. Marcela re-imagined the kids' room and yesterday we took down the bunk beds and created room configuration #3. I've posted photos of most of this at our Flickr page. This is not to mention the neighborhood kids who hang out for hours each day or the laundry that just keeps coming or the professional work that both Marcela and I are doing. Maxim points out that it doesn't include her piano practicing or the sketching she has been doing, either. She is correct.

We have decided to make a few repairs to our car and use it to get us north this summer. Some trepidation. But life has been giving us many gifts, one of them is the patience to let things happen as they do. To be at ease with the bigness and out-of-my-hands-ness of so many things. To look on that not as some kind of transcendental injustice, but as the very fundamental condition in which we float.

We miss our home soil with an empty longing that can overwhelm us sometimes. But we are finding our way toward peace upon this narrow heap of sand.