Sequim Thanksgiving

  

         I knew I was happy because I laughed so much.

Skyping with cousins

  Judy and I drove to Sequim  to stay with Rose and John for Thanksgiving.  On Thursday morning, Rose and Jessamy baked pumpkin and apple and lemon meringue and pecan and coconut cream and chocolate cream pies.  Jessamy made apple cider  caramels, and Jamie helped to wrap them in wax paper.  I made much simpler dishes and talked to Paul's family on Skype.  We loaded the cars and drove to Rainbow Farm, home of John's nephew Joe and his family.
  

Pies

Jamie wrapping caramels

Sequim Thanksgiving dinner 

Swinging

      The children played outside on the swings and the bouncing boards and the playhouse.  They gathered eggs from the chickens, with Jamie careful not to let the warms, slimy shells touch her skin.  Joe's wife Lisa  has been raising turkeys.  Her brother Peter and brother-in-law John  prepared two thirty- pounders for our dinner.  Even with 27 of us at the table we only made a dent in one of them.

                                                          Here's the family tree:

Kris

Eww!  Don't touch those eggs!

My sister Rose is married to John.  Jessamy is their daughter, married to Rob, mother of Josh and Megan and Jamie.  John's brother Chas is married to our old friend Kris.  Their daughter Jennie is married to Doran and is the mother of Hannah and Elliot.  Joe is the son of Chas and Kris.  He is married to Lisa.  Their daughter is Olive.  Lisa's brother Peter and his partner John  live in part of the big house at Rainbow Farm.  Lisa's mother Charlie and her second  husband Frank were at dinner, as well as her first husband Frank, Lisa and Peter's father.  Also at the table were Joe's friend  Curt, Curt's wife Jess, their son Milo, and Curt's  mother Shirley Minnesota.

Lisa

Peter and John

      After dinner Joe and Curt led us in song, choosing ones that we might remember singing as young people.   "Do you know Copper Kettle?"  Joe asked me.

"Your mother taught me that song when I was 18", I said.

Joe and Curt with Olive

"She taught it to me, too, " he replied.
      Meanwhile, Josh led the children on parades that started  outside in the dark and wound around among us though the living room and kitchen.
     On Friday we visited and played games.  Megan had ridden her bicycle to the property where her grandfather lived as a boy.  She decided that she wants to live there when she grows up, and made lists of how she wants to design the house and use the property.  She asked Chas, who has just retired as a finish carpenter and contractor, if he would be able to help her.  She and Chas had a long discussion about designing houses.

Megan and Chas confer

Jamie and dollhouse

Elliot, Josh, Jamie and Hannah create a dragon village

Judy

Thankfulness tree

    Chas brought some of the diabolical jigsaw puzzles that he has created. Jess the math teacher  and Jenny the programmer created a grid for keeping track of clues in Clue.  The played the same game for hours.  (Megan tends to win Clue in a half an hour. ) Jamie carefully tended her great-grandmother's dollhouse.   Josh played a computer dragon game with the little kids.
     Lisa made a thankfulness tree. She asked us write what we are grateful for on paper leaves and pin them on the tree.  I am thankful for our Sequim family.  Judy wrote that she is thankful for each breath.
     

Thanksgiving

Maxine and Simone

Sam, Charlie, and Jack

Ninja monastery

      It was a quiet week at the Ninja Castle.  David went to Boston for business,  Courtney and Baby Simone were in D.C for a scientific meeting, and the Tibetan monks Khempo and Thinley were busy with their texts.   Maxine and I were on our own.

Dressed for school

Art is the default activity

     She  would wake up laughing, and follow me closely  down the hall to the bathroom.  The house is very dark at 6 AM.  Judy had sent her a black cat flashlight, and that helped to brighten the hallway.  Then on to the kitchen, where Maxine  worked on her constant creative projects.  We have a morning bargain, Maxine and I: she does not like the smell of coffee, and I don't like the smell of yogurt,  so we steer a little bit clear of each other at breakfast.  Dressing is a long process of negotiation and guessing  about the whole day's  temperature.  Maxine can now brush her own hair, but one day covered it with a Santa hat.
     Maxine is learning French at school, and incorporates it into her playing teacher.  "Levez-vous!"  she commanded, and I reminded her, "S'il vous plait," as I stood.  I taught her "Asseyez-vous", and we bobbed up and down.  I have to get her to school by 8:30 for her art lessons.  I struggled to keep up the momentum of dressing and breakfast and hair and packing lunches, while I really just wanted to follow Maxine's lead and play.

Scooter Olympics

    I picked her up early from preschool, and  played with her until dark.  One day we hid and found plastic Easter eggs down by the creek.  One day it was the Scooter  Olympics in the driveway, with  Maxine directing and narrating the  at the top of her voice.
     One day we were going to a concert.  First Cowgirl-Farmer Maxine groomed her hobby horse.  Then she dressed up, because you have to for a concert.  She put on her yellow and black dance costume, and pinned flowers in my hair.  She rode the horse and I walked to the concert.   Maxine performed three dances, and won three trophies.  We ate dinner at the concert, with Maxine setting the table.
     I was always aware of the clock.  My goal this first week of Central  Standard time was to get her to sleep by 8:30.  We didn't even come close most evenings; dinner and baths and hair- untangling and selecting pajamas have been known to take hours.

Brushing hair

     I love to tell stories, and couldn't wait to continue with the adventures of Princess Lovely Dancing Maxine and her seven silly brothers.  In May I had made up 25 or 30 of those tales to tell to Maxine before she went to sleep.  But now, at 4 and half, Maxine likes to have Magic Tree House books read to her.  No more spontaneous stories with characters only she knows about; she is now held by the larger culture.  When she performed her dances for the concert, she became Tangle, and then Rapunzel.  I asked if Lovely Dancing Maxine would be performing.  Maxine said, "No, Lovely Dancing Maxine is dead.   Rapunzel has taken her place, and has to save her people." For the third dance of the concert, we went outside into the beautiful pink light of the Texas evening.  Maxine's third dance was about God.
     Meanwhile, the monks were working. Every day, Khempo sat on the floor by his altar writing in longhand.  Thinley would mutter and read aloud to himself as he tap-tapped on his computer, getting Khempo's texts online.  He would shout and bustle over to Khempo with questions.  They were working against some kind of deadline. ( David often carries Tibetan texts from Texas to an American in Boston who is doing  digital preservation of  Tibetan books.  Maybe they were getting manuscripts ready for that project.)

Khempo

Solar-powered prayer wheel

      Around 5:30 the monks would stop writing and walk to Starbucks.  After Maxine and I finished in the kitchen each night, Khempo would start cooking. He cut up enough cabbage and chard and broccoli and onions  to fill a big soup pot.  He added  oatmeal  and spices to the vegetables;  that is what he and Thinley ate every night. They lingered over dinner, and then Khempo  cleaned the kitchen meticulously.
     I had about four hours in the middle of  each day to myself.  I would sit on the porch in the warmth.  I'd listen to the rustle of trees and the sounds of children playing in the schoolyard beyond the creek.  I wrote.  For most of my life I have taken time away for quiet contemplation, going off to a convent or retreat house or Trappist monastery for a day or a weekend.  It is a way to still my busy mind and tap into what is deeper.   I hoped that these hours on David's porch would help me to center down, but mind remained busy and skittish.    Maxine has a solar-powered prayer wheel that the monks brought her from Nepal.  I set  it in the sun to spin, figuring that the world spins, the prayer wheel spins, my mind spins, on it goes.

Grabbing

Reaching

Success

     Courtney and Simone returned late on Thursday night.  Simone is a big, strong girl. She smiles, blows bubble and makes loud  crows of happiness.  She can now sit up, and she can reach and grab her toys.  I had a delicious time playing with Simone before I flew home on Friday.
  
  

Halloween Village

Scary?

Tina leading the party

     People in Paul's neighborhood go all out for Halloween.   The Kalils were definitely in the spirit.  We carved Sammy's pumpkin with a template, Charlie's with an eye to making it as fierce as possible, and Jack's from a design that he found online.  Paul and I scooped out and sorted  the goop so that  Tina could roast the seeds.  The three Jack-o-lanterns joined the pumpkin that Jack had decorated for his report on Abraham Lincoln.

Skeleton princes bowling

Captain America being fierce

     Tina organized  Sammy's preschool class party.   She drew Jack-o-lantern faces on 16 clementine oranges to put in the kid's party favor bags.  We madly cut out eyeballs for the Decorate the Monster game.  At party time, we helped the 4-year- olds into their costumes. The boys became knights, Ninjas, and pirates, but all of the girls were princesses or other Disney characters.  What does that tell you about the future? I hope nothing.  My favorite was the skeleton princess.  The kids tossed bean-filled balloons into plastic pumpkins, decorated a monster, and rolled gourds onto white toilet paper rolls in Ghost Bowling.  Sammy, in his Captain America costume, joined in all the fun.

Tattoo parlor

Finished product

     Charlie wanted to dress as  Derek Rose, the Chicago Bulls basketball player, for Halloween.  Tina carefully researched Derek Rose's tattoos.  Charlie held stock still for almost an hour while Tina drew the tattoos all over his arms and upper back.
     At Jack and Charlie's school, the children and teachers parade around the block in their costumes, chanting, "Happy Halloween."  Jack led the line in his   "I'm made of money" costume.

Made of money

     Evanston has a rule that trick-or treating may only happen between 5 and 7 PM.  The tiniest kids, dressed to the teeth, toddled around in the dusk with their parents.  The parents were in costume, too.  I had a long, strange conversation with a white-bearded Merlin who seemed to think I would care about characters in his favorite TV show.  Another father made Charlie's day by greeting him with, "Hello, Mr.  Rose.  I am so happy to meet you.  If  I may ask, could I have your autograph?  And would you give my daughter some candy?"

Trick- or -treating

      After the first wave of toddlers seemed to be finished, we left a big bowl of candy on the front porch and set off door-to door.   Almost everyone  who answered our knock was dressed in full costume-- a Valkyrie and a Sponge Bob and a Cat in the Hat.  One man, in a hard hat and tool belt, set his bowl of candy on sawhorses  in his front  yard  with the sign, "Renovation of Doom."  In spite of the cold, there were several porch parties going on, neighbors with  costumes and cocktails waiting for the trick-or-treaters.  One neighbor had an eyeball pinata hanging in her front yard, and the kids took a whack at it. Charlie called out to his friends and  Paul greeted the drummer in his band.  We met the one-year old who was just  adopted from Korea last week, whose house Tina had decorated with a big "Welcome Home" banner.  A teenager in school uniform walked home  down the middle of the street,  way too cool to mix with the little kids.  "Hey, Samir, can you catch? "  called a woman in her doorway, and tossed him a candy bar from the bowl on her porch.
      We were back at Paul's house by 7, so the boys had plenty of time to eat their fill of candy before going to bed.

Sammy ponders candy

Coffee rounds

Sheila

     My women friends provide the anchor of my days.  Sheila and I walk early in the morning three days a week, and then we solve the problems of the world over coffee.  When we have disruptions to this schedule for important events  like weddings and visits with grandchildren, it leaves the state of our world entirely too unexamined.

Karen, Betsy, and Maggie

Judy and I meet Betsy, and sometimes Karen,  for coffee almost every week.  This is crucial, in order to keep the earth tilted correctly on its axis.

Roxie

At Roxie's table

   Every month Roxie hosts a tea for ten or twenty wonderfully interesting and opinionated women. The tea is for knitters and others talented at handicrafts.  I fake it every time, making minuscule progress on the same plain purple vest that I have been knitting for the past six years.   Roxie sets a beautiful and creative table, and covers it with abundance.  Last month, I was sitting next to Pat.  We just looked at each other and sighed with contentment.  No words were necessary to describe the riches of the food and the company.
      There are other happy monthly occasions:  Marilyn and Tricia and I have a literary coffee every month, swapping book suggestions faster than we can digest them. Mary Jean organizes a girls' happy hour on the final Friday of the month.  We have heated political discussions, filtered through the lenses of our crone wisdom. The women of my church meet once a month at member's houses, just to enjoy and celebrate our lives.

Jeanne

Patti's travel tales

Jeanne's cat, Yo You Meow

    When Jeanne is in town from the coast, we join her for lunch, often at her house.  Jeanne is a cosmopolitan cook, spending vacations at cooking schools in France and Spain.  We linger over food and conversation with the other guests, , soaking up each others' stories and jokes and travelogues.  It is always hard to leave Jeanne's welcoming hearth.
    When I moved West I left behind dear friends of my heart. My first years in Oregon were a scramble and a struggle, finding love and work and home.  I made good friends one by one, but it took a long time to reach critical mass.  I am rich in friends now.