What is better medicine than to gaze early each morning upon hummingbirds, chipmunks, and silvery water?
Category: Sketchbook
Oops
Falling down the steps and going to the local ER is NOT the recommended way to begin a lakeside vacation. Unless you are resigned to giving up the hiking and swimming you had planned, in favor of that big sack of work you brought along for evenings and rainy days…
Oh well. The view is beautiful. And I can still paddle the canoe!
Annie
Eli
Views
Castle by the lake
Using stones, sticks, leaves, acorn caps, and lakeside clay, my children are constructing an elaborate castle, complete with throne room, furniture and dishes, tiny paved patio, and bathroom fixtures. Who needs Lego?
Inspiration
We are visiting the peaceful lakeside house of our wonderful friend Martha, and it is a restorative retreat for the whole family. Here is my son deeply immersed in writing.
Wild Geese
For the anniversary of September 11th, a painting and a poem.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
— Mary Oliver
Jim
This image is available as a high-resolution print on 8.5″ x 11″ archival paper.
Lichen
One of the goals of our Botany block is to explore the range of plant categories we find in our immediate surroundings, wherever we happen to be, from fungus and seaweed to flowering plants and trees. This was our first study of lichen, discovered growing on a fallen twig, and it was quite small. But the more closely we looked, the more we saw.
Lichen is actually two plants, a fungus and an alga, working symbiotically: the fungus provides housing for the alga, and the alga provides food for the fungus. Like many traditional marriages.
The Secret of the New Jersey Town
This spring we visited Maplewood, New Jersey, where my husband grew up. In exploring his old haunts, like the town library, we discovered that Maplewood, New Jersey is the Home of Nancy Drew! (The library carries the entire collection.) Not to mention the Bobbsey Twins, and the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift! I don’t see how my husband could have lived there all those years without realizing he was sharing his home town with so many celebrities. (Actually, with the publisher of their series.) I think he was busy reading the Horatio Hornblower stories.
Well, with a daughter making her way through the Nancy Drew books, he now has total Nancy Drew Awareness. Here they are having some father-daughter-dog time. I’m fairly sure he’s awake. My husband, not the dog.
Carol
Amish Free-Range Lucky Charms
When grocery-shopping as a family, we acknowledge that tastes differ.
Phyllis
Ben
