#homeschoolingmama

Not that many years ago, the enormous trunk of my old Volvo held a stash of gritty plastic buckets and shovels all summer, tucked to one side, opposite spare oil quarts and a yellow jug of coolant: well-used childhood possessions.

This beach trip our family is entirely without sand toys, although we’ve been to numerous beaches, and even created castles with our hands and this fine red sand, with smooth stones and dried seaweed. I am likely the only one in our family who remembers those sand toys.

Here’s what we do now: on a chilly morning yesterday, the older daughter filled out a college math assessment on-line. At a particularly knotty problem, she looked at me. My own adolescence of function and cosecant reared up before me. I could feel myself teetering on a edge, before I said simply, Call your uncle if you want help with that one…. There’s only so much I can do, and cosecant no longer falls into my skills.

Which blended in perfectly with Jeffrey Lent’s beautiful new novel, Before We Sleep, about a daughter growing up – and much, much more.

There were far worse things than to prepare youngsters for the world that would lie ahead of them. To prepare them for the day when, inevitably, that world would not make sense.

– Jeffrey Lent

Photo by James Dailey

I unclogged the kitchen sink yesterday afternoon with a sewer snake and a five-minute tutorial courtesy YouTube. In my childhood home, my dad had a yellow hard-covered book he consulted for his share of plumbing. While the reference method of home repair has changed, the essential has not. Just before I unplugged the sink, I wrote an article for work at the kitchen table my mother painstakingly refinished decades ago, and then I chopped up a watermelon for the kids, who appeared sweaty and panting from bike riding. They conceived a plan to cook outside, and built a blaze with birch bark.

My teenager appeared with her boyfriend, and we sat outside in the wood smoke that shifted with the breeze, laughing about marshmallows and hair gel, and remarking about the cooling air and the clouds fattening with rain. Tiny knobs of blossoms hung from the current bushes, and all around us, green growth surged mightily.

I had finished a reasonable amount of work (and triumphed with the drain, too), my daughters weren’t bickering, the black flies were negligible, and then eventually we left the fire and went walking in the rain, as I did as a child, too.

Dead my old fine hopes
And dry my dreaming but still…
Iris, blue each spring

– Bashō

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Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Growing Girls

Roaming Kids