The Bay Area is a little harder for me to take in than Humboldt was.  I look at the cars and wonder, “Where are you all going?” There are so many houses. Everything is big.

It’s beautiful here. We went to Muir Beach the other day and burrowed into the sand. The kids made friends and dug some big holes with people. Chinua went for a little walk around to the next cove and accidentally discovered a nude beach. Why is that man wearing no pants? he wondered, before spotting another dozen people with no pants.

The strange thing about staying in this house with our friends is that the last time we did this, their kids were our kids age, and ours were either babies or not even thought of yet. Then they moved overseas and rented this house out.  And we moved overseas later, and in the meantime, they came back.

Now we are back here together.  They have teenagers and we have young kids. I remember trying to stay out of my friend’s hair while she did school in the morning with her kids. Now they are in the local middle school, and I’m the one at the table, homeschooling. At the table beside the window that looks out on the lovely valley with all the houses.

The oldest of their kids turned eighteen yesterday. We had a party and I volunteered to make Indian food. Another old friend came by who is probably the best cook that I have ever met, and she assisted me in making chapattis.  I joked that I’d come up in the world, having her as my assistant. It was fun.  It felt like home, like Goa with all the food on the rooftop.

I’m working on necklaces.  I hope to have a bunch more in the shop by Wednesday.  It’s so lovely to have handwork to do.  I sit and oversee Math and make knots, thread beads, play with tangible things. In the early morning I play with intangibles, the world of words, trying to put what I see in my head down on paper.

Making necklaces is a more reassuring practice, but I guess craftwork and writing go hand in hand.

I woke up very early this morning to get some work done. I’ve been so busy with homeschool that I haven’t been able to get as much writing done as I like to, and the morning hours are some of my few free hours.

Except that the inevitable happened. This time it was the Leafy Boy. He trekked sleepily out of bed and trailed toward my computer after me. When I told him that it was far too early to be awake, he gestured irritably at the sky.

“It’s morning time!” he said.

It is very hard to reason with Leafy about the seasons and longer days and the equinox and all of that. Trust me. Bed time has a similar problem.

I implemented the ol’ back up plan. Keep the boy from waking up the others.

Which explains why I tidied and edited a few paragraphs with a four-year-old on my lap.

And why I wrote this post with a four-year-old on my lap. A four-year-old who has not stopped talked. I think he has sung the Transformers song seventeen times during the creation of this post. It is simply inspiring.

What is actually inspiring are his hands, so beautiful, laying on top of mine while he pretends to type along with me.

Two doses of Leafy for you:

Reposting this:

And a fishing story.

We just dropped into the Bay Area last night, after a teary day of driving. The sky was crying also, great buckets of grey tears, and that may have had something to do with my mood.  And it may have been leaving the ranch. And it may have been coming back to a place of such beauty in my life, as well as such pain.

Some of the most precious and most sorrowful things of my life have happened here.

We are with friends in Marin County. We have not yet crossed the bridge. (We will when we come to it- Oh sweet Lord, a pun on my blog!) We woke up to the sun and are carving into the day slowly.

As for the necklaces, you sweet people, I love you! Thanks for the sold out message!

I have enough of the lovely coral pieces to make one or two more of those, which I will put up when I make them.  And I have many beautiful stones.  I’ll let you know when new designs are in the store.

The house we’re in now is one of the first places we stayed when we were newly married, and also one of the first places that Kid A visited when he was a little freshie, just out of the womb. What memories. I will sip them slowly, and with hope. There are so many lovely things ahead.

Some gratuitous Solo for you:

Hey friends, I have four necklace designs up in my brand new Etsy Shop, and many more to come. I’ll let you know as I put more out there. (There are multiples of the designs, so don’t be afraid to check them out.)

The way the story goes is that I wanted to buy something in Thailand, for resale, but was disappointed by what I was finding. So I decided to buy beads! Lots of beads.  And make things that I was really excited about. My favorite so far is the one pictured above.

So there you are, go check it out. Shipping is free in the United States and Canada.

Love,

Rae

(This photo is unrelated to the post: just a beautiful oak tree here on the ranch.)

Yesterday was adventurous, and not always deliberately so.

We dragged ourselves out of the house, because it was sunny.  Or rather, we leaped out of the house, beaming, but rather later than we planned. We drove through forests and fields, exclaiming over the wildflowers. It never gets tiring to us, we are easy to please.  We filled up at a tiny little gas station, in a cute little town, planning to drive the hour and a half to Shelter Cove.

When we stopped at the grocery store, we saw an old friend in the parking lot. It’s always nice to see an old friend in the parking lot!  She pointed out that our tire was getting low.  It has a slow leak. Mmmm hmmm! we said, and then headed into the store to stand in the chip aisle for about an hour, gaping over the 800 brands and styles of chip. How does one choose? And then another old friend found us there, and gave us big hugs.  And so we invited her to the coast with us. She said that maybe she’d meet us later.

I don’t know what happened in that grocery store. It was like a vortex.  It felt like we had been there for our whole lives. It felt like one minute we were dipping our toe in the world of food products, and the next we were emerging from a sludgy pool of time waste, gasping and spluttering. I know that I spent far too many minutes staring vacantly at price labels. Part of the problem is that, Post-India, I still don’t understand money. What is a dollar, exactly? What does it represent? When I look at something that costs $3.00, for instance, I think with excitement, “Well, I have three dollars!  I have three dollars right here in my wallet!” And then I buy it. But was it a good price? I may never know.

We did leave, eventually, with bread, hummus, swiss cheese, pickles, salami, and crisp, hard apples.

And promptly forgot about the tire.

Which meant… that we drove twenty minutes down a remote road and then had to fill it with our little emergency tire inflater thing, that you plug into your cigarette lighter.  (I didn’t even know that we had a tire inflater thing!) The only problem was that our cigarette lighter doesn’t work. Fortunately, a sweet woman was waiting in her car for her grandson to get off the school bus. And she was more than kind. We used her cigarette lighter and chatted for a while. The kids scrambled up and down the hill, grabbing onto trees and digging in piles of dirt and pine needles.

With a full tire, we were back on the road.  We drove up hills and down hill, curving around, and then back around the other way. Suddenly, I realized that my brakes weren’t exactly working.  I leaned on them with all my weight and slowed down enough to pull off the road. I put the van in park and pulled the emergency brake. Immediately, smoke was billowing out of the wheel wells. There was no fire, but they were hot. I burned them. I’m very sorry.

We let the brakes cool, hoping that they would work again. We inspected the flowering tree by the roadside, which I thought was purple. YaYa disagreed. She thought it was blue. In reality, it was probably periwinkle.

We peered at wild irises. Chinua taught the kids to throw stones so they could hit a knot in a tree. I tried to meditate. I prayed. I thanked God for the view and for being able to stop, and for my family.

Eventually, eventually… we were ready to go again. The brakes worked fine.

Our friend had passed us and probably wondered what under heaven was taking us so long, but she stopped and talked to us and we decided to follow her to a spot she knew of.

A spot where the waves crashed wildly, in a frenzy. In a mad, uninhibited, orchestra of frenzy. It was very soothing.

We climbed on top of a very big rock, and she told me she’d been sitting on that very spot when the recent large Humboldt earthquake had occurred. I thought that was crazy, to be sitting on a piece of rock at the ocean when the earth starts shaking? Wow. I mean, if you’re going to be anywhere when there’s this shaking, this dog-pick-you-up and toss you back and forth shaking, maybe the line between earth and sea is the place to be.

We hung out for a few hours. We ate our picnic. We talked. The kids ran around and Solo ended up wading through very cold water.  I pulled his socks off and rubbed his little feet. We decided that it was time to go. It was getting close to sunset.

And we drove home, our friend following us, just in case our tire tried anything sneaky on us again. And we made it back to the ranch, ready for bed and sleep and the absence of dreams of going down hills with no brakes.

(Updated to add: the tire is fixed!  And my camera is found! Two good endings.)

Do you remember when I said that I thought the book was pretty much finished?

Ha ha.  Hahahahahaha.  Ha. Sigh.

Well!  Enough about the three year long bout of self-torture otherwise known as writing a novel!  (I’m entering another revision, and that’s all I’ll say about that.)

*

Winter is following us.  This week has been cold and rainy, and we are cozy in the house with a fire going. Sometimes I have to give my head a shake.  It’s late May! Anyways. Whatever.  Let’s look at a photo of last week.

That feels better.

Solo has decided that he loves the hammock.  Our friends have a hammock bolted into their house, beside a large window that overlooks the valley. Mostly, though not today, you can see trees and grassy dales and fluffy clouds over the hills. It’s beautiful.  Solo has no appreciation for the view, though.  He prefers to sit in the hammock like a little hedgehog.  Yesterday I forgot he was in there, until about half an hour later he made his presence known. He likes to lie back and suck his thumb, rubbing his ear.

Lately, if he feels self conscious at all, he gently places one finger inside his right nostril and just sort of rests it there. I’m trying to discourage this.  However, I’m encouraging hammock time.  It’s like tribal playpen time. Helpful while Kid A and YaYa and I are working on school.

Have you seen my camera?  I seem to have misplaced it.  And I would like to have it back.

Our animal lover, YaYa, has been in bliss.  The boys have also been in bliss. YaYa is animal-crazy, the boys, in comparison, are only animal-happy, but they all have been having a great time.

(A friend emailed me today, encouraging me to take all the goodness and kindness from family and friends as treasures into my heart, storing them well.  I thought that phrase, storing them well, is so exactly representative of what I have been doing.  Storing up rest, and ease, and peace. The kids are storing up on pet love.  It’s a far cry from the beach dogs of Goa.)

YaYa, getting her horse ready for riding.  She’s an industrious little brusher. Charlie is an elderly horse, very gentle, very slow.  Good for kids. Sadly, he’s getting to the end of his life.

Tj readjusting YaYa’s helmet.That’s Johanna, in the background.  She’s Tj and Mark’s lovely new daughter-in-law.  She and Eric live here on the ranch, in a cabin a few miles away, and she and Tj have been wonderful about giving the kids riding lessons.

At first, Johanna led Charlie.

Then Tj gave YaYa a riding lesson in the arena.  She’s concentrating pretty hard.

Oh, just look at her!

So cute.  I just want to squeeze her.  She rode back to the barn on her own. (With us close by.)

Kid A also did some riding, and got his own lesson. He looks handsome on his horse.

And Leafy! Leafy turned into a warrior. Charlie was led around the yard with the warrior on his back.

We’ve also been working on schoolwork while sitting in the sun.  We need to take every opportunity to get the last books read from last year’s curriculum, because the new one is coming soon.  But the kids are definitely getting a well-rounded education.

I’ve also been making necklaces, which I’ll be putting up on Etsy. I was looking for some jewelry to sell, when I was in Bangkok, something to help with the cost of traveling, and I realized that I wasn’t crazy about anything that I was seeing.  I was crazy about the stones and beads I saw, however.

So I’ve been making some stuff.

I miss India, also. There is always a feeling of immense blessing and happiness over being here, and just underneath, a thread of longing for my little house in the village, for lunchtime on the roof. For crowds and dusty hot days and severe, staring faces. But here we have grass and mild breezes and animals to love. Friends and dinnertime around the table. So the longing is just that little thread, put away until it will be time to go back. It is the traveler’s curse, I think. The little thread of longing that weaves through everything.

What better way to celebrate a birthday than with a loaf of bread (which is meant to be a portrait of your face) made by your kids (with help) and a vase full of lilacs?

Add Tj’s spaghetti and meatballs, bluegrass music played by your friends, a serenade by your husband, and lots of quiet talks, and you have a beautiful birthday dinner.

Thanks for all your good wishes!

Last night I sat in a wood fired hot tub with my husband. It was overcast, so we couldn’t see the stars, but we knew they were there.

A single flame of a candle, in a glass-paned lantern, bowed to us. It waved, and bowed, and bowed again. I was touched, to say the least. It was the last night of my first thirty years of life. The small flame saluted those years and looking up and out into the sky, I felt, like I often do, the magnitude and tininess of earth, of the world and all my small years.

If we weren’t held down, we could just fly off. But we are held down, by a force greater than us, and millions of miles away, brilliant orbs swirl and dust the universe with beauty that we will never see.  I am made to be here. I fit this place. Earth.

Coming here to Humboldt County is another homecoming. I used to live in Northern Mendocino, which we practically considered to be Humboldt, because we drove north, over the line, for every little thing. We left that land, and that river, not without tears, (Many, many tears) because it was the beginning of a deep healing that was carving its way into my bones. Carving into bone may not sound like healing, but I need Jesus words to be corkscrewed into every calcium-fortified surface.

Whether I believe it or not, I am made. Breath of God sustains me. I am held up and loved and the hand of God gently cups the crown of my head. I am not too high-strung or sensitive or anxious to be loved by him. I stand on the hill of his regard and the whole universe spins before me. I have been cast down, but I am lifted.

Soon after we left this place, our house was crushed by falling trees in the middle of the night. We learned then not to doubt the path that God has laid for us, not to look back. We learned also, that dangerous things can happen in safe places.  Do not imagine that you can pad your life, that gentle voice said. We were justified in our faith, in our decision to leave.

Now we are visiting friends who have made space for us.  It is a second home, a fourth home, a sixteenth home. Being welcome here has eased the sting of leaving.

I went away and found more healing. I found that I could get through fear and love a foreign place more than I ever imagined. I found that jungle sings inside of me, even as much as forest. I didn’t know that was possible.

I found that earth is mine in a way that I didn’t know before, and it has nothing to do with ownership, with citizenship.  I can’t really own anything, can I? I went away and left everything I thought I had owned, and found new life through loving things that have nothing to do with my place of birth. The universe is spinning, and I love the farthest galaxies.  I am allowed.

One thing that my faith teaches is that we are adopted by God. Not only servants (though that too) or devotees (though we are in fact devoted) but adopted children. It means that in loving the farthest galaxies, I am loving something that will in fact be mine one day, loving it in longing, but in the most respectful and honoring way, owning it. Now is the same as later, in essence. This is what the Prodigal Son did not understand, and neither did his older brother. All that I have has always been yours.

I own nothing, and even tomorrow is not guaranteed. These first thirty years have been adventurous and fiscally strange. Things are always dicey when you are surrounded by trees in a windstorm. But I love these leaves and grasses like brothers. The flowers in these fields stand on the hill of their Creator’s regard. Jesus pointed to them, when he was telling the people of his care for them. Oh these cherished small things.

I went away from here, and then I poured my love for this place into a book. My friend told me a story, and that story ignited something inside of me, and I took all that longing for a place of my own and put it into words that immortalized something about the beginning of healing. It exorcised my grief, and taught me that we don’t lose things, really, just like we don’t lose our childhoods.  The children that we were stay inside of us, and so do the places that we’ve been.