Vermeer By Howard Nemerov
Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvelous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.
At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded windo, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat’s cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.
If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold…
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.
1. It's true: after a long hot melty summer, I kinda go crazy in the fall!
The weather cools off and I finally feel like leaving my air conditioned house and doing things. Like playgrounds!
Why waste the nice days on school? We do a lot of heavy duty stuff when it's very hot or very cold out, just so that we can take off on beautiful days like these.
2. Also, I love it when the leaves change.
You can tell because I have taken a picture of all five leaves which have changed color within a mile of my house.
I think I am still keyed to the leaf changes when I was living farther north. The leaves here won't really get going for two week yet.
3. We went apple picking on Tuesday!
80 pounds and 6 kinds of apples later...
I have a new favorite apple: Winecrisp.
You probably won't see it in supermarkets (it's quite an ugly apple), but if you find it in a farmer's market, buy all you can! It's very sweet with a slight balancing tartness and a spicy taste that's hard to describe. It's also intensely apple-y.
4. In the last three days we've eaten caramel apples (that's Klenda making caramel), made apple sauce and apple butter (that's apple butter baking down), made apple butter pumpkin muffins, and eaten a lot of apples.
Still to come: apple fritters, apple tarts, apple bread, and (Klenda promises) many many pies!
5. Then there are the pumpkins and squash.
Carving pumpkins, painted for the interim.
And eating pumpkins: Fairy Tale and Cinderella, both just fabulously tasty.
6. Moderately unrelated, while at the farm where we picked the apples, Choclo wanted to buy an enormous squash.
This was after I had bought all the other pumpkins and squashes, so I was reluctant... until he offered to pay for it out of his allowance.
So we brought it home, and he immediately set it up in the comfiest chair in the house. Then he swiped my small butternut squashes and a permanent marker.
Then he explained:
This is King Gourd.
And these are his bodygourds.
7. Meanwhile, I just realized that Oob's picture is going to look like an early Halloween costume. It isn't. My kids just dress up all the time and ask me to put their pictures on the blog.
He's a bow man, which confused everyone since we have friends named the Bowmans.
Not just regular sloth this time, my dad has has been doing very badly lately.
The good news about this (as hard as it is to believe that there could be good news) is that my superhero sister came home to help take care of him.
In fact, she came in through BWI (the airport close to me) last
Wednesday and I drove her up last Friday.
In between we took her to
National Gallery, her favorite museum!
And then on Friday I drove her up to my folks, and the 5 hour drive took 8 crazy traffic filled hours.
Mmmm...pulp.
Somewhere around the 7th hour, we stopped for gas and she got a bottle of peach aloe juice.
"Try some," she said, "it's really good."
It had "pulp," which is literally translated as "small slug like bits of aloe that bump into your lips when you try to drink it."
She laughed...immoderately.
Amazingly, I did not actually leave her at the gas station.
Anyway, there is more good news. We were starting to think my dad needed to be transferred to hospice, and instead he ended up in the hospital again where they found his sudden inability to walk and debilitating pain may turn out to be less cancer and Parkinson's and more an impinged nerve.
They can fix that! But I'd be super grateful for prayers!
Oob loves birds, and was disappointed in the lack of feathers in Mammal Hall, so I told him we would find the birds. I had a vague idea they were on the bottom floor.
We discovered two things.
One, the birds are tucked away in two dead end hallways in the basement.
Two, they are not "birds of the world" the way Mammal Hall is "mammals of the world."
They were something much better! They were samples of every single bird found in this area in the last 150 years!
As a novice bird watcher, it was fantastic! I have a fancy searchable bird app with pictures and songs, but there is truly nothing like seeing all the sparrows in the area next to each other, holding still. Seeing them together, it's quite obvious that the song sparrow is the one with the gray cap and the house sparrow has just a gray stripe.
There were glass cases for song birds, another for owls, another for ducks, for eagles and vultures, for heron like birds... all with tags explaining where and when they might be seen. It was a beginning birders paradise!
His parents would sit alone together
on the blue divan in the small living room
listening to Dvorak's piano quintet.
They would sit there in their old age,
side by side, quite still, backs rigid, hands
in their laps, and look straight ahead
at the yellow light of the phonograph
that seemed as distant as a lamplit
window seen across the plains late at night.
They would sit quietly as something dense
and radiant swirled around them, something
like the dust storms of the thirties that began
smearing the sky green with doom
but afterwards drenched the air with an amber
glow and then vanished, leaving profiles
of children on pillows and a pale gauze
over mantles and table tops. But it was
the memory of dust that encircled them now
and made them smile faintly and raise
or bow their heads as they spoke about
the farm in twilight with piano music
spiraling out across red roads and fields
of maize, bread lines in the city, women
and men lining main street like mannequins,
and then the war, the white frame rent house,
and the homecoming, the homecoming,
the homecoming, and afterwards, green lawns
and a new piano with its mahogany gleam
like pond ice at dawn, and now alone
in the house in the vanishing neighborhood,
the slow mornings of coffee and newspapers
and evenings of music and scattered bits
of talk like leaves suddenly fallen before
one notices the new season. And they would sit
there alone and soon he would reach across
and lift her hand as if it were the last unbroken
leaf and he would hold her hand in his hand
for a long time and they would look far off
into the music of their lives as they sat alone
together in the room in the house in Kansas.
Happy birthday! You're older than I am! For the next 8 months.
We actually had a birthday weekend since the Emperor, as part of his birthday present, was in and out all weekend attending the Gokhale conference.
We ended up celebrating three times, which was delightful and tasty!
A Few Great Things About the Emperor
1. He answers the hard questions that I never could.
2. He does DoCat with the kids after dinner.
3. He is the Comma King! (Hurrah for the Comma King!)
4. He can make an A plus feel like a slap in the face and a C minus feel like a gift from God.
5. He got me started exercising again!
6. He shows me all the funny stuff from Twitter without me actually having to wade through it all.
7. He's my favorite political wonk.
8. He makes beautiful children.
9. He makes me laugh!
10. He can whistle really well.
10. He reads to me.
11. He's the world's best partner for adventure games.
12. He's a dab hand at crosswords.
13. He'd always rather know the truth.
14. He's an ideal Lay Dominican.
15. He's the perfect person to talk things over with.
16. He has a cool head in a crisis.
17. He's interested in all sorts of things.
18. He has an eye for good art.
19. He has a growth mindset.
20. He's good at encouraging people.
21. He goes along with virtually all of my crazy ideas.
22. Except when it's a really bad idea!
23. He makes really good enchiladas.
24. He really likes my cooking!
25.He knows a crazy amount about comic books.
26. He writes excellent poetry.
27. He can talk in iambic pentameter.
27. He's a great driver.
28. He's a great (and patient!) driving instructor.
29. He's good at figuring things out.
30. He prays with me.
31. He sees potential in people.
32. He likes to park backwards, but he never runs over my bush.
33. He likes Gilbert and Sullivan.
34. He has a very nice singing voice.
35. He speaks French (although he says he's forgotten a lot).
36. He's got a quirky sense of humoor.
37. He stands tall (and glide walks)!
38. He is a great Game Master.
38. He's happy to try new things.
39. He knows a lot about Dr. Who. Old Who, New Who, Non Canonical audio books...
40. The people at Big Finish send him Christmas cards! From England!
41. He's a great Dad!
42. He's the night time parent.
43. He's got a talent for quickly learning new things, and then teaching them more clearly.
44. If you ask him, he will draw you a sheep (the right way).
45. He cares about fairness, even when it's to his disadvantage.
46. He believes in lost causes, just because they're right.
47. He's my favorite.
I'm really enjoying having an all boys class and an all girls class for the first time ever.
There's a certain camaraderie in the single sex classes that is so fun to watch!
Also these particular kids are great: very into chemistry and doing experiments and super fun to be around. I love teenagers!
2. It's a special time in life to be able to enjoy both teens and younger kids.
Usually Klenda and Leena do things with Choclo and Oob during part of the boys' class (Zorg does this during the girls' class) and then they spend the rest of their time left to their own devices.
They wandered into the tail end of Chemistry looking like this.
Pretty awesome devices!
3. In other news, Klenda, Leena and I have been working on crafts for our parish fundraiser.
Among other things, we've been making these tiles using alcohol inks and writing saint quotes on them with sharpies (which really are another alcohol ink).
This was our first try, but it was so fun,
we're working on a second batch already!
There are tons of tutorials on using alcohol inks, but this was my favorite:
4. Speaking of creativity, Oob has been making all sorts of special (non alcoholic) drinks. He loves to serve them to people on ice with a straw and a fancy umbrella!
Not just any umbrellas, the best mini umbrellas!
Also, I've been finding little paper scenes taped around the house.
Oob's explanation: "It's sort of a crafty kind of thing that I like to do."
5. Our hot weather finally broke: we went from a high of 98 to a high of 68 in two days! But now it is lovely September weather in the low 70s.
Well, actually now we're in the middle of 5 days of rain after nearly a month of dry weather.
That's Choclo checking the rain gauge. Three Four inches so far, and the garden is much happier!
6. Right before it started raining, and on the last of the hot days, we put up our new sheds!
These were intended to be storage for our bikes, especially since Zorg got a nice new bike for his birthday. We got two so the bikes wouldn't be crowded and hard to remove.
But... All the bikes are crowded in the shed on the right and the left shed has turned into a clubhouse. Surprise! I figure some day I will even have space in the shed for a lawn mower, but I'm probably happier stuffing it with kids anyway.
7. I'll just leave you with this "Take a picture of us thinking with The Thinker!" shot.
If you've been in DC, this is the sculpture garden between Natural History and National Gallery.
Vermeer
If I could say to you, and make it stick,
