Summer Break: Week Twelve

The ending of Summer Break 2017, was bittersweet. Summer Break is never long enough. There's never quite enough time to fit in that one last lazy day by the river or at the beach, or even just sitting in an easy chair in the front yard. I always want just one more.

But it was a good Summer. There were honeybees and fresh berries and a somewhat-happy growing garden. It was hotter and drier than usual, which the green beans and squash loved but my beloved kale and potatoes hated.

The kids grew. We laughed together. We plotted and schemed for our upcoming Disney trip.

The final closing weekend will always be marked in our memories sadly though.

Not for the amazing Kaleo concert at the Oregon Zoo, or for blackberry crisp with homemade ice cream. Not for the first batch of homemade salsa from our greenhouse jungle.

It will instead be remembered as the year the Columbia River Gorge caught fire and burned. So many beautiful trees gone forever. So many trails and foot bridges to be re-built. We're thankful that the fires did not reach us; we are a good 15 miles away as the crow flies. But every day, our air was full of some of the thickest smoke we've experienced. We breathed the death of trees into our lungs, and daily remembered a different favorite place, wondering if it remained.

Summer Break: Week Eight

The Farmboy took this entire week off from work, and we managed a landscaping blitz like we haven't done in years. Y'all should have seen us at the end of each day, moving around like a couple of 80 year olds. Aching muscles and joints from digging holes and pulling weeds and spreading bark. It was pretty hilarious, actually. But at the end of the week, our place looked better than it had since the kids were born. Our motivation was the pending Twistapalooza III at the end of the week, in which we expected to entertain 80-100 adults in our front yard. It's pretty remarkable what a couple of stubborn over-the-hills can accomplish when they've set their minds to it.

This was also the week that we spent trying to cope in 100+ degree temperatures and air thick with wildfire smoke. Quilts on all of the West-facing windows, fans on full-blast at night, eating sandwiches meal after meal, and swollen ankles (my body hates hot weather!). We managed to survive yet again without air conditioning. Someday maybe we'll stop being so frugal and just install the silly thing already.

My herb garden was one of the very first features that we ever installed when this place was just a house in the middle of a cow pasture. For years it has been the bane of my gardening existence, with weeds blowing in from the field, infesting the brick walkways and every quadrant of my lovely compass design. The kids didn't even remember that there were four brick paths. Oy. If I had a dollar for every hour I've spent lifting those bricks and carefully pulling all of the grass and weed roots and re-setting the bricks... well, I'd have enough money to hire someone else to tend it for me. Our approach this time was to weed-whack everything down to ground level, lay down landscaping fabric, spread mulch, then selectively plant a few herbs in each section. The paths will still be a problem, but I'm hoping that we can stay ahead of the weeds moving forward. I'm pretty happy with how it all looks now. I'll have to post an "after" picture in a future post though, because it is currently still home to a couple of blue canopies and two BBQ grills, left in position after our yard party.

Several years ago, maybe even a decade, the Farmboy took some seed pods from a friend's Golden Raintree. He loved that tree and was determined to start one from seed. I completely forgot about his experiment, but under his tender care, the seed turned into a sapling that looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, then suddenly, this year, grew in such leaps and bounds it was astounding. And then, imagine his delight when he realized that it was going to blossom this year. This guy... there's really no end to the things he can do.

Summer Break: Week Three

The week started out so stinking hot it made every part of me hurt. Not really, I don't suffer from chronic pain, so I don't want to make light of that statement. But heat and Beth do not mix well. And since the heat comes so rarely to our part of the world, most people don't have air conditioning. I make do by hanging quilts over all of the West-facing windows, basically turning the house into as dark and cool of a cave as possible. It always works well for the first day or two, but by the third and fourth day of a heat wave, it's pretty much impossible to bring the house down under 80 degrees. Which does not make me a happy girl.

Enter the new swimming pool. Which is still so cold from all of that well water, that thirty minutes soaking in it chilled me to the bone. Afterward, sitting in an 80 degree house, it took 3 hours for my feet to warm back up. It feels good knowing that I now have a legitimate coping mechanism for heat waves. :D

Other than trying to stay cool, there was VBS to take the kids to, and the usual errands to run. The Farmboy took the week off and started tearing the nearly-20-year-old deck off of the back of the house. We ate in the front yard almost every night and tried to relax as much as possible. I even dialed my work back quite a bit, only taking two runs into town to mail orders, and only answering the most pressing emails.

I ate the first blueberry of the season and showed up to band practice wearing the same shoes as the others (minus one) (yay for Converse!). There were two giant Jackfruits at the local Grocery, which impressed the kids. And I got to end the week with a tea date with my Mama and two Sisters and one highly squeezable Nephew.