There is a little creek on the other side of the road at the bottom of my parents’ property. My parents asked the neighbor man if they could have access to a section of it for their grandkids to play in and he said yes.

My mother calls the little shady stretch of creek “The Beach.”

My younger son, especially, is head over heels in love with it. He got to help Grandmommy with some of the beach clean-up and afterwards he couldn’t stop talking about it. Everything was The Beach This and The Beach That.

The first time I went to the beach, he was beside himself with excitement. He leaped out of the van, leaving the door open, and took off running.

“Come back here and shut the van door!” I hollered.

He paused and gave me a frantic look. “I have to get to the beach!”

I let him keep going and shut the door myself.

That was the afternoon that I took all four kids, plus the Fresh Air girl. My mother was at the beach, too, and she and I sat in the creek in our lawnchairs and visited while the children explored.

The scenery brought to mind a picture that I’ve recently pinned: a fallen tree over a creek with the title “The Original Playstation.”

At first I thought a playstation was one of those backyard climbing contraptions, but then I realized that they were referring to the video game thing. Oh.

It was our Fresh Air girl’s first creek experience of her visit. She was terrified of the water spiders.

I finally got sick of her pussy-footing around and leveled with her. “The water spiders are harmless. That’s a fact. It’s up to you to decide if you’re going to let them keep you from playing or not.”

“Okay,” she said as she stepped into the water. “If I get bitten, it’s all your fault.”

“You won’t get bitten,” I said.

My younger son thought it’d be great fun to dip the top of his head in the water. He did it a couple times before moving over to another spot.

He kneeled down on a rock and then, moving really fast, stuck his head under the water.

Except the rock angled out under the water and so he smacked his head on the rock.

He handled it really well—just clutched his head and held real still. I laughed so hard at him, and even in his pain he was smart enough to realize that it was a pretty dumb, and therefore hilarious, mistake.

Then my mother, also fed up with the Fresh Air girl’s high-pitched shrieks at everything that moved, announced to her, “I’ll give you a dollar if you lay down in the water.”

There was a bit of bargaining back and forth. The final terms were that she had to lay down on her back far enough to get her ears wet.

It took her a while to get horizontal—she kept popping up because she was so cold—but she finally laid all the way down while we stood around her cheering our heads off.

Of course, the bet stood for all of the kids.

They put my mother out five dollars, fair and square.

And that’s how we spent our afternoon at the beach.

This same time, years previous: drilling for sauce, peach and/or nectarine tart, thoughts on breastfeeding

After last year’s Fresh Air fiasco, I questioned the wisdom of inviting another child into our home. But then I did it. Of course. Because I knew that the chances of us getting another holy terror were pretty slim, and the truth is, that holy terror didn’t affect us all that much.

So we invited another child into our home.

Actually, she had come to stay with us at the very end of her trip last year because she done did wear out her welcome at her first host family’s house. We didn’t have any problem with her, so I crossed my fingers, hoped I wasn’t begging for trouble, and invited her back.

She was a good match for our family: loud, assertive, and opinionated. She fit right in.

I ended up really liking this little girl. She was super smart and articulate. She asked good questions. She was observant. She could see the big picture. She even called me out on my inconsistencies. (I didn’t like that so much, but sure did admire her for it.)

She arrived on a Tuesday, when we were in the midst of a big corn day.

She cried for a couple days, but then her homesickness faded. At first she had no idea how to entertain herself (this inability to play never ceases to catch me off-guard), but by Friday she was started some imaginative games. Thank goodness! Only then did I realize how tense I had been, waiting to see if she would catch on to how we do things at our place.

Her make-believe game of choice was Getting Your Hair Done. She loved playing with hair.

She also loved playing in the van. Combining the two was a brilliant stroke of genius (not mine). It kept them occupied for a very long time.

She braided my younger daughter’s hair for church. I think the Fresh Air girl wanted to do more braids, but my daughter had her limits. She is very particular about her hair, though you’d never guess it since it looks like a floppy mop most of the time.

Speaking of a floppy mop, I don’t know why we didn’t think to pull out the wig until the last day.

She couldn’t get enough of it.

(By the way, this wig needs a name. Tanya? Vanessa?)

I tried to go out of my way for us to do fun things, and we did make it to the water a bunch of times, but the truth is, I was up to my eyeballs in garden stuff.

Next year I think we’ll aim for hosting during the first trip—August is just too… August-y.

This girl was over-the-top picky, so I
had my work cut out for me. Thankfully, I had my new weapon: French-style meals. By the end of the visit she was eating—and
all these were foods she claimed to not like at first—granola, peaches,
bananas, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and on and on and on. It
was immensely gratifying. (Also, I think she thinks we only eat in
courses. At every meal she’d ask, “How many courses are we having?”)

She was obsessed about what I would pack for her lunch on the bus.

“I need juice,” she told me.

“You need juice?” I challenged. “But you haven’t had juice for ten days and you’re doing just fine!”

“We had orange juice once,” she corrected me. “And mint tea.”

“I could pack you some mint tea. Would you like that?”

“All the kids on the bus will probably come back with water,” she muttered. “‘Cause everyone in Virginia is so healthy.”

The next to last day was hellish. The kids fought constantly. I kept having the urge to blame it on the Fresh Air girl, but then I remembered that there are days (many, many, many of them, in fact) when my kids fight all day long and sometimes for days on end. Ten days is a long time for a child to be together with a best friend, let alone a new person they didn’t know very well. It was only normal that things would fall apart after awhile.

I talked to my own kids, privately, about going out of their way to make the last day a good one. They rose to the occasion (secret fist pump!) and everything ended on a bright note.

This same time, years previous: around the internets, peach cornmeal cobbler and fresh peach ice cream, tomato and red wine sauce, vegetable beef soup, mustard eggs, and Russian pancakes

We just got back from a long weekend in upstate New York. While we were there, we visited a piece of heaven.

New York is filled with all sorts of beautiful places—lakes, gorges, wineries, etc—but when we are there, we tend to hang out with family and not do much else. Which is fine with me because I’m not a touristy, go-go-go sort of person.

But my husband’s sister suggested that we take the cousins to a park for a picnic lunch. The park was close and we could just sit and visit while the kids played, she said. It was no big deal.

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds like fun,” though I was probably thinking something along the lines of, Can’t the kids just have a picnic lunch in the back yard out under the trees? I mean, how great is this park anyway?

Well. It turns out the park is really, really great.

It’s only about ten minutes from my in-law’s house. Ten minutes! In all my years of visiting upstate New York, not once have I been to this park! Heck, my husband had never been to that park!

Once we were there, it was only a five-minute walk up a rocky gorge to get to paradise.

A waterfall! A swimming hole! A creek! Smooth rock ledges! Blue sky! Moss! Ferns! I was dumbfounded. The kids were not. They shrieked and stripped down to their swimming suits and jumped in the icy water and shrieked some more.

We ate our sandwiches and potato chips and peaches. We visited. We wandered around with our cameras and took pictures. We dipped our piggies in the cold water. We sat quietly, just studying the tumbling water, the floating leaves, the gorge’s walls, the rocky formations.

My husband told his niece some tall tale about a thief who snatched away little girls who wouldn’t stop eating peaches.

She didn’t buy it, not for one minute.

My daughter stole my sunglasses.

And then she put them on my husband.

Eventually the children got brave and started jumping off the rock ledges into the deeper water.

And soon after that they turned blue, and we packed up and headed back down the gorge.

“We are going to come here every single time we come to New York,” I informed my husband. “This is the best place ever.”

This same time, years previous: lately, our life, washing machine worship and other miscellany, apples, kill a groundhog and put it in a quiche, SOS!