The River's Little Brother

The other day our landlord's lawn service came by to do their last work of the season in our yard. The kids watched entranced from their bedroom windows as the men used their blowers to clear all the leaves off the lawn.

While the lawn is quite neat now, the leaves all went into the brook, where they clogged up among the rocks.

When we go outside to play, I try to be doing something active, like raking, trimming bushes, or just cleaning up toys. The kids seem to play much better when the adults around them are also engaged in something (though in the warm months I often choose to read a book instead).

It's been quite cold: it's about 35F right now at 2 pm. There's not much for me to do since the leaves are all raked away and nothing needs weeding or trimming, but it's much too cold to sit around reading. So I took a small leaf rake and cleared out some of the leaves from the rocks in the brook, freeing them to go downstream.

After I got tired of doing that and was sufficiently warmed up by my labors (wet leaves are amazingly heavy), I sat beside the brook for a few minutes. I never tire of watching the water, the birds coming to get a drink, or whatever there is to see along the banks that day.

I noticed that because I had freed up a few more places for the water to come through the rocks, the sounds of the brook were much louder. It reminded me of something from the very beginning of The Wind in the Willows, which I had just read to the kids the other day:

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before--this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver--glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble.

(Try reading that out loud--the alliteration is wonderful!) Our little brook is not quite full-fed as that, but it certainly makes a lot of music. Recently I figured out its entire route--starting about 2 miles away from us, it finally merges with a small river and then a larger one before the water ends up in Newark Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. If anything, knowing that helps me explain to the kids why we shouldn't throw things into the brook: we wouldn't want to make the ocean dirty, now would we?

Why I Love the Autumn

Anthropapa has been reading A Mantis Carol, by Laurens van der Post, one of his favorite authors. I was idly flipping through it the other day, when I came across an extraordinary passage (not really so extraordinary: his writing is consistently beautiful) that I want to share.

He is talking about how he has a deep love for his native southern Africa, yet the passing of the seasons is much more marked in other climates:

We have nothing so awesome as the fire of autumn sweeping through the great maple forests of America, stripping their leaves from them in tongues of flame until they stand naked and penitent before the reckoning we call winter. It is a moment always full of a profound and natural sanctity for me, when the earth round about me becomes like an antique temple wherein this conflagration, aflame and aflicker among the trees, accomplishes the final metamorphosis that fire did for the dead in those archaic places of the great forgotten mysteries, removing what was provisional, false and perishable from the spent life, so that only what was permanent, true and imperishable could accompany the spirit that once invested it on the journey to whatever lies beyond the here and the now.

It is almost as if in the fall everything around me there suddenly becomes allegorical and each tree represents some prodigal being, its inheritance spent in a summer of celebration, standing bankrupt before the great impartial necessities and recognizing for the first time that where it started from was the home to which it inevitably must return, and the bleak rounding journey about to some unimagined increase in that inexhaustible place of origin comes to us all, always disguised as a fear or retribution.

The image of the leaf color as a fire burning away the inessential, and the bare trees reminding us of what is essential, somehow resonated with me.

I've noticed over the last few years of living in such a maple forest, that in the cold months I experience an opening up -- when all the leaves are gone and there is little but dark trunks and white snow, I feel as if I could see for miles where in the warm season I am constrained by the intense greenery all around. Even the falling of the leaves themselves and the snow floating down evoke a distinct sense of space, an experience of three-dimensional space become visible with each falling particle near and far.

I think it will take a long time for me to really penetrate why I have always loved the autumn. There are easily seen practical reasons -- a love of warm clothing and winter holidays, a love of returning to school -- but those are not the root of the feeling. There is something personally symbolic about it, which van der Post comes close to in this passage.

Probably I'll never come to any permanent conclusion about it. But as it's such a strong feeling that has been with me my whole life, I'll keep trying as an attempt at some sort of self-knowledge.

Autumn Walk Haiku

Cool, crisp autumn air--
ate lunch sitting on a log,
fed some sweet horses.

My feet are aching
as they crunch through the dead leaves.
It's time for a nap.

Saturday Surprises

Today's been a pretty good day, so far. After a wonderful pancake breakfast, the kids and I went out in the backyard for the first time in many days. It's just been too cold, and often rainy, to play out there. (OK, the kids could probably have played out there just fine. I just don't usually have the energy to do much outside stuff after picking them up from daycare at 3 pm.)

While they played (SillyBilly got out some of his tools to hammer on something or other, Napoleona made leaf/dirt stew at the play kitchen. I don't know where they get this gender-specific stuff from!) I decided to try to tackle the leaf situation.

Our yard is ringed with maple trees. They are quite beautiful, but it is truly shocking and amazing how many damn leaves there are. And how heavy a leaf pile is after it has sat out in the rain for several days. After trying to budge the medium-sized leaf pile I had made before Halloween, which needed to merge with the main large leaf/brush pile in the corner of the yard, I decided to give my arms a break and sweep off the steps leading to the basement.

As I was sweeping off the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, I had my first surprise of the day when I saw this wildly trying to get away from me and my evil broom:

I think I was more excited than the kids were, especially after I told them they couldn't touch it! After looking at far too many herpetology websites, I think I've narrowed it down to an Ambystoma jeffersonianum (Jefferson salamander). It was probably enjoying living under all the leaves piled up next to the house, where the hose occasionally leaks and keeps things nice and moist. I deposited him (her? It's hard to tell with salamanders.) in the thick leaves at the edge of the brook, where I figured it was most salamandery.

After SillyBilly and Anthropapa went to run errands, Napoleona and I went inside because the leaf pile had turned my arms to jelly. I decided to make cookies, from the wonderful Waldorf Kindergarten Snack Book. Wonderful, except some of the recipes clearly assume you already know how to bake. I decided to make the ginger snap recipe as a test run for possible Christmas cookies, and (second surprise) it simply stated to mix all the flour, spices, molasses, and butter in the bowl to make dough.

Now, I didn't think that somehow mixing a stick of cold butter into flour and molasses would work! I knew I shouldn't cut the butter into the flour, because ginger snaps aren't flaky. I clearly had to cream the butter and molasses together.

Then I realized the error of my decision to make cookies -- whenever I try to cream butter with an electric mixer, the butter just either flies all over the place or clumps up annoyingly, so I like to cream the butter the old-fashioned way, with a wooden spoon. With my leaf-defeated arms.

It all worked out fine, and here's a nice picture of Napoleona, rolling up cookies all by herself, thank you very much. I tried to help her with some, and she complained LOUDLY. So, she made a whole sheet of cookies all by herself.

What's up with all those gnomes and fairies?

[Fairies and gnomes] actually come from people's experiences of elemental forces that help the plants to grow or the minerals to form. These "sightings" or "sensings" occur cross culturally, although we are pretty steeped in the European tradition of how these "elemental beings" are talked about and represented in visual form. There is a kind of "truth" in how they are represented in paintings or knitted figures, because the person rendering them is trying to convey certain archetypal truths.
-- Rahima Baldwin Dancy, Waldorf in the Home

One thing that many people notice about Waldorf early childhood classrooms are the gnomes and fairies. Little knitted or felt gnomes might live in a basket ready for children to play with, or silk fairies might hang from golden threads above a springtime nature table.

Kindergarten teachers might lead their children in a circle game about gnomes marching through the forest with heavy sacks of jewels, or sing songs about fairies helping the bees to find nectar in summer blooms.

So, what's going on with this? Why all the emphasis on mythical beings?

Waldorf early childhood methods emphasize imaginative play. We also try to foster the child's natural sense of being "one" with the world and with nature. Children love to be outside, playing with water, mud, sticks, rocks, and flowers.

Children also have a natural feeling that everything around them is "alive." Rocks can talk, trees have feelings, and certainly there are invisible beings all around us helping with natural processes. Fairies and gnomes are a physical manifestation of this feeling of the aliveness of nature.

On another level, fairies and gnomes could be seen as representations of the opposing forces that human beings must try to balance: Fairies are pure spirit, hardly touching the Earth, and working with the forces of life and growth. Gnomes are pure matter, living and working under the earth in the mineral realm, and working with the forces of death and hardening.

Here in our house we have lots of gnomes and fairies around. We've got one in the fridge, for example, who lets us know he's happy with the food selection by making loud knocking sounds occasionally. The kids have numerous little gnomes made of felt, wood, and that dashing knitted fellow you see above. I feel that bringing in a bit of this archetypal, elemental world is one way to work imaginatively with forces and processes that are otherwise invisible, and it encourages the kids to use their imaginations.

I'll give one last personal example of why I like to incorporate the "little people" in my little people's lives:

At night we can see some lights in the distance out of a window in the kids' room. One night I told them that perhaps those were the lights of a far-off fairy castle. I wove a story about how the fairies were so busy all day helping the plants to grow, flowers to bloom, etc. that it wasn't until nighttime that they could rest in their castle. We talked about how they have grand processions (are those lights over there flaming torches lighting their way?) and how they love to dance after they've eaten their feast (are those lights the glow of the stoves in their huge kitchens?). The kids were full of wonder and their eyes shone.

The kids often refer to the fairy castle lights, even though I told that story long ago and haven't mentioned it to them since. They really took in those images and can work with them in an imaginative way. They have never once made the connection between the fairy castle's lights and the building that sits there in the daytime!

Major Milestone

You'll all have to excuse me for a moment, I'm feeling a little farklempt.

This morning I dropped off the boy at his first day of summer camp. I packed a little lunchbox, made sure the backpack had spare clothes, and made sure all of him was covered with sunscreen.

He's pretty excited, though at the moment when it was time to give me a kiss and go with the camp counselor, he looked a little worried. But he waved jauntily a moment later, going off into the world.

He'll start learning to swim, see wild animals, go on hikes, and make new friends. What more could a boy want?


Update: here's what SillyBilly looked like after his first day at camp:


Just what I like to see...a tired little boy. Good tired, of course. Not bad, not-enough-sleep, sick tired, but good, did-a-lot-outside tired. Despite getting to bed a bit late and being tired again this morning, once he arrived at camp he was off like a shot, completely forgetting to say goodbye to his Papa. Early bedtime tonight, woo hoo!

Gratitude

Things have been busy. Summer has come, and all the activity of the season.

Anthropapa spent Father's Day weekend at the Omega Institute, taking a seminar about organizational development and Theory U and camping out. He took the bus and train up to Rhinecliff, but the kids and I drove up on Sunday to get him. The campus there is quite beautiful, with a large lake and many green and wooded acres. We had a yummy vegetarian lunch there and a peaceful drive home.

On Monday, SillyBilly will start summer day camp through The Nature Place. He is so incredibly excited that he asks me how many more days until camp, at least 40 times a day. We just got the information about the special activities (Hike to the top of Black Rock Mountain! Learning about wildlife! Learning to swim! Dirt Week!) so the kid is at a fever pitch of anticipation. And he has his first lunchbox.

We've continued our explorations of our local wildlife and weather. We've been noticing that at least one of the chipmunks in our yard can easily climb trees. The other evening I watched a bat swoop up and down the road in front of our house, busily relieving us of a portion of our insect population. And right after that I saw the first fireflies of the season, though they are getting a little ahead of themselves with the hot weather lately. Tonight we had a wonderful thunderstorm, though SillyBilly doesn't seem convinced when I tell him that the thunderbolts won't hit our little house since they have all those tall trees (not to mention the dorm next door) to hit first.

I've steadily been finding editing work, though some of it at a discounted rate that I would dearly love to discontinue. I guess I get to look forward to some future negotiations on that front. Just finished a memoir of a man who was a cultural officer with the State Department during the Cold War in Germany, Laos, and Russia. Looking forward to doing more translated Rudolf Steiner lectures next week, and possibly a book on working on a spiritual level with a difficult spouse!

So, why did I name this post "Gratitude"?

I've been feeling thankful lately, that's why. Thankful that I can do work I love, thankful that I live in a beautiful place, thankful that my son gets to go to summer camp for free, thankful that the bats are eating some of the bugs, thankful that Anthropapa got to get some time away to study.

The Simplicity of 3-year-old Fun

I realized I had a few pictures to post that I thought were interesting, and only a slightly interesting way to link them together with any cohesion, thereby avoiding one of those "random crap" post titles. Or maybe I just need to take some random-crap-post-titling lessons from Papa Bradstein. (No offense meant, Papa B. Luvya!)

First we have the latest local attraction, baby robins:

(They're already full-fledged, but I just didn't have time to upload this while the news was breaking.) These birds were kind enough to nest only about 4 feet off the ground in our neighbor's cherry tree, allowing us a close-up view of how freakish nestlings are. Word must have gotten around, because when I excitedly asked a local kid if they'd seen the baby birds, this 7-year-old gave me a "yeah" worthy of the grungiest teen. I am so yesterday's news.

Then we have this rather odd installation piece by Napoleona:


She advised me that this was her "nightstand" next to her bed. I thought the sacrificial pose of the farm animals combined with the wooden-play-carrot-piece lingam and cup-full-of-rocks yoni and with the sparkly Indian box were worthy of the next highbrow Asian fusion gallery opening. Also note the oh-so-trendy homemade crochet doll blanket serving as part of the display surface -- didn't you know all the hip chicks crochet now?

And then, the first hot day worthy of playing directly in the water:


Napoleona spent about half and hour sitting directly in the brook, happily scooping up sand and piling it on the rock to her left. She said something about it being a gnome's sandbox. I tell you: who really needs toys!!

Spring Has Sprung

Miscellaneous evidence of spring:










The boy got his first bike!















The Easter bunny came, but immediately went back to Florida because it was too darn cold.












We made these sheep out of yarn, felt, and wooden spools. Sometimes it's hard to find crafts that a 3 and 4 year old can do. These adorned our Easter dining table and nature table.












We had that enormous storm, heavy rain for two days. Our humble little brook threatened to flood into our backyard, but luckily it chose somewhere else to roam free. The picture on the right is how the brook looks in the summer with little rain, taken from the same spot as the left one.











Well, this has nothing to do with spring, but I had to share. The other day Napoleona found a little piece of uncarded sheep's wool. She was puttering around, and the next thing I knew she had dipped the wool into a glass of water, put it between two wooden blocks, and rubbed the blocks together to make felt! My crafty girl. She's not even three years old yet -- I think she's a prodigy!

This week should be about 70F every day, so we're expecting the trees to bust out some major pollen. The crocuses, snowdrops and aconite are all gone, and now we're starting on daffodils, primroses and grape hyacinths, with tulips not far behind. The maples are all flowering, as are the magnolias and forsythia. We've spotted the chipmunk that lives under our lawn, the woodchuck who lurks near our parking space, and we noticed some serious courting going on among the songbirds this afternoon. The kids were very excited to see that a blue jay pair has chosen the maple tree outside our front door for their nesting site. We also found that the edge of the brook sports several skunk cabbages, which are some of the weirdest looking plants ever.

Best of all, I can let the kids play outside for hours and hours again. No more cabin fever!

Signs of Spring

A quickie post, I'm up to my ears in 3 (!) editing projects (I must mention my favorite, a scholarly book about a fin-de-siecle Hamburg art historian. Makes me miss all those art books in the UCI library very much.)

Deer tracks in the mud in our yard. I know, hard to see, but the kids were very excited by this.

Duck city in our little brook. Once we counted seven wanna-be Papa mallards swimming oh-so-nonchalantly behind one soon-to-be Mama mallard. Now they seem to be pretty much paired off. We're waiting breathlessly for ducklings.

Winter aconite.

Crocus. We've got purple, yellow, and white right now.

Today we noticed the first tiny green leaves on a bush in the yard, skunk cabbage near the deer prints (I'll have to take a picture tomorrow, those are some freaky plants!), and a blooming red maple. We had the first chipmunk sighting in many weeks, one zooming along the bank of the brook desperate to get away from us enormous loud humans.

The songbirds are working overtime, waking us every morning. We put out some bird seed mix on a low table by the brook, and delighted in watching a mourning dove, grackle, mallard pair, assorted finches and sparrows, and a gray squirrel all dine there. They may eat us out of house and home. The kids decided that throwing the seeds into the brook was the best way to feed the ducks, but I prefer them to come on land so I can see their silly orange feet! The blue jays and mockingbirds have become incredibly squawky, and we regularly hear woodpeckers going to town on the trees.

Coming soon: green grass!

So nature incites them in their hearts...

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye...

---

When April with its sweet-smelling showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein in such liquid
By which power the flower is created;

When the West Wind also with its sweet breath,
In every wood and field has breathed life into
The tender new leaves, and the young sun
Has run half its course in Aries,
And small birds make melody...

-General Prologue, Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer



It might not be April yet, but yesterday we saw the first bees of the season, coming over to our little crop of winter aconite. Today we saw the first shoots of bulbs coming up (other than the one sad clump of snowdrops that tried to bloom a few months ago when it was crazy warm). And there are an awful lot of little birds maken melodye around here!

Though there are still icy patches here and there, the kids still got muddy and wet today digging in the yard. They may have still been wearing wool underwear and sweaters, but I didn't have the heart to say no to their first mud in months.

Friday Freezing Fun

Anthropapa had the day off today, so he and SillyBilly took the bus into the city for a big boy adventure. Plans included possibly taking the subway, going to the Met to see the Egyptian stuff, and playing at the adjacent Ancient Playground.

So I decided to take the rare chance and go to the nearby Waldorf toy store, Meadowlark. It's in a tiny red barn, far too small and full of nicely displayed toys to risk taking two kids single-handedly. Napoleona had a fine time checking things out, and ended up sitting in one spot playing with puzzles while I puttered around. Bless you, my little phlegmatic one! I was even able to sneak out a birthday present for her.


But the highlight of our morning, and the reason for this post, was our walk to the store. We are very lucky to live in an area that while fairly densely populated, also supports a healthy variety of wildlife and opportunities for nature experiences. Though our walk was about 1/2 mile, we experienced all this:

• slipping on the slidy ice
• prickly holly leaves
  
• a small flock of cedar waxwings
• ice rimming the brook
  
• the first robin sighting of the spring!
• some of the first green leaves of the season--how do they push through the still frozen soil?
  
• the stump where an enormous mulberry tree fell down last autumn
• huge rhododendron buds just waiting to open
• gray squirrels busily trying to find the last of their winter caches
  
• handfuls of sticks
• an enormous crow squawking from the top of a tall tree, silhouetted against the bright blue sky

In the anthroposophical view of human development, the young child under age seven learns primarily through physical activity and imitation. Though it's been a difficult winter for outside play (little snow but lots of cold windy days), we've been taking little walks to see what can be seen in the forest around us. In this way the kids are still able to be outside even if they can't do their favorite things like digging or water play. The other day they had a blast trying to use their toy hammers to break a huge mound of icy snow piled up by a snow plow, finding the one patch of mud to get themselves filthy (!) and climbing on boulders.

Today's moment of imitation came after our walk. I got out the bird book to make sure those were indeed cedar waxwings we saw. A few moments later, Napoleona was sitting by me with 3 or 4 stuffed animals, paging through the book and teaching her little friends all about the birds. Nothing nicer than hearing her say "Look little puppy, a bald eagle!!"

Recently I've been mulling over the idea of homeschooling the kids using Waldorf methods. Since they're both at home anyway I'm already de facto homeschooling them, and it couldn't be easier using Waldorf ideas. Early childhood is about will forces and imitation: last night before bed I got the kids to help me clean their room by saying that we would be birds making our nests. I started picking things up and before I knew it they were both grabbing baskets to fill with all the toys on the floor, making wooden block nests, toy car nests, etc. Napoleona even went so far as to take a wooden bowl, fill it with bits of ribbon and cloth for softness (I had been telling them about how birds will use things like string, snakeskins, or even plastic to line their nests), and then proceed to sit on the bowl until her stuffed animal "hatched"!

To me, that was a beautiful moment of imitation and creative play. I hope to follow that up with finding a real birds' nest for them to see.

Eating Locally

I just got the latest email newsletter from the Organic Consumers Association. I followed a link to a fascinating article about local food: Eating Local: There's No Plate Like Home.

I'm a big fan of eating locally-grown foods. I have been blessed to live for the last 10 years in places like Sacramento, CA and the NYC area, which have access to amazing produce. I've also been lucky to live near biodynamic farms and CSAs, which to me are an improvement on organics.


I've noticed that organic milk in stores is always ultra-pasteurized, because the dairies are few and far between. California allows raw milk products to be sold in supermarkets, so I could get them at the co-op, though they were shipped 150-200 miles. In New York, raw milk is only available directly from the farm, so I currently get raw milk through a herd share program at Pleroma Farm, which is just under 100 miles away.

I'm concerned about both the environmental costs of fossil fuel use and the prospect of diminishing supplies. I learned something about the scope of the link between food distribution and fossil fuel use in this article:

In his book Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market, Worldwatch Institute senior researcher Brian Halweil writes about the enormous Mid-Atlantic regional distribution center for Safeway supermarkets in Upper Marlboro, Md., where all the East Coast produce is inspected. Even if the products will eventually be sold in a farmer's hometown 400 miles away, they must first be shipped to this central location then shipped back.

But this article takes the local concept further. The 100-mile diet sounds like an amazing exercise: only eat foods grown within 100 miles of your home. I could easily live on vegetables from the biodynamic garden across the street (at least in summer, but then I could get more local stuff from the co-op down the street). I could even get apples and berries from within 5 miles.

But...no coffee? No iced tea? NO CHOCOLATE? I would really miss that food of the gods.


And...no sugar? No olive oil? No salt?

The article recommends using butter instead of oil, and honey instead of sugar. I guess if I can't get coffee, I don't really need sugar to go in it.

I used to think, yeah - we should just eat locally and so many problems would be solved. We'd eat more nutritious food, use less petro resources, support local business, etc. Sounds like a winner all around.

Then I realized that I was partially basing my utopian food vision on an incorrect historical model. I was a big Little House on the Prairie junkie as a girl, and I recently bought a Little House cookbook. But they used sugar, salt, and a bunch of other imported items in addition to wild game and homemade sourdough.


Humans have been trading foods and spices for thousands of years. I realized, duh, once we had the wheel and seaworthy boats, everyone could have sugar and salt.

Sure, those things were once so prized and expensive that the woman in charge of the house would keep the keys to the spice cabinet on her person at all times. But nowadays, I think I could make an exception for sugar and salt in the local food arena.


Also, I live in a maple sugaring area, so I could get sugar from my backyard. Also I found out that there is an active salt mine within about 200 miles of my home. Gotta love the internet!

Bugs and other wildlife

So far in the new house we have microscopic brown ants invading the cats' food dishes, enormous and very speedy ants cruising around the whole house, a wasp that Duncan unfortunately tried to play with, various tiny spiders and house flies.

Now, having lived in coastal areas of California, both Papa Hunt and I have lots of experience with ants, and aren't too fond of them. I remember a 2-3 inch wide swath of them crossing our living room from the sliding glass door to the kitchen trash. I remember ants coming inside in the summer for water and the winter for food.

In our last house we had ants that didn't try too hard. They would come munch on crumbs in the kitchen occasionally, and they liked any kibble bits the cats dropped on the floor, but really they never tried to invade. But I have a bad feeling about the ants here. I have never seen those tiny brown ones before, and the big ones are really fast and aggressive.

This morning we walked over to the Pfeiffer Center garden to buy some chard and green beans. They have a little pond with some koi and lots of lily pads waiting for some frogs. The Huntlings got a big kick out of the tadpoles the gardeners are cultivating in tubs next to the pond. We only saw one with the beginnings of legs so it will be a while before the pond is froggy. We also got to see some of the garden's bees coming to drink there.

Yesterday right by Papa Hunt's office we saw a big black rat snake. He (?) was in some tall grass in the sun, but when we stepped near, swoosh! That was a fast snake.



Then the other day, Papa Hunt saw a woodchuck standing on its hind legs munching on raspberries at our old house. I never knew something so fat and rolypoly could do that. (The woodchuck, not Papa.) Those raspberries sure are sweet though.

When I think back on our time in Sacramento, I remember lots of wildlife. The American River Parkway was home to many creatures year-round, including mule deer, turkeys, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, river otters, salmon, and acorn woodpeckers. But most of these animals are quite shy or difficult to spot, so that the Huntlings would have had trouble experiencing them.

I'm grateful that this area of New York, though built up, seems to have plenty of wildlife accessible to the kids. Also we can go visit the cows and chickens at the Fellowship farm, and go up a few times a year to Pleroma Farm to pick up shares of raw milk and eggs. I want my kids to know about domestic animals and where their food comes from, as well as the wild animals around us. I think this knowledge helps children feel more secure and comfortable in the world.