You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘seasons’ category.
In the early mornings, when I set off for the train station, it is foggy. The fog is thick and wet and even close landmarks are invisible. My fellow commuters wear thick sweaters and boots; they are dressed for fall, for this weather at this moment. I am not, because I know in about 30 minutes it’s all going to disappear. The sun will break through and instantly the mist will melt away, dissolve, a wisp of ephemeral shining white vanished in a blink of time. I stand out, in my short sleeves and sandals on this crisp October morning, and I wish I had thought to wear layers. Next morning, straining to reach a scarf (which will keep me warm in the morning and can be tucked in my bag when it gets hot), I slip, bang my arms very hard on a shelf, and emerge with a spectacular bruise on my inside elbow. Afternoons are hot and humid; nights unbearable because of the humidity and the windows closed against fresh night air and hordes of mosquitoes.
I’ve spent every morning this week in Casablanca, doing some orientation for my new job. It’s gone well; nothing was earth-shatteringly new, or new at all really, but I’ve met some nice people and caught up on my reading. I’ve memorized the train schedule between here and Casa; I’ve memorized the train stations. I’ve taken a lot of taxis, both Rabat’s blue “petit taxis” and Casa’s red ones. (Who has turquoise, you’re wondering. That would be Mohammedia. This is the stop before Ain Sebaa, where you must change if you are going directly to L’Oasis.)
Trains in Morocco can be quite pleasant. Most mornings I have managed to get a coveted window seat facing forward, mainly because it seems many people do not care if they sit by a window or if they face backwards. I care. I stare out the window at the fields and forests whipping by, past apartment buildings hung with laundry and children playing soccer on a patch of packed dirt. We flash past trees gnarled and twisted by the fog. I watch a stork land in a plowed brown field, folding its enormous black-tipped wings. I see women stooped to work a field in identical poses, as if they were modeling for the passing train. On the way home, in brilliant sunlight, I see the deep deep blue of the Atlantic waters, and the houses of beach communities shining white in the sun.
I’ve taken a lot of taxis this week. I realized something I already pretty much knew: if you are in your car, the sight of a taxi nonchalantly cutting an entire block-long line waiting at a red light by driving into oncoming traffic and then whipping over just at the intersection and waiting patiently for the light to change will enrage you. But if you are sitting in that taxi, anxious to not miss your train, you will secretly rejoice. You will be basically happy to have just missed that line, to have not waited your turn. It’s kind of fun for your inner five-year-old.
I have spent more time traveling than I have spent in class. I am very tired; I’m not used to leaving while my children are still in pajamas, my travel mug of coffee in my hand.
Casablanca is not a romantic city of white houses tucked amongst Mediterranean hills. It is huge, noisy, crowded, polluted. The traffic there is worse than Rabat. Every day class ended early and I would calculate which station to leave from. Casa Port, located across town and necessitating a white-knuckle taxi ride through the noon rush, was a direct train that left every 30 minutes. L’Oasis Station was closer, walking distance, but train left once a hour and I had to change at Ain Sebaa, which involved sitting in the sun for 20-25 minutes. Once on whichever train, I would lean back against the window and relax as we glided through the countryside like a snake. Every day I would arrive back in Rabat, climb the stairs through the interminable construction feeling the fresh sea breeze against my face, happy. Home.
I woke up early this morning, 2 hours before I needed to. The wind was picking up. I could hear through my open window the leaves tossing, rain beginning to splatter. Before I knew it, we were in for a full-fledged thunderstorm. Lightning flashed in the pre-dawn sky; thunder crashed louder than the Ramadan drummer.
When I got up, the storm continued. I went in to get the kids up; they were all awake listening to the rain. Last night, I made cinnamon rolls, so I heated them and boiled eggs and dug out the fun striped egg cups they got last Easter. I’m a good mother, unlike that woman here last week giving her kids cold cereal and telling them to stop their whining about the long-life milk already. In the meantime, the clouds burst open and the deeps poured forth. Roads turned into rivers. Lightning and thunder collided right overhead. We watched the long grey uninterrupted lines of rain. Electricity flickered on and off; the internet didn’t work. I called Maroc Telecom and got put on hold.
Our house is a two-minute walk from the kids’ school. It’s quicker to walk than to drive, by the time you get the car out of the complicated garage we share with our landlord, his brother, and their 3 cars. But they couldn’t walk. The rain was incessant. I had the window open in the living room, and spray blew in as if from a waterfall.
Donn dropped them off and we had coffee and cinnamon rolls ourselves. Still the rain continued, unabated, insistent.
About an hour and a half later, when it had finally slackened, then slowed to a drizzle, I got a phone call from Ilsa. “Mom!” she gasped. “Come get us! The school is being evacuated!” “Because of the rain?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. In the background was a cacophony of junior high voices. I could barely hear her.
She came back on. “Mom! Come to the small door, okay?”
“Are you serious, Ilsa?” I asked her. It just seemed strange to receive such a call from your child. Shouldn’t it be more official, from the school secretary or nurse or another parent? “I’m DEAD serious,” she announced, and hung up.
So we headed down to the school. Apparently several classrooms had flooded, and the electricity was out. The rain had mostly stopped by this point. The roads were filled with stalled vehicles and puddles a foot or two deep. Friends told of journeys interrupted, of it taking an hour to travel a stretch of road that normally takes 10 minute, of a small pool, six feet deep, in the middle of an underpass.
The school was a madhouse. All the students were standing in the courtyard, which is reached by a small staircase. Parents jostled their way to the front of the stairs, where they would stand, eyes scanning the crowd, looking for their own particular child. Teachers stood at the top of the stairs, asking parents which class their child was in. Then they would descend into the melée, emerging eventually with a student in tow.
I eventually collected my 3 and we headed out the door. There were still hundreds of bedraggled students huddled under the trees and awnings of the school. The teachers wielded enormous umbrellas.
I asked one if there would be school tomorrow. “Who knows?” he shrugged. “Check the school web site.” That is, when the internet is back up, I thought.
The kids were thrilled. Abel is missing a history test today. Ilsa is missing TWO tests. They ate their sandwiches in the car on the way home, “second breakfasts,” and are already clamouring for lunch. They are all watching a movie and drinking hot chocolate in their pajamas, changed out of wet jeans and hoodies. Meanwhile, outside, the last drops of rain fall from the hibiscus hedge under a weak and watery sun, but I hear thunder in the distance, rumbling ominously.
We’ve been in Rabat for a year now, and I am beginning to recognize patterns in likely and unlikely places; weather changes, school, items available at the stores. It’s a good start to feeling settled in a place. There is a huge difference between a new school year in a new school, and a new school year as old hands, experienced in bookstore locations and teacher requirements, with familiar faces welcoming you back, yourself able to befriend the new ones.
Ramadan was not such a shock this year; we knew it was coming, stocked our freezer with bread for lunches, were already prepared for its rhythms and changes. We have not spent our mornings wandering around Agdal waiting for bookshops to open, nor our evenings walking miles because no taxi would stop for us, getting lost in alleyways on the way home. Having a car makes a huge difference, but knowing what to expect even more.
Aside: yes, of course Mauritania celebrates Ramadan as well. But it is different here, and last year we were unprepared for those differences.
Last September, as a newcomer, I was disturbed at not being able to find tinned tomatoes. Great was my joy (don’t mock me; I cook supper most nights and I use tinned tomatoes in a LOT of different dishes) when I found some. I’ve bought them unthinking, casually, all year. But now, early September, suddenly they are nonexistent again. I don’t panic. I know that soon, I’ll start seeing them again. In the meantime, when I found a few cans at LaBel Vie the other day, I bought them all.
Yesterday, a friend came over, and we sat on our balcony in our wooden Senegalese chairs and talked and talked. It was muggy and overcast, and she told me it was supposed to rain. It won’t, I told her. It’s too early. Last year it started raining in late September, and everyone told me it wasn’t normal to have rain before November. But of course I was wrong. When it started to sprinkle, I thought of my clean dry clothes hanging on the line, and decided to leave them. I was sure it was soon be hot again, and I’d let them dry and then get them. Wrong! It poured for the rest of the afternoon. The children arrived home dripping. Last night, after the mosque, the streams of people going up the street were hurrying, hoods and umbrellas up, holding newspapers or plastic bags over their heads for protection. The drummer didn’t make his rounds.
Last year, everyone said it was the wettest winter in 30 years, the end of an extended drought. This summer the fruit was cheap and plentiful, but I have no way of knowing if this was unusual or not, if Morocco was greener than usual. Only now can I have a basis of comparison.
September rain. The lightning flickers rapidly. Last year I compared it to a mischievous child with his hand on a light switch, and that comparison sprang to mind last night. The boys and I stood on the balcony, breathing in gulps of fresh air, watching the glint of rain in the streetlight’s orange glow and the movement of leaves in the trees. Today there was another shower and now it’s back to hot and humid again, with the occasional sudden breath of cool air like a gift. The sky is blue. I find, looking back over my archives from last September, that the sky was deep blue then as well. Friday lunchtime, and the imam is chanting, his voice going up and down melodically. The wind bangs our open windows and doors.
Today at the Nomad household, we’re listening to Christmas music. You know what that means. We just got a delivery of Christmas presents! Included is a new CD, Elliot‘s present to Ilsa this year, her favorite “girl band“ doing a selection of Christmas songs both old and new.
Celebrating Christmas in March is a not-uncommon part of life overseas. We’ve gotten Christmas presents in April, in July. Once, we were really impressed with some friends’ organizational skills when we received our Christmas presents in early November…until we realized they’d been mailed “in time” for the year before.
That was in Mauritania. Getting mail in Mauritania was a bit of a gamble, always. For a start, most postal workers in the US have never heard of Mauritania, although they will smile thinly, offended, if you ask. “Of course I know where it is,” they will tell you, always. “This will arrive in 10 days to 2 weeks.“ Then they will send your mail to Mauritius, and it may or may not ever reach Nouakchott, Mauritania, West Africa.
Then there were Mauritania’s stellar organizational skills. For a start, there is no door-to-door mail service, which makes sense, since Nouakchott is literally a place where the streets have no names. (I should have named my blog that! Darn…) Very few streets are even paved in this capital city, only a few major ones. By no stretch of the imagination could one impose a grid pattern on the city. Everyone I knew lived on one of the many sandy alleyways, choked with trash, that meandered across the face of the city.
To get mail, you have to rent a mailbox at the city’s one post office, located downtown across from the Hotel Marhaba, which has a really nice pool if you enjoy paying money to be on the receiving end of a lot of attention from Arab men. The mailboxes are small squares with a key, just like the one you had in college. If you get a parcel, they put a small slip in your box, and you go out that door into the hot glaring sun and round the corner, where you present your slip to a person sitting behind a desk. A couple of times, I was allowed back into the dusty, cavernous back room. Picture Aladdin’s cave, that vast hall of glittering treasures piled haphazardly with no sense of order. Now replace those golden piles with dusty boxes, time-begrimed bits of crushed cardboard, outdated sun-faded magazines and smeary envelopes. Add in some cobwebs, piles of fine sand in the corners, and masses of flies zooming round in that annoying square pattern, and you’re getting the picture. So it’s really not surprising that we occasionally got parcels 2 years after they were sent.
Given the risk, if at all possible you got someone to bring things to you. Anyone coming from the US was besieged with requests. Best of all was if someone was just unexpectedly going to a conference or something like that for a short time–sometimes you could even negotiate an entire suitcase. The kids quickly got used to having two or three Christmases and birthdays–usually the best presents weren’t the ones received on the actual day.
I have to say that so far, I’ve been quite impressed with Morocco’s postal service. I’ve gotten 3 parcels since we arrived, and all have come in a timely fashion, intact, and delivered to my door. But there are certain things one shouldn’t send through the international mail, and the boys’ long-awaited and much-anticipated new DS’s are a good example. Today, we got a small suitcase full of things just for us–yes, a friend went to a conference. The kids got some much-needed new clothes, we got a couple of new DVDs, and the boys got their Christmas presents from us and their grandparents–a red and a black DS Lite, to be precise. They’re pretty stoked on them. They spent the evening sitting two feet away from each other “chatting” on their DS’s.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas! We are.
Last Friday was sunny and warm–perfect “vacation in Morocco” weather. I could just picture everyone in northern climes staring enviously at the pictures of Donn, in jeans and t-shirts, heading down to the beach for a couple hours of late afternoon surfing.
But after I waved him off and came inside, the wind started up, first as a faint distant noise, but soon a full-on door-banging shutter-rattling extravaganza. It howled. It “wuthered.” I yelled HEATHCLIFF and then instantly regretted it, as I had to spend hours trying to remember and explain the plot of “Wuthering Heights“ to Ilsa. It didn’t help that I have never especially liked that book. I find it over-dramatic and I lose patience with the characters and I think it’s probably the stupidest thing in the world for an author to name everybody the same name. How many Catherines are in that book? Why not at least spell some with a K? But I didn’t want to turn Ilsa off it before she has started really reading the classics, so I tried to be neutral as I described people driven crazy by the wuthering of the wind. That part she understood.
First, the hallways filled with dead leaves, blown in under the cracks in the door. Then the door banged open, again and again. I had to lock it to keep it closed. Then came the rain, in sheets, in torrents, along with the longest peal of thunder I’ve ever heard, and flashes of lightening. Soon the dead leaves were floating in a puddle of water blown in under the door.
On Saturday morning, Abel got me up at 7:30 (he usually sleeps, this one) because the wind was whistling through the shutters. It really was–probably an E sharp, if I had to guess.
The storm raged unabated through the night and most of the next day, but Saturday afternoon the sun came out, pale and watery but soon gaining strength, adding scintillating jewel tones to the drenched and dripping landscape.
That’s how it’s been ever since–alternating sun and warmth with freezing, dripping wind and storms. This morning, for example, was warm and windy, but by noon it’s back to grey skies and wind-whipped trees. I don’t mind, but then I spent my childhood on the Canadian prairies. I just make another cup of coffee, and pray my umbrella lasts one more day as I shiver by the side of the road waiting for an elusive taxi to appear through the mist.
Our friends are snowed in somewhere in Europe, so we’re staying here a few extra days. It worked out well because the dr was also delayed in leaving, which could have meant 6 people in 3 bedrooms, more comfortable in theory than in fact. He’s gone now, bequeathing us the rest of the Starbucks in his freezer and the molasses in his cupboard.
Tomorrow is moving day for real. Who has a good recipe for gingerbread cookies? I like ’em chewy.
Ironically, after I wrote about how cold it was, it warmed right up. Wish I’d thought of that before. Today was gorgeous–sunny, deep blue sky, and warmer outside than in. Now that the sun has set, leaving the stars to glitter like rock salt in the sky, it’s cold again.
Many of the comments on my last post talked about being cold, so I thought I’d warm us all up by posting something from the archives. This was originally published in September, 2006.
Weather Daze
All day the sky was low, about 10 feet over our heads, and made of bronze. The air was heavy, without a breath of wind. The leaves hung limply in the garden. By nightfall, it was, if anything, even hotter than it had been during the day.
We always get at least a couple of nights like this during the year, so I knew what to expect—the electricity would go out. Sure enough, about 11:30, I was writing an email to my husband when suddenly I was plunged into darkness.
I fumbled my way into the kitchen and found matches and candle. Leaving a trail of blue wax drips behind me like I was Gretel trying to find my way home, I turned off what lights I knew were on and tried to find the kids’ water bottles. This year, 2 of 3 don’t have insulated ones because I haven’t gotten around to buying them yet, so their bottles need to be ½-filled and placed in the freezer overnight. I completed this task mostly by feel and optimistically, with faith that the lights would be on before 6 a.m. (Hey I’m an optimist! Didn’t you notice that bit about ½ filled?)
By midnight, I mounted the stairs, leaving my signature blue drops behind me, the candle and I both dripping. Our room was a tiny bit cooler than the rest of the house. By some miracle, I could get a driblet of water from the tap (when the electricity is gone, the pump can’t get water into the house), enough to brush my teeth. I cleverly stuck the candle to the side of the taps, to leave my hands free, choosing that spot because a. I would have the light and b. it would be easy to clean the wax off the smooth porcelain later. There was plenty of room between the candle and the plastic shelf above which holds toothbrushes, soap, etc. I washed my face, careful not to let the water splash onto the flame, since I’d left the matches downstairs in the kitchen. The flame heightened in the still air and licked quietly at the underside of the plastic shelf… Oh well. I never really liked that plastic shelf much anyway, and if I put my scrunch spray over the hole, no one will notice. And who else goes in my bathroom anyway?
I lay down on top of the sheet and tried to relax. I could feel the heat descending upon me, the heaviness of the air, as the last of the coolness evaporated. I dropped off quickly, only to wake again gasping for air a few minutes later, drowning in a puddle of my own sweat. (Gross, I know, but we must face facts if we’re going to help you feel you were living it too) I walked slowly, hands outstretched, feeling with my feet to avoid stepping on my daughter’s face, and groped until I found a hand fan, and fanned myself till my arm was tired. I waved it over the kids. (I think I’m addicted to parenthetical remarks: we have only one AC so all the kids are sleeping in my room these days. Privacy? Well I don’t get much of that at the best of times!) I gulped down a glass of water. I wandered out onto the balcony, but it was just as hot out there.
Elliot woke up, gasping. He was dripping wet. We chatted a while about the lack of electricity and how much darker it was. There’s a hotel near us with a generator, and we could see their light reflected off the sandy air, like fog.
Soon all the kids were awake from the heat, and inclined to be whiny. It was about 1 a.m. by this point. I sang songs, I told stories, about children who lived in ice caves and went to school by sleigh, about a little girl who lived with her family on a cedar-covered island in the middle of a cold grey sea. I thought of hell and said I imagined it might be like our current situation, which made my daughter cry. (Although it didn’t take much to make her cry at that point) Finally about 2 we all wandered out onto the balcony, which was gritty with sand. Everyone liked standing there staring out at the darkened city. We felt the teensiest breath of air sigh across our faces. In hope, I dragged two mattresses out, but the mosquitoes were terrible for such a sandy night, and the night seem disinclined to loose any more sighs our way, although I sent a few its way, in hope. We went back in and opened the windows. We tried to sleep.
The night dragged on. Around 5:30, the electricity came back on, just in time for the call to prayer to blare from the mosque across the street. When it came on, we all cheered! We all slept in, too. At school, the kids’ teachers said that everyone was tired but let’s still try to get some work done.
No one in the city slept last night. I compared notes with French mothers, Senegalese house-workers, Mauritanian friends—all had the same experience, although some were lucky enough to get a nap in later.
The morning continued hot and still. The air was still sandy, but the light was brighter. Suddenly, the sky went dark red and the windows rattled. Sand and wind mixed together hit the house with a bang. We were in for a really bizarre sandstorm—more like a sand blizzard. For about an hour the storm raged, disrupting traffic, downing trees and electric wires and fences and streetlights, lifting plastic bags into a wild frenzied dance in the air, filtering through even closed windows to leave a film on every surface in the house. I stood on the porch, looking out. Visibility extended only as far as my next-door neighbour’s, but amazingly enough the wind was cooler.
I went out towards the end. The house was still muggy and hot, which made taking my sticky skin out into a sandstorm something special in the way of exfoliating options. Also, it saves me money on that rub-on tan stuff—my way is all natural, no weird chemicals. Come visit me and you can try it too—for FREE. Optimistic and generous, that’s me.
Eventually the sand died down, so we opened up the house for the cooler breezes. But they went away too. Now we’re back to where we were before—still and hot.
But the electricity is still on! I’m going to bed, where I can enjoy that AC while it lasts. I hope to dream of ice caves.
“This is the most rain we’ve had since 1974,” says a Moroccan woman confidently to me.
I joke in response. “Maybe we brought it with us from Oregon.” After all, these days of scudding grey clouds and cold slanting rain remind me of my Northwest home, even though the land here is more like California, with its palm trees and groves of olive, citrus and eucalyptus. But the joke does not go over. People just look at me. I know that the rain is considered a blessing; I wasn’t trying to claim to be the author of it.
Storms wake me in the night. Wind howls, rain gusts; it shatters against the glass windows, it soaks the laundry I forgot to bring in. During sunbreaks, as I gaze up into the deep deep blue framed by flashes of fuchsia bougainvillea, I can feel the southern latitude in the strength of the sun.
One thing I did not expect to worry about in Africa was keeping warm. My first foray onto the continent only enforced this for me. We landed in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in April 2001. We were met by a man we’d known in Oregon. “We’re planning a tourist trip into the interior for you, to the historic city of Chinguetti,” he told us, “But we’ll see if it cools down first. It’s been so hot that some people have died.” Oh.
The airline lost all our luggage so I washed what we were wearing that first night, and hung it out to dry at about 1 a.m. Our clothes were dry as bones the following morning. That was a clue. We were in the desert now, a place where even the air is thirsty, and rain evaporates before it hits the ground. I wore sandals and cotton skirts year round.
We knew that Morocco’s climate would be different. We studied maps, checked the weather.com statistics showing yearly averages. Rabat, our new home, is the same latitude as Los Angeles, and we assumed things would be similar, much cooler than Mauritania, where it got up to 125 degrees that first summer, but not cold.
But although the plant life is similar, with palm trees raking the sky with their spiky fronds, the weather here is far colder than Southern California. The houses are built for the hot summers, with no thought taken for cold damp winters. I was talking to a friend about this, and she showed me how she was wearing 4 layers of turtlenecks and sweaters, plus a scarf. “You have to wear a lot of clothes,” she told me. “This is how the Moroccans do it.”
In the meantime, we’re all sick. The cement-block house echoes with our coughs. It might not snow here on the coast, but it does in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, where apparently you can ski. “I was sick a lot my first year too,” soothes a Korean friend. “But then I learned to do as the Moroccans do–I don’t use the space heaters.” We’re not convinced, until she explains that she used to run hers all day and all night. I still don’t know why that would make you sick, but given that these run off large bottles of butane gas, I suppose the fumes wouldn’t help.
On Saturday morning, Ilsa and I walked a couple of blocks to a major road to catch a taxi. Her clean jeans were soon soaked to the knee as we dodged puddles and tried to keep the umbrella from blowing inside out. In the meantime the rain poured down, bucketed down, incessant. We drove in and out of enormous puddles, straining to see through the condensation that fogs the windows of all taxis in the rain.
This morning, I woke to soft rain, a silver whisper on the pane. I reluctantly put my bare feet on the icy tiles that make up Moroccan floors. When I opened the front door to send the kids off to school, my breath fogged out around me. Our shower is, literally, scalding hot, with the fun addition that when you turn on the cold water, the hot water heater shuts off, so you can alternate scalding/freezing/scalding/freezing. Or you can take a bath. We turned on our space heater, huddled round, gratefully drank hot coffee. We’re keeping warm here in Africa, but it’s a lot harder than I thought it would be.
This post is an entry for Scribbit’s December Write-Away contest. I found the topic fit right in with what I’d been thinking about anyway.
Yesterday was blustery, a cold grey day. The wind whipped rust-coloured leaves round our ears. All day clouds scuttered in front of the sun, and we could see a storm coming.
What do you mean, yesterday was Halloween? Well, maybe where you live. I did make pumpkin cookies.
We woke up cold and stressed. We rented this furnished apartment from a friend of a friend with the understanding that we’d be out by November 4th, the day before the new tenants arrive. But we haven’t found our own place yet. It’s not that we haven’t been looking–we have looked as hard as we can. We have 4 rental agents working for us; we have tramped up and down the streets asking neighbourhood guards if they know of places; we have told everyone we know in hopes they’d hear of something. But all the possibilities have, one by one, shut down.
So what do you do when faced with impending homelessness?
We had to take the boys downtown to a birthday party. We dropped them off and then took Ilsa out for a fun supper. “Enjoy being an ‘only’ for one night,” we told her, and let her order what she liked off the menu of a little café offering warmth and shelter from the rain. The waitress openly adored her, kissed her cheeks and stroked her hair and brought her a big glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. (“I can’t believe I liked the juice in America,” said Ilsa. We are all happily becoming accustomed to the fresh kind. Juice oranges are less than 50 cents a pound, and we’ve bought an electric juicer)
Afterward supper, we stepped reluctantly outside and sheltered under the awning, searching oncoming traffic for a taxi. None came. The downpour slackened slightly so we started to walk to where we knew a taxi stand was, about a block away. We went right by the open doors of this patisserie. Inside was warm, bright, dry, and filled with chocolate.
I don’t want to imply that we deal with our stress by just eating pastries made of chocolate mousse over a chocolate wafer base topped with a fresh raspberry. No, we have other ways.
Fortunately the kids are on vacation for the next 11 days.
Life overseas–it’s not for the fainthearted. At least we’re never bored. Or thin.
Ilsa is having such an American summer. I think this is to make up for last summer, when we were basically moving the entire time and people, specifically Ilsa, didn’t actually have very much fun. She brought it to my attention a lot at the time. And even though I didn’t intend to make this her best! summer! ever! , it seems to be working out that way.
First, as always, we had to suffer. And you don’t know suffering until you are forced to do 3 months worth of Spanish class in 5 days while on vacation at the grandparents, with that sparkling chlorinated swimming pool just calling to you out the windows. That was a dark night of the soul, let me tell you.
But then we finished Spanish (and there was much rejoicing…YAAY!). And then we went to the zoo. And then we drove back to Oregon, and a few days later, there was Jr Hi sports camp.
Ilsa is not what you might call a sporty girl. She thinks soccer is boring, and volleyball is hard. (She’s also 4’3”) I had asked her if she wanted to go and she said no, so I had decided to just send the boys. This is a low key sports camp; 3 hours a day, 4 different sports, ending with a huge water fight on the last day. She wasn’t interested until she found out that Amy was going, then we couldn’t keep her away.
This week, it’s Art Camp. Again, this is pretty low-key; a friend of ours is doing it. “Ilsa has to come; she’s the kid that’s most excited about it,” Lisa told us. So off she goes every morning, coming home with canvases and clay fairies (she’s in a fairy phase) and mosaics and all sorts of things.
Next week, it’s summer camp–swimming and horses and cabins of 6 giggling girls and one giggling counselor and (hopefully) leather crafts. Cuz nothing says “You’re having a great American summer!” like pounding a flower into a leather circle and calling it a coaster.
However, once these camps are over, I expect the whining to start. You all know it. “Mo-om, I’m bored,” they say. One summer, in Mauritania, I had prepared a lecture that I could deliver at the drop of a whine–super fast, rattling it off, a fairly typical “this house is full of books and toys and computer games and you have so much more than those around you blah blah blah” This works great on kids, let me tell you. They inevitably responded with, “Oh thank you for correcting our thinking, Mum, you’re so right!” And then they would skip happily off to build imaginative forts out of household objects and do science experiments. Of course they cleaned up after themselves.
In real life, they did have a bit of a point. Mauritanian summers are hot, and dusty, and boring—all their friends have left, sometimes the electricity goes out, it’s too hot to play outside till about 5. I was bored myself. But I still hate the whine.
This summer, I have a new weapon in my arsenal. We got copies of the Pocket Editions of the Dangerous Books…The Pocket Daring Book for Girls: Things to Do
Most of the content of the books are also in the large versions, so you might wonder “why bother?” However, the smaller book is much more portable and travel friendly, and it does include new things as well. Thanks to this book, we have paper hats and airplanes all over the house, slingshots have been attempted, and secret inks sprout like mushrooms. I’m thankful that so far, no one has tried their own zip line or home made geyser, but I’m fairly certain it’s only thanks to a lack of materials. There are even instructions about how to fry an egg on the sidewalk and how to make your own stink bomb. Should be an interesting summer.
Seriously, I love these books. They are so fun! Almost as much fun as crawling into bed, exhausted, and finding my little active, engaged, imaginative monkeys have short-sheeted it (instructions also in the book).
When I was about 8, I remember making a list of “signs of spring” on a drive I took with my parents. I remember this because they were highly amused at my list, which in addition to items like pussywillows and crocuses, included a dead skunk. I don’t know why I thought this was a sign of spring and they didn’t either, but it passed into family lore.
Early spring has arrived here in the NW. The weather is gorgeous–the sun is actually warm, and the wind cool and clear. Everyone is outside as much as possible. Yesterday on my walk home from the gym, I smelled daphne’s sharp, astringent scent and saw azaleas beginning to bloom. Trees are ringed in purple and white crocuses.
Donn also took a walk yesterday. For those of you still stuck in winter, you might enjoy a little vicarious trip through Portland in late February, here.
Planet Nomad 