Town and Country

  Of the last five weeks of school only ONE has been a full week. The other four?  Truncated by...

First day/half day

Labor Day

Rosh Hashanah

Yom Kippur

It is one of those Chicago North Shore things that surprises me every fall. Public Schools are closed for Jewish holidays.  This four day week could become a nice habit.  I love having a day during the week to play with my girls, explore Chicago, or go on an adventure.  It makes me wish we could take a day every week to do our own hands on education.  Who knows, maybe we could?

Last Monday was Rosh Hashanah.  We did the town.  The girls and I spent the whole day in the city mostly exploring The Field Museum which is Chicago's Museum of Natural History (and home to the most complete TRex in the world!).  I didn't take many pictures.  Think rocks, mummies, giant sloths, wooly mammoths, stuffed mammals brought to Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, and dinosaurs, dinosaurs, dinosaurs.

Today, in what the girls declared "needs to be our Yom Kippur tradition"

we did the country.  We drove an hour North to the Illinois-Wisconsin state line to a beautiful apple orchard that was lush with ripe apples.  This farm was not an overpriced prepackaged "experience of the country" for city people (no hayrides, no corn maze, no cotton candy, no frills).  With a humble sign and a few retirees handing out bags and collecting cash this orchard was delightfully simple.

Rynn climbed trees.

Eleanor ate multiple apples trying to make her two very loose front teeth fall out.

Grace's New Home

Tomorrow morning

at 9:30 

our church will gather for worship at our new church home!

Whitefoot

"She lived at the center of the world.  This is one of the things every mouse knows.  Wherever she was, she was at the center of the world.  That one lives at the center of the world is the world's profoundest thought. So firmly was this thought set in Whitefoot's mind that she did not need to think it. Like humans, she lived in the little world of what she knew, for there was no other world for her to live in. But she lived at the center of her world always, and of this she had no doubt."
 -Wendell Berry, Whitefoot, A Story from the Center of the World

Did you know Wendell Berry has a children's book?  It is a little book, a mere 59 pages, with small sketches of a little mouse interspersed throughout the pages.  The plot is simple- a little mouse builds a home in a place she thinks is safe for her children.  One night, in a strong storm, she is swept up into a mighty flood that sweeps away her home and Whitefoot herself into its cataract of open water.  Most of the story is the description of her survival, but it is also the story of her transformation.

"She changed from a small, huddled animal who might as well have been asleep to an animal altogether awake."

As the flood subsides she is dropped into a world previously unknown to her. This new place becomes her new "center of the world" for that is where she is.  Berry concludes his simple but profound tale with these words,

"At the center of the world, on the silted and soiled floor of the woods, among the shadows of the moony night, she went about her still-unfinished task of staying alive."

This month marks five years since I began this blog.  Five years of documenting life as I have seen it from inside this little, increasingly aging, body that is Caroline.  My center of the world has moved from Portland to the North Shore of Chicago and three different houses/apartments in those fives years. Like Berry's little Whitefoot, my viewpoint is small.  I see the world through my circumstances, and only in rare moments do I have the courage or self forgetfulness to see it through another's.  Most of the time I live caught up in my own perceived "center of the world," for that is where I am, going about my "still-unfinished task of staying alive."

I've been contemplating putting this blog to rest. In many ways it seems to have lived its course.  I don't feel as motivated to write as I used to. In the deluge of information that increasingly absorbs all of us, I have wondered at the point of continuing to splay our life in type and picture on the internet.  There has been so much going on in our lives in the past five months about which I cannot speak publicly that any creative energy for those things about which I can speak has been depleted.

The Lake

This afternoon I did what I do almost every day.

I walked to the lake.

 Lake Michigan has the power

to calm

to invigorate

to cheer.

It is only a few blocks from our apartment.

Today it looked like the Atlantic Ocean.

Some kite surfers thought so too...

I caught this guy with my phone...

Last weekend the remnants of hurricane Isaac said goodnight 

in an magnificent lakeside sunset.

(photo courtesy of a church friend)

And not long from now...
it will look like this!

Our First winter 2010-11