Portrait

year one, 2011

Growth ring

M and I are one!

...and we still don't take very good self-portraits.

To celebrate the month of our anniversary, the streamers that fluttered around the ring of witnesses at our wedding went up around our decks. That's been a fun reminder.

On the weekend of our anniversary, we took a 24-hour vacation to a refreshing mountain river, with falls and pools clear as glass.

We mark this milestone with profound gratefulness and joy. It's very humbling to hold a gift and know that it's not by some merit that you've have it.

Livingroom Life

big squash leaves make me so happy.
I promptly prepared them for breakfast- a favorite dish from Cameroon.

In the same room, on the floor, is this.

Professional collaboration with a guy he grew up with who does another type of engineering.

The machine, which I've named Alvin, materializing from digital design to physical presence...in our  livingroom!

The season of gathering family has begun.
Here my newest and nearest relatives are gathered in the livingroom for a belated 1st birthday and Father's Day. 

Four generations plus dog.

June is a verb

I get it now. Each year, the sudden lurch into high activity rather surprises me, as the year turns Spring into Summer. Perhaps it's the heat or the furious plant growth or the summer solstice that alters our pace, I don't know. But today it dawned on me, something which I never learned in English class: that June is a verb. That's what we've been doing these last few weeks: Juning!


Homestead reports:
H&M- living it up

Guest room- enjoying lots of company

Tomatoes- fattening
Cucumbers- climbing, first one was delicious
Cosmos and Lupines- coming!
Canoes- dripping
Mercedes- drinking gallons and gallons of inky fluids, trying not to get dehydrated.

Look about you

This is the name of a clever play by Anonymous, written in the 1500's. M&I enjoyed a production of it at a local theatre earlier this year. If nothing else though, I like its advice.

When I was looking about me today, there were two very exciting sightings:

This explains the morning carpentry sounds outside our bathroom window:

I learned that they are cardinal eggs! Here is the Mama (picture take through a screen):

And then at lunch on the back deck, M remarked on a blue- feathered bird at the edge of the wheat field. I gasped when I looked through our scope:

An Indigo Bunting! I've always heard of but have never spotted one of these dazzling and slightly frumpy birds. Now in our own back yard.

Oh, why not

It was a week a bit low on the social meter, and hours upon hours of design work for M. So, despite our weariness when the bell rang on Friday, we jumped in the car...and our weekend kind of exploded. Only a few events had the camera along.

Drive up and join friends and cousins for dinner and singing, home later than planned? Oh why not.
Why not spend the next day in old stomping grounds, hours south of here, celebrating graduation with family.

Why not drive home that same night so we can, the next morn, attend worship in our homes with small group and then all troop in to the all-church potluck.
Oh, what the heck, why not strap two canoes on the car and hit the lake with friends who invited last minute?

Sure, why not book it home in time to go kayaking with a new local friend?

And why not celebrate the holiday with family and delicious homemade feast on a hill in the country?

All told, we logged over 11 hrs in road travel, Friday to Monday. But in the end, why not? We burn this fuel out of a desire for relationships, and trying to make the best of the here and now. (Don't be fooled, this chipper perspective is not always part of it.)

Perhaps one could paint our life in splats and splotches on a broad-stroke cucumber-green background. This might represent the lurches and halts and us learning to keep an underlying even-keel. The painting of course is also impacted by where the canvas is mounted and how the two of us hold the brushes.

Ten for Ten

We marked ten months together this week. So here are 10 photos of ordinary life around here.

17 May: Ten months of marriage. We're in a cloud on top of the blue ridge parkway.
We went up with M's aunt and cousins to see if we could get up through the heavy weather system
and look out over the valley.  Obviously didn't get quite high enough. 

You never know what will be arriving next at our house these days, as the inventor is at work...

What, pray tell, is that? 

Okay, so they sent slightly more foam than was needed, to the tune of 90lbs.

What's not to love?

I have taken this break between semesters to "unpack".
Moving out of cardboard boxes and reading old journals,  letters, and photos has been a symbolic and emotional passage.
Here is my creativity supplies in their new home. Sister M, fear not, my "Do Box" is still in there!

One evening, I sorted and played through old sheet music from years ago.
Ripped the skin off my thumb with an ol' glissando.
(anyone remember that "Joshua Fit the Battle.."?). It was really fun.

The wild strawberries flushed ripe all of a sudden on Saturday.
They've got runners all through the orchard and seem to survive the mowing.

I planted cucumbers and purple beans at the base of this bamboo shade trellis that I made,
at the unprotected end of the house.  While jabbing the poles into the ground,
a little splash of water made mud through which the tip could deepen the hole.
This was a trick M saw in Bangladesh as a kid. 

Sweet pea update.