Where in the World?

Chers Amis,

Without pulling out the dusty atlas or googling - where is Bhutan? Surinam? What is the capital of Montana? Find the Marianna Trench. Ha! Be honest, you got at least one wrong! Americans are, as a group, terrible at geography. My college roommate thought Hawaii was east of Florida. The gravity of this sin of geographic omission is compounded by the fact we lived IN Florida at the time and thus, she should have had some concept of where she was. Last spring my kids all watched the National Geographic Bee and were entranced by the competition. Between rounds, the producers cut away to "man on the street" segments where reporters walked on the National Mall in Washington D.C. and asked tourists - all American - basic geography questions. Questions like, "China is located on what continent?" and "In what state is Yellowstone National Park located?" flummoxed the passerbys as we shouted the correct answers at the screen. It was painful. Now, in all honesty (and mixed metaphors), I am not the sharpest geo crayon in the box. I was stymied by Surinam. Here is a great website to test and increase your geographic knowledge with interactive quizzes and maps. Try it, but be prepared to be humbled!
-- Marjorie

Time for a Fungi Hunt!

Chers Amis,

We are still on a mushroom hunt chez nous - which is good because they are everywhere and provide wholesome - if not edible - entertainment. Did I mention that they are free? Always a plus. If clusters of yellow, tan and white are emerging under trees and compost piles around our mill, they are probably at your house too. A nature walk is in order. That's right, now, if it is dark then tomorrow. Really. Bring a magnifying glass, a notebook, a piece of wax or newspaper, and a metric ruler if possible. Now walk around the woody areas of your property, poke around under ferns or underbrush, look on old logs and the compost, flower pots and herb gardens are great and don't forget the lawn and under trees. Unless you live in a desert or Antarctica you will find at least one.

Now take a good look at the major parts, the cap, stipe/stalk and the underside or gills.
Measure the cap width, stalk height and width (in mm) and look for any distinguishing features. Is the top sticky? If you scratch it does it bruise or turn color? Does it smell like anything i.e. cucumber, almonds, fish etc. Does it have a strange shape or texture? Like jelly, slime, coral? If you decide to take it home to sketch, pull it up carefully and wrap loosely in paper paying attention to where you found it. Was it on the ground or on wood, on another mushroom? Make special note if it is under a specific kind of tree! Here is a list of features to notice:

Cap Shape bell, conical, convex, flat, knobbed, sunken
Cap Surface fibrous, grooves, scaly, smooth
Cap Colour brown, buff, cinnamon, gray, green, pink, purple, red, white, yellow
Bruises bruised, no
Odour almond, anise, creosote, fishy, foul, musty, none, pungent, spicy
Does it have gills or sponge-like pores?
Are the gills attached, descending, free, notched?
How are the gill spaced? close, crowded, distant
Gill Size broad, narrow
Gill Colour black, brown, buff, chocolate, gray, green, orange, pink, purple, red, white, yellow
What is the stalk shape? enlarging, tapering
Does it have a ring around the stalk? Does it seem to come out of an egg sac?

Take it home and make a good sketch - with color - and mark all the details. Don't forget to make a spore print. Here is a link to a nice fungi nature notebook page you can print out for younger children to ilustrate. The Audubon Field Guide to Mushrooms is excellent for identification but try finding it at Myco Key. This is a really FUN interactive fungi ID site. You click on different fungi shapes, colors, locations, and measurements and it gives you a list of possible genera ranked by probability and linked to photos and details on all the different species. It is quite neat. The girls had fun "making up" a fungus but clicking on crazy colors and configurations to see if they could find a fungus that fit their description. Try it. Mushrooms aren't like poison ivy - they don't make you itch or sick unless you EAT them, and unlike the bane of my existence, flying stinging insects, they won't land on you or swarm. They just sit there and wait to be discovered.

-- Marjorie

Magical Mycology

Chers Amis,

Caddie has gone mushroom crazy! I should preface this for those of you who don't know her, by saying that Caddie is a true naturalist and amateur biologist. Her favorite series of books is the National Auduban Field guides: Insects and Spiders, Amphibians and Reptiles and, of course, North American Mushrooms. Their bindings are broken and torn and the pages have been frayed with love. Warning - if she asks to read you a book, decline unless you have at least an hour for she will take you page by page, plate by plate through her current read. I do not exaggerate. When the humid summer heat and recent rains produced the seasons first major mushroom outbreak on our property, Caddie was enraptured. My garage has become a sorting and staging center and every free moment revolves around fungi hunting,identification, measurement, illustration, or research. In 10 minutes last nite she found a breathtaking - and life taking - Destroying Angel (Amanita bisporigera) by our shed, several giant bitter boletes pushing through the pine straw and ferns in our dry creek bed and a cluster of lemon yellow lepiota parasols opening in my rosemary. As my father used to say, "There's a fungus amongus." Or ten, or twenty . . Colored pencil boletes and russulas, stinkhorns and polypores are sprouting through the pages of her nature notebook and it is contagious. If you are interested in things mycological try Katya's Book of Mushrooms by Katya Arnold.

Even now as I sit here at the computer she has come in telling me of another bolete find in the woods that I must come see. So I do, Kodak Easy Share in hand. Some mothers and daughters share hobbies like sewing or scrapbooking. Caddie and I share mushrooms. They are beautiful and delicate and, like flowers and childhood, they bloom and fade and are gone. I don't want to miss a single stalk or second.
--Marjorie

Pirates and Storms!

"Heigh, my hearts! cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare! Take in the topsail. Tend to the master's whistle. Blow, till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!"

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Chers Amis,

Prepare to be boarded, landlubbers! There be pirates afoot! Batten down the hatches, the wind doth howl! Pirates and storms have blown through these parts this last week and I aafearded our fair schooner has borne the brunt of the wild wind and savage strikes. All things electronic: DSL modems, televisions, satellite systems, and automatic garage door openers have perished. Alas, we found ourselves adrift in the dial-up dark ages. Be careful what you pray for, Mates!
Last Friday our back deck was overrun with scalawags as our Literature Club had its first formal meeting of the year to discuss Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. We had gotten together in July to see the Georgia Shakespeare Company's performance of the classic. The sponsor - Target - gave each child a pirate hat and eye-patch to take home. These were well displayed Friday accented by assorted belts, handkerchiefs, golden earrings, cutlasses and other buccaneer gear. This is our third year in this Literature Club and is has become a centerpiece of our home schooling year. We read one book a month and meet to discuss it and share whatever "rabbit trails" we have followed. This month Caddie wrote a long story about how a young stowaway survived being marooned on Blackbeard Island and Scarlett wrote a plaintive message in a bottle from a castaway seeking help. Pippin even narrated a great review of the book that he illustrated in swashbuckling fashion. During the meeting, the girls learned to use a compass to navigate a treasure hunt for pirate booty, use map coordinates for a pirate version of "Battleship", and discussed literary terms. It was great fun! Our next book is a biography of Helen Keller which should entail some really interesting and hands on activities.
Following through on the pirate/island/ship wreak/storm theme chez nous, we started reading the Tempest by Shakespeare. First, we read a portion of the story form to familiarize the girls (and Pippin) with the plot and characters, then we read the same section from the play with exaggerated voices and gestures.

" I have suffered With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish'd." Miranda, Act I, The Tempest

We may be Tempest tossed, but it has been an adventure and luckily the Direct TV repair man came yesterday. Now, if only that garage door were working . . .

-- Marjorie

Let the learning Begin!

School has official started! Yeah! It will be more of a challenge this year as Pippin, my kindergarten has joined the fold and as you might have guessed from his moniker, he is a mischievous fellow full of spunk and kisses. He also looks just like his daddy so he gets away with more than the ought! So now we are four at school - Caddie is in 4th, Scarlett in 3rd and now Pippin as well. I've started another blog to record purely school happenings at the laboratory of the mind. I don't know if I will merge them or not. This blog thing is still very new to me but I enjoy the quiet space to record what is happening in our little corner. I hope all of you are doing well and that the sweet smell of fresh pencils fill the air at your mill.

-- Marjorie

Poetry Friday

Chers Amis,

Fridays are for poetry. It is when we start to take off the practical suit of everyday reponsibilities and losen the belt of the 5-day work week, unbutton our imaginations and take a deep draught of peace and for a few moments abandon the world of prose. I enjoy Billy Collins (most of the time) because he is relaxed and wants the reader to experience the joy of poetry, not to "tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means. " -- Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry. I like this poem because it talks about the joy we can find in our now, our present moment, our ordinary nights and days. I would love to know what poetry you like and why.

-- Marjorie

I Ask You

What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside--
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles--
each a different height--
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt--
frog at the edge of a pond--
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.

Billy Collins

Closeness to God

Chers Amis,
"God is closer to you than you are to yourself, " someone told me without explanation a few weeks ago. I puzzled over this for a long time. What does this mean? How is this so? A few straggling ideas came to the troubled surface of my mind. . . We are a construct of atoms, animated by a soul, propelled by electrochemical impulses, reacting to our environment, other objects and beings within the same grid of space and time. God is the space and the time. He is the creator, owner, lender of all matter. He is the designer of the particles and the space between them, the force that sets them in motion, the time we wander through, the air we breathe, the spark within us, our beginning and our end, our dust and our consummation, our life lived or wasted, the energy and its transfer. He is our chemistry, physics, art, beauty, decay, rebirth, the Alpha and the Omega. I am only a sensor, an eye, an ear, given a second to see, glimpse and record a bit of this greatness. I am only a note, a pause, a cosmic firefly and yet, he calls me, "Sing with me. Dance with me. Remain in me always." How can I not for in him, we live and breathe and have our being whether or not we understand the mystery.
-- Marjorie

My Love Hate Relationship with Insects

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell

Chers Amis,
Flying insects and I have a troubled past based largely on irrational fear and poor eyesight. Books, I have always loved. They don't move. They don't sting. However, as a child the mere whisper of buzzing would send me hurtling in the opposite, and often hazardous, direction. There is a tale repeatedly told around our holiday table of how while fleeing a solitary yellow jacket, I collided full force - face first - into an enormous pine tree, much to the amusement of those present. God, having a sublime sense of humor, graced me with a daughter who adores creatures of every stripe and risk level. Caddie is like a zephyr or a rainbow - impossible to catch and bind within the walls of any building. She has a special affection for insects which, like a kitten, she brings me to admire and identify. This has been the source of my salvation for it requires a book! Suddenly the beast is tamed and I have come to enjoy identifying all the flora and fauna that surround mon moulin. Even those that sting! P.S. This is a Giant Resin Bee (Megachile scupturalis) that we found nesting on our deck. Only the females sting - if you contain them in your hand. A good bee.

Letters from My Mill

Chers Amis,
Enfin, a quiet moment to sit down and tell you about the sweet happenings at my moulin - my mill. Why all the talk of mills you ask? Well, it started with a desire to clean up a cluttered corner and make room for a new school year's books. I only meant to pack up all those dusty tomes that I couldn't bear to throw away but a few called to me from the top shelf like friends from the past whose paths no longer intersect your own. Voices from far away - Verlaine, Baudelaire, Pagnol. Most lofty and reserved, some angry and cynical. But one clear voice caught my attention, Alphonse Daudet's "Lettre de mon Moulin." It is a collection of stories and anectdotes about the people and places he encountered while living in the first floor of a old mill in Provence. So happy, was he in this place, this "Little corner, perfumed and warm, a thousand miles from newspapers, cabs, smog! . . . And all the nice things around me." From there he wrote, his door wide open to the sunlight. I could smell the honeyed hills and smiled, taking the bouquin down for a long conversation to catch up on all the news. It reminded me that while my home isn't really an old mill set up on the lavender scented hills of Provence with a lovely wood of pines sparkling in the sun, it is my simple corner of goodness and joy. Welcome to mon moulin.