Skipping Town

We're still here, still surviving--thriving--with only a dorm fridge and a cooler, and though there has been more rain and lightning, our power has stayed on. It's been another few days of quiet and relaxation. We've spent most of our time at the pond, the girls' favorite spot: feeding fish, spotting tadpoles and salamanders, fishing with long sticks for great hunks of algae, tempting frogs with long grass stalks to jump and chomp. Today, as a kind of blessing or omen, we spotted the pond's fabled snapping turtle. We were all on the dock, tossing bits of bread in to entice the fish, when suddenly something larger, much larger, emerged from the deep. It was beautiful and terrifying, and it hovered there at the surface, its long, wrinkled legs treading water, and watched us. Then it swam serenely away, under the algae leaves. It surfaced one more time while we played, and then it was gone. Neither Andrew nor I really believed the turtle was real. We've heard a...

Andrew, Lucia, and I were alone for our final three days in New Hampshire, and Andrew and I set about indulging in some of the country luxuries that make leaving Holdenfield (we’re still trying to come up with an affectionate/irritating name for the property) so difficult. For the second summer in a row, Andrew bought and cooked a live lobster, which he then turned into amazing lobster rolls. We’d gone out to dinner in Hanover for a date night a few days prior while his parents stayed home with the sleeping baby, but the place where we always have lobster rolls had, for some reason, removed them from the menu. So we made them ourselves, and they were delicious. We ate them by candlelight. We could do this in New York, but it just wouldn’t be the same. We also bought a fire pit and set it up behind the house, where we sit to look out over the fields and sunset. Saturday night we had a dinner of fruit, olives, crackers, and cheese, then built a fire and made s’mores. We sat and talked in...

I’ve been behind in my blogging because we spent the past nine days in New Hampshire, and though the days of being internet- and cell-free are over, I choose to limit my computer time as much as possible to enhance the off-the-grid feeling I savor there. And there was much to savor: Stars There are always incredible stars. On the clearest nights the Milky Way is visible from the front yard; we saw that, and a bright shooting star, and, thanks to the telescope a family friend had brought, Saturn and its rings. The Big Dipper tilts just over the top of a tree behind the house. Stones Hands-down, Lucia’s favorite activity all week was collecting stones in her bucket, which she (and, consequently, Andrew and I) calls a “bubbik.” The road past the house is unpaved, awash in tantalizing gravel; and the drive up to the house, which is just a worn path in the grass, also has its share of stones. Each morning, barefoot Lucia would traipse down to the road and spend a long, long creating her col...