It’s the first and easiest question to ask an acquaintance this time of year: How is your summer going? Around these parts it seems especially on the tip of everyone’s tongue because our summer (unlike, apparently, the poor rest of the country’s) has only just arrived. The sun and (semi) warmth are very welcome visitors after this incredibly rainy year, and you can see the lift they put in everyone’s step.

But that does not necessarily make it an easy question to answer. A good friend asked me how our summer was going just last night, and I had to pause—what have we been doing this summer? It feels like a blur of workdays and weekends, unfinished projects and unmet goals, and good intentions to hang out with friends that have not yet come to fruition. The sad truth is that this, my first summer not a) facing another year of school in the fall or b) planning a wedding, feels… just like the rest of the year.

When I was a kid, summers were about building imaginary trains out of lawn chairs in the backyard and riding around the neighborhood on my bike. In middleschool and highschool, they were about catching up on unfinished schoolwork and tagging along with friends to creeks and swimming holes. In college, summers meant a whole variety of things (including shooting weddings, for a couple of those years) that all amounted to counting the days until we started classes again.

Now, I’m having to learn a new year-rhythm: Working for five days (or sometimes more) and then resting (theoretically) for two. Counting the seasons not by school terms but by changes in weather and scenery and produce available at the farmer’s market. Enjoying summer not as a break from responsibility but as an infusion of warmth and encouragement to keep going with the responsibilities that won’t let up as the year goes on.

If I make this sounds gloomy, I don’t mean to. It’s true that in some ways this new rhythm is stymieing to the projects I would like to work on and the friends I would like to spend time with, but in others it is a great relief from the pressure of impending school deadlines. And it it is certainly not without its moments of levity or joy, or its opportunities to create (even though every weekend feels nine times too small to fit in everything I would like to). Here are some of the things besides working that Gil and I have been up to this summer:

• Reading books. Gil, for his thesis, has been reading many books on the structure of story, especially those by David Mamet, Joseph Campbell, and Owen Barfield. I have been taking a bit of a break from the heavy-duty nutrition literature I had been reading, instead currently reading The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver and The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett. (And we’ve both been reading the plentiful supply of superhero graphic novels Gil keeps flowing through our house from the library. Just in case you forgot we were nerds.)
• Watching movies. In keeping with Gil’s reading, we went on a David Mamet movie kick early this summer. His movies have been hit and miss with us. I would most highly recommend The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main. Gil would most highly recommend Redbelt, because he is a martial artist. Our latest movie kick is somewhat less cultured but a whole lot of fun: Marvel superhero movies. We’ve watched Thor, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2. Now we just need to see Captain America and we’ll be all set for The Avengers next year.
• Cozying our cottage. As part of our recovery (thank goodness) from our latest mold-tastrophe, I have been getting, one by one, to those projects that I just kept putting off—purging and organizing our closets, sorting through years-old school binders and chucking most of the contents, and finally setting up my creative corner. I have also, with the help of my dad, been renovating a little bookcase I found at St. Vinny’s earlier this year. I hope to have photos of it soon.
• We’ve also both been working on personal projects; trying to write more, draw more, exercise more, etc. And I have been mulling and mulling over my thoughts about nutrition as all the reading and talking about it I have done meet the day-to-day act of actually eating food. It is a complex and (I think) important topic, and as soon as I can figure out in what form to do so, I hope to share some of the “mulling” I have done.

So… that is our summer thus far. I hope that whatever “season” of life you are in, you are finding ways to enjoy this summer too.

(Unless you live in the southern hemisphere. In which case, well… I hope you enjoy summer when you get to it.)

One year ago last Saturday, in the beautiful wilderness of Mt. Pisgah, Gil and I were married:

Our first year has been filled with work and school and “fun” adventures like moving and fighting mold (and our fair share of skirmishes, I’ll be honest), but all in all the vast majority of the problems we’ve dealt with this year have come from outside our relationship and not from within it—for which I am very thankful. I would marry him over again in a heartbeat.

Last weekend, we used our camping supplies (many of which were wedding gifts) to camp out on property belonging to some very gracious friends of ours. So on the morning of our anniversary, we were in the forest once again:

Here are our silly camping faces:

Campfire coffee with raw milk (YUM):

A campfire cutie:

We came home Saturday and spent the weekend watching movies and eating the rest of our S’more fixings. Oh, and ordering a Dehumidifier, which is currently sitting in our house doing its duty. (It filled its full 30 pints on our first day using it! Yikes. But it makes me glad we have it.)

And, finally… no, I didn’t quite finish my thank-you notes on time. I am deciding to forgive myself for this. I hope, if you are one of the (gulp) many who will hopefully be receiving your thank-you notes in the next week or two, that you will forgive me too.

Already I neglect my blog-posting schedule. Maybe you didn’t realize I had a schedule, but I do, and I’ve been neglecting it. It is just hard to know what to post when everything going through your head is a hissing, snarling, complaint about your “terrible life.” (As if.) You know the saying: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. So I haven’t been.

It is also hard to write a blog post when all of your spare moments are spent trying to bring some semblance of order back to your upturned house.

Let me explain. Everything needs attention in order to thrive—even the backs of closets and the bottoms of mattresses—and MOLD has become the character that sneaks into my life and seems to punish me for my inattention to such details.

It began in our first apartment, which we moved into last summer. I don’t remember when exactly we found and fought the first outbreaks of mold in that apartment, but afterward we tried to keep the air circulating and dry—especially in the bathroom. But it only got worse, culminating, in January, with the discovery of copious mold on the wall behind our bed, covering the boards of our bed frame, and on the bottom of our mattress. This explained why Gil, with his allergies, was starting to wheeze—and it was the reason we beat a hasty retreat from that apartment, carefully discarding or cleaning any of our moldy items, and landed instead in our adorable “cottage in the woods.”

Imagine our dismay, when, a few weeks into living here, we found that my Birkenstocks had molded in the closet. Had molded in the closet—or were moldy when we brought them with us? Either is possible, though the second is more likely. In any case, I had to throw them away and pray they hadn’t spread to anything else.

Long story short, we found mold on a few other items before we finally checked under our mattress and found that the mold had re-grown right where we killed it. So we did what we should have done before: we hauled our memory-foam mattress (a wedding gift from my parents) to the dump. And now we’re sleeping on an old mattress of my parents’ that they happened to have around—currently on our living room floor, while we finish cleaning and airing out the bedroom.

Now, I realize that on the scale of possible life catastrophes, this whole thing really only registers on the side of “slight nuisance.” But the fact is that while we’re here in the thick of it, it’s making me want to tear my hair out, scream, and hide under my covers until it all goes away. (Because I am still five years old.) Every time I come home from work and look at the contents of closets and shelves that have been shaken out across the floor, I feel stress rise inside me like a tsunami. Everyday chores (which I have a hard enough time with, as you know) still need to be taken care of, but I can hardly walk two steps without tripping over a laundry basket or pile of books: my nightmare situation. Couple that with the niggling fear that even after we sort this all out and put everything away we will somehow have missed some mold or that it will come back, and this is all just a recipe for headaches.

But.

Enough complaining—even in the midst of this frustrating mess, I can see (if I look very carefully) that it is in many ways a blessing. I thought about this as I was vinegar-and-tea-tree-oil-mopping  the bedroom floor the other night. Let’s start with little things: I have been wanting to finish cleaning and organizing our house for ages, and now it’s being forced to the forefront of my attention. Also, now I don’t have to worry about the mattress all the time anymore.

But there are bigger things, too: this is all a reminder, as Dad pointed out to me, of why it is good that our treasures are not on this earth. On this earth, thieves, or rust, or moths, or mold can and will take even our most precious possessions away. Dealing with all this can’t help but loosen my hold on all of our stuff; especially when I have to get rid of things I never would have imagined throwing away. And that perspective, I think, is a real blessing.

Also, I just have to say that my husband has been incredibly helpful with this whole process. In addition to helping with all the tasks that need to be done, he has been ever the anchor keeping me from running around squawking and flapping my arms. It is a blessing to have such a partner, and it is a blessing to be reminded what a blessing that is.

———

P.S. Any advice you have for dealing with mold would be greatly appreciated. What I have gleaned so far, from articles like this one: a) don’t use bleach, because it makes mold come back quicker, b) mold needs moisture to grow, so focus on keeping things DRY and well-ventilated, and c) mold spores are everywhere in the air, so don’t even think about trying to totally remove them from your space. Just focus on making it so there’s nowhere for them to grow.

Does anyone have anything to add to this? Specifically, do you have any advice for how to keep difficult areas, like the bathtub and shower curtain liner, dry? Thank you in advance.

The day after I took this photo, I awoke to a crash from the kitchen and a sad-faced husband who nodded when I asked, “Did you just break something I love?”

Sometimes my focus becomes incredibly narrow and negative, and the morning of the shattered bird mug preceded a number of days in which that was the case. And ugly days they were, too: overlooking blessings, and balking and moaning about insignificant problems, and staring at my laundry for hours before actually doing it kind of days.

I’m sure you don’t ever have days like that.

(Please tell me you sometimes have days like that.)

I always wonder what precipitates these ugly moods. I’ve been doing a lot of learning and thinking about nutrition lately (expect more on that topic in the future), and I can’t help but think that my rule-breaking dips into refined sugars over the past weeks have had something to do with it—but whatever the cause, no-good rotten mood days are a forceful reminder that I am Very Human.

On the day I took that photo of the bird mugs, we had a special little visitor.

His name is Ronan, and Gil and I had great fun watching him for a few hours while his mama took a much deserved break.

Ronan was such a champ; he never fussed a bit, even though he didn’t know us very well, and he was so curious about everything in our house. (Which is apparently not very “child-proof”; who knew our spice jars were at perfect baby-grabbing height?) And not to put too much weight on nutrition (if that is possible), but Ronan’s mom Sara is on a very similar nutritional wavelength to ours, and I couldn’t help wondering if that had something to do with Ronan’s great behavior. OR he could just be a good-natured little dude. Or maybe a little of both.

(Ronan and Gil were buds. I’m starting to amass quite a collection of photos of my husband with other people’s babies.)

In any case, whether because I was over-sugared or just because I’m a broken human being, our delightful visit with Ronan did not keep me from throwing myself headlong into a hissy fit for the next few days. And that’s life. It is never as idyllic as photos of coffee mugs with steam coiling out of them make it look like it should be. And the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, even things as small and silly as one of your favorite bird mugs. And good days will usually follow bad ones. And so they have.

(On a related note: I can’t help but feel slightly convicted by this video. I’m a product of my times, apparently, but I do love designs with birds on them.)

Hello, friend. It’s been a long while. I hope it will be a long while again before I type those words another time. It turns out I needed a breather from the internet, a breather which imposed itself when problems with our apartment (yes, the one I was finally settling into–isn’t that the way of things) incited us to move out in February. What we moved into I like to describe as our “cottage in the woods.” The truth is only slightly less romantic: no, we’re not truly in the woods, but we are renting what used to be the barn on the three acres which remain of an old, formerly expansive farm. And the view out our windows is trees and green (almost) as far as the eye can see. I love it. Oh, and one more thing–it doesn’t have the internet. Hence the imposed breather.

It’s amazing how many things you find to do when you don’t have the internet. Not that I have time on my hands all that often–I do work 40 hours a week, like a “normal person,” now. But when I do have time at home to myself, instead of imbibing from the spout of the web, I have to turn to things like books, or DVDs, or, God forbid, actually doing things. Like chores, or writing, or cooking, or gardening, or art. That’s when it gets really scary, and really wonderful, and really worth not being able to get online.

But the more settled I’ve gotten into our new routine at our new place, the more I’ve begun to feel the pull of this blog again. For better or worse, I can’t seem to kill it completely, so I’ve decided to try once more to breathe life into it instead. The problems I always run into, and doubtless will run into again are:

1. The fact that blogging on a regular basis is hard work.
2. Neuroses about who is or is not reading what I write and what they think about it inevitably worm their way into my brain and tell me it would be much safer to just not write anything.
3. Sometimes I just hate computers and don’t want anything to do with them.

The last one is the easiest to deal with–I already tend to draft on paper, so as long as I can make a regular practice of doing that, I should be able to minimize my computer time. The second is trickier–working with those demons is a very difficult, though not impossible task. They will quiet down if you try hard enough. Which brings us to the number one problem, and the most difficult of all: blogging, like all writing, is hard work. If you want to do it regularly and well, it requires time and energy and creativity–even at times when you don’t feel like you have any of those things to spare.

So here I go. Attempting to walk the tightrope–to balance a full-time job, my personal life, and blogging. I suspect I will need your patience and forgiveness, as always. But I am looking forward to the journey.

P.S. You probably have already noticed, but I’d like to draw your attention to my new library page and the fact that I am now on Twitter.