Odds and Ends

I never found Ryan's quarter. His doctor told me to stop looking. It will come out, or it already has, and I missed it. He seems fine.

The kids got matching pajamas for Halloween. Aren't they cute? Just ignore the flash glare on the refrigerator.

For Halloween, the kids were Spiderman and Cleopatra. They looked so great! I really missed my friends this Halloween, since Halloween at our house had become something of a tradition in Spokane. Luckily, I was busy enough to not dwell on this. My aunt Betsey and grandmother came over, and we all carved pumpkins and I made some stew. It isn't really dark here until about 6:30 or 7:00, so we went out after dinner and got loads and loads of candy! The kids asked about their friends, but we still had a great time. I loved that my grandmother got to tag along with us. I hope my kids remember that for the rest of their lives.

Last weekend, my friend Heidi and her husband, Rich, invited the kids and I to join them for tidepooling at Leo Carrillo Beach, just north of Malibu. It was so much fun, and I hadn't done that since I was a teenager. We saw sea anemones, hermit crabs, starfish, and (gasp!) we all got to hold an octopus! You know, I have heard that sea anemones sting, but one of the best things about tidepooling when I was a kid was to touch a sea anemone and watch it curl up. I used to put seashells in the center of the anemones to watch them grab them, presumably to devour them. But then a minute or two later, you watch them spit the shells out. So, I tentatively touched one this time, and lo and behold they still don't sting! So I taught my kids how to touch them so they could have the experience of watching them curl up, too. Now, I would say that 10% of the time, the kids explored the tidepools, and 90% of the time they played Star Wars with Jacob and Connor on the beach, but I loved being there to watch them explore the rocky shore for the first time.

So what's the deal? Does anyone know why everyone says sea anemones sting? Is it just certain kinds? Have I just been lucky?

We had rain yesterday. The first significant rain since we've lived here. There were times it just came down in sheets, so fast that the parched ground could barely absorb it. It just makes me wonder, how does this dry land support so many people? And many days, you can see the air pollution, even in Camarillo, near the ocean. It seems that this land is stretched beyond what it can support here. And then it rains, and it cleans the air and washes the dust off of all the plants and makes the hillsides green, and you see what attracted people here in the first place. It can also be impossibly beautiful.

Look for kale and cabbage in the markets soon, it's planted everywhere here right now. First it was strawberries. Then cilantro, parsley, and onions. Now kale and cabbage. And all the citrus trees are loaded with green fruit. You can tell what's in season here by smelling the air. Recently, everywhere we went, you could smell cilantro. And in the fields, migrant workers were picking cilantro in perfect, grocery store bunches and plopping them into some big, bundling machine pulled by a tractor that gobbles them up and, I guess, stores them inside, in bundles, somewhere. I've never lived so close to so much agribusiness, and then small family farms tucked in between here and there. Farming is hard work.

I'm in the middle of Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Wow. What a poignant writer. I gain so much insight to the human psyche from reading her stories.

More soon. . .