chino house

July 7, 2008

at the Bend Public Library in Bend, Oregon

We’ve moved again. I am always a little wistful to leave a beautiful landscape even if we are exchanging it for another one just as lovely. Plus moving days are just a wee bit stressful. The packing up, the wondering where we’ll end up next. Even if we have a plan, there are always at least a few bumps (or boulders) in the road. However, mercifully sandwiched in between the twin headaches of packing up and setting up is usually a drive. This is the part I love. It is very restful for me, since I am not actually doing the driving and the kids (if by some miracle they have not had their brain drain privileges revoked) are usually buried in various forms of media, so it is quiet. Taido and I talk or just ride in silence.

Yesterday’s drive was exceptionally gorgeous, beginning in the Hood River Valley which is covered up in wineries, orchards and fresh fruit stands. We stopped at one of each before Taido had his fill of my saying, Oh can we please stop there? We tasted local wines, gobbled up cherries and the first of the season’s blueberries and we bought some fresh local sweet treats, in particular a little delectably flaky pie of which we all had a bite. There is actually a brochure called the Fruit Loop that details this area’s local produce treasures. You could spend a long time just following the loop and stopping at all the little troves. Our favorite was the Gorge White House which combined a wine tasting and a fruit stand inside of an old white farmhouse romantically situated between views of the rolling hills quilted with orchards and Mt Hood rising on its other side. Mary Polly and I had to spend a little time imagining what it would be like to live in such a spot.

After all the stopping we drove on through the hills surrounding Mt Hood, taking in the shots of the mountain like giant paintings around each bend in the road. It rises much like Mt Rainier does in Washington, seemingly out of nowhere, flanked on all sides by evergreen forests. And the Hood River bubbled along the highway, descending as we were ascending. Goodbye, sweet little Hood River, both the town with the yummiest pizza place ever and the river with all its rapids and kayaks. I hope to see you again one day!

Soon the bright green forests and orchards gave way to cattle ranches and tumbleweeds. The moisture seemed as though it were sucked completely from the air, leaving only dust and dryness. In fact, our new campsite is so dusty that the children are not allowed in the camper until they have bathed. Bathing. Yes, it is practically a foreign concept, especially to those boys, but they now have to at least rinse off. Simon bathes in one of our kitchen tubs and I am sorry that you cannot see it because now that he has stopped screaming and actually likes his little kitchen tub bath, it is the cutest thing ever!

Though I find I am not partial to layers of dust, in exchange for its annoyance, there are several new wonders to behold at our new home. The most pervasive is that it smells like Christmas.  The smell of the pines is so strong that it sort of soothes if you release yourself to it. By that I mean to say that I am trying to take deep breathes of pine instead of choking on the dust that is following Ben around like Pigpen. He seriously looks exactly like Pigpen. Ben has made sort of an art out of being messy and his gift for dirty has been mastered here in the desert climate of central Oregon. But it’s all good, because the second wonder of our new campground is solar showers. Have you ever seen the likes of it at a campground?  How fascinating is that!  We were deep inside our sleeping bags last night as the temperature dropped about 50 degrees, and at 6 when Taido got up to leave this morning I could hardly stand to poke my head out, but by 8 the sun was quickly warming everything in its path, including the water for our showers. That just amazes me I tell you.

It’s the details I love.  I know that Bend is like this amazing town with crazy amounts of cool places to discover.  I have a stack of just a few of the recommended destinations from the visitors’ center detailing waterfalls, volcanic formations, caves and I know not what that I will later choose from as I plan how we will spend our days here.  But I can tell you now the thing I will remember about our stay will be the solar showers, oooh and maybe the nice deep outdoor kitchen sinks for washing dishes.   All campgrounds should have those.

I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures following one another softly like pearls slipping off a string.

I just read this line to the children from Anne of Avonlea a while ago while as we sat on blankets in our campsite. The words describe today just perfectly. The sun is shining, but a gentle breeze has blown all day. We stayed in camp today, even Taido stayed here and studied most of the day in the camper. We have been converting Mary Polly’s bed to a table for her to draw and Taido to study, which meant I could leave Simon there for a nap after lunch. Cole also stayed back and enjoyed some much needed quiet while Ben and I followed Mary Polly on her bike through the campground. We took a path that runs over the railroad tracks and carves through a little forest down to the shore of the river where the windsurfers put in. The shore is littered with small clam shells which both Ben and Mary Polly love to collect. We are already traveling with a jar almost full of small shells and pieces of beach glass from previous days of collecting, but you can’t have too many I suppose. I sat on a piece of driftwood and closed my eyes, enjoying the rougher winds blowing on my face while I cupped my hands to hold the shells they brought to me. When my hands were full, we walked down to another part of the shore and watched a kite boarder put into the river. I shivered a little as he waded out into the cold river with a rope and waited for his buddy to release the kite tied to the end of it, which is much easier said than done. The kite was huge and seemed awkward to hold up, especially as it filled with the wind and became heavy enough to knock even a strong man down. After several tries, the kite finally flew up into the air and was quickly guided out over the river. His friend then slid the man in the water his kiteboard, which I was amazed only took one try. I’ve slid loads of water skis to people (mostly my father) in much less choppy water and I nearly always miss, making the poor skier swim with the rope wrapped around his arm to get his water ski. But one smooth shove of the board and seconds later the kite boarder was pulled up on top of the water and out into the river, moving quickly over the waves so that in just a bit, the kite that was so huge before was now just a tiny blue crescent amidst the massive backdrop of rock and mountain that rises on the opposite side of the Gorge.

Mary Polly soon took off on her bike and though I could have sat and watched the surfers all afternoon, Ben and I gathered up our shells and began to slowly make our way back along the path. We took in the yellow and orange poppies on the sides of the path. Such bright pretty little things. We checked the progress of many a blackberry bush. Last week on our walks, all the bushes were covered in white flowers, but now only a few flowers remain, tiny green berries forming in their places. I’ve promised that by Mary Polly’s birthday they’ll be just covered in blackberries. On about our thirtieth bush we discovered a few early ripened berries in an especially sunny corner, but they were very sour. As we were standing around with puckered lips, Ben said, Hey Mama! Look up there at all those red balls. I think those are cherries! And indeed, Ben had found a wild cherry tree. We could only reach five or six cherries to taste them and they were oh so sweet! It was just torture to have so many dangling above our heads out of reach. After standing and staring and jumping and grabbing for a while, we determined that we would have to climb the tree. Mary Polly had come back to find us at this point, and she was strongly urging me to figure out how to get up higher because it was just so exciting to have found a wild cherry tree! Oh how I wished for my sister at that moment! (And I wished correctly for my sister and not my husband because let me tell you that when I later tried to enlist Taido’s help in going back for a second round, he was not exactly enthusiastic about the project.) Anna would have scrambled up into the tree before I had finished tasting my first cherry, but in her absence and at Ben and Mary Polly’s begging, I gingerly stepped into the blackberry bushes surrounding the trunk of the tree and climbed as I high as I could into it. It was about this time that we realized that we had nothing to put the cherries in, so Mary Polly rode back to camp to retrieve her handy red bucket. She informed me when she came back that Cole was rereading Anne of Green Gables and he had just read the part where Anne says she thinks it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry tree when Mary Polly informed him that we had found one. Well, being in a wild cherry tree myself, I wasn’t so sure about the sleeping part but that did not lessen my enjoyment of the happy coincidence of finding myself in a scrape worthy of Anne Shirley herself.

Ben and Mary Polly ended up having to tromp all through the blackberry briars in order to reach the cherries on the branches I pulled down or to take them from my hands by the fist full. At one point I had one leg wrapped around a thick branch while I slowly leaned back on another one until I was bent almost completely in a backbend along the branch, hanging practically upside down picking cherries with my left hand from a branch I was holding down with my right. The things I will do for fresh fruit! You have no idea! We worked for probably close to an hour and brought back the bucket about half full. Slow going. But we might have picked a full bucket if you count the ones in our bellies and the ones that slipped through our fingers into the blackberry bushes.

Cole and Taido happily helped us eat our cherries, but I’m not sure they fully appreciated the great effort that getting them required. But that’s alright because even though we are all three covered in scratches, it was worth the simple delight of the novel experience for all of us. Ben said as we were walking back that today was his first time picking wild cherries to which I replied, You know what, me too!

The first afternoon we spent ih Hood River, Oregon, I was struck by how few children there were. Somehow, taking four children EVERYWHERE has made me very sensitive to how child-friendly places and people are. In another life, I would like to write a book on traveling with children because all the guidebooks I am using are for people without children, apparently. Hood River is similar to a ski town, only for windsurfers. And I think there are probably fewer children who windsurf than there are who ski. Perhaps someone can dispel my myth about windsurfing not really being a family sport, an idea largely put in place most likely by the fact that my aunt and uncle who don’t have children have been chasing the wind for as many years as I can remember. They live and work out of a Chinook that is parked in the part of the world with the with the most ideal combination of water and wind. This usually translates into Baja in the winter and the summer on the Gorge. Before I ever saw the Columbia River Gorge for myself, I heard it referred to by my uncle who was usually “headed to the Gorge” when the temperatures became unbearable in Arkansas. They are probably here right now and lest you think I am a shameful niece for having made plans to meet them, let me explain that this simply is not the way things are usually done in my dad’s family. (Of course, surely it goes without saying that these windsurfing gypsies are on my dad’s side of the family.) In fact, cell phones have sort of ruined the mystique for me about how Loibners (my maiden name) track one another down. Someone recently asked my mom how she ever did all those crazy trips with my dad before cell phones and she said that she never worried about finding him, because he always found her. When we were with him on a trip and he was taking off for his daily dose of adventure (ahem-like today…we got a text message from him on the top of Mt. Elbert this morning. All it said was “on Elbert.”), we never had to worry about where he would end up. Even without a very specific meeting place, he would find us. “I’ll meet you in Aspen,” he would say. And then there we’d be sitting in a park or a restaurant in Aspen and in he would walk, just as casual as you please. Or we would be walking through a little tourist downtown area of somewhere, say Crested Butte, and we would hear him whistle. We all knew that whistle. My brother, sister and I can still look at each other in a crowd and know we’ve heard Daddy’s whistle. For many years that is how we have known that he is nearby.

My dad comes by both his impeccable sense of direction and his tracking abilities honestly. And sometimes, these findings are a result of effort, but often they just seem to happen without explanation. Several years ago, my parents actually ran into my dad’s parents in Juneau, Alaska. Just walking down the street. My parents were on an anniversary cruise and my grandparents were backpacking up and down the coast of Alaska on the ferries, because you can ride the ferries for free if you are a senior citizen AND they have free coffee. Come on, what else do you need? After their meeting, I know my dad was forlorn to be returning to his stuffy cruise ship cabin while his parents were sleeping on a ferry deck under the stars, but he did marry my mother. And she’s certainly made her share of compromises. For a girl who was raised with a maid who came three times a week, she can certainly be a trooper. She spent seven nights in a pop up camper with me and my four children and she held her own just fine.

There are many more stories of family members on my dad’s side running into one another while on vacation. I think once my grandparents were picking berries on the side of the road in Oregon somewhere and my uncle saw them and stopped to say hello. I can’t remember the details of that one, but I swear it’s true. Also classic is the time Taido and I were sitting at our kitchen table in Seattle and he says, “That looks like your grandparents walking up our front steps!” And when I opened the door, my grandmother exclaimed, “We found you without even calling to get directions!“ Classic.

So it won’t surprise me if the next time I go into town for groceries or to do laundry, I run into my aunt and uncle. They‘ll have no trouble spotting me. I’m the only girl in town NOT wearing board shorts and a bikini top, and if that’s not enough…well there is a parade of four children behind me. Give a hollar if you see us!

I woke up for the first time this summer in Oregon this morning.  A new month in a new state.  I love a fresh beginning and I am prone to look for one wherever it can be found, so it is with a smile and a little more spring in my step that I began this fresh morning, even though it brought with it the first rain clouds I have seen in almost two weeks.

My mother and I thoroughly enjoyed one another’s company for the week Taido was in Colorado, despite the downer of the dreadful break-in.  The sun shone all week long.  Taido got us all set up in a campground with both a swimming pool and a playground before he left for Colorado, so Mother and I sat outside talking and reading while watching the children play for much of the week.  The days became so warm that I started to dig out shorts for Ben and me about halfway through the week, and that was when I realized that the two bags of clothes that I had been storing in the van (to reduce the camper clutter) had also been stolen.  Everything but my jeans, my icebreakers (of which I know own three), my warm jacket, warm socks and wool caps was taken.  Anything for warmer weather or for looking a tiny bit nicer was packed in the van safely away from the rain, but not from thieves.  Half of it I was going to send home with Mother, and I was going to keep the other half to wear to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland or on an especially sunny day.  I was sad all over again as I realized all that was gone.  Many of you will rejoice in my sadness over a certain pair of pink striped casual North Face pants that I have worn non-stop for six years.  And though you might be happy to never have to look at them again, I am quite distressed to have such a very piece of me gone.  As well as my River Market patchwork skirt and dress.  And my green wool Leadville Keens.  And much much more.  As I have compiled the list, I have been appalled really at how many clothes I owned and had with me.  When you write it all out, it just looks scandalously extravagant.  I have laughed and cried over praying and writing about being “purged.” I meant mostly to refer to being so isolated, but let’s just say that the stripping of material possessions by the thieves has certainly applied to my general sense of being purged.  And they were very obliging of the fact that it was only I and not my blessed husband who requested the purging.  None of Taido’s FOUR very nice backpacks were touched.  Of course, he had two of them with him in Colorado, but there were still two buried in tubs in the van, along with all other forms of biking and climbing gear, too much to be listed, but all protected from the purge.  Also protected, miraculously, was my purse which we found lying open on the floor on returning to the van, with visible cash and (gasp) six passports all still in tact.  Certainly a little weensy angel pulled it out from someone’s arm as he was making his escape.  Crazy.

Still, I was not made to suffer long at all.  Within a few days, I received a package at our campground (did you know you could do that???) by two day mail from my sister which contained an old laptop of my brother-in-law’s (on which I am now typing) and lots of clothes with a note attached saying that “here are some clothes for Simon’s birthday in Alison’s size.”

Oh, I just LOVE Aunt Anna, Mary Polly squealed as I was trying on the clothes in the camper and then running back and forth to the bathroom to stand on the toilet seat with the stall door open in order to see full-length in the mirror.  I now have something for warm weather and something to wear to the Shakespeare Festival.

And Mother and I determined that the robbery would not ruin our week.  They would not get the best of us.  So we lifted out from under the oppression of pouring over all the ways we could have prevented it and day tripped off here and there delighting in the glorious weather.  We went to the zoo, to one of the most beautiful outdoor food markets in the world, and to a strawberry farm where we completely lost our minds and picked 32 pounds of strawberries.  We had Mary Polly going all over the campground trying to give away berries.  We made loads of friends.  (Some campers next door to us shared some of their fresh caught salmon with us!) But even with so many given away, we still made ourselves ill on strawberries.  We finally ate the last of them yesterday at our picnic lunch after climbing Beacon Rock, an 848 ft monolith (the 2nd largest in the world) that juts out into the Columbia River and affords absolutely gorgeous views of the Gorge.
I put Mother back on a plane on Saturday.  I pulled her bags out of the back, set them on the curb and hugged her goodbye.  When I hopped up into the driver’s seat, I turned around only to be met with the tears of my children, which of course made me cry.  But we didn’t have too long to wait for our comfort.  We were back at the airport on the next day picking up Taido.  Praise God that he came back to us on that plane instead of drowning in a somewhat precarious river crossing in Colorado!  We both had many tales to tell, which we did after we broke camp and hit the road to find our new home for a week.  Riding shotgun on the open road is one of my favorite places to tell or listen to a story.  We talked all the way down I-5 but our voices were hushed as we began to drive Highway 14 and let our eyes feast on the beauty driving east along the Columbia River.  Scarcely had we finished the stories from the previous week before we began the new adventures of this one.

Hi all - this is Sarabeth posting on behalf of Alison…

Yesterday, while Alison and the kids and her mom were eating lunch, someone broke into the BMV and stole Alison’s laptop and some cameras.  They have reported everything to the police, complete with serial numbers, so hopefully - just maybe - it will be recovered.

The fortunate part of the event is that although passports and cash were also in the van, none of that was taken.  And, of course, that no one in that precious family was in danger.

Most of you know that Taido is in Colorado this week - so although Alison is okay, she is a bit shaken.

Also, sad to say, she will be without a computer for at least a week until he returns. So for all of us following the Chino camping adventure - well, we’ll just have to wait.  She’ll be back - but she wanted you to know why she’s not here for now.

Ok, another thing I love about Canada is that all products are labeled both in English and in French. It is such a small detail, but it’s like language study all day long. It takes me twice as long at the grocery store because I am reading both labels just for the novelty. I am standing in the store saying the words to myself and just marveling at the fact that there are two languages on everything. Look that says, “beurre!” Hey, that means butter in French. (I am hard up for entertainment, apparently.)

The double labeling has gotten me in to trouble a few times though, like yesterday morning when Cole was fixing bagels for everyone (so I could keep sitting in my chair reading), all of a sudden he said, There is something wrong with this cream cheese! It doesn’t taste right. I barely glanced up from my book to say something like, Too bad. It’s Canadian cream cheese. It was all they had at the store. You’re just going to have to flex. Be grateful you have something to eat, etc. To which he threw down the knife, passed his bagel to Simon and marched out saying, I was REALLY looking forward to those bagels this morning. I responded with all kinds of grace again about just being grateful for having something to eat at all and about the 40000+ people who will DIE today because they don’t have enough to eat so I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ANY MORE ABOUT IT!! DO YOU HEAR ME?? Not to mention that he was beginning to poison all the other children’s minds about the Canadian cream cheese that they had not even yet tasted. I never got up from my seat though. I just kept reading. Then, LATER, as I was cleaning up breakfast and putting away the cream cheese, I realized that the problem was not that the cream cheese was Canadian nor that it was organic. It was garden vegetable. Apparently, in reading the French label, I had just been so enchanted with the word “jardin” that I had neglected to notice that the cream cheese was not the usual plain variety that my kids are used to eating. Oh well. I do so love the way the word garden sounds in French. Tant pis about breakfast!

23		24		25		26		27
	Monday		Tuesday		Wednesday		Thursday		Friday
	Few Showers High 63°F Low 53°F Precip. 30 %		Few Showers High 75°F Low 54°F Precip. 30 %		Showers High 66°F Low 56°F Precip. 40 %		Showers High 67°F Low 52°F Precip. 60 %		Showers High 62°F Low 51°F Precip. 60 %

Things are really looking great for our return to the pop up. I’m psyching myself up for the rockin’ good time that is being hunkered down in a pop up camper with four children. We’ll probably finish like seventeen books.

Just don’t anyone tell my mama about the weather. She’s spending next week with me while my husband leaves us to go climb mountains in Colorado with teenagers.

My mama gets cold when the weather dips below like 80 degrees F. So this should be good.

Ok, I’m pretty sure Canada didn’t like invent rhubarb. In fact it isn’t even indigenous to North America, strangely enough, but Canada is where I have been lovingly introduced to this enticing vegetable, so I’m counting it as one of the things I love about Canada. Taido and I had this strawberry-rhubarb pie experience on Granville Island a few weeks ago that I have since been trying to repeat. But without actually going to Granville Island, not that I don’t want to go back. I do. I do. But it is a headache of a bus ride with all the crazies and so I’ve been settling for substitutes that haven’t been quite as good, but that do have all the children singing the praises of this red stalky vegetable. Then I found a pie on Smitten Kitchen that I am just dying to try, but of course, I don’t have all my pie baking things with me, so I will have to wait until another day when I am back in my own precious kitchen (sigh) to try this pie. But I have been so wanting to get my hands on the vegetable, so I could get to know it a little better. You know? Feel its textures. Wash it. Chop it. Play with it so we can be friends. So I bought some. And last night I made a strawberry rhubarb crisp in one of the three (yes THREE!) cast iron skillets that I brought with me, and let me tell you. It was dEEElish! The kids were scraping that skillet for the crumbs and begging for more. I might just have to make one more before we say goodbye to the oven, because it is official. One of the things we Chinos just LOVE about Canada is rhubarb.

Here’s the recipe I used for the crisp if you want to try.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Crisp

Place in the bottom of an 8 inch cast iron skillet

1 1/2 cups chopped strawberries

1 1/2 cups chopped rhubarb

1/4 cup turbinado sugar

2 teaspoons whole wheat flour

Mix the topping ingredients below and sprinkle on top of fruit:

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup thick oats

1/2 cup whole wheat flour

1/4 cup turbinado sugar

1/2 cup chopped nuts

Bake at 400 degrees for 25-30 minutes.

Serve warm with vanilla ice cream. SOOOO good.

I am beginning a series of posts on things I love about Canada. I am doing this partly just to highlight the things I love and partly to take my focus off the things I don’t love, especially since most of the things I don’t love involve either the de-valuation of the US dollar or the lack of Arkansans, and those things really have nothing at all to do with Canada, except for its being the place where I happen to be experiencing them.

And so, the first thing I love about Canada is of course, the farms. The dairy farms (both cow and goat) have my particular love right now since the berries are still awaiting their moment as the stars of the summer. All the markets to which I have been carry local products, and the phrase BC made can be found all over, not just on produce but for all sorts of products. When Mary Polly and I met a lady with pink hair on the bus who was delivering papers, she made certain to tell us to go to Granville Island to eat and shop because there is NO corporate American crap over there, just pure handmade CANADIAN stuff!

When I was shopping yesterday evening at the local grocery, I saw products in the cheese case that were made by the farmers I visited last week. When I saw their label, I was like, oh I have to buy that cheese because those people are like my best friends now! Right then and there was when I recognized the brilliance of the Circle Farm Tours. If you go around and visit the farms, meet the artisans who make the cheese, milk, yogurt, etc, walk on their land and pet their animals, you begin to feel connected to the earth/farmer/animal that will make the food that you will later feel compelled, or even privileged to buy if you happen across it in your local market.

So I guess I don’t just love the farms of Canada. I love that farmers are so important to Canadians (or at least to British Columbians) that I already know about them even though I have only been in Canada for a few weeks. The interweaving and networking that has occurred to make Vancouver a locavore’s paradise must account for the fact that there are soooo many people here.

For the last two days, the sun has been shining in Vancouver and we have drunk it in. We have walked and biked in it, basked in it at two different parks and enjoyed its warmth through the windows of our lovely house. I lied on the grass at a park yesterday for two hours and just listened to all the different accents while the kids played. Vancouver truly is an international city. Someone asked us where we were from because of our accent and Mary Polly was bewildered to discover that it is WE, who have accents and not THEM. Besides the park we haven’t ventured out to too many places. A bakery here, a small grocery there. But we have soooo enjoyed our house.

We’ve baked cookies, which was top on Mary Polly’s list of things to do while we have an oven. We have pulled out of our buried plastic tubs lots of the treasures I brought for the summer that are perfect for a rainy day, but that you can’t actually pull out in the rain. You can only fit so much inside a camper, so for the last weeks much of the entertainment I brought has remained in the van. We did a large jigsaw puzzle of Canada. Who knew there were so many provinces? I know I am revealing my total geographical ignorance here, but I have long been under the impression that there were like six or seven. A misconception we are correcting this week as we attempt to learn them all, and their capitals. Mary Polly is learning to cross stitch, with the same little pattern books from which I learned. I knew I saved those for a reason. She worked a good bit of the evening yesterday on a little koala bear. She keeps calling it “her patchwork,” because that is what Anne and Diana call their sewing. She loves to say, I must get back to my patchwork. She worked on it while I read Anne last night to her and three sleepy brothers. She is still sleeping late, but the boys are getting up much earlier without the cold and the rain to keep them snuggled into their bags. We have also pulled out the art supplies and lots more books. We are all spread and sprawled over this great house, and we are still in no danger of overcrowding it. Such luxury.

Still with all things pretty nearly perfect, we must have a few bumps in the road, ours currently being that Cole and I have spent the better part of the last week or so getting crossways with one another, culminating last night in my having to walk out of the room mid-sentence, leaving him alone on his bed for fear of boxing his ears or worse. When I came downstairs and told Taido that I was in danger of losing it with him, Mary Polly, seemingly enraptured with “her patchwork,” spouted from her corner, You knooooow, it’s kind of against the LAW to hit your kids, Mom!

Of course, I know that darling, that’s why I left the room. To avoid breaking the law.

Among other things. I went and spent a few minutes being quiet and breathing before going back upstairs to apologize to the little creton. We both decided to take a lesson from Anne and begin anew today. We had just read Anne’s words, Marilla, isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet? Marilla responds to Anne much like I’m afraid I would. She tells her that she’s certain she’ll fill it up with mistakes soon enough. But thank goodness that the Lord’s mercies are new every morning.

And they are. It is cloudy and colder today, which makes our presence in this house all the more a treasure. It’s wonderful to sit in a chair by the window that separates me from the elements. And we had these wonderful scones for breakfast with raspberry preserves, at Ben’s suggestion.