I had great plans for a big post on all the changes in our lives in the time in which I stopped writing, but I think I’ll just skip over it for now and let you gather up the pieces as they come over the next few posts.
Here’s a crucial bit of information to get you started: last year we sold the house in the woods that we spent 11 years building with the help of our families, and bought a century-old house in town. We moved last spring, and are approaching our first anniversary with our new home. We miss things about the woods to be sure, but our new house is wonderful. Being so close to everything has changed our lives in many ways. We walk to school and to the little market up the street, we can visit our friends whenever we want, and all the girls activities are much easier to manage. We feel, in a way, like we’ve moved to Europe. We’re no longer behind the wheel for hours a day and for me that’s been the greatest and most wonderful change.
Unfortunately, the girls feel like they’ve lost their backyard wonderland and haven’t been playing outside the way they used to at our old house. In the summer we can garden, but a flat lot in town doesn’t have much appeal in the winter, especially when there’s no snow. So a few weeks ago when we finally had snow accumulate over night and it warmed enough by afternoon to make it sticky, we took advantage of it and used up all the snow in our front yard (and some of the neighbor’s too) to build some snow sculptures.
The big girls started with a snow grandma and snow baby.
I spun and crocheted the snow grandma’s scarf from a rainbow batt, with the intent of using it for such a purpose. It’s one of those projects that turned out so homely that it’s irresistible.
Iris and I built a snow “dragon” (horse might really be a better description) complete with slide and then Eva helped build steps up the other side when Iris declared her “little legs were too tiny” to climb up. We got the greatest compliment on this when a passing toddler eyed the slide wistfully and then asked if she could go down it. Of course we let her play on it, and I thought again how these kinds of interactions with the community are so valuable, and still so new and exciting to us.
We built a snow queen on the boulevard, looking rather longingly at the sculptures in the yard. Her face was dyed with cranberries, which I always have in the freezer. Just a gentle squeeze and they work great to color snow pink. By this point it was beginning to get cold and dark, mittens were soaked, and there were rumors of hot chocolate to draw us back inside.
Of course the weather kept warming, and now our sculptures are nothing but icy fragments in a mostly bare yard. And we’re really really really starting to look forward to gardening.