



My daughter is thrilled with our new season. Every day she says, "Mama, can you believe it? A minute ago it was winter, and now it's spring." And it does feel rather abrupt, as though we shouldn't yet trust the motions of the planet. And there certainly is a lot of mud. We have been taking afternoon walks through our forest, led by the two-year-old, which means we have ended up stuck in a marsh on more than one occasion. He thinks it's great, until the shoes get lost in the goo, at which point it's a lot of curious poking and squelching of liberated socked feet, which become soaked feet, which means I carry him home again while the 5-year-old sister tsk tsks over his imprudent behavior. That last photo above is not taken in the marsh, by the way, but at the swing set. My camera seems to be going into slow decline; the little screen on the back has gone dark, so it's hard to know what image I am capturing. Feet, sort of. But I like it. And that fabulous hive we did find in the marsh.
I am in the midst of a large editing project, and it's got me thinking about narrative quite a bit. (My Jane Austen read-a-thon has, too, of course. Austen is such a master at pacing and revelation.) My five-year-old likes a nightly bedtime story, and for a long time we had been doing a serial story about a group of fairies living in a meadow. I was so very tired of inventing capers for fairies, so I proposed, instead, that we make a story from four elements. I offered a set of categories, which will change when we get bored with them; for now, they are: a flower, a color, a vehicle and an animal. My daughter thinks of one thing in each of those categories, and then I invent a story that involves each thing. So one night I made a story with zinnias, purple, a helicopter and a whale. Tonight it was irises, yellow, a submarine and a cow. Awesome! The stories usually end up being ridiculous, but I think that is really good for this mama, who can be rather serious and heavy of mood at times. And what child doesn't enjoy a good story about a cow riding in a submarine?