Perlieu in June

We went to our beloved spot in Dunn County again last month. It had been over a year since we'd last been there. I'd say that it was one of the most relaxing cabin trips yet. We even had some friends visit us.

Here's a set of pictures from the trip, including digital and film photos.

Fire Roasting

I mentioned a couple of posts ago about roasting coffee over an open fire with my buddy Pat. He was good enough to share the pictures from this adventure, and so I will too.
You can see by the color that they're pretty early in the roast process above.
I can just barely see that Pat was wearing his Clover t-shirt. Very appropriate.

As Pat said, it was a "fantastic uneven roast."

Not good coffee, but a very good time.

Snow Boys

Gibbie is our cold boy. He likes "coldness". His other favorite qualities include "softness," "coziness," and "loudness."
Man, does he love winter! He makes snow angels, and just stays on the ground, staring at the sky. He loves to throw snowballs, dress up warmly, work on shovelling, get raced around the yard in a sled, just watch the snow fall. I wonder if it's because he's a winter baby? He was early exposed to the cold. I remember that even as a newborn, he liked to be out in the fresh air.
I too love winter. I have fond memories of walking with Paul through sparkling night snow, weighing whether I ought to let myself fall farther in love; later walking hand in mittened hand together, late again because we were so wrapped up in talking. Further back, of playing outside in the deep snow until I couldn't feel my legs, that weightless feeling of lying face up in a snowbank, the squeak of my snowpants as I walked to school, and of course the gleeful anticipation of a potential cocoa-after-sledding-art-on-the-dining-room-table-filled snow day, as the white heaped higher outside the windows.
On the other hand, our little Ezra has always disliked the cold. He likes to be free from the burden of clothing and in Minnesota, in winter, especially with parents like us who keep the house on the chilly side, it's just not possible much. We've had to enact policies in our house requiring mittens, boots, sweaters, scarves, and, yes, even pants to be worn before walking out the front door. He started pitching fits for almost the first time in his life when forced to bundle up for this new snow.
These pictures are from the first snowstorm of the year, which we watched and delighted in up in Battle Lake, Minnesota--we all watched, at least, and all of us excepting Ezra delighted in it. There was enough snow, for one day, to scrape together a hopeful little snowman. Ezra would have nothing to do with the snowman. Does he look like he's having fun on the little blue sled? Trust me, he wasn't. He tearfully didn't want to wear even a sweater. He wanted to be held, wrapped up in a blanket. Well, really, he wanted just to go back inside.
I think Ezra has had a tiny bit of winter fun since then. But it's been in spite of the cold, in spite of the snow. My theory is that he's just still so little, and sees himself as such, that a little dangerousness, a little adversity, just isn't any fun at all. I bet it will be a whole nother story next winter.

Fall Vacation

It was a few weeks ago now (ok, so almost a month) but here's some pictures from our fall vacation to Battle Lake, MN.



(If your flash isn't up to speed, here's a link to the album.)

Menomonie Weekend

We just spent a wonderful weekend both in my home town of Menomonie and at the Perlieu land. We got to see both of my parents, go to my 10 year high school reunion, and relax at the cabin. Probably the highlight was a stretch of about nine hours on Saturday that Libby and I got to be around Menomonie without the boys. It turs out that, given the chance, we still really enjoy hanging out together!

Here's a small album of photos from the trip. They're not regular family vacation photos, since some are things we found interesting (signs, Menomonie's green algae-rich water, graphitti) as well as the normal cute kid shots. As always, I recommend the slide show option for viewing them.

Perlieu in Spring

We recently got back from the most wonderful trip to the woods of Western Wisconsin. We love this place. It's the landscape I grew up in and Libby grew up visiting. Now our boys can enjoy it too. We may have more to say about specific adventures from this trip, but for now enjoy a slide show.
(Click here if you're Flash disabled.)

Knowing the plants

It was a great moment for me when Gibbie, seeing staghorn sumac with it's drying flower clusters pointing up all over, said, "hey, that looks like fruit!" What kind of fruit, we asked? And he said, "Sumac!" I was particularly proud because the sumac flowers we have gathered looked very different from these, because these had all lost their leaves. Yup, we've been making a tasty juice from the flower clusters, and he's even developed an appreciation for licking the sour fuzzy flowers.
I do hope the kids grow up knowing how to read the land and plants. In the above photo, you can see dozens of different plants. I don't so much care if he knows all their names (I sure don't!) but I'd like to teach him, and learn together, and I'm sure eventually learn from him, all about them. Know how to make baskets from the bark of the white trees, as he calls them. Know how to eat the different parts of the milkweed plant during different seasons. We can dig the wild parsnip, and look forward to the raspberry and blackberry seasons in their turns. We will look around for the jewelweed when we get a nettle's sting and pop the seeds out at each other in the late summer when the pods are spring-loaded.
Here Gibbie is enjoying the tactile beauty of the ready milkweed seeds. Soon he will scatter them in the breeze, as any happy person will.

Fall is a great time for gathering basket supplies; we collected willow and cattail. They are drying on the porch, if one can call it drying with all this rain! I look forward to weaving them up into beautiful and useful things when we are stuck inside later in the year. That's the great beauty of this world; In the plants, seemingly dying back in the fall, are the stores for new life, promises of fresh vigor and growth next year, and abundant material for wild and artisinal beauty. This world is so made that in a deeper sense than I can grasp, dead things are always and everywhere coming to life, greater and better than before they fell. I am thinking of the food we eat, the seeds we sow, the troubled lives we live, and Christ himself.

Our Fall Vacation

Here's a look at our fall vacation. I took last week off from work and we went to the Perlieu cabin, and then Libby's grandparent's place near Battle Lake, MN. We'll write more about the trip itself when we can, but for now just enjoy the photos!


(If the slideshow doesn't work for you, here's a link to the photo album.)

Purlieu Weekend

It's been a busy couple of weeks and we've got a lot of back-blogging to do! Two weeks ago we took a long weekend in Wisconsin. It started around a close family friend's graduation party and turned into a good excuse to spend a couple of days at a cabin in the woods. If I've got the history of the place right, it goes like this: Libby's dad and some friends decided to form a sort of farming co-op back in the '70's and bought some land in Dunn County Wisconsin. The whole farming aspect didn't much take off, but they built a couple of cabins and have had various projects going on the land. We've been spending time there on and off for years and love the rustic (no electricity, pluming, etc.) accommodations. Libby would come here in her childhood and thus learned to love the same landscape that I enjoyed growing up just a few miles south of here.

This was our first time bringing the boys to Purlieu (as it's called). We thought Gibbie would love it, since he so much enjoys the large wooded parks we frequent in St. Paul. Some aspects he took to right away, like the large field with a hill to run or roll down.

There was one unexpected obstacle to his nature enjoyment, however. Bugs. I guess we just have a lot fewer bugs in the city. For the first day Gibbie went around with his hands over his ears trying to block out their buzzing.
Eventually, after talking with him about it for a while, I figured out why he was so scared. He's really good at taking a concept and generalizing it. He knows that bees buzz, therefore he figured that anything that was buzzing around his head must be a bee and could hurt him. No wonder he was freaking out. He didn't completely get over the bug thing until our last day out there.

On Sunday morning we decided not to drive back into town for Church. Instead, we went down the highway just a mile or two to the Hay River Lutheran Church. I had expected this little country church to contain a handful of old people singing feebly and slowly after listening to an old pastor preach feebly and slowly. I was wrong. It was a small church, but it was full, and full of people of every age. The pastor had a wonderful conversational style of delivering a message true to Jesus' character. He also had quite an accent. Someone said he was from Colfax (another small WI town). We later learned that came from Australia before serving in Colfax! When we went downstairs after the service for coffee we met people who lived all around the Purlieu land. They knew about the land, and a little about the people who owned it. They were impressed that we knew the old farming couple who used to live next to Purlieu, in fact one of them was their niece. It was a joy to see some life in that little place, and to meet many of the friendly folks who live around the cabin.

On our way back to St. Paul we stopped for lunch at that very farm once owned by the old people I mentioned. After they moved into town for health reasons one of the Purlieu members bought their land. It's a beautiful little valley with a creek running through it.
Looks idyllic, doesn't it? What you can't see in this picture are the wood ticks. Hundreds of them. All over us. They weren't bad at the cabin, but here there was a steady crawling stream of them. When we sat down for lunch here Libby said, "Oh Paul, you've got a tick on your pants... and one on your shoulder... another on your shirt... here's one on Ezra's head..." and so on. She didn't mind it so much (that's the ex-wilderness guide in her.) It really bugged me, though, and I was already in a bad mood because the Mercedes was running funny and I was worried about making it back home. So Libby pulled out one of her tricks from camp counseling: the Tick Stick.
See that brown mass on the diaper pin? That's a stack of impaled wood ticks. They still wiggle a little like that. It's great for grossing out Junior High campers.

We did make it home in the Mercedes. It was a good trip, but I think the next one will be even better because the boys will have already gotten used to the accommodations. I forgot to mention how much Gibbie liked the "potty house"!
This last picture has no significance except that I think it's a good photo. (Check the texture on the wood and old chair.) Gibbie is being a bird in his nest on the porch of the cabin.