September 17, 2018

George saw the otter for the first time yesterday! I've seen the otter in our backyard pond many times. The most famous was when I saw him with the cable guy two days before we moved in, in November of 2016.

Mr. Cable Guy and I were in the backyard hooking cable-y things up when he looked out at the pond and spotted Mr. Otter swimming around. Cable Guy, as I usually call him, was not your usual cable guy with a pot belly (sorry to cable guys everywhere but...) and baggy jeans over that neon t-shirt they all tend to wear. No, this cable guy was more of the outdoorsy type, dark hair, bearded, pretty well dressed for a cable guy, in jeans and flannel, and he told me he's from Wisconsin. He got super excited when he saw the otter and said it absolutely made his day. See, I don't think you'd get that from your average cable guy.

I got excited too. Seeing the otter in my very own backyard pond made my year, in fact. I looked up the spiritual symbolism of otters, and they represent playfulness and joy. I took it as the very best omen about our new home, which has since been quite a joyful place to live. But the otter remains elusive.

Looking at our pond is therapy for me, and I tend to be able to sit quietly and observe life in general. So I'm the only one, until yesterday, who'd spent enough time sitting quietly observing the pond to have seen our elusive otter. Even the next door neighbors, who have lived here for 14 years and also look directly at the pond from their back deck, have never seen the otter. A couple weeks ago at a backyard fire I could tell they weren't sure if they should believe me about it.

I saw Mr. Otter playfully chasing ducks earlier this summer, so yesterday when I saw some swimming creature chasing ducks as George and I sat on the deck, I immediately took notice. Is it the muskrat? Maybe a beaver? Nope, after a Google search and getting out the binoculars and observing further, we decided for sure it was the otter. I was right all along! (As an aside, so was Mr. Cable Guy--I've always used him as proof that I wasn't making this up.)

It doesn't really matter that I was right, so much, but that I now get to share this experience with George. We have both seen the otter, and that's exciting. It IS too bad we now know, thanks to Google, that otters chase ducks not just for fun but because they eat them. Ugh. I only wanted to know the fun side, but now I know the truth too. Still, otters are so playful and represent joy to me, and I'm sticking with that.

Isn't life like that? It seems everything has two sides to it, and it's complicated and complex and sometimes hard to navigate the reality of it all. I haven't written here in a while, and there's a reason for that. The last time I wrote, it was about back to school and how melancholy I felt about my kids being grown up and George going back to teaching. I wrote how George is my best friend and I love doing things with him. And that's the absolute truth.

But there's more to it than that. We've been married 23 years, and it's been hard too. Like, really really hard. Wonderful and hard. And when I write about how great it is being married to him, these days I get uncomfortable with that because I know I'm only presenting one side of our marriage, the good side. I'm not one to complain about my husband, because I don't see a need for it or a value in it.

However, I think people need to see real life pictures too--not just the good stuff. Because when we only see other people's good stuff, we feel ashamed and alone in our bad stuff. I can't take away anyone's loneliness, but maybe by letting others know our seemingly perfect marriage is far from it--instead, it's very real--maybe you won't feel so alone.

So that's been bugging me ever since I wrote that last post. But now I'm going to write again. I am not free to write about a lot of things I'd like to write about, but this is a start.

And that otter has inspired me again!

August 27, 2018

Today teachers, including George, are back to school. Last week he worked a full (not-required and of course unpaid) three days doing band prep and practice with a core group of students. This week he is required to be there for four days, for teacher workshops and prep and open house. This is the first year in many that he's working in just one building, teaching band at Apollo High School. He's happy to be in one place, and hopes this assignment will last. Teachers like to build relationships and programs over time, and it's hard to do when districts move them around so much. Fingers crossed--we'll see. I mostly hope his years goes really well.

This season always feels like a big transition, but lately it's not as exciting for me as when I was a student or my own kids were little. Now back-to-school mostly reminds me of the passing of time, and it makes me wistful and a little sad. Our daughter is back to college, George is back to work, and that leaves our son and me home most days. I love the summer days when George is around, as he is my best friend and we have lots of fun together. Morning coffee on the deck. Walks around the neighborhood. Camping trips and bike rides and kayaking with friends.

In fact, we spent four hours kayaking down the Sauk River on Saturday with a couple of friends. Four hours! Yes, that's a long time to be in a little boat. But it was glorious. It's amazing how wild the river seems, so close to town. We paddled from Rockville to Anton's Restaurant here in St. Cloud. I don't know how many miles that is, but it's four hours when the water is pretty low and the river is quite weedy, as it is in late August. It was a fairly lazy paddle, but still...some effort.

We saw too many Great Blue Herons to keep track of, and at least five or six bald eagles. Do you know how big those eagles are up close? Wow. I've seen many bald eagles but never as close as they were on the river. They flew up out of trees and bushes right next to the water, right on top of us. The closest thing I can figure is they're about the size of a grown man's torso. That is huge in a bird!

After the trip, we treated ourselves to an early dinner at Anton's, a former speakeasy that is one of the St. Cloud area's best supper clubs and most kitschy, historic spots. It's on the river, so we paddled right up to the landing, put the boats in the truck, brushed ourselves off a bit, and sat down to eat.

It was a nice ending to a nice summer filled with memories.

August 22, 2018

Yesterday I made applesauce from the apples that have been falling from our trees. Sixteen pounds of apples, and we're not even harvesting yet. We've just been picking up what's fallen and looks intact. The applesauce is good, a little tart because some of the apples are pretty green and I don't use sweetener.

And these are just a few days of windfall apples! 16 pounds.

The ones on the trees (we have two in the backyard) are getting close to ripe but aren't quite there yet. George, who grew up with a small apple orchard on his parents' Virginia property, says the seeds should be dark brown and then you know they're ripe. Most of the seeds I saw yesterday were brown, so I guess we're getting there?

Chopping and coring with a knife, because we also got rid of the apple corer and all apple paraphernalia, turns out. I prefer using a chef's knife anyway. Apples go in the saucepan, cores and bad spots go in the bowl for the compost.

When we moved two years ago, we first went to an apartment, not knowing where we'd end up. So we got rid of tons of stuff, including all my canning and preserving supplies. It felt great to declutter, and I am not too upset that I'm now rebuying some of that stuff and we're only two miles from the last house. Oh well. On Sunday we went to Mills Fleet Farm and bought a new canner, some quart and pint-sized canning jars, plus a jar lifter and magnetic lid lifter.

Turns out we bought the wrong canner (I went for the cheaper, more classic granite-ware enamel one) because we have a glass top stove and for that we need a stainless steel canner with a flat bottom. I'll go back and buy the stainless steel one soon. There are many, many more apples to make into sauce and, my favorite, apple butter. Yesterday's batch made about five quarts, a decent amount but, as I said, those are just the last few days of windfall apples.

The trees are still bursting with more.

August 21, 2018

How do you get away from the screen? It feels like screens have taken over everyone's lives. Whether the smartphone, the laptop or desktop, a Kindle or iPad or another tablet, never mind the now somewhat quaint television itself (not quaint in airports or doctor's offices, mind you!), we have screens in front of us all the time.

As a voracious reader and information hound, as well as a copyeditor who works on the computer, I struggle a lot with moving away from all the screens. Since my concussion last August, this has been an even bigger problem as my vision becomes blurry and my eyes fatigue quickly.

Lately, what I have taken to doing is staring at my backyard pond a couple times a day. In order to quiet my mind while I do so, I set a timer for 20-30 minutes and go sit in one of the Adirondack chairs in the backyard, usually with a beverage in hand but nothing else. Somehow knowing the timer is ticking, I don't get antsy about how much time I'm sitting and whether I should be doing something else. I can take 20 minutes to sit, for goodness' sake.

Sipping my tea or coffee, I watch the ducks fly in for a landing, and the Northern Harrier hawk zoom overhead. I hear squirrels chittering in the trees and dogs barking in the distance.

This is meditation without the "woo woo." I struggle to meditate because it doesn't feel natural to me to sit on a cushion and focus on my breath. I'd much rather sit in a chair in silence, beverage in hand, staring at something nice. It slows my breathing and thoughts just as well, and it does me a world of good.

Some words really stood out to me recently when I read them in a No Sidebar post called Why You Need to Unplug: "Unplugged time needs to be built into your life on a rigid, strict schedule until it becomes a habit that you don’t have to think about, or even better, it becomes such a treasured time that you want to unplug even more often."

Treasured time, that's what I'm looking for. It doesn't have to be a "should" but can be something that draws us in. My backyard pond does just that.

How this blog name came to be

I've been wanting to start a personal blog for a while now, and didn't want it to be an "identity marketing blog" attached to my name. I spent all of yesterday brainstorming possible blog titles, and in the evening I asked George, "If we were to name our house, what could it be?" He suggested "Cattail Cottage" pretty quickly, and then he said, "But we can't name our 1980s house a 'cottage.' "

I said, "Why not?" With its fake Tudor look, to which we've added shutters and window boxes filled with red impatiens, it's more cottage than anything else. It's definitely not a manor or a lodge, and we're not opening an inn or bed and breakfast. Plus, I love the cottage decorating style so "cottage" it is.

I liked that Cattail Cottage tied in both our backyard pond and the house, and I love the alliteration. So, again, Cattail Cottage it is. And this will serve as my journal, where I intend to write about whatever strikes my fancy. A lot of times, that is the natural world that surrounds our pond--whether birds or otters or the now-teenaged fawns that have been running around lately, or the apple trees and native plants in the yard. My home and family have my heart, and are always my top priority and value, so that will be my most likely focus.

I haven't been writing much lately--for about 4 years, in fact, since I started editing the writing of others. That tends to exhaust my word work, and it has been a whirlwind four years of busy-ness working as a copyeditor, moving houses, sending a daughter to college, getting a son through his post-high school program, and so much more. But I miss writing, and I want to do it just for myself. If you read here and enjoy it, all the better.

Until next time,
Lisa