Early Morning

*Edit: I just noticed that Blogger has misplaced most of the accompanying text from the following picture posts. I'll try to fix it later, so check in again. It's kind of fixed.
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Darkness and fog cover what little I can see from the window beside me. Birdsong, muffled, still trills in a steady stream of warbles and chirps. I am glad of the birds.

Life is life, and we've been living it. School winds down on its spool, though there are a few things I'd like to continue through part of the summer. I think about the golden moments, about what makes us love learning, about what we invested this year, about what I should have invested but didn't, about the Big Reasons that undergird our decision to home educate and how I can make them more the flesh of our days and not only the bones.

The garden space lies choked in weeds, ready for someone to come and cast out demons. If I think about all that I'd like done with a fingersnap, I quickly become overwhelmed. It's the weight of painting the inside of our home and staining the outside and mucking out barns and clearing the woods of multiflora rose and finding a way to repair Nails and deliberately decorating and planting fruit trees and berry bushes and windbreak trees and getting a goat, or, better, a COW and getting a horse and maybe a pig so we can eat bacon and buying a wood stove and gathering WOOD and building fun bed-lofts for the girls and a TREEHOUSE with a ZIPLINE (we have the zipline; we don't have the treehouse) and a flatbed-truck-playhouse and buying a new septic cover and digging a new well (as the house inspector firmly said Should Be Done) and moving the dead fridge and...while worthy of doing, none of it matters if I neglect what lasts.

What will last are the souls of my family and of people in the world around me. What will last is the Joy that remains through temper and depression and discomfort. What will last is the truth that this time is small and should be lived with eyes that are open.

The sun's coming up over a horizon still cloaked by fog, and sometimes that's all one needs.