Happy Birthday, Darcy Jo!

In honor of the end of Darcy's eighth trip around the sun, here are some pictures of Darcy for you to enjoy. Vaguely chronological, but fairly otherwise fairly random.

Ok. Now the computer made me do non-chronological, so you'll have to deal with it. Sorry. I've apparently broken it because it's being weird about letting me add even more photos of Darcy's first eight years. You might have to be satisfied with her first 3.5 years for tonight.

Hmmmm...What Was I Doing Eight Years Ago?

For those in the know, the answer might come quickly. At about this time eight years ago, I was being moved from the birthing center at our midwives' office to the hospital because our girl was being stubborn about coming into this world.

Can't blame her -- it was twenty or thirty below zero! Who would want to leave a private heated swimming pool for that kind of weather?

Darcy Jo is turning EIGHT tomorrow! Our girl is getting so big! Stay tuned for some pictures through the years.

Cranberry Curd -- Thinking Outside The Can!

I'm thinking outside the can with all my cranberries!

It's so fun to have lots of cranberries to play with. I'm going to do something savory with them tonight for dinner -- still in experimental stages -- but I also juiced a few cups this morning so I could try my hand at cranberry curd:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the color is red, but not as vibrant as the berries or the juice because the color of the egg yolks is tempering it a bit. It is delicious and smooth as silk, though. Curd is supposed to freeze well, so one jar will be going in the freezer for Christmas, just because it's the right color. 

Addition: I got chastised for not including the recipe. I used this lemon curd recipe as the model, but switched the lemon juice for freshly-squeezed cranberry juice. I also added a pinch of salt because I thought I needed to add some pop to make up for the lack of zest.

Cranberries In Photos

I am a little sore and a little sunburned, but I'm ok with that because the cause was a glorious afternoon of cranberry picking! As I mentioned yesterday, the two Oregon counties to our north grow many delicious cranberries. We got to go pick the edge of a bog that is waiting its turn for a flood and harvest.

On our way to "our" bog, we got to see the tail end of the harvest of a flooded field. Such amazing colors!

It's hard to tell size from this picture, but the berries are HUGE compared to the tundra cranberries I picked in Alaska. But you CAN see how plentiful they are.

Picking into a white, slightly translucent bucket on a sunny day leads to the illusion that these are free cranberries, all huddled in a circle. They're not! This was my half-full bucket.

Our food crew, showing off our harvest. All told, the three of us picked about 29 pounds of cranberries in just over an hour.

I wasted no time. An hour after I got home with the berries, there was a cranberry crisp bubbling away in the stove, another assembled and frozen, and some sliced berries simmering in balsamic and sugar to go into a roasted beet salad.

Now I just need to finish cleaning and drying the rest and I can go to bed!

Cranberries!

Really, I should wait until tomorrow to post about this because I'll probably have pictures, but I'm excited, so I can't wait.

I didn't know this until we moved here, but the two Oregon coastal counties to our north produce about 5% of the national cranberry harvest. Because the growing season here is so long, the berries get to stay on the bush longer than in other cranberry-producing regions, so they get bigger and redder and sweeter.

And I get to pick some tomorrow!

A friend/colleague leads cranberry gleanings in bogs near Port Orford. Gleaners get to keep half (I think) of what they pick, with the other half going to support the Port Orford Co-op. I'm hoping my fingers remember their cranberry-picking lessons from Alaska so I can come home with lots of berries to play with.

The End Of KRECR And An Unrelated Picture

Here's another view of the Bald Hills, just because it's such a beautiful place. It's unrelated to the rest of the post.

Today was a beautiful fall day. We hiked out to the ocean through the Tolowa Dunes, just one of several amazing ecosystems that surround us. We passed by many different mushrooms on the trail, and way too many of the yellow banana slugs that call this place home, too.

Once we got to the beach, we watched the waves, picked out beautiful rocks and driftwood, got kisses from a dog there with other people, and left as the fog reached back onto the land.

On the hike back to the trail head, we realized that it's almost exactly a year since Michael came back to Del Norte from Pennsylvania. Darcy and I moved back two months earlier, but Michael needed to finish up some work at Delaware Water Gap before coming back to Redwood. In the last year, we have settled back into our community here almost as if we'd never left.

When we left Del Norte for Pennsylvania, the last place we stopped was Darcy's school, the Klamath River Early College of the Redwoods, known as KRECR (pronounced krecker -- with a short 'e'). We had asked Darcy if she wanted to see our empty house or just remember it as we lived there and she chose not to see it empty. So she went to school like any other day and we picked her up in the afternoon and drove out of town with very heavy hearts.

Her classmates and after-school friends had loaded her down with gifts -- unexpected things I needed to find space for during our long drive across the country. She also had a pea shoot to try to keep alive on that drive. (You can see it in a Pennsylvania hotel here.)

Darcy started back at KRECR just three days after flying back from Pennsylvania last year. She had a great year. 

She went back again this year. We had high hopes despite a staff change over, decreased enrollment, and other issues, but KRECR was facing serious hurdles. After weeks of late night discussions, we moved Darcy to a new school this week. It was a difficult decision, one we didn't make lightly, and one that created a lot of sadness and guilt in our family. We wanted to support the school. We tried to hold on during a difficult transition. In the end, we just couldn't let Darcy watch her school fall apart around her any more.

For most of this week, I had put away the sadness. My last three minute encounter at KRECR on Darcy's last day had made me so angry that I hardened my heart to the school's troubles and moved on with my life. The anger was justified, but the cause isn't important now.

Yesterday, KRECR announced that it will close after December 19th. There are simply not enough students left to maintain the school. At first, even hearing this, knowing that a dear friend's heart would be breaking with this news, I couldn't feel sad about it because of those last three minutes.

But truly, KRECR is bigger than my last encounter and it's bigger and better than this shortened school year. It was started with love to bring an alternative to this community, one focused on place and culture. It's goals were to help every child thrive at their own pace, to instill a dream of college in a community where that is so often not the dream, to use restorative justice to resolve conflicts in a more meaningful way than suspensions and expulsions allow, and to create a school that honored this place and the people who have lived here since time immemorial.

We gained two new school board members in this week's election. Neither of them, based on the non-partisan debate I attended, seem likely to support the kind of learning environment we valued at KRECR. It would be nice to think that we could bring some of what we loved about our school to the larger school district. In very small ways, maybe we can. But a larger overhaul of the system will require that all parents stand up and demand change and put tremendous pressure on the school board. 

Darcy was elected last month to be KRECR's school historian. Now that it is closing, it is up to all of us who loved the school to make sure its legacy is not judged by its last few months.

The Great Thing About Not Posting Much

The great thing about not posting much at all this whole year is that now, when I most need blog topics, there are so many things I didn't post about! And I can post about them now!

So, for example, this was a stellar year for lupine blooms in the Bald Hills. The Bald Hills are gorgeous open mountain sides in the southernish part of Redwood National and State Parks. Some springs, they are dotted by lupines. This year, they were carpeted in them:

 That bit of red is me, for scale. So dense. So lovely. (The flowers, not me.)

 Our little imp almost blends in.