matching tracksuits

Despite the ravaging neighborhood creatures, we managing to grow things. Our plot behind the house is struggling a bit,

but our squash, zucchini, melons, and onions in front of the house are doing very well.

Some are even flowering.

In fact, we’ve kept one thing in the ground long enough to have a harvest: radishes. A few are almost as big as a ping pong ball, and K explains that we have to pick those now, else they’ll be no good. “They don’t taste as good when they’re bigger.” Not knowing the first thing about growing radishes, I nod my head in approval.

Radishes are a like dill for me: they make me think of summer in Poland.

We use the radishes to make a creamy cheese spread: diced radish mixed in with farmer’s cheese. A simple thing, but then, many of the tastiest foods are “simple things.”

The cheese is a highligh of our Sunday-morning breakfast. The Girl as her usual: French toast and Maple syrup.

Then we notice our back bed has been visited again.

Enormous holes, spread through the bed. “It’s the worst it’s ever been,” K sighs.

Our raccoon neighbor? Dogs?

It’s hard not to take it personally. “What did we ever do to you?” A useless thought — best to start planning how to keep out of our garden dogs, chickens, raccoons, squirrels, bears, elephants, and whatever else might be lurking in the neighborhood.

“There are places one returns to as if returning to home.” Thus begins a sweet little montage of photos from the school in Poland in which I taught for seven years. Images of life in the school are interspersed with youthful sentimentality.

I know few of the students, but they’re all familiar: all Polish students become familiar at a certain point. There’s just a look about them. K and I see a woman walking down the street here in Greenville and almost simultaneously say, “She looks like a Pole.”

The halls, the classrooms — all so warm and familiar.

The text belies the author: a young graduate, somewhat longing for the simplicity of high school:

“There are people whom one never forgets,” followed by images of teachers I worked with, one of whom was a student when I first arrived in 1996.

“These people will always been in our hearts.” Sentimentality is excusable when one is young. It should probably be so when one is old, as well.

“There are moments which we will always remember.” They pile up, though, and act like a sieve: things we thought we’d never forget, never get over, sift to the bottom and are all but forgotten about. This young film maker probably hasn’t realized that yet. Maybe he/she will never have to.

The final words: “All of this is in one place, and that’s here.” Cut to an elevated image of the school, and a smile on my face.

I wrote a quick note to the YouTube user who posted it: “I taught at that school for seven years — I appreciate your video. You have at least one picture in the video of students I taught.” No response.

Still, I watch the video from time to time, and it always makes me smile and read my journal from my time in Poland.

Now who’s being sentimental?

I mentioned earlier my efforts to use xtranormal.com — the free animation site — in school. Here are a couple of examples from students who used the site to animate research done on selected topics about Victorian England.

Education in Victorian England

L’s bike seat needed some adjustment. She was eager to help.

“Hand me that,” I could ask, and she would, occasionally. More often, I was asking her to take this instead of that, asking her to bring this back, calling her name out several times in rapid succession when she was reaching for a nut or bolt I’d be needing shortly.

Required: a seat adjustment.

Reason: it’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s grown significantly since the last time she pedaled around. I raised the seat about two inches.

An initial fitting showed that a raised seat wouldn’t suffice. I slide the saddle back as far as it would go.

Result: a happy little girl.

Yet another image that hints at a five-year-old L.

Growing up, I drank milk my mother purchased from a small farm about fifteen miles from our home in Virginia. When I went with my mother, I often got a “tour” from Mrs. Campbell. Chickens, cows, a horse or two. The cows wandered about the pasture, grazing and lazing all day long. They moved slowly and seemed totally relaxed.

For a suburbanite like me, it was heaven.

Then there was the milk: always thick and delicious. Vigorous shaking was prerequisite to pouring. And a taste that was radically different from the nonsense I drank in school.

When we stopped our milk runs and turned to store-bought milk, I was initially disappointed with the taste but eventually grew used to it. Trying to remember that taste was like trying to remember an odor: it lingered in the mind just long enough to taunt me with the realization that I can’t truly remember it at all.

I’ve had the opportunity to taste that milk again, here.

It turns out, there’s a local dairy farm and creamery that runs on the same principles: no hormones or antibiotics; free-range grazing; stress-free, healthy living.

Further, it turns out they give tours.

We arrived just after twelve, stepped out of our car and suddenly felt we were back in K’s home village. The odor of a farm is international, and strangely warm and heartening.

The farm is Trantham’s Twelve Aprils, and the tour convinced me of one thing: buy their milk or no one else’s. No growth hormones, no antibiotics, no stress, grass-fed — pretty much what I grew up on.

K had heard about the tours, so she arranged a few families to get together for a tour and some strawberry picking afterward.

Sitting in a trailer behind a tractor being dragged all around a farm doesn’t seem like it would be terribly enjoyable, but learning about simple but revolutionary grazing techniques and the resulting product was, in fact, almost a blast. L was entertained by the simple fact of being pulled by a tractor. Having a farm coloring book helped as well.

The milk is available only in South Carolina, but given the small size of the operation (they have, if memory serves, eighty milking cows right now) relative to the size of the output is fairly stunning.

After the tour, we got a chance to sample the milk. They have three products: buttermilk, regular, whole milk, and chocolate milk. I’ve never, in my life, been a fan of buttermilk, but theirs was delicious.

“Mega-dairies add things to their buttermilk to sour it,” the guide/farmer explained. “The result is a strongly acidic taste. Ours doesn’t have that.”

She was certainly right.

Finally, it was time for strawberry picking. “You might not find much after the school kids we had coming through here this week,” the owner’s daughter said.

L helped by serving as a quality assurance specialist and general run-around-the-farm-laughing consultant.

Just before packing up, we were able to see the pregnant cows. “We’ve got fifteen due in July,” the guide/farmer said. “It’ll be a busy time.”

As always, L stood, fascinated with the animals. Last summer in Poland, “I want to see the cows” was a common refrain.

The fascination hasn’t waned in the intervening year.