This is home. Beyond this sycamore sapling (which, grandparents, Chas can identify!) lies a limestone expanse covering hundreds of acres, porous with trails and itching with wildlife. I haven’t begun to scratch the surface on my true feelings of place here, mostly because I have grown accustomed to actually being there either with the children or with Damon. We scramble and hike with friends and kids, but mostly we run. Almost every morning.

This morning, as we craggled our way through the round pebble creekbed, now bone dry. Frost crept upon the stands of wildflowers, long since browned by summer’s hot draught. A curious carving of ice, easily mistaken for packing foam, glistened around the base of each weed. Layers upon layers of crystalline ice ribbons sheathed brown stem. I dislodged a dry column of webbed crystal. During the night, in a last defense against the harsh northern wind, each stem swelled and burst, and seeping slowly from the plant oozed all sap and life to form intricate whorls of feathery ice curls. Layer after layer melted into my red hand. Happy to prove to Damon that it wasn’t frozen dog pee, I wiped my hands and kept on running.

This, among all daily surprises I encounter here, is why I don’t do treadmills. And this, followed by Tacodeli’s agua de melon (2 glasses) and poblano, spinach and egg tacos (with a half cup of the sour cream+fresh jalapeno hot sauce) is one very big reason why I’d rather not move. But change is in the air….

A circuitboard made of white foam and leftover yarn that Ford’s friends made during his birthday party; Chas’ wild volcano painting, originally with volatile sound effects; A featherwreath adorned by Betty and Boo; Ford’s rock collection: “magic rock,” amethyst geode, coral from Galveston, birthday geode from CZ…

Our Fall nature table. Little Ivy Elizabeth Walker, Ford’s favorite character last year from The Village, sitting on the resting rock in the middle of a little Hill Country glade; Burr oak and Post oak acorns from around town; Edwards limestone; Ball moss from everywhere around town; chickenfeathers and unknown native grass, what I pretend is a White-Tailed deer…

at Ivy’s feet: “HEXAGONS!” that Chas found on our walk through the neighborhood (courtesy of a sunbleached, long-dead armadillo skeleton)…

Gretel, another storybook favorite, plays cavalier atop Big Billy Goat Gruff; and no nature table in our house is grounded without a chicken.

I am waiting for apple bisque paint to dry on paper and listening to three seperate snores. It’s allergy season. The windows are all open and neighbors just chunked two fireworks into the sky, exploding over the oaks, hissing sparkling arcs across the driveway. I imagine a handful of boys laughing a few doors down, high-fiving over a six-pack and rummaging the garage for more things to detonate. It’s a window into the Sicore boy’s future, enough to make me wince (Watch those fingers, boys!) but also smile. It’s FUN to blow stuff up!

Damon and I went alone together to the gym this morning. We shared machines and grins. In the middle of the bustling gym floor I wanted to pounce on him. Watching him huff and puff drove me crazy. It was like a shot of Back in College, that undivided attention between us. So as soon as I picked up Chas at childcare, I scribbled down reservations for the rest of this week and next week–pencilling in about an extra half-hour for good measure, each day. Damon did the same. It feels like I’ve found a missing gasket and now I’ve replaced it, allowing the machinery to run smoothly again. This may have been one of those elusive missing things in my life.

We took the kids out on the lake again tonight. Austin is absolutely lovely right now, fresh out of the shower and sprinkled with joggers and children and rowers and hummingbirds. I’ve been dying to bring along a camera, but too paranoid that it might get wet (which it will); the setting sun just gilts everything on its way out. Chas and Ford shared the middle seat tonight, each dragging the little wooden boats that Damon made them, holding graham crackers opposite hands. The way it should be, we just coasted in and out of cypress coves, above illicit beds of Eurasian Watermilfoil and broad mats of Hydrilla, the boys humming Sonic Youth and we, the grownups, chuckling over cold beer. We ran a Great Blue Heron off its hunt five times, tracing its hunt by accident along the convoluted, wooded banks off the lake.

The paint is now dry. I’m daydreaming of graduate studies in painting here at the university. Priorities first, though. I close that window in my browser and step back to the table, dreaming up a series of paintings for a show. ‘Self-taught’ is satisfactory.

It’s mid-August and we’re roasting under happy white hot skies with evenly-spaced, cottony clouds. And it’s dry. Natives hark back to the 1950s and dust storms and hectic farming, and they get giddy about gray clouds on the horizon but are too supersticious to predict rain. When the clouds pass overhead, they spit fat droplets that pat the pavement and vanish magically, evaporating before you can call it rain. And then you sigh and shrug your shoulders.

In the morning, I crawl downstairs to start a pot of coffee and let the hens out for the day. Almost immediately they run for respite in woodier shade, and I start watering the deer-picked, rabbit-picked, chicken-picked truncation of a summer garden: wrinkled and dark green, prostrate. Within minutes, the cicadas start humming a low, warm-up drone. Like dry beans shaking in a parched pod, the cicadas rattling trance intensifies as the heat sets in. I slink back inside.

Chas wants to be outside at all hours, so for him it’s all a matter of being buck naked out there. I have no choice but to follow him with a tube of sunscreen in my back pocket and a narrow set of eyes, since the job mostly entails shepherding him out of direct sunlight. Which is difficult, really, because our yard is mostly sun. He glows in the sunshine, his white back reflects the entire spectrum of light as he examines a pillbug in the brown grass, something the hens must have overlooked; they’re busy meanwhile under the boxwood, flinging dusty mulch onto the walking path as they burrow six inches into the landscaping. I re-pave the path with the broom as I return for cover, my feet now dusted with roasted umber dust. Chas runs in my wake, the chickens flurry from the hedge to follow him, but the door closes. From inside, Chas laughs at the unaffected triplet standing on the doorstep, wasting little time before they start scratching again and picking at the potted ferns.

We’ve lived in this rental house for a year now, and the place is finally beginning to fit like a glove. Though a temporary rental (we begin building this year on a lot down the road), we have given it our patina. We have adopted and lost two pet fish here, but also begun raising the chicks, who have, for their part, done a tremendous job connecting us with the outdoors. In mid-July. In Texas. Which seems entirely difficult, given the heat, but by God we have learned to enjoy it and sweat it out. By the bucketsful.

Today in a tube dress, straw hat, pigskin gloves and flip flops, I cut and nailed rolls of galvanized builder’s cloth to the pesto-colored poultry tractor. As I tatted away in the shade, the little chiquitas chased each other for earwigs, sometimes peeping quietly by my side, asking for a wing. Boo, the bold one (because they really do have different personalities), flit perch-by-perch to my neck, where she inquisitively pecked at my moles and freckles. The other two weaved around the timber, little Buffalo shortshanks they’ve become, content to scratch around my workspace, dusting themselves occasionally in a patch of dark topsoil, peeping their quick, velvety peeps of contentment.

I’ve gotten to know the deer, who rarely make themselves seen anymore, much less sleep with their twin baby fawns out in our front yard (they did this daily, last year) but still continue to eat the runner beans, flowerheads, morning glories, sweet potato vines and god-knows whatever gourd/pumpkin/squash seedlings I tried to grow from seed. They continue to surprise me, sometimes grazing feet from me as I jog along the trails, with their fawns stumbling close behind them and at other times, sneaking about like elves in the moonlight, grazing tiptoe across the lawn.

I am finally proud of the boy’s room. Finally, because it has never felt, no matter where we have lived, to be their own– it has always been a post between travels: en route from the bathroom, to fetch a toy before going to the living room; the halfway point between breakfast and brushing, where they can dilly dally five minutes while I clean, playing with forgotten toys. Never has their room been theirs in the sense of belonging until we added the bunk bed. That was two weeks ago.

In the time that’s passed, since the purchase of the bunk bed, the room has taken shape into a sleep playground and a place to stay and play. The quilt my mother made during the 1972 summer Olympics (when she was pregnant with me) is now draped over the top bunk rail, making Chas’ lower bunk the sleep fortress. Before naps I lay there and read to them as they scramble over me like lion cubs, and I, heavy with exhaustion, lay there and read. At night, I sit at the foot of the bottom bunk, reading Grimm and Anderson by the light peeking out of the closet. I’m surrounded by goose down and log pillows and quilting and childbreath and the warm pads of feet resting against my legs. Ford is content to lay in the bunk above while I read “because there are no pictures in the book” but also because he delights in his new space to sleep. The sleep king, who has to be awakened in the morning because he is so heavily renewing his energy during the night.

When I pause mid-Ugly Duckling, I ask “Ford?” and listen for an answer. Only the soft sound of a stuffed nose: slowly in, slowly out, waltzing in the summer nightmusic of the air conditioner, turning pages and other little snores here and there (I think Damon must be asleep, too, now). I reach over to rest the book under the bed. The floor beneath the bed has become a charter library: The Story of Pooh, The Story of Ping, Aeson/Grimm/Anderson classics, Baby Animals, Hedgie’s Surprise, Make Way for Ducklings, Blueberries for Sal. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek makes a cameo appearance.

The place feels like home in the way I’m starting to settle in: a mixed bouquet the color of sunrise on the kitchen table; the way I can make stovetop coffee blindfolded; clothespin artwork to the back deck’s lattice, and hang my jewelry to a piece of driftwood in a windowsill in the bathroom; I smile to see Damon shepherding his harware in the garage, replacing stagnant unused stuff with the stimulus of welders and grinders and routers and saws, all in singlefile attention. Some people settle in quickly to a new domicile, but I think we’ve grown jaded to constant change. After all, we lived for a year in a 22-ft. trailer. With a baby. We want a sense of permanence so badly against the the tech industry flux. Here, we can at least afford to stay; it’s now only a matter of believing that roots are, beneath all our lingering doubt, indeed growing.

The pool in our neighborhood is open. It sits on the lake and adjacent the playground so it’s layered with the summer sounds of ski boats, laughter and shouting. All of the children are an inch taller, more sinewy than last year and a lot louder. I’m crowded by the youngest, with open arms for Chas, who is jumping off the ledge and into the water. Ford bobs and squeals with the more experienced swimmers. He’s riding atop a blue pool noodle and flashing everyone with Damon’s goggles and a wide smile full of straight, sweet little preschooler teeth. Some of us parents are lining the poolside, legs submerged, beers in hand and busy catching up. Many of us haven’t seen each other in months, and we’re quickly retying our seasonal connections. After all, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming months. The pool is the great common denominator during the long summer languor, and there’s something for everybody here, where nobody frowns upon beer bellies and mismatched bikinis.

It’s not fair that Chas can nap like this without me. But Ford will have none of it. He meets my exhaustion sometimes with sandpaper to my nerves, and I could just cry. So I’ve started taking vitamins more regularly, and with exercise and a little more sleep I’ve built up a better defense against the afternoon slump. Damon has introduced me to blackberry sage iced tea in mason jars. And I’ve taken up painting the sleeping babe.

I signed up for an encaustic painting class. A while back, I mentioned Amy Ruppel and her wonderful buttery paintings. I love this texture. It’s what I’m craving, more fat. Anyway, I’ve been wanting to learn for years, it’s just been hard to find an instructor. Lo and behold, they have one in Austin at the Laguna Gloria. So I cancelled our Vegas plans and am now sitting primly on the edge of my seat, waiting for two weeks to pass so I can start playing with oils and beeswax.

There are no more caterpillars. I keep waiting for a second generation to spill out of the trees but they haven’t arrived. I jogged along the creek today. The white rocks are dry now and milk-green where water trickled down only weeks ago, runoff from uphill. The pools where the big fish swim are coated with pollen and dust and milkweed tufts. Every big patch of sunlight holds a surprise along the trail. I’ve learned to ignore the scattering spiny lizards and squirrels. At the last minute, before my foot falls on them, they dart into shadows, bark and leaves flying behind them. So I ford through the little forest community, knowing it will all unfold before me.

Unless it doesn’t. My foot descends on a fat snake. Like the recoil of a shotgun, I yank back with so much force that I pull a muscle in my chest. But the snake is safe, motionless, and only as I bend down to study it does it slink into a rotten tree stump. Who knows what else I’ve narrowly missed?

I watched the kid’s sunhats bob and spin in the Twinner this morning as I pushed them up and down the neighborhood hills. Left and right, the wildflowers! Everywhere, embroidering the landscape with color. Like butterflies, we stopped at every honeysuckle to sample the sugar; Ford wouldn’t let a single vine pass unplucked. Australian cowdogs bounded to greet us, licking sunscreen off our hands, as we walked under the arching necks of blooming yuccas, a mature hedge that bordered their yard.

We spent another day at home, but mostly outdoors: pruning trees, training vines, repotting, chasing black bear caterpillars across pavement. In the middle of the day, we watched the storm pass in green darkness, spraying a horizontal rain and dropping hail between the boards of our patio the size of small grapes. Then the sky opened like a vault, and I got a wild hair to drive the kids down to the lake, where I waded into the water with a hand cultivator and a pickle jar, collecting aquatic plants.
I thought it would make the betta happy.

But we survived the last day of the flu: grimacing with every cough that blew my way; washing, washing, washing; spicy seafood soup with lemongrass and mushrooms from the Thai restaurant down the road; iced tea in mason jars with fresh spearmint; bundling up into the down comforter to watch Godzilla movies with Ford in blue twilight. His hair is thicker, no longer baby-like. I’m finding it difficult to snuggle with him, he has grown lean and long.

I laid there, in the rain, remembering cocooning like this in the Airstream. With Ford I would snuggle up in the same comforter, womblike and warm, under the air-conditioning’s permafrost. We’d lay there, wrapped in down and encircled with window: we’d curl up and watch the water crash on the rugged Kennebunkport coastline, or tractors plow by, or passersby swoon at our silver bullet bling.

I ran through the neighborhood again, backtracking alone. This time, to the stopwatch. I started out pounding but eventually glided, like I was pedalling up and down the hills. I have retrained my upper body to assist, my legs to reach higher. My eyes followed the powerlines, where birds were busy preening in peace: cardinals, mourning doves, Whitewing doves, Scrub jays, cowbirds. Above them swooped chimney swifts, and the whole lot of them were in song. A four-foot cedar stump jumped out at me from the bushes, black and damp. I never noticed it this morning, but I imagine it was bone dry and pale, then. But that’s the bunny in the magician’s hat, why I stayed to watch the show and left my gym bag in the car, only two inches further out the driveway.