The swamp garden

The boys love hands-on outdoor play. Digging in the dirt, making mud pie, pouring water type of stuff. We have the mud kitchen in our backyard, but we are always looking for new places to explore in addition to returning to the tried-and-true. Some of our Greenville favorites include the RMSC butterfly garden and Linky Stone Park, even though neither is meant for digging but more for exploration and observation. We often head to Paris Mountain State Park for outdoor hiking, to pick up sticks and find rocks, but as a State Park digging is frowned upon and lugging a bunch of containers and toys out can be tiresome. However a new spot has gotten our attention as a sort of giant mud kitchen – the Swamp Garden.

I’ve written before about our nearby bakery & locally-sourced grocery, the Swamp Rabbit Cafe & Grocery – here about the store and here about their produce boxes. We often meet our friends at the Cafe because it is a great spot for a short hike on the Swamp Rabbit Trail and a healthy snack afterwards. Picnic tables with shade awnings provide relief from the sun and cool drinks and treats from the store are always a delight. However we always had to be extremely diligent in watching the kids, because in addition to the vehicular traffic there was also bicycle traffic to worry about.

The solution is the Swamp Garden. Its intention is to “provide a free-range play area for small children in order to inspire their curiosity and a love for nature.” A non-obtrusive fence helps corral the kids while plenty of stuff keeps their attention for hours, and really it seems that there’s something new on each visit. It started off small, with stumps and picnic tables for parents to rest while the kids grabbed some of the containers from the shelf to collect hickory nuts or cicada shells. Then the wagon and various tricycles appeared, rendering the kids mobile. The bug cabinet with nets and fake bugs encouraging the capture of real bugs. A sand box ingeniously designed with a hinged lid that can be closed to protect from wandering nocturnal animals but is perfect for sand play. And the simple – a few kid-sized shovels for digging in the dirt and then all the things the kids have found: sticks, rocks, nuts, seeds.

This Halloween the Cafe & Grocery hosted Little Monsters Night on Halloween. With a scavenger hunt, pin-the-spider-on-the-web, story time and all sorts of other fun stuff, the boys had yet another chance to show off their costumes and play with friends. Wouldn’t you know it, despite all the arranged activities and their costumes, all they wanted to do was dig holes and pull that wagon around!

The swamp garden is what your kids make of it, just like the little library housed in the miniature house next to the picnic tables. I suggest stopping in to grab a fresh scone and coffee from the cafe, and then settling in for an hour or two while the kids play. Enjoy a brisk autumn day (or even a hot summer one as the mature trees provide plenty of shade) with friends and let them do their thing – be kids and dig holes.

6 months in North Main

As the 6 month anniversary of moving into our new house approaches, I’ve been thinking about how it finally feels like home. We’ve settled in well: making friends with our neighbors, becoming active in the community, and adding to the yard to make it more suitable for the kids. Nothing in the interior of the house has been changed other than some electrical work we had done soon after moving in, but the boxes have (mostly) been unpacked, our belongings have found homes and the superfluous done away with. We’ve picked up some furniture to fill some holes, reassigned other pieces to serve different purposes and identified what we still need.

We celebrated Ūsiņdiena with ice cream downtown, one of the many things we love about our 'hood

 

It’s true that we have fallen in love with the neighborhood. North Main is close to downtown, not quite walkable with the boys, but definitely doable without driving if we walk to the trolley. The giant, mature oaks lining the streets provide shade, color and character. The street is inhabited by an eclectic mix of families, young couples starting out and neighbors who have been here since they were children. We can walk to two parks, one of which is part of the school the boys will be attending in a few short years. Friday I walked to the school with Lauris and Mikus to check out Arts Alive, the annual fundraiser featuring music, food, games, rides and a silent auction to benefit Stone Academy. It was nice to recognize a few of the families that live on our street, and even nicer to know that by having fun all afternoon we were helping to support a top-rated local school. Mikus loved the “Dinosaur Dig” activity, a sandbox filled with buried treasure that both boys dug around in for quite some time (for them the digging was more fun than finding the prizes). Lauris especially remembers getting a train painted on his arm and his hair colored pink. He wanted to participate in the paintball-style glitter fight, but I thought that was best saved for when he is a little older. We left balloons in hand about three hours later after a meal of snow cones, hot dogs, pizza and popcorn. I’m very glad we went to check out what was going on; I had seen a few ads for Arts Alive, but thought it was an art program for the Stone students. When we saw the news helicopters circling that afternoon I figured out it was something more – over 2,000 people were expected.



In the last picture, notice the pink hair...

 

We’ve also recently joined the neighborhood community group, and Thursday evening attended a membership drive at the local soda shop to meet more neighbors. It was only recently that we learned such an organization exists; due to several developments being built nearby there have been concerns over subdividing, retention ponds and the loss of mature trees, and we attended an informational meeting to learn more. The social meet and greet Thursday reminded us that there is an organization looking out for the general health of our community, and we had fun meeting new people and checking out the fire engine from the local firehouse.

 

In our six months here we’ve managed to make some big changes to the backyard. During the winter we built two raised beds in the sunniest portion of the yard, which were immediately appropriated by the two little guys as their own personal digging site. With some pressure treated lumber, rebar and a saw we were able to quickly put together a very solid, easy to assemble (and disassemble if needed) raised garden that hopefully will be productive for us this summer.

 

The spring however has so far been a constant struggle to keep Mikus from pulling everything up from the garden, and we had talked for a while of building a sandbox to keep them otherwise occupied. While Zinta was in town our neighbor stopped by to let us know she had seen a sandbox on the curb a few streets over as she knew we had been thinking about building one and hadn’t yet found the time. I left the boys with my sister and went to take a look, finding an adorable wooden sandbox in great shape. Good (free) finds don’t last long in this neighborhood, and after measuring and deliberating and trying to figure out a way to fit the playset in the car without taking it apart I was resigned to waiting for my husband to get home with the truck. At that moment yet another stroke of luck occurred, as a neighbor saw me and offered to give the sandbox a ride to our place with his pickup. Roberts has fitted the box with a cover and yesterday we filled it with river sand, a cheaper alternative to the play sand that sells at home improvement stores.

 

The sandbox is not the only “lightly used” play equipment taking up space in the backyard. A while back we went out to Anderson to a farm that belongs to some friends of ours, and they offered us they playset that their girls had outgrown and was taking up space where the pool was to go. After determining that it could be taken apart we accepted the offer, knowing that putting it back together might prove more of a challenge than getting it home. Sure enough, between having to replace a couple of boards and the awning, to having to “tweak” things a little, the result is not exactly how it originally looked. The important thing however is that the two boys now have a swingset and slide to expend energy on, and that Mikus has become a little spider monkey climbing up and down the rock wall.

 

With all the settling in and changes in the last six months I’m curious to see what the next six will bring. I’m excited to see what happens with the garden, so far it looks like the squirrels and insects will provide me a challenge with some of the plants. And we keep adding more; a raspberry bush has joined the blueberries and the grape has finally budded, some hostas will be joining the shrubbery out front and the mint that a friend dug up from her garden has finally established itself in the back close to the irises our neighbor separated for us from her gorgeous garden. She’s the one that had to give her three guinea hens to her brother; we are simultaneously sad and happy to see them go as we (especially the boys) loved collecting the beautiful feathers that occasionally landed on our side of the fence, and that they would keep us company while we played and worked outside, but the early morning wake-up calls will not be missed. Never a dull moment, it looks like we’ll possibly have some chickens for neighbors on the other side in the coming months, should I complain a little in order to secure a bribe of fresh eggs?  Changes on the block aren’t restricted to new development either. Friends on another street (with a French connection) have decided on a move to California, and we are sorry to see them go, but new friends we refer to as the #2 pencils (we first met them as a family on Halloween, when they were dressed up as…) remind us that there are tons of families with kids of similar ages as L & M on our street.

 

I wish to end this overly long post with the following thought - everything happens for a reason. Upon moving back from France a lot earlier than originally expected we regretted selling our house; the first home we ever owned, the house Lauris spent the first months of his life in, the friendships we formed in another tight-knit community. But now I realize that if we still owned that house, we would never have bought this home, in a neighborhood that has already brought us so much happiness. Now wouldn’t it be cool if the rumors of an owl living in our tree were true (well, except for maybe the new chickens...)?

May 1st

This morning we took a stroll to the marché aux puces, and in addition to half dozen paperback novels (in English!!!) we also brought home a bouquet of lily of the valley. In Latvian they are called maijpulkstenīši (literally May clocks) and in French, muguets, but they are symbols of spring in all three cultures. Usually there are flower vendors selling homegrown flowers at the marché, but the difference today was in the sheer volume of the flowers present. It seemed that every person leaving had a bouquet in hand, and unknowingly we followed the tradition of May 1^st by bringing one home ourselves. Their beautiful smell has now filled the room, and it brings back memories of my great-grandfather who once gave me a gift of lily of the valley perfume when I was a little girl.

A very nice description of the muguet tradition can be found here.

Bric à brac

Things that came home with us;

A brightly colored tablecloth, two tiles with vibrant flowers, a wooden toy for Lauris, a glazed flowerpot to hold our orchid,, “The Cat in the Hat Dictionary in French.”

Things that almost came home with us;

Giant ceramic platter in the shape of a fish.

Not much is open on a Sunday in Clermont-Ferrand. The occasional bakery or café, and the marché aux puces. Yet year round, rain or shine, on Sunday mornings the Place Gambetta and Place Salins fill up with vendors. From big trailers to tiny little hatchbacks, from items laid out on the ground to large displays, there are bargains to be had and junk (or treasure) to be bought!

The variety of vendors is the draw in this flea market. There is a man selling geodes he probably found himself, and an old woman selling her jams. At least half a dozen tables are selling every cell phone, computer, GPS and other charger that has ever been made. Antique books, comic books, children’s books; all kinds of books and all in French. Accessories and clothes, jewelry for your toes, the African art and the wine push-cart; vases, bowls, perfume and trolls, tarnished silverware and shoes without a pair! On one end there are a few food vendors; potatoes and carrots possibly dug up the previous day, mussels, locally-produced honey. Hungry now? Why not buy a big plate of sausage or truffade, cooked up on the spot, in pans a meter across. On the other end you can find brand new knives, postcards from Venice, collectible John Deere tractors and old toolboxes filled with unidentifiable metal chunks.

Flea markets aren’t for everyone, but most of my family are fans. In the States garage sales are abundant in the spring, consignment sales are a newer thing and there are even online classifieds like craigslist.org that specialize in gently used stuff. Roberts likes the occasional garage sale where he can rifle through old fishing lures. Years ago in Georgia, he deviated from lures, buying a white tux with tails from, as his business card proclaimed, “the junk man.” And me, I keep hoping to find that perfect painting, that funky old necklace or maybe just a little comfort in something that reminds me of home.

Of course there is also plenty of junk; useless tchotchkes that are the trademark of all flea markets. But the marché is full of shoppers, sellers, treasure-seekers, tourists and families out for a stroll. And all of them – bargain hunters and negotiators.  Final verdict – thumbs up. Something for everyone, if you don’t come for the junk, come for the atmosphere!