Silhouettes in Spring

1. Strahov monastery 2. View from Prague castle gates.

Working on our cookie technique

I found spring-themed cookie cutters in our local dm Monday, and they made their way home with me along with the usual tonnage of goods required to run a baby. Caroline ran in the door shortly afterwards. Faster than you can say Strč prst skrz krk she had her homework done, a few paintings hung up to dry and the cookie cutters washed. At 5:30 she pointed out that she had even spoken civilly to the baby several times without being reminded. With such overwhelming evidence of goodness in front of me, I agreed to quit work for the day and we made cookies from a mix I found hidden in the back of a cabinet.

Sugar cookies need to cool before they are decorated, so it wasn't until yesterday that we decorated them. We as in C, our babysitter, and myself. Or more truthfully, I whisked together the icing, set out sprinkles galore, ate a cookie to taste test the icing and ran to a meeting, leaving C pouring sparkles with abandon while Marie carefully starred a butterfly. We all liked the green lamb with its rather evil pink eyes. Its dialogue with the red rabbit (sitting in a field of green just to lambie's left) was quite remarkable for a spring lamb.

The cookies have disappeared by now due to their proximity to the main cook in the house and his sweet tooth, but this weekend I've promised C to pull out our baking cookbook and make another batch from scratch. She wants to make enough this time for all her class AND Dada too.

Strč prst skrz krk = a Czech tongue twister famous for its lack of vowels. We're working on our Czech pronunciation here at Kolokolo as C will go to Czech first grade next year and a tongue twister is a fun way to wrap up a practice session. This one means "stick your finger through your throat".

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

 

A mosquito pond in the making?

 

A year ago the view from my desk looked like this. Time passed, construction happened. Our balcony, unused, gathered dust through the summer as the contractors next door built a parking garage. A month ago, the construction stopped, and the work appeared done - nearly.

We're not sure why, but the builders have left a pond on the roof next door, complete with an archipelago of dirt islands. The water is at least an inch deep and when it rains we watch the waves ripple across the roof, and I wonder just how many gallons of water it might take to bring that ceiling down.

Prague Castle in March

 

Yesterday's walk across the Vltava gave me a chance to see Spring's colors, just appearing. I like the sky's hint of blue above the castle's rooftops. (Yes, I found a picture that wasn't quite all gray!).

How many generations of architecture can you see in this picture?

Life cycles

(or, I've got Slate's Shoot the Recession photos on my mind)

When I went out to lunch today I carried my camera with me to see what shots I could find. Unfortunately for the picturesque, the weather is behaving just as it should in March, blustering about and supplying us with wind, clouds and rain. So despite my best efforts (and I had no children with me, so no excuse really) my shots of the castle, the Charles Bridge, and the National Theater all turned out flat and gray. Then I passed a window display and I knew that this would be my shot of the day.

Explainer: SLEVA means sale in Czech. Stores across town are marking down their goods, waiting to see what happens as the Czech Republic moves into a recession. And any guesses about the street art in the reflection?

A Little Gardening

Caroline loves puttering about in gardens and would happily spend all afternoon watering and rewatering any plant she comes across. We've reached an understanding on this subject though, so she now asks me before she turns on the deluge, and we hope our plants will survive a bit longer as a result.

At the beginning of March, we grew an amaryllis bulb into flower. Yesterday James and I picked C up from school and we walked to our favorite flower store a few blocks away to see what we could try next. Bulbs have a disheartening habit of blooming and then dying away for the season, so we're branching out into herbs and C has a promise that we will plant our retired daffodil bulb in the next available garden.

How I came to know Prague*

We tell our friends it all began with our honeymoon. We say it was Venice and the coffee, the architecture, the little grocery stores: they won our hearts. Flying home from Milan, we were ready to go back and see more, but knew it would be a long stretch until we could afford our next vacation abroad. We started talking about jobs in Europe before the plane reached Greenland.

Or maybe it was earlier, when my twin sister and I were in college and we traded a debutante dance for a trip to Europe. We traveled around Belgium with two great uncles and our great aunt, visiting every cathedral and art museum in the country, pretending to be the urban Europeans we were not but our great aunt certainly was and our great uncle would (on occasion) deign to be. This was the great uncle who left S.C. and never moved back. Who skipped out of his PhD work to defect to Europe in the 50s, marry an art historian, become a professional bird watcher and houseboat owner. He was the breaker of all family traditions, an iconoclast, the most infamous black sheep of the family. Ellen and I thought he was wonderful.

My first trip to Europe was in 1991. At the other end of the decade, in 1998, Will and I married and traveled to Italy. Then we came home to our respective jobs: I wrote for a research magazine in N.C.; Will went back to work on his dissertation in a university up north. We knew one of us needed to move but which of us and where - that was the great debate. It got easier when Will won a fellowship to finish his PhD. I decided we could live anywhere as long as we had an internet connection and started to look for jobs in San Francisco and Europe. Europe bit first, so to Prague we went.

That sounds simple, right? It helped that my sister had moved to Zurich to be a consultant the year we got married. I got my job in Prague because the person who hired me worked with Ellen. He told her he was looking for someone, just like her, who could run the design department in his new start up. She turned the job offer down, and sent him my way instead. The job paid start up wages and had a dubious future but we decided it would do for a bit. My editor offered me a year's leave of absence, we gave away our cars and arranged our wedding presents and library in Will's mother’s attic. We flew to Prague with four suitcases and a violin. Will’s suitcases were mostly full of books, but I didn’t find that out until later.

Our first week in Prague, we stayed in a pension right on the river. For ten dollars a night we were the proud renters of a drawing room in a fin-de-siecle flat. Despite its decay, I loved our room's fourteen foot ceilings and high windows looking out onto the water. The bed though, with its inch thick mattress and humid feather blankets, lost its charm quickly. As soon as we could, we moved into our own flat, empty of furniture but with our four suitcases to prop us up.

What happened then? The person who hired me quit to form another start up. I took over the office - the development arm for a tiny consulting company. In the excitement of the internet bubble, I conveniently forgot why we had moved to Europe. Instead, I worked until midnight for months on end, building that office into a medium sized business with its own income. It was thrilling. I learned a lot. I didn’t see much of Europe though.

In 2001, the bubble burst, my first company and I parted ways and I launched my own business with two partners. Around that point, we began to travel, take longer vacations and try out a more European life style (weekends, hello!?). Caroline came along in 2003, and we discovered just how much more you become a part of a country when you have a child in it. Having C turned Prague into our home, not just a place to work and explore Europe from. And so, here we are.

* Eurolush asked me the other day how we happened to move to Prague. I often wonder about other expats' arrival stories, so I thought I'd post our own too.

A sketch for Eleanor

Eleanorfromthecommentbox wrote a poem this week that caught my fancy and C's too. So last night C posed, I snapped pictures and today I sketched a thank you illustration for Eleanor. Because thanks to Eleanor and the internet, I got inspired to try my hand at sketching again. And thanks to Eleanor and the internet, Caroline gets to see poetry freshly minted - that's a cool thing indeed.

A mountain of books

We went to the States with five suitcases - three of them empty. What did we bring back? Books, books, books! C, Will and I each built our own mountain, though as C said, she's willing to share with me if I will share with her. Most of my stack came from our old collection, which I bring over bit by bit each year, but I did bring some newbies (marked * below) home too.

Now that the dust has settled and jet lag disappeared, I'm on a great rereading kick and just finished Treasure Island last night. Have you read it lately? When I was a child I was a bit terrified by the book, and the pictures made me shiver with delighted fear (illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, the paintings tell a vivid story by themselves). But after reading all the Patrick O'Brian books, and the even more gruesome Matty Graves novels, Treasure Island seems much more pacific to me these days and I only had to turn the lights up high a few times in my midnight readings.

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Middlemarch Part 1 & 2, George Eliot
Mr. Darcy's Dream*, Elizabeth Aston
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Agent Zigzag, Ben Macintyre*
Pon Top Edisto
Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle, Ellen Gilchrist
A Working Girl Can't Win, Deborah Garrison
The English Patient, Michael Ondattje
Drawing for Children, Mona Brookes
Audubon, Robert Penn Warren
Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Swan Lake, Mark Helprin
An Incomplete Revenge, Jacqueline Winspear*
Johns Island*
Burning Bright, Tracy Chevalier*
Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
The Riverside Chaucer
Treasury of Art Nouveau Design & Ornament

Charleston graffiti

 

I collect graffiti everywhere we go apparently!

Note my second favorite South Carolina tree makes an appearance here. I do love palmettos.

Sunshiny day

 

After a week of weather forecasts calling for dreary with a chance of more dreary, the sun decided to pay a surprise visit to our neck of the continent today. Caroline, home from school with a cold, thinks its timing is all off, and has retired to her shaded room with a stack of books to flip through before her next nap/snack/game of Uno. James, on the other hand, thinks the sun is great. Here he is playing peek-a-boo with the light.

He's not always this smiley of course, and at nearly ten months has developed definite ideas about what he should be able to do. Climbing off furniture, hanging out with me, and playing with every toy that C shows an interest in are top priorities right now. Last night before C's cold struck, she and Will practiced sword fighting in the play room. They closed the doors to ward off the noise, but mostly succeeded in offending James considerably. Abandoning me to my book he crawled across the living room to bang on the doors and shout until he was let in and given another sword* to chew on while he watched.

*Lego makes great foam swords which Will and Caroline use to practice fencing with.

Live Oaks, Growing

 

Live oaks don't lose their luster in the fall. Southern Live Oaks, or Quercus virginia hold onto their leaves until spring and shed them just before their new crop arrives. They're very sturdy trees - they may drop their branches in a hurricane but rarely get uprooted and seem to thrive in lots of different soils. Left to themselves, they can live a long time. One of the oaks on my family's farm has a trunk equal to its cousin in size, the famous Angel Oak. The City of Charleston estimates that the Angel is over 1400 years old. We suspect the family oak has seen a lot of summers pass by too.

Live oaks remind me of some of the best parts of my childhood and driving down a road covered by an oak tunnel of branches and Spanish Moss sends me back to summer and that carefree feeling I used to get when I knew that ahead of us waited a dozen cousins, late night card games, all the tomatos, shrimp, and m&ms we could eat and a bookcase full of Readers Digest Condensed Books to catch up on.

I used to try to draw the oaks too, and my grandmother still has one rendition hanging up in her dining room. Every time I visit her, I see it and think that I need to try again. So each trip to the Island finds me taking dozens of pictures to use as models. This year, this was one of my favorites and I think I'm going to use it as the basis for my next try. Details to come.

Home again home again jiggity jig

 

The house is quiet - everyone else is sleeping off jet lag while I organize pictures and review the unbelievable evidence that, yes, we just were basking in the sun a mere few days ago! Time to slip in a blog post and resume my usual blogging activities (thanks BB and Ellen for the motivation ;-).

From the top, clockwise 1. Caroline lays out a picnic blanket, preparing for cousins! 2. C tries out the Yorktown's captain chair in Charleston SC. 3. C and James after J's baptism, just last Sunday. 4. C walks down an oak alley at my family's farm. 5. James smiles for the camera.