Love in a Time of Homeschooling (15 page)

Julia began picking feathers from the grass: long goose feathers and small, two-inch peacock feathers with fluffy bases and shining emerald tips. I called her to join her sisters, and the four of us walked into the air-conditioned space of the cottage.

Stepping into the Orchardside Yarn Shop is like entering a chapel full of stained glass; the walls are covered in shelves of bright, multicolor yarn—two dozen shades of blue, five variations on magenta. There, one finds yarns like beaded necklaces or tiny strips of tinsel. Yarns with names such as Glitterlash, Fizz Stardust, and Squiggle. Contemplative yarns: Zen, Yin Yang, and Space. Holiday yarns: Tropicana and Malibu. And everywhere: scarves, sweaters, purses, and baby hats knitted with kaleidoscopic effects.

To me, the place is as beautiful as an art gallery, as spiritual as a convent. Each stitch is another rosary bead, each scarf another proverb. In that chapel of yarn, women congregate on Saturday mornings, knitting and talking and laughing. Throughout the rest of the week they drop in and out like supplicants coming
to leave a prayer. It would be educational, I thought, for Julia merely to sit in that room and absorb the ambience.

“We'd like to take knitting lessons,” I said to the friendly white-haired lady behind the cash register. I pointed toward Julia, who was fingering yarn textures: cashmere and mohair and chunky wool.

“I'm here every Saturday morning,” the woman said. “Lessons are ten dollars; children are free. I'll teach you a few things, and then you can stay for the morning, as long as you like, and keep asking questions.”

“Saturdays are tough, because I have all three of my girls.” Rachel and Kathryn were visible behind me, oohing over the “soooo adorable” mittens. “But Julia and I are homeschooling, so we could come any weekday, during regular school hours.”

“We get lots of homeschoolers.” The woman smiled. “I'm Sharon.” She handed me a business card. “You'll need needles,” she said, which I assumed would be an easy choice—I was wrong. The needles in that shop were as diverse as the women who used them: some tall, some short, some thin as shish kebob skewers, others fat as sausages. Most were made from traditional bamboo, a few were orange and purple translucent acrylic. “Knit Faster!” one brand urged, “with Turbo knitting needles!” I didn't want anything turbo in my car, let alone my knitting needles.

“These will do well for starting a scarf.” Sharon handed me two pairs of bamboo needles. As for the yarn, Julia chose a shimmering ruby skein, soft as velvet. I flinched when I saw the price. If we bought three skeins, this would be a forty-dollar scarf. But if the beauty of the yarn inspired Julia, so be it. I bought one skein to get her going, and for me: a pale blue soft yarn perfect for a baby's hat.

“Three lessons should get you started,” Sharon explained. “Give us a call when you're ready.” With her card in my pocket,
I resolved to telephone in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, my girls and I walked outside and climbed the forty steps to the blackberry patch. A chalkboard at a little stand listed the prices: a pint for two dollars, a gallon for fifteen—one fourth of what we'd pay at our local grocery store. The picking proved easy if somewhat unadventurous—no arms scratched reaching through thick brambles for the best berries, no purple-stained clothes, no beestings. Here were neat parallel rows of bushes arranged as if at a vineyard, with huge black and crimson edible jewels thicker than my thumb. For half an hour, the only sound was the plunk of berries in plastic buckets, like slow rainfall on a tin roof.

Looking back, I realize that our afternoon at the berry patch had already provided Julia with the lesson in local agriculture that I had sought at the Confederate produce stand. The Orchardside Farm offered excellent fruit at a bargain price, giving us a chance to support the county's economy. I looked forward to returning once the school year began.

But life rarely grants such idyllic moments. When Julia and I scheduled our Tuesday morning knitting lessons in September, we learned that if you didn't come on Saturdays, your lessons weren't with Sharon. Instead, we were taught by another local woman who was perfectly nice, but she didn't teach children for free. And she didn't teach in the yarn shop; she preferred the nearby office, with its comfortable couch and coffee table. I didn't have the heart to tell her that we had come chiefly for the ambience of all that rainbow yarn.

Julia, meanwhile, could manage only a fifteen-minute attention span when it came to knitting. Her impatient fingers battled the needles and yarn, producing stitches that were often bulky or twisted; the teacher was always unraveling and telling her to try again. Invariably I released Julia to go outside, where she stalked
the peacocks and free-range hens, while I received the knitting instruction to pass along in the evenings.

Although Julia didn't take naturally to textiles, our mornings in that corner of the county were time well spent. The introduction of knitting supplies into our home meant that for years to come, all my girls would take turns picking up the needles and yarn, sporadically trying and failing and trying again. Moreover, next door to the Orchardside Farm (“next door” meaning two hundred yards away) stood an equally wonderful spot, the Buffalo Springs Herb Farm.

Julia and I visited there after our first knitting lesson, parking beside a bank barn built in 1890, which was painted dark red with brown trim. Originally the bottom housed livestock and the top stored hay, but on that day the lower level held offices, and when Julia and I walked into the upper area, we were impressed by the cathedral-high roof that revealed open lofts where dozens of herbs and flowers in clustered bouquets had been hung upside down to dry. Around us, antique farm equipment lined the walls—a Christmas sleigh, a shaving horse (i.e., a wooden foot-operated vise). To our left stood a gift shop filled with woven baskets, potpourri, sachets, and soap (southernwood, pennyroyal, lavender, and peppermint) along with a wealth of spices (parsley, savory, and tarragon).

Most of the spices and dried flowers had come from a garden outside, where Julia and I headed after buying a few items. The garden resembled an Appalachian answer to the grounds at Versailles—tiny, but landscaped with meticulous care. Heirloom vegetables remained locked away behind a picket fence, but the rest of the gardens were open for the public to wander free of charge, and were bordered by a trellised walkway on the east, a small hill on the west, and the gardener's cabin at the southwest
corner, with its log walls, stone floor, and two centuries of gardening tools on display.

Julia was in Nirvana, smelling and touching very gently, never picking or trampling. She wandered through the fragrance garden, the Mediterranean garden, the paradise garden. A small incline lay covered in twenty-three varieties of thyme—I hadn't known there was more than one—golden thyme, caraway thyme, longwood thyme, and all the varieties of creeping thyme (fairy and cosmosus, and orange spice). My favorite was “minus thyme,” as if thyme could be subtracted back into some herbal past.

Julia lingered in the medieval garden, which was constructed like the ruins of a small stone chapel, with two-foot statues of saints tucked into stone nooks, a Celtic cross draped in vines, wind chimes dangling where the altar should have been, and small wooden benches that served as pews. When we sat down, Julia tilted her head: “Can you hear that?” Gregorian chants echoed so softly that a visitor would barely notice if she didn't take the time to stop and sit quietly. On our way out, I saw that someone had dropped pennies in the holy water.

Outside the gardens, across a broad green field, stood Wade's Mill, its water wheel turning. Julia and I headed there next, both of us dashing through the lawn sprinklers (September in Virginia can reach the upper nineties), so we entered the stone-and-brick mill still dripping. Inside that tall structure, giant gears pulled a four-story oval belt that operated huge grinding machines, producing white flour, wheat flour, and cornmeal, mixed with other ingredients and sold in little rope-tied bags: pesto flour, polenta, buckwheat pancake mix. Julia ascended the mill level by level, until she reached the outdoor platform beside the top of the wheel, where a long trough filled with water led to a moss-
covered chute. She dipped her palm into the water and stirred. “It's cold and clear,” she said, smiling, and I smiled back.

I looked upon that field trip as a great success, even though it served no big educational agenda. There were no facts for Julia to memorize about mills or gardens or bank barns; no quiz the next day. The excursion's purpose was largely aesthetic, allowing a child to absorb the beauty of the world and to admire what men and women could build when they set their minds to it. I sensed that Julia needed lessons in the marvels of human life as much as lessons in math and English. Much of the time she had spent in school seemed to have convinced her that human existence was a dreary affair filled with tests and worksheets and homework. And although hard work is an inescapable part of life, the world I wanted to show my daughter was also full of wonder—not only the wonders of wilderness (Julia was willing to acknowledge those), but of man working in harmony with nature.

We would return to that corner of the county twice in the coming weeks, journeying an hour round trip to reach the knitting cottage—a significant chunk of time in an average school day. Add all the field trips I had planned to Washington and Williamsburg, combined with frequent jaunts to the library, grocery store, and coffee shop, and Julia and I were destined to spend a lot of time on the road. Time is especially precious when you have only one year, so I wondered—what was the best way to use the car as a classroom?

Driving to the yarn shop, I sometimes turned on classical CDs and let Julia absorb Tchaikovsky while she stared out the window counting hawks that perched in trees alongside the highway. On longer trips, we brought along DVDs on history and modern art, followed by Julia's choices:
Dinotopia
and
Pokemon 2000
. But for most of our shorter drives, I turned off the technology and insisted on quizzing her in math and history and French. What is
eight times six? I asked as we maneuvered between tractor trailers. Eight times seven, eight times eight? What's the difference between obtuse and acute angles? Take out a sheet of paper, I'd say, and draw a trapezoid. Indicate the length of its sides, then calculate the area.

Julia was thoroughly, invariably disgusted.

“We're in the
car
, Mom. Can't you give it a rest?”

When traveling on public school trips, she explained, the kids were allowed to play with Game Boys and listen to iPods.

“Public school field trips happen once every couple of months,” I replied. “We are in the car every other day.”

I tried to compromise by quizzing her for only the first half of every car ride—the longest I could ever hold her attention anyway. But even that intrusion was met with resentment. At root, Julia was a child who wanted to be left alone with her thoughts, and I valued that impulse. In our world of cell phones, text messages, and endless screens, most people spend far too little time engaging with their minds. Deep contemplation is an endangered art.

In Julia's case, however, the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction. She seemed likely to overdose on introspection. I remembered the words of Mrs. Hennis, Julia's first-grade teacher: “Julia is in her own world, and it's a wonderful world…but she needs to spend more time in our world.” On car rides, I dragged her into my world by peppering her with questions. “
Quel âge as-tu, Julia
?” “What country first established colonies in New York?” “How do you find the circumference of a circle?”

Perhaps we would have been happier if I had engaged her in thoughtful conversations about the uses of mathematics or the complexities of historical events. But Julia was willing to have those conversations after three o'clock each day. The hours between 8:30 and 3:00 were the only time when she would agree
to “play school,” trying math computation, French conversation, or memorization of
anything
. I was determined to make the most of those hours.

Thus we established the roles that would become entrenched over the coming months: I was the drill sergeant and Julia was the dreamer. I wanted measurable progress, achieved through self-discipline and effective time management. Julia wanted a free-flowing and organic approach to life, where reading and math and music were pursued only to satisfy impulses of curiosity and pleasure, not to make “progress” toward societal goals. She wanted to live like Walt Whitman in
Song of Myself
: “I loafe and invite my soul / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Loafing was Julia's joy.

I had done my own share of dreaming and loafing as a child, and I valued those hours as critical for building an imagination and nurturing a happy spirit. Still, I worried that Julia didn't show much motivation to succeed at her schoolwork, whether in our car or kitchen. When I told John, he just sighed and gave one of his “like father, like daughter” explanations: “When I was a kid I don't think I had motivation to do anything except play floor hockey, watch cartoons, and hang out with my friends. I didn't want to be anything or do anything until late in high school, when I first thought about going to college.”

I told Julia that she needed to find a balance between dreamy reflection and structured tasks. Youth offered that rare opportunity when a girl could grow to become an accomplished athlete, a rock musician, a Rhodes scholar, or whatever she set her heart upon, if she could combine self-discipline with her imaginative visions. And so I gripped the steering wheel and pushed my reluctant child forward with her schoolwork.

One of my initial goals, as the cows and sheep and cornfields passed beside us, was to ensure that Julia learned her state capi
tals. I had been surprised, the previous summer, to hear that her fifth-grade peers would not be memorizing Bismarck, North Dakota, and Boise, Idaho. I viewed that task as an elementary rite of passage, and so had Julia's school, until a few years earlier, when they'd decided to drop it.