I took this photo last week because I surveyed the room after our usual morning learnapalooza and was heartily amused by the disaster we left in our wake. I thought I’d write a post about how learning is a messy business or something like that. I wanted to remember how the stuffed cat had to perch on the table to listen to King of Ireland’s Son, and how the colander kept Wonderboy busy for twenty minutes, and how everything on the table and sofa signified a small event in our day.

But I got busy and didn’t write the post. I came across the photo just now while uploading more baby pictures for a lonesome daddy way out west, and it hit me that that was probably the last such morning we’ll have in this house. A day or two later is when we shifted into hurry-up- and-get-ready-to-go mode.

You seldom do know that the last time is the last time when you’re living it. Later, when you realize, it smacks you in the heart.

Things are picking up speed now, as far as our move has concerned. Nope, the house hasn’t sold yet, but the kids and I are heading west before winter sets in. What do you think, am I taking my whole Little House motif a little too far?

This week I’m interviewing movers, having our minivan’s windshield replaced, selling off the contents of my garage, hauling vanloads of clothes to the thrift store, and trying to think of all the places (like PayPal) at which I need to change my email address.

Which: while I’m thinking of it! If you’re still using an EARTHLINK address for me, it’s time to retire it. The correct address is thebonnyglen (at) gmail (dot) com.

And speaking of the Bonny Glen! When I announced that we were moving to Southern California, a few friends lamented the loss of "bonny glen" as a descriptor of our home. Of course you know the name really comes from one of my Martha books, Down to the Bonny Glen, which in turn came from a line in an old Scots ballad:

"I’ll fetch my nut-brown maiden
Down from the bonny glen."

Here at the feet of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are bonny glens around practically every curve of the road. This is the bonniest of bonny countrysides. Every time I look up at the hills, which really are blue, my heart soars. Of course I’m a Colorado girl by upbringing, and no landscape is quite right without some mountains holding up the sky.

They have mountains in southern California, too, but I’m betting they aren’t blue. Of course, they’ve got a stretch of big blue that ought to go a long way toward satisfying my craving. My girls can’t wait to see the sea. It won’t be long now…

But about the bonny glen, I was telling you about how a few friends expressed regret or sympathy for the fact that "Here in the Bonny Glen" was going to cease to be an appropriate title. I was going to write a long post about how the Bonny Glen is a state of mind—which it is, for me; this blog is my way of celebrating what I love about our life together, and it helps me to look out for the bonny moments, great and small, as they come to us. Sometimes we joke about how it isn’t always sunshine and roses in the Bonny Glen (and believe me, it isn’t). But this blog helps me to be mindful of living joyfully and making our days worth celebrating in print.

However, be that as it may—and it IS—I am pleased to announce I’ve thought of a way for "Here in the Bonny Glen" to continue to be a literal description as well as a metaphorical one. Actually, it was Scott’s idea. I’ve been reading up on California homeschooling regulations and have decided to go for the "register as a private school" option. I told Scott we’d need to come up with a NAME for our "school." Without missing a beat, he IM’d back: "Duh. Bonny Glen Academy."

Actually, what he wrote was "The Bonny Glen Academy for Exceptional Children and Road Scholars." Which made me laugh. (Of course we think all children are exceptional in some way or other. Ain’t no mold fits all of ’em.) We bandied about various terms in lieu of Academy…"Day School" doesn’t fit; "Institute" makes me shudder; "Lyceum" seemed a bit over the top. Personally, I like "Brainery," which is listed as a synonym for academy at Thesaurus.com.

In October, we shall indeed be Road Scholars. The gang and I are driving to my parents’ place in Colorado (more mountains!) and Scott will meet us there for the last leg of the drive. He’s got places he wants to show us, points he passed on his own drive two months ago. Tucumcari Mountain, the desert, the Broccoli Crossing…

It will be quite an adventure.

These next few weeks will be crazed, no doubt. As opposed to, um, the serene and uncomplicated days we’ve passed since Scott’s departure in July. Ha. Such is life here in the bonny glen, where "bonny" = "noisy and chaotic" and "glen" = "house in extreme uproar."

And since it’s Poetry Friday, I’ll share the lyrics to the ballad that inspired the name of my book, my blog, and my homeschool. You can listen to the melody here.

Horo, My Nut Brown Maiden

Horo, my nut brown maiden
Hiri, my nut brown maiden
Horo, ro maiden
For she’s the maid for me.

Chorus
Her eye so mildly beaming
Her look so frank and free
In waking and in dreaming
Is evermore with me.

Oh Mary, mild-eyed Mary
By land or on the sea
Though time and tide may vary
My heart beats true to thee.

With thy fair face before me
How sweetly flew the hour
When all thy beauty o’er me
Came streaming in its power.

The face with kindness glowing
The face that hides no guile
The light grace of thy going
The witchcraft of thy smile.

And when with blossoms laden
Bright summer comes again
I’ll fetch my nut brown maiden
Down from the bonny glen.

I’m sitting here waiting for the phone to ring. A realtor called
shortly after noon, just as I was starting to make lunch for the kids.
She asked if she could show the house between one and three, with the
time frame somewhat flexible. Of course I said sure, even as the voices
in my head commenced their panicky clamor: The upstairs is a mess!
Rug needs vacuuming! Toothpaste spatters on bathroom mirror! Unfolded
laundry on bed! Dishes! Lunch! Baby’s nap! Oh look she just spit up on
the floor AGAIN!

But I’ve learned to ignore those voices. They never shut up, and you
could drive yourself (or more to the point, your kids) crazy by paying
too much attention to the pressure those strident little nitpicking
mind-voices love to heap upon you.

So I told the kids lunch would have to wait, assigned each of the
girls a job, and called pal Lisa to ask if we could barge our noisy
selves right into the middle of her day. Because Lisa is an absolute
peach, she said of course, and asked if I wanted to send any of the
kids ahead while I did the cleaning.

I decided to keep them here until the realtor called back (she had
promised to give me a heads-up when they were ten minutes away, so that
I wouldn’t have to keep the kids out of the house for a big long
window), and I’m glad I did. Because here it is a little after two, and
there’s been no heads-up call yet. I gave everyone a snack on the front
porch, but no one’s had a real lunch. At least I had time to get the
place presentable. Now the waaaaaiiiiiiting.

But I know this is part of the place we’re in. Limbo. I’ve spent a
lot of my adult life in one kind of limbo or another: in a state of "as
soon as we get through THIS, life can go back to normal." Somewhere
along the line it dawned on me that this IS our normal. There will
always be some factor turning life upside down: a new baby, a book
deadline, an illness, a new job. If I sat around waiting to JUST GET
THROUGH THIS, my kids would spend their entire childhood waiting.
Instead, I have tried to embrace limbo, to make it a place for real
living, not getting-through.

So we go on with our read-alouds and our nature walks, our silly sing-alongs and our bean feasts. We try—

Hey, the phone’s ringing! Maybe it’s the realtor!

***

It was. Calling to say: they aren’t coming. Someone locked her keys
in the car. This ate up all the buyer’s time and he’ll have to
reschedule.

I just called Lisa, cracking up. "I don’t know how you can laugh
about this stuff," she said. But she was laughing too because it really
is funny. As usual, life makes my point far more eloquently than I ever
could. You can’t let Limbo get you down. You have to put up your tent
and make your little ring of campfire stones and get busy roasting your
marshmallows right there in limbo, or else one day you’ll look around
and say hey, we finally got through it!, and you’ll discover that your kids are grown and they never got to try s’mores.

(Crossposted at lissa.minti.com)

Tonight I had to run out after dinner to pick up milk for tomorrow’s breakfast. So there I am at the grocery store at 8 p.m. with my five kids, putting the necessities of life on the conveyor belt:

Milk
Fruit
Cereal
Ice Cream
Toothpaste

(Scott had already restocked my supply of the Most Important Pantry Item of All, you remember.)

On the way home we passed a big old turtle on the side of the road. Whooooaaaa, the girls all exclaimed, and they chattered about it all the rest of the evening.

We are easily excited. Me, I didn’t even need the turtle. The ice cream was excitement enough.

But you didn’t even know we were gone, did you?

What I didn’t mention last week when I wrote about our Sunday Drive (with Vomit) was that poor Wonderboy’s little bout of carsickness didn’t bode well for what we had planned for the next day. See, I had decided that if I’m really going to drive these younguns of mine all the way across the country after we sell our house, it might be wise to take a little test drive. A pre-road-trip road trip, if you will. Destination: Alice’s cottage. Hard as it is for me to believe, we’d never actually been there before; she moved into her current house after we abandoned her for the Blue Ridge. We were supposed to visit last summer but Wonderboy broke his head. Literally. And that was actually the least serious of the medical emergencies he threw our way that week. Needless to say, those events necessitated reworking our vacation plans just a little. As in: goodbye, Cottage Garden; hello, hospital cafeteria. (Ah, old friend, how I’ve missed your pudding.)

Now here we are a year later, on the verge of another big adventure, and I just couldn’t see hightailing it all the way to the other coast without ever having taken a stroll in the cottage garden. So with my little heart all broken because Scott is far away, I concocted this plan to betake ourselves to parts north for a week of gabbing and eating and baby-kissing and toddler-chasing and gabbing and singing and swimming and also gabbing. And then the day before we were supposed to leave, Wonderboy threw up in the van.

Also! That very same morning, last Sunday it was, one of Alice’s children woke up feeling ill and he too did some spewing of his own. But not in the car (thank goodness). Two more of her little ones were listless and glazed that day, and it sure seemed like some nasty virus was commencing a slash-and-burn mission through her household.

This was the point at which any sensible mother would begin to rethink her vacation plans. But I am not any sensible mother. Nor, it would seem, is Alice, whose philosophy is "If the kids get sick, let ’em get sick together." Okay, that isn’t really her Philosophy with a capital P but it WAS her stated opinion on this particular occasion.  So Monday morning, after some dithering (because Dithering is my middle name) I went ahead with Plan A and loaded the kiddies into the minivan and hit the open road.

I didn’t mention this excursion on the blog because I didn’t want The Internet to know my house was sitting empty all week. The Internet might think I have jewelry worth stealing. (I don’t.) (But I do have a lot of Signing Time DVDs and The Internet might not have realized that I brought them all with me.) But it was hard not to tell you, dear readers of these posts who utilize the internet yet are somehow not The Internet, that sinister entity. I sooo wanted to blog the trip. Which I couldn’t have done anyway because when I arrived at Alice’s my ancient laptop, Cantankerous Marge (who, as I’ve mentioned before, is not equipped for Wi-fi but I figured I could just use dial-up—you know, blogging the old-fashioned way) would not turn on. You could push that button as hard as you liked; she remained stubbornly blank-screened no matter what. I guess she does not like traveling. Or perhaps she simply does not like me. There is a nice Apple repairman in town, and I am hoping she will like him better.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway because as it turned out, I was too busy gabbing and eating and baby-kissing, etc., to blog. I did sneak a few minutes on Alice’s computer here and there but all I managed to do was fill my drafts folder with fragments about what a glorious place her cottage is and how brilliant and adorable her children are and how annoying it is that California is sort of really really far away from where she lives. Oh, and I invented another new word, which is always satisfying. (You should try it.)

We had the most fabulous week. No one threw up. Well, Wonderboy did, but only once, and it didn’t signify anything except too much milk in his belly. He had more than double the number of beautiful girls waiting on him hand and foot (and stomach), and it is possible I lost track of how much food and drink he was actually consuming. He rebounded quickly, especially after Alice’s Patrick gave him his Very Best Shark Shirt to wear. It is an important shirt, and I am sort of jealous that it doesn’t fit me.

I will write more about the trip later. There are about a million things to say. (But fear not, I shall limit myself to six or seven.) We arrived home early this morning (and nothing was thrown up except our voices in several rousing choruses of "Poe, Edgar Allen") and the van is mostly unpacked, the laundry is washed but not dried, the babies are thoroughly napping, and I have cleaned out the fridge. Which I know you’re supposed to do BEFORE you go on a trip, but I refer you to the "not a sensible mother" passage earlier in this post.

And now I must go make a grateful phone call to the kind young friend who kept our plants and hermit crab alive this week. Also I must go break Jane’s heart by telling her that no, we cannot leave stagnant rainwater pooled in the top of the birdseed bin on the deck even though yes, it WOULD undoubtedly be extremely interesting to watch those mosquito larvae mature into grownup bloodsucking mosquitoes with a thirst for Little Girl.

Which is why I have such good ideas. Such as my decision to take all the kids out for lunch during our open house today. A big fancy lunch. At (drumroll) McDonalds! (You are dazzled, are you not, by my originality.)

I live (for now) in a town so small (for now) it doesn’t have a McDonalds. You can drive twenty-some minutes one way or twenty-some minutes in the other direction to find the golden arches. But that was part of my Brilliant Plan. The open house coincided with Wonderboy’s naptime, so I figured I’d let him sleep in the car, we’d go through the drive-through, and he and the baby would both wind up with decent naps while the rest of chipped away at our good health with tasty fries.

And how beautifully the plan unfolded, at first. The boy fell asleep right away, the baby snoozed, and the girls and I sang bad camp songs. Before we knew it, there we were at french fry heaven. Except. There was a sign on the drive-through menu informing us that due to a busted water line, McDonalds had no water.

"Sorry, no soft drinks or coffee," the hand-scrawled message announced.

The kids aren’t allowed soda, and I don’t drink coffee, but still. There was no way I was going to buy food at a place where, hello, the employees couldn’t wash their hands.

Hey, look! Next door: Burger King. But the busted water line? It affected, apparently, the whole block. Burger King had a similar sign.

"Our water is out. No drinks! All food items still available."

Thanks, but no thanks. "Wendy’s?" I suggested. The girls agreed. We drove on, leaving the waterless block behind. Of course there was a Wendy’s not far away, because this is America. It was on the wrong side of the street, though, and in the midst of the maneuvering I had to do to get into the correct lane, Wonderboy awoke from his slumber. And, for no apparent reason, threw up. A lot. All over.

The girls were screaming, retching, holding their noses. Poor Wonderboy was shrieking at the top of his lungs, and who could blame him? That is one lousy way to wake up.

I turned down a side street and pulled into a deserted parking lot. The girls scrambled out onto the baking asphalt. Wonderboy continued to scream. I reached for the basket of spare wipes—and remembered I’d tucked those into Scott’s car just before he left for California. You know, in case he spilled something on the trip.

Hadn’t yet occurred to me to replace them.

There was a burp cloth in the diaper bag. I managed to get Wonderboy’s carseat unbuckled and stripped off his nasty clothing, then mopped him off as best I could. Which wasn’t very well. Mostly I just moved the sick from his body to mine. Because all he wanted was to hug me. Jane used to want the same thing, when chemo was making her throw up all the time. I’m pretty sure it’s a toddler instinct: I will feel much better the second you allow me to smear my vomit in your hair. You are awesome, Mommy. Mind if I throw up just a little more? There was a clean spot on your shirt.

By now, of course, the baby was awake. And unhappy. The girls were melting all over the parking lot, but they were none too eager to get back into the van. Also, they were all starving. Because of course we were now waaaay past lunchtime. And yet, somehow, no one felt much like eating. Go figure.

I got my poor little boy back into his still-pretty-icky-but-only-in-a-soaked-in-way seat and we made our pathetic way back home. "A day will come," I promised my girls, "when we’ll look back on this and laugh our heads off."

Rose was skeptical. "Why would we?"

"Because it will seem funny. I mean, it really IS funny, when you think about it. It just doesn’t FEEL funny now."

"It sure smells funny," said Bean.

"Why is it funny?" persisted Rose.

"I’ll have to explain it later," I said, finding it impossible to expound and hold my breath at the same time.

"I really really have to go to the bathroom," announced Beanie. "REALLY."

I really really want to be nursed, sobbed the baby.

I really really want you to turn back time and make this not have happened, moaned the boy.

I really really want a good shampoo, crackled my hair.

Nope, not quite funny yet. Okay, maybe a little.

I had to think about whether I was going to reveal this ground-breaking discovery to you, dear readers, but so many of you expressed envy interest in my eight-year hiatus from laundry that I decided it was only fair to pass on the extraordinary Secret to Excellence in Laundering I singlehandedly developed in my very first week back on the job.

Oh, yes, I am not a complete rookie in the Cleaning of Clothing business. There are mountains of freshly washed garments in my hidden past. My laundering experience goes back all the way to high school, when I became a master in the art of folding baggy poly-cotton shirts and knit stirrup pants. It was during the nine months I lived in the hospital with wee Jane that I passed my dryer sheets to Scott, and when he decided to quit actual paying work and become a freelancer, I very graciously allowed him to continue with the lugging of clothes to the laundromat and the scrounging for quarters in the sofa cushions prior to the lugging. Because that’s how nice I am.

But one might expect one’s skills—honed to perfection though they be—to grow rusty during eight years of neglect. Not so in my case. Why, it was on only my second load this week that I made my Startling Discovery, which I shall share with you, my loyal readers, in this sneak preview of the upcoming infomercial that will doubtless make me a millionairess.

For ultra-clean clothing, put garments IN the washer while the wash cycle is running, not on the floor in front of the machine.

You heard me right. Amazing breakthrough, isn’t it? This revolutionary technique will exponientally increase what we laundry experts call "the Clean Factor." The sudsy water in your electronic washtub will whisk all dirt away.

You may thank me now.

How, you ask, did I make this astonishing discovery? (On my infomercial, a guest 70s-era actor will ask this question with very wide eyes. Final casting decisions are still pending. Front-runners: Alison Arngrim and Mike Lookinland.) Well, [Mike or Alison], it was simple. Drawing upon my laundering expertise from previous years, I had followed the manufacturer’s guidelines for commencing a wash cycle. As the tub filled with water, I added liquid detergent in the recommended amount. Next, I sorted our soiled clothing by colors. Selecting the pink-and-red pile for the first round of cleansing, I heaped the clothes on the floor in front of the washing machine as the water continued to pour into the basin.

Housekeeping experts recommend using this wait time to tackle some other minor, short-term task. Accordingly, I did so, finding plenty of tasks with which to occupy my time in other areas of the house. Some time later, my darling daughter Jane passed by the washer and noticed that it was sitting full of sudsy water with the lid open. She called out to report this fact to me. I hollered sweetly and in lilting tones called back to ask her to close the lid, thus allowing the washing machine to enter the next phase of its Cleaning Process.

Some time later, just as the spin cycle was shuddering to a stop, I returned to our Home Laundry Center and investigated the pile of red and pink clothing on the floor in front of the machine. Hmm, I thought, this really does not meet my Very High Standards of Cleanliness in Clothing.

That’s when I had my remarkable idea. Suppose—

(Suspenseful pause)

Alison or Mike: What, Lissa, what?

Melissa Wiley (smiles disarmingly): Do you really want to know?

Studio audience: TELL US, TELL US!!

Melissa Wiley (laughs disingenuously): All right, I’ll tell.

I asked myself: Self, suppose I were to run another wash cycle and PUT THESE CLOTHES INSIDE THE MACHINE. Would it work? Could it be that they would come out cleaner? Is it possible that, as with children, osmosis is not always the most effective method?

And so: I tried it.

Alison or Mike: (gasps)

No, it’s true. And it worked. Those very same clothes came out MANY TIMES CLEANER.

Studio audience: Oooohhhhh!

Alison or Mike: That’s incredible!

Melissa Wiley (modestly): Why yes, yes it is.

Cut to announcer offering Melissa Wiley’s best-selling book, YOU TOO CAN BE A NOT-SUPERMOM!, for the low low price of $29.95.* And if you ACT NOW! this adorable mateless pink sock will be included, absolutely free.

*Plus shipping and handling, some restrictions apply.

More about the Communion (and our big news) here.