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Abby Quillen

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Nature

Hello Fall

By Abby Quillen

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“Summer ends, and Autumn comes, and he who would have it otherwise would have high tide always and a full moon every night.” ― Hal Borland

Yesterday was the first day of fall. To celebrate, we went on one of our favorite hikes, stopped at the bakery on the way home, and made a feast of red lentil dahl for dinner. It’s raining, our pumpkins are bright orange, and we’re well into the back-to-school routine. Yet still, I can’t quite believe summer’s over.

It’s Ezra’s last year at home before kindergarten, and something about that makes this season feel even more fleeting than usual. We go on morning adventures every chance we get, and I try to memorize the way the boys look as they ride their bikes and run together, how their hair glows in the autumn sunshine.

We’re savoring the bumper crop of figs on our neighborhood trees, the strangely lovely smell of our neighbors’ rotting apples, and the taste of the last sun-ripened tomatoes. It feels like we may be in for an early and soggy winter this year. I’m both looking forward to a quieter season and missing the one past, which I suppose is what autumn’s all about.

I’ve decided to celebrate the cooler weather by reading lots of novels. If you’d like to join me, here are some book lists. I’ve also just discovered the wonder of sending long-form essays to my Kindle. I’m in love!

I hope you too are enjoying these first fall days.

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September 23, 2013Filed Under: Family life, Nature Tagged With: Autumn, Autumnal Equinox, Celebrating the Seasons, Fall, Family life, Family Traditions, First Day of Autumn, Seasonal Celbrations

August Field Notes

By Abby Quillen

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August must have been the shortest month in history. At least, that’s how it felt for us as we swirled through a whirlwind of conferences, parties, birthdays, and projects. Fortunately, we also took some time out for a much-needed relaxing family camping trip just a few feet from the Pacific Ocean and a lovely hike in one of our favorite spots. I managed to capture some photographic evidence from those adventures, which I’ll share below.

What happened to the big website revamp, you may be wondering. Well, change is coming! But, for a myriad of reasons, I’m postponing it until after I launch my dad’s anthology in November. Stay tuned….

For now, I’m excited to be back to regular posting. I missed you all!

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Did you have any August adventures? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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September 9, 2013Filed Under: Family life, Nature Tagged With: August, Blogging Sabbaticals, Camping, Connecting with Nature, Family life, Hiking, Nature, Oregon, Oregon Coast, Outdoors, Relaxation, Sabbaticals, Summer, Vacations

Celebrate Summer

By Abby Quillen

How to Celebrate the First Day of Summer #seasons #familycelebrations

Thursday, June 20 is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. The sun will bathe the Arctic Circle in 24 hours of daylight, and ancient monuments around the world will align with the sun.

Seasonal celebrations can be easy and fun. Here are a few simple ideas for welcoming summer this year:

Celebrate

  • Place a bouquet of roses, lilies, or daisies in your family members’ bedrooms while they sleep, so they wake to fresh summer flowers.
  • Find a special place outside to watch the sunrise and sunset. You can find out what time the sun will rise and set where you live here.
  • Eat breakfast outside.
  • Trace each other’s shadows throughout the day to note the sun’s long trip across the sky.
  • Make flower chains or a summer solstice wreath.
  • Display summer decorations: seashells, flowers, sand dollars, or whatever symbolizes summer in your family.
  • Play outside games, watercolor, or decorate the sidewalks with chalk until the sun sets.

Explore, Plant, or Gather

  • Gather Saint John’s Wort. Traditionally Europeans harvested these cheerful yellow flowers on the first day of summer, dried them, and made them into a tea on the first day of winter. The tea supposedly brought the summer sunniness into the dark winter days. If you don’t have any Saint John’s Wort in your garden, you might consider planting it. It is  a useful herb, and it thrives in poor soil with little attention. Find out more about it here.
  • Visit a U-pick farm to harvest strawberries, snap peas, or whatever is in season where you live. Find a “pick your own” farm near you here.
  • Take a camping trip. Light a fire at night to celebrate the warmth of the sun. Sleep outside. Wake with the sun.
  • Go on a nature hike. Bring along guidebooks to help you identify birds, butterflies, mushrooms, or wildflowers.

Eat

  • Make a summer feast. Eat exclusively from your garden or the farmer’s market to celebrate the bounties of summer in your area.
  • Host a “locavore” potluck.

Read

  • Read aloud from The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson.
  • Read aloud, watch, or put on your own rendition of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. For kids, check out the book A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids by Lois Burdett or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Kids: 3 melodramatic plays for 3 group sizes by Brendan P. Kelso.
  • Head to the library for a pile of summer reads. There’s no better way to cool off than to immerse yourself in a brisk, cold-weather classic, like Snow Falling on Cedars or The Call of the Wild. For this season’s must-reads, check out these lists compiled by Trib Total Media, Publisher’s Weekly, NPR, and Oprah. And for kids and teens, check out these summer-themed picture books and easy readers and YA books, or this collection of summer reading lists.

Wishing you a happy first day of summer!

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these related posts:

  • Slow Summer Living
  • Slow Parenting

Need more inspiration for your summer celebration? Check out these resources:

  • 10 Ways to Celebrate the First Day of Summer
  • Celebrating Midsummer – School of the Seasons
  • Celebrating the Solstice: Fiery Fetes of Summer – Huffington Post
  • Summer Solstice 2010 Pictures – National Geographic
  • Stonehedge Summer Solstice 2010 – YouTube (1 min. 49 sec. video)

How do you plan to celebrate the first day of summer? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.Save

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June 17, 2013Filed Under: Family life, Nature Tagged With: Celebrations, Connecting with Nature, Family life, Family Traditions, First day of summer, Holidays, Nature, Seasonal celebrations, Seasons, Summer, Summer solstice

Redefining Wealth

By Abby Quillen

Redefining Wealth #gardens #greenspace

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” – Henry David Thoreau

“In the new good life, the point is not to have the most toys, but the most joys.” – John Robbins

I was thumbing through a gourmet cookbook the other day, and the author recommended visiting farm stores to procure the most flavorful, just-picked ingredients.

I glanced out at my garden and felt wealthy.

Here we are harvesting fresh herbs, greens, and eggs every day just a few feet from our back door. The early spring sunshine probably deserves more credit than I do for all of this abundance. But I’ve invested plenty of sweat and love into that soil over the years, and I built something that feels very much like wealth.

When I hear the word wealth, I usually think of stock portfolios, IRAs, and 401Ks – the green stuff.

But when I think about what makes me feel wealthy, my mind jumps to other green stuff: my garden, city parks, wide open spaces, and the neighborhood fig tree that gives and gives and gives.

I also think of my close, connected neighborhood; my friends; and walking and riding my bike every day. I think of my kids and our unhurried mornings reading books, watching snails, and counting spiders’ legs.

Wealth is usually defined as an “abundance of items of economic value or material possessions.” But I wonder if it’s time for us to redefine wealth, at least in our own lives.

I’m not knocking savings accounts, retirement plans, or consumer goods. These things are important; they’re just not the whole story.

When we reflect on what makes us feel wealthy, we expand beyond our culture’s emphasis on property, assets, and commodities. We might think about good health, breathing clean air, living in a safe neighborhood, and having access to fresh produce. We might think about having more time.

And by redefining wealth for ourselves, we can ensure that we’re building the kind of lives and communities that make us feel wealthy. They might look a lot different than the ones we see on advertisements and on TV.

[clickToTweet tweet=”We can build lives and communities that make us feel wealthy. #gardens #greenspace” quote=”We can build lives and communities that make us feel wealthy.” theme=”style1″]

If you liked this post, you may enjoy these:

  • Can Money Buy Happiness?
  • Making Economic Exchange a Loving Human Interaction
  • Ditch the Life Coach and Do the Daily Chores
  • Should Towns Print Their Own Cash?

What makes you feel wealthy? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section.

May 27, 2013Filed Under: Gardening, Nature, Simple Living Tagged With: Building Wealth, Gardening, Gardens, Nature, Simple Living, Wealth, Wealth Creation

Happy Earth Day!

By Abby Quillen

In honor of the holiday, I’m posting a column my dad wrote for the April 21, 2011 Denver Post. I have a cameo appearance, and I love my dad’s hilarious and true take on how we should celebrate the day.

Replace Earth Day with Binge Day

By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post

Earth Day is Friday, and as a loyal resident of Earth, I want to celebrate properly.

I may have already found the wrong way to celebrate. In 2003, I was invited to speak at an Earth Day rally in Alamosa. Being rather immodest, I accepted.

But my 170-mile round-trip drive must have damaged the ozone layer or accelerated global warming or otherwise worsened whatever we were worried about eight years ago. The gathering in Cole Park was pleasant, but there were generators growling and smoking to provide electricity for the amplifiers. This didn’t strike me as especially Earth-friendly.

And when my stage turn came, I followed Peggy Godfrey of Moffat, who’s a cowboy poet or cowgirl poetess. However you describe her, she’s a great performer. I felt like the local garage band that somehow ended up appearing after the Rolling Stones. Peggy is a hard act to follow.

This was clearly not an appropriate Earth Day commemoration for me. But what would be?

To find out, I called the greenest person I know, my daughter Abby in Eugene, Ore. She has a big garden and keeps chickens. She and her husband, Aaron, don’t own a car; Aaron bicycles 12 miles each way to his teaching job. Abby’s always on the lookout for local foods and gentler ways to run her household — for instance, she washes her long brown hair with vinegar instead of commercial shampoo.

(I should point out that we did not raise Abby to turn out this way, as we had a car but no chickens. It’s a choice she made after graduating with honors from the University of Colorado Denver with a degree in history.)

“So how do you plan to celebrate Earth Day?” I asked Abby, expecting to hear that she’d be at a big rally in a downtown Eugene park.

“I know some people who are driving clear up to Vancouver, B.C., for an Earth Day festival.” She laughed at that irony. “But for us, it will be pretty much the same as any other day. I’ll feed the chickens, gather eggs, tend the garden, take Ezra (their 3-year-old son) for a walk, hope he naps long enough for me to get some writing done — what I do most days.”

Abby’s got the right idea here: If you care about the environment, forget about Earth Day trips and celebrations, and live simply every day. When you think about it, focusing on the environment once a year doesn’t make much sense, especially when that celebration often involves burning a lot of fuel.

But there does seem to be a basic human need for annual celebrations, and to that end I propose a yearly Binge Day.

On the other 364 days of the year, we would live simple green lives with local food and drink. We would walk, bicycle or ride public transit to get around. We would eschew gaudy imported novelties, fad electronics destined for quick obsolescence and other trashy food, goods and geegaws.

In other words, we would live prudently and sensibly, following adages like “Waste not, want not.” The global economy might contract on that account, but it seems to be doing that anyway.

On Binge Day, though, we could pig out on champagne and corn-fed prime rib. We’d rent a Hummer or an Escalade to drive to the shopping mall for an orgy of conspicuous consumption. We’d ignore the recycling bins and just toss our abundant trash in a barrel. And after the once-a-year Binge Day blowout, we’d go back to living sensibly.

Add it up, and Binge Day should be about 364 times better for the environment than Earth Day.

I’m editing an anthology of my dad’s columns. To find out more about it, visit edquillen.com. How are you celebrating Earth Day? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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April 22, 2013Filed Under: Household, Nature, Social movements Tagged With: Earth Day, Ed Quillen, environment, Environmentalism, Green Living, Holidays, Simple Living, The Denver Post

Welcome Spring

By Abby Quillen

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard’s Egg

The spring equinox is this Wednesday. What a perfect time to celebrate longer days, warmer weather, and blossoming trees and flowers. Here are some ideas for simple ways to observe the day:

Observe and Explore

Watch the sun rise and set. Visit a farm to catch a glimpse of the adorable lambs, calves, and chicks. Go for a hike and identify wildflowers. Learn about the plants and trees on your block or in your yard.

Celebrate

Arrange a bouquet of crocuses, daffodils, tulips, or dandelions for your kids or partner to wake up to. Go on a picnic. Eat dinner by candlelight.

Play

Fly a kite. Blow bubbles. Draw birds. Collect bugs. Run around barefoot.

Plant

If it’s time to sow seeds where you live, designate a place for each member of the family to plant a favorite vegetable or flower in honor of spring. Or, plant a hanging flower basket or window planter.

Make

Make a spring crown out of dandelion or clover chains. Get creative with some spring arts and crafts. Decorate hard-boiled eggs with natural dyes. (Try beets, cranberries, blackberries, or raspberries for red; yellow-onion skins or turmeric for yellow; parsley, spinach, or red-onion skins for green; blueberries for blue; and coffee, pecan hulls, or black-walnut hulls for brown. Or experiment with whatever is coming up in your backyard.)

Read

Read aloud from The Spring Equinox: Celebrating the Greening of the Earth by Ellen Jackson. Check out these ten spring reads for kids aged 0 to 9. Browse Publisher’s Weekly’s list of The Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2013.

Eat

Prepare a spring feast with the first crops of the season. Dandelion leaves, steamed nettles, and asparagus are delicious spring greens. Other traditional spring foods include eggs, ham, and sweets.

Reflect

Spring is a time for rebirth and new beginnings. What’s ready to grow in your life?

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March 18, 2013Filed Under: Family life, Nature Tagged With: Celebrations, Family life, First Day of Spring, Seasonal celebrations, Seasons, Spring Equinox

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