This past weekend was our annual Haiti Reunion. This was our 7th year attending this gathering of our people. I say that purposefully: these are our people. These are our kin. Our get-togethers are like going to a gas station when your tank is on empty and getting a fill-up.

Last year I wrote a post about our Haiti Reunions that really attempts to articulate how we feel about them. I re-read that post tonight and it made me cry. It expresses so well pretty much exactly what I want to express again now. Please read it by clicking here.

These four (above) have so much in common it is almost hard to fathom: two sets of twins, born within a few days of each other, in Haiti, placed in the same orphanage (years apart), and adopted into American families in the state of Pennsylvania. How amazing is that? Now, imagine, always being so unique: you’re a twin, you’re Haitian, you’re an adoptee, you’re black with white parents, you’re a kid with dreadlocks, you’re smart-as-a-whip-and-super-quick-and-uber-reslient-and-have-a-ridiculously-high-pain-tolerance and you’ve got gumption-enough-to-spare and spunk-enough-to-light-a-fire and you’re-pretty-darn-willful and everywhere you go you are noticeable as very much unusual in so many, many ways. You can’t just slide by or slip in because you always stand out. And then, for one weekend a year, you get to be just-like-everyone-else and “normal” and — phew! what a relief! — not so unique. For one glorious weekend you can breath, and just be, and you don’t have to be self-conscious or concerned because everybody — everybody around you — gets it. Like, really gets it. For most of your life, you’re the unique one. But for now, you fit right in, and everything is easy, and you’re not so remarkable or noteworthy. That’s what it is like to get together with these kin of ours each year. It feels so good.

It isn’t just our Haitian Sensations for whom this weekend is such a special, and important, time. It is just as profound for their siblings and parents too. We’re with people who really know — in a way unlike any other — what it is like to be us in this world. Don’t get me wrong: we embrace our uniqueness (we wouldn’t be the families we are if we hadn’t been 100% willing to take that on). But we enjoy the respite of one weekend of being “normal.” It is just so pleasantly wonderfully incredibly nice to be able to just be us, without worrying about how we’re perceived and received and conceived of. We can just be. And that is such an amazing feeling.

I took the picture below from the front passenger seat of our car as we were about to pull out of the parking lot to leave the reunion. A bunch of kids were barely outside our car’s door, almost overflowing into it, as they said a hundred “goodbye’s” and “I’ll miss you’s” and “see you next year’s” back and forth with Kyle, Owen, and Meera.

The picture is worth a thousand words. We gather around each other, wild and crazy, with glow sticks flaring, and voices at full volume, and every bit of ourselves just adoring each other just as we are. From start to finish we are just us. And entirely accepted and fully embraced as just us. That gives us something so valuable. And we go home from the reunion feeling all fueled up.

A year seems too long to wait to do it again. But we’ll wait. And we’ll do it again. And us J-Ms are in it for the long-haul.

To our inner circle of Pennsylvania-area-Haitian-Adoptive-Families — our kin — THANK YOU. We love every one of you so dearly and so deeply. We’re with you every step of the way. Love, the J-Ms.

Every year I post about our summer trip to my family’s cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. (One of my favorite posts on the subject can be found here). Each year we J-Ms make our annual pilgrimage to the cottage that has been in my family for 5 generations. I’ve written lots about our trips to the cottage — how they are an anchor in the rhythm of the J-Ms year, how much this place means to us, and the roots of the history. Summer cottages like this one are a rare and precious treasure passed down to the people who get to enjoy them. A tiny fraction of the population will ever experience what we get to live out at the cottage every summer. This profound form of privilege is not lost on me. We did nothing — absolutely nothing — to earn this. We do not deserve it. But we have it. What lessons will we learn from it? What will the next generation receive in the riches of all this? And how are things constant, yet evolving, all the time? We are so much not what the generation before us was. But we are not all that different either. How can we be intentional and purposeful about how we inherit all this and pass it forward? These are the things I think about as we speed over the surface of the crystal clear waters, with wind in our hair, and astounding landscapes all around us.

From the back of the boat I’m also usually spotting our young water-skiers, and snapping photos of them, and cheering them on as they fall and get back up again. I feel like that is sort of a metaphor for my life right now — as we speed along at incomprehensible speed and I try to capture these moments and encourage and uplift, all the while just hoping and praying that this next big wave won’t be a big one that knocks us over for good in some unpredictable way. And I can’t help but have other thoughts too (like, ‘how many black kids ever learn to waterski?’ and ‘how will the fact that we do this for a week — and see no other non-white people the entire time — impact our boys?’ and all sorts of other things like that). All of it is a lot. So much. And, like I said, we don’t deserve it. But it is ours. For now. And so I try to use it wisely, be humble and grateful, and be thoughtful in how we proceed.

This summer was special at the cottage. They always are. But here I want to record some of the really outstanding things that made this year’s time at the cottage most notable. For one thing, there was a whole day when we were all there. By all there, I mean — as my mom says, “the whole family” — my parents, us, my sister and her family, and Maria and her family. It was really, truly, a glorious thing.

Photo above: all of us out for ice cream at Bailey’s Bubble in Wolfboro. This pic is precious. So is the one below: Maria and Meera on the boat. For anyone who knows Braydon and me from way back, you can just imagine the emotions this evokes. How many weekends did we spend with Maria, at the cottage, on the boat at Winnipesaukee, when she was the age that M, K, and O are now?! It is just so crazy to think about. Here are our two girls — our ‘first’ girl, and our ‘last’ girl. To say “we love these two” just does not cut it.

This summer was Lukasz’s first trip to the cottage. My sister now has a family of four! A beautiful thing:

Here’s another beautiful thing– Kyle and Owen finally have a boy cousin! This photo just melts my heart:

And this summer, at the cottage, Braydon turned 42. Thanks to MorMor, Meera got to make him a cake:

And, perhaps the biggest milestone-marker of all from the cottage during Summer 2013… Kyle caught what was the biggest fish ever caught in the memory of recent generations! He caught a 22 inch largemouth bass right off the dock! This is really, really, really noteworthy!!!!!!!

Just for the record: we threw it back. We throw them all back. “We are Sports-Fishermen-And-Women” (I repeat this to the kids, over and over and over, as I put countless worms on hooks and spend endless hours untangling lines. Note: although I’m willing to deal with the catch-and-release of pulling hooks out of fishes, I am not yet willing to embark on the whole filleting and chopping process.)

It was, truly, a memorable annual summer trip to the cottage. Here are some of my favorite pics:

Kyle, Owen, and Sadie are becoming very good water-skiers. This was their 4th year water-skiing (they started at age 6 [K&O] and 7 [S]). We’re all anticipating next year to see if Meera will start, or if she’ll wait until she’s 7. This year we spent hours and hours with the “big kids” behind the boat. Waterskiing 2013 — Kyle, Owen, Sadie:

The big deals with waterskiing this year were that we took the connector out from the skis, lengthened the rope, and all three kids were working on going outside-and-inside both sides of the wake. Outside the wake — Kyle, Owen, Sadie:

Waterskiing is definitely the big kids’ favorite activity at the cottage. Luckily for us all, MorFar has the infinite patience and sheer dedication to drive that boat in circles around the cove for hours and hours on end.

Tubing. They love tubing too. But that isn’t nearly as fun to photograph. So, I have only this:

My favorite to photograph is kayaking. There is something so beautiful about it. It just fills me up in some indescribable way to see scenes like these:

Hopefully we can store up these images and save them for the dead of winter when we need their warmth the most. Or for times in our future when we need to rely on memories from the past to keep us afloat. Here is my favorite kayaking pic from 2013:

This annual summer trip is filled with traditions for us. Some are newer, some are older. Here are just a few:

We started this just last year — a Sunday early morning boat ride across the lake to the waterfront park in Wolfboro, where we dock the boat, and set up our own chairs and blankets for a 30-minute-max church service. This is a win-win-win! Even the kids like it. And my parents can even bring their dog! As we walked down the street to get donuts afterward, Braydon and I couldn’t help thinking that if church could be like that all the time, we’d happily go every week! 😉

A much longer tradition (as in, at least 3 generations long) — trying to catch the Mt. Washington Boat and waving like crazy to the passengers on board:

And hold kitties:

Thanks to these two:

And thanks to the generations before them.

“I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual…O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” ~Henry David Thoreau

Kyle, Meera, Owen – Harbor Island, Summer 2013

Over the past five weeks I’ve taken hundreds of photos that never showed up on the blog. I don’t want to just toss them all, or have them get lost in the nether-land of the computer hard drive — so many of them are family-photo-album-worthy, and each one represents a memory I want to try to keep. At the same time, I am feeling self-conscious about the blogosphere seeing all these pictures and hearing me go on and on and on about how wonderful our summer has been. The problem is that we don’t have any other way that we’re documenting our lives or saving our pictures — this blog is it (unlike many bloggers who blog primarily for their audience, I am blogging primarily for me and my most inner circle). So, please, those of you bored to tears from all my South Carolina posts, and/or those of you who are sick and tired of seeing photo after photo of all this… just disregard this little series of posts. These are for our family-memory-keeping. If you’re interested, go ahead and take a look. Otherwise, go ahead and skip it. Many of these were taken with my iPhone, and I’m posting them mainly unedited.

K, O, and M — this one’s for you! We have had a GREAT summer so far. The best summer of my life (and I am pretty sure the best summer of your lives too). Some memories to keep:

sunrise from the back deck of the beach house

Harbor Island Beach

Kyle in front of the Gantt Cottage, at the Penn Center (this is where Martin Luther King, Jr. would stay when he’d come to the Penn Center with other activists to plan their strategies for the Civil Rights Movement)

iced coffee on the beach

the back seat of the car, on the 5-minute-drive to Hunting Island beach

Meera at the pool — she made new friends almost daily

Kyle and Owen at the pool — they made new friends almost daily too

Owen and Meera on the dock at Port Royal (although the bambinos make friends everywhere they go, they are still each other’s first and foremost; and this summer was a summer of bonding for this fierce threesome)

Owen and one of his many favorite Lowcountry treats: stone crab claws

I sometimes got up early and went walking/jogging on the beach by myself. Those were amazing mornings for me. Spectacular beauty. Photos above, and several below, were taken with my iPhone during those times.

late nights watching Red Sox games

K & O at the pool

Meera’s artwork was hanging everywhere, all over the beach house

fruit on the beach

lazy mornings, playing

beauty everywhere

5 beach chairs and an umbrella

M, K, O — Harbor Island Beach

grocery shopping

Owen

ice cream at the pool shop

we lived by these tide charts

‘chillaxin’

Owen bike riding to the beach house, down Ocean Marsh Road

a brief rain at lunch = picnic in the back of the car

Kyle and Meera, Harbor Island Beach

cool as a cucumber.

the boys play chess

Meera tries the Beaufort clams — raw on the half shell

K & O spent hours and hours and hours boogie boarding

Meera and Heather spent hours and hours and hours making “dribble castles”

OMG. I LOVE THIS GIRL.

Papi reads a book

Mommy reads a book

Spanish Moss

never a dull moment.

a (rare) quiet moment

Hunting Island State Park & our 2013 car pass tag

playing in the tidal pools at Hunting Island

matching necklaces (I call them “starfish”; Meera calls them the correct name, “sea stars”)

football in the surf on a Sunday afternoon, Hunting Island

history everywhere

pure Owen

pure Meera

pure Kyle

wide open spaces

wide open spaces II

our go-to guide for the past 5 weeks

South Carolina peaches

Owen and Kyle at the top of the tower, Port Royal waterfront

Meera, pool float

in front of the lighthouse, Hunting Island

shrimp boat off of Harbor Island

riding in the golf cart

Meera & Braydon in Charleston

shrimp scampi — I was going to do a Food Friday blog post about this — how amazing the shrimp here is, and how incredible it is to buy it right off the boat, etc. I was also going to link to the best shrimp scampi recipe ever (I made this weekly while we were here: Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Linguine with Shrimp Scampi) — click here!

I was also going to try to write a post about my observations of the reactions of people in the South (as compared to the North) to seeing/interacting with our black-white-adoptive family. But I never got to that. Above picture is precious to me: Kyle and Owen just very comfortably hanging out with an older black gentleman on the waterfront in Charleston. He let them feed the birds with him. And he talked with them, in depth, about God. Our boys are embraced by the black community (almost always), and it is truly amazing to watch and witness as an outsider-yet-their-mother.

I was also going to write a post about Owen’s newfound obsession (discovered on this trip) with pralines. His new favorite food.

I was also going to write a post about The Shrimp Shack. [I guess I never got around to a lot of the posts I was going to write.]

I was also going to post about fiddler crabs (above left), and alligators (above right).

I did post about hermit crabs! But I forgot to include this awesome picture in that post.

my summer “desk”

reading at the pool

Hunting Island

the bambinos in the hammock on the back deck of the beach house

* * *

It has been an amazing and inspirational five weeks. Tomorrow we leave and head north.

I’ll end here, with my favorite photo from the summer (Braydon took this with his iPhone one night when we went for a walk on the beach at sunset):

Saltus River Grill is one of my favorite restaurants in the world. I’m sure partly it is sentimental: it is a special spot in a very special place for us. But there are other, more objective reasons as well. The food is a fusion of Lowcountry/Sea Islands/Gullah and Haute-Cuisine American/French. This is my kind of place: a place that isn’t afraid to fuse grass-roots, hard-core, local/”ethnic” food with very high end cuisine, the most cutting-edge trends and techniques, and the highest quality ingredients. This place does not shy away from complexity. I also have a soft spot for any place that uses locally grown and seasonal ingredients. And… of course… there is the wine list. The wine list at Saltus is short and sweet. I’d prefer a short list of carefully selected bottles than a huge book of labels that lose meaning. Lastly, location location location — Saltus has a location to die for, right on the Beaufort waterfront, with a beautiful interior and even more beautiful exterior patios with gorgeous outdoor dining furniture. Oh, and the service is excellent. Basically, it is, for me, the whole package.

In the five weeks we’ve been in South Carolina I’ve done a lot of cooking. We have eaten out rarely on this trip, so we decided to splurge for one of our final nights here. Last night the five of us went to Saltus for dinner. I was hoping our kids would be able to handle themselves there, and that we’d not totally embarrass ourselves at such a high-end establishment. I was hoping it would be a lovely night.

It was lovely, dreamy, and free-of-embarassment. It was spectacular. It was, for me, a Top 10 night out with our family ever. I loved every minute of it. From meandering down the sleepy streets of Beaufort to wind our way to Saltus…

To the lovely conversations… (while we waited for our food the bambinos were able to come-and-go freely from the table and play on the playground at Waterfront Park; the playground is within eyesight of the Saltus patio– a win-win for the whole family!)…

To the family bonding… (these two, in particular, were especially lovey-lovey)…

The food…

The whole thing. It was dreamy.

After dinner we walked along the waterfront. The boys found some friends to play stickball with (of course). They could have stayed there all night — it was pitch dark when we finally pulled them away to head back to the beach house for our 2nd-to-last-night in South Carolina.

I know we should not feed the birds. And we don’t do it much. But after we ate our sandwiches on the beach today, Meera really, really, really wanted to give the seagulls the bread crust that she didn’t want to eat. I gave in and said o.k. She broke off teeny tiny pieces, one at a time, to make it last. And it was a really delightful moment for all involved.

Stone Crab Claws, Carolina Marsh Tackies, Boiled Peanuts

After a day at the beach today, and before dinner, we J-Ms had a little Sea Islands Cocktail Hour. We picked up some stone crab claws at a roadside stand on the way home from the beach (these are Owen’s favorite! dipped in melted butter! Heather too, but dipped in cocktail sauce). At the same stand we also bought boiled peanuts (a favorite of Kyle and Meera, who definitely take after Braydon — all three boiled peanut lovers). The bambinos had their favorite cocktails: ginger ale (K & O), and chocolate milk (M). And Braydon made our new favorite cocktail: The Carolina Marsh Tacky. This was a serious Lowcountry/Sea Islands Cocktail Hour!

We discovered this drink on this trip, and it has really grown on us. There is something really perfect about it on a hot summer’s eve, after having been in the sun, sand, salt, and water all day. If you’re up for trying a really unusual new summer cocktail, try this out!

Carolina Marsh Tacky

1 1/2 ounces bourbon

1/2 ounce fresh lime juice

4 ounces cold ginger beer

Lime wedge

Fill a cocktail glass with ice. Add bourbon and lime juice; top with ginger beer. Garnish with fresh lime. Serves 1. To make a pitcher: 1 1/2 parts bourbon, 1/2 part fresh lime juice, and 4 parts ginger beer.

P.S. The drink is named after the Carolina Marsh Tacky — a rare breed of horse native to South Carolina (click).

The South Carolina Sea Islands are a wealth of riches just teeming with life. These are not powdery white beaches with sun-bleached (empty) shells and crystal clear waters. We have had the privilege of spending time on beaches like that and they are exquisite and wonderful. The beaches here are exquisite and wonderful too, but in a whole other way. This is a different dimension of beach. And it is not for the faint of heart. In the five weeks we’ve been here we have rarely found an empty shell– there is something living inside just about all of them. And you can’t walk two feet without coming across something alive.

Everywhere — in every fraction of every square inch of every piece of the beach, there is life here. It is truly unbelievable. You can’t love this place unless you take a deep breath, breath in the salty air, and accept that there is stuff squirming, crawling, scurrying, living everywhere you look. The ecosystem here is healthy.

We have spent hours and hours this summer finding all sorts of things. But our three favorites are definitely hermit crabs, sand dollars, and sharks’ teeth.

There are hermit crabs everywhere on the Harbor Island beach. There are big ones and small ones and everything in between.

We’ve had so much fun finding them, playing with them, and then always leaving them behind on the beach to live their lives. Some of their shells are so beautiful, we’d love to keep them, but we have only twice in our five weeks found uninhabited shells.

And sometimes we’re surprised to find something inside that isn’t a hermit crab. One day Owen found this (below) — it is an Eastern Conch, otherwise known as a Whelk. Like I said… not for the faint of heart! (He asked me if he could pull it out and eat it. He was very disappointed when I said no.)

On both Harbor Island and Hunting Island, sand dollars are in abundance. In the five weeks that we’ve been here we have seen hundreds. But we’ve never seen a dead one. So, sadly, we have no sand dollar shells to take home. Happily, it means this place is alive and well — a place where sand dollars can flourish and thrive.

When the tide is high, Kyle and Owen love diving for sand dollars just off the shore. They find dozens and dozens of them under the water.

At low tide you can find sand dollars sitting on the wet sand, hunkering down, just waiting for the tide to come back up. During low tide Meera loves looking for sand dollars along the beach. She has become quite the expert at finding them, and has found many.

But our favorite thing to do is to look for shark teeth. On certain beaches (and really, in areas all throughout the sea islands) you can find fossilized shark teeth. Believe it or not, these are the teeth of sharks that lived thousands to millions of years ago! The beach at Hunting Island is our favorite place to look for them. When the tide is low, the bambinos love to walk along the water’s edge and search for shark teeth in the very shallow water.

You can find them scattered all over the dry beach too.

We find lots of them in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In our five weeks here we’ve been collecting them. Our shark teeth collection is now pretty large — we’ve probably found a couple hundred of them! Here are a few of the ones we’ve found:

The bambinos have found tons of other interesting things too. Lots of horseshoe crabs and jellyfish.

Kyle is fearless. He’ll pick up and hold anything. While his brother and sister squirm, he’ll hold every kind of crab he can catch.

And Owen is so quick that he can catch all sorts of little things in the water with his bare hands. He loves to catch tiny shrimp and minnows in the tidal pools at low tide.

And with nets and buckets the bambinos catch all sorts of crabs and shrimp and fish and who-knows-what-else!

This week the bambinos and I went tomato picking. Yes, tomato picking. We’ve been blueberry picking, strawberry picking, apple picking, pumpkin picking, and flower picking before. But tomato picking was a first for us.

I had seen the sign on the side of the road for the entire time we’ve been here. And I’ve been wanting to do it. So, this week we did. It is the very end of the tomato season here, so we were cutting it close, but we found a ton of tomatoes still on the vine, and had a great time doing it. The bambinos thought it was a blast!

We could have picked buckets and buckets full, but we limited ourselves to one small bucket (with only a week left at the beach house, there are only so many tomatoes we can eat!). We selected our tomatoes very carefully… there were so many to choose from!

In the past few days we’ve been eating these delicious fresh-off-the-vine, hand-picked, locally grown tomatoes. Of course, we’ve been eating them straight up. But we’ve also had tomato, mozzarella, and basil salad (sprinkled with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper — this is one of Braydon’s favorite foods of all time). We’ve had open-faced cheddar and tomato sandwiches (on English Muffins; simply sprinkle with salt and pepper and bake at 400 for a few minutes; classic!). We’ve had BLTs (really now, who doesn’t LOVE a BLT in the summertime?!). And we’ve had the best of the best — the best ever bruschetta. If you haven’t tried The Pioneer Woman’s Bruschetta (click for recipe), then you’re really missing out. And made with our fresh tomatoes this week… it was heavenly (I don’t even have a photo; they were eaten up way too fast). Happy Friday!

Kyle has been determined to teach Meera to boogie board. Over the past couple of days they’ve been having great success… thanks to Kyle’s endless patience. He has way more patience than I do with her. He has spent hours in the water with her, carefully pulling her out, getting her set up, waiting for the perfect waves, and giving her good pushes — over and over and over. When she has a good ride (which is often lately), she is so excited… and so is Kyle.