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We went to a lovely mass today at the hospital. The priest was young, Polish, very devout and radiated faith. Oh, what a happy encounter on a Wednesday afternoon.

Yesterday, was Halloween and the evening couldn’t have been more perfect. The weather was mild and clear. There was a bright moon and clouds winging past the silver face. The mix of orange maple leaves, pumpkins, orange twinkling lights and the pretty houses made the street look like a Halloween setting of “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

People were on their porches being neighborly. Our New Bedford neighborhood was picture perfect on Halloween night. The sky was dark by five o’clock, so by 7 the trick or treating was in full swing.

Our house dispensed two very large bowls of candy, we didn’t have a pumpkin on the porch, so we lit a candle to show we were in business.

We came home for dinner in the middle of the quest. The kids ate hurriedly and were quickly out the door for the second half of the trick or treating. Rosie, who is the protector of family tradition made sure that all the key houses were visited. She thought she would portray an evil princess, but there is no way that child can even look mean.

Kiko had what he thought was a rather sinister mask, and Sera, well Sera is sweet no matter what she does.

And that is a worthy topic to blog about. Desa is my first cousin, sandwiched between my older sister, Maria, who was born in November, and me, born the following December - oh my goodness, our stories go back fifty years. Yet I feel ageless when I consider the march of decades.

As long as I have had the ability to remember, I have known Desa. I can see her in her three year old self in California when I was as tall as a kitchen counter. I can see her running down the beach at Cresta Ola, in our back yard in Balibago, our big house on Clark Air Base, at her house in Santa Ana, California, at Christmas in Albuquerque, in Hawaii, at Casa Blanca in Baguio, always, Cresta Ola. Years in Manila that led to the gradual mysterious launchings of me and my siblings back to the USA, to begin our virtual family life, connected by invisible strings of love that spanned the continent.

It would not be expressive enough to say we grew up together. Our branches were grafted, bound, entwined, forced, rent apart and resprouted. Our leaves bore four seasons, again and again. She was an only child, there were eight of us. My favorite picture is one of the nine of us, arranged like a totem pole.

She was always the ringleader, the rebel against the junta of grownups. She showed everyone, much to the grownups dismay, that there was another way to deal with life. Personally she showed me that rebellion was sometimes a necessity, and that following my own gut was the only way to go. When everyone said , “NO!” she said, “Why Not? ”.

I was a timid onlooker for much of my childhood, succumbing to mishaps and having my share of torn knees, bloody this and that and scrapes and bruises. With Desa, I was brave enough to jump off the high dive at Cresta Ola, (though I landed in a colossal belly flop from fifteen feet up.) I was brave enough to climb a water tower in Baguio, though once I was up, I had no idea of how to get down, and had to negotiate the final eight feet with the indignity of someone cajoling me to drop and land with bent knees.

To say we had fun would be an understatement. We heard ghosts together, we sat around fires on the beach, we watched the moon set into the South China Sea, leaving a bright trail of silver.

She was my favorite invitee to the doings of my sweet staid group of friends, she never neglected sending for us to attend her big dances, although I for one, often felt like a country mouse. Our mirth was side splitting. Our tears shook down the roof. Our spats were conflicts worthy of UN arbitration. Yet, nothing sad stuck.

When I walked into her hotel room this morning, it was as if no time had passed at all. There is no getting used to one another, we step back into our elemental connection and carry on. All my kids adore her.

Now, in this long summer of our life, we sit as mothers too, talking about our children. We were delighted to listen to stories about her son, and remembered with mirth stories about our once little children. This is richness.

So with a mere four hours to reconnect, we took a ride through Boston and ate Thai food. Then we dropped her off at HBS where she will be for the week. We’ll see you soon, dear cousin!

This is the apple pie the lovely daughters made for Bettina. It was very good, and had several kinds of apples, all from the surrounding orchards. The girls bought the apples at the "Bioneers by the Bay" conference that was held at UMass Dartmouth.

The two kinds of dinners are cooking. Two kinds of chili, vegan and turkey. I like to cook dinner early in the day, because that is when all things seem possible. My least favorite thing is to put finally put food on the table, and to clear the dining room before dinner. Bud and the kids do that. The table was made of maple wood by his Prince Edward Island great grandpa Charles Machon, whose Scottish wife died out in Saskatchewan. He returned East in his grief, with his many children, but without his wife and baby daughter, and started over yet again.

So we use Grandpa Charles’ dining room table, now missing one carved ornament. The table is a little too small for us, but it will hold out a little longer.

The homeschooling is also done for the day and so the afternoon stretches ahead with possibilities. Bud is in meetings all day and the big kids are at the university. It’s quiet, for a moment.

I find things that surprise me. I found an excellent series of animated drawings by Kiko that I had never seen. I am not immediately privy to their creative works. For some reason known only to them, things work better in total incubation. I was downstairs at one of the computers and found a drawing in the scanner. It was truly excellent, full of personality and movement.

A little later I found a page of words by Rosie. She has eccentric penmanship, something like a Victorian spider. It was a list of potential presents. Such lists are always changing and being left wherever they were written.

I found a hand colored anime picture by Sera that I hadn’t seen during her last showing the other day. This one was buried under a stack of papers next to her big brother’s computer. JM’s computer hosts Photoshop.

Sera was telling me about one of their late night games where they pretend to be Airbenders (don’t ask me what that is.) It has something to do with a TV show that is watched with much glee and with the doors to the living room shut. My children are very aware of something I couldn’t put into words when I was a kid. The grownup world is stifling to the free wheeling creative world of children.

When I see their creations as homeschooled kids, they are so many leagues ahead of what art class in school prodded out of my older children.

But then, there is school and there is school. I know many people who have positive school experiences. I know many who have had abysmal school experiences. Regular school has not been our path, much to the disappointment for those who would have given anything to see us in a context they could understand.

I will say it here. One of my life’s biggest mistakes was to put my kids in a parochial school that I shall leave unnamed. Looking back, it had a Dickensian quality compared to the open, Catholic, hippie, sunny, homeschooled life we had in California. Of course, the weather was bound to make a difference. But beyond that, there was a basic negativity and group management of the children. Blind obedience was expected. My kids couldn’t bear it and were the saddest children with the highest grades.

A series of unfortunate events led us to reclaim our children on by one, until they were all homeschooled again. We stuck forthrightly to what we knew best and have launched them into college with great success.

I am very grateful to be odd enough not to care about what other people think. It does occur to me from time to time that we are exceedingly eccentric. That is quite fine though. We’ll see how the rest of the book turns out.

So we begin another week. I am listening to Michael Hoppe’s Poet, Romances for Cello. It is beyond beautiful. I sit here and a kind of mental movie takes off. I am seeing Baguio in the sunlight and smelling pine needles. This morning we went with a dear friend to have a look at houses in the surrounding towns and villages. There was one house nestled in a grove of pine trees, it looked like Baguio to me. How nice to look down and see the rain of pine needles.

We saw houses near the beach, in the woods, in the village.

I finished reading Julia Cameron's "Floor Sample" last night. That's where I learned about a musician named Tim Wheaton, and following that thread I happened upon Michael Hoppe. It is all too interesting, and thanks to the Internet, Google, and Itunes, it is easy to surf at the speed of thought. Working hand in hand with synchronicity a session of discovery may reveal too much to absorb in one sitting.

We made great soup last night and two kinds of bread. My dear baking girls made a perfect apple pie. For breakfast there was an apple cake with a confectioner’s sugar glaze. With kids like these, hosting guests for the weekend is easy! They love to cook and bake and do so cheerfully! I don’t say, “Pinch me!” because, I am used to it at this point, and every so grateful.

We had a lovely week with our friend visiting. She arrived bearing gifts and grace, pulling abundance out of her bags. It was so much fun. When she is around I have this great sense of "What will happen next?" It's always an adventure around her. She is in a state of life transition and it is so exciting to see how her life will unfold next.

This weekend Desa is zooming in to go to an executive seminar at Harvard. She will be booked all week, so we will grab the window of visiting and cram a year of fun into a few hours. My family is like that. If they are in the proximity to visit, they make it a point to do so.

Mercy volunteered at the great Bioneers by the Bay conference. She got to go on a wilderness trek and find wintergreen, sassafrass, and wild carrots. She learned how to hide in the woods.

All of us went to the conference and enjoyed the free trade coffee and chocolate and came home carrying all sorts of new ecological technology.

JM is pulling in A’s in his English courses (this we expected). I am quite happy with how well they are doing at the university.

The little kids went to see Flicka yesterday after mass. We went to mass at the hospital. Yesterday, Father Mike mentioned that his Dad died a few weeks ago. He started to speak about his father, then his voice caught with tears. I thought of all the people he comforts with the Sacrament of the Sick and how he attends to the sick and dying at St. Luke’s, and then I thought of his own personal loss. I had the feeling that he was so lucky to have his father, and that his father was indeed proud of his son.