Last Weekend our dear friends invited us to visit them in their beautiful house upstate.  From the moment we pulled into the drive way, they made us feel so happy and at home.  Our kids have been friends along time, for the older ones since 6 or 7 months old, for the younger ones since birth, and I would say that they are like cousins except for one thing.  Mira would like to marry Ben and open a restaurant with him where they trade off running the kitchen and the front of the house.  Maybe it is best to say that our children have an ease that usually comes with best friends.

Next door to our friends lives a neighbor, a solitary woman with an extraordinary barn and animal friends that she was kind enough to share with us one morning.

We tromped over to her place unannounced but with the promise of a horse who plays the piano and, especially wonderful for Liev, of a sweet, old dog.  We were not at all disappointed.  M. came out to greet us and had the horse play the piano right off.  The kids, well some of them, fed the horses carrots, too, and Liev and the dog became fast friends.  Genevieve got to touch her first caterpillar, whom she, of course, wanted to put in her mouth.  It’s a good thing that the daddies kept a keen eye on her.

M. told us that one of the horses braided the other horse’s hair.  She leaned into them and patted each one, so very much in love with her horses, so at ease in her life.  She took Ben up the hill to the pumpkin patch to cut from the vine.  M. described how she had planted the seeds of a white pumpkin hoping that she would have a whole family of  white pumpkins this year.  Each and every one grew orange-colored.

As we went back down the road, leaving the extraordinary dome-shaped barn behind, we left with four of the little pumpkins, bright orange and beautiful against the blue, blue sky.