Love in a Time of Homeschooling

by Laura Brodie

  I wondered if the visit disturbed Kathryn’s eight-year-old mind. My adult consciousness told me that tragedies were unfolding in that room, along with miracles. Four nurses and one doctor hovered over the newest, tiniest arrival: a twenty-two-week-old boy, no bigger than a newborn kitten. His squiggling toes were the size of Dippin’ Dots.

  Later, Kathryn told me what had been on her mind: “I want to be a doctor like Aunt Karen. What should I do?”

  We drove to the library and selected six children’s books on human anatomy. At home, I searched in the back of a closet and retrieved a four-foot floor puzzle of the human body—the skeleton on one side, the organs on the other. Kathryn pieced it together, memorizing and reciting the names of every bone.

  “Where can I buy mouse organs?” she asked the next day. Aunt Karen had her own laboratory where she and her assistants monitored living mice and performed experiments on refrigerated mouse lungs.

  “Hmm.” I hesitated. “We’ll have to think about that one.”

  All of this enthusiasm stemmed from one field trip. In two hours Kathryn had seen babies tinier than she ever imagined and a hospital bigger than half of Lexington’s downtown, and her aunt, whom she’d known only as a cooking, cleaning, nose-wiping mom, had been transformed into a person of life-or-death authority, dressed in a long white coat. Kathryn’s vision of the world, and of her own future, had been significantly altered because we had taken her out of her usual classroom to another setting that was equally educational. Up until that point she hadn’t witnessed many career options for women beyond various forms of teaching. She knew about elementary school teachers, dance teachers, and college teachers like me. But now she could envision herself as a doctor, and no homeschooling was necessary for that mental transformation—just a parent’s readiness to supplement a child’s schooling by visiting sites of learning around the community.

  That’s why field trips topped my list of priorities for Julia. The glory of our autumn lay in all the places she and I planned to explore.

  Having said all that, I must now hang my head and confess that our first field trip was lame. We left home on our third school day to visit a new tourist attraction south of Lexington called Escape from Dinosaur Kingdom, which I hoped might appeal to Julia’s paleontological bent. Mark Cline, a local artist and beloved town character, had built the place. Cline specializes in enormous fiberglass sculptures, glazed and elaborately painted, which he houses in an “Enchanted Castle” a few miles outside of town. Drivers can’t miss the spot when heading south on Route 11: four sarcophagi, painted gold and blue and green, guard the white wooden privacy fence. Inside lie the remains of old elephants and hippos and Halloween monsters, a giant watermelon with windows, and imperial weaponry from Star Wars.

  Dinosaurs are one of Cline’s specialties; Julia had seen his “Cretaceous creations” years earlier on the street corners of a tiny neighboring town called Glasgow. Cline had convinced the town fathers that T. rexes and velociraptors hanging from the windows of abandoned buildings might encourage folks to visit their economically depressed crossroads. (Hey, it got our family to visit.) But now, Cline’s dinosaurs had migrated farther south, and Julia and I were going to check out their new habitat.

  On the way, we passed another Cline creation in a pasture to our right: a full-scale reproduction of Stonehenge, made from heavy Styrofoam and aptly titled Foamhenge. In the spring and fall, Foamhenge plays host to medieval festivals and college students’ late-night drinking bouts.

  “Ever heard of the Druids?” I asked Julia, and I inserted a brief history lesson into the drive.

  After a few more minutes we reached the entrance to the Natural Bridge, the water-carved two-hundred-foot arch where Julia had disappeared on her first-grade field trip. The bridge is the sort of gorgeous natural wonder that should belong to our national park system. Instead, it has been transferred from one private owner to another, who in recent decades, have surrounded the site with sedimentary layers of kitsch. Escape from Dinosaur Kingdom was the latest addition, joining a wax museum, a toy museum, underground caverns, an equally cavernous gift shop, and the saddest miniature golf course imaginable.

  For twelve dollars we bought two tickets to Dinosaur Kingdom and “Professor Cline’s Haunted Monster Museum” (the two couldn’t be separated), then drove to an empty parking lot beside a wooded hill.

  Julia seemed a little creeped out by the surroundings.

  “When you look at trees, do you ever see the faces of animals?” she asked.

  I looked at the woods around us—shapes and lumps and colors and textures—but did not find them especially interesting. “No, I don’t see faces.”

  “I do,” said Julia. “All the time. But never the faces of humans. Only animal faces. Birds and wolves and deer.”

  “Do you think that the spirits of animals live in trees?” I asked.

  “I think that animals live in trees,” she replied, ever logical.

  “You know,” I said as I locked the car and dropped the keys into my purse, “there was a poet named William Blake who lived at the end of the seventeen hundreds, and once, when he looked at a tree, he saw a host of angels singing in the branches.”

  For some reason, Julia didn’t approve of this. “Mom,” she said sternly. “I don’t hear things. And I don’t see what’s not there.”

  “Ah,” I murmured. “Okay.”

  We passed through a gateway shaped like a monster’s howling mouth, with gargoyle-topped columns on either side, before walking up into the woods on a once-paved path, now a mixture of broken asphalt and dirt. To our left, almost hidden in the trees, a green-hoofed demon dangled a child from his claw; beyond him, a small graveyard was filled with fiberglass tombstones. I didn’t tell Julia that I, too, was a little worried. Walking alone through the Virginia woods toward an abandoned house/monster museum seemed like the rural equivalent of entering a dark Manhattan alley. I feared that I might be leading my daughter into a scene from Deliverance. At the trail’s end, a giant skull with one revolving eyeball protruded from the side of a two-story turreted brick building. An enormous snake curled its way out one window, up to the chimney, where it swallowed a man’s bloody leg. Recorded screams floated from the house’s interior. The ticket taker on the porch stared at us as if we were the first people he had seen in months.

  Luckily, Mark Cline’s lovely, smiling wife appeared to our right.

  “Have you come for the Haunted Monster Museum?”

  “No, the dinosaurs,” I said, and she directed us toward a wooden shack marked “Lost Caverns.” When we stepped inside I realized that I hadn’t done my homework on this attraction; the place had an unexpected narrative, posted on a painted sign:

  It’s 1863. While digging for dinosaur bones in the Lost Caverns, the Garrison family has discovered an entire valley on the other side filled with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, so has the Northern Army, who seek to use the dinos as weapons of mass destruction against the South. Can the Garrisons and their pet monkey Blinky stop them before it’s too late?

  God help us. This is why Mark Cline earns extra pages in the book Weird Virginia. With our nonrefundable tickets in hand, Julia and I passed through a “cavern tunnel” lined with imitation fossils of plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs and other saurs of great variety, then entered a “valley” (read: pine forest) where velociraptors had cornered a cow while a screaming Yankee hung from the jaws of a T. rex.

  All I could do was shake my head. Dinosaurs eating Yankees is the sort of bizarre sight that entertains tourists (a Washington Post reporter later dubbed the attraction “hilarious!” and “amazing!”), but when you live in our county, the endless references to the Civil War get very tiresome.

  “Do you like this?” I asked Julia.

  “Mom,” she rolled her eyes. “There’s a man’s face poking through the stomach of a giant snake.”

  I looked, and she was right. A contorted face with eyes squeezed tight was pressing though a snake’s belly
, resembling Han Solo frozen in carbonite.

  “There were no giant snakes in the dinosaurs’ age,” Julia protested. “And a pachycephalosaurus would not be standing alone like that.” She pointed at a sculpture in the trees. “They lived in herds.”

  As we walked out, a motion-sensitive T. rex jerked its head forward and roared at Julia, so she backed up, walked forward, and made the head roar again, then did it one more time, until the dinosaur’s head got stuck and locked in place, twitching and roaring.

  On the drive home I thought to salvage the afternoon by stopping at a local farmer’s produce market. “Country Hams! Homemade Honey! Apples and Tomatoes!” proclaimed the hand-painted signs. Here was a great lesson in the importance of supporting small farmers and eating fresh local produce. “Look at the sweet potatoes!” I said when we stepped out of the car. “Look at the string beans!” Bushels of fruits and vegetables filled the covered patio, some local (tomatoes and zucchini), some not (bananas and kiwi). The prices were a bargain, so I started filling plastic bags with yams and yellow squash, until Julia spoke up from her tentative stance beside our car.

  “You sure you want to go in there, Mom?”

  “Why not?”

  She pointed up, and when I walked out of the shaded area, I saw that she was gesturing toward a row of T-shirts that hung like an awning outside the patio. Some featured cartoon drawings of big-breasted women; others showed big-bottomed women perched on Harleys, wearing thongs. The crowning touch hung to our left: a T-shirt sporting the Confederate battle flag, with the words “Never apologize…” emblazoned above the Stars and Bars, and below: “…for being right.”

  “Great,” I said, sighing. Instead of supporting corporate agri-business, my dollars were going to fund the Grand Wizard of the KKK.

  The Confederate battle flag is a sore subject in our part of Virginia, with some people condemning it as an unequivocal symbol of racist hatred, and others saying, no, it’s just an emblem of Southern pride. VMI cadets used to include the Confederate battle flag in the background design of their enormous class rings, until 1992, when a group of black cadets put their collective feet down. “Why is it such a big deal?” John asked one of those cadets, who looked him in the eye and said, “My grandfather was killed by a group of men who wrapped a Confederate flag around his neck and hung him with it.”

  As for me, I hesitated outside that produce stand, torn between my political principles and my desire for cheap sweet potatoes.

  “If I go in, will you come?” I asked Julia.

  “I guess so,” she said.

  I entered, half expecting to find a tattooed Hell’s Angel behind the cash register. Instead, there was a smiling, warm elderly man making friendly conversation with everyone in the place. I wondered if he knew or cared that the T-shirts outside would alienate a lot of potential customers. Maybe he did care. The last time I drove by, the only things hanging outside were flags of the Cherokee nation and an Irish brigade.

  Driving home that afternoon, I asked Julia, “Why do you think some people display the Confederate battle flag?”

  She replied without pausing. “Because they hate black people.”

  “I’m sure that’s true for some of them,” I said, nodding. “But do you think there are others who just feel like Northerners act snooty toward them, and this is their symbol for showing that they are proud of being Southern?”

  Julia didn’t buy it. “People can be proud without saying that black people should be slaves.”

  When it came to moral questions, Julia usually divided the answers into right and wrong, with most human behavior falling on the wrong side. She had no tolerance for shades of gray, especially the grays of the Confederacy, and while her moral absolutism was often admirable, I wondered if it would serve her well in the future. During the course of her life, she was going to meet a lot of terribly flawed human beings, and it was always easier to dismiss people than to talk to them. For now, it was her prerogative to say that the emperor had no clothes.

  Fortunately, our next field trip remained free of any shadows of the Civil War. Julia and I had decided that as part of her art curriculum, she and I would take knitting lessons, which meant driving thirty minutes into some of the most beautiful farmland in Rockbridge County, to reach the Orchardside Yarn Shop.

  We had made a preliminary pilgrimage to the shop back in August, with Rachel and Kathryn in tow. The journey involved a twenty-minute drive up the local interstate, exiting at a crossroads full of sprawling truck plazas, then turning away from the highway-view subdivisions, into rolling country hills where the farmers still struggled to maintain vast homesteads.

  On the road that leads to the yarn shop, the houses are beautiful two-hundred-year-old affairs, some wooden, some brick, with wide porches and lily-dotted ponds, red barns, and silver silos. The Orchardside Farm waits four miles into this landscape, with its own two-story house, white wood with crimson shutters, and to the left, a small bright cottage where a grandmotherly, bespectacled woman serves as our region’s knitting goddess.

  A wide stream traverses her front yard, and driving over the water on her small concrete bridge is like crossing a river into paradise. Ducks and geese paddle the stream; peacocks roam the lawn. In the back of the yard a steep climb leads to a hilltop pick-your-own berry patch—two acres of raspberries and blackberries.

  “Have you come to pick yarn or berries?” a young woman asked on that August afternoon, as my daughters and I stepped out of the car.

  “Both,” I said, and she pointed toward the white cottage.

  Julia began picking feathers from the grass: long goose feathers and small, two-inch peacock feathers with fluffy bases and shining emerald tips. I called her to join her sisters, and the four of us walked into the air-conditioned space of the cottage.

  Stepping into the Orchardside Yarn Shop is like entering a chapel full of stained glass; the walls are covered in shelves of bright, multicolor yarn—two dozen shades of blue, five variations on magenta. There, one finds yarns like beaded necklaces or tiny strips of tinsel. Yarns with names such as Glitterlash, Fizz Stardust, and Squiggle. Contemplative yarns: Zen, Yin Yang, and Space. Holiday yarns: Tropicana and Malibu. And everywhere: scarves, sweaters, purses, and baby hats knitted with kaleidoscopic effects.

  To me, the place is as beautiful as an art gallery, as spiritual as a convent. Each stitch is another rosary bead, each scarf another proverb. In that chapel of yarn, women congregate on Saturday mornings, knitting and talking and laughing. Throughout the rest of the week they drop in and out like supplicants coming to leave a prayer. It would be educational, I thought, for Julia merely to sit in that room and absorb the ambience.

  “We’d like to take knitting lessons,” I said to the friendly white-haired lady behind the cash register. I pointed toward Julia, who was fingering yarn textures: cashmere and mohair and chunky wool.

  “I’m here every Saturday morning,” the woman said. “Lessons are ten dollars; children are free. I’ll teach you a few things, and then you can stay for the morning, as long as you like, and keep asking questions.”

  “Saturdays are tough, because I have all three of my girls.” Rachel and Kathryn were visible behind me, oohing over the “soooo adorable” mittens. “But Julia and I are homeschooling, so we could come any weekday, during regular school hours.”

  “We get lots of homeschoolers.” The woman smiled. “I’m Sharon.” She handed me a business card. “You’ll need needles,” she said, which I assumed would be an easy choice—I was wrong. The needles in that shop were as diverse as the women who used them: some tall, some short, some thin as shish kebob skewers, others fat as sausages. Most were made from traditional bamboo, a few were orange and purple translucent acrylic. “Knit Faster!” one brand urged, “with Turbo knitting needles!” I didn’t want anything turbo in my car, let alone my knitting needles.

  “These will do well for starting a scarf.” Sharon handed me two pairs of bamboo needles. As for the yar
n, Julia chose a shimmering ruby skein, soft as velvet. I flinched when I saw the price. If we bought three skeins, this would be a forty-dollar scarf. But if the beauty of the yarn inspired Julia, so be it. I bought one skein to get her going, and for me: a pale blue soft yarn perfect for a baby’s hat.

  “Three lessons should get you started,” Sharon explained. “Give us a call when you’re ready.” With her card in my pocket, I resolved to telephone in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, my girls and I walked outside and climbed the forty steps to the blackberry patch. A chalkboard at a little stand listed the prices: a pint for two dollars, a gallon for fifteen—one fourth of what we’d pay at our local grocery store. The picking proved easy if somewhat unadventurous—no arms scratched reaching through thick brambles for the best berries, no purple-stained clothes, no beestings. Here were neat parallel rows of bushes arranged as if at a vineyard, with huge black and crimson edible jewels thicker than my thumb. For half an hour, the only sound was the plunk of berries in plastic buckets, like slow rainfall on a tin roof.

  Looking back, I realize that our afternoon at the berry patch had already provided Julia with the lesson in local agriculture that I had sought at the Confederate produce stand. The Orchardside Farm offered excellent fruit at a bargain price, giving us a chance to support the county’s economy. I looked forward to returning once the school year began.