William Bolt was my two-times great grandfather. An adventurous spirit, as a young man in the late 1880s he traveled back and forth from St. Louis, Missouri to Laramie, Wyoming with his cousin Harry to work as sheep shearers. Lucky for me, his passion for storytelling compelled him to keep a detailed journal of his escapades – most notably falling in love with my two-times great grandmother, Mollie King.

I caught my breath when I came across his entries about one of my favorite places in the world, Lake Tahoe. His descriptions of the early days of Reno, Truckee and Lake Tahoe made my heart swell; what a tremendous gift to know we walk the same path. I now know for sure that there’s a special reason the Universe calls us there so often. I’m sharing an excerpt from his journal; sometime soon, I will flesh out his stories for all to enjoy.

 Winter, 1883

We are climbing the Sierra Nevada mountains. I ride most of the time on top of the freight cars. We stop for a long time at Reno, a rough town. Harry and I leave the train at Truckee. Smith goes on to California to spend the winter with relatives. Harry heard we could get a job of early shearing near Lake Tahoe. We stayed around Truckee a couple of days, a sort of a lumber camp of saloons and gambling houses and I could always see a bunch of Indians and white men sitting on the ground gambling. The Truckee River runs through there, a raging torrent all the way from Lake Tahoe. I seen some Indian women fishing. I went to them – they had a fire of only a couple of sticks and they catch a fish, hold it over the fire a minute, then give it to the little children. I seen them little two year old Indians eat the fish just the way it was and the only thing they threw away was the head and tail.

Harry had arranged with the stage driver to take us up to Lake Tahoe which is about 15 or 20 miles away. We could always count on Harry to plan everything without trouble or expense. He had a way of talking to everybody and always made friends and we always traveled as workers. We rode on top of the stage up through the mountains to the lake. The scenery was grand. Where we wanted to go was about six miles from headquarters – a yacht was going to our landing that took the mail and of course, Harry had him take us and our big roll of blankets. It was a grand ride. Lake Tahoe is so large you can scarcely see across it and they say there is no bottom. The Indians are afraid to go on it because if you went down you never came up – even the wood goes to the bottom. I can see a stack of wood laying on the bottom . The water is so clear we can see to a great depth.

When we got to our landing we found out there was no shearing to be done. The owner of the camp would like us to work for him. Harry told him we would stay a few days and work for our expenses. Our job was snaking in logs and we lived with the timber men. The fishing is very fine. We just go out a few short distance from shore in a boat and drop a hundred foot line and catch Speckled Mountain trout.

The time came to take the yacht back again. Sailing in a yacht was new to us – it was very grand on that beautiful lake on top of the mountains, then the stage ride back to Truckee.

This post was inspired by The Mapmaker’s Children by Sarah McCoy, a novel about two women are connected by an Underground Railroad doll. Join From Left to Write on May 19th as we discuss The Mapmaker’s Children. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

It was the juxtaposition here that caught my eye; the hovering between the change of seasons, between permanence and the fleetingness of the moment. I ride by these trees every day, hurrying to school, never stopping to look up or notice.

It wasn’t until this month, when the light changed and the air cooled that I really noticed them – that I really stopped, looked up, and paused. It was the position, really, between the durability of the palm with its strong backbone, its wide, graceful fronds against the fragility of the pistache, finger-thin branches freeing themselves of vibrant red and yellow and orange debris.

It’s just like life.

One minute, we’re enduring life, riding the bumps and bruises and crests of the moment. We’re holding fast, occasionally throwing our arms up in glee, knowing that the immutability of what we know to be real is there to keep us safe. Strong. Comforted.

And right next to us, close enough to touch, a blaze is extinguished. A force at once vibrant and animated, slowly shedding its color in preparation for the next season. The next stage. To go dormant, to conserve its energy for what is yet to come. Fragile. Fleeting.

Both equally exquisite. Both equally elusive. Both equally extraordinary.

It’s just like life.

So I stopped my bike and snapped a photo.

Friday photos are a snapshot of life, a moment in time, an image that lingers. They’re my attempt at capturing the extraordinary in the ordinary – taking a pause to breathe in the moment in this wild and fleeting life.

p.s. – I think you might enjoy these Friday Photo moments from weeks gone by, when I captured a last gasp of summer, Dia de los Muertos and a harvest. Click over and take a look, and please, let me know what you think.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Greetings from Calistoga, California!

Most people think of the Napa Valley for wine, of course, but there is SO much more there than driving around doing tastings. Quaint towns such as St. Helena, Yountville, Healdsburg, Sonoma and Calistoga each offer chances for a romantic weekend spent riding bikes, walking the town, antique shopping, eating our unbelievable fresh northern California produce, and most of all, relaxing.

Have you ever been somewhere and immediately had that feeling that this will be a place you come back to over and over again?

That’s exactly how I felt when I first slipped into one of three mineral pools at the Roman Spa Hot Springs Resort in Calistoga, California. Bliss. Perfection. And I instantly knew that this was going to be an indulgent 24 hours and that, yes, I would definitely be back. Calistoga is one of those tiny towns that’s off the radar of most people, but since it’s divinely close to my home, it’s an easy day or overnight trip. For us, a once-a-year overnight-without-kids is about all we can manage with our schedules-last year we had a great trip to Healdsburg!

The Roman Spa isn’t an over-the-top fancy schmancy kind of spa; it’s clean, comfortable, quiet and if a girl wanted to, she could indulge in all the spa-type treatments…but me? I’m perfectly just happy indulging in what The Roman Spa is best known for – their mineral pools. Their website describes The Roman Spa as “ A hot springs paradise of invigorating waters intimately set among flowering Mediterranean gardens, private patios, splashing fountains, and a staff dedicated to your ultimate relaxation and pleasure. This is the perfect Calistoga hotel and spa to explore the wine country, stroll through Calistoga, sample Napa Valley’s best restaurants, or pamper yourself with intimate spa treatments” and I’d have to agree.

They even had artichokes growing outside the rooms!

One of my favorite spots, after soaking in one of the three mineral pools, was right here! I preferred the outdoor pool, which is kept around 94 degrees-perfect to float around, book in hand, and feel the minerals working their magic. For those who enjoy the heat, there is an indoor pool kept around 100 degrees, and an outdoor HOT jacuzzi that hovers around 105!

Roman Spa Hot Springs Resort outdoor pool

I found it super relaxing to sit in the shade and read – I finished L.Y. Marlow’s great World War 2 love story, A Life Apart, while I was there!

Calistoga has basically one main street, but it is chock-full of fine dining restaurants, cafes, and cute bistros like the one we chose for dinner, All Seasons Bistro. I always check Yelp when I travel for reviews and ideas, and this place came so highly rated we knew it would be perfect. It surely didn’t disappoint…

Since it was a weeknight, we had our choice of seats. We wanted to be right in the middle of the action of this quaint little spot. I loved the black and white tile floors, the RED ceiling, and full, old fashioned bar running along one side.

To start, I had one of the most delicious salads ever – their roasted beets, organic mache and arugula, with shaved pickled fennel, feta cheese, toasted pistachios, and citrus vinaigrette. Oh-my-goodness was it good! The red and gold beets were thinly sliced and placed on the bottom of the salad like a little treasure! The shaved fennel was just subtle enough to add a tang, and the light dusting of feta added a creamy touch. It seriously would have been enough for a meal in itself, but there was so much more to choose from!

One of their most highly rated plates is the risotto with spring vegetables, and I can see why. The risotto was perfectly al dente, the sauce gently coating each grain with yummy goodness. The veggies were crisp and fresh, adding gorgeous color and texture. I could have eaten the whole plate; well, I did share a little…

John went for the braised lamb shank served over creamy polenta, a touch of braising juices, Swiss chard, crispy shallots, and just a sprinkling of pomegranate seeds to give a little burst of happiness in your mouth. Decadent. He loved every bite!

And yes, there’s always room for dessert…as long as you have time to take a long walk afterwards! I couldn’t resist their specialty: warm dark chocolate torte served with housemade cookies and cream ice cream, topped off with a ‘drizzle’ of rich, fudgy chocolate sauce. When we cut into the torte, the warm fudge sauce just oozed all over the plate, making one gooey, chocolatey ball of yum. Yep. As good as it was, we could hardly finish it.

After a walk, a nightime swim and a solid sleep, it was time for breakfast. Calistoga is kind of sleepy, but we found a ‘traditional’ diner, Cafe Sarafornia.  According to their website the story of their name is that “California’s first millionaire—Sam Brannan—bought up the geyser lands in the upper Napa Valley, on the prospect that it would be a great place to build a resort for his well-heeled San Francisco friends. When asked what how he intended to accomplish this feat while co-imbibing with said friends, Mr. Brannan was purported to have said, “I’m going to make it the Calistoga of Sarafornia!” (what he meant to say was the “Saratoga of California” after the then world-famous Saratoga Springs in New York). Hence the name of the town, the name of the diner.”

I like little trivia bits like that.

We managed a light breakfast…

…because we were heading for a morning of mineral baths, reading, relaxing, and then LUNCH in Napa on the way home!

We found this little treasure on Yelp as well – it’s called Melted, and their tiny cafe specializes in sandwiches-melted, of course! This one is called “It’s Been A Long Time Cousin”, and after one bite we knew why the hostess asked us if we like it HOT! WOW! Roasted chicken breast, jack cheese, habanero salsa with a side of pickled okra all on this crispy waffle type bread…amazing. Oh-and a cup of warm tomato soup for dipping, too!

 The much milder “Bread Crumb Trail’ featured turkey, Jarlsberg cheese, candied yams, cranberrOh and chive aioli, all on that mysterious waffle bread…how do they do that?

 And, sigh, after a nice lunch on their patio, it was back home. 24 hours of soaking, reading, relaxing and EATING sure did a body good!

Read about more beautiful hot springs in California here.

Calistoga on Dwellable

 Related articles

• • 13 luxurious California spas

• • Calistoga on list of Fodor’s best small towns

• • A Perfect Summer Day

• Travel with mamawolfe: Healdsburg and Camellia Inn

Related articles

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

One of Grandma Grace’s dress designs.

My mom lives in an old adobe cottage originally  purchased by my great-grandparents. For three generations this tiny home has been the place people go to live when they’re done with the big city, or just need a change. I’ve been told that Grandma Grace loved stone houses; maybe it was their solidity that drew her to them, or the way one feels so anchored to that place when sitting by the fire on a cool summer afternoon. Maybe it was just her opinionated spirit, a woman who knew what she wanted-I’ll never really know for sure.

Grandma Grace has always been a sort of eccentric shadow in my life. Although she and Pops moved to California in the 1940s, the adobe wasn’t the first house she bought on the California coast; legend has it that she was a huge fan of log cabins, and chose one as a summer vacation spot long before she made the move from St. Louis. Some people say it’s still haunted; personally, I believe them. Spirits like hers don’t just leave easily.

She was a small woman, with a huge personality. Not many women in the early 1900s had the courage to start their own business and employ their husbands in their dress designing company, but Grandma Grace did. She was the original entrepreneur, starting off by sewing her own clothes, then churning that home business into a successful design company. I still have boxes of lace and buttons she left behind, lingering like shadows of a world I never knew.

When I think of women in the 1940s, I think about a culture which required civility, meekness, and a certain sort of knowing one’s place in the world. I’m not sure I would have survived. At that time, women were unlikely to be the head of a household, own businesses or be divorced – and my Grandma Grace was all three. Of course, she ultimately remarried my great-grandfather, with my grandmother as her maid-of-honor; just another example of eccentric Grandma Grace.

I can just imagine Grandma Grace and her ladies together, teacups in front, maybe a flask to their side, discussing their desire to be themselves despite what conventional stereotypes might have dictated for women at the time. A sort of modern-day book group – without the book, but with the drinking.  I like to think she would have agreed with people like Bertrand Russell who said, “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”

I have to believe a bit of her eccentric spirit lives on in me today. I think she would have liked that.

This post was inspired by writealm.com’s word of the day, |eccentric|.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:

Ski racing at Squaw Valley

I got a text from my 14-year-old son the other night suggesting I check ig – that’s Instagram for parents without teenagers. Intrigued, but somewhat hesitant about what I might see, I clicked over. A quick video popped up, taken from the handle of a shopping cart rolling wildly across an icy parking lot in the dark in Mammoth Lakes, California. Screams of delight pepper the soundtrack, accompanied by the comment “What a way to start off the Olympics with some of our own games #slidinanddrivin”.

Yes, my son was unsupervised, in the dark, far away from home and it made me smile. Why? Because surprisingly, it’s what’s best for my kid.

When he was born prematurely fourteen years ago, he spent the first six weeks sound asleep. Watching him snooze, all five pounds of him curled up with a smile on his face, I figured mothering a boy would be easier than I expected. I figured he would always be so sweet, calm and compliant. I figured he would spend the next eithgeen years or so waking up in the room at the end of the hall, and that if I kept the cupboards well-stocked he would be pretty happy to be home. For the most part, I figured right.

What I didn’t count on was his independent, indomitable spirit. Once again, at age thirteen, he forced me to flip through the parenting handbook of my soul and struggle to determine what was ‘best’ for him.

I never in my wildest dreams imagined that he would voluntarily move away to boarding school. I know parents who have had to send their kids away to ‘save’ them, but for my kid, the thought of not seeing his smiling face or hearing him pad down the hardwood floors on his way to the kitchen each morning left me breathless. Panicked. Terrified.

One thing I was always sure of was that I knew what was ‘best’ for my kid, and suddenly, I was stupefied with his idea that moving to Tahoe to live, learn and ski for the winter was what he thought was ‘best’. As Katrina Kenison writes, my husband and I “owed (him) the willingness, on our part, to refine and redefine our own idea of what ‘the best’ might really mean.”

It started out with really listening to him, hearing his goals, his dreams, his passion, and his rationale for wanting to leave home, leave his friends, his school, and everything familiar to take a chance on what might be. The more we listened, the more possible it seemed. So we let him take the lead, hoping that everything would work out the way it was meant to be, but ashamedly, holding out some secret hope that it wouldn’t.

We had it all planned out. He would live at home through high school, attending our alma mater just like his sister. It’s right down the street from our house, after all. He would ski on the weekends like he always had, ski race for his high school, and sleep in his own bed every night. He’d do his chores, continue his piano lessons, work hard in school and go to college. Maybe he’d even live at home until he got married…that all seemed so safe. So doable. So planned. It seemed like the best path for him – for all of us.

Jon Kabat-Zinn said that “our children drop into our neat, tightly governed lives like small, rowdy Buddhist masters,” Katrina Kenison shares in The Gift of An Ordinary Day, “each of them sent to teach us the hard lessons we most need to learn.” I think of this quote every time my stomach drops with anxiety, which happens on a daily basis lately. Relying on texting, Instagram and the occasional sc (again, for the teenage-deprived parents, that’s short for Snapchat) to get a tantalizing tidbit of his daily life is NOT what I imagined my life would be like a year ago. I don’t see his homework every night, I only hope he’s using the washing machine once in awhile, and have to trust that he’s eating his vegetables every day. I’ve released the control over his schedule to his ‘dorm parents’ and his stringent ski coach, knowing that now it is they who have his best interests in their minds each day.

My son certainly dropped into my life in the most exquisitely, incomparable, and unexpected ways. I’ve been forced to reevaluate my parenting, my expectations, and my need to control his path in life. I’ve stumbled forward, learning to trust that things will work out the way they’re supposed to, to mother by faith, and that maybe the hard lesson I need to learn is that ultimately, we are the only ones who truly know what is ‘best’ for us. All we really need to do is be willing to listen for it.

Jennifer Wolfe

Jennifer Wolfe, a writer-teacher-mom, is dedicated to finding the extraordinary in the ordinary moments of life by thinking deeply, loving fiercely, and teaching audaciously. Jennifer is a Google Certified Educator, Hyperdoc fanatic, and a voracious reader. Read her stories on her blog, mamawolfe, and grab free copies of her teaching and parenting resources.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me: