Chandra Hoffman's Blog

Thank you for all the birthday wishes. 51 is causing more introspection than last year’s typical milestone of 50. In part this may be that in 2024 I was in Arizona, distracted by the captivating depths of the Grand Canyon and the perhaps more terrifying prospect that my baby would choose a college on the other side of the continent.

Grand Canyon

Sept 6, 2024

But this year feels weightier and like it might truly mark the halfway point of my adult story. 30 years ago, at age 21, I began dating the man I’d known since we were gawky preteens, not fully aware these were the beginnings of the love story of a lifetime. This year, I watch as my mother at 81 adapts to a narrower life following a massive stroke last March. If 51 marks the halfway point of adulthood, if I get another trio of decades equal to those I’ve already had, I am in.

Thirty years ago, my aspirations for the future were appropriately scaled to the shorter scope of that chapter—a starlit wedding and epic romance; babies with fat feet and sweet neck napes to nuzzle; a home with soaring ceilings, light, equal parts whimsy and welcoming; an intentionally international adventurous life full of sports, animals, oceans and affirming creative success -- all with a grounding love story at its epicenter.

I certainly didn’t think too much about the second act, the quasi-empty nest, the launching of bright but separate storylines for our young adults, a love story that sinks into its roots in Scrabble games and morning coffee and the quiet certainty of the long run, our vocational storylines beating a steady background drum to the thrumming melodies of our passion pursuits. I was less aware of—took for granted-- the machinations of our country’s democratic structure. I was more focused on ribbons and outcomes, and less on building a partnership with an animal where there is trust and a respected loop of communication. I was picturing a celebratory red carpet moment for a novel to film adaptation, and not the solid teaching/writing/ghost writing/editing life I have now. I was thinking about propagation of my species in terms only of my own human offspring—not realizing how the nurture would expand to include a circle of my kids’ friends, nieces and nephews, college students and of course, a parade of animals. Back then, I was not dreaming about the specifics of heirloom seed starting or creating future-heirloom crazy quilts from bins of my children’s old clothing.

And yet, here I am.

In the 24 hours surrounding this 51st birthday, I did the following things:

--had our sacred morning two coffees with cream with best friend/husband of 25 years

--harvested and roasted ancho/banana/jalapeno peppers and orange accordion tomatoes from the garden for a salsa

--took a nature walk/water romp in the Pennypack with my newly 24-year-old son and dog, and celebrated him with sushi and Danish butter cake

--delivered for long arm quilting to a dear friend the top of Piper’s college-quilt, which we stitched this summer from hundreds of her childhood clothes and will deliver to her dorm, not across the country but in Florida near her brother, next week

--submitted to agent the full manuscript for one of my pen names

--cleaned the coop and checked (in vain!) for first eggs from my freeloading spring chickens

--gave away three mammoth butternut squash that weigh as much as your average preschooler (I have more--let me know if you want some!)

--played with my hairy grandkitties and walked a boy loop with husband, oldest, big dog and male cats

--rode bareback and bitless into an Indian summer thunderstorm on my equine partner of seven years, Phoenix, who was not convinced this was my best idea

--hiked a 4.5 mile Sleepy Hollow walk-and-talk loop with my sister and sister-cousin, founding original members of our weekday morning Schlubby Fit workout group, 13 years strong

--received the sweetest texts and calls from family, long-distance Umiami and FIU kids, their people, former students and sisters of my heart

--celebrated to the tunes of our collective Cayman Island love story Holiday Inn/Barefoot Man origins with J, my sister and her husband at a fabulous UB40 concert, an event Nick dubbed “CB51”

--capped off the birthday with five minutes left in Sept 6 2025 by driving my mom’s lost caregiver from her shift change in the rain to her lost Uber driver circling in the dark roads of our sleepy hometown

This is not the scripted Dream Day of a life I specifically pictured thirty years ago, but I had this thought as I weeded my herb garden, cleaned pasty bums of chicks and listened to current events podcasts in an attempt to straddle the razor’s edge between power of knowledge/bliss of ignorance while I turned over the scraps of my quilting station for the next project: This is exactly the life I hope I get, as my Dad used to say, “good Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise” for the next thirty years.

Unschooling is a style of homeschooling that I was never quite brave enough to take the leap on in the years of forging educational paths with my kids. I tell myself it was because I knew there were testing benchmarks that my kids would need to hit if they chose to dip in and out of traditional education because of friends/sports or personal goals, but honestly, it requires a level of commitment and trust in the concept of small humans as inherently curious beings that I was never sure I possessed.

Grossly oversimplified for the sake of this essay, the concept of ‘unschooling’ is where parents create an environment that supports independent learning and discovery, but provide no structure or Have To--no carrots or sticks. The premise says that without instructional guardrails, the young mind will indulge in nothing but “Cheezits and video games” for approximately four months. However, sometime around the five month mark, just as the young body might crave an apple instead of MSG-laden chips, the young brain will also become bored of video games, and might say to a parent, “Hey, there’s a volcano in my favorite level of my video game. Do we have any books about volcanos around here?” And voila, an unschooled child begins their fully independent quest for knowledge.

As I’ve said, I never fully embraced this homeschooling style because I wasn’t brave enough, but as a college professor, I have met students who are the product of this education, and their zest for learning, capacity for critical thought and analysis outpaced their peers from the most rigorous academic prep programs. So I do believe there is something to it.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HORSES?

As in my parenting/educational life, in my equine experience, I lean towards the natural and less structured. I am attracted to modalities and programs that emphasize the inherent agency of the horse and stress looking to their innate behaviors and communication styles to create a partnership between human and horse from the ground up. I have long-loved the fathers of natural horsemanship, Monty Roberts or Buck Brannaman, and more recently, have studied Connection Training, positive reinforcement/clicker training and participated in and hosted aspects of both Eponaquest and Horsespeak.

But one of the burning questions in my seven year journey with Phoenix has always been DOES WHAT WE DO TOGETHER BRING HIM JOY? I take comfort in the fact that he runs to meet me at the fence, and if I linger too long on my phone when arriving at the barn, he will lean over his stall door, grab the halter hanging on the hook in his mouth and fling it at me like an impatient toddler. But I wonder if given the choice, would Phoenix choose to be with me?

Two weekends ago, I traveled to New Jersey to audit a clinic with a woman who had been described as a ‘wild Danish woodland sprite of a horse whisperer’, who believes firmly in a purist type of free horsemanship and whose social media tagline is “When Horses Choose.”

 (Check out Mia’s YouTube channel for a deeper dive in her training method.)

photo Sarafina Photography

Just before attending the clinic, I had switched to riding Phoenix in a bitless bridle—meaning there was no metal in my horse’s mouth to ‘control’, steer or stop him. Phoenix came to me years ago with a lot of mouthiness and some jaw issues, and when I first posed the idea of bitless with my young horse, a trainer cautioned me about his stubborn nature and his strength, and warned I would never be able to stop him. So for most of his life, we have ridden in a loose ring snaffle. Leading up to this clinic, thinking I was going to learn about ‘letting my horse choose whatever he wanted to do’, I switched to a bitless bridle and started riding him around the property with zero contact with the reins, going with the flow of when he chose to walk, trot or canter around, wherever he wanted to go.

What it turns out my horse wants to do with me on his back and zero input from me?

Plunge his head down and eat the last of the autumn grass.

So I could not wait to watch my friend and trainer Lisa take her super-independent, 16.2, strong, green six-year-old Dutch harness horse to this clinic which said it was about letting horses choose, with no saddle or bridle, and see what the heck was going to happen. Honestly, it sounded as dangerous as handing your seven-year-old a jumbo bag of gummy bears and a Playstation controller, and walking away until dinner time, or even next Spring.

I was also excited to hear that another participant, Sarah, was bringing her four-year-old unbroken Standardbred to the clinic, for his very first time to see how he felt about a human on his back. To call what I watched that day “breaking” a horse would be a misnomer.

What I learned from auditing is that Mia’s method is one of the most pure, equitable, safe and joyful types of horsemanship I have ever experienced. Capitalizing on her years spent living with different wild herds of horses (both Icelandic and mustangs), Mia has developed a technique that uses the natural language and hierarchy of herd behavior to communicate and create an invitation to a horse-human connection that’s simply magic.

The horse is free from accoutrements—no saddle, no rope, no halter or bridle, and loose in a space with a human who is inviting them cheerfully into partnership with a human guide. The horse is absolutely allowed to say ‘no thank you’, and Mia respects that choice and creates what would happen in the horse world—a NO Zone. You don’t want to join up with the herd after being invited by the leader to come play our reindeer games? You’re free to say no, but then your space is a corner when you can sit there and say no all day along. Enjoy your Prisoner of Zelda and Cool Ranch Doritos by yourself, pal.

But Mia’s energy and magnetism, as she walks away had all of the horses turning their head and saying, wait, I might have changed my mind. And when they do, they’re welcomed to come back to try join up/partnership again.

Photo Sarafina Photography

There are mountains of praise, full body scratches in all the places a horse loves best, and a woman after my own heart, she sings to them!  

[For a more detailed explanation of Mia Lykke Nielsen’s methodology, read this]

When the horses have bought into this highly engaging, affirming dynamic, Mia says this is them choosing to be part of your herd, trusting you to be their benevolent leader, and from there, the conversation can move to whether or not they accept you on their back and pledge to carry you safely and trust that you won’t ask things of them they can’t do. From that point on, riding is somewhat traditional, albeit without the guardrails of all the things that we have always believed make a rider in charge and safe—tack.

Clarissa tries Mia’s method with Duchess today

Clearing up my previous misconception that the horse could choose anything (gorge on grass, jump a 3’6” oxer or gallop around breakneck with rider clinging to mane,) this is not that. The choice is the horse committing to the partnership. Mia’s assertion is that she feels safest without tack because she can feel the back tense, the head go high, all the signals a horse gives that their fight or flight has been triggered, and that we are at risk of missing with layers of tack between us.

In that instance, she slips off with a litheness I can only hope to replicate, addresses the disconnect, perhaps backing the horse a step or two the way a boss mare would, and then the partnership returns the mounting block and continues. It is fascinating to me that the horses, including mine, move better, more balanced, even in a frame, with nothing but perhaps a circle of rope (Mia’s cordeo) for communication.

 Just as I balked at the unschooling journey, inherent in this conversation is the quiet fear of the horse owner—if given free choice, what if my horse doesn’t choose to be with me? What if what we do together does not bring them joy?

Mia came back to Dalla Pasche on Tuesday and Phoenix and I got to join in a clinic/demo and I wondered—would he run away from me, in favor of greener grass?

But instead, inspired by her enthusiasm and she says the history of the years we have built together, Phoenix joined right in the fun. Stay tuned for more on our bareback/bit-less journey, and for an announcement of when Mia will be back in the US if you want to come see this for yourself.

A pretty remarkable something happened last week, on a random rainy midday in May: the last of my kids officially finished high school at the kitchen table of our homeschool evaluator. Piper did it without a mortarboard and gown or any of her peers beside her, in part because she finished a year early. As we stood up with her diploma, I pointed out that she’s missing a commencement address and asked if I could write my own keynote, a proud tribute to her class of one. She agreed, (if she can read it first.) The backpack that she slung easily over her shoulder as we walked out into the drizzle was stuffed with a portfolio containing all of her high school work, and a year of college credit to boot.

“Mom,” she used to say as we trekked to Arcadia University, Bryn Athyn College and Bucks County Community College in search of classes that would fulfill her academic requirements and fuel her interests, “feel my bag. Just try to lift it.”

To say I am proud of her is the mother of all understatements.

To say this was an easy road would be a lie. Halfway through 10th grade, we withdrew Piper from the parochial school system in our town for reasons that are not the focus of this essay. Without being hyperbolic, this difficult decision may have been an instrumental part of saving her life.

Upping the ante on this choice—we have no brick and mortar public school in our district. As I heard her explain to Max’s UMiami friends over spring break when they were trying to figure out how his sixteen-year-old sister was also on break from college, “While everyone has a federal right to a free, public education, proximal districts are not required to accept you as a student, since you don’t pay their taxes.” Which is true. Our district’s anemic answer to public education is PA Cyber, and with enough of a sour taste in our mouths from online school during Covid, we returned to our homeschool roots and built a curriculum from local colleges. Fortunately, J and I both have jobs with some flexibility and were able to drive Miss Daisy, working many laptop hours from libraries and parking lots of institutions of higher education. In the middle of last year, Piper got her license and drove herself thirty minutes to community college where she completed a full course load, all A’s.

The challenges were not purely parental/logistical—figuring out how to get a fifteen-year-old to class—there were also hurdles for Piper to navigate. Not only did she have to acclimate to professors and course loads assuming young adult levels of agency and responsibility, a quiet student who would prefer to fly beneath the radar had to deal with well-meaning questions like those in her Statistics 110 class: How old were you when you started college? and How many pets do you have at home? where honest answers caused heads to swivel. (Really? Who has six cats?!) In addition, she dealt with grown men who assumed a young woman on a college campus, dressed in sweatpants/hoodie and wearing obvious Do-Not-Disturb headphones while studying in the library was interested in their advances.

“In addition to the pepper spray you got me for Christmas, I need a T-shirt that says, I AM UNDERAGE & JUST HERE TO LEARN.”

While we are no strangers to homeschooling, in the US and abroad, I also worried aloud to one of my friends about what it would mean for Piper to miss out on the “traditional high school experience”. She asked me something that stopped me in my tracks: How many of your traditional high school experiences — the awkward dances, the immature behavior, the bullying, the eight hours of forced babysitting, the freaking lunch table politics— do you really want to live over?

Last fall, Piper and I spent most of our lunch hours climbing at the gym around the corner from her Arcadia classes. We downed WaWa bowls in the car and went back to our respective grinds, a little sweaty, chalk dusted and smiling. There was nowhere else I would have rather been.

Before you worry about my homeschooled child’s lack of structure and social life, she was able to play on a club field hockey team and our kitchen is constantly humming with the chatter of teenage girls making frozen fruit whip, pavlovas and creme brûlée while binge watching episodes of Bones and Naked and Afraid. What this has done is enabled Piper to maintain the relationships she chooses while creating distance from the often-messy social dynamics that are hallmarks of high school. Somewhere along the way, she found deeper confidence in her voice as well. The girl who once worried about ordering at restaurants can now set up meetings to advocate for herself with professors. She banters with her adult coworkers at the ice rink and has lunch at Tyler Park with her lab partner from Chemistry. “I mean, she’s twenty-six, but you’d like her. She’s cool.” Friday mornings, she has a standing date with her five-year-old cousin Lumen for science experiments and art projects.

Still I worried about the things she might be missing because of this non-traditional path and suggested ways we might simulate some of the milestones.

“Lots of people do senior photos. Do you want to go dress shopping and do a professional photo shoot somewhere?”

“Have you met me?” she replied, complete with one of her withering glances, which can strip the petals off the hardiest of daisies.

Our homeschooling evaluator suggested we go to the Halloween store for a cap and gown, to take a picture for posterity.

Piper rolled her big brown eyes, but the blue triangle in the corner of her left one twinkled

“Look, the best you’re going to get is when we go up to Ithaca for Hayden’s graduation, I will put on his mortarboard for one photo. That’s it.” And she added her sideways smile.

While I look forward to that exciting occasion next weekend, I sifted through photos to find just the right one to pair with this tribute to Piper. Instead, I found a theme, a hundred photos that capture the essence of her—all the things, heavy, light, animal and human, physical and metaphorical—she carries:

(Click play on the slideshow below)

All The Things She Carries

—backpacks stuffed with books, projects, papers, art, clementine peels and Starburst wrappers

—sweet confections and homemade creations; the way she nurtures with food

—miracles of nature, from sparkling seaglass to newly hatched chicks to a freshly bathed crested Polish to the perfect fall leaf

—the doe-eyed adoration of every cat, dog, cousin and child that comes into her life

—the loyalty, admiration and confidences of her close friends and girlfriend

—tender, mended bones and heart; the scars a testament to her tenacity and grit

— a resolve that shyness was something she would outgrow and shed at sixteen, like her “winterskin” Marmot jacket

—a love for all things Harry Potter, a back-up glue gun, half-finished cups of her favorite teas, and our fireplace bed

—”Dave” her chalk bag, shoes, harness, gear bag, stick clip, daypack and crash pad

— a creative aesthetic that imagined a quilt with over 1000 pieces, endless bottle cap art in Utila and a wall of dozens of paper butterflies taking flight

—a fierce inner strength that has empowered her to overcome setbacks, illnesses, anxiety and injuries

—a loathing of the cold, cruelty to animals, meanness, immaturity, the patriarchy, close-mindedness and stupidity

—a passport stamped from Scandinavia to the Caribbean, and weeks of memories on the rock faces of the Southeastern gorges

—mutual lovefests and bantering rapport with her siblings and her pseudo-siblings, the big sisters from PDX who lived with us

—the constant companionship of Toast, her foster-fail bottle baby and Amelia, her latest midnight rescue

—a reconciliation of the ‘inexplicable sadness’ and the sensitive tenderness that makes her a deeply empathetic human

—a moral compass and fire for activism that can rock others back on their heels and makes us all a tiny bit afraid of her

—the welling gratitude of two parents so proud of all she has accomplished, excited to see what the next chapters bring

* *** *

As far as the photo in the cap and gown goes, we’re not that worried about it. We have a feeling there will be more graduations and major milestones in her future. After all, she’s already 1/4 of the way there.

I am making tacos tonight, and not Old El Paso shredded lettuce and diced tomatoes tacos out of a box, but the ones we used to eat on the best nights of our adventure years in Utila, with crisped pork al pastor, four of the most perfect avocados mashed with red onion, mango and cholula, black beans and cilantro and more onions, tomatoes and the last of the pickled jalapeños from the garden, and corn tortillas dipped in the crockpot juices and fried crisp. It’s the dish I always used to make when they warned me that lots of extras would be around at dinnertime, the one that all the kids’ friends say reminds them of our house. I stopped just short of making the tortillas by hand tonight because I did have to work, but to be honest, this meal feels like my most important job of the day. After a luxurious holiday month with all the chicks in the nest, Middleman goes back to Miami tomorrow, and we are all a little sad.

I have nothing novel to say about this premise—Grown and Flown chronicles every aspect of young adult fledglings spreading their wings. I read and nod along to many. I agree we want them to launch, to find the vocation and location and people that make their hearts thrum.

I don’t worry so much for me and J. Of course we miss them when they go, deeply, but we have obligations like careers and home projects, the busy-ness of friends and hobbies and Scrabble and walking the dog and creating long narratives about the cats and chickens.

But it is the blessing and curse of raising kids who genuinely love each other that they experience loss when the forward marching of time breaks up their band.

It is not that the past years haven’t been peppered with moments where they were furious with, worried about, and grieving on behalf of each other. It is also not the first time someone has left. The oldest has WWOOF’ed around the world and lived in Ithaca for three years, the middle in Miami for three months, the baby gone on climbing expeditions and doing college to finish her high school curriculum closer to home. But somehow this Christmas, with one pending graduation and moving to grad school in NYC, another firmly building a life where palm trees are more familiar than Northern pine, the other pondering where her gap year will take her, underscored the reality: we will likely not all live together under the same roof again.

I asked the boys on a twinkly, lounge-y fireside night over Christmas, boys whose gifts under the tree beside us included gadgets for making tacos in the kitchens of their apartments with friends in other states, “Do you guys feel like you still live here?”

Both said no, and then maybe seeing the look on my face, added, “We don’t live here, but of course, this is Home.”

My own brother, only 15 months older than me, left for Duke in 1992. While there, he met his wife and they moved to Colorado and have two children, one old enough to be looking at colleges herself. A large part of me is still waiting for my brother to “come home from college” so we can resume the relationship of our childhood.

To ease the sting, J and I plan adventures for everyone. They all have itineraries over the next three months to visit each other, and there’s a lake house in Skaneateles with our name on it, post graduation, for Memorial Day weekend. And of course, they’ll come Home. Visits and internships and friends and holidays and weddings…

When they do, I’ll make tacos.

I wrote this post, in 2011, about what kind of relationship I wanted to have with my new smart phone. Most years, I start off every January with a resolution to park my phone in the bathroom overnight, to not tuck it in on my nightstand. This year, I didn’t even bother.

In my Writing 101, I teach this (perhaps now dated) article from The Atlantic on whether or not these devices will destroy a generation. Ever since its debut, I discuss with my students their relationship with what I call ‘ubiquitous connectivity’ and what they want that to look like. The first years, the students didn’t recognize themselves in Twenge’s depiction of iGen, but thought it might sound a bit like younger siblings. Then in the thick of it, students acknowledged their addiction, defiantly proclaiming they appreciated their phones listening to them so they had better targeted marketing. During the pandemic, I taught this article over Teams, the irony not lost on any of us in our Brady Bunch squares, and I added to the curriculum and we all watched The Social Dilemma. One student noted that his mom took hashmark notes of how many times he touched or woke up his phone during the documentary (187) and his little sister? 225 times.

I try not to present as sanctimonious from the front of the classroom. I own my own addiction. But then this year, something changed. This past fall, students spoke freely about how they are coming to realize the onus is on them. They are irritated by Big Tech, while embracing what is useful in their devices. Many of them had summer retreats or camps that didn’t allow devices, and they want more of that. Most had a summer they lost to horizontal doom scrolling or endless YouTube and TikTok, and they didn’t like it. They turn off push notifications, delete apps that waste their time or make them feel bad about themselves. We joke that their generation will look at us handing a toddler an iPad with access to the internet while she waits for her French fries the same way we look back at our parents letting us ride in the middle of the front seat, no safety belt, while they smoked cigarettes with the windows rolled up.

One student said, “It’s my job to set limits and boundaries around screen time. It’s the one thing my phone can’t and won’t do for me.”

I teach this class again tomorrow, new students. Perhaps, now the pendulum swings back.

This is the landing page for our Winter 212 Writing Class. We are working on platforms of identity, passions and introspections. We are committed as a group to seeking presence, discovery and awareness in our writing.

Please take a look at the platforms below and check back often for new writing!

Edward Vogt — Manifest the Mystery

Make-Believing —analyzing media to understand the universe 

Queer Craft & Film Reviews —

Heart In Sole — Sneaker Reviews/Sneaker-Related News/Everything Shoes

Traveling in My Own Bed

A Taste of Something

I’ve hit a point in my life where a sink full of dirty dishes is a real treat. If the dishwasher needs to be unstacked first? Even better. It’s a simple set of actions—everything has a place, there is a start, an end, a predictable assembly line of making the dirty clean, the reward of a shining sink and a little ticked box of accomplishment. What could be more beautiful?

My dad, a busy real estate executive in the 80s used to wax poetic about weekend mowing 13 acres. He had an old school farm tractor named Big Red, and often strapped a kid to his back or let us ride on his lap. He said, “What you still have to do is laid out in front of you—turn around and see what you’ve accomplished directly behind you. It’s instant gratification; perfectly simple.”

Right now, life feels overwhelming and complicated. I can’t think of a single friend who isn’t seriously struggling in some critical area of their family, work, social life or health. My small town is undergoing a painful, ideological identity crisis which threatens the fabric of connection, pitting the values, livelihoods and well-being of so many good people against each other. My kids are reeling from a few years of pandemic disruptions in everything from sports to future dreams to their health. In the midst of all this, my horse colicked, Finn tore his CCL, our cat got hit by a car and my wisdom teeth decided to make a very delayed appearance. Crises popping up like so many carnival whack-a-moles, where my ability to be optimistic and nimble feels like more of a requirement than a choice.

This is all to say nothing of turmoil in Ukraine, the price of milk and gas creeping ever higher, and crypto farms—imaginary money—threatening to undo all the climate change gains and end life as we know it.

Foreplay these days in the Hoffstead looks like hours browsing acreage with room for a few grapevines and enough space between us and the hordes that it will take them a relatively long time to find and kill us for our artisan homemade goat cheese.

It’s going to be okay. In the interim, a beautiful sink full of dishes presents itself to me at least once a day, and I roll up my sleeves and dive in—a clear start and end, a simple and complete task. A sigh at the end as I dry my hands on my jeans and resolve to tackle bigger problems.

I am thrilled to be teaching another college class on creating online content and populating a platform with written (and other) media. Please feel free to pop into the sites of intrepid students, listed below:

Aronel

Danny

Isaiah

Amanda

Keziah

Faye

Simone

Jada

Will

Leo

Danielle

Norma

ANIMAL — We continue to hatch baby chicks this summer as my broodies just can’t quit. This latest little love bug is hanging out with me while I trim the basil and the lavender.

Phoenix and I also are having fun after taking last year off from competing. With a busy summer of writing and corporate event work at the college, zipping off to the barn in the early mornings to beat the heat remains my happy place and fills my tank. We are learning Training Level 1 and while his down transitions feel a little like a freight train without brakes, we’re getting there.

VEGETABLE —Okay, so you really came here for the veggie pie recipe, and I can’t blame you! But first I have to explain how I was able to grow squash with limited square footage due to starting another 45 tomato plants. This summer, I dedicated the majority of the real estate space in my interior garden for nightshades and herbs. J built a raised bed for basil, strawberries and lavender, and I made a cucumber frame, but everything else went to tomatoes and peppers which are undoubtedly our family’s favorites.

This meant I had no space this year for those ramblers like squash or widlflowers in my interior garden. However, I have lots of real estate inside my chicken run, which is 40x40 and surrounds our interior garden to keep insect pests to a minimum. I have had luck growing a Concord grape ‘chunnel’ which gives my birds some shade, and our cherry tree in the run is thriving.


My solution was to use real estate inside the chicken run to create towers out of old tomato cages. I lined the sides with straw to slow erosion and filled the towers with chicken compost, just like I would potato towers. When the soil was tall enough to be out of chicken range, I planted seeds for bush zucchini, yellow squash, butternut squash and wildflowers, and then covered the tops with wire to keep birds out until they filled in. Before the plants came in, I admit they looked a little like the Hollow Men from Eliot’s poem, but now they are doing exactly what they are meant to—provide a space saving way to grow squash and flowers INSIDE a chicken run.

MIRACLE — the result of this is the amazing veggie pie, which is a recipe Piper and I came up with six or seven summers ago to handle an abundance of zucchini, eggplant, and other late July veggies.

First, you go to the store and buy a pre-made frozen pie crust because jeezus I can’t do everything. Then you use your regular peeler to shave curls of the squash, and roll them. For zucchini and yellow squash, I leave the outer skin on for color, but obviously you have to kind of hack off the butternut outer layer because it gets too thick. Roll the curls up and nestle them together. I have also added eggplant, but we didn't do any of that this year, and my jellybean tomatoes often add a perfect pop of color tucked in between the curls, but those are taking forever this year since I direct-sowed the seeds.

I throw a bunch (5-8?) eggs into the vitamix with some ricotta and herbed salt. Pour that mixture over the curls. Then I add shredded parmesan and cheddar, snip some fresh chives over the top, a little fresh pepper and into the oven she goes. Don't ask me what temperature. Hot? I was finishing a sourdough at the same time so I had it cranked to pretty darn hot, like 475?

I promise this will be delicious. We had it with a salad, some Prosecco, sourdough and gnocchi with homemade pesto.

Today at work, in advance of the busiest week of my season, with a dozen fires to be put out, I got a call from a very irate, elderly gentleman who demanded to speak to me personally and privately. The conversation began with a history of his regular Thursday men's luncheon group, where they liked to go, what they liked to order, down to ingredients on the sandwiches and 'that onion soup, with the cheese on top', how they typically liked to split the bill, who they invited, what they discussed, and then a detailed recounting of a very bad recent lunch experience.

(For those of you who don't know, I do not work in a restaurant.)

About fifteen minutes in, I wondered if I was being pranked. Had someone tattooed on my forehead, scrawled on a bathroom wall or taken out a freaking billboard with my phone number that said CHANDRA HOFFMAN SOLVES PROBLEMS?

The conversation lasted thirty-five minutes, mostly with me listening, and at the end, I suggested a few possible solutions and he thanked me and we hung up.

When I recounted the story at dinner, my teenagers were astounded that I had stayed on the phone so long, and even presented ideas for a problem that was not mine to solve. Here's the thing:

My Dad is dead. But before he died, seven years ago, he was old. And it is my fervent hope that should he have ever called a stranger and angrily recounted a long story, and dropped into her lap a problem to be solved, he would have been met with kindness.

In a lot of ways, I told my kids, that phone call was the easiest part of my day.

To quote Ram Dass, "We're all just walking each other home."

That's all. Be nice.