dead people's stuff

You've been to them, yard sales selling off everything that's left. Sometimes they're called estate sales, as though something of value besides the house remained, but rarely is anything left but evidence of a life. They should call them Life Sales. The accumulation of one person's life. What is disconcerting is that stuff is still in the drawers, the bread still in the toaster; and each one has the terrible Christmas corner, with faded plastic poinsettias and garish gold garlands, squared and flattened now from being boxed for a thousand years. I'm exaggerating, of course, but you can still smell the person, picture her making her little twin beds with the pale yellow chenile bedspreads-- the kind of beds Lucy and Desi slept in before they could show couples sleeping together on television -- White Shoulders perfume bedside with that bumpy dotted milk-glass bedside lamp with the ruffled shade. You can tell she hasn't been gone all that long. The hardest things for me are the boxes and boxes of photographs. I will burn all of mine before I die. If I remember. Note to self. I have this one picture, this great picture, of a girl holding a robin in her hand. I'm sure I've talked about it before, here in blogworld. I may be related to her, I don't know. I'll never know.
















But there she is, with that bird just sitting in her hand and she looks neither pleased nor shocked, just aware that something extraordinary is being recorded. That she is unknown drives my need to make a photograph album and label everything. Everything. Tell the whole story. Make up what I don't know. Fil in the gaps, for posterity, and yard salers.

We drove and drove, yard sale to yard sale. From a living person sale I got these metal grid cubes that link together to make storage space. They are in primary colors, but I don't really care. If I had my way, they'd be black, but they're in the basement, so, who cares? Not me. I always think that more or different storage will make my life better, but it rarely changes anything. I just end up selling it all at my next yard sale. And in a neighborhood like this, I think the same shit just keeps cycling around and around. We live the same life in different houses here in SE Portland.

I sorted through my clothes some more and now I have a cube of turtlenecks, a cube of black t-shirts, a cube of levis -- you get the drift. I think I would do well in one of those lofts you see in the movies: one big room where you can see everything all the time at the same time. As it stands, if my belongings are in boxes (which they often are as I am prone to reorganization in various new storage devices) they may as well not exist. If I can't see them, they don't live in my memory for long. Thus the shopping and replacing. Seems my hard drive erases itself about every 8-10 hours, so when I open the storage boxes after six months, its like Christmas. I recall a psychological concept called Conservation of Mass (Psych 101). Like the child who plays peek-a-boo. Prior to mastering this concept, the child covers its face and believes she has disappeared. I'm a little like her. It transfers to most areas of my life.

We went on a motorcycle ride this evening. Up Germantown Road and back down 23rd to Music Millinium to find an old Youngbloods cd, High on a Ridgetop. I love She Caught the Katy and Left Me a Mule to Ride. Still caught up in the emotion of yardsaling at dead people's houses, many of the houses we passed, original country houses, embedded in fern and ivy, sat decomposing in the dank jungle of Portland's West side. The smell of decay was strong as we flew by these crumbling monuments to human occupation, reminding me that somebody started each one. Each home represents someone's big plan for permanence, back in the day when people built houses for themselves. To stay. To pass along. It is a big hive we have on this planet, and we seem to favor hillsides. Always standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Whethter we are blocking their view or seeing even further I guess remains to be seen. We are the next and I wonder who will stand on my shoulders and take my place and what of the photographs?

cleaning house

I tore through my closet this morning, early, inspired by rage. I should get angry more often. I can be quite productive. I have way way way too many clothes and need just a few more: a long white linen shirt to go over camisoles and a light pair of just used overalls to cover a multitude of sins. Its time to have a yard sale.

'nuther day

Well, for those of you wondering whassup, we're not going to do the property thing. Turns out we're not wealthy after all. Lifestyles of the mediocre and obscure. That's us. Naw... we went to the bank and they would have loved to sell us a buttload of money, but we couldn't quite figure it out. There was so much on the line. And we could have crawled out on that limb, but back there would always be the things sawing away at it. In order, my reasons for supporting the decision not to go forward are:

Its too freakin' hot down there.
Our families are too freakin' close.
The ecoterrorists in the neighborhood freakin' annoy me. Seriously.

So, home we are and home we'll stay.

It did galvanize, momentarily anyway, the value of saving for retirement property.

So now you know... the rest of the story.

existential weekend

So there we were. Eliott Creek B&B, my Father-out-law's cabin, for a nice quiet weekend. We got in Friday afternoon. Kurt wanders over to his father's place for coffee, as usual, and they go for a walk, as usual, and my husband returns with a funny look on his face, says, "I want to talk you into something." Pause. "Go for a walk with me." He seems serious. I think, okay. I'll go for a walk. I'm not that lazy that he has to talk me into it. "Okay. A walk sounds great," I say. He still seems serious. He's kind of shifting from one foot to the other. "What?" I say. "What's going on?" He crooks his finger and says, "Let's go look at the 10 acres Dad has for sale." He pauses. "I told him we want it."

So began the relaxing weekend. This could be a long post, because I'm going to take you for a walk through the property and try to record some of the emotional upheaval that is still going on in my psyche.

The road in. Literally and figuratively. The road was just dynamited into submission after a 30 year nap.













10+ acres, 750 feet of which are pristine, year-round, swimmable creek frontage. The majority of the lot is hillside, forest--logged probably sometime in the fifties or sixties. Well forested again. Beautiful. Lush. The septic is installed and approved, the meadow, below, is huge.... at least 3 acres of level, buildable land. Off grid. Untouched. The road ends at this piece. Beyond is only rock face and Forest Service land. A rare private subdivision in the middle of all Federal land. Below is a view of the meadow from entrance.
















This shows the first of three drops in water elevation on the property. There are three small waterfalls with enough drop to run a hydraulic generator year 'round. The water is clean. Very little human occupation upstream. Stunning.
















A longshot up the creek from the back of the property. I wish you could see this. It goes on and on back along the creek.














A view of the creek at the deep green far end of the place. The meadow is open and sunny with a decent growing season and plenty of room for a nice garden (picture a 12 foot fence), but the far end is more dense. The property is situated in the middle of an old copper mining community that died years ago (JoBar), but has supported a small (10 people or less) alternative community for the past 40 or so years. My husband's father the main landowner.















At the far end is this gorgeous rock face. Probably 200 feet high. Many ferns, trillium, other delicate posies.













Rock face close up. From the end of the property this is pretty much it. Rock. You can hike way up and over it (but why? I ask. Why?) and a mile or so down the road is a remote campground, but nobody comes over the rocks. Nobody.













Amenities. Hers.















I don't know if you can see this, but the ridges (long, knee-high piles of river rock) are tailings from the hydraulic mining activity in the early 1800's by Chinese immigrants who were generally treated badly and run off a cliff when we were done with them, or so the saying goes. A few years ago, Jacksonville began having a Chinese New Year celebration and I thought it odd.... At any rate, there are tailings throughout the property.













Shed. His. We would likely build next to the hillside, in the shade. That way, it would be cooler in the summer. It couldn't get any colder in the winter. Many of the homes (a loose description) in the area are decorated with found items turned to flower pots. At this point, it seems a sin to decorate this sanctuary. A quiet home, a garage for the equipment, a shed for the well, some chairs and a table down by the water, to bring up when the rains come. The piece is well above any recent high-water mark. The flood of 97 didn't get it.












Challenged with my fabulous life, I hardly know what to make of it. I've lived off the grid before, and would do it differently if I am (since I am) confronted with the opportunity: reliable heat, comfort, water, light, refrigeration. I do not want to live poorly. But how often does somebody say, here: have another life. Again.

For both of us, even to consider this is a tremendous step back in time. We both lived here once upon a time. Kurt's father is here. My history is here. Distant, but the bones still rattle in the closet. The question is whether it can be both a step backward and a step forward -- if the city life will take a backseat, if it will live in well-behaved memory or remind me of all I should miss.

But I spent the weekend, and the morning, and likely the next month, trying like hell to figure out who I am. This is not the quest of a 50-something. I should be over all that. Am I that little hippie chick who canned peaches and hauled water up a hill, all tan and pregnant? Who sat naked at the edge of Yale Creek unafraid of my body? Or, am I the person I've sold to employers, a capable, competent managerial slave? Am I a civilized modern woman who can negotiate a big city with relative ease and fool the natives? Am I a writer? A biker? A wife? A mother? A junkie? A drunk?

Shit. All of the people I have been are clamoring for attention in the face of the chance of monumental change. I can't figure out if I have been lulled into the belief that a job and health insurance are critical or whether I would regret leaving it all behind. Do I think we can throw it all up in the air and live on love? I used to. I used to move freely through my life with little overhead save a bag of dirty laundry, a sleeping bag and a dog. Now, it is significantly heavier to be me. So much more to carry.

But wouldn't that leather furniture looks spectacular in a cabin?

I think these decisions are for the young and unsuspecting, the dreamers and optimists. I have been to the circus. I know how the magic tricks work. I know who lives in the outback nowadays. I know too much and too little.

But I sit beside that creek and think: I used to be this.

shedding

The first day out of winter clothing, the first non-black day, feels like full frontal nudity to me. I have on a perfectly respectable blue sundress, but feel fat, white and naked -- in that order. I am.

I just purchased a pheasant berry, or, himalayan honeysuckle plant. I'm not sure what it is going to do, but the fruit is splendid looking, a tiny, burgundy, hop-like flower that hangs pendant-like beneath broad leaves and is just as nice dried. I'll get it in a pot today. Not sure if it will take over, so am not going to put it directly into the ground. Not enough space to lose.

I don't have to go back to work until Wednesday, and I am sitting at home, day one, trying to adjust to the fact that I can enjoy myself, if I only will. Inertia rules. I have been downtown today, shopping my little heart out, until I had to go to a noon dental cleaning. Whee. Audrey, the hygenist, a tiny little asian thing, said she has a serious cellulite problem and an old woman's body. Cleaning teeth is a job for someone with OCD and I believe she is well-employed. My teeth are clean.

Tomorrow morning, we head for parts South.

We hired a new nurse at work. A him. A male nurse. During the interview process he was asked what he does for fun. "I really enjoy power tools," he replied, humorless and intense. To get a little closer to the point, the interviewer asked, "What is your philosophy of life?" He said, without hesitation, "I follow the Ten Commandments and the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church." We were more or less speechless. One of those occasions when a light version of "alrighty then" would have been a perfect fit. So, he will be looking after my folks. And I will be looking after him. I guess the good news is that he will be anything but a slacker. And he'll work weekends. Of course he will. He will obey God and Country. He will obey. Its part of the Big 10.

de nada

where have all the comments gone?

leather

I'm headed out to purchase brand new leather furniture at lazboy.

Five hours later... done. I am the proud owner of more stuff. I put my old stuff on craigslist but nobody seems to want it. Go to: portland craigslist-furniture-mission sofa and loveseat - if you want to see my crap. yep. Its right there. It won't be delivered until July, so the immediate gratification part of my brain is experiencing a minor stroke, but I am ready to sit on camp chairs for two months. You read it here first.

I will probably make minor adjustments in the decor -- just ever so tiny -- perhaps paint and carpet, maybe window coverings. Maybe. The leather is very dark brown. Coffee grounds brown. Future Martha Stewart postings are very likely. I am a little disturbed at the notion of purchasing Lazboy products, but they are not recliners and offer a great repair guarantee package for the leather. Lazgirl, now that I could get behind.

The search for furniture, a lifelong pursuit, always involved orbiting early yard sales and dusty second-hand stores. This is new, though, and the cruise through crowded furniture showrooms has been illuminating. The things they think people will put on a coffee table. Where are your feet supposed to go? These items of African interest are big and un-ignorable. And useless. Now, as I gaze around my own little showroom, I'll admit not every single thing has a purpose, but three giant picture frames with one Pakistani purse suspended between layers of glass, all three sitting in the middle of the table, blocking my view of Survivor? I don't think so.

And get this: the sofa cushions are attached to the sofa. Not loose. They wouldn't slide off if you begged them. Now, where will all the money go? I recall (wistfully) digging for change to do laundry. Back then, a quarter was a big find. Those were the days, eh? A load of wash for a quarter, hauling dirty laundry tied in sheets like a hobo stick to the Ruch laundramat, sitting the children on the washer during spin cycle because we couldn't afford the horse at the checkout stand. And we did all the laundry at once. Thirteen loads was not unusual. Make a day of it, then, stack it all nice and folded, tie it back up and haul it home: kids, dogs, whiskey and all, hitchhiking highway 238 with nothing to fear but the ol' man at home. If I remember long enough, I always get there.

But these sofas.... I'm not sure how to take care of them. Do I get a skinny attachment for my vacuum cleaner? Nah. Who vacuums?

clarification

This should be good. Me, providing clarification. L wanted to know about Anne Lamott's comments on whether or not to write about the living. What I recall.... is that she talked about people seeing themselves so differently that if you created a character, a real bastard, based almost verbatim on some asshole you know, they would read the book, walk up to you and tell you what a good book it was and what a bastard the bad guy was and how the hell did you ever think that up??????? She had actually had that experience and was all neurotic about seeing some woman she had written about and when she did -- nada.

But L, if you write about me, I'll know.

For me, I just won't write crap about my son or my husband. All the rest of you are fair game. And it isn't that there is nothing to write. OH! Believe me. But I gave birth to one and am hopelessly and legally devoted to the other, so am not quite ready to cut my throat. Shit, my kid doesn't call me on mother's day and I still won't write smack about him. Maybe I just did.

It is sunny. We went for my first bike ride, and will walk later. Survivor ended sunday night, so that leaves an evening free. I don't like to be tied to TV when it gets warm out. I'm grateful for the tube during the winter, but I'm ready to be outside. I am still mad that YauMan didn't win it though. He was the best contestant ever. Ask anyone who watched it. Ask me.

saturday

I'm never really quite certain where the balance is when it comes to writing about the living. I don't, for instance, write about my mother in law, even though there are things I could write. I listened to a cd by Anne Lamott one time that talked about this topic. It is walking that tightrope between, "Damn the editors" and "living in a family with some measure of harmony."

I doubt she reads my blog (MIL not Lamott). It could happen. Would I care? Not much and not for long. She pretty much just forwards pithy, pseudo-feminist spam (self-centered, stereotypical, shopping, body-conscious, male-bashing) with never an original thought. Oh. Did I say that in my out loud voice?

So I'm a shitty wife. I am. I come home on Friday and I don't want to dedicate this weekend or any other to anybody else. I am socially exhausted. I take care of other people's families all day every day for money. I don't care if its Mother's Day weekend. I don't get to see my mother or my son, so I'm mad. I love my husband. I really do. I just can't, at 50-something, have a new mom. I can't bond. It ain't gonna happen. There you have it.

So, this weekend is Haley's graduation from Northwest YouthCorps. She's been in the outback of Oregon blazing trails and eating stew from a dutch oven. She's a gnarly kid anyway. We will drive down to Eugene to see her graduate, and we adults will all be piled in the front seat of our truck. Hubby, me and MOM. I'm not looking forward to it.

My hope is that today will count as Mother's Day. Two for one. I am not a nice person.

monkeys I know

The Clan

Some monkeys who are no longer on my back.














The abandoned Mr. Baggs (see previous post) This monkey actually showed up on our porch with this note, possibly seeking asylum. We never did find out who left him. It was pretty creepy. If you click on the photo you can read the note.

















Cross on the garret wall. For those in peril.

road kill

I ran over a squirrel. I tried not to. I zigged, he zagged, and there he was, furry little tail twitching in my rear view mirror. I know I know I know they are nothing more than rats with decorations here in the big city, but I'm not from here, and I like squirrels. I grew up in campgrounds with gray squirrels and chipmunks when were were in higher elevations like Lake of the Woods. I watched Chip and Dale cartoons. I've delighted in watching them walk along the phone lines on Clinton Street out my bay window. I know they're a pain in the ass and they bury peanuts in my geranium pots, but shit. The little bump under the great big tires of my great big shiny red truck was not enough. There should have been body damage. But, he was on 122nd in rush hour traffic. Maybe he was suicidal. Maybe that was it. Poor little guy.

I went in for a CT scan of my gut. Something is wrong with me [other than that] and I had to drink a bunch of water and wait. That is not something I do easily. I have a bladder the size of a teaspoon and it waits for no man. I think I have been clear about my ability to pee anytime, anywhere. I've published articles about bathroom stalls of the northwest. I been around.

So there I was, about two hours into having to piss, and now its time to draw blood. This is not fun for me. I'm not exactly sure how much to say here... leave it to your imagination that my misspent youth caused me just ever the tiniest problem with phlebotomy -- thus the need to be fully hydrated. Well I was fully hydrated. I was afloat. So, I explain to the child who is about to stick pins in me that this isn't going to be easy. I always warn them and they always reassure me and I always leave the office looking like a junkie on a bad day. Which I am, but not just now.

Anyway, she ties me off and says, "Relax."
Now, I can relax, or I can refrain from pissing all over the CT scanner. As my good friend Dan used to say: clean body, clean mind. Take your pick.

I didn't die, she got her blood, and I didn't urinate on the equipment. That's the short version. I still don't know what's up with my body. I just don't want to need surgery again. (see previous posts) I can't live on Vicodin.

Well, maybe, just for a minute.

cecil

My first Cecil Brunner rosebud. This rose is about half an inch long. Lovely,isn't it?

hats

I spent the better part of my day in Goodwill looking for sun hats. It isn't sunny --don't get the wrong idea--this is Portland. I decided to have a pre-Mother's Day hat party at work. Mothers and their mothers. Grandmothers and their mothers, actually. I have to give them something to do with each other or they will spend the whole party arguing about where is home and why can't we go now and where is dad who's been dead for twenty years but it seems like yesterday to them. It is always yesterday, never today, and always just the one moment. Its all you get with Alzheimer's. Its all you get anyway -- they just seem to have a firmer grasp of the ethereal, if that's possible. [Is it?] And it doesn't matter that I hold Mother's Day on the Friday before, because its all the same day. We could have Christmas next Tuesday and they wouldn't blink. But that wouldn't be very nice, would it? So, a couple of days early, we will make peach tea and glue silk flowers onto floppy straw hats and call it a party. Mad as Hatters, every one.

So there I was, not at a Goodwill SuperStore, but at the Goodwill Bins. The Pound Store, as Larry calls it. Everything for sale by the pound. I pictured a bin of hats, teeming with wide-brimmed straw, taking my sweet time picking the nicer ones from the vast selection. This was not to be my fate. There were rules, to begin with. What is it with places like that? Run by lesser folk with attitudes. I hate being elitist. I am a fingersnap away from streetwalking, grocery cart, shit in the alley, wear all your clothes at once poverty and I look down my (perfectly straight, patrician) nose at these poor bastards who sort my leftover shit for a living.

This is supposed to be about sun hats, not a sociological confession.

This place was huge. It rivaled the new Boeing building. There were giant bins of human waste, unsorted, ripe for the picking. But there were so many people. And the rules. First of all, you have to keep moving. If you stand still you get run over. There were Russians (I told you. The scarves give them away. According to my husband they ship this stuff back to the mother country by the buckets.) So all of these people with their shopping carts were digging madly through the bins and I'm s h o p p i n g like I was at Nordstroms or something. I was kind of just strolling, not really wanting to touch anything, pick anything up or turn anything over or get my little hands dirty. And this is precisely what was required. Mind you, there was a time when about half a gram of somethin' woulda had me crawling to the bottom of those bins sorting buttons for days, but I'm civilized now. Timid. Useless. And not a freakin' hat in sight. I took a deep breath and knew I had to dig. Digging was called for. So I began my search.

When all was said and done, at a buck a pound, I had 10.96 worth of hats and flowers. And a breadboard. And a cool Tibetan bag. I think I could get the hang of this. Again.

Memory ... I remember when my brother Kim and I were robbing a Goodwill box, the kind with the metal tip-in donation door. I was sitting in the tipper, balanced between inside and out (I have lived there), reaching inside, going through shit, when the cops drove up. Kim tipped it closed, I fell in, and was stuck in that Goodwill box until he got me out after the cop left.

peony and the drive by incident

By now, most of you know I raise Alzheimer's patients for a living. Well, in case you didn't know, I do. They are wealthy and live in a private place created just for them. They each have their own little apartment and I beg -- I BEG -- their family members not to furnish their rooms with heirlooms. Alzheimer's is the great leveller. About halfway down the trail, personal property ceases to hold any special appeal. Not much matters. To them. To family? That's a whole 'nother deal. Not that family matters a whole lot to them after awhile, but the stuff... the stuff matters to the family.

So there I was, fast asleep, midnightish, and the phone rings. I always know these calls are for me. Almost. So I fumble for the phone, and the night shift med aide tells me, in pretty broken english, that a car has smashed into the building and destroyed Peony's room and all of her trinkets: commemorative plates, crystal vases, knotts berry farm cup and saucer, the works.

I wonder about Peony, as I should. I'm always so relieved when I show signs of compassion. I worry that I'll forget to ask: "Oh, and Peony? Is she under the broken glass or under the bumper?" But Peony slept right through the whole thing. She's deaf as a post.

So, the morning was full of taking pictures and attempting to reconstruct what might have happened. Who knows? Some crackhead probably trying to turn around in a driveway that, at first glance, looked a bit wider. Maybe a swing shift employee in a hurry to leave work who accidentally floored it in reverse, jumping the curb, crossing 15 feet of lawn and smashing into the wall without, say, stopping to say oops. my bad.

Her daugher showed up before nine, the first words out of her mouth "shattered family heirlooms." I knew the bill would be high. But really, who sets the price for memory? You can't buy it back. You don't really even get to know you lost it.

I remember my sister in law driving through some lady's house, knocking her out of bed and breaking her ankle. She at least had the good taste to pass out at the scene. We'll never know what happened.

And really, I'll never care all that much. Peony is okay. Knotts Berry Farm is still in business [right?] and they still make those commemorative plates, only it seems like they all have Elvis on them.

Time for Survivor.

one anniversary and a funeral

May Day May Day. It is our third anniversary. We had dinner at Montage, that Cajun place under the Morrison bridge. Yum. They wrap leftovers in sculpted tin foil to go home. Somebody decided that we should have dessert because it was our anniversary, so they sent us home with this fat piece of chocolate cake, which we just finished and I have vanilla sauce on my fingers and I can still type.

Today I went to Alice's funeral. I don't usually go, but Alice didn't have many people to show up for her and she was wearing red, and I thought that since we'd danced together it was the least I could do.

I'm never really sure what to do, Amy Vanderbilt-wise, for a funeral. Do you still wear black, for instance, or is it okay to dispense with tradition. Now, I always wear black, so for me, its no trouble. I have the good black clothes and the great black clothes. Today I wore one of each. But, do you bring flowers or send them ahead? I really only know biker funerals, you know, the kind where you throw precious things in the hole: gold rings, good weed, bad whiskey, stolen roses and eventually somebody usually takes a piss for old time's sake.

It wasn't like that.

It was in a mausoleum [shudder] and it was a little creepy, nine or twelve lawn chairs stuffed between slabs of pink marble with the names of dead people on them stacked ten high, a ceiling probably twenty feet tall. Her urn wrapped in red velvet up front and afterwards people were invited to touch the velvet. I didn't. The minister was her stepson and the few people who were there I had never seen. He mostly told the story of his father instead of Alice, but that is probably because it is the only story he knows and people seem to think their perspective is interesting.

I know I do.

The only thing I learned is that Alice liked to mow the lawn.

I don't understand the reason for mausoleums. They had not run out of room out in the dirt, so it wasn't like that. I think its that they want permanence. I think that would have probably gone without saying but for my saying it. Maybe notoriety. Maybe status.

Dead is dead. The place was thick with the smell of roses, or rose spray, more likely, because the identical little vases on each crypt were full of silk and plastic flowers. Again, that permanence thing. Weight my ankles with chains, throw me off the side of a boat and feed the fish. Heaven knows I've spent my share of time leaning over the bulwarks. A wonder I never fell in.

My husband sent me a text message that said, "I'm not a smart man but I know whut love is." I am happy to be married. Permanence... ah.

learning curve

I learned some tricks today to improve the blog. The three of you who read it may notice some changes. Asia came over, still a little croupy, and taught me how to link other blogs, how to do blogrolling and subscribe to other blogs and how to change my template. I made some wild sweet orange tea, which I think is the best orange tea there is. You can disagree with me and I won't change my mind. So I learned, slowly slowly.

There are manners associated with blogging, turns out. Silly me.

After mowing the lawn and planting more ground cover, my honey and I napped on the deck, staring up through white lilacs into pure blue sky, sweet sunlight toasting my rain-whitened face for the first time this spring. I love my backyard.

vortex

Coffee is on, my cup is full, my feet are up and the gravity of this vortex is comfortable right now. As the sun comes out, I'll get out my bike and tour the neighborhood gardens. Slow climbs and straight stretches. Asia I am not. Inertia incarnate, that's me. But I do like my bike.

I have scheduled a bus tour for my people. We will tour the rhododendren gardens. We will not get off the bus. Herding cats comes to mind.

My honey is cruising craigslist for garage sales and I think we'll go in search of stuff we don't need.

Back later same day: found some stuff. Two square cement flower pots and a set of plastic camping dishes. And an angelwing begonia. To replace the one we killed. oops.

time

Early morning, should be getting ready for work, but I do that every day. Last night we took the Canby Ferry across the river, the Willamette, I'm pretty sure, although I guess it could be the Sandy River, but I'm pretty sure it was the Willamette. It was only a buck and a quarter. Or, as the ferryman put it: a buck fifty with a twentyfive cent rebate. I will post a picture later. It only has room for 4 cars and we were the only one crossing. We had travelled out to Mollala for twin schwinns for 25 bucks and ended up with 2 drills, a buffer, a sawzall and the bikes. The guy just kept saying, "take this stuff. My friend died and I'm tired of dealing with it." Grief is grief. Like snowflakes, it affects no two people alike. I know that when my father died, my mother gave away all of our worldly goods... most notably an antique round oak table with ball-claw feet. That people took advantage of her is irritating, but it was to be her lifestyle from then on out, which was a little tough on the budding Martha Stewart in me. It was difficult to give her gifts. You'd see it the next week on a stranger who was sleeping on our floor. "Our reward is in heaven," she'd say. She really had the detachment thing down.

Writing early in the morning is like walking down a long road with lots of dark little houses along the sides. You don't really know what's inside until you cross the overgrown yard, lean across the unpruned rose bush, and peer through the window. Oh.... its just Mom.

So back to the here and now, or at least as recently as last night, we had dinner in Sellwood at a crappy Mexican restaurant that had an obscene mural of red peppers lining the women's room. Big red handpainted peppers.

I really do have a job. I really must exert enough force to extract myself from the vortex of this couch. I really must......

K&F

I was listening to a radio program last week at noon time which I sometimes do to get out of the nuthouse and into the ohsointellectual space provided by NPR. Some guy was talking about writing. And you know me, anything about writing BUT writing is of monumental interest to me. He had written a book about writing, which is sort of like actually writing, and it was kind of an expanded nanowrimo thing: take this year to write your book (or something) I'm sure it is wonderful. And he said the thing they all say: write every day. HE suggested a 600 word minimum, and even on vacations. And that is a sentence, and that is the book. And it has been said a thousand times before, best, I believe, by Anne Lamott who said something to the effect of this: the only thing standing in the way of finishing the book is all that pesky writing. Yes. And the thing for me is this: I don't count blogging. And yet it is all I do right now, and I like it. It is, like Roy pointed out in his very good blog that I haven't read until the past few days because I stay in my own little world where I know people will be kind to me, that blogging is like letter writing. I used to write letters every day. Every single dsy. I wrote them to best friends, to aunts, to boyfriends in jail, to pen pals, to my brothers. I was a letter writer. 13 pages sometimes; and I shopped for the perfect stationary at Hallmark stores and as time progressed and I found more expensive things to spend my money on, I wrote on scraps of notebook paper -- still my favorite: thin lined -- and I wandered the streets and gutters around cheap motels in search of a pencil because I feared the permanence of ink. And now this public domain.... nearly four years into it and it took me a very long time to be willing to hit the publish button and send out these letters to no one, these rants and baseless commentary on my quiet little life.


I don't know who took this picture or where it is, but if I lived there they couldn't get me.











So, I will learn to link to other bloggers, because they are out there too, and I will be a part of a community, and I will write my letters to no one.

66 dollars

I just planted $66.00 worth of flowers. At pony-pack prices, that's a whole lot of posies. I planted snow drops and red-carpet steppables (you can walk on them, although I hope not to) and grace ward lithodora and trailing lobelia and geraniums and pansies and verbena and one regal begonia. It had better be regal for 7 bucks. And sweet peas. I love sweet peas. I planted a big pot of sweet peas and planted sweet pea seeds all around it just for insurance.

willow fencing









I will post a picture of all this crap just for you. I pulled dandelions by hand and edged the front retaining wall bed with a willow-stick fence. I didn't get out my dandelion puller, although I have one. I use that for the big jobs. WE don't have any dandelions in OUR backyard. It is pure, pristine, all green sod--pure grass. My dandelion puller is great, though. It is a machine I bought when swearing off roundup, but I've backslid since and poisoned stuff with limited remorse. I'll say this and reap the backlash, but I don't really know if we'll be around to reap the rewards of our collective bad behavior, Al. Probably some metaphoric Korean gunslinger will wipe us all out in the nick of time, just as the level of roundup in the water supply reaches tasteable levels. Toxic? Who cares? Does it TASTE good?

I know this is only my blog, and I know I have neglected social or political commentary. I know. I know. But this recent killing spree, this most recent catastrophe of oversight and neglect (I won't attempt to say of or by whom) is just further evidence to support my belief that the human race has yet to prove its adaptivity.

I hate politics.

I just plant my garden and love my husband and miss my son and feed this new family of mine who is one more today with a grandson, Michael, here for dinner and fishing on the Willamette in the morning. And during the week, I make money by watching over 15 little gray-headed women plus Abe. Abe is the only man, unless we move Sam in. I don't think they would get along. Sam is too pushy. Abe is a softie. The ladies, some of them, are dying this Saturday afternoon. I make no predictions. This isn't the lottery. Not an event but a process, to quote often trite self-help jargon...But Alice and Pansy are fading slowing into the west. Godspeed.

blueskys

On the way to the beach yesterday I prayed for good weather. I actually said a prayer. The forecast was for drizzle and me without a coat, thus the devout-ish behavior: oh, jesus, don't let it rain on me. As we came through the pre-dawn darkness into a clear bluesky morning, I felt comforted by the great beyond. Although, the notion that there would be could be specific cosmic interest in my personal dryness is extremely unlikely, I am comforted by these beliefs that I cannot undo. But I am also betting I wasn't the only one out there praying for no rain in this sodden city.

I love it here. I love our sod. Wait, I'll go use my honey's computer to post some pictures, or wait, maybe I'll try to load some on my flash drive and put them on this one. I can't figure out shit. There. I did it, as you can see.


the backyard















the new fence
















the sod















So, I pounded the sand in search of the now-elusive razor clam. We got 24, and they were big, so it was like a double limit (15 each=30), really.

It is a bit cumbersome to hunt for clams. You have to carry the gun (see previous posts) and a blunt-ended stick to pound the sand with, like a shovel handle.

Did I ever tell you the story about my old Dodge Polara that I drove for a thousand years and every time I turned off the ignition I had to hit the starter with a shovel handle to get it to start again? Yes? No? Nevermind. That was another life. I'm talking about clams, here. These connections in my head go on and on.... kind of like asha's diner/dive dendrites.

So, there I was, pounding the sand in search of the dime-sized hole with a tiny water spout that is the tell, the "show", of the clam's hidey-hole. Then comes the difficult part: it takes two hands to run the shovel, so you have to do something with the stick. AND, because time is of the essence, you have to be quick. You can't, like, set the stick on dry sand and go back for the clam because: a. you don't have time -- these guys move fast once you've tamped the sand and woke them up. and b. all sand looks pretty much the same. Run and set the stick down, come back and voila! no clam... So, I dropped the stick and went for the clam, stick be damned--and all this in the midst of rushing surf. I still maintain that clamming would be alot easier if you could just get the ocean to lay off for a minute. In and out, in and out, in and out. It is relentless and inconsiderate. Water that won't hold still.

So, there I still was. And I have tossed the stick, got the clam (hooray!) and now, gone back for my stick. But it has been washed away. I begin to search the beach, the ever-moving surf, for my stick. It is a wooden shovel handle with a green metal end. I see an old man carrying two sticks and I walk toward him. I say, "I lost my stick." He ignores me. I think, oh, it must not be MY green ended stick. It must be HIS green ended stick. I am gullible that way. I keep walking. I think old people would never steal. I think old fishermen are intrinsically good, although there is no basis in reality or history for me to think this. My brother Doug is a fisherman, and I lived on the docks in Charleston for too long and hung out with fishermen and woke up out to sea with fishermen who did not have my best interest at heart (although at that time, my best interest was a somewhat fluid concept) anyway....

I wander around in the surf, wasting precious time. It is now an incoming tide, after all, and the clam beds are now being covered inch by inch, minute by minute, and I only have 8 clams and can get an honest limit of 15, and have come all this way and don't want to go home without my fair share. So, I can't find it. My stick. My husband notices, says, "That guy has it." Same guy. So I walk over to him and ask in the nicest possible way,

"Did you just pick that stick up?"
He ignores me again.
"Hey," (I'm closer now. Its my stick alright.) "Did you just pick up that stick?"
He glares at me.
"Did you lose it?" he asks.
"Yes," I tell him.
He flings it aside in the surf and walks off.
I have to lunge for it.
I was close enough to reach it, but he just flung it and splashed off.
Meanie.

It was then I noticed his bag of clams: a giant net bag dragging behind him with probably 50 huge clams in it. He must not have got the memo about the 15 razor limit.


the take

















What a prick. I don't usually use that language for old guys, but I'm making an exception this once. Actually, he probably had a commercial tag, and has an attitude about tourists. But I ain't no fucking tourist. I live here. I was born here. I deserve.

So, here I am this fine friday morning, skipping work. I love to skip work the way I used to love to skip school. I hate obligation. It is the essence of my disorder. I am going to take Sid to the vet to get his rabies shot, his nails done (what about mine?) and a long walk in between so he'll forget all the meanness of this civilized and disease-ridden world.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

mafioso

I drove to a nameless nursing home today to interview a person who has Alzheimer's disease and see if I want him to come and live out his days at my place. The wisdom of interviewing someone with Alzheimer's escapes me, but I'm always up for an adventure.

I remember walking through the halls of a nursing home back in the day, and this woman, this shell person-- nothing left but paper skin stretched thin over sharp bones, draped into her wheelchair sort of like a pie crust before it has been pressed into place, stick arms flung outward, legs splayed -- said, in a sandpaper voice, "If this is a rest home, why can't I get any rest?"

And now, perhaps heeding her comment, they are called nursing homes or rehab centers, but walking through the halls, little has changed. One thing. One thing has changed. They don't tie people up anymore. They (we) seat them in wheelchairs, pin a magnetic device on the back of their shirt, attach the other end to the wheelchair, and tell them to stay put. Of course, they, without benefit of memory, do not, and a godawful alarm goes off, scaring the shit out of the poor little person who has no idea what generated it. But it does not keep them seated. They rise, then they fall, break a hip and keep the place in business. Now, I know it seems mean to tie them up, but you may see the sense in it. And the rule is, if a person can release a seat belt on their own, they can wear one. But the point is, if they can think, they don't need one. A mystery, to be sure.

Anyway, it is curious to me, the notion of rehab for people with dementia. I wonder if, when I have dementia (I assume I will), if they can finally teach me to do my exercises.

So, I interviewed Sam. His wife had come to see me, told me she had been taking care of him at home for years and, like so many wives, he was getting to be too much. Sam was a bigshot. A real mover and shaker, with buttloads of money, wheelin' and dealin'. Now he has become too much, hard to handle, verbally abusive, still thinks he's running the show. But this time, he has walked away in the middle of the night and fallen down. And that is what usually happens. Before "the event" the wife almost always says something like: "It isn't that bad yet." But it is. Usually. And once they land on my doorstep, some of the denial is broken. and some bones.

So I walk into the room, and Sam, friendly guy, says, "Hey, come sit over here." So I do. But here's the thing: He's tiny. He's this little bitty ninety year old shell man in a wheelchair. He couldn't kick his own ass. So, I sit down with Sam and his best friend, who's name is also Sam. Who looks like a mafia hit man. Friend starts to talk to me and Sam yells: "Hey! Shutup for five minutes. I'll do the talking." And he has the voice. The man voice. I say, "Sounds like you're a guy who's used to having people do what they say." He turns to me, nodding. "I'm the boss," he says. I nod. "So I see." And it kind of goes on like that for awhile. I tell him his wife has been to see me. He says, "Yeah. She's the scout. She reports to me." Which, acutally, seems pretty true. So, I try to ask him questions to test his memory, but his friend thinks I really want the answers and tells me the facts. I don't care about the facts. I know what I need to know. I say, "How long you been here?" Sam says, "Six months." Friend says, "It's only been a coupla weeks," which I already know. Sam doesn't let him hardly get the words out before he yells, "HEY! YOU'RE JUST A GUEST. NOW KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT FOR FIVE MINUTES AND ACT LIKE ONE." I smile. This is better than TV, and I like TV.

So, I'm not sure I'll take Sam. He would be fun, but I'm not sure he'd fit in with my little harp-singing-gray-headed ladies. If I had strippers and bouncers, maybe, but that just ain't what's going on.

Pearl got two cabbage patch dolls today. She named them Roger and Tulip.

vonnegut

I wrote this poem a long time ago, maybe 30 years. It rhymes.

Cat's Cradle: For Newt Honniker

I live in a cat's cradle murmurring lies
rock me to sleep as I feed on goodbyes
motion perpetual take me away
silent as morning comes bringing the day
faithlessly dreaming I sleep the day long
sunlight surrender to right nor to wrong
but trades for the moon and stars, absence of light
and breezes that carry me into the night
waking, I'm tangled and helpless and new
my cradle in ruins; my feelings untrue
so weave me another one
feed me a lie
capture me endlessly
murmur goodbye.

jbs
I loved that book.

what i don't know

...could fill these pages.

Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. This is my favorite Vonnegut quote:
"There are two kinds of people in the world:
the ones you know and the ones you don't know."

exerpt from Cat's Cradle.

It has been a humbling week--one preceded by statements of such hubris, such unmitigated certainty as this:
"Pansy is dying."

And she is. As I am. As we are. As we do. Just not today.

Pansy IS dying, in the way that any 96 year old woman with end stage Alzheimer's Disease, is dying. She is dying more predictably, say, than I am (if you don't look too close at my metabolic profile or driving habits.) But I meant it. I said, as succinctly as Bill Murray in Ghostbusters said it, "This chick is toast." I meant right now. Pansy is going to die now. A week at the most. And I know this because I have such vast experience with death. I know so much. I am a professional. I know this shit inside and out.

And I was wrong.

We pros have those kind of lotteries. We guess. We suppose. We think we know. We think we know how long it takes in the absence of water. We think we know how people will do. But we don't. We don't know shit for sure. But sometimes, sometimes, we use our outloud voice when we oughtn't to. And people are listening.

The funny thing is that I feel like I failed because she lived. Lives. Lives on in spite of the tragic things that happen to people who don't know they are sitting up and can't even put their hands out to block a fall. I feel like I stole a moment from her family, who are so ready to release her to the great yawning gasp that we call the other side, that I beckoned for the reaper on her behalf and did so without her permission.

I know I am making way too much of this, but its my blog. Nobody blamed me. I'm the only one on my back. I only hope I can recall, in that moment when some other family is looking to me for certainty, that I don't have any. That I have experience, but no answers. That death is private and unknowable.

So Pansy lives on, to die another day.

happy easter

I started my day sitting next to a friend who is a heathen, as are many of my friends, dissing easter. It is common knowlege that I like Jesus and we have a good natured banter about all that, but it does wear thin. I don't get why non-christians celebrate easter, and to her credit, she does not. I like the fact of the resurrection, of my own resurrection, of our collective resurrection. It is a message of hope, and I need that. Spring.

The backyard is covered with cherry blossoms. The new sod looks as though a snow storm just ended. Maybe we could make a blossom man. Or lay down and make blossom angels, but we aren't supposed to walk on the sod.

I have a headache that I have had for about three weeks. It is actually a situation caused, I believe, by the position required to play the harp. I am not accustomed to holding my arms up and out and plucking and concentrating for an hour. It is definitely a learning curve. It is a pretty bad head/neck/back ache, though, and I hope it passes. I can't think to write.

home theatre

We walked two blocks to the Clinton Street Theatre and saw Black Snake Moan. Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci. She is so odd. But, I liked the movie and love having a theatre so close to home. It isn't a good theatre, and the sound is pretty bassy and hard to understand, and the decor is post apocalyptic, but other than that, the popcorn was pretty good. Three bucks for a movie and 2.50 for popcorn is about right. They don't pretend to be anything they're not.

It was a housework day, and I got out of cooking Easter dinner for mother in law. I said, "I don't want to cook or do dishes." I'd like, for once, to have a holiday myself. I like holidays. I hate housework. Hate it. But, I got through it. I did the dishes, swept and mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, changed the sheets, vacuumed, dusted and did like four loads of laundry. No wonder I'm tired. Kurt put sod down in the backyard yesterday and I guess that gets him off the hook for this weekend. But not Nicole.

So, its Easter Saturday, and I miss my son as usual at holiday time. But it is not the adult boy who I miss. Its the Easter basket, egg-finding, blonde-headed little boy who always knew where to look, who was famous in the family for saying, "This is the worst Easter I've ever had," when his soda was flat and warm, and now we all say it when anything goes mildly wrong on a holiday. I remember growing up in a house on Peach Street -- 1314 South Peach -- funny the details you remember.... and we would always find an egg the next year, in the gutter, in the garden tool shed, some nasty remnant of Easters past. I love coloring eggs, and have never not done it until this year. Last year you can look at the post and see that I did it by myself. The eggs were so pretty. But there are no kids anymore, and it just doesn't make sense. I may do it anyway. We'll see. I do enjoy them.

We drove to Newberg to see the monk last night, took the motorcycle. It was a beautiful night and a great ride and the monk is good but getting very old. I like to see him during holy week because he calls it that, and it is that for him. He says it like it is a busy part of his work week, as though there is increased pressure to be holy as part of his job description. I'm sure there is alot to do with all the visitors to the monasatery and all that. When he sees us, he blinks his eyes and says, "wow" like we are a vision. He thinks K looks like a movie star. So do I.

another night

A new woman moved in. She is from Austrailia. She is a gardener. These are the things I know about her. What I don't know is so much more. It makes me consider what is known about me. (mememememememememememememe) But really. If I go nuts. Or when. Or more to the point: when they discover I am nuts, where will you find the cookie crumbs that will lead you to who I am? How would you know, for instance, that I hate lotion that smells like fruit or baked goods? Or that ballons scare me and I hate the feel of a butterfly on my arm? Would you see that I had painted a wing and use that information to decorate my room with angels, not knowing I can't stand angels? Would you know never to comb my hair when its wet and that I hate tight clothes and rarely need a sweater? Would you know better than to sneak up behind me or startle me? That I like to sleep in a TB cold room but no matter how hot it is I need a sheet. Could you ever know how much my son means to me or what a miracle my life has been? And if all of this trip is documented, who will read it outloud so the ones who do the work will know.

Today, the Austrailian Gardner cried and cried. She was so lost all day, and I had no way to lead her home. I didn't know, for instance, that at one point in her life she had lost her son -- lost track of him -- and that the young man she was looking for this morning was him. It took most of the day to figure it out. She can't really find her words anymore. She knows what she wants to say, but can neither speak or understand spoken words. She can read, and so I write.... Finally, she said the word Presbyterian, and I knew who to call. I called her church friend and she came and we unravelled the mystery. In the meantime, I went out and bought some geraniums. When in doubt, plant shit.

There is a priest where I work. He lives on the other side, the normal side, the (mostly) undemented side. I watch him for a couple of reasons: holy men interest me, devout people interest me, anyone who can maintain faith in the presence of reason interest me. Not that these are reasonable times. Hardly. I have an innate mistrust of priests because I was raised by a Pentecostal mother who told me the Pope was the Antichrist, and priests his handmaidens, so to speak. So, my interest in them is complex. I give them wide berth, even at deathbeds -- and you know me and deathbeds. I'm never quite sure what they're up to or how they figure they have more of a connection than I do. But this guy, he showed up for Rosetta and she wasn't even Catholic. He sits on his wheeled walker on days when the sun shines, off to one side of the sidewalk in the grass. He faces the sun, eyes closed. His tolerance for time is impressive, for quiet, for solitude. For prayer.

Off to bed. I practiced my harp, so can lay down without guilt. I am learning to accompany myself with my left hand and play melody with my right. Now, if I can sprout two more and applaud myself, or just one to pat myself on the back, all will be well.

dylan

I am all alone. It is night and I am alone. My husband is patrolling street signs in another town, shining a flashlight on each one to make sure they still shimmer. It pays the bills--that and the mad house.

I was alone once for a long time. And now it is an absence I don't quite know how to fill. So this is what I do. Word play.

I am disturbed by song lyrics this evening. I was watching TV, nothing new, and a commercial began, the melody and lyrics of "catch the wind" (in case you don't know them as intimately as I):

In the chilly hours and minutes
of uncertainty
I long to be
in the warm hold
of your loving mind
just to feel you
all around me
and to take your hand
along the sand
ah, but I may as well
try and catch the wind.

when sundown pales the sky
I want to hide awhile
behind your smile
and everywhere I'd look
your eyes I'd find
for you to love me now
would be the sweetest thing
t'would make me sing
ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

Bob Dylan

I love that song. Now, I know it is the combination of those words and that music that softens my mood, that returns me to childhood--adolescence, really--days spent in hand-patched levis, cross-legged in Lithia Park, learning the melody on my first recorder, my only gift under a slim Christmas tree and the only thing that mattered to me, and what it took for my mother to make that happen...

But here's the thing........... I know I almost scared you with that sweet image, but really, that's the problem, isn't it? All of those images are used up: beaches, sunsets, romance, all that shit. It is so fucking difficult to find an original metaphor these days, these days where fist and bone have replaced heart and soul. And for those of us who put words together and take them apart for fun and torture, we are damned lucky if we can say what we mean and mean what we say, dodge trite and stay true. If we can say that which almost certainly has been said better, but not by us, and twist it one more time for the record, well good luck. The few the proud, the verbose. But we are many, now, and the metaphors show some wear here in blogland.

It was beautiful when he wrote it, and when I heard it and knew it for poetry, and was captured.

fuschia saturday

How it really went was not quite so nice as expected. It was a perfect morning. K went fishing, I dinked around the house, all that. When he came home it was time to go do the free dirt thing. So off we went. Earlier in theday I had run out to buy sphagnum moss to line three of my baskets. In case you didn't know, moss turns to peat after awhile and is not so great to line the baskets anymore. (But is great for soil, so saved it all and gave asia a bag of it. As I was out looking for moss at the local overpriced garden store, I found two divider trellis pieces and although they had "sold" signs on them, the signs were not convincing. They looked like they had been sitting in the same place for quite a while. I found a garden store worker and asked what the story was. She found out that somebody had said hey I want those I'll be right back with the money and never came back. So the story was that I could have them for half price. Yay. So home I went with my moss and two wooden dividers to place between our backyard and the homeless shelter next door.

It isn't really a homeless shelter, and truly, anymore there is little to complain about since the mad dogs who used to live there got kicked out. Now, there are just poor crazy people who need a small place to hide out in. They don't talk much at all, don't open their curtains, don't own vehicles, and don't stay up late, so why am I bitching? Anyway, the wooden dividers are really nice and clean up the fence line well.

So, back to the story... K gets home and off we go to Freddy's. We find a parking place clear across the parking lot and load a basket to the hilt with all of our pots and truck them over to the garden department. All the fuschias are gone.
GONE? This can't be. Last year I had to settle for petunias in my back yard pots and I never really got over it. I have nothing against petunias, but they are kind of leggy and sticky and I wanted fuschias and that is that. So we had the Hawthorne store call the Hollywood store (not the real Hollywood, it is a section of portland which doesn't resemble Hollywood in the least so I don't know what the story is there) and they had TONS of fuschias left. Hooray. We hopped back in the truck after re-loading all of the pots, and making sure the moss wouldn't blow out as we travelled beyond our neighborhood. As we pulled into the Hollywood Freddy's, the skys parted and a torrential downpour began. Ah, springtime. Ah, April showers. But it was still March. We charged through the rain, sidestepping rivulets and near washouts in the parking lot. These are the kinds we got:

8 bright purple (white with purple center)
4 royal airforce academy (pink with purple center)
4 blue eyes (magenta with dark blue center)
4 pink marshmallow (white with hint of pink)
3 lena (creamy white with pink center)
and two others I can't remember.

I'll post pictures as they bloom. I usually fill the pots with other hangy things like trailing lobelia and allysum.

I understand that by not linking to other blogs that I am not doing my part for blogland. I feel bad about that. Will mend my ways in two weeks.

houseboats

It is a dream of mine to live on a houseboat. Simple. Work would get in the way I am pretty sure. It already does. My sister-out-law is moving to town from Alaska and we looked at one for her. I would do that. I would. I know two women who live on them, one in Vancouver and one on the Channel. One single, one married. We talk about it, husband and I, and it may, like so many other of our dreams, become reality.

It is Saturday morning on Clinton Street, my favorite time. I woke up to a blog by my best friend l. about closing all of the libraries in Jackson County. Tragic. A beautiful commentary that I hope she sent to someone else. Orwellian. End of civilization.

I am not doing what I had planned to do this morning. K went fishing and it felt so good to just be home that I didn't get dressed and go out at the butt-crack of dawn like I usually do. I am home, drinking coffee and typing. My favorite.

It is a big day in my world: Fuschia Saturday at Fred Meyer. WooHoo! So I empty the dirt out of too many pots and stack them in my truck ready for the free dirt. Free dirt! Can you imagine? They are always a bit disconcerted to see us roll up with our piles of pots. In line in front of us are ladies with flower pots they can hold in their hands. Little painted things, all porcelain and fragile. Mine are industrial types: Huge vats of dirt and moss ready for the planting. It has been such a dark winter that it seems early, but here it is! Fuschia Saturday is upon us. I must find sphagnum moss to line three baskets and a few accompanying plants to fill in between the fuschias.

The back yard is shot. We are going to have to try sod. I guess the ground stayed too wet and drowned the new grass we planted back in October. It was a wet one. so there is just mud, and it has to dry out a little before we can sod it. Fortunately, due to all of our last summer's projects, there is little square footage to cover. Sod should be easy, but I've said that before. It is all easy for me: he does it and I watch and hand him things. Like this Thursday morning when the sink fell off the wall in the bathroom: he just gets the stuff and fixes it. Me? I make a little island for bathroom stuff by the kitchen sink and expect never to have one again. I adjust easily. I remember when my heating stove started leaking in my house on 4th and Oak in Central Point and I couldn't fix it and nobody else would and I heated the house by pouring cups of diesel fuel into the heat box and it leaked on the floor and my whole house smelled like diesel all the time, and my clothes, and I just lived in it and lived in it. Helpless as a newborn duck. And it isn't that I was unwilling to fix it, I just couldn't care about it enough to get it done. Paralyzed by poverty. I came to expect so little. Deserving is a powerful thing. Expensive.

I hate it when I feel like I am reporting instead of writing...when poetry leaves me and I am stuck with the facts. It is a barren landscape and I cross it with uncertain steps, each footfall hoping to land on softer ground.

Ah, there it is.

When my sister-out-law was here we went to the Japanese Garden. Oh. I want to go back when the irises are in bloom. It was perfect, silvered clouds in broken blue sky, cherry blossoms postcard perfect. But alas, too many humans. Ants on a hill. It was the height of cherry blossom time, so to be expected, I guess. We (me and K) talk about going to Europe, and I think, okay, okay. A couple of thoughts recur: I am terrified to fly. Sincerely. And second: If I could just get everybody out of the Sistine Chapel and take a private tour, that would work for me. Or Ireland. Or Greece. My husband wants me to get to those places, but again, the flying... and the people. I hate crowds. I don't go to parties. I don't have fun. It scares me. It always has. The amount of whiskey it took for me to have a good time at a bad party(and that by rumor, second hand reporting, and public record) was obscene. And knowing my social phobias, I always had to get a head start on the party favors so that by the time I got to the party, it was over for me. I have literally fallen face first through the door on my way into a party. Over before it started. By design or default? Who can say?

So home I am and home I'll stay. OH! we are planning a long (2 week) vacation this summer. We will head out from here east to Wyoming then North into Canada. A tour of the Rockies. (low numbers of humans, I'm hoping) We will camp and fish our little hearts out. We may hop place to place, or find somewhere we like and hang out. The Odell lake thing is off. I have trouble dreaming quite as large as my honey. All I want to do on vacation is not work. Really. That's good enough for me. We looked at renting a Hummer, but seriously, talk about obscenely conspicuous consumption. I hope we just take our truck. I bought an atlas of the US and Canada and am obsessively planning. I don't mean to follow the plan, but we'll have one. It passes the time.

tour guide

I have spent the better part of this weekend being a tour guide. Yes, me, the one who couldn't figure out why she kept winding up at the airport. My sister-out-law is moving to town and suddenly must find a house to buy. I am voting for the houseboat in Scapoose, but that's me. She is a country girl, moving from Alaska. She is the only quasi-family member I would not be horrified to have around. She is a grown up, and therefore, okay with me.

Portland is a big city, but a small town. I drove her around my neighborhood, and some others I am semi-familiar with, and we found some houses that people didn't want anymore. We drove through felony flats and showed her why she isn't interested in all that. After, we had dinner at Salvador Molly's. I love their food although it is very noisy in there.

Why is it that semi-hip restaurants get to be so noisy and dirty with so-so service? And why is food that is too spicy to eat and enjoy, enjoyed by some as a sort of masochistic rite of passage? I don't get it.

Later same month: Addendum to all of this... my sister outlaw didn't get the job after all. I am disappointed. She is disappointed. We are disappointed. I miss the people who know me. Not that there is so much to know, but there is so much to tell. She has the backstory. She has the goods on me. We killed and ate rattlesnake together (kind of a cross between scallops and chicken, in case you were going to ask), did a road trip with two cases of good wine, listening to only Roseanne Cash and Carole King's Tapestry. I wore this black, beaded antique top with hand painted roses and danced the beads off and woke up in Charleston with two bikes chained to the back of the van. I never did like wine.

Ah, well. Another life.

cardboard rosetta

Rosetta is dying. She is, perhaps was, a socialite, a fainter of victorian proportion, hand to forehead, grasping for balance as each ripple shakes her well-heeled world. We will keep Charlie, her 25lb cat, who comes to sit on my desk when Rosetta is not feeling well. He spreads his bulk across my paperwork and makes himself clear, staring at me until I go check on her. I don't seriously believe in the whole cat-as-medium thing, but I believe in Charlie.

I had the wierdest dream. I dreamt that I had to share my office (recall that I don't share well, play with others, run with scissors)and it was like a secretarial pool with lots of desks, no dividers and lots of old and crabby social workers. ick. So I grabbed a chart and started leafing through it and in between the pages I found a doll, flat cardboard, tattered, long and thin, naked with godiva-long gray yarn hair and bright crytal blue eyes. As I held her in my hand, I realized she had a pulse. It was the strangest dream. I'm sure it was Rosetta.

sunrise on the island

It was an early morning on Sauvie's Island, water turned onyx in the dark, sunrise slow and persistent, under and between the clouds, layer upon layer of gray. Boats launched in the still night, small red and green lights the only evidence of their passing. As the dawn arrived, Sandhill Cranes flew overhead, giant pteradactyls, making a clicking noise as they fly. From what I hear, they fly upwards in a spiral formation until they are out of sight and head to Texas on the Jetstream. Sauvie's Island is a bird sanctuary. You can hear the geese gossiping in the trees clear across the Columbia, their numbers in the thousands, darkening the sky as they rise as one and head off to the next empty cornfield.

Barges pass, loaded with all kinds of cargo, so heavy and huge that they push the water, actually suck the water from the shore -- the river a thousand feet wide -- and as they go by, the water backfills and slaps the shore with wake after wake after wake. Occasionally, they pull out so much water that they ring the bells on the beach poles, novices running to hook a fish that isn't there. There was a seal out today, feasting on the fish we didn't, and boat people coming too close to shore for the comfort of the beach guys. Scotty throws weights at the boat people and shoots at the seals, but Scotty wasn't there today. Score one fish for the boat people.

Just as we were about to leave, one of the poles bent and hubby ran for it but lost this one. We had been napping in the truck, and I tried (valiantly) to leap out of the truck and reel in my line in case the fish ran for it and our lines got crossed up, but my foot was asleep and there was nothing I could do but shake it off and wait for the tingle to subside. By that time, all was lost.

Last night, the salmon was so good. Fried in butter with steamed rice and sauteed brussel sprouts. Best food I've had in a long long time. A sixteen pounder gave us enough steaks for 7 meals. At 9.99 a pound at Freddy's, that is a $160.00 fish. And I guess if you count fifty bucks for a fishing license plus salmon tag, gas to get out there day after day until you get one, season after season after season, Freddy's might be the better deal after all, but there ain't no sunrise at Freddy's, no cranes, no mighty columbia.

pearls

I want to write about the unit, the sadness, the insanity of it all, but the sun came out and I left work early to come home and move my tulip pots into the light, and rake dead leaves sitting too long on the back patio. I wanted to be in it. Inside Spring. I don't want to miss another one. I missed too many, too many sunny days spent inside a bathroom stall, too many moments for planting and regeneration spent in dark bars and back alleys. Too many long nights spent talking about all those things I would if only I could. And I can and I do. But that is abstract, and God is in the details.... or the devil. You decide.

A string on my harp spontaneously broke. Just up and snapped. It is repaired now, and on with the music.

It is Saturday morning, and Haley is asleep on the couch and I am not alone in my home the way I like to be, but I know that it won't be long until these girls are grown and gone, and that they also like their time alone. They are women. They need to regenerate just like I do, and for this short time, this time before take-off, we share this space. I miss my son.

Pearl doesn't care what our names are. We are pretty much all the same to her. Servants. She calls us Mira or Bobby Sue or Gilligan if she's really annoyed. She doesn't care about much but her sister. Her sister lived on the "other side" and came over each day to have dinner with Pearl. She wasn't ill, only old, and she died in the night. Pearl's family doctor made an appointment to talk to her and wanted to be the one to deliver the news. A family doctor. She's said they set him up in business years ago, and she's 90-something.

Pearl's husband died a few months ago and like most widows she misses him like a body part. "I'm too young to be left alone," she says to me. I just nod. I'm not going to remind her that she's 90. Deep down, she knows it. At the moment she's somewhere back in the days when she and Joe were dancing at O'Conley's downtown. She has that look in her eyes. "I'm a ship without a rudder," she says, sitting in her wheelchair, her sunday-go-to-meetin' leopard print mumu spreading around useless legs like frosting on a cake. She says "sunday-go-to-meetin'" as a joke. She is a modern woman still, checkered eye-glasses, chewing gum, a wicked sense of humor and appreciation for servitude.

I am up early and heading out soon. Husband is fishing. I am not. Too early, too dark and too cold for me.

Update!! first springer salmon of the season: 16 pounder, Sauvie's Island, 9:00 a.m. I don't have to figure out what we're having for dinner: salmon, rice, roasted veggies.

impermanence

We went for a drive today, out to Astoria and on up into Washington. I've never been to the places we went. I like Oregon better. I love Astoria. I'd live there. But throughout the drive, I was struck by the deterioration of wood homes. The great old houses of the 21st Century are falling apart. I mean really falling apart. The closer you get to the coast, the truer it is. What the fog and salt air doesn't get, the blackberries do. If you stand still long enough in Oregon, blackberries will consume you. Its a fact. I saw house after house slowing sinking into the landscape, becoming one with nature, tilting, sliding, gravity exacting her payment for time spent. I lived (a relative term) in this house (another relative term) in Inglewood or Inglenook or something. A small coastal town. The house was sinking into Shinglehouse Slough (thus the affordable rent) it did not have windows to speak of, black plastic covered the windows, and we had to hop across log rounds to get to and from the back door. Electricity was questionable. On an incoming tide, water would reach the floor, short circuit the kitchen, and you couldn't stand on the floor and touch the countertops at the same time. So, undaunted, we hopped chair to chair, my four year old son's memory inspired by ECT. But that was a lifetime ago.

We drove through Rainier, the town of, and I asked, innocently enough, where is Mt. Rainier? My husband laughs, is still laughing even now, and says, "Seattle." Well, why the fuck would somebody name a town Rainier if you couldn't even see it from there. And maybe on a non-cloudy day you can, but that is hardly the point. I mean, Portland is a port, and there are other more aptly named places, Ashland, for being at the base of a volcano, maybe. I can't really think of many examples, but I was a little embarrassed. And because we drove past the old Trojan nuclear plant and I said, "I thought that was in Washington," and again, the laughter. But really, if you think about it, when you're driving down I-5 from Seattle and you look off the side of the freeway and there it is, and you know damned well that you're in Washington, and that in a few miles you'll cross the fucking bridge into Oregon, well, anyone would conclude that Trojan is in Washington. But it isn't. Its in the Oregon bump. I will admit to being somewhat geographically challenged. I am easily disoriented. I hardly know where I am most of the time and have no sense of direction, but I always have enough gas and I know for sure that given enough time and petrol, that you can get anywhere from anywhere else.

And back to the impermanence of wood, why is it that eventually, once a house really begins to decompose, the owners paint it purple? I don't think it is a good house color under any circumstance, but when the shingles are rotting, the cattle have long since broken through the fences and gnawed off the windowsills, that a person would think, hey, I know what will give this place a fresh look: purple paint.

But I do love farm country. I love rolling up to a breakfast joint at about ten-thirty on a saturday morning and watch the last call babes having breakfast with Mr. Lucky. I'm mean. I admit it. Only in a small Oregon town would you see the sign: Tanning, Toning and Saw Sharpening. nuff said.


All the way out, a radio station was playing Beatles A-Z. I know this guy who picked Ringo Starr up hitchhiking outside of Vegas. I happened to mention this to my husband who knew Sherman. Sherman Parker was, and may still be, Ruch Oregon's most inert individual. He lived in a shack with a dirt floor, not because it was hip, but because he didn't notice. He did not bathe, that I know of. My husband found it far more difficult to believe that Sherman had ever left the Applegate Valley than the rural legend that he had rescued one of the Beatles from car trouble. Or that a Beatle would have car trouble at all. Sherman is alot of things, but he is no liar. He won't even drive a red, yellow or orange vehicle becasue he thinks those colors are "of the devil." He didn't always think this way, and in fact at one point was so loaded on PCP that it took him 12 hours to crawl from the garage to his house -- a total of maybe 100 feet. Usually it only took him half an hour. :)... but the Ringo story is that Sherman drove to Bakersfield -- for car parts, the only thing that motivated him-- and on the way, passed a blown up van and stopped to help. There was Ringo and some Vegas dancer and he gave them a ride into Bakersfield. It could be true. I, myself, have never seen a Beatle, but I loved them. George most of all. When I was young it was important to say which was your favorite. You had to commit.

So, that was my day. It was good to get away.

frankie

I know that I am still a young whippersnapper to Frankie. Frankie grew up in the south and is named after Frank James. Story has it that they had their last stand on her grandmother's porch. And I figure what the hell, it had to happen on somebody's porch and it could have been her's and its a good story. And I'm a liar too. Nothin' wrong with that.

So I'm leaving for the day, and I hear her yoohooing from her room, "Honey!" So I'll be Honey for a minute and I go in there. She's blind. I'm not sure why that matters, but I'm sure it matters to her.

She is crying. I sit next to her on the bed and stroke her face. "I'm old," she says, the pink satin quilt her son brought is pushed to one side and the old wool blanket is up around her chin.

And that's the thing. Was a time, many many times over, that I looked in an old woman's milky eyes and said, "Hey, you're just a spring chicken. You're lookin' good. Nothing stoppin' you!!" Only the arrogance of youth would deny what an old woman knows for certain.

This time I just said, "I know," and I held her hand. Its what I would want. She prefers the old wool blanket, but the pink satin makes her son feel better.

the dream

This morning I was reminded of my house dreams, the ones where I awaken within the dream and find that I am in the process of moving, and that somewhere along the way I have given up my home, my long time residence, for a place that seems at first glance extraordinary. It is furnished with beautiful antiques, which admittedly are a little baroque for my current tastes in furniture, but there I am wandering room to room, until it seems that all the rooms are really connected, and there are no whole walls, just unfinished framing in places, and it is dark, and the further I get into the back of the house, which seems to go on forever, I find things that belong to people: an antique hair brush and mirror set, clothes in the closet, a razor and toothbrush. And I am not alone. I come to a back room and an old woman is sitting in a rocking chair with red long-johns and I know she is the other tenant, and I have given up my privacy to live here and I can't go back.

So that is the dream.

I am working too much. I am tired. I am hungry. I am dealing with too much. But I am finally alone this weekend, and I went out this morning to find squirrely bread, which I like alot, and frozen blueberries and frozen cherries, and two perfect white long underwear shirts. I bought two because I can.

So my sweetie is fishing and I am not. And I have a day to myself, yay, to practice my harp, and straighten my world, and wander through antique shops to my heart's content. My heart's content. Yes. I will do my laundry, and not just throw the million dollar lingerie in the dryer because I'm too lazy to care for my things. Work takes on too big a piece of my mind, and I get home, and it takes a minute for things to settle back to where they belong. Home.

porch

It wasn't really warm enough, but it was a morning for cleaning and rearranging, and the overstuffed chair ended up on the porch to make room for guitars and harps and other assorted items. Nobody sat in the chair anyway. It was just a collector, something like a butler who holds out his arms for your coats, but unlike a butler, never puts them away. A catch-all, which seems to be what any semi-flat surface in my home becomes under my lack of survellience. And the only way I ever clean my house is if I rearrange it: thus, the chair moves to the porch sort of like one of those little square plastic toys with moveable squares, precursor to the rubiks cube, where you have to move the squares around in sequence, but you never get rid of anything, much like all of my acquired treasures. I've thought about this, and wondered at the underpinnings of my lack of domestic skills, the causes and conditions that have made me the crappy housekeeper I am. I've honed it to one narrow point of light: poverty.

I have moved so many times, and so quickly many of them (I once thought I'd start a company called Midnight Movers), that I may never feel permanent. I was always moving in or moving out, so cleaning always involved moving furniture. Stay with me, this may make sense eventually. That, and bad furniture. I always had free sofas that were on the verge of un-useable, consequently the sofa turnover rate was high, and I'd be replacing the last gasp of upholstered charity as the next item, often stolen from a goodwill box, was brought in (middle of the night, big men, low light), Then and only then, would I clean the space left by the old one, not out of necessity, but opportunity: There was the vacancy, full of dust bunnies (dust rabbits) toys and lost socks, begging for attention. Even I couldn't deny it.

Okay, poverty and laziness. I'll concede the point.

But that's not the point. The point is that we had breakfast on the porch and although my feet were cold, it was good to breathe the late winter air. I am a porch sitter by custom, and love to watch clinton street from my perch high above the sidewalk. I love the snatches of conversation: "...can you believe that for a family of four?" and "...pushing her bike up the middle of the street with no lights on." And the morning-after girls, in outfits that must have looked better in the dark, with uncomfortable shoes they no doubt had not planned on walking home in, uphill no less, bed-head and smeary, wishing they hadn't. I think. But I would think this.

So my love and I had breakfast on the porch, bacon and eggs and flourless, flax toast for me, potatoes and an english muffin for him.

the water is wide

Tiger Lil was humming.

Wait, let me back up.

I've been practicing my harp and am actually learning to play it. It matters to me to learn this, and surprises me (the arrogance) that there are still things I want to learn. I'm not sure if stasis is my goal, but save that thought for another day.

I am learning to read music. Rather, I read music, and am learning to play the harp correctly, not by ear. So I am actually able to play music I have never heard before. But learning this way, I am never really certain if I get it right. I have been practicing a song called "The Water is Wide" for two weeks. Because I have never heard the song played by anyone but me, I'm not really sure what it sounds like.

So there I was, getting some lunch together in the dining room, Lil singing in the background. She's a soprano. A really good soprano. But she no longer knows the names of things if you ask her. She could say it outright if it came from her stream of thoughts, but if you interrupt it, there is no recall. Just generalization.

I am filling my plate with salad and I hear this tune, this haunting melody, and I think, because I am self-centered, because I too live in my own world, that the song is in my head, that I am just hearing the notes together because I play them over and over again, day after day, and this song has become part of me. Because I don't know this song, really. I just know these notes together, and how they sound when I play them. And Lil sings on.

So I rise to consciousness, aware of the tune, and look around me. I realize Lil is humming, and I look at her and experience the frustration of knowing she is unable to answer a straightforward question, but I must know. I must.

"What is that melody?" I ask her.
She looks at me with wide nordic eyes, "I'm..." she can't even find the words to say she doesn't know.
I try to bail her out. I have to know, but I accept that she will not be able to find her words. "Is it 'The Water Is Wide'?" I ask.
Her eyes light up. "It's wonderful." She exclaims, hand to her heart, eyes seeking more information from me, begging me to tell her something she can hold for just a moment.

Because moments are all we have.

Any of us.

So we hummed the tune together, and I confirmed what I knew. And she sang a few of the words, but not many, settling for da da da da da in the loveliest soprano range. And I promised I would bring in my harp the next day, and did, and we had another moment together. And it is selfish of me to have wished that when I showed up with my harp the next morning, that she bounded across the room (at 93) to greet me, but she didn't. She just hummed, and it was another day... another moment.

But the thing is, I recognized the tune, so that means I was playing it right. I am learning. She is unlearning. I am grateful for forward life.