southland in the springtime

We went down to see Haley and her NW Youthcorps crew in the hills outside of Tiller yesterday. I don't think I've been up to South Umpqua Falls in 20 years. It is a little different, I think. I think the fish ladder is newish. We were looking at campsites for our upcoming vacation the first week of June.

Ah, vacation.

We were planning a trip to Yellowstone and finally got clear about our unwillingness to spend 600.00 on gas. What a pisser. But we did clarify our mission, eventually. I asked my husband what he wanted to do for a vacation, and he said, "Whatever you want, my love," which I must admit has a damn nice ring to it. But that was not the point. Then, he talked about spending time with his father, who isn't getting any younger either, and we agreed to camp in the southlands.

For me, it is agreeing to camp in the southlands again. Since he grew up in the backwoods of Southern Oregon/Northern California, camping is a foreign thing. Live in dirt on purpose? He's pretty new to it. And me, being the queen of camping, owner of all camping things, it is all a vacation is to me. There is nothing else. What do I want to do on vacation? Camp. What do I need? A book and a tree and a chair. That's it. And water tumbling by. And maybe ripe blackberries. That is it. Oh, and no eighties rock music blaring from bad car speakers. That's nice too. So I may be a tiny bit picky.

So, southbound we are. For those of you who know it, we will be at Hutton on Eliot Creek from May 29th until about June 2-3, something like that. C'mon up. Bring a chair and your own damn book. I'm re-reading the Thornbirds for the thousandth time. I love that story. Tortured catholics. Don't know why.

So we spent the day with Haley, who is a burly little thing, with her dreads and rag clothing stitched together with fur and carpet remnants, giant bones stretching her ears into skin hoops, carving trails where there were none, moving boulders from rockslides along the Rogue River. Children guiding children to learn the value of good hard work. I think it is okay. Go NWYC. They work harder than I ever could or have. Or would.

Today, I shopped early to get the Winko trip out of the way. I went to the one on 82nd, and let me tell you, 82nd is a scary place 'long about 7:30 on a Sunday morning. The humans that roll out from under bushes and parked cars and those tiny little hooker motels are a mess. As the sun comes out, so does everybody else.

Then we went yard-sailing, and found some unnecessary shit including a Frank Zappa CD . When we popped it in the CD player, a song came on and I knew the words to it. It was such a strange sensation to know the words to "Hot Rats." Clearly, I was in a coma for way too long. I do know about his logo and what it is. If I knew how to post drawings, I'd show you. If you know it, and can post drawings, WAIT! this is the age of the internet. It MUST be out there somewhere..... be right back... okay, here's the logo. Okay, well obviously it is at the front end of this post. So, return to beginning and look at it. Do you know what it is?

Well I do.

So, apparently I did have some interest in Frank Zappa. I know his children are called Moon Unit and Dweezel. Memory surprises me sometimes--the storage capability of my brain and the absence of recall. But once triggered, a cascade of useless trivia is momentarily available to me. And I make it available to you, my readers.

Anyway, we went for a walk as evening approached and saw a UPS guy walking his dog. We were going to follow him to see if he made only right turns but got bored and went home.

politic

To maintain my right to bitch, I kind of have to dedicate one post-- one lonesome, provincial post-- to this historical election. Having worked for and with government agencies (local, state, county, but not federal) I am not much for conspiracies. I think they are too complex and the need for clear communication beyond governmental ablity. That being said, if I WERE a conspiracy theorist, which I am not, I would say that the Republican Party is nicely positioned to win in November. We are running a well-liked white man against an idealistic black youngster idolized by our attention-fractured youth, and an old white woman who nobody likes very much but they can't really remember why. I don't think there could be a more perfect duo to feed the huddled masses longing to be whatever huddled masses long to be.

I'm tired. I'm tired and just a tiny bit negative about the notion of electablitiy, which has been (imho) discussed/diluted to innoculate the public against giving it any credence, when, in fact, it is seriously the point. I don't believe that the American People, in the privacy of the voting booth, elect a black man to the highest office in the land. And I know this is not a rare and special insight. It is a common thought, often stated. Is it a "sad commentary about middle America"? Yes. I think it probably is. But no less true. And Hillary, who asha refers to as "neocon lite" is not my idea of a dream candidate, and I don't know that it matters all that much. I don't know that she'd do much better than Obama in a general election, but better is better. As much as I'd love to throw my considerable weight behind the fresh new guy, I don't think it wise. As truly as it is time for a change, it is also time for prudence and caution. We cannot afford to lose. And the assumption that "anyone is better than GWB" is naive and ignores history. We said that last time and lost.

katerina's purse

Katerina has a port wine stain covering the left side of her face that she used to cover with theatrical makeup. That was when Johnny was alive. In her purse are two copies of the same cherry chocolate cake recipe, a AAA card she holds up proudly. Twenty five years, she says, like it was an award. Maybe it is. She finds a small snap purse that opens to be a sewing kit. She looks at the buttons stuck to a length of tape, and tries to fit the tiny scissors back in the pocket but her crooked fingers can't help her anymore. "I sewed these buttons," she says. "Well, not these buttons." Then she unfolds a small piece of notebook paper. "My list," she says. A grocery list? I ask. She looks at me, serious. "Cosmetics." Then she pulls out a photograph of three people sitting on a sofa, the fat man in the middle with his great arms around a younger Katerina and some man. "Oh, there's Frank!" she exclaims as though he had just walked into the room. "He's dead." She smiles up at me, matter of factly. She has no idea who I am. You don't live to be ninety and not gain some familiarity with death. "Frank drank more than he should have," she said. I nodded. Who is this man? I asked. She held the snapshot in both hands and squinted through glasses that could have used cleaning. "That's my Johnny."

She remembered the names of all of the plants on her narrow sill, an african violet, tulips, roses (they were actually carnations, but from her vantage point, I gave her credit) and a lily. She asked me if I would care for the violet. I told her my mother used to raise them and all I knew is that they needed an east facing window, which it is in.

She is new to me, Katerina, and I hope she lives long enough to recognize me. I am senseless to wish these things, memory being what it is in my world.

come saturday morning snow

Once again, the Northwest Stormtrackers missed. The sun is streaming in my window and I know it isn't 70 degrees, but it is a blindingly beautiful morning on Clinton street. Maybe in Hood River they lost some apples, but I don't know. It was unseasonably cold, as promised, but no precip.

Loretta is at the coast by herself. I remember the first time I went anywhere alone after raising kids and being coupled. It was a constant challenge to grant myself permission to move about the planet freely. I got good at it after awhile.

Today was "date night/day". No children, no grandchildren, no mothers in law, we went out to breakfast, went to see 88 Minutes (Al Pacino movie) then out for a steak dinner at Saylers. We wanted to try Ringside downtown, but they wanted about 40 bucks for a steak. Seemed like too much money even for date night. So, I ate about half my stuff and came on home to a sugar free ice cream bar. I remember Asia's Thai friend who almost ate that 72 oz. steak a couple years back (eat the whole thing and its free -- don't and its 50 bucks.) Well, I saw the steak. Its still there. People still try, but only on weeknights. I think K would have gone for it otherwise. Anything for free food.

Hey, turns out me and the Pope have something in common. Looks like we both wear red shoes. His are Italian leather and mine are Keens, but still, its something.

nothing

I am planting things again in the hopes that the sun hasn't forgotten us completely. I have been biding my time, waiting for that Gardener's Mecca: the Canby Master Gardner Fair in the first week of May. I had been biding my time, that is, until the sun made a fair showing on Saturday and I went to Freddy's for just a very, very few plants. Just a few dozen. My husband, attempting to be caustic and unfair, laughed as I, in his words, replaced all the things that didn't make it from last year. I tried to explain that annuals don't make it, aren't expected to make it. Just color for the springtime. So there.

I planted tons of lobelia and verbena, columbine (which will be back next year just you wait and see) and a bunch of succulents along the side of the deck, mother hen and her chicks, stuff like that. Spineless cactus. Leave no dirt un-planted, I say.

It has been a long, wordless winter in my world. I seem to be running out. I keep saying they will come back to me like I am Capistrano, and some evenings and some early mornings I hear them clattering at the windows, asking to be let in out of the rain, but I won't do it. I won't.

Not yet.

easter

Went for a walk down our street yesterday. It was a beautiful day. My husband is a garbage hound and is always snooping throught the free shit that lines the inner SE Portland streets.
"There's money in this one!" he exclaims.
"That's not real money," I said, looking over the edge of the trash can and into a cardboard box.
But it was.
"It is!" I shouted, master of the obvious. "That's the real deal."
He reached for it.
"Don't!!" I yelled. "It's wrapped around dog shit."
And it was. Dog poop wrapped in money. That's our neighborhood. Just three blocks from Obama-Central. White paradise. Where we have such abundance we clean up the shit from our 600.00 pure bred dogs with cash money.
I won't bore you with my reminiscence of all the times I searched for quarters deep in the sofa, risking life and limb and hypodermic needles, to do a load of laundry.

Ah... those were the days.

Then, we went for a drive up the Washougal River to Dougan Falls and Naked Falls. Wow. Great slabs of sandstone with rushing green water pouring over them. The sun was out for a rare weekend appearance, but I had a stomach ache and threw up on the way home. Stress. I'm looking for a new job.

Now, it is Easter Sunday.

We, after much debate, attended a baptism for one of the grandchildren at a Lutheran church in Cornelius. It was a small congregation in a small town in a newish church with bad stained glass. I love good stained glass and would convert to Catholicism were it not for the glass ceiling.

So there we were, in the front pews against my better judgment. The pastor called Jacob and his (duelling) parents and the custodial grandparents, up to the bapitsmal, and asked him point blank: Do you want to dedicate your life to Jesus?

"After I get the eggs," Jacob replied.

He has his priorities, that boy. Eventually, of course, they had their way with him and dumped water on his head and made the mark of the cross on his forehead with something holy. It was a bit primitive, really. The familiar rituals of my childhood conducted in the light of adulthood. It all seemed held together with tape and white glue -- faith a thing that evaporates with time.

I hadn't been in a church on Sunday in a long time, and never in a Lutheran church. It was alright. A bit lackluster, much like described ad nauseum on A Prairie Home Companion. You really can't picture them dancing much.

yard sales and scrap heaps

Heading out to accumulate more shit. I have a placque behind my desk that says, "You can't have everything, where would you put it?" And still I try.

Today I hope to sort through a pile of picture frames and frame some photos of our collective children and make a family wall of sorts. Was a time when I hoarded frames, bought them at yard sales and fretted over which ones were best and which pictures to put in each frame. I spent days sorting and changing and polishing the glass and tacking the frames together, antique and flimsy, to make a home. Now, I have this pile of frames and glass and photographs and very few family photos on the wall.

There are many many many to sort through. Last weekend I completed a scrapbook for Pieper, my neice, and now on to this.... it is the year of scraps for me. Fragments. Remnants. Tying up loose ends. Now, with all of the family photos, it makes less sense to frame and hang them as it does to find yet another couple of photo albums and get the photos preserved, framing only a very few for the wall.

again

I awake to the sound of birds in the laurel outside my window, the lilac still bare but hopeful, the refuse of autumn cluttering the waking soil.

I am skipping school today. Calling in sick. Nothing makes me feel better than not doing what I am supposed to do. Rebel with a clause. I feel like crap right now and am hoping the eventual call in will help with that. I skipped a meeting last night and now this... what will the future hold?

It is supposed to be a beautiful day today. Once again my husband planted grass seed in the back yard. Last year, if you'll recall, we used sod. It failed after a couple of months. I think because he cuts it too short and because our back yard is shady and you can't purchase shady sod. It died rather dramatically. Suddenly, long about october, there wasn't a blade of green to be seen. This time we hit all the elements: dug deep, added lime to the soil, used lots of shade mix seed, tamped it down gently, sprinkled a thin layer of mulch on top, watered daily, and now we wait... but we have been waiting now for three weeks. I'm accustomed to grass that springs up after 8-9 days, but not this stuff. Yesterday, finally finally, we began to see tiny little green hairs here and there. I say we, but it's all HE.

Everybody has an opinion about growing grass if you bring it up. You should do this, never do that, only use this seed, never start before May, blah, blah, blah. I think seed grows if you water it, pretty much. There seems to be some wisdom about not cutting it too short, only one-third of the blade is to be cut, and I can't be sure about the mower and uneven lawn, but generally leaving it longer is better. The lazy person's method of cutting it shorter and less frequently is probably why so many of my lawns have failed.

Well, that's your gardening lesson for today, one of the first really nice days of the year. I am holding my breath for spring and the Canby Master Gardener's Fair. I don't know if I'll be able to wait that long. I do want to see what all comes back before I start jamming new stuff on top of sleeping plants. I really can't wait for my poppies. I'll be out in the yard today to see what is pushing back through the soil for another run at life on the upside. I'll move aside dead leaves and clean up the decay of another year spent in hiding. In so many ways.

I made the call. I am free. Ah, worklessness. Hooray. I should be unemployed.

fake money

Louisa is probably a millionnaire. She looks like one. Even at 96 she holds herself in that post-debutante manner that just drips with having.

I have enough now, but add up the years... and I have rarely known enough. Eventually the balance will come... those days of enough balancing with the many years of lack. For now, I notice the differences.

So even though she is well down the rabbit hole, well into the bermuda triangle that is dementia, she likes to carry money. She will also wipe her butt with it in a moment of inattention, so it is a casualty of the realm that I ask and I ask and I ask families please please do not give your crazy little mama daddy auntie any cash.

But they do.

And here are the girls, working for not enough, never enough to still the craving mouths of the many little baby birds at home, having to discover the money and make that critical decision not to keep it. Not. to. keep. it. I understand the depth of their decision. And when one of them leaves the cash in a little envelope on my desk and waits for me to find it and open it and get rid of it so the temptation can be gone because until we both know it is there, nobody knows it is there. Not really. And there is a star in heaven for Jessica tonight.

I went to the dollar store and bought some play money for Louisa. But that wasn't good enough. Her nephew found it, threw it away, and gave her the real thing.

When we found it on the floor I soooooooooooooooo wanted to give it to Jessica.

death and facials

There is no way I can catch up with all I have not written. No way. I can summarize day upon day spent in the pale yellow catacombs of death and depression, I can blame it on the gray of winter, the inevitable longing for blue sky. I can, as a true-born Oregonian, make an honest admission of cabin fever. I have not, it turns out, forgotten how to type, or what my address is here at bluesky. Perish the thought. Every single day something happens that is worthy of blognote, that makes its way past the mundane and into consciousness, the spark that says YES, that would make for a good post. But evening falls, never soon enough and always too late, and I am paralyzed on my perfect leather sofa, sitting in my corner where I always sit, and I digest the intensity of the day without hitting a key except to play mahjong.

There I was, Friday morning, lying in my bed, struggling to know the perfect will of Almighty God in my life and the voice of God speaks: "Why don't you go ahead and get up and get dressed and go to work and we'll see how that goes." Fine.

f i n e.

So I showed up because they pay me to, and left at noon just to bolster my precarious mental health. I am always on call, and I told them to find someone else to call this weekend and let me have a fucking break. Did I say fuck?

And later friday night we went to our second lesson in east and west coast swing dancing which you'd think would be fun, and it is, but my fun-o-meter is broken right now. I've lost my sense of humor. Everything seems so serious, but really, its only life and death.

So I awoke saturday morning, hips and calves sore from rock-lead-one-two-three-one-two-three... Before I could talk myself out of it, I wandered a few blocks down my street and met some friends. We talked, as we sometimes do, about things of a spiritual nature. We don't call it talking about religion, but that is essentially what it is. Turns out as long as you're not talking about Christianity, your'e talking about "things of a spiritual nature." Once Jesus comes into it, you're talking about religion and you're fucked. Anyway, I tell them how stressed I am, all of this time spent trying to divine what is next for me. Should I quit my job and work at a coffee shop or some other place where death is a relative anomaly? Shall I live off the proceeds from my house and write a blockbuster? What to do What to do? Still stressed to near breaking point, I came home from the meeting and Nicole, who is in beauty school, offered to give me a facial at 10:30. Now, I am so exhausted that even a facial seems like just too much to cope with. It would require me to get dressed and leave my sofa. But I'm wise to my own psychosis: it thinks it can kill my body and keep on going. So I say, okay. Okay. I will experience some fucking pleasure then if you are going to make me.

So I went to the beauty school and waited my turn. There were three massage tables, semi-private, curtained off one from another, and I was in the middle one. There was another facial starting at about the same time, and I had really been hoping for quiet. As I mentioned.... I was just the ever so teensy bit stressed. We, Nicole and I, settled into the nice smells and textures of the process until behind curtain number one, comes the conversation:

She was really in a lot of pain when she died. I mean, we knew she was going. My aunt is 91 and she wants to be cremated. Yeah, just yesterday. the pain was terrible and she's out of that so its really a blessing. So now we have to figure out what to do. My husband has his grandmother's ashes on their mantle. Yes we knew she was going, but you're never ready for that....

blah
b l a h
b l a h
b l a h....................................

Finally, we both just started laughing. Death is life is death is life.

I was reminded of that line from the beginning of Dances With Wolves: "Were it not for my companion, I would be having the time of my life."

ground hog's day

I don't know what is happening in Kansas or Nebraska or those places that are home to the ground hog, but it is raining here. And has been for ages. We are surrounded by snow, but none here. We tried to take the nice new little car out for a spin to see Multnomah falls turned to icicles, but no dice. The road was blocked from too many wrecks. That was last week, and still the snow falls all around us.

I celebrate this day because I am a huge fan of spring and of hope in general.

no promises

I'm aware of the cost of absences like this. I have been writing other things, not fiction, and I miss bluesky. When I am not writing creatively, I am ruined.

Pearl died. Nobody still living liked her very much, and I'd have to agree that she wasn't easy to like, but I liked her and she liked me. It was my desk that she liked. She liked knowing the boss. She was an elitist. A true snob with her millions intact to the bitter end.

Many of my people are dying again right now. The cycle is repeating, as cycles will, and those little souls who were wandering and kicking the cat and tearing the plants from their pots have begun to call out the names of their brothers and sisters gone on before them, calling for mama because push-come-to-shove that's who we want even if we're ninety. They're trying to get home to papa because he'll worry. This is dying -- going home at last.

There is one who is trying to pass, and her son doesn't want her to go just yet. She wants to die, says as much every morning when the sun finds its way to her reluctantly opened eyes. "Leave me be." And the son wants more anti-depressants and different anti-depressants to "perk her up." And I tell him, "Ain't no cure for ninety, pal." Ain't no medicine gonna get in front of the will to live once that place in line is taken. Nope. Not even with a strong faith in a misunderstood god. But what do I know?

I've cancelled my harp lessons. I love my harp, but I will not use it to make a living any time soon, and do need to move obligation to a far side in this short life. Obligation, too, is ruinous to me.

Ah, there. It is good to write.

requiem for my truck

I traded my big fat red truck for a shiny new Mazda. There. I've said it out loud. I am no longer a truck driver. Again. Primal AARRRGGGGHHHHH!

You may remember a time when I had a brief meltdown and bought a tan Mazda sedan. This Mazda is not like that at all. It is a pearly white five door hatchback. Almost a truck. It is small and oh so much better on gas. The sedan moment was a bit of an identity crisis, followed shortly and expensively by that shiny red truck that I love(d). At least it was paid for. The Mazda, on the other hand, is not.

So.

My brother Marc talked me into buying that truck shortly before he died. I don't think he could bear the thought of me being stuck forever in beige. Kind of like car purgatory. He loved to buy cars. I don't. I just told him to pick it out, get the paperwork together and I'd sign up. So that's pretty much what happened. When I showed up to get the truck, I was a little surprised that it was teenage-boy red, but when I started driving it, it fit me. I used to take Marc for drives near the end, him on methadone for pain, me not, playing old songs he loved like Wooden Ships and Somebody Robbed the Glendale Train. And we'd sing and sing like we used to do before everything went to shit.

Now he's gone. And the truck is gone.

So we bought the Mazda 3 together. I'm not sure why its a three. I don't get all that. But it has lots of airbags and safety stuff, and keyless entry, and electric windows. We needed a non-truck. We needed a commuter. It's mine, but we'll share vehicles now. His white truck, my white car. Much better. Its a new day in married land.

attention span

I am here. I would leave it at that, but there is more. I am distracted and busy and want to quit my job and have not done it. I want to work in a coffee shop where things make sense. And from the outside in, so much does make sense. Up close, the Peyton Place of life is distressing.

I am off to the Alzheimer's Association this morning to learn about something. I can't think what. There is everything and nothing to learn. The nature of dying does not change. They die. We die.

Humor is a prelude to faith
Laughter is the beginning of prayer
(Reinhold Neibuhr)


I need a pair of rose colored glasses.

upgrade

Happy New Year everyone. My first sip of coffee, a peek at asha's blog, and my day - my year - is off and running. We celebrated last night with like-minded people, and found our way from bad music to tables of sweets and coffee at midnight. It was good to be out and about, and good to be home with Sid as the rockets began to fire. I'm not sure if I've been clear enough about how much I hate eighties cover bands. I don't know who Pat Travers is. I hate-really, hate-loud rock music, with a few exceptions, such as the Stones. I love Van Morrison, and Tom Waits, and Sarah McLauchlan and nice melodic quiet music like that. And Green Day and Weezer. And I love the blues. And crosby stills and nash. Stuff like that. So, now you know.

Upgrade announcement: I bought my beloved an HDTV yesterday. It was his christmas present and took awhile to pick one out. It isn't huge, as those things go, but it is much larger and lighter than our former set.

As to resolutions, I will try to keep my eyes open, along with my mind. I wish I would write more, play my harp more, and stay off sugar. Little feels within my grasp at this moment, but it is early and I am hardly awake. I have six books brewing in the back of my mind. I have a harp sitting in the corner gathering dust, I have sewing projects and home decorating ideas. I want to paint my kitchen in five different colors.

I want it all. But you know what they say: You can't have it all. Where would you put it?

christmas present

Christmas in the present.

The gifts: A copper teapot, a pocket knife, a treadmill and a sock monkey to add to the clan. He's beautiful. Haley found him at an antique shop. He is handmade of real socks, not the acrylic type you see mass produced these days, and has a crooked handstitched smile.

Being present at Christmas.

All of these things.

Together we cleaned the house. I got everyone phoney fur throws so Nicole and I can stop battling over the zebra stripe. Sid even got one. He doesn't know what to think. It is on his bed, and it is soft, so he likes it, but it doesn't smell like him so he is suspicious of it. We are awaiting the arrival of the mother in law.

She is come and gone. Brunch of eggs and veggies, coffee cake for the normal people, watching Stardust and talking to all of the families on the phone. So many others, now. So many. My family grows and grows and at times like this, I feel like they know me.

drive by christmas

It was a good trip, the Drive By Christmas. I gave my son his scrapbook and he was properly surprised and pleased to have it. I think he even teared up a little bit. We drove house to house, leaving tiny gifts of homemade blackberry jam wrapped in red cotton dishtowels; red metal stars and red rubber spatulas that I found at Winco and love to cook with.

It was good to see everyone, and it is good to be home.

I like being a passenger, in so many ways, but on these trips south, then north again, I am able to reminisce as we pass places for the many-th time, places so embedded in memory that they seem at times part of a movie set. As I age, and as places age and change, I am moved at the impermanence of things: of the many tractors along the road, of Mexia's -- a roadside cafe or tavern or inn, one that captured my imagination every time I passed it on the freeway headed north. It was a tall white clapboard house with a vertical sign that you could just see through the trees. A poorly marked exit leads to it, but I have never taken that exit. I was always afraid to. Mexia's, in my imagination, was a satin-lined brothel, a roadside oasis, brownskinned women more beautiful than I've ever been, with ivory hair picks holding back flowing locks of black hair. As I passed what is left of Mexia's, I wondered at my memories, of my fear of beauty and its unwieldy power and my unwillingness to allow reality to alter memory.

Driving through the Applegate, seeing the barns that finally finally finally came down as though somehow they would not, that somehow they would remain, that my memories would be enough to hold the sagging timbers intact until I no longer needed to see them as they had always been, always and never falling for these long fifty years now, as though the landscape existed only for my entertainment. And we passed Roy Winningham's green house, built for him by his brother Dave who is in his 90's now, and Roy is gone I'm almost certain, the retarded younger brother, who lived in his own house on the edge of the meadow and helped tend the cattle across from McKee Bridge. I remember those old men. Dave, who talked slowly and could play horseshoes like nobody else. He was a patient man, as ranchers can be, men who live by the movement of seasons and light, who are not pushed by artificial time or held back by manufactured misery. Not modern.

But I always thought Roy's house would be there, and I always thought there would be people at McKee Bridge who remembered the stories Dave told. And they are mostly gone. As I packed away my son's scrapbook, and tucked the genealogy of these people, the Applegate pioneers, my son's people, into the back cover, I was glad I had made some record of a time gone by: loggers and ranchers, men who needed alot of room to live.

As I grow old behind them, it is terrifying to think that the time is passing, that I have lived in log cabins and hauled water from a creek and know how to use kerosene and clean a lamp globe without burning myself or breaking it. So much is behind me, and the terror, I suspect, is that there is less in front. I am in awe of my life, and the people and the history who have touched it. There is nothing to regret.

jane is gone

Watching her leave was hard. She stood in my office, shaking her fist in my face, cursing me with the words, "You, you have no love in you." And I don't know how far off she is. At that point, she was close.

Like so many of us didn't, Jane got caught being crazy. And once that happens, it is all doom from there on in. You become protected, and being protected ain't nearly as fun as living your own crazy little house, knee-deep in hoarded margarine containers and tin cans, setting up shop outside your own front door selling potholders and paperbacks for a dime.

Over the years, Jane had collected a whole bunch of dimes. Many many thousands of dollars worth. And now, now what good does all that frugality get her? Protection, that's what. She shook her shrivelled fist and hyperventilated, "You're taking my life from me. I want my life. Not YOUR life. You life is worth nothing!" her thin voice crackling across my desk like old lightning.

I hate social workers.

wintering

Every day I run out of time, and writing is lingering at the back of the pack of wolves that nip at my heels this time of year. So much to do. So much to do. I have listed the demands on my time, work and Christmas among them, and will not bore you with them again. Writing comes and goes and will come again.

At present, I am composing a letter to go with the scrapbook for my son. It must be carefully articulated as he does not suffer emotion easily or for long, and it was an emotional stroll down the dark alleys of this past life. I want to issue a blanket apology, something akin to David Crosby's "Sorry I drank thanks for the liver" statement, and let it go at that, but I won't. He will always know he was born to a writer, dammit.

My days have been full of cardmaking and harpplaying and housecleaning and treegetting and lightstringing and foodeating and moviewatching. I am lazing through the winter without apology. We head for the southlands friday for our Driveby Christmas, flinging presents into the yards of our families and on the road and home again.

For the politicos: I am waiting to see if Oprah can get Obama elected. Are we so asleep that he seems real? To me they are all cartoons so far. I don't know what will happen. Of course I don't. How could I?

history

I had dinner with my neice last night. We drove out the their farm of filberts and marion berries along the Willamette River. Two neices and their mother, and their families. To describe my family as fractured is accurate, and these girls were raised on the far side of one of the deepest breaks. A crevasse.

At some point, when her daughters (one my neice by blood) were about two and five, she took them away from us and never came back. The girls are now 40 and 43, and to be face to face with her is like looking in a rearview mirror. I see myself, my brother, my grandmother, perfected by the union of my brother and a beautiful but crazy girl some forty years ago.

They came to my mother's funeral some seven years ago, and even then, it was stunning to see her. She has become a good woman. She knows some of the tragedy of her young life, but wonders at her lifelong fear of poverty and places that are not clean, and I will not be the one to describe her childhood to her. She told me she used to make up stories about her family because she didn't have one.

I cried. I don't know what to tell her.

I'm not sure why we didn't see her again. I'm not sure why we didn't keep in touch with them. To protect her? But when she said, "There probably aren't any pictures, are there?" I had to laugh. Oh yes. We have pictures. Pictures we have. So today, I dug out pictures of her grandmother, and her grandfather, and her greats and great greats, and her father as a baby and her aunts and uncles and I will write her a family tree and make her a scrapbook, because I know how and because, fracture or no, we are family.