ghd

asha is in town and because asia is in the midst of home revival, we were allowed a slumber party at my house last night. What joy to sleep in and spend the morning with my friend. I am sick, and home at my doctor's bidding, but still and all, it was a timely visit for us both, I think. The chatter was wonderful and welcome and so so missed. There is nothing like a good girl friend and lots of catching up to do. That she is a writer, and prods me to produce, is icing on the cake. We all need a push. I was invited to join a writing group, but you have to pay to be in it, and there is a leader or someone who is the identified "writer" and I can't imagine paying. That is, beyond the bzillion dollars for that oh-so-useful master's degree. There was that. We had a late breakfast at Cup&Saucer on Hawthorne. I had french toast. I'm sick. I can have whatever I want. After breakfast, asia arrived and took my friend away to babysit her adorable grandaughter Thea.

I always try to post something on Groundhog's Day. It has been an important event at different times in my life, when I needed a reason to celebrate in the middle of a long, gray winter. Today, the hog must have seen his shadow, although I was not in Nebraska or Kansas or wherever flatlander's find prairie dogs. I think that's what a ground hog is, isn't it?

Today, the view up and down Clinton Street was bright, my home embarrassingly unprepared for the legions of walker and bicyclists. My dogshit yard and naked chickenwire fencing stood unadorned, absent summer's tendrils of tomato and nasturtium, ripped from the sodden ground after freezing, seeds falling here and there, willing to endure winter's face-slap, that scolding time that ensures a certain reverence for days like this, even if the shadow promises another six weeks. We delight in these fickle days that remind us of times to come, times to prepare for. The liar days of winter, where the light is not warm, but reminiscent of it; where the dark comes too soon anyway.

reuben

Tonight, its dinner with Haley at the Barleymill Pub on Hawthorne and 21st. He's bringing me home a reuben. Sounds fine. I feel like I may live after all. Today I spent half the day in the Drs office and had a chest xray. I'm fine. Just sick, as usual.

It is Friday night and I want to rent movies. Instead, we went to a Hollywood Video store that is closing and bought 65.00 worth of old movies. Watching "The Morning After" with Jeff Bridges and Jane Fonda. Next, the Stones new documentary by Scorsesi and "Love in the Time of Cholera" and Little Miss Sunshine and Mystic Pizza. Then maybe I can find the strength to go back to work.

boredom

I was watching Rachel Ray make fish tacos after watching Paula the Southern Belle make five dishes out of cheese after watching four consecutive episodes of House Hunters International, and having decided a move to Bali was a great idea, I saw the mandatory mosquito nets and decided to stay put. After being sick this long, the mindnumbingness of daytime TV is evident. I am paralyzed, coughing fit after coughing fit, sick of the dogs, sick of myself.

I haven't worked since last thursday and couldn't if I had to. This is a bad one.

But I'll live. I always do.

Kurt is out, taking his children to dinner one by one. I think that is so nice. Each night he brings me something from wherever he ends up. Tonight he is taking Nicole to Authentic Thai on Division. They have the best shrimp salad rolls I've ever had. Or maybe its the best peanut sauce. My friend Cameron says to dilute the peanut butter with a coconut soda found only at asian markets to make good peanut sauce. So, if yours turns out anything like mine, a hint would be helpful.

With this much time on my hands, I sleep and shop online. Right now, I'm after a pair of red velvet flats by Blowfish. Wish me luck. Right now I could really use some Ruby Slippers.

weather and family

Well, "a little under the weather" has turned into a bit more like a hurricane. I am sick.Bronchitis again. But happily, it is the first time I have been sick since May, and with my track record, that is fabulous. I'll take it. One bad spell. I'm waiting it out, hoping my body and the various supplements will put up some kind of a fight. I'm rooting for the C and D combo.

Changing the subject -- back to Arcata and funerals and such...

My aunt who passed in November, I think I mentioned, was a genealogist, even before computer databases were easily accessed. She had populated Ancestry.com with much of our family tree, both of her sides, her husband's side and my father's end of things. It is difficult to tell this story without some kind of a recap of who's who, and that will take a minute. Bear with me. I'll limit it to one side for now.

There were four Forster children: my mother, her sister (the one who just passed) and two brothers. Both uncles were interesting: one a Marxist, the other schizophrenic. The Marxist had one child, Darla, who I knew when she was tiny, but family fracturing being what it was in my family, I'd heard nothing from or about her since she was about four years old.

Well, one of the grandsons decided to pick up where my aunt, his grandmother, left off, and after the funeral, he took a bunch of information and entered it into the database at ancestry.com.

So... a few weeks pass, and one of the cousins gets this email from Darla asking are we who she thinks we are. We are. So, long story long, she lives five minutes from me and we decided to get together for dinner.

So... good for the internet. Good for the mormons. (who run the database, I'm assuming.) She seems like family. We seem to have alot in common. She loves camping and she knows all the stories about her end of the famly and why things were the way they were and went the way they went, from a Marxian-schizo perspective. She knows, for instance, that my uncle stopped drinking port and started eating a little bit of dirt each day in penance to remember how much he loved god. This, clearly, was not the Marxist. Anyone listening to talk radio back in the sixties and seventies would have remembered him. He was an opinionated man.

It is always fascinating to me how truly fractured a close family can become, and even so, no matter the disconnect, how much family is still just family. Darla, (which is not her name, but in fairness, why would I drag her into this mess?) is a manic gardner and understands that there are many shades of not-quite-white, and the difference between purple and, say, periwinkle or cornflower. My husband kept saying at dinner, "She's just like you." We were both nervous, Darla and I, that we would have nothing in common, that our husbands would feel alienated from this happy little reunion. Turns out they both fish and were able to talk about that while we started catching up.

So, we shared old photographs (you know how I am about those things) and in among the bad Kodak shots was one of my grandmother sitting in the east-facing window with her dog on her lap and my mother's african violets sitting in the window. Seeing those small pots of flowers in a winding wrought-iron stand, a fixture of my childhood, was like reaching back forty-seven years in time. I could feel the velvet of their petals, hear my mother telling me they don't like to be touched. My grandmother, my favorite person in the whole of my life, was sitting in the corner just where I'd left her.

So we will try dinners, and camping, and maybe knitting the clan back together in a few odd places.

mommeries

I am home from work today, feeling a little under the weather, a little happy to be home. Probably happier than I should be, but not going to work is exhilarating, even when it is legit.

My blog suffers from my busyness, my consumption with the need to make a living. I wish I was one of those women who could live simply to simply live, but I don't know how to not work. (Today being a notable exception...) and I don't know how to live on less. I live on more. and more. and more.

I have been thinking about my mother lately, about how hard she worked, and for so little. At one point she was a night-shift janitor at the Bear Creek bakery (Harry and David, now Jackson and Perkins), a huge warehouse factory orchard business in the Rogue Valley where everyone has worked at one time or another. I have. She swept their floors, washed gigantic and heavy pots and pans. She mopped -- three times every night: wet mop, damp mop, and dry mop. Its funny what you remember. She worked with a crazy person who thought a big black dog followed him everywhere, who had suffered more than one crib death in his family. She brought home tins of pineapple macadamia cake, and broken bits of fruitcake that we'd have for breakfast. She raised five children without benefit of welfare -- some of the "children" long beyond the age of maturity -- maturity being a somewhat ambiguous term in my family. I remember she saved anything left after bills very carefully and bought a dinette set: six chairs around a small, oval formica table with one leaf, upholstered in the latest mandarin orange and avocado green vinyl print. She was so proud of that little set, which I now know was a cheap thing, but it meant so much to her to make our house a home. Everything was mandarin and avocado, with chocolate brown accents, all of the wood pieces "antiqued" white with gold and avocado highlights. I think that was in the sixties. Yes. With Aretha playing in the background, one brother in VietNam, one passed out on the [avocado green] sofa and one playing quarterback for Medford, the best looking kid in school, my sister not yet on methadone.

As I go through my excess, attempting to put together a yard sale in the spring, and I continue to acquire more and more, I think of how hard she worked, and how little we had, and how much we appreciated small things.

Ah well, poverty follows me like a stray dog that just won't go home. Or is home.

long winter IV

I have been to seven funerals in three months. Too many, even for the angel of death. I should show some caution throwing words like that around, but so often, in the winter, it seems true. I look forward to spring and the promise of new life and green where there is mud and blue to overtake the gray. I wrote a line in a book once that went like this: the season progressed in a continuum of rain, from mist to downpour, and Ruby forgot the color blue. I'm feeling a bit like Ruby just now, cleaning up dogshit that is mush. There is an art to it that I won't bore you with, but leave it at this: frozen is good.

We were driving down 82nd today, and there are trailer parks in among failing restaurants and seedy motels. The urban version of Bolder City. I loved Bolder City. I don't know if I've said so before, but its true. A forested trailer park on a river. There is life in all of these places, many better lived drunk, I'll admit, and I was, but I never want to live in another trailer. Drunk or sober.

This evening we are planning (I am planning and my husband is nodding) our summer vacation. "Do we have to take both dogs?" he asks, as if I'd leave Duffy behind. "Yes. We do." We will take them with us to Yosimite where they will be eaten by bears.

I watched the series on National Parks and want to see some of them. Our trip to Glacier was amazing, and the Ho Rainforest and the Northern Cascades, and the Redwoods, and Crater Lake. It seems very American, but I'm American. so.

trees

Well, the Charlie Brown tree is out of the box and on the table -- the best I can do with Sid and Duffy tearing through the house playing tug of war. Sid doesn't wholey understand the game. He has spent five years sitting in front of us, waiting for us to throw the ball, toss the frisbee, hold one end of the rope. Now, with Duffy a more than willing participant, he is confused and territorial -- his goal to have the thing, then, once had, whip it into shreds and destroy it. Suffice it to say I've spent my wages on pull toys. More and more he allows a little play before consuming the thing. And Duffy has mastered the art of being a lower and slower dog: hiding under furniture. Drives Sid crazy.

At any rate, Christmas time is here. It doesn't feel like it yet, distracted as we have been by Nicole's accident, dogs and jobs and funerals. I should make a post about Nicole's trauma. On the 20th of November, she was hit in a crosswalk as a pedestrian by an 88 year old man. She's okay, but took quite a hit and will have a scar down the side of her face to remember the day. She was right and he was wrong, and insured, so she should benefit if carrying a facial scar on a beautiful face can be compensated.

So, happy thanksgiving, merry christmas and happy new year. There. Cards are on the way.

arcata

One of the worst things I do in this blog is generalize. My cousin Jimmy (always Jimmy, never Jim and certainly not James) said the broad strokes were basically right. My caveat is always that I am not a writer but a liar, and so keep myself off the inevitable hook of accurate historians (not Jimmy, he was great about reading my account of his family's history and mine.) Anne Lamott says she is careful what she writes about the living. As people pass, they fall under the pen, which we all know, is mightier than the pencil.

I am in Arcata tonight, attending the funeral of my aunt tomorrow, spending the days and the evenings with cousins I haven't seen since the last funeral. I look at thier children, some named for those gone before, everyone looking more than a little bit alike. I am the only one from my shrinking clan who is present this evening. Allegedly, my brother will be here tomorrow. I hope so. We say things like: We've got to stop meeting like this. But this is how we meet, we 50 somethings. This is the social calendar of an aging family. And I wonder if the younger among us understand what a family we were, what spectacular people preceded us in death, how blessed those of us left behind are to have been a part of this whole.

I talk alot about the differences between my side and their side of the family, but what I usually forget to mention is that it never mattered. For instance, when my cousin Gary showed up and I told him I had moved to Portand and he said, "That bastion of liberalism." I just said, "Yeah, buddy!" and we both laughed. What is true is that I have no idea the politics beyond those who make it my business.

On a different note, Duffy is learning to poop while leashed. He isn't very happy about ithe indignity of it all, but as I was about to give in and let him off-leash, four fat raccoons slipped under the fence and stood drooling, still as stone, awaiting a single moment of inattention and a late night snack. Duffy, a ratter by trade, was thrilled to see them, and wanted to attack. I'd always heard that terriers are big dogs in a little dog's body, but didn't realize what that level of fearlessness would look like in action. He does not seem to think taking on four adult size raccoons is imbalanced.

east meets westie

The therapy llama is Smokey. Duffy was impressed.

Raising a puppy on a dementia unit (a "memory care community" for the faint of heart) has its plusses and minuses. My spelling may be called into question in that last bit. Anyway, Duffy can hardly be to blame for all of the, shall we say, leavings, here and there. Today, for instance, somebody pooped in the tea room and somebody peed in one of the trash cans. We didn't know about the latter until Duffy had rooted around in it and came out smelling like some old bum's jockey shorts. Bums may not wear jockey shorts but I'm sure you get my drift. So I grabbed Duffy, stuck him in the sink and washed him with quarternary disinfectant. Nah, not really, but I did use good soap. Not baby soap. Not for THAT smell.

So being a puppy is relatively easy. You can blame the little round wet spots on Nate and nobody is the wiser.

The dogs are blissfully asleep, Duffy has learned to sit and that fact alone gives me hope for the future. He can learn.

My aunt died and I'll be making a pilgrimage to Arcata soon, me and the pup, back to one of the places of my youth, rich with time-twisted memories, to the place where my father died. I'm not sure if I've told the story or not, but I'll go ahead and spill it here.

My aunt was married to a logger. His name was Earl and he used to throw us up in the air, scaring the crap out of my mother. He drove to work on the old Oregon Mountain Road to and from Arcata through the Smith River Canyon during the days when they were logging the redwoods. Bad. I know. Anyway, one June morning before the crack of dawn, he drove off the skinny little road and plummeted to his death, leaving behind my aunt and seven children.

My father was between jobs at that time, so he and my mother and us five children moved to Arcata so my father could run his business (the Shadow Lodge in Trinidad). This was in the days before welfare and that's what families did. We were a close family, spent summers camping together, all that. So, we got Earl buried and my dad began working at the lodge. Mid July, my father laid down to read the newspaper and never woke up, leaving my mother and her five, and my aunt and her seven children to fend for themselves.

Twelve children and no welfare. I don't know how they got through the next months, but they did. Eventually, it was clear that there were too many people in one space and we moved back to Portland, I think, to be with my grandmother while my mother grieved my father. I think what really happened was that my aunt moved on, went to school, sold the business, made good financial decisions; my mother cried until she found whiskey some five years later, then her problems took a backseat to alcoholism.

The house in Arcata was an old, Spanish style stucco castle, with inlaid tiles, near Humboldt State, a block from downtown Arcata, heart of the Emerald Triangle. I spent a summer there when I was thirteen, I think. My aunt was an intellectual. A republican intellectual, which must be harder, don't you think? She travelled far and wide to follow genealogical threads of the Morris and Forster clans. And now she is gone, the last of the Forster children, at 91.

People who want to live forever haven't taken the time, I think, to talk to very many 91-year- olds. I have never met one that wanted it to go on indefinitely.

mama

Duffy is nearly four months old now, and I am able to employ my hands in things other than taking him out to pee, cleaning up pee, picking up poop, or monitoring dog-dog combat. They are getting along fine, the pup and the pit, for those of you who worry. Duffy is alpha and Sid is basically gay, so it works.

I don't know if I wrote about it or not, but vacation a couple of years ago brought us through Arcata on our way south to Mendicino. My favorite aunt lives there, lived there, and when we visited it was clear that dementia had done its handiwork on a once-fine mind. She was a brilliant woman, a genealogist with an attitude, racist about phone voices "Can I get someone who speaks English, please?", and politically just to the right of Atilla the Hun. This last according to her right wing children. My family swung far left, artists and alkies all.

So, my aunt was placed in a dementia unit, much like mine, I suppose, and her house recently sold. Her children, much more organized than my clan, cleared out her house and brought me some photographs and documents they thought I'd like to have, and because I am currently the most responsible person in my family still living (I know, scary) they thought I'd be a good steward for the family treasures.

I exaggerate. There was no treasure. But there were letters, which are treasures to me. Letters from my mother to her sister.

I know I've characterized my mother as a madwoman in these pages. I know. And to be fair, she was. But she was my mom, so I get to say that stuff, just like my son is the only one who can say it about me. And he's welcome to say what he will.

The letters are precious, and reveal a hopeful if not an optimistic woman, badgered by poverty she could never see her way out of, even when the opportunity presented itself. They tell of job after job, hovel after hovel, where she scratched out a life lived without money for stamps or long distance or gas money or dental care. Of a belief in the goodness of her children even when anyone could see we were pure shit.

Once about twenty years ago I did a sort of life review, a sort of therapeutic retrospective, and found that by the time I was 33 I had moved 48 times that I could remember.

Let's just say I know how to pack.

So reading my mother's letters was like watching a movie of my late childhood, and the years after I left home, too early, where the comments about me are scarce but hopeful.

Time to take Duffy out.

beauty and the beastie

Thea meets Duffy.
Duffy, one ear up, one trying.

Duffy, once again
Thea swinging under Duffy-power

Wow. Motherhood is demanding. Sorry. I think I can take my eyes off the little darling long enough to post something. I'm referring, of course, to Duffy. Thea only came over for a little while. Duffy is staying forever.

He is the devil. Sid is full of holes, my carpet in dire need of shampooing. I am learning the inestimable value of the dreaded crate. God bless the crate. It has saved Duffy's life and my sanity.

pupdate

Duffy only looks innocent.

Westie 1, Pitbull 0.

duffy

Duffy was born July 20th. He's a West Highland White Terrier. He is so much fun. Sid even thinks so, if he could just keep him from winding in and out of his legs.

flying

...by the seat of our pants. It is a travel style I am accustomed to, road tripping, planless, mapless, questless. And it used to be fine. It still is, I suppose, but we are getting a little old to be past our bedtime and not knowing where bed is.

We were scheduled, by many, to be in Southern Oregon for the Jacksonville yard sales this weekend. We do it every year. But last night we got home from work, checked the weather report and simultaneously said nooooooooooooooooo. Not 102 in Medford. Not again. Sid would be in the back of the truck, and that just wouldn't work. I nearly killed him the last time we were down there. So, adults that we are, we changed our minds. It has been our custom for several years to have breakfast at the Mustard Seed in Jacksonville, a crappy little hole in the wall with outdoor seating for family and friends. We'll do it again next year, weather permitting.

Instead we went crabbing in Netarts, where someone has grafittied an R over the N, and a d over the last t. So, we were in Retards all day friday, crabbing our brains out, frying in the reflection off the water. It was a beautiful day, but I am baked. Seriously. We crabbed with fishing pole butterfly traps. I can't explain it, except to say that crabs are tough to pull up when they dig into the sand.

When the bait was finally gone (chicken legs and delectable Willamette-beneath-the--Burnside-Bridge catfish) we headed south to Pacific City to find lodging. Well, much like Joseph, when we were working without a net a couple of weeks ago, there was an international wake boarding or jet ski competition and not a single room in the whole area. So we made it down to Lincoln City and the Sea Echo motel. As we began to fill the ice bucket, we found a syringe in it.

"How thoughtful," my husband said. "They thought of everything!"

"Damned diabetics," I countered. "Always leaving their equipment laying around for the children to play with."

So, with some trepidation, I look forward to some aloe lotion and a good night's sleep. The Pakistanis are having pizza two doors down, and the ocean laps against the shore too far away for me to hear, but I'm too tired to care.

bonnie

One of the very few things I've missed about the Rogue Valley since moving to Portland is the Britt Festival. Britt and my son. And my girlfriends.

Not only did I move far away from Jacksonville, but my hookup for tickets doesn't even work for Britt anymore, so it would have been pay as you go had I stayed, which I wouldn't have. Anyway, I bought tickets to see Bonnie Raitt at McMennamin's Edgefield, not knowing what the venue was like. Happily, it was just like Britt. Outdoors, sloping grass, blankets and boozing yuppies.

We were pretty much on time. The tickets said 5:00. We figured it was an early concert so all of us aging boomers could be in bed by nine. But it was only the gates that opened at 5:00. Being a first-timer, I didn't realize it was really almost completely like Britt, even in the not-so-great ways. Like the line. And line-sitting behavior. I'm not sure how much space I've taken up in this little diary discussing line behavior and my attitudes about it, but really, there are certain types, and they can be irritating. And concert behavior. That too. Anyway, as we approached the venue, it was clear we would be standing in line. Way way way back in line. Bucking up, we trekked past the people who had been sitting all day, earning their places, wishing we had known. But we have these pesky jobs. So there wasn't much we could have done except the Britt-inspired idea of paying someone to sit in line for us.

No need.

I heard someone shout, "Judy!" I just kept walking because I am invisible. No one knows me. I'm a stranger here. "Judy," the voice called again. I turned. "Hey, its Bob." I said. And it was. This guy we hardly know, who hardly knows us, knew my name. "We can't take cuts," I said, taking cuts. It was blatant. Sue me.

We got a great place right on the cusp of the lawn with a great view of the stage for "The BonTag Roulet," a Louisiana inspired tour with Taj Mahal. He seemed less like I remembered. It was only when he sang with Bonnie that he became again the old Mississippi blues man.

At concernts, I often notice drunk people. I sometimes envy them, but this evening, a woman who seemed to be having more fun than I've ever had, came tripping back from the outhouses with a two-foot long tail of toilet paper hanging from beneath her skirt. Laughing it off, she shouted to the crowd, "I'll never wipe again." A nice image.

So we tossed out our blankie and my low chair and got all set up. It was McMennamins, so the food was bound to be good. You can't bring in your own picnic like at Britt, so we had pulled-pork sandwiches with coleslaw. Yum. And two dollar water. God that pisses me off. We spent six bucks on water and that is the one thing you CAN bring in. Next time.

So, we sat down in our perfect place, on a school night, under the rising full moon, the audience a sea of gray hair, and like good white people, did not get up to dance until the bitter end. It was also like Britt in that if you DO get up off your lily-white ass and move, some dried-up schoolteacher behind you will tell you to stay seated so she can see. She will explain to you ad nauseum the decorum of open air seating. Amy-fucking-Vanderbilt. She was there. I saw her in action, Eddie Bauer long-shorts, waving her pointy little finger in Liz's face. Liz could have kicked her ass easy, but it just wasn't an ass-kicking kinda deal. Which begs the question: was there ever? Or were we just out there kicking ass for no reason?

I should clarify that I never specifically kicked anyone's ass. That I remember.

But come the bitter end, we danced and danced and danced. Listening to Bonnie sing "Angel from Montgomery" right there. Oh boy. That was a spiritual experience for me. She didn't do "Love Me Like a Man," but you can't have everything, can you?

quilt update

Not to be outdone, I went to Fabric Depot and bought two rotary cutters, two plastic grids and a self-healing cutting mat. I am a real quilter.

the quilt

Without going into agonizing detail, I am working on a quilt. Its a work thing. The finished quilt square will be 8 feet by 8 feet and will be part of the Alzheimer's Quilt to Remember. Like the AIDS quilt, only not.

So, I've gone to great effort to design this quilt, to purchase the fabric at Fabric Depot on the first day of their 40% off sale when every seamstress in the metro area shows up to stock up. I spent hours selecting fabric, another hour standing in line. I solicited photographs of Jan, the woman we are honoring in the quilt, a woman who has lived with the disease for probably 15 years, has been in a locked unit for eight, has been bed-bound three of the eight.

Tough woman. Tougher disease.

So, I get my husband to make digital photos of the originals of Jan as a baby, a child, a beautiful young woman, a bride, a wife... and print them, magically, from my computer right onto fabric squares.

Now, it is time to cut the fabric.

This is all happening at an assisted living facility, old women with fading eyes and shaking hands cutting fabric and trying to follow a pattern, saying things like, "This is old hat to me." and "Where's the line? I can't see it." I kept telling them, "Hey, no big deal. If it isn't perfect, we'll sew different sized seams and it will all come out in the wash." Me and Jan's daughter marked the lines on the fabric and the old women did the cutting. I was working without a net, as usual, nervous about letting the project get away from me, cutting the fabric badly, having to find more, or god help me, different stuff if they wrecked it.

But they didn't. They did great. Just great. That is, until the REAL quilters arrived. Real quilters, equipped with rotary cutters and transparent plastic grid-sheets. My handmade, tape edged templates were no longer enough.

I started hearing things like, "Some of these squares are a quarter-inch off!" It made me nervous. We kept on cutting, thanking the old women, encouraging them, telling them its fine, don't worry. The real quilters kept complaining about our inaccuracy, finally saying, "Its the markers, not the cutters." And the final blow, "You're honoring your mother with this quilt, I'd think you'd want straight squares."

We were the markers. It was our fault. We had ruined the project. We had dishonored Jan.

Not really.

No, the real quilters stayed on and straightened every single edge of every single square. I was impressed. I did not even mention medication or OCD. Not even once. I thanked them profusely and know they will hang with me to the end of the project, because that's what real quilters do.

visitation

A white dove settled on the air conditioning unit outside my office all morning yesterday. It was so beautiful, pure white with a black tail. I wonder where she went? I wonder what it means?

weezer

We been drivin' for days.

We took off Friday night for Weiser to watch Haley graduate from a Northwest Youth Corps back country session for the fifth or sixth time. We stayed the first night in Baker City at a crappy motel and left early for Weiser. This time the ceremony was outside in the blazing eastern sun near Mann Creek Reservoir. I've always wanted to see Weiser, home of the fiddle championships. It isn't much, an old Idaho town, old houses, no money for paint.

I also love Weezer's song Island in the Sun.... we'll never feel bad anymore. hip hip.

The drive over was pretty much how the drive is from Portland to LaGrande: beautiful at first as we drove through the gorge, then fascinating as we approached The Nothing--that great flat quilt of parched land rolling out beyond the turn in the river where the Mighty Columbia heads for the ocean at Umatilla or Hermiston or something and leaves Oregon to die of thirst. From then, well, staying awake was the task. New wind farms have sprouted up along either side of 84, strange plantations, the Washington windmills visible only from Oregon and vice versa. They are cartoonishly large, with generators the size of a schoolbus sitting atop towers well over two hundred feet tall. Occasionally we came upon one visible from the road, shockingly white against the perfect blue sky, propellers twirling slowly in a steady wind in a 154 foot swath. It was hard not to stare.

Once we were done in Weiser, we headed for Caldwell Idaho to visit my neice. They have a lovely small farm on the outskirts. Idaho looked like I expected Idaho to look. I've seen the panhandle, but never south. Rural. White. Republican. Cassie explained all that to me in advance. But being from Southern Oregon, and lily white, I would have been right at home.

After visiting Cassie and Mike, we took off for northeastern Oregon, home of the beautiful Wallowa Valley, which seems a generous reward for enduring The Nothing. We passed through part of Hell's Canyon and into the green green grass of Joseph at sunset. Because this was a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants road trip, no advance reservations were made and there was a big ol' bike rally in Joseph and no lodging in the entire county except Minam. We'd heard it was a Bates Motel, so we drove all the way back to LaGrande to get a room.

So, we came back home along the Washington side, stopping only at the pretend Stonehenge which is actually a WWII monument with an inscription on the sacrificial altar that read something like, "blah blah blah...and the fire of patriotism that only death can quench." What -- really? Only death? Not even an Original Reed's Ginger Brew?

And what does stonehenge have to do with WWII?

And now my husband, doomsayer that he is, is looking at video clips of windmills exploding in flames and coming apart in a stiff wind. Geez. It is good to be home.

on blackberries

After two days of blackberry picking, netting probably five gallons of berries, enough for five gallon-size freezer bags, ten jars of freezer jam and two gigantic blackberry milkshakes, I have a few observations to share.

Is blackberry picking a lost art? Where are the blackberry pickers? In this economy, its a no-brainer. In Southern Oregon, where people still realize that berries actually grow out of the actual ground, there are people lining the roads in 110 degree weather, boards underarm, going to their favorite spots.

Seriously. You pay five bucks for a teaspoon of blackberries at Freddy's - and I'll admit, they're fat and pretty and you don't have to change clothes to get them and you're typically not wounded in the process unless you cut in line or use the parking lot of the 39th and Hawthorne location, but really, why NOT pick blackberries? They're free. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it before, but I knew a guy once who planted blackberries in his front yard. Now that is begging for trouble if you ask me. Hand in hand with cockroaches, blackberries will suvive human occupation. I've seen them consume houses, cars, neighborhoods.

And there is significant difference between country picking and city picking. If you see previous posts, you'll learn about the first time I picked blackberries in Portland. It was an event. I got lost in Oaks Bottom. It is my husband's second fondest wish to have blackberry pie for his birthday and I didn't know where to look. The next year, I took my husband with me, and it was a little scary down in there with homeless folks that were napping or dead, but the berries were great. Then, we found this place way down at the far end of front street in the industrial district way out toward Linnton and it was good, some evidence of homeless folks, but not like being trapped in Oaks Bottom in the damp and dark. So we went back there this year and they'd mowed or poisoned all the berries and they were gone, and the people were gone, too. This year we picked out in Hillsboro along a forgotton road, kind of a perverse Lover's Lane/slash/city dump, with old sofas and porn magazines. Nasty. But the berries were great and easy picking what with my knee injury and being like standing on a pegleg pitching headlong into the briars.

I miss picking berries on the Applegate River. I miss knowing the places of fat berries near water. Berries that are firm and juicy and don't fall apart in your hand. I miss the winding road, the sound of larks and sandpipers protecting their nests along the beach, flat stones perfect for skipping; the low August river rolling warm over tumbled rocks; the absence of fear and imbalance.

Youth.

You do have to know what to look for. For instance, there is a gloss to berries, and if the gloss is gone, the berry is over-ripe. And fatter is not always better. And there is an art to just picking. My husband tends to look up and over the tops of the bushes, to places he could never reach if he was seven feet tall, always in search of the perfect spot. Me? I just pick along the road, slowly, deliberately, going after low berries and the forgotten ones at waist level. You should not have to pull on them, but to gently roll them off the vine and into your hand. And don't get greedy. Don't drop a handful trying to fit just one more into your palm. Put them in the bucket. And don't set the bucket on uneven ground. Trust me on this. I use a cut out milk jug that has less chance of spilling.

There are a couple of things to bring: a board, a long sleeved shirt and wet rags. The board is to lay down and walk into deeper berries (once you've exhausted all the low berries.) The wet rag, well, take my word for it --when you're done picking, you'll know what to do with it. The shirt, for protection. But I think you can go faster if you don't wear a shirt and are careful. The shirt hangs up on the thorns and impedes the whole process. I don't mean shirtless for god's sake. Just sleeveless. And brave.

So, if you want some pie, say so. I have enough to make a few.