Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.
Quinn turned 17!
I hatched some eggs!
I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.
Jazz band went to state!
Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.
A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.
I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)
I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!
I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!
I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 23
11/23/24
After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 24
11/24/24
I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed. It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 25
11/25/24
I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 26
11/26/24
I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.
~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28
11/27 and 11/28/24
Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 29
Observed 12/1/24
I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.
Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.
“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”
“Mmm.”
“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”
“Whoaaa.”
I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.
And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.
I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 30
Observed 12/2/24
I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).
I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:
Friday night lights
clarity
light cone
sunrise
stage lights
cousin Rita
head lamp
sunlight on water
sunlight on kitten fur
glow slugs
cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying
you, and you, and you.
I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.
When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.
I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.
Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.
I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”
~30 days of gratitude~ day 16
11/16/24
I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 17
11/17/24
I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 18
11/18/24
I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 19
11/19/24
I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 20
11/20/24
I am grateful for sunlight on water.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 21
11/21/24
I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.
I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 9
11/9/24
I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 10
11/10/24
I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.
(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)
~30 days of gratitude~ day 11
11/11/24
There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.
It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.
She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.
I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.
I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.
But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.
That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.
In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.
After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.
In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.
But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.
So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 12
11/12/24
In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 13
11/13/24
I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.
Did November 1st sneak up on me? Yes. And no. I knew it was coming, but it arrived in the blink of an eye. So after a jam-packed Friday, it’ll be a shortie for day one.
Michael J. Fox says, “My optimism is fueled by my gratitude. And with gratitude, optimism is sustainable.”
I’m grateful for this borrowed wisdom because optimism seems crucial in this moment, and if gratitude can fuel it, it is just one more reason to kick off another year of 30 days of gratitude.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 2
11/2/24
I am grateful to have been under the Friday night lights for last night’s high school football game. I am no big fan of football, although I am a reluctant fantasy football player to fit in with the guys at work. (Okay, maybe I still don’t fit in; I called my team She-rah Princess of Sportsball.) I root for my husband’s team and my family’s team, because it matters to them, while harboring no illusions nor denial of the toxic aspects of the sport. At any rate, I’ve attended all the home football games at NHS the past three years while Quinn has been playing at the games in the pep band. You all definitely know by now that I’m a band mom.
PSA: the band kids are in danger if we don’t defeat the felon. The homophobic, transphobic, anti-Department of Education, anti-gun-safety, anti-choice, anti-environment, hatred-fueled candidate for president. Please vote for the band kids: for their safety, their ability to be themselves in the world, their autonomy in their own bodies.
Last night, in their final game after a mostly losing season, our team won in an epic manner, and it was senior night, during which the football team seniors and the cheer team seniors were honored, and I have a band senior (the band seniors stayed invisible in their corner of the bandstands, but whatever.) And the band sounded great, and the cheer team is always amazing, and the football team was winning, and the kid who usually plays the drum set had to leave at halftime.
For the second half of the game, Quinn got his chance, at long last, to put down the bass drum and sit at the drum set and play all the songs he has been practicing throughout high school. This was something he had ardently wished to do. I was so grateful to be there to witness it, to take inordinate amounts of video of the fight song, let’s go band, pokerface, funkytown, tequila, school’s out for summer, the hey song, and all the songs he got to play. He also got to play the snare drum, as he alternated with his snare drum player friend so they could both have a chance on drum set. You know that thing the drummers get to do, to start off the song, where they whack their sticks together above their heads, to give the rhythm for the song they are all about to start playing? Watching your kid do that particular thing, to lead the band, is a crazy awesome feeling.
There is so much going on in the wide world and my own much smaller world, that it is difficult to even know how I feel on a spectrum from despair to joy, from anger to hope, much less what to write. But I was jumping on the bleacher seats, fist pumping and screaming at the top of my lungs happy last night when that boy carried that ball down the field, and my boy whacked his sticks to make the band play the fight song. I am grateful for one uninhibited moment of joy.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 3
11/3/24
A friend I met in an online group when our boys were infants, so a friend I have now known for seventeen years, posted a confession sometime this past year about her gratitude practice. She said that sometimes she wonders if it can be another form of spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. At the same time, she shared that she believes her gratitude has been life saving for her in the years since her oldest son died. This woman has done so much awe-inspiring work on raising awareness around grief, and I take her thoughts on gratitude very seriously. I commented on her post that I, too, wonder about the potential for harm coming from a practice that has such good intent. I’ve thought about this so much in the months since our exchange. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting, I just never want to show up to the gratitude without being authentic.
It’s like this: there is a lot that goes on in any given day. Yes, I can almost always find something I feel grateful about during a given day, but also? Some days, there are some very large elephants in the room that make it more difficult to access gratitude, and more importantly, I would not want to negate all other valid feelings by trying to tamp them down beneath a gratitude that is forced.
Take today for example. I am super grateful for yet another annual fill-your-pantry market, another bucket of honey, another freezer full of humanely raised meat. I am ever so grateful for my husband who drove me not once, but twice, to the valley, and sat with me through a very difficult event.
But not mentioning that the event he was driving me to was one where we witnessed and joined in the grief of a family whose twelve-year-old son has died, would feel wrong. To not acknowledge sadness doesn’t do my gratitude practice any favors. I am not just going to say I am grateful for the life of this boy while I am so torn up that it is over. I don’t want to use gratitude just to spin every negative thing that happens into positive vibes.
So I guess that’s another thing to be grateful for: increasing clarity about exactly what my gratitude practice means to me. I am earning this over the years. Today’s clarity: I’m not interested in weaponizing gratitude.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 4
11/4/24
After some weekends, it’s possible to be grateful for Monday. I am grateful for a productive day scrubbing a fish tank until it sparkled. I am grateful for a simple evening of tuna melts (thank you local fishing community for supplying cans of tuna that have spoiled us for life against grocery store cans), strawberry ice cream, and watching Farm Aid with Rich while we each provide a resting surface for a cat.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 5 and 6
11/5 and 11/6/24
Speaking of elephants in the room, I couldn’t really post last night. But this morning someone on social media somewhere quoted lines from a piece by Ursula K. Le Guin:
“The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?
I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.
The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.
The way of the water admits them all.
The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”
I spent most of my day walking around the lab, controlling the flow of water, or being baffled by my inability to control it. I was grateful for the distraction, something to focus on, something to keep my body moving. I had a short break and took a walk on the estuary trail, paused and listened to the sound of the water for a few minutes. And then I went on.
As for tonight, I am grateful for the official meal of November, served proudly on national nacho day.
Here is the full blog post the quote is borrowed from. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/119-the-election-lao-tzu-a-cup-of-water
~30 days of gratitude~ day 7
11/7/24
I am grateful for date night, same dreamy husband, different year. He is good to talk to. Five stars, would marry again.
I attended a training in Galveston in early May, to become more skilled at boat stuff. It just so happens I spent a semester there almost exactly twenty-five years ago. I was quite excited to see it again, this place from my past.
Looking down on earth from the sky – over Seattle, or the Cascades, or the Rockies, or Houston, or Phoenix, shapes organize themselves into assemblages, groups of this or that. Green crop circles or brown crop circles, large or small. Suburban housing, skyscrapers, mountain peaks. Rivers with their feathered fans of tributaries still as statues, the flowing only implied from so high up.
When I got to the Galveston seawall and walked along the beach, the assemblages were spirals. Moon snails, channeled whelks, knobbed whelks, many other snails. Moon snails whole and intact. Moon snails cracked laterally– the spiral exposed. Moon snails cracked on the side – the spiral spilling open. The top taken off a whelk – a spiral self-contained, but having lost its depths. Another with the top gone, only the deep center groove remaining – uncontained and open to the infinite. Spirals with multiple injuries, cracks and gouges, jagged edged and hard like shards, like knives ready to inflict instead of being inflicted upon. Some whose edges are once again smooth, ready to soothe, ready to scoop sand and shimmer. Some broken crosswise, revealing compartments, but the segments taper, the spiral is implied. Windows into spirals, where water and sand can enter, cannot be kept out. But where water and sand can also empty out, can be given and taken, a portal, a conduit. Holes drilled by predators. Neat, symmetrical, belying their violent origin. A whelk unearthed from long buried under sand, where no oxygen reached until the shell blackened. Having risen to the surface where there is all this air to breathe.
I like that birds exist and that birders are a known type everywhere, so that a woman carrying around a zoom lens is quietly accepted as “probably a birder” and I can go on taking pictures of whatever I want, including, sure, some of the birds of Galveston.
On my last day, I asked two of the local women involved in the boat training for the most reliable place to see dolphins off Galveston. I wasn’t sure they’d have an answer, but oh, they did. Go to the ferry, they said. Walk on and ride it across and back. They told me it was free for walk-on passengers, and that you are guaranteed to see dolphins.
My hair was already a tangled mess from the day on the small boats, so I stood on the ferry’s upper deck near the bow, camera at the ready. I started seeing dolphins right away, surfacing and milling and feeding at the terminal. Pelicans, a frigate bird, an ibis, lots of seabirds I cannot name.
I zoomed in on cargo vessel bows coming in and out of the shipping channel, but saw no bow riders on the way across to Port Bolivar. A few car passengers filled in along the balcony rail while the ferry was underway, then they retreated to their cars below as we docked. I stayed on the ferry at the opposite end, walked to the stern which would be the new bow, and watched groups of dolphins feeding at that terminal, concentrated at the end of a jetty. Then I caught one leaping in the distance. I could not stop smiling, alone on the deck.
The ferry emptied out of cars and filled back up again, and we retraced our path. This time we were headed upwind, made more intense by the speed of the ferry, and I felt like I could lift right off the deck. I managed to stay on my feet and keep watching the waves. A tugboat was crossing in front of us in the shipping channel, so I zoomed in on its bow where a dolphin was bow-riding. I caught it leaping and spinning and frolicking in the splashy bulge of water pushed in front of the rounded bow. My whole trip felt complete.
I did not know until I scrolled through my photos later that the tug was named “Dolphin,” how very on the nose. And another kind of spiral, life folding back on itself, like the dolphin spiraling in the bow wave, like reappearing in Galveston twenty-five years later to visit an earlier version of myself.
I’ve been intentionally heading out on estuary walks behind the lab this late winter-early spring, watching for signs of the herring run.
Some of the days have had perfect sunlight. This day the angle of the sun on the submerged cobbles had me thinking of the rainbow-rock lakes of Glacier.
Other days had me pondering all the different words you can use to describe that metallic patina on the water when the light is limited by cloud cover. Mercury, pewter, chrome, tarnished silver.
This herring season has seemed prolonged to me. I started seeing signs in late February, but I am still seeing signs now in late March. All the furred and feathered friends of Yaquina Bay have been very excited, flocking and frolicking around.
Herring season outside the lab coincides with Arctic cod spawning season inside the lab. I’m neck-deep in embryos this time of year.
Early embryos
Embryos further along in development
So many potential fish.
x
By-the-wind-sailor jellies have washed ashore in droves – it’s their season to festoon the salt marsh grass with tiny blue prisms to catch the sun.
First pelican sighting of the season.
Raft is the collective noun for sea lions, Rich looked it up.
Also, I laid eyes on one or two actual herring this year! In the middle of being consumed…
Harbor seals get in on the action, too. They are just a little more stealthy about it than the sea lions.
I still hadn’t seen any herring eggs at all inside the estuary, so I took myself to the north jetty after work on Thursday afternoon as the tide was moderately low. It’s at this time of year I begin to rejoice that the daylight has not all faded by the time my work day ends.
I found the eggs!
Eggs covering every surface as far as the eye can see… seems like a pretty good year for herring here locally.
Seems like a pretty good year for Arctic cod in my cold room, too. Here they go, starting to hatch.
This is a bird. I found three options on a blog of what it might be. To my eye, it looks most like the surfbird, but based on the description of rock sandpipers being solitary and quiet, that seems like a likely choice. It also resembles (to a person who looks at fish all day) the black turnstone, so I am not ruling that out as an id, either.
There was quite a breeze, and I loved the way the outer tidepools divided between the textures of the water within and just outside.
The find of the day was a dead octopus! I have never seed a live octopus in a tidepool, and while that would have been cooler, this was pretty remarkable to see. I stared at the scene for quite a while as quite a few hermit crabs crawled around the suckers. The large red sea urchin appeared to be quite interested in octopus meat as well.
I think the anemone pictured above is a painted anemone (Urticina grebelnyi). Below is our very common giant green anemone.
In keeping with tradition, here is the grid of birthdays:
We will celebrate Quinn’s seventeenth birthday next weekend when he is home, but I could not let the day pass without marking it in my usual way, wandering through random tidbits of science and math and literature while reminiscing about this young man I have had the privilege of raising.
My photos of Quinn as he approaches seventeen are of him playing in band, and of him holding kittens. These seem to be the two moments he doesn’t mind having his photos taken, so I will take what I can get. Luckily, others were holding cameras at Quinn’s winter band concert, and I have another band parent and Quinn’s English teacher to credit with some of those images.
Seventeen is the seventh prime number. It is the only prime number which is the sum of four consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7) because any other set of four primes results in an even number. It’s a lucky number of Euler, which is different from the way 13 was lucky, but still quull. In abstract algebra, seventeen is a supersingular prime, the explanation of which I had no comprehension of, which is probably a sign I never took abstract algebra, but I still think supersingular sounds intriguing.
Quullest photo. This was taken by Q’s English teacher.
Quinn is not taking math this year as a junior, but he would still be the only person I know who will find some of these tidbits quull, like the fact that the Pythagoreans abominated the number seventeen (I imagine he will giggle at this). I think he will be tickled that Carl Gauss chose mathematics as his profession because of his proof that heptadecagons (polygons with seventeen sides) can be constructed with a compass and unmarked ruler, and that this is because seventeen is a Fermat prime, whatever that is. Quinn likes Carl Gauss as much or more than the next seventeen-year-old. I think Quinn would like that there are seventeen fully supported stellations in an icosahedron. And I also think he will find it interesting that seventeen is the minimum number of givens needed in a Sudoku with a single solution.
According to MIT, seventeen is “the least random number,” which is because it is the most commonly chosen number when someone is asked to choose a random number from 1 to 20, according to several experiments.
Quinn is taking chemistry this year, and the element with the atomic number 17 is chlorine (which rhymes). Also, it reminds me of swim lessons. The element with a molecular weight of seventeen is ammonia. Which reminds me of diapers. Doesn’t time fly?
But the subject Quinn has been the most excited about this year (possibly with the exception of band) is English. So it will bring me great joy to remind him that the Haiku form has seventeen syllables (5 + 7 + 5). In other literary greatness, seventeen is when a wizard comes of age, and is the number of sickles in a galleon in wizard currency.
There are the same longings as ever. I wish I had more time with him. I wish I had his birthday with him. I wish I could fully support his stellations.
When we left off at sixteen, NASA was getting ready to launch a mission to space object 16-Psyche, an asteroid made of iron and other metals. The launch was successful in October, and in December, the spacecraft turned on its cameras successfully, the moment on a space mission called “first light.” The craft will fly by Mars in 2026, receiving a gravity assist from the planet named after the god of war, and then will continue on to Psyche, arriving in 2029. This asteroid may be a planetesimal, the building block of a planet, or in other words, an opportunity to look at what our own planet looks like on the inside. Our own earth is a hunk of metal at its inaccessible center, and this is our chance to learn more about our own core. Maybe. Or find out something else.
Messier space object 17 is the swan nebula. What is a nebula, you might ask? So might I.
A nebula is
Luminescent star-forming
Interstellar stuff
From my vantage point crowd controlling the middle school band at the winter concert, I got this back-of-the-band shot of my tall drummer.
Nebulae are those colorful, foggy space places whose images would make good Trapper Keeper covers, and they are full of cosmic dust. They are the places where the particles of cosmic dust clump together and attract tumbleweeds of more material until they give birth to a star. I picture a grain of sand in the mushy mantle of an oyster gathering ocean bits to form a pearl, only space. After the stars get born, the remaining material leftover is thought to be the makings of planets and their rings, their moons, their comets and asteroids. A nebula is like a solar system womb, then. And the swan nebula is one of the largest star-wombs in our Milky Way.
NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team and ESA
Wombs. Milky ways. Quick subject change before I get too weepy.
Cicadas! Some species of cicada have a seventeen-year life cycle. Probably a lot of people already know this, but every time I hear it, I still think it’s miraculous. Between mating seasons, they are buried underground for seventeen years. This seems excessive and impossible and also has very cool ecological reason and rhyme. Also there are fossil cicadas dating back to the Triassic in Australia. Automatically quull.
Also, the periodical cicadas (including the 17-year varieties) are part of the genus Magicicada. I just learned this and I think it’s magical.
Magicicada
Underground for seventeen
That seems excessive
Cicadas are of course known most for their music, and as musicians, they are basically percussionists. I can keep going.
Did you know that the different stages of nymphs that develop during the 99.5% of their life that takes place underground are known as instars? There are few words I love as much as “instar.” See star-womb nebula discussion above.
There are a hypothetical thirty broods in the Magicicada genus, which are exclusive to North America. Many of the hypothetical broods have not been observed. I try to wrap my head around this and picture the type of nerd whose job it was to hypothesize mathematically occurring cicada broods, and I am picturing someone not that different from Quinn. (They numbered the broods with Roman Numerals. Am I wrong?)
We will not be enjoying roasted cicadas for Quinn’s birthday, though this is a culturally important delicacy to the Onondaga people.
Despite the hypothetical brood abundance, only fifteen of the broods are known to survive today, and their timelines are mapped out for our entomology ecotouring convenience. Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois brood from the Midwest, is a seventeen-year cicada expected to emerge in 2024. The next time they do, Quinn will be turning 34.
Quinn could, as a younger boy, become sentimental about dryer lint, sticks he had collected on the floor mat of the car, candy wrappers. Perhaps he resisted farewells as a response to living in two separate households, and within each household, moving homes several times in his younger years. I would not know, as I was lucky to have one household—a farm!—and it is still the household I return to visit my 48-years-married parents in. So when I’d remove his stick collection from the floorboards to vacuum the car, I’d reverently pile them in a section of the garden where he could visit them if he liked (until we moved again). He has grown marginally more pragmatic about such things as a teen, but I wasn’t sure how he was going to take it when the actual car was the thing we would be saying goodbye to.
The Neon became unreliable in 2023, and I have been opting not to take it on highway 20. This winter I realized the trunk had leaked so much that the seats were now moldy. For a while I cherished the idea of passing this car onto a teen who needed a first car, maybe even Quinn, but the project of its rehabilitation was getting beyond me. Cue several months of avoidance and driveway sitting.
Last Saturday, a young man knocked on the door and asked if I’d like him to remove the Neon from the driveway. He works on cars, knows how to drain the fluids, and would take the car to Dahl’s for the $200 they will give him for it. He offered to split the money with me. I accepted his offer.
Quinn happened to be home, or this would have been a harder decision. I knew he’d want at least a chance to say goodbye.
I thanked the universe for solving my adulting problem with no effort on my part, and told the young man to come back in a couple hours with his trailer. I pulled the last remaining items out of the car, an archaeological dig that tugged its own heartstrings. I located the title. I had the car empty by the time Quinn came outside and I filled him in on its impending departure.
He made me peel the Lisa Frank stickers off the dashboard that B pancake had stuck there years ago, and hang onto the rainbow tie-dye steering wheel cover Rich’s mom had given me and save it, despite the elastic being shot. He reminded me to check the CD player. The battery had enough juice to power the eject button and lo and behold, Brandi Carlile’s Firewatcher’s Daughter had still been in the slot. The Eye is a song Quinn and I love to sing along to together. I would have been very sad to lose it.
Then he asked if I would transplant the tiny fern that has grown for years out of the Neon’s left front fender.
At this point the lump in my throat grew painful. I used two jack-o-lantern carving knives with their skinny blades to carefully extract the roots of the plant from the grungy fender crevice. We found a spot in the corner of the front garden bed to situate the fern in a bare patch of soil.
Satisfied, Quinn and I watched from the driveway as the guy got the Neon started and a black cloud of exhaust emitted from the tailpipe. He stepped out of the car one more time to discuss payment, and I told him to keep the money, he was doing me a favor. Was I sure? Yes, I was sure. He thanked me. He said it sounded like a cracked head gasket. I was glad to know I wasn’t wrong, the car was at the end of its life. 195,120 miles and many memories have accumulated in our fourteen years with the Neon.
After he drove it up onto the pavement to load it on his trailer, earthworms emerged from the ruts where the tires had been sitting.
We went inside and Quinn turned around and blew a kiss through the window at our good little car.
When I was with Quinn’s father and pregnant, we bought a used jeep that was intended to be the “family vehicle” as soon as Quinn was born. But, while I was still pregnant, his father’s truck died and the “family vehicle” became his work vehicle, while I walked and took the bus to my two jobs. Even with a newborn I commuted by public transit, which thankfully was doable in Portland, but let’s just say, less than ideal.
We split up on the eve of moving to Newport. I took the jeep so I could get to my new job and support Quinn. The $800 blue book value of the jeep was a contentious line item in mediation. I could not wait to never drive it again.
I found the Neon on Craigslist. A friend’s mother’s car someone was selling cheap, with low mileage and a stick shift. It was under $2000 and even so, I needed to convince my credit union to give me a loan. Andrew, a lab friend, drove me to Florence to pick it up, and I paid it off a year later.
The Neon is the only car I’ve ever independently bought, you see. Independently buying a car hits differently if your movements and finances have been constrained and controlled by another person for years. The Neon meant more to me than a 2002 car with hand crank windows ought to have meant. With my next tax return, I bought Quinn, who was three, a nice car seat that would keep him safe up to eighty pounds. As my string bean lengthened but did not gain much weight, he held onto that seat until I convinced him he no longer needed it, around second grade. All the beach bird feathers he had tucked into its side pouch were added to the stick collection in the garden.
I don’t have many photos of the Neon, but hunting through photos shows me all the places the little car took us; in a sense, it’s just outside the frame of every picture. It took us to beaches, to hikes, to campouts, to the end of Beaver Creek Road for several years and multiple flat tires. To school and activities and all over town. Loaded to the gills with a canopy and market gear, we drove it to farmer’s market every Saturday.
It was the site of all the Pickups and Drop-offs of Quinn’s two-household/one-driving-parent early life. It was where Quinn learned to blow kisses, as a fundamental building block of the routine to make transitions marginally more okay for him, to help him cope with always being left by the other person he loved. It was always the site of our coming back together again after we had been apart. A car can mean a lot more than you ever meant to let it mean.
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