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.
Maybe it’s the sunbeams I stared into through my camera lens yesterday, as our band gathered into the staging area, or the pollen in the air, or maybe I have something in my eye. Pretty sure I’m allergic to backlit sun-drenched brass sections looking like angels are bending from the sky to kiss their foreheads.
I had the privilege of chaperoning the NHS marching band to the Starlight Parade in Portland yesterday. I love our band. I love watching them embody something Glennon Doyle says: “We belong to each other.” I love watching them lift their chin to let a friend reach in and close the clasp at their throat or adjust the chin strap on their shako (that’s what the hats are called). “I trust you,” they say, exposing their vulnerable soft parts. “I can be trusted,” they say, with their helpful hands.
I loved looking into the eyes of each student with a squirt bottle in my hand and saying silently, “Trust me.”
“I trust you,” they say silently. They open their mouth.
We used to call it “baby bird style” when Quinn was in second grade and we’d squirt water into the open mouths of the kids on field trips. I realize/remember when I watch another band mom, Carol, hydrating them, that our mouths open, too. It is so human, so motherly. Here comes the airplane. Ever since we started squirting things in their mouth as babes in arms, from breasts or bottles, spoons or fingers, we’ve opened our mouth when we want them to open theirs. We are mirrors.
Speaking of they/them. Happy Pride. I know one reason the band room is home to many kids is that they don’t exactly fit the regularly sanctioned acceptable categories of high school. The band room is home to the neurodivergent, the nonbinary, the nonconforming. Which is why I like taking them to Portland, where the 2023 Starlight parade Grand Marshal is Poison Waters, a drag performer and social activist. I like the exhibit behind us in the parade being TriMet, the bus I rode to work while I was pregnant with Quinn, with the slogan All Are Welcome. I like the Portland crowd with their rainbow light sabers and their heart-shaped glasses and their clowns on bicycles and their llamas on leashes and their boy children in tutus and their girl children in dinosaur crocs and all their children dancing and wielding guns that fire nothing but bubbles.
I like that their band teacher introduced so many of the end-of-year awards at their spring concert using they/their as he talked about each student, however they identified. I like that they can be boys tucking ponytails up into shakos with bobby pins and girls with pixie cuts or pigtails and nonbinary young people being whoever they want to be.
I like how kids from a rural coastal town go to a city fair. When told to be in groups of no fewer than three, their threes adhered to each other like Velcro and grew into fifteens, wandering under huge, gnarled city trees, venturing together into the dust-mote-filled sunbeams to hop on carnival rides, then congregating again under the boughs to loan each other cash for slushies and elephant ears. I like how they belong to each other.
They all have doubts and fears and preoccupations. I know I did as a teenager. I want to tell them… I still have so many doubts and fears and preoccupations, most recently upon my return to being a band mom who barely sees my son. The last Starlight parade we attended, I had a sixth grader who lived with me half time. Since then, a pandemic pulled us apart. We are coming back together. We are still here. We are not the same. But we still belong to each other. The band room is still home. I want to tell them to keep reaching for what they love, and especially for the people they love.
A beautiful mural featuring a blue bird up at the top of a tall building on SW 2nd and Salmon caught my eye, and I felt sure it had not been there four years ago on the parade route. Sure enough, this painting, called Inheritance, was created just last year. In it, an elder’s hands offer a bowl to a younger set of hands. The bowl brims with fir cones, trilliums, and butterflies.
I want to tell them: Look up, little birds. Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up.
Also, there will be school bus fender benders, anxiety, garment bag chaos, missing shoes, forgotten backpacks, mood swings, vomit, blisters, dying phone batteries, and body odor.
There are enormous bands before us and behind us, with military-level discipline and polish and prestige, plumes spearing from their caps in waterfalls of sparkle and glitz. The band behind us filled at least four buses, maybe more. But I’ll take these kids, these coastal sardines packed into one bus, the ones who worked for their uniforms (the sophomores through graduating seniors remember the many nights they haunted the haunted house in 2019), with their proud plumes of blue feathers. I’ll take them and I’ll tell them silently with my eyes: Soar.
I am grateful for a moment with the ocean at sunset and the trust of a tall, lanky friend to watch it with.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 19
11/19/22
I am grateful for a winter squash kind of day.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 20
11/20/22
I am grateful for unexpectedly calm seas, spontaneous dates, and laughter.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 21
11/21/22
Grateful again, for all the same things. But repetition isn’t so bad.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 22
11/22/22
Grateful for ten years and eleven months of loving Rich. I’m grateful he is and has always been the kind of man who, when he sees a feral kitten, does not see a throwaway, but a treasured furball; who, when he received not just me but all my baggage, did not return me to the pound, but embraced me and blended me into his loving family. It’s never going to stop being surprising, and I’m always going to be grateful for his love.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 23
11/23/22
Today I am grateful for Lemony Snicket-inspired emails from my son that made me laugh. And Lisa kitty in the ham box. And nachos.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 24
11/24/22
I am grateful that a small panther named Lookout was available to demonstrate another thing I was grateful to spend most of my day doing: lounging in the sun. I procrastinated my pie-baking and spent the middle of my first day of vacation writing outside, my favorite. Grateful for the sunshine time and as always, Grandma’s never-fail pie crust. And kittens.
This morning I started off feeling grateful for kitties when they took turns burrowing into the sleeping bags that are still laying around the living room from road-trips-that-are-not-vacations. Then when I was wrapped in two hot towels after showering, (in recent years I decided throwing a towel in the dryer before showering was something I deserved, but only recently did I upgrade to two hot towels; I’m worth it! Anyone with self-worth issues should adopt this life hack.) I thought about when I’ve overused butterfly metaphors in years past, and how the chrysalis seems so appropriate for how this time of year feels. Going inward, wrapped in a sleeping bag and turning into goo. The slow cooker of imaginal cells encapsulating the dream of flying. But right now, the season of biding my time, wondering what all this goo is going to become when I emerge next spring.
11/5/21
~30 days of gratitude~ day 5
My mother-in-law Nancy died on October 15, 2021, eleven months after my father-in-law Bob, who died as last year’s month of gratitude was ending. As the writer in the family, I was honored to write a respectable obituary for her, simple words that fool nobody in their attempt to capture her life in one paragraph. These words here are not those respectable ones, but they have the same intent.
May her memory be a blessing.
As an aspiring writing nerd, I think of both sides of the word memory. There is what we remember her for, and there are the contents of her own memories leading up to her death. Her own memory, eroded by dementia, was a terrifying, fascinating landscape of imagination colliding with children’s Bible stories and nightmares. At least this is how it seemed to me in April, at that turning point while she still remembered who she was, who we were, but only just.
I couldn’t help thinking as I sat by her hospice bed in October, that her memory is what nobody will end up talking about as she is eulogized across Facebook. Nobody wants to talk about dementia, but I want to, because it has had such an impact on me this past year. I suppose it may be considered rude to bring it up, but the more Rich and I have mentioned it to friends and colleagues, the more we come across others with loved ones who lived with, or are living with, dementia.
Toward the end of her life, people said things like “you’ve already lost her,” extending empathy. There were many incremental losses, and by June she had no idea who we were. But I feel like I really got to know her in a unique way in April. So much of what had formed her and structured her life had fallen away, and in moments it was just the two of us, meeting in this liminal space.
Who I found under all that had been stripped away wasn’t exactly who I had known for the previous nine years. On our first meeting, she saw five-year-old Quinn melting down and judged him in need of firmer parenting. On subsequent visits, she busied herself with dividing possessions and heirlooms she wasn’t actually ready to relinquish and we weren’t ready to receive. We grew into a loving mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship over time. She gave Quinn oodles of fossils when he was older, and shared her crafting passions with me. I saw a sneak peek of what I’ll call her new uninhibited side during our wedding week, when she snuck a cupcake or two after decades of sugar-free eating restrictions imposed on herself and others around her. But in April, the only actual food I saw her help herself to was chocolate cupcakes I baked her for her 88th birthday. She happily sat down to whatever plate I put in front of her, full of “avoid” foods from her blood type diet chart, but she wasn’t paying attention to that anymore. In April, I didn’t see her so much as fill a glass of water, dementia had progressed to the point where she would have starved on her own, but those cupcakes, though. Her memory, her loss of memory, was a blessing in that it freed her to indulge.
She told me about her father’s appreciation for good coffee from around the world, the wonderful smell of the special coffee store they’d visit, how he’d let her try sips. She didn’t become a coffee drinker, addictive substance that it is, and she would never have told this story before April, inhibited about food as she was. She wore a tiny scowl when I would serve Bob a hot cup of coffee, a treat he loved, but which she believed he should avoid. I know this was out of love: she wanted him healthy, but I am grateful that she got a chance, finally, to relax these impulses. I’m picturing her with a nice dark chocolate cupcake and a mug of excellent coffee now.
In between bouts of agitation and sundowning, I saw her appreciate simple pleasures in those last days she spent in her house, things I hadn’t seen her do before. She spun the prisms in her window at sunset and watched rainbows dance around the ceiling. She delighted in a squishy silicone ring I bought her as a placeholder for the wedding ring she had misplaced. She said yes every time I suggested going for a walk.
After, as family sat around her kitchen table and I typed her obituary, once I had the basics covered, I said the words, “She will be remembered for….” and waited for family members to fill in the blank. Every time, we ended up laughing. She will be remembered for confiscating a bag of Cheetohs, forbidding a poinsettia, hypervigilance over a set of square Tupperware. She will be remembered for thrill-seeking such as no one would suspect from her appearance or personality; ziplining in her eighties and bouncing on our trampoline, and one of her favorite memories was of flying her father’s airplane as a girl. She will be remembered for her devotion to Bob and her children, for her vitality, for her strong faith.
I will remember her for the walks we took, those two weeks in April, around her yard. I will remember her bending to sniff the lilacs and stooping to speak to the turtle hiding beneath the bush. I will remember her whistling to the scissortail flycatchers on the power line, turning to me with a smile when they replied. I will remember her surefootedness as she navigated the uneven terrain, the deer divots and sycamore seed pods, enjoying the flowers and butterflies with me.
I had no idea about dementia when I first heard her say her memory was giving her trouble. I understood dementia was memory loss but that’s not how I would define it now that I realize how those words oversimplify. Yes, many memories were lost, but many brand-new memories were also woven from the fabric of her experiences and the fantastical workings of her mind. Of course, many of these new memories bore no resemblance to established reality, but they were her memory, just the same. Sometimes these false memories were quite problematic, suspicions and fears, this ugly side of dementia that is not encapsulated in “loss” of memory, in forgetting. I wish more people knew more about this, to know when it was not really their loved one, but the dementia, talking.
In June, it was amazing, appalling, devastating, how much had changed. To her, there was something we ought to be doing about those canoes by the lake. To her, we were her “big people” and possibly “relatives.” To her, Rich was Jesus, and she had birthed a baby just recently that she didn’t get in “the usual way.” I wish for everyone who is ever going to experience this to know, going into it, to just nod, smile, and respond positively, even when your mother-in-law thinks your husband might be Jesus. “Well isn’t that something!”
This might seem to be an odd subject for a gratitude post, but I am grateful for Nancy’s life, grateful that she allowed me to be part of her family, allowed me to get close to her while she was dealing with the impossible disease of dementia, allowed me to feed her cupcakes and help her shower and take her for nature walks. I’ll stop short of gratitude for dementia, but for the lessons, the learning I’ve done this year on the subject, for those aspects, I am genuinely grateful. I’m grateful for her memory, and even for a few freeing features of her memory loss.
When we picked up her personal items from her assisted living facility, there was such an odd mix of things, like a child’s confused duffel bag after summer camp but on steroids – so many of her belongings missing, and items belonging to others we could only guess at. In one box I found a stack of dessert napkins in a colorful floral pattern, with a butterfly on each one, that she must have taken to her room after a social event. They stood out to me, these butterflies, my own solace as I used every spare minute of my five weeks in Oklahoma this year to photograph the butterflies around her home. I set the stack of napkins in the cupboard of paper products in the house that will wait until another non-vacation trip to be dealt with, but I tucked one butterfly napkin in my folder, a sad and silly keepsake maybe, but a reminder that even in memory loss, one doesn’t have to quit collecting butterflies.
11/6/21
~30 days of gratitude~ day 6
Happy national nacho day! Here are some tiny spicy peppers I grew, since they are good in salsa and prettier than nachos. If you’ve been here for the duration, you know this is a big day of gratitude in our household, and this year I had my avocados and cheese ready. After we ate our nachos, we walked outside in the dark to see how the clear sky had pulled up its cloud blankets over all but one small patch. Arms around each other, we gazed up and Rich joked that he saw a very slow shooting star. “That’s an airplane,” I said. “No, a satellite!” he corrected. As we both laughed, a real shooting star dove across the satellite’s path. It’s like that a lot with him, so I know now to expect the unexpected delightful light-bringing moments. Grateful for laughing at stars with my husband, nachos, and tiny purple peppers.
11/7/21
~30 days of gratitude~ day 7
I am grateful for a weekend of rain-sun, shine-dripping on us as we ran errands and puttered in the yard. I am grateful for thoughtful husband gestures like finishing grating the cheese, driving me to buy the one missing ingredient for dinner, and making a huge batch of popcorn. I am grateful for brussels sprouts.
Today I am grateful again for nachos, grateful for sunshine, and grateful that this video shows up faithfully in my memories every November.
11/10/21
~30 days of gratitude~ day 10
I am grateful for writing. It hasn’t been an easy year, and the one that came before was also hard. So I’ve been writing a lot. Like a LOT. And going to meetings in boxes on screens with others who write. I am grateful for these writing friends and for their stories. The stories that stick with me are not the ones with shiny production value that wrap up neatly in a bow, but the hard stories, the ones where someone has made it here to tell the story by some grace, but with ragged edges and a careworn heart. This summer I watched my yard butterflies so diligently that I started being able to tell individuals apart by the nicks and cuts and gouges and folds in their wings. Like the writers, the most unforgettable butterflies had the most beat up and tattered wings, but still showed up to the flowers every morning, still lifted those shredded wings to take flight.
Rich took the day off for our wedding anniversary and we got to go tidepooling together. The photos above are are from our walk. He planned ahead to do this, but told me just beforehand, because he likes spontaneity. He told me the night before, rather than the morning of, because he knows how much spontaneity I can handle! It was a lovely anniversary date. I looked into all the pools, and he says he did, too, but I suspect he was mostly looking at my butt.
~
Below are from the next walk, just me.
Yeah, I was starting to notice a theme, too. Mammal, bird, fish… there is something so striking about bleached bones on the black rock beach.
pretty sure the orange dots on the snail shell are baby feather duster worms…
another feather duster – same pool as the maybe babies
This day was a very low low tide, and I got there with time to try to attempt a goal I had in mind since the summer began – to go to the “end,” the farthest extent of beach accessible on foot. Before I got there, I went way out on the outer edge of sea urchin territory – looking for sunflower stars (and striking out) but also just feeling so lucky to get to wander around out here where it was usually underwater. Basically snorkeling without having to get so cold…
The end. I made it! I had forgotten there was an archway around this corner. Quinn and I trekked out here years ago, but I had forgotten the view was such a treat. It spoke to me like caves and arches seem to speak to humans, of openings and possibility, of ancient connections and solid foundations.
