Tag Archives: boats

a little more 2024

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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!

 

 

 

~thankful thursday~ light cone

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/24

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.

Galveston

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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.

kodiak kaleidoscope

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Kodiak July 2023. I got to see humpback whales right away, day one on the water. And also days two, four, six, and seven. Whale wealth!

 

Kodiak day two on the water brought even more whale wealth than day one. Humpbacks and killer whales. It was gratifying to hear “we’ve only ever seen them one other time in eighteen years of this survey.” I can’t take much credit but I did put in a special request.

Kodiak kaleidoscope:
Giant Pacific octopus
Rock greenling
Opalescent nudibranch
Sunflower sea star
Sea otter
Bald eagle
Tufted puffin
Not pictured but still helping fill my Kodiak wildlife bingo card: Dall’s porpoise, sea lion, harbor seal, and river otter, golden eagle. Not to mention all the rest of the fish, but we won’t say much about the fish, for they are data.
Did you know that one of the collective nouns for puffins is “an improbability of puffins?” I was delighted with not just pairs, but whole rafts, improbabilities, of puffins.
I’ll be back in August to what is quickly becoming another favorite place of mine on Earth.

~thankful thursday~ everywhere and nowhere

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11/18/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

Today I’m feeling grateful for all the little things, the popcorn and cranberries that grow into long garlands of gratitude if you string them one by one.

 

11/19/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful for spontaneous dates to go outside and look at the moon. Rich handed me my jacket a little while ago and took me out on a moon date this evening. This photo is not from tonight, but from a moon date somewhere in New Mexico, waking up in a Rest Area and getting back on the road toward home.

 

11/20/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for good work bringing good food to good people. I am grateful for Saturday sun. I am grateful for my crew who sees to it that I take my break, eat my thermos full of chili, and hydrate. I am grateful for chocolate poblano peppers burnished past green to purple-brown and all the way to red. I am grateful for the architecture of each savoy cabbage leaf. I am grateful for roots.

 

11/21/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

I am grateful for a hike with Quinn, for frost pockets and cold creeks, for beaded webs and sunshine on son.

 

11/22/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

I am not taking this class for a grade so it’s fine if I cheat. November has some easy days of gratitude that I shamelessly capitalize on. November 6th is nachos. The 22nd is not the only day I dedicate to husband gratitude, but it’s a definite one each and every year. Every 22nd of every month is to be celebrated, whether we are celebrating our first date or our wedding day, and all the 22nds in between bear the title “dorkaversary” to keep things light. Today is the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate Ten Years Together on December 22nd.

This morning as we were wishing each other a happy dorkaversary, we recalled that ten Novembers ago, we were being helped along in our eventual romance by our yoga teacher, who decided it was high time for a partner yoga series! “Breathe with your partner,” she told us, as we sat back-to-back lengthening our spines and working out how to breathe at all, much less with our partner, oh my. “Now twist to the right and reach your right hand to hold onto your partner’s left thigh.” Do what now?! At this point in the narration Rich freely deviates from what actually happened. “That’s not my thigh you’re grabbing…”

He cannot behave. I will need more time to work on him! So grateful for the time we’ve spent together.

 

11/23/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

I am grateful for hope, which appears in this moment not as a thing with feathers, but with fur. A sea otter has been visiting our Oregon coast for several days! This is an event that for most people is probably cute and fun, but for me, it is a profound gift in a heavy time of loss.

I got into marine biology to save endangered species I loved. I became better informed about that over time, and I doubt very seriously that what I do is helping at all. What I do feels like a painstaking documentation of extinction. I know an awful lot about the very specific details of endangerment, how whole ecosystems have folded in on themselves, how our coastline here resembles what it was a century ago only on the very surface. I can take credit for saving nothing.

Sea otters were hunted down to about 1% of their historic population size. The last known individual sea otter swimming in Oregon waters was shot off Newport in 1907. Locally extinct ever since (a reintroduction attempt in the 70s did not succeed), they no longer exert control over sea urchins, which overgraze the kelp holding down the base of this ecosystem. Other species help in the role of maintaining kelp forests, though none to the extent that otters once did. Lately I lean over the edge of every far-out tidepool I visit, hoping and wishing to see a sunflower star, an important urchin predator in the absence of otters. But sunflower stars reached critically endangered status in December 2020, failing to make a comeback from the sea star wasting disease epidemic that began in 2013. Locally extinct now in the southern part of its range, sightings in Oregon are now vanishingly rare. I have not been able to find one.

I started writing gratitude posts as a way to pick myself up when the long shadows of the cold dark fall bring on familiar seasonal despair. But these last two years… despair has not been a seasonal condition. I have struggled with even wanting to bring it up this year, but my kid has still not come home to me, and this day, the 23rd, is his day the same way the 22nd is for Rich and I. I’ve been Quinn’s mom for fourteen years and nine months, and to only see him a few times a week on video and every other Sunday for a hike is… well, despair has been a steady state for this mama.

When he was little, Quinn would get into a cardboard box boat and bring a book in with him to read while he paddled, set crab traps, and coiled his ropes. One frequent book was A Lot of Otters. The premise: Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and her child are reunited.

And this is why I will never achieve any type of greatness in my field. I cannot separate this entire bundle of emotion and sadness and longing and grief and tenderness and hope from this one tiny furry being. Somehow, now, this otter is carrying on its belly, not just a tasty meal of sea urchin, but a whole load of other baggage I need it to carry for me. It is too much for one otter to fix a whole broken ecosystem, a whole broken society, a teen’s anxiety, a mama’s broken heart.

I got to see the otter for about thirty seconds yesterday. I stood there for a lot longer than thirty seconds. Waiting. Watching. My hands took a while to recover from the cold after I left, but I saw the otter. I am so grateful I got to see the otter.

This morning Rich asked, already knowing the answer, whether I would go back again today to check on the otter. I did not see the otter today. But when I heard a rumor that there was also an orca sighted in the area this morning, I knew I would stand there for a long time again. I did not see the orca either. I hope to see orcas someday. (Yes, I am crossing my fingers the orca did not see the otter…)

Maybe why I like marine mammals is that there is no guarantee of seeing them. Someone said aloud what I always think to myself about that gaze you get into when looking for mammals: that you look everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

It makes me think of one quote Joseph Campbell used about God, “an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”

The seeking is the thing. The waves are rough and the mammals are hiding, I’m standing there, looking at the whole wide circle of ocean, looking everywhere and nowhere. Looking for hope.

 

11/24/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am grateful for this sound.

~rainbow mondays~ lighter

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“…we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid,

the new dawn blooms as we free it,

for there is always light if only we are brave enough to see it,

if only we are brave enough to be it.”

— Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb.

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

a boatswain’s crepuscular ditty

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“Aye.” Bioluminescent waves streak past the hull of the ship as you make your way forward. Carrying out the order, you climb into the headrig to furl the inner jib. Dousing it was smart in this wind, but the swell is big enough to dunk you if you stay out too long and your stomach swoops as the top of the waves skims just below your boots on the footrope. Easy enough to accomplish in daylight when the sea is calm, but another matter entirely in the dusk, with the bowsprit reaching such peaks and troughs of motion. Furling from the peak to the clew, you don’t take time to stretch each flake of canvas into a fancy zigzag like you would to show up in port, but instead grab loops and hunks of the bulky billows and wrap a daisy chain with the downhaul line, giving a good tug to keep the peak from creeping back up the stay in the wind and resetting itself, looping over and under the mass of canvas, wrestling and hugging until it is subdued, interlocking loops of rope creating a net to contain it, and you reach the clew, secure it to the jibboom, and spider climb back inboard. Grasping the jib halyard, you take out the slack, resecure it on the belay pin. Halyard coiled and hung, you make your way aft to the quarterdeck. It’s a new feeling to be on a broad reach with a following sea of this magnitude. Just off the starboard rail, dolphins surface. Knives slicing through the waves, flashes of silver, going ten knots like your ship. Long rollers come from behind, the ship surfing over each one like a hill passing ponderously under you. Motion completely different from the Atlantic, but even on the Pacific it’s different from when the swells are on the bow. Nobody leaves the deck, though it is after dinner and your watch is on duty. Only the right combination of conditions let you sail this swiftly on your wooden ship, without the engine, though the lack of a shaft brake means the whole deck vibrates from the freely spinning propellor. Propelled instead by wind, and a powerful push from the sea. Quiet has so many different connotations on the ocean, but the most significant for you is the silencing of the inner voice. Rising and falling, watching constellations of students form and ungroup, filter below to their bunks. Slowly, the deck clears, and just the standing watch remains. Turning over the helm to you, the second mate heads below to chart a position. Up on the bow, one of the students is on lookout. Vessels begin to appear on the horizon as night falls, tiny lights in the far distance, but none come near. With your mind empty and clear, individual words roll under you like the waves. Xylophilous, to grow or live on wood, which you think is meant to refer to insects or fungus, but you like to think could refer to a person who spends days barefoot on caulked planks of oak. You tuck that one away for later, perhaps the next line in the journal swinging in the hammock where it is stowed over your bunk. Zodiacal constellations march a glittering parade across the deepening sky, the night just begun.

~thankful thursday~ seed bank

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11/5/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

I have kept a gratitude journal for much of 2020. It helps me in November, and this year I needed help in all the other months. I was also looking ahead with some awareness that this November might not be my finest hour either, and thought of it as an investment, but it’s not really money in the bank I’m picturing. More like a seed bank, like I was putting away seeds from the flowers I grew this summer, knowing I would need to have the memory of past flowers and the hope of future flowers tucked in a safe place in order to get through the flowerless days. In July I recognized this, and was grateful for, “this garden of gratitude I am growing, one which will be able to be visited in November and harvested from when I may not have enough of what is in season.”

A few of the summer seeds I collected in my bank:

7-12

Hummingbird having a snack of crocosmia while the sprinkler was watering the terrace garden, and then resting on the flower stem to have a little shower before taking off again.

8-27

Pulled over on Otter Crest Loop overlook and took pictures of the beautiful blue ocean, trees, rocks, Queen Anne’s lace. Whales came by to say hello.

9-1

The smell of fifty pounds of beautiful peaches ripening in the kitchen.

9-3

Egrets wading in the bay as we drove the bay road home for date night pizza night. Their reflections in the blue, blue water (so nice and sunny) were just stunning.

9-5

Having enough energy to chop two ziplock bags of peppers for the freezer and can nine pints of fresh chopped heirloom tomatoes in rainbow colors, the urgent care variety I salvaged from the compost bin at market. One green zebra tomato (with one tiny squashed shoulder) the size of my head filled two pints with one more chopped piece leftover… one pink damsel that was about the same size (with one hole poked in it from another stem)! By tomorrow these would have been slumping with mold. Some beautiful vegetables are so vulnerable that it defies all pragmatism to try to bring them home, but I do it anyway, to honor the farming wrought, against all pragmatism, to bring them into being.

9-17

Walk on the beach- a fun egg case, a new nudibranch, and the whole place to myself since I arrived at dawn in the fog. Just what I needed.

Date night. Always.

11-5 today:

Speaking of date night, it is date night once again… modified for the times we inhabit, but we still observe this weekly tradition. I am grateful my love didn’t look at my tenderness, my propensity to fall to pieces, and decide I was too vulnerable, grateful that he defied all pragmatism and brought me home anyway. Grateful for the gratitude seed bank today.

11/6/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

I am grateful for the tiny bird that visited my window this morning, when the sun came out (grateful for the sun). I did not think I would get any photos but this little guy really wanted to check out what was going on in our living room, and kept lurking long enough for camera retrieval, and even after Lisa kitty wandered over and settled herself down to watch the nature channel. (The bird did decide to depart when Bart panther-pounced up beside Lisa.)

I am no birder, but my Sibley guide said it might be a Ruby-crowned kinglet. They would like our spruce trees, and would be coming down out of the treetops this time of year to migrate, possibly. When I first saw this bird’s head, I thought it could have bashed its head on the window and been bleeding. No, it was a little more red violet than red, so maybe it had smashed one of my last few raspberries on his head (DIY raspberry beret?) and finally I got a good enough look to realize it was the actual color of the feathers. (Parsimony would have helped me here.)

I later discovered that the scientific name of this little bird is Regulus calendula, and, of course this magical creature would be named after a star and a flower. Not just any star… the first schooner bunk I slept in on my first semester at sea was also named Regulus. And not just any flower… calendula, one of the only things still blooming in my flower pots in November, a botanical healer, an edible salad topping, and of which quinn asked me as a toddler, “are you going to put calend-u-willa on that owie to feel it better?”

Basically, this little bird might as well have started singing to me, “you belong among the wildflowers, you belong on a boat out at sea, far away from your trouble and worry…”

So it was an easy choice today, though happy nacho day to those celebrating (we’re out of avocados, such bad form! We all know I will be grateful for nachos other days this month!)

11/7/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

I am grateful that a woman can hold the office of the vice president of this country, and not just in theory anymore, but in reality.

What it’s like for me personally, is I’m just now realizing how much it matters to me. I have been thinking for a while, like since maybe a little over four years ago, of how it matters to little girls everywhere, watching, listening, absorbing, that women be trusted with positions of power, but it hit me tonight that, as Quinn pointed out to me one time, I was once a girl. Tonight, hearing our Vice President-elect say, “I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” was the moment I could no longer hold back tears. The other thing this election outcome is like, for me personally, is like the time when I was leaving an abusive relationship and I was having a panic attack that I had almost forgotten to get some of his tools out of the vehicle we had shared, and my guy friend who was helping me pack my U-haul told me, “MB, someday, someone is going to say nice things to you.”

I’m getting pretty used to the person I’m married to saying nice things to me all the time, I mean it’s pretty relentless, all the nice things he says, and does. Also, when I showed up wildly unprepared for cold rain and gusting wind at farmer’s market today (pretty sure I’m not the only one with some of my ducks not in a row this week), I was so grateful for his XL hooded sweatshirt (and the fishing community who keeps him supplied with F/V swag from all the boats he works so hard to build and repair every day) stowed in the back of the car, which nested nicely atop my size M sweatshirt and kept me warm for the whole day.

I am grateful to be able to look forward to having a president very soon who, when he speaks, will not trigger memories of years of emotional abuse. A nice aside is that the President-elect is the very guy who wrote the legislation that enabled me to get a restraining order when I needed one. America, get ready, because someday soon, someone is going to say nice things to you.

11/8/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

I am grateful for the glorious weather today as my honey and I made our annual honey pilgrimage to obtain our four-gallon bucket of gold. I am grateful for the fully stocked chest freezer and pantry heading into the season of slow cookers and staying in. I am grateful for the way the god light was slanting through the conifers in the fog as we drove east, and for the colorful trees painting our journey into a rainbow road trip.

 

11/9/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

Today when I was waiting an extra long time for my grocery order, I was grateful I had brought along my book. I am grateful for the ability to order groceries from home and pick them up outside the store, and for the energetic youth who cheerfully hoisted two cubic yards of potting soil into my trunk, saying he does the same to help his grandmother, who also likes to garden. I’m grateful the store gave me a discount I didn’t ask for, just because I had to wait; I basically got paid to read fifty delicious pages. I am so grateful, in case I haven’t said it yet this year, for good books. Sometimes, they take me right out of myself, and sometimes they pour me right back in. I have leaned on them hard this year for both of these essential services.

 

11/10/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

There are days when writing a gratitude post is like plucking words from the air as easily as picking raspberries off the vines in the vase on my kitchen table. Even though I spent part of my day today studying word-crafting, tonight I am in percolating, not plucking mode.

I do have one gratitude I’ve been tucking away for a day when I was otherwise undecided. I have been having a much easier time waking up in the morning this November, having finally bought myself a full-spectrum light near the end of October. I’ve suspected myself to be a SAD puppy for a lot of years now, so I’m not sure why this took me so long. I’m grateful that when I mentioned it, my husband was also wondering why we didn’t already have one, and happily turned it on for me the first few mornings, during his usual wake-up (yes, I’m a grown-ass woman who has trouble waking up before dawn without help). The thing is, just a week or two in, I’m already awake enough to turn it on for myself, and more importantly, I don’t feel like rotten black death inside for the first hour of the day as my body rejects it’s-still-night-time like a mismatched organ. I don’t know what wizardry this is, but I know this little light is better than any supplement has ever done by me. We call it my sun ball.

When I was buying it Rich supportively said he thought it would help us both, though he felt he may not be as affected by shortening daylight as I am because, he said, “I generate light.” Boy does he ever. (He meant welding but I mean how he lights up my life.)

 

11/11/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for and in awe of the connections… the unseen order of things… the cosmic consciousness. This may not make any sense to anyone else, and I’m okay with that. (I’m not taking this class for a grade!) I was told to “just obey it” yesterday when the wrong scene came to my mind during my writing workshop, and I spent ten minutes writing descriptive language about a scene I had no idea was connected to the piece I’m writing. Turns out it was so integrally connected, I spent the next twenty-four hours with wave after wave of profound revelations crashing over me. A significant breakthrough. In the earlier part of the class, when asked to explain why I was the most qualified person to write what I’m writing, I wrote why I’m the expert on mothering my son, including a sentence about the placenta that it still in a ziplock in the back of my freezer. Then today, as I was reading more of my book (my teacher is one of the authors), I came across a passage where she announced to her teen daughter that her placenta is still in the freezer. Shortly afterward, a rainbow came pouring across the page as the low and lazy November sun streamed in through the glass block window.

In other literary news, Rich and I discussed this morning what constitutes a nacho (singular). Grateful for November nacho nights, a pair of placentas, and rainbow connections.

~summer shorts~ a list of emptied spaces

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One – sea urchin grottos

There is a cavity left behind when a sea urchin dies, and sometimes other things come in to attempt to fill it. They don’t fill the spaces in the same way; maybe they glue themselves to the ceiling of the empty grotto and extend fleshy tentacles when the tide is in; maybe they snail along the walls grazing any newly settled algae; but they aren’t the purple spiky echinoderm that is made to fill such a hole.

Two – cardboard box boats

I’m not sure what got Quinn thinking of Baby Kitty one night, but he was sad he couldn’t remember her very much, only where we buried her. I offered to send him some photos, and he liked that idea. The following night we talked about how kitty was in the background of so many photos of him, like one where he is in the foreground inside a box boat. I remembered him taking A Lot of Otters into his box boats with him to read. The child in the book is also in a box boat.

I pulled A Lot of Otters off the bookshelf and read it to him over our video call. The basic plot premise is that Mother Moon and her child become separated, her tears fall into the ocean and become stars, the otters play with the stars and draw her attention to the child by concentrating their light, and she and the child are reunited.

“Mother moon was looking for her child…”

Three – my arms

That night I had a dream about hugging Quinn again, finally, when this is all over, and when I hugged him in the dream he was so much bigger than me.

Four – mothers’ hearts

A local mother delivered her baby still born. I imagine a fresh space prepared for this babe, like an empty sea urchin grotto painted pink, and now a closed door tries to hold back the tidal wave of love reserved for this little one it cannot be showered upon. Suspended in an impossible position, this mother whose face I know, this friend of friends, carrying this staggering weight of this love she cannot bestow, carrying breasts heavy with milk with whom she can nurture no one. Full where she should be empty, empty where she should be full. If my grief cries tears into the ocean to turn into stars to light my way to reunite with my child, her grief must be the kind that fills the ocean basin from bottom to top.

Five – guinea pig kennels

Quinn’s talk of pet grief seems prophetic and he is now missing one of his beloved guinea pigs. Ms. B and Squeaky came to him when he was seven. I couldn’t sit with him through the night as he held Ms. B in his lap and worried, or hold him the next day after she passed away. On our video call that night I read him a long meditation I had written in which a guinea pig stood on a bridge crossing over a stream, not knowing how else to bring him comfort from far away and defaulting to using my words as usual.

“You cannot see what is on the other side of the stream, you can only see that this side is very lush and beautiful, surrounded by forest, but a thick fog hides the opposite bank from your view. You can see little rainbows appear here and there as the sunbeams sneak through the trees and touch the fog. It’s a beautiful mystery on that other side.”

He turned off his web cam while he listened to the visualization of Ms B crossing the bridge to the other side.

Six – forests and homes

Oregon is on fire. The winds on Monday night took out trees and power lines and brought fire and smoke and landslides to even our coastal community where we can no longer take our position beside the sea in a rain forest for granted. Breathing carcinogenic air for days intersects with the health concerns we already face and I find that this situation is helping neither my breath holding tendencies nor my anxiety. I checked the folder with the important documents, though I will probably continue pacing my house, looking out at the orange sky, looking at items and wondering which ones I would grab if we were to be evacuated, too.

I know people who had to grab their house cats in the middle of the night and get out with their lives. There are so many more who I do not know. I try not to feel sorry for myself that my overnight backpacking plans with Quinn have been postponed.

Hundreds of geese huddled along the edge of the bay as we drove through foggy smoke after picking up pizza for date night at home. Robins had sat in the grass all day looking stunned. So much dryness. So much stillness after such a turbulent wind. The lawn crunched under my feet as I pick pears up off the ground, embarrassed by the plenty falling into my hands while others are losing everything, or still waiting to hear the outcomes of their everything.

The next morning I couldn’t take the pacing anymore and flipped a hundred pancakes for evacuees sheltering in a church.

Seven – farmer’s markets

Even when farmer’s markets have been canceled in the past, my farm would still show up, in full marine foul weather gear, and sell tomatoes and cauliflower and bundles of fresh parsley out of the truck as cold rain fell in sheets and we sipped hot drinks from thermoses. This week, we did not sell any tomatoes, the markets and even the harvest were paused while we all held our breath and prayed for that manner of rain to fall.

Eight – aquarium exhibits

Max lived thirty years – a long sea lion life – but it still makes me cry that he is dead now, too. My toddler would point him out to tourists back when we had an annual membership to the aquarium and went there regularly, and they’d remark on my son’s lengthy attention span and articulate commentary about Max’s activities during the daily feeding routine. Other children would peel off after thirty seconds and Quinn would stay, narrate, re-enact, commune with Max, beyond even the attention span of the adults. I wonder if Max is finally allowed to be released back into the sea, but I have doubts.

I can’t bring myself to tell Quinn about this fresh heartbreak.

Nine – my arms

I still wouldn’t get to hug him.

Ten – enough

I think I’ll leave this one empty.

~a month in the life of a lifelong learner~ resilience and reciprocity

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An actual week of down time

Late july… TAG program had finished, nobody was visiting, the dojo was closed, it wasn’t time for theatre camp yet, and the only thing quinn had that week was 2 afternoon swim lessons. it was some much needed down time. We got to do things like family boating and have the family of camp boss came over to bounce. q binge listened to audio books to catch up on the wings of fire series- i took him to the library to get a few books (actual ones with pages) and it reminded him of series he wants to continue.

pancakes

our pancakes visited! they seem like they are getting so big… until i see them next to quinn! He truly grew so very tall this past year. We all went to Arr place for breakfast, and then played at the big pirate ship playground. We flew kites at the beach, and went home for spaghetti dinner. Quinn is still branching out little by little with foods, and instead of his normal plain noodles with only parmesan on top, requested his noodles “lightly stained” with sauce.

Laptop repair

quinn made it through last school year using my old laptop, but by the end he was limping along with a cracked screen which would cause glitches (it is touch screen so the cracked area would act like it was the place being touched instead of wherever you were navigating with the actual mouse). after a tiny bit of research i spent $20 on a new screen/digitizer and one evening we took it apart, and the next morning we finished putting it back together! and turned it on! and it worked! It is hard to overstate how pleased we were with ourselves! It now acts as just a standard screen and no longer does touchscreen, so there might be a loose connection but the touch screen feature is not necessary. just the fact that it runs and didn’t completely get broken beyond repair by my repair is a win. Hurray for a second year of school with this laptop (fingers crossed) for $20!

Here he is putting in the last screw, whooping when it actually turned on, and then testing minecraft to enjoy the lack of glitches!

it’s been kind of nice that his laptop was under the weather. i didn’t rush to fix it for summer and i think he spent more time unplugged because of it. he used it some when it wasn’t acting up, but would eventually lose patience with glitches and do off screen playing.

reciprocity

he has days where he is not always up for conversation and will just silent treatment me. not in a mean way, it just seems he is inside there percolating. fixing the laptop screen was a fun activity together and we had a couple of good nights at karate, as he has been learning his green belt techniques, so it’s not all surliness. sifu was joking with him, “who is this person named quinn, we used to have a student named quinn a long time ago but he hasn’t been here in a long time,” and quinn was a little quiet then too, and at the end as we were leaving and sifu was concluding, “it’s just that i missed you and i’m glad you’re here.” Quinn was still quiet so i said, “and i missed you too, sifu.” i think our theme for 7th grade might be reciprocity… it covers the need for reliable two-way communication on the phone that lau and i talked about on the florida beach over smoothie bowls (memories!) and i have established is an area i want to see growth in; and reciprocity also covers being polite and, well, reciprocal in conversations (even if he didn’t feel like saying “i missed you too” then i still want him to say something that acknowledges the other person has spoken.

We had a reciprocity conversation in the car soon after that and i explained my thoughts on the phone and conversational aspects and said it’s my goal for him for 7th grade (like kitchen lunch making skills were a focus in 5th grade). he understood and seemed cheerful about it all. he hadn’t checked his phone since the previous morning, and he pulled it out to check and had messages from aragorn. he and aragorn are forming their band, naming it “the poets” and the song they want to learn right now is seven nation army  (the white stripes). i know come as you are (anyone here familiar with the band nirvana?) is also on their list to learn.

sneakers and the perception of coolness

another interesting topic arose around shoe buying… he wanted the same exact pair (saucony raptor) of running shoes as last year (still resists change as a general rule), but since he can’t (all i can find is a size 14) i looked up some other saucony and found a cool looking black pair with “slime” lime green accents, totally his color. i showed him, and he seemed to like them, but then he told me he wasn’t that excited about shoe buying because he’d still be uncool. Hold up, what? He explained, it’s the middle school thing where you have to have the In Brand of things and it’s all some kids talk about… so i asked what brand was cool last year, and he said it was Nike. i said, “well here’s the thing. i wear nikes because my feet are narrow. your feet are wide, so they might be wrong for your feet. but if you want to get nikes we can try, but i want you to try them on at the store first.” he was sort of relieved, “you mean they’re not too expensive?” and i said, “a lot of nikes are too expensive, but there are some i can afford, you would have to choose from those.” as we scrolled through them online so he saw the $8000 air jordans and the $75 dollar air pegasus (the ones i get). so a spinoff conversation happened about perceived coolness, how it changes later on into wanting to be set apart from others instead of being just like everyone else… and how it’s normal to want to do what others are doing in middle school, but that i wanted him to weigh his own likes and preferences and comfort above what others would think or like. Why be cool when you can be quull?

The next day he tried on nikes, they felt bad (too tight around his ankle) and the store only had black/white (no good colors). So he tried on saucony again. he said they felt exactly right like his old ones, and wanted to order the quull slime green ones. so i did. size 9 for those keeping score at home.

Theatre camp

q loved theatre camp as usual. they did a lot of who/what/where/when/why improvisation skits for the first few days and the first day he was a narrator, something to do with a bank guarding a cat shaped cake, and a rat came to try to steal it but it was not stolen in the end? The second day he told me, “i was a goldfish that was being carried in a sock, and really didn’t have any lines.” then we went up to middle school for registration and saw another kid who had just been at theatre camp as well who shouted across the parking lot, “hey goldfish in a sock!”

In quinn’s theatre camp performance this year, he was a battle-weary nutcracker toy who came to life with his gang of other animated toys (a ballerina on whom he had a crush, a teddy bear who liked to give him hugs when he would have war flashbacks, and a jack in the box) who all together came to life to try and save the toy shop from the evils of online shopping. the oscar may have to go to the girl who would enter each conversation the toys were having with, “did i hear you say….” and tried to entice them, in her “creepy house lady” automaton voice, to buy from her company spamazon, “which in no way was meant to resemble a copyrighted billion-dollar corporation” oh, how i love theatre kids. The icing on the cake was the spamazon emblem with, instead of an orange smiling arrow, an orange frowny face arrow.

q’s costume really accentuated his height- he wore a light blue soldier costume, with a very tall faux fur hat on his head – he looked impossibly tall. He did well with his role, and i love that they managed to feature him drumming in one scene where they did a talent show and his talent was drumming (just as the ballerina doll was an actual ballet student and got to showcase her moves). In the 2:00 show quinn had a small tom-tom type of drum, and the other toys danced while he drummed. In the 6:00 show, his entrance with the drum was late, and i heard his voice side stage call “on with the show!” and he came out carrying the helmet of the spamazon creepy lady and drummed on that. afterwards, he told me the drum had been completely missing, and so he improvised and grabbed that and carried on. I asked if someone was off stage helping him problem solve that… nope! I am SO proud of his ability to stay cool when things don’t go perfectly (he was downright cheerful about it and laughed it off) and that resilience right there is me getting my money’s worth on theatre camp.

Quinn told me that he met two girls r and e, and was happy to see his friend c with whom he has attended every theatre camp so far, but who goes to a different school, and the four of them played settlers of catan in between the 2:00 and 6:00 performances. goldberry was also attending this session, and played a hilariously emo teen character in one of the other groups. As usual, some of the youth screenwriting impressed me with the level of humor, worldliness, and existential depth.

we left for portland after the 6:00 performance and woke up to snuggles with our 6 month old (!) w pancake. She is the squishiest girl. Then it was time to head for the airport for our trip to new york!

On the planes and in the airport, quinn looked at his d and d players manual, looking like such a teen with his devices all plugged in charging and sipping a soy steamer. he also read his warriors book (he is about 6 books into the 25 or so there are in the series). On the long flight he turned on the map on his seat screen and obsessively updated me on our flight speed over the ground and amount of time to our destination. He asked if we would be getting our connecting flight in “the airport with the dinosaur” aka chicago o’hare, which was going to be the case on our return journey. The flight there went through boston, where we ate burgers for dinner.

We didn’t arrive at grammy and grampy’s house until after midnight, so you’ll have to stay tuned for next month’s lifelong learner installment to find out what happens next!