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.
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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.
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.
The day after quinn’s birthday, as soon as sleepover friends went home we set out for a visit to see/meet our new pancake w. rich had met her on the day she was born, but this would be quinn’s and my first time meeting this new little person, still very brand new at only two days old! Quinn has always liked babies, but i think he has a special even softer spot in his heart for his new niece, born the day before his birthday, and he wasted no time getting her into his arms.
triceratopses and tesseracts
There is a little pisces boy i know who just turned 3 who reminds me so much of quinn. he loves drumming and dinosaurs and is very articulate… when i see him he reminds me a lot of those days. His mom posted a video from his birthday of him opening a present. he gasped, “a triceratops!” then put his little hand out to the side how quinn used to do, “i love triceratopses!!!” studied it some more, found a slot with his finger, “it’s a triceratops so you can put pennies in it!” as his mom elaborated on that, he turned and looked up at the camera with this smile, “it’s for me!”
Quinn and i both watched it over and over. and then we did an anagram of the word “triceratopses” (plural) because, well duh. and i don’t know if it was because we had just re-watched a wrinkle in time that weekend, but one of the first words we found in “triceratopses” was “tesseract.”
he had some poetry homework to catch up on from missing several days of school one week. he was venting about how long the poetry unit had been and how he felt like it was making him hate poetry instead of like it. i told him he should reclaim poetry for his own, and whenever he was assigned to write a poem, smuggle in something he likes, regardless of the assigned topic. we got off on a tangent of smuggling dinosaurs into every poem. To test this idea, he would give me a topic such as “book” and i would say, “the small boy turned to the diplodocus page of his book,” and got him doing it too. all that week i’d ask “did you get a chance to smuggle in any dinos today?”
sand and sea lions
on a wednesday afternoon i picked up quinn from school and took him to the maritime museum. there were tibetan monks visiting, and they were creating a sand mandala all week. They had started creating the mandala on tuesday so by wednesday they had gotten a portion of the work done, and would keep working outward from the center until sunday when it would be swept… it is such a cool concept to me because of the celebration of impermanence, of putting time and effort and love into something in painstaking detail knowing it will all wash away… so much to reflect on there of course. a mystery and a paradox that is central to the human condition, really. i did not know quinn would be so captivated. when we went in, i gave him a tiny bit of background but not much. but he just instinctively knew it was a calm quiet space, he sat down and folded his hands and quietly watched. a woman came over to where we were sitting and watching and showed us where we could make a small mandala of our own and use the tools and get the feel of it… quinn loved making a sand mandala. he was so into it, saying, “we need to do more of this.” and then he was completely fine with brushing it all away at the end! that was the part i was most amazed about, i think. the metal tools for the sand sounded like such a happy sound, and reminded me of frogs. bayou frogs have been vocal the past week so it is starting to feel like spring, but when i said that both quinn and another little girl who was making a mandala thought i meant the wooden musical frogs (she apparently has some at her grandma’s house and quinn has one as well). the monks were all smiling and doing their work but when they’d take a break they were all on their smartphones and ipads. one of them came over to the table the kids were working at and played a video of the dissolution ceremony of the big mandala (another time they did it) to show them the idea of the whole thing, but it was just so funny (to me- the kids were not phased) to have him prop an ipad up and hit play.
something about the calm of those monks, the happy sounds of the metal tools they were using, the beauty and color of the sand, the sun glancing off the bay in through the windows. he didn’t want to leave.
on our way in he had said he wanted to visit the sea lion dock while we were on the bay front, so eventually after an hour went by i suggested a walk to the sea lions and he was ready. so we walked. he held my hand the whole walk to the sea lions, up and down the bayfront and back to the car. i know he doesn’t even really think about it but i just love that he wants to hold my hand.
at the sea lion dock we watched them for a while (there were lots, all sleeping and jockeying for sleeping positions on the floating docks) and we were commenting on their behaviors. one had a strap or collar around its neck looking like it needed to be removed and it didn’t look healthy, and quinn was moderately upset by that (“someone needs to DO something about that”). our other observations were more amusing. one huge sea lion we nicknamed grandpa was situated on the corner of the dock with his face hanging over the edge. he would lift his head enough to breathe but then let his head loll into the water. you could watch him exhaling bubbles into the water as he slept! there were other snorers above water level, whose cheeks/whiskers you could watch as they would shake or flap, and we’d point them out to each other. the way sea lions assert dominance by opening their mouth at each other… sometimes it gets much more heated with barks and bites, but a lot of times it’s, “i open my mouth in your general direction,” and that settles the dispute. we had fun doing behavioral ecology observations.
social studies homework on ancient civilizations
Also this month we played a game from christmas called tiny epic quest, that we hadn’t had a chance to play yet. It is roughly a board game d and d adventure with lots of little props and pieces and spells and quests and goblins. when he was going to school that friday morning i asked him what his best parts of the week were, and he chose making the sand mandala and playing the game.
he spent some time with his birthday present called turing tumble, a fun marble-programming gizmo with an anime workbook full of challenges that build on each otherr in story format. basically a toy made precisely for quinn.
with 2/3 of 6th grade behind him, he attended his 3rd dance (glow in the dark theme).
pie!!! lots of little blueberry pies. i dropped quinn off at the dojo on pi day (march 14th) for jump tag and pi day pie fest.
a dear friend commented on quinn’s birthday post that he might like the book navigating early by clare vanderpool so i immediately requested the audio book from our library. he loved it, finished listening to it before i had gotten to the halfway point, so continued to listen again along with me as i caught up. It’s a book that takes place in maine in 1945 about 13 year old boys, friendship, mothers and sons, and brothers. There is hiking on the appalachian trail, boat building and rowing, and fly fishing. It is also a book about pi, which coincidentally made it a wonderful book to happen to be listening to on 3/14. One of the boys in the book knows pi in colors and textures and reads the digits of pi like a story. He is not only a synesthete, but has other quirks of sensory, intellectual, and emotional intensity that remind me of someone i know who also likes numbers. sock seams and shaking water out of his face; in a metaphor for his friend’s ability to be irrationally stuck on an idea, the narrator likens his brain to a lobster in a lobster trap; literal interpretations and sureness of being right; jelly bean sorting to organize his neurons in emotionally or intellectually puzzling situations. highly recommend.
executive function skills
he remembered at 7:15am on the last day of 6 week term, after completing 2 missing assignments (for days on end) and getting up to speed on how to do his upcoming math homework, that he also had an art project to finish and hand in first period that day. doh!
one day he was getting up to speed on graphing linear equations, y= b+ mx; he knew what all the variables meant and understood what recursive functions are and how to find the ordered pairs that solve this equation and how to graph ordered pairs and find the y intercept. and yet… was getting stuck on how to do it. He did not stay stuck for long. however I spent quite a bit of energy trying to convince him that graph paper would be a good thing to use for his homework this time since it is all graphing which is what graph paper was invented for. one feels one is stating the obvious sometimes. he finally came around. again, the culprit was stuckness. having used blank paper all year for math homework he was in a groove and reluctant to change, but in the end realized it’s ok to change your way and adapt to what is happening in real time. increasing flexibility one millimeter at a time!
i distinctly recall feeling thankful for spring break on the horizon!
