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.
This year’s song lyric that has been rolling around my December brain is “with a voice as big as the sea.” Maybe not such a surprise that I choose the oceanic line, but I think it’s in keeping with the theme from November of celebrating bigger. I’m celebrating having Quinn home for a full week for the first time since March 2020. I guess you could say I identify with any Mary who bears a precious son, has to live without him, but knows in her heart she will be reunited with him one day. I’m also celebrating eleven years of loving Rich. I took my camera to document the rose-gold ocean sunset on the shortest day, because I’m also celebrating the return of the light. Amazing how the change can be so incremental – just three seconds more light the next day – but somehow light accumulates and there will be summer once again, with a little patience. Happy holidays to all our loved ones.
I am grateful to be feeding a bottomless boy and playing endless rounds of Tiny Epic Quest this evening. As Quinn has slowly reintegrated into life at the dragon house, I stood in Fred Meyer one recent day contemplating the gummi vitamins. The ones in the cupboard from when he was in seventh grade and the pandemic began that led him to shelter in place at his dad’s for over two years were kids’ multivitamins, now hardened with neglect and past their expiration date. On the grocery store shelf, I looked back and forth between kids’ and men’s. Kids’. Men’s. I put the men’s gummi multivitamins in my shopping cart. Grateful for vitamins, and the boy-man sleeping under my roof tonight.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 12
11/12/22
I am grateful for sunshine again. The dwindling of the busy market season allows me to work a little on Saturday to earn my produce, then go home and nap. Then walk in the woods with the kittens (I guess feral kittens love to be taken for walks) taking backlit photos of vine maple leaves to wake up from my nap again. A newt saunters by with a wave. A stand of tiny mushrooms sprouting from a pinecone catches a sunbeam. I go back inside and I am grateful to get to watch Quinn, also sunlit, eat systematically around the flaky pastry crust edge of the Danish I brought home for him, then the gooey cream cheese center, then lick his fingers.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 13
11/13/22
I am grateful for a phone call with Mom today. Another big 2022 gratitude is that I finally got to visit Mom and Dad in January and June, and I’m looking forward to another visit in January. And then June (when I graduate) and then having them come out and visit us in Oregon again. I am so grateful for my parents and for their love.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 14
11/14/22
I’m grateful that even when a day in the middle of November is a blur between the hours of still dark and dark again, sometimes it’s a very pretty blur.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 15
11/15/22
As I spend each November being grateful, I tend to take a closer look at gratitude.
Every October, I know that by mid-November some gratitude momentum will build. But every November 1st is daunting. There is something about October that whittles me down. Only because I know the benefits do I intentionally sit down each November 1st and begin again.
Sometimes I judge my gratitude posts because they are tainted with ungrateful sentiments (say, about a difficult coparent or a bad hiring process) and think, my gratitude isn’t pure. And then I think, if I strain out any negative feeling, I’m not being very real.
I can both have a terrible day and express gratitude. It’s not that gratitude wins, or that it erases death or taxes or my archnemesis coparent. It doesn’t resolve my inlaws’ complicated estate-trust-thingie and it doesn’t end war or defeat the patriarchy.
What gratitude does do, is it lights a little warming fire in my soul while the shitstorm howls and sleets and ices over the part of the world I can’t control, just outside. I have soft walls and the wind can knock me over sometimes, but I prop my shelter up and keep rebuilding my little fire. Imperfections, scars, holes are all illuminated. But so are textures, colors. I notice the way the sunset makes the tent walls glow orange, noticing that the night is long, but the sun does rise again each morning. I keep turning toward it, and it keeps being there to greet me. Grateful for gratitude, year six.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 16
11/16/22
I am grateful for salted caramel rum gelato.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 17
11/17/22
I am grateful to be married to such a hardworking person who works overtime hours for large chunks of the year. I am also grateful that he leaves work promptly at 4:30 for date night, because priorities. Also, the sunrise over the bay when I arrived at work this morning was easy to be grateful for.
I have felt grateful quite a bit in 2022. One thing that happened to me this year is I got hired to a permanent position doing what I’ve been doing for decades, contract to contract, grant to grant, lab to lab, with some lapses. Biologists do this all the time, but it’s a horrific system, and should be phased out, and I’m not shy about holding this opinion. It would be difficult to overstate the amount of relief brought on by this development, after all these years. Even the tiny auto loan I took out ten years ago to buy my 2002 Dodge Neon required payments that stretched, at that time, beyond the end of my one-year job contract. And a one-year contract is a good one, often the best there is. And sometimes they get renewed, like that one did, that year, so I paid off the Neon after all.
Side note: I’m grateful for my little Neon, with its little second engine that could, that I still drive to my job, which is now a permanent job I can keep until I’m done with all the car payments I may ever want to make.
I like fish, and I’m grateful to get to work with them, and I like the people who work on the fish with me. I’m grateful to be needed and valued enough for my skills that a whole job, with benefits, was bestowed on me.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 5
11/5/22
I’m so grateful for all the congrats on the job, wow, thanks everyone! To follow on gratitude for my job, another big thing happened in 2022 that I am also super grateful for. Rich and I closed on our house that we’ve been hoping to buy since we moved into it six years ago. A strong sense of providence and a heaping scoop of divine glitter sparkles pervaded the timing of the job-house combination. See my previous post about payments that extend past the end of contract durations if you want to understand why. Two mortgage payments in, and a lot more to go, these two big adulting milestones feel like they just had to go hand in hand.
I have not made Facebook posts or told many people about these huge life events in real time (July for the job, September for the house) and I know now that I was falling into the silence-will-protect-me trap. I have feared that knowledge of my successes would lead my coparent to strike out, but either these new developments made it to him despite having kept my celebrations small, or here’s an idea, maybe it’s not me or anything I have control over that makes him play dirty.
So I am celebrating now. I am so grateful to have a home with a wood stove that my husband has been keeping warm through the last few weeks as the weather got chilly. I am grateful for the well-insulated walls and the sturdy roof and the quirky backsplash and the big front window. I am grateful for our good well and our septic tank and our driveway covered in a blanket of needles. I am grateful for comfy spots to snuggle our kitties and my borrowed fairy dog. I am grateful for the acre and a quarter sloping gently to the slough-bayou, with giant beautiful redwood, port orford and western red cedar, hemlock, and spruce trees lining the trail we have walked into being and Rich has maintained with his power tools for our daily walks. I am grateful for a couple of redwood trees in particular, the wedding trees we stood in front of when we said our vows five years ago, and so grateful we don’t have to move away from them.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 6
11/6/22
I’m grateful for a day full of real and satisfying work of filling our pantry. I have been attending the fill-your-pantry market since its early days, back when Rew was still my last name, before I even met Rich. When they can’t find my pre-order filed under “H” I know to ask them to look under “R”. When I was a kid eating meat and potatoes on the farm, Dad would exasperate me by telling me the name of the cow I was eating. I usually made a big scene and stomped away from the table, but I have come around to appreciate that close knowledge of where our food came from. I did not ask the nice farm family today the names of the cow, chickens, and pig we will be eating this winter, but I am sure they knew. They also radiated gratitude for our purchase, for supporting their farm, and said it was fine to haul our chickens, sausage, and roasts out to our car in their cooler and bring it back in when we were done.
I am also grateful for a new four-gallon bucket of honey because there is something so wealthy about all that gold.
I forgot my camera, but luckily I always have an abundance of local food photos up my sleeve.
P.S. Happy nacho day!
~30 days of gratitude~ day 7
11/7/22
As I try not to be devastated that the sun is down when I leave work, I am grateful to get a very nifty glimpse of the moon while driving home. The top half was obscured under a periwinkle dusk cloud, which made the moon look like a big whale eye (not the first time I’ve seen whales in the sky). I didn’t capture that image but when I got home I watched it rise up through the trees and then went inside where there was soup in the crock pot.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 8
11/8/22
Today I’m grateful I got to leave work on time before dark, and that it wasn’t raining, or even very windy, and I stopped by the beach. I’m grateful I thought of it this morning, so I had my camera with me. I’m grateful I arrived in time for sunset, and that sunset was quirky and unique. I’m grateful I started my day by turning in my final thirty-page creative writing packet of my third semester of the MFA program I’ve been semi-secretly enrolled in. Twelve thirty-page packets since last June means I’m about to be a thesis student. I’m grateful to be quitting this business of staying small and keeping it all under wraps. Also grateful for my vote and to all who vote for women not to have to stay small.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 9
11/9/22
I’m grateful for an ordinary day of hard work, kitties and woodstove fires, husband hugs, and nachos. (And falling asleep in my chair before posting a gratitude post, apparently!)
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.
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.
When swallowtail butterflies wake up in the morning and climb out of their sleeping bags, they sit still and angle themselves toward the sun. They need to warm up, need to absorb enough sunlight into their muscles before they can fly.
There is no way I would have believed you if you told me last summer that I would feel better this summer despite Quinn still not being home. If you had told me last July that he still wouldn’t be home this July it might have done me in. Holding these Julys up side by side, there is no contest. I am no less tattered, but last July I was having trouble climbing out of my sleeping bag.
This July I am sitting still beside the sunlight each morning.
This July I am flying.
Tattered survivors. Pieces torn away. Wings made of something as fragile as tissue paper or gauze stretched across the thinnest wire, would melt in heavy rain, would shred in strong wind, would shatter in a freeze.
I watch them hold onto the flowers and ride the wind.
This July, I am holding on to the flowers and riding the wind.
I have been gathering the dried seed heads of the various columbine flowers that grow in my garden, and was headed to the final patch, the one that grows under the butterfly bush with the dark purple flowers, which are in brilliant bloom in late July.
I was so focused on the seed collection task, hunched over and looking down, that I was startled to see a shadow among the bush’s own shadow that was moving, a flutter that betrayed its being cast by something more than leaf. Abruptly, I stood up and almost hit my head on a butterfly.
This swallowtail had such tattered wings that I could see the purple of the flowers through the hole in its left forewing. It was also missing the frilly lobe that should be along the trailing edge of the left hindwing, and had other torn and frayed edges, signs of a long, hard journey, perhaps beating to windward.
It spent a long time sipping from the bright orange throats of the dark purple flowers and let me take close photos on that bright sunny day. I was grateful for this little reminder of the butterfly effect of gratitude, grateful also for the visual reminder that we may be tattered and beat up, but we should keep going, that there is still beauty in our surviving, that there is still sweetness to drink in.
I find it interesting that I saw its shadow first, even while looking down. I am peering into shadows even in summer, because if 2020 was a butterfly, it would be the most shredded looking one still flying the friendly skies. Even though July is full of bright sunshine and winged beings for the sun to shine upon, this is a different sort of summer in a different sort of year.
Normally July is a time of flying around the country visiting family, this time of wings and flight. Instead, this July is a month of being still and figuring out how to be okay with that, grieving the loss of that time with beloved kin.
As I peer into the shadows, I must remember that at least these shadows are being cast by butterflies, and take note that it is also the time of year to stop, spread my wings out on a leaf, and just absorb some sunlight.
