~thankful thursday~ glow slug

Posted on November 22, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ days 14 and 15

11/14 and 11/15/24

I was grateful yesterday for another date night, and tonight I’m grateful for nachos again. But in addition to those repeats, I’m grateful that I’m not taking this class for a grade (which apparently was a gratitude I posted five years ago yesterday). I’m also grateful for some awesomely inspiring writing I’ve been reading, like this essay from Andrea Gibson (whose writing I also shared last year). They just so happened to mention gratitude, wouldn’t you know. “I hope we each feel a deep responsibility to be grateful for our lives through this time, to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun.”

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/24

I am grateful for another sunrise (“to wholly cherish every morning we are alive to see the sun,” eh?) setting up the farmstand in the predawn murk working shoulder to shoulder with good people. I am grateful for the abundance I take home (pictured here on the truck’s front bumper), and for the sturdy, hearty vegetables of fall, including, har har, a very “hearty” rutabaga that could so easily have passed for that meaty human muscle. I am also grateful for my sweet kitty Rey, also known as Reymond, who is named for a Jedi and whose favorite toy is her mouse ball. Rey also likes to hunt down the green ear plugs that tumble out of Rich’s pockets after work. She was like Kylo last year, a crusty-eyed outdoor kitten who opted in on condo life, but now she is a full housecat who likes to make suggestions in her tiny-meow voice about when the wet food ought to be served to herself and Bart. Sometimes her tiny meows are just requests for “urgent care pets” and I pick her up and tuck her on my left side like a baby while I do kitchen things. She loves cream cheese. One of her least cat-like traits is that when Rich vacuums, she comes running and likes to play vacuum games and even allows him to vacuum her fur. She likes to tuck herself into the small space beside Rich’s hip in his recliner. She sits with me during writing time every morning at 4, which she has been licking my face to wake me up for at 3, because daylight savings is a gift that keeps giving for a while when you have pets. I am grateful for the big nap that Rey and I took on the couch this afternoon, and a yummy schnitzel dinner from the wonderful new food truck in town (locals: follow Raised by Wolves on the social media for their menu, they are fabulous and they incorporate veggies from my favorite farm). And now Rey is curled up by my feet, but figuratively she is curled up inside my internal organ that resembles a rutabaga.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/24

I’m grateful that some communication happens with no words.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/24

I’m so dang grateful for sunshine today. There was lots of rain, too, and that meant rainbows. I am grateful for the steady steps a project can take with time and patience.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/24

I’m grateful for a successful trip to the vet for this guy today. His name is Peachy and he showed up while I was in Kodiak this summer, and approximately three days after I came home was converted from scaredy yard cat hiding in the wood pile to taken-care-of lap cat sleeping in the condo at night. He purred right through his vaccines today, and is such a big healthy boy at seven pounds. I probably have enough cats to ride out the rest of the gratitudes, and I won’t do that, but he is one of the ones I’d be in error not to mention. I am grateful for the way he flops onto the driveway to have his belly rubbed as soon as one of us appears, and the way he adores his big brother, R2. I am grateful for how kitties seem to be made of pure gratitude themselves, that they transmit through their beautiful kitty eyes.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/24

I am grateful for sunlight on water.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/24

I’m grateful for a second day in a row of sunlight on water between storms, for date night garlic bread with marinara dipping sauce, and for science. A new nudibranch from the very deep Pacific Ocean has been named, after many years of observations and research in order to establish that the mystery mollusk is, in fact, a nudibranch. This creature lives at thousands of feet, under the extreme pressure and incredible darkness of the midnight zone, where the soft-bodied animal creates its own light. This self-sufficient being contains male and female parts and collects prey by trapping them in a floaty-flowing hood. When threatened, their bioluminescence scatters across their body like a starry sky. So if anybody is looking for a mascot for these times, science has got you covered.

~thankful thursday~ flyer

Posted on November 16, 2024 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

11/8/24

I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/24

I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/24

I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.

(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/24

There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.

It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.

She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.

I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.

I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.

But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.

That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.

In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.

After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.

In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.

But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.

So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/24

In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/24

I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.

~thankful thursday~ celebrating bigger

Posted on November 11, 2022 by marybethrew

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

11/4/22

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!)

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/22

Today I’m grateful for sunshine.

~thankful thursday~ everywhere and nowhere

Posted on November 25, 2021 by marybethrew

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 6^th is nachos. The 22^nd is not the only day I dedicate to husband gratitude, but it’s a definite one each and every year. Every 22^nd of every month is to be celebrated, whether we are celebrating our first date or our wedding day, and all the 22^nds in between bear the title “dorkaversary” to keep things light. Today is the penultimate dorkaversary before we celebrate Ten Years Together on December 22^nd.

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 23^rd, is his day the same way the 22^nd 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.

~thankful thursday~ the helpers

Posted on November 18, 2021 by marybethrew

11/11/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

Today I am grateful for weekly date nights, for blackberries pulled out of the freezer and turned into syrup for date night cocktails, and of course for my handsome date. The photos are from other dates, we did not go to the golden gate bridge this evening, just to the Noodle Café, for which I am also grateful. But I do get to go to some very cool places with him when I am riding in the passenger seat, even when it’s not vacation.

11/12/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

I was having another one of those “grateful for husband/kitties/popcorn, again?” moments, wondering whether it was worth repeating all the same things over again that I am always grateful for. Then I looked back at my memories, as I’ve got a good pile of previous year gratitude posts to fall back on if I am already going to be repeating myself. I saw that one year ago today, my dad was spending the night in the hospital after a scary heart rate drop. A year later, he has a pacemaker and has re-emerged from retirement yet again and is back driving bus, but now with the proper number of beats per minute. My post from two years ago concerned butterflies and migrations and extra trips I had flown in 2019 to visit my parents, including the very last one I took there in October that year while my mom was having radiation. I am so grateful to be able to say that she is cancer-free and he is marching steadily to his new beat and in four more days they will both be boosted. My gratitude for my parents’ health is of course both amplified and shadowed by my husband’s loss of two parents in one year. But I’ve noticed that at least for me, this gratitude season always seems to involve looking into shadows, trusting that stories about shadows are so often secretly stories about light.

11/13/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

Grateful for a blue-sky farmer’s market day, a long evening nap on the couch by the wood stove, and bagels, the college roommate of nachos. (I took no good photos of my rainbow display today, so this one is from a few weeks ago; now there are more root veggies and fewer eggplants, but still colorful and abundant.)

11/14/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

While not vacationing in Oklahoma, I was grateful repeatedly for strangers who helped us take care of things. There was C, who reassured us that we were moving Nancy into assisted living at the exact right moment and not a moment too soon, and then texted me after her first night to let us know Nancy had enjoyed hot cocoa after dinner! There was E, who sat patiently with us in the bank, untying confusing paperwork knots and offering real sympathy, sharing her own story of loss even though we were randoms revolving through her office. There was J who sat with us in the funeral home, explaining the steps to this Advanced Adulting task over again when I got lost. She radiated sweetness, kindness.

And finally, I will be grateful forever for D, the nurse on 3 West at St. Francis hospital who could tell, without being able to talk to her, that Nancy needed her room a little bit warmer to be comfortable. D, who received word of decisions made in accordance with Nancy’s wishes to remove feeding tube, then a day later to remove oxygen cannula, and whose hands carried out those important jobs. D, who applied chapstick, and told us about Nancy puckering, appreciating the attention to her dry lips despite having maxed out the morphine drip. Into the isolation room she would hustle when the morphine drip beeped its “downstream occlusion” alarm, proclaiming, “it’s the song of my people!” And would joke along with us about how Nancy was just trying to get us to change the subject. D showed us her trick of being able to write both backwards and forwards with both her left and right hand. Instead of logging into the isolation room computers, she would write backwards on the glass doors, to be able to input her notes when she exited a room. D has been on the COVID ward since the pandemic began, so she has had time to perfect this skill. Concurrently with Nancy, she had two pregnant patients and was worried for them. She also had a belligerent patient who kept ripping off his cannula, who then signed himself out AMA. It’s no joke in there. When a patient from the psych ward was also COVID positive and on suicide watch, she would play tic-tac-toe with them using the dry erase markers, sitting on the other side of the window. She thought Nancy was “just a doll,” and shared about her work at the facility her Grandma had lived in. She understood dementia but it didn’t seem to get her down. She would ask her Grandma and her other residents, when they told her each incongruous story, “how old are you?” And when they said 39, or 56, it often made the story make marginally more sense. After two different days of D having a feeling “this might be her day,” based on Nancy’s vitals, she finally told us, “I’ll see y’all on Saturday,” the day before Nancy died. We did not see D on Saturday, but I’m so grateful for the days she took care of Nancy and of us.

(originally posted two years ago)

11/15/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

Still grateful about this.

Happy Monday, friends.

11/16/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

I am grateful for books! There are some gems in this rainbow of recent reads.

(from gratitude 2019)

11/17/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

Today I am grateful for the Ghost of Gratitude Past.

~summer shorts~ give rise

Posted on July 19, 2021 by marybethrew

“Some people have an aesthetic of delineation and symmetry, of keeping each vegetable distinct from each other vegetable. That’s great, and it works for them. My philosophy, though, is abundance. I want to draw people in with color, and piles of overflowing vegetables, spilling forth from cornucopias, piling into one another, blending into a rainbow.”

I stacked sopping wet bunches of carrots, cold water droplets sprinkling the multicolored veggie-print fabric on which I laid them. The new staff member painted by number, adding veggies to each basket I had laid out with a representative of what I wanted there.

Laurie had asked me to help refresh the vibe of our market booth. When she asked me to make a rainbow display, it flipped a switch for me. My pandemic farmer’s market year-plus has been a continued effort of showing up, devotion, doing what I believe in – food security, organic growing, getting food to the people. It used to be more about enjoyment than just devotion. I haven’t been making displays, much less rainbow ones. I have been letting the crew who handled the veggies handle the veggies, while I handled the money. An important job, but not soul-nourishing. Emerging from the pandemic has been halting and awkward, as predicted, but it’s been dawning on us that we can revive some things, like big, beautiful displays. The prospect of making a sweeping swath of veggie artwork before me, I was back to excited.

Cascading eggplants, purple onions, and purple majesty potatoes, purple carrots with their orangey-red lateral root scars. Fragrant basil, parsley, dill, and mint flooding green leaves around four kinds of zucchini, two kinds of cucumbers, and broccoli. Pattypan and yellow summer squash the color of sunshine blending into goldenrod-hued sweet Italian peppers, their tapered tips and seductive shoulders peeking from a basket near the center, making their summer debut. A mountain of orange carrots, golden beets blending into red beets, red Norland potatoes, dryland (non-irrigated) tomatoes, concentrated red succulence.

While searching for the term for the lines on a carrot, wondering about that specific feature of rootiness, I stumbled upon a Plant Ontology forum (as one does) and learned they can also be called root periderm scars. I guess they have been called root lenticels, but it is now understood that they do not conduct gas-exchange. They are formed when lateral roots emerge and initiate a wound response in the periderm – the peripheral cell layers. Cells proliferate, heal over this wound, form a new layer. The plant ontologists decided a new name, root periderm scars, was warranted.

It makes me think about how forming new roots can inflict injury. How wounds can result in scars, in tissue that cannot breathe. But also how injury can give rise to new growth, new layers.

~thankful thursday~ hallowed

Posted on November 26, 2020 by marybethrew

11/19/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

I am grateful my husband gives me assignments when he knows I am feeling blue, to go outside with my camera. Otherwise, I may never have noticed that spiders build webs in clothespins. I am grateful for date night takeout and not having to cook dinner. I am grateful for the reflections shimmering on the bay, the moon slipping out from behind its veil as it followed us, and the surprising coating of hail around one curve of the bay road. It’s easy to feel grateful on Thursdays.

11/20/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

I am grateful for hope.

11/21/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

Today I am grateful that my husband bought me a heated shirt, and that he reminded me it might be a good day to wear it at farmer’s market. He bought it back when I used to spend hours at a time in a 2 degree C cold room siphoning carefully around Arctic cod embryos, and it was a game changer in my life on the same level as the sun ball. (Cold/dark are not my happy places have we talked about this?) I was so happy to push the power button on my shirt after the initial hustle to get the booth set up was over and it was time to stand in one place where I’d need my extremities to continue to function in order to punch calculator buttons. Continue to function they did! Also, the sun was especially shiny today and I am grateful for that excellent light, in addition to warmth.

11/22/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

It has been eight years and eleven months since Rich first talked to me about watching the sunrise while out in the forest cutting firewood… and today we celebrated by taking a drive out to the forest to cut firewood! I didn’t lift a finger, but instead hiked around the surrounding area with my camera, finding fungus in all colors and sizes, and admiring the stumps of the original old growth trees that once presided over the area. These stumps had seen fire long ago, and the moss and lichen layers now knit variegated green tapestries across the charred black canvas. My favorite aspect of the fantastically gigantic stumps was that they each had some sort of window or archway or dome built into them, and each one now housed a hollowed out center – or maybe more accurately, a hallowed space. I peeked through the windows, positioning myself where I could gaze upward through them at the stained glass effect made by the trees and sky, but I did not enter each cathedral, fearing I’d drop down into some underground root system catacomb never to be heard from again. As I circumnavigated each stump, I would inevitably end up on my knees, photographing the tiny mushrooms juxtaposed against such immensity, marveling at the poetry of the whole thing. Rich watched a half dozen elk glide through the ravine from his vantage point, and when he was done filling the truck, he met me down by the stream that coursed for stretches out in the open, then snuck underneath the spongy moss-covered layers of old decomposing timber. Eight years and eleven months ago, Rich and I concluded that we have the same idea of how to go to church on Sunday, and I am grateful we got to spend our morning doing just that together.

11/23/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

So much to be grateful for, like a brother phone call, a super quick and friendly grocery pickup (I had my book with me…), a kitty perched sideways on his tower, a pastel rainbow halo around the moon as its reflection in the swamp water looked like a shiny egg in a nest of twig shadows, then hovered in just the perfect pocket between tree limb silhouettes on a bayou walk, in the periwinkle sky as our after work walks inch closer to dusk. Scattering more seeds in the gratitude garden.

11/24/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

I am belatedly posting a Tuesday post again, because between actually having lab work to do again, and the third session of my writing workshop, I ran out of both time and words. It’s funny because with how I am fairly stewed in words by the end of a workshop session, I simply cannot form sentences. Then this morning my brain woke up at 4:40 with words, but they were for the workshop piece, not the gratitude post! I joked today that I will dedicate my first book to the sun ball which is 100% responsible for me being a born again morning person. I am grateful both for work and workshops, and that my gainful employment brings me up close to creatures such as cod #9436, pictured here looking out from the swim tunnel (think fish treadmill). Of all the years to have been learning so much about respiration, a year characterized by so many horrific examples of struggling to breathe. I am learning all kinds of things about how cold water fish like #9436 breathe, and how they struggle to breathe in water that is too warm. I am grateful to use my dimensional analysis skills hard won in freshman Chemistry class, to still keep trying to save the planet.

11/25/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

Today I am grateful that on my way to put my fish through its paces, I arrived on the scene of a rainbow shining brightly over the ocean.

~thankful thursday~ bedraggled we begin

Posted on November 5, 2020 by marybethrew

11/1/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

Squinting into the mid-afternoon sun while I stood six feet apart from a local friend and goddess in the parking lot of the Toledo post office not long ago, I received both a goddess blessing and some good advice. In getting through this year of hardship, she said she has tried to do her best to “put some light on it” each time the heartache, worry, and trauma pile up on her doorstep. I had just shared that my son has been living and isolating with his dad since March, and dumped a little more on her doorstep, and, true to her word, she put some light on me.

She didn’t tell me it would all be okay, or try to talk me out of feeling how I feel. She looked at me and said, “that must be hard.” It is hard. I’m not doing great, and I didn’t have to pretend I was. I could just stand there like a bedraggled flower and absorb some light, nothing required of me.

It is with some trepidation that I embark on my fifth annual November gratitude challenge, as not-great as I feel; the inner critic, she may need to be shoved in a closet for the season. Luckily, I’m now accustomed to feeling iffy and self-critical as November approaches, then wondering why I was ever uncertain by the end of the month. Each November, I relive the mystery of how a very small sparkly thought of mine can come back to me magnified a hundredfold, a many-mirrored lighthouse beam orienting my small craft to shore in the storm. The unprecedented storm we’re experiencing in 2020 may test the limits of this self-care practice, but it is also why I believe sharing light this year might be more vital than ever.

Today I am grateful for the people in my life who hold this kind of space, who experience the full range of human emotion, expect and accept it of others, help normalize it in the world. Thank you for shining your light.

11/2/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

On Halloween, Rich handed me the newspaper so I could read Bobbie’s beat, in which she had shared the day brightener where adults asked little kids to define love, and Rebecca, age 8, says, “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis, too. That’s love.”

There were seventeen other ones, but I was overcome with cat hair and had trouble reading the rest because my eyes were watering.

After I regained composure, I told him I would probably begin painting my toenails at exactly the age I was no longer able to do so, and we both laughed.

Then we went outside (me, bundled up) to stand near the wedding trees at the head of the trail and observe the full Halloween moon come up over the tree-lined ridge across the slough, and then walked down our trail a little ways, dunking the moon back down into the treeline, and watching it unskewer itself from the trees one more time. As I leaned on him, he had his arms wrapped around me and we heard an owl calling.

Today and every day I am grateful for my husband. This year I have especially felt grateful for the little patch of nature we get to steward; the solace it has provided to be able to just walk outside our door and visit the trees, the birds, the growing things, the sun, moon, and stars, has never felt so profound as it has this year.

After we got back from our moon date, Rich told me he would paint my toenails for me, when the time comes. And that is love.

11/3/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

I’ve been tagged in gratitude posts by no fewer than five of my friends, who are also participating in the gratitude challenge. I am grateful for this safety in numbers, giving me courage.

Once upon a time I changed someone’s mind about something. It’s really so rare, isn’t it? I remember the times my own mind changed about things, and it wasn’t because of a carefully crafted argument or because someone bludgeoned me enough times with their opinion. It was because someone who happened to have a different opinion had built a rapport with me around areas of common ground, and I had time to think about why their opinion differed and weigh it against my own values.

Joel is a customer at the farm stand every Saturday. I don’t think he has missed a single pandemic market, he is there with his face shield, his list, his basket, and he has strived to be among the first customers in line each week. If I had to oversimplify I would say Joel is conservative, Mormon, loves Thomas Jefferson, and preferentially chooses my checkout line. I have the date ready to tell him so he can write it on his check (still writes checks), and we chat while he balances his checkbook right there on the spot. He asks about my son, who he can tell is “very smart” from the stories I’ve told him, and Joel likes that in a kid. I tell him to say hi to his wife Claire for me. I get the feeling Joel does the COVID shopping so she can stay safely at home, and I think that’s sweet.

Joel’s list usually includes the same items: chard, broccoli, carrots (two bunches), green beans, a green bell pepper; melons when they’re in season, delicata squash when it’s their turn. Nothing too crazy, no watermelon radishes or radicchio. He doesn’t branch out, if we don’t have it, he doesn’t substitute. If green beans are out of season, he skips them. Someone on the crew who hasn’t known Joel as long was delivering the bad news that we didn’t have green bell peppers that day, but offered that we did have yellow bell peppers. I knew this was normally a no-go but I wondered if he might hear the suggestion if it was coming from me, and I figured, what the heck. “Joel, try a yellow bell pepper! I bet you’ll like it!”

Joel took a yellow bell pepper home that day. I am grateful for this. He may not have liked the yellow bell pepper, but I hope he did. When you think about it, opting for a yellow bell pepper is maybe not the most radical change of heart. Yellow bell peppers all start out as green bell peppers after all. But maybe we humans also have more things in common than we have that divide us.

11/4/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

I am grateful my husband is looking forward to me posting, which is helping me go ahead and do it.

It’s still raining today and when I saw rain in the forecast the other day I cut myself what flowers I could find. Recently I read about using raspberry foliage in arrangements so I cut the not-yet-ripe ones that would just mold in this weather and it’s a (sing it with me and Prince) raspberry bouquet.

I don’t know much right now. But I know I want every vote counted. And I was grateful to have some ripening raspberries to stare at today when I didn’t know what else to do.