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~thankful thursday~ all true

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 16

11/16/23

I am grateful for the sun melting into the ocean on my way home from work, and the red crescent moon dipping into the ocean on our way home from date night.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 17

11/17/23

I am grateful for writing, as a discipline and hobby and obsession. One of the things I like about writing personal narrative is that there are constant opportunities to reanalyze, rethink, reassess what I always thought was true. There is a story I tell myself, and then there is a story beneath that story that I have yet to discover, and when I do finally get at that deeper story, it is always more rewarding. Usually the surface story is something I’ve memorized about my life that feels true enough, and has served me well enough, but the story underneath is truer, and will serve me better. The story underneath is always the one with more layers, more complexity, more nuance, and less duality. There is moral certainty in the top story that I have to give up, though, in order to embrace the truer story.

My son required a neonatal intensive care unit when he was born, and that is where my attention has been during the war between Israel and Hamas: the NICU in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. There is no story I can embrace where 39 babies in critical condition must be used as a shield by either side in a war. There is no justification for infants who require breathing assistance to not be receiving it, for their bundled bodies to be lined up in a row on a bed when they are prone to infections and should be in isolation, when they need warming beds, but the fuel to provide the electricity they require cannot reach their hospital because their “side” might pour it into a tank instead.

I read that 90% of the children in pediatric hospitals in Gaza are experiencing traumatic stress, and 82% of them say they fear imminent death.

I read that parents are writing their children’s names on their bodies—when children’s bodies arrive in the morgue, coroners find the marker writing on their legs and torsos. In some cases this is the only way to identify the bodies.

Women continue to give birth during this conflict, infants are being tended in a neonatal unit where the life support equipment helping children to make it through their first weeks of life has stopped beeping their heart rates, stopped inflating their lungs, stopped warming their tiny bodies. The medicines commonly needed in a NICU like surfactant and caffeine citrate have run out. Because I can remember how it felt to press my face against my son’s sedated body in a NICU cubicle, to wind my arms under and around his tubes and wires to be as close as I could to him, I can recall the comforting sound of beeping, the warmth of the incubator radiating from his body. The story I’ve carried was that I just wanted him out of there, that the NICU was a place of trauma that was keeping us from beginning our mother-son life together. I know that story served me in a way, but I know a truer story now, one in which I feel gratitude for that place and the bridge it provided to help my son make it to the start of that life. I imagine the terror and heartbreak of that comforting beeping going silent, the incubators going cold.

If we give up our moral certainty, can we find an answer that is not anti-Palestinian, nor antisemitic, nor anti-Islam? I do not know what it is, but I believe it precludes the slow sacrifice of babies requiring neonatal intensive care. The solution will not be born from the surface story that has seemed true enough and has served its purpose, but from a truer one that is harder to tell.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 18

11/18/23

I am grateful for a day saturated with writing, reading others’ writing, reading my writing aloud, and hearing others read their writing. And a little lap time with yard kittens.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 19

11/19/23

I am grateful that Rich is at least as invested as me in my gratitude posts, and I cannot go to bed without him reminding me that I haven’t written one yet. Good morning, love, I am grateful for you.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 20

11/20/23

I am feeling grateful for my mom and dad today, and realized I didn’t take any super awesome pictures of them together this summer, so I will remedy that on my next visit. I did take pictures of them separately back in June, Mom and Quinn, heads together as she showed him how to make soap, Dad on the tractor, and there is a snapshot of the two of them blurry and laughing at the dance party following my MFA graduation. I am grateful for the comments on my previous post, appreciating the love between Rich and I, and wondering if we know how lucky we are. I know it is rare, and I do know we are lucky, and I also am lucky to have witnessed another rare pair, all my growing up years.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 21

11/21/23

I am grateful to have finished work with time before sunset at 4:43, for a walk to the water’s edge, and ten minutes of listening to the ocean.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 22

11/22/23

Can you find my husband in this photo? I can, because even though I can’t read the name on his coveralls, his sideburns are unmistakable. I am grateful for him (again, I know, ew, but the 22nd is our day). He does fascinating things at work like suspend a very heavy engine on very short straps and move it from point A to point B inside a fishing boat with zero room to maneuver. Sometimes he welds and fabricates, sometimes he operates a crane, and other times he solves impossible problems like the one in this image. Which I’d like to thank his coworker for taking, because sometimes when he tells me about his day, the stuff is barely believable. For the first few years we were together and someone asked me his occupation I said he allegedly welds, because I hadn’t actually seen him do it. I mean, making things out of metal and fire? But then I did see him do it one time. And it was all true.

 

~thankful thursday~ hugs

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~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

11/9/23

I am grateful for another stunning sunrise over the bay this morning.

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

11/10/23

I am grateful to have him home on this Friday night, watching Ice Age together over the official meal of November. (Photo from summer, when both these youngsters were smaller than they are now.)

 

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

11/11/23

I am grateful for a few little spaces in my weekend for some extra writing time.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

11/12/23

Today was Don’s celebration of life.

I am grateful to have gotten to know Don before he went on to join the mycelial network that feeds and communicates with the trees. I am grateful and honored that Jeannie included me in his celebration today. I am grateful that in my extra writing time this week I was able to write five pages and then cut them down to two and a half pages, to fit in a four-minute time slot. I am grateful that while my hands shook, I don’t think my voice did. I am grateful Rich and Quinn were there holding my hands. I am grateful for the embracing response of the rest of Don’s community (like literal hugs; his older brother whom I’d never met hugged me not once but twice), for new connections, and for the energy Don is already somehow instigating to keep his work going.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

11/13/23

We’re entering that phase of November when the gratitude really starts flowing, picking up momentum, and although I have one by 8 am, I also have seven more by 8 pm and it becomes impossible to choose. I am grateful for a sweet share from a farm girl I’ve known since I was a farm girl, of a post written by another farm girl she thought I’d appreciate. I am grateful for the sunshine day after a soggy, windy weekend. I am grateful for a sunny window table in the library at my work where I spent my lunch break with my laptop (more mini writing retreats whenever I can). I am grateful Rich made popcorn when we got home from work.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

11/14/23

Some nights in November I am just grateful to bask in the warmth of the wood stove and scroll back through photos of summer.

 

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

11/15/23

I am grateful for my job. You know, when you picture what you will be when you grow up, and then you actually grow up and you are something, they can be two very different things. And yet, you can end up being grateful for the weird thing you ended up being, all the same. This is a picture of a weird thing, a fish called a penpoint gunnel, like a little squiggle of eelgrass, only a swimmy little animal, which I only know because of my weird job and how it sent me to Alaska, three times now. I think if I am still going to Alaska years from now and finding penpoint gunnels, I will be grateful.

banner day

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This kind human is a sophomore. He spent our labor day hike dispersing dandelion seeds because, “every living thing deserves a chance to grow.” I made a wish on each seed, in similar words, but my wishes were all about him.

Also, today we sign closing papers to buy the dragon house. A long-held dream comes true.

 

Honorable mentions:

I am halfway through semester three of my program, and still loving every 4am writing session. On a sunny day back in January, I typed one of my essays on Great Grandma Rew’s typewriter and submitted it to a zine called Selkie, and I recently received word that they’ve published it! I will share how to get copies when they become available. My first published essay, hurray! In a zine named for mythical females who zip in and out of sea-suits to live in both realms, on the theme of “disobedience.” Sounds about right!

I started my permanent job in July. I’ve filled out what could be the last round of new hire paperwork, for the last set of changing benefits, and the waves of relief are still washing over me, and I expect that will keep going for some time. Three pay periods in, I went to Kodiak, Alaska, for field work. A new place to fall in love with. (They have otters there!!!)


rock greenling


penpoint gunnel


giant Pacific octopus



humpback!


uh-oh


Salmon for breakfast, and second breakfast.

Sending love to all the mama bears out there with cubs snuggled close and the otter mamas with their pups swimming off and away.

killer whale week

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It’s been a big week.

This week I got my start date for my new job (July 5th), I finished my second semester—my first half—of my MFA program, and I saw killer whales in Yaquina Bay!

 

I managed to take a few terrible photos, and some rather poor videos, which I will cherish forever and always. How I love them. I spent an entire thirty-page submission writing about them during first semester, so it seemed fitting they would come help me celebrate the day I reached the halfway point! I tried to clip many frames of blurry, empty water, and skip to the pertinent parts, but apologize for causing anyone seasickness with my shaky cinematography.

 

This one is longer and retains more shakiness, but also shows an eye patch a time or two, which was completely awesome to see. I was fairly close. You can’t hear it in the video over the wind, but from where I was standing, I could hear their exhales each time they surfaced!

After work, I grabbed my camera and husband for a bay road drive date and he got to see a couple of them, too.

 

All of which is to say, a lot is going on behind the scenes, but I’m still here, and I still write things.

~thankful thursday~ shine-dripping

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11/4/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 4

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.

 

11/8/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

I am grateful for reruns! (click here and scroll down for apple gratitude from 2017)

 

 

11/9/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

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.

it’s no wonder

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I’m reporting back from my first semester one-week residency, and I don’t think it will surprise anyone that I’m having a fabulous time in Writing School!

I thought I’d share one of my favorite quick ten-minute writing prompts from the workshop portion of the week, shared by my instructor Nadia Owusu, that she picked up from fellow author Kiese Laymon. (Highly recommend both of their books!) I think there are friends reading who might love this prompt as much as I do, and I challenge you to take ten minutes to do it!

The prompt:

Can you remember one sentence that was said to you by another person, or that you said to yourself, that made you feel horrible, maybe even among the worst feelings of your life? Write that sentence down. Now revise it so that it’s affirming, or so that it opens up new possibilities. Riff or journal about it.

~

And here is mine:

 

It’s no wonder you suck at being a mom – you got kicked out of grad school.

 

You left a PhD program that was depleting your soul, and made the most of it by writing a Master’s thesis to be proud of. It’s no wonder that you are rising to the occasion of mothering so beautifully with your newborn son.

It’s a wonder you could believe you got kicked out of grad school. You kicked grad school’s ass on top of which you are kicking ass at being a mom.

I wonder how you could have gotten to the point of believing him tell you lies about yourself like that you got kicked out of grad school. It’s a wonder how you’ve bloomed as a mother after sucking in so much of the sewage he spewed.

When grad school lost its wonder you made the move to end it with grace, then turned your wonder towards the baby boy in your arms.

When grad school lost its wonder you kicked it to the curb, let being a mom suck you in.

When grad school lost its wonder you kicked it out, then kicked out the man who insulted you.

When grad school lost its wonder you bloomed into a mother.

It’s no wonder you bloomed.

tender and mild

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I am placing this image of nine-years-ago Quinn drawing a whole bunch of baby dinosaurs “standing on the floor of the egg” here to signify that there’s a lot of writing going on, gestating behind the scenes. The sun ball lamp might be my egg incubator, and I am waking up early to keep up with the words that bubble to the surface after each long winter’s nap.

I do not want to neglect my blog, and it seems like just the venue to wish happy holidays to all, from here at a safe social distance. I considered using this as my holiday card:

but then I realized I don’t have my stuff together enough to send cards. It was just a snapshot of another “one of those days” that we have all had approximately 365 too many of this year.

It’s the end of 2020 now. I usually choose a song lyric each year, but there isn’t a “bleak and weary” Christmas song, so I chose tender and mild. It’s been mild leading up to Christmas, cold but clear, so we got to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, almost. A few days before, and two days after, above the melted sorbet horizon. The word tender certainly fits how our hearts are feeling – battered, bruised, sore, vulnerable.

The holidays are serving as an anchor point for some in a year that has felt awash in a swirling sea of time: You Are Here. For me, these holidays are so bizarrely different that they do not serve me that way exactly. I have calibrated time for myself according to the signs of seasons even more than usual during 2020. The nesting robins placed me squarely in spring, while the nest is now filled up with curled, brittle leaves, so I know we’re closing in on winter. Mushrooms, even, helped me orient, and I don’t know the first thing about them. Yet, just seeing them popping up all around me secured me into autumn. Thinking of their work beneath the surface of things to make available in the soil what the forest needs to absorb next year is a sustaining thought.

To no one’s surprise, I took myself to the edge of the world to perch on a rock and try to find a migrating whale. I did find one (the white puff in the upper left, above). Moving along at a good clip, but paradoxically, for me it was another anchor, another sign to mark the season. The gray whales are headed south to celebrate fecundity and renewal, to circle around newborns, tender and mild, in warm lagoons.

(Laguna San Ignacio 2001)

I hope these photos from an adventure long ago to said lagoons will make you smile, finding you snug and healthy in your homes for the holidays.

(Laguna San Ignacio 2001)

Merry Christmas friends!

 

~thankful thursday~ hallowed

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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~ seed bank

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11/5/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 5

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

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

7-12

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

8-27

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

9-1

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

9-3

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

9-5

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

9-17

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

Date night. Always.

11-5 today:

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

11/6/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 6

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

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

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

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

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

11/7/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 7

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

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

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

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

11/8/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

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

 

11/9/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

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

 

11/10/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

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

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

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

 

11/11/20

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

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

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

~summer shorts~ reclaiming

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Have you seen me lately? is the title of one of my depression songs. I hardly ever listen to the Counting Crows anymore, but the feeling that I have gone missing lately is a little bit accurate.

When I go missing, when I need to retrieve myself, the ocean is where I go. During a pandemic, it may mean going to the ocean at 6:30 am on a Monday, and it may mean going less frequently, but the ocean is still where I go to collect myself and bring myself back. Here I am, standing, kneeling beside the crowded tidepools of my inner world. There beside them, soaking in the brine, is the end of a long strand of mended rope. I pick it back up in my hand, ready to start adding to the storyline, twisting new strands, threading on new beads and seashells, eventually stringing more cranberries and popcorn once it is a little less soggy.

woman beside a tidepool

How does it happen that I would ever set this rope down? I know better. I repeat to myself like a mantra why I write. I repeat it enough that others know it, can paraphrase it. The fragmentation that once characterized my inner experience was the result of mental health crisis – major depression brought on mostly by emotional abuse (gone), but also a little bit predisposition (still there). Fragmentation, a broken storyline, allowed me to lie to myself, disconnect from myself, betray myself, something I remain committed to never do again. Writing is my best tool to maintain a cohesive storyline, to integrate the various pieces of myself into one narrative that I can keep my grip on, so that I can see the connections between one segment and another, so that I can tell if I am being true to who I am and so that I can tell if I am deviating from my truth or forgetting crucial pieces of the story.

tidepool on oregon coast

Too much slack in the line is a different problem from fragmentation, but tangles are not conducive to okayness either. Winds will blow on me, waves will continue to endlessly pass, and if I am not doing the steady, dynamic tending this line of mine requires, it can become knotted and snarled. These posts piling up behind the scenes, where I keep second guessing myself and saving to drafts, need to start being eased out before they accumulate further. Like the sheet that controls the business end of the sail, my line works to keep me on course, to keep the wind coming across my sails in the most efficient way to maintain forward progress, to keep me from capsizing, to keep the sails full not flogging, to keep me from wallowing in the doldrums.

sea urchins and anemones

There is a certain amount of tension required to keep ahold of myself, in other words. The danger is there to become too tense, to hold on rigidly, which can also rock the boat. When my shoulders start to reach my ears, my hands are clenched, and I am holding my breath too often, I need to loosen my grip, inhale, exhale, and observe what the ocean is doing. Take stock, adjust course.

sea urchins and anemones

You can sail forward even when the wind is close to your bow, but there is a reason why they call it “beating to windward.” Heading into the oncoming wind and seas (usually they are coming from a related direction to one another, though not always) can feel like a beating. The motion of the vessel is more jarring, the force of the impact coming down from the crest of each swell causes the whole hull to shudder and the rigging to vibrate, and the ship is heeled over at quite an angle. The ship must be tacked much more frequently to maintain course, an act which by its very nature strains every line and piece of hardware, every tired seam and joint. Changing direction frequently just to keep going forward is exhausting, and you must ensure the coffee pot is lashed in the galley, the deck gear all stowed.

sea anemone partly folded inward

Still, it is while sailing to windward that I have most often encountered dolphins riding the bow wake. It is also only in the dark of night that the bow wake glows with bioluminescence. Remembering my study of the word “streamlined” a couple of years ago, I recall my conclusion that the status of the flow around me has less to do with turbulence in my life, than what shape I present to the flow; that if I present less resistance to the flow, I have a more streamlined experience. Salmon use the energy of the current to propel themselves upstream; adversity is not a direct line to crisis, in fact it can be a force of energy that is harnessed for good.

sea urchin and anemone close up

I feel as though, right now, I am swimming upstream against a strong current, or sailing into a strong wind. I am okay, but I am on watch for signs of slipping down the current too far towards the waterfall’s edge, or letting the wind get around behind the wrong side of my sails. I am okay, but I am swimming hard with nothing in reserve, I am beating to windward and taking a beating. I am okay, but I am only okay because I know firsthand the consequences of slipping downstream, of capsizing.

urchin and anemone

At market one recent Saturday, a lovely woman handed me a bundle of braided sweetgrass. She grows it herself, and she said she wanted to give it to me because I inspire her. I am using it to smudge this space and reclaim it, to clear out any traces of energy that would keep me quiet, that would turn down my voice, that would ask me to be smaller, less than fully me.

anemone detail macro

red and purple sea urchins

closed sea anemone

sea urchins and anemone

sea urchin with spines missing