Road to Hana

Known for its 600 switchbacks and 52 single-lane bridges, the road to Hana, on the northeast end of Maui, adjacent to the West Maui Forest Reserve, is situated in the last undeveloped swathe of land on the island, and the most remotely situated region in the state of Hawaii. Driving it yesterday, strip malls quickly gave way to sugar cane fields, which faded into vine-strung tropical rainforest where rainbow-bark eucalyptus trees and banyan trees alternated with impenetrable groves of bamboo. African tulip trees towered above, their mammoth crimson blossoms -- flame tongues -- clustered at branch-tips. I was in fern heaven: entire hillsides and banks of lush, giant ferns. Trying to capture any of it on film seemed hopeless: you just have to go there yourself.

Luckily, I was not behind the wheel. Paul, trained on the back lanes of Ireland, is a pro at narrow winding roads -- more than once he proclaimed "This is NOT a one-lane bridge!" Nonetheless, they were narrow, and most drivers perceived them as such, and the ever-accumulating quantity of them -- coupled with the fact that you have to go back on the same road (unless you have a 4WD) -- makes for some dizzying travel. I just did the math: 1200 sharp turns and 104 skinny bridges. Here's a detail from the map:

I guess that makes anyone who drives this road and back in a single day a saint. I hereby cannonize St. Paul the Husband. Down on your knees, heathens.

At a rest stop about a dozen feral cats made begging rounds among the pick-nickers. When a man threw a scrap to one of the cats, at least a dozen feral hens came sprinting out from the bushes -- and I mean sprinting -- and one snatched up the bit well before the cat was able to take possession. These were some tough old hens; easy to see who's at the top of the, uh, pecking order here!

We stopped for Kalua pig tacos at Up in Smoke, an open-air BBQ stand situated among a cluster of shacks in a clearing carved out of the jungle. Always on the lookout for ruins of a sort, I spied this car back in the weeds, with a smashed windshield, littered with African tulip blossoms, with a coleus growing out of the wipers.....




Most of all I was enchanted with the bamboo groves: I could live happily for the rest of my life surrounded by bamboo. I love the speed at which it strikes upwards to the sun, I love its scent, the texture of the green stalks, the sound of those thousands of leaves fluttering in a breeze. I love that it sends its rhizomes out horizontally beneath the surface of the earth, a secret that will not be controlled. I've grown it myself in large oak casks, but this just seems wrong: a plant in a cage that belongs in the wild.

We drove back in waning sun, left behind the black sand beaches, the glistening black crabs scuttling across lava rocks, the waterfalls, the 52 single-lane bridges. The brazen hens. Too soon civilization reappeared: a yoga studio, a coffee shop, a gallery. A three mile rush-hour traffic jam, luckily going the other way. Safeway. K-Mart. Wal-Mart. Home Depot. Had to remind ourselves that we still were in paradise, even though the road to Hana and its 600 switch-backs was, alas, behind us.

On Lahaina Bay

Fifty-foot sailboat, humback whales breaching, slapping their flukes. A mom-whale swam directly under the boat when her baby got too close to us; she quickly headed him off. We were able to see most of her when she arched up out of the water: spectacular. It's a thrill unlike any other. The first mate said that she's about as long as the boat and weighs three times the boat. No whale photos -- I didn't want to be fussing with the camera and then miss the actual experience.



But in the lulls between sightings, the horizon beckoned, as did the West Maui Mountains, and Lanai and Molokai in the distance. This Hipstamatic lens (on my iPhone camera) I'm using takes the shot and then reverses a part of it and superimposes it on the photo, and it's different every time, with some pretty thrilling results. Today it seemed to capture where my head is in this exotic landscape: a shifted perspective, images layering themselves one upon another in my consciousness, and hazy at the edges. Sometimes up is down, and vice versa --

But then, that's what a vacation is supposed to do, I think: shift the brain into a new place, shake up the vision a bit, open ones eyes to a changed landscape, where there are colors whose names you could have never imagined before this day, this place, this moment --

What I Have Resorted To

I keep starting blog entries then deleting them....still sponging up the local scene, the upwards temperature shift, taking note, as per usual when I'm away from my home setting, of the many nuances in human behavior. Primarily, I've noticed that most "holiday makers" (as they say in Ireland), or more appropriately, "hula-day makers", fall into a few categories:

1. First timers, characterized by an obvious goggle-eyed expression and an indeterminate stride.
2. Honey-mooners, goggle-eyed for each other, bound at the hips.
3. The "let's give this one last chance" couples, silent and bored at dinner, blankly staring into their pink-umbrella-topped Mai Tais. Wife almost always with a flower in her hair. Husband generally agitated. Loosen up, folks!
4. The retirees. Most conversations I've overheard from this group concern their most recent cruise."Last month we were in Bora Bora blah blah blah." More like Boring Boring.
5. The pros: they know where they're going, they walk chin-out, chest-forward, they laugh too loud and boom their voices, know all the "rules".
6. People like us, for whom I'm always on the lookout. (I like to believe we defy a category, but I may be mistaken.)


Last year, my first time here, I was in a daze the first few days, and was amazed that I was surrounded by what seemed to be Professional Huladay-Makers. Where had I been all my life?! (I'd been eking out a living, scraping up the rent, inventing a dinner from Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard, penning a poem or two when the muse graced me with her appearance.)

---

At Safeway, rambuton (a tropical fruit related to the lychee):


Late afternoon sun viewed from the lounge chair --


Paul's and my alter-ego silhouettes:

Zero to Paradise in Eight Hours

From this:


To this:


More later.
Gotta get my hula on.

Evanescent

I ran across this sentence that my son R. wrote as part of a spelling assignment when he was in 5th grade (the spelling word was "brief"):


We were golden for a brief moment.

---

And by Robert Frost:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

---

My advice to you:

Be golden today.

This Particular Harmony

I don't remember the song, but we were listening to a Chet Baker CD at work today, all going about our separate jobs -- Melinda resizing imagery, R. making photo-masks, I was packing pieces for the big wholesale show coming up -- when I suddenly became aware of the fact that all three of us were singing along, each with our various vocal talents (or lack thereof!).

There was not much that was conscious or even self-conscious about it. We were more just part of the symphony of background noises (rolls of packing tape unfurling, the click-click-click of the exposure mechanism, footsteps on the wood floor, the heave of heavy boxes, the rustle & crackle of stiff sheets of plastic, the printer spitting out a new transparency, glass vessels clinking into each other) but we were singing! On the job!

There are few delights more delicious, I truly believe, than feeling a freedom to sing in the presence of others. Not to perform, but to just let the music move the soul forward into a melody of its own, with no reward other than the joy of feeling ones voice lifted into the atmosphere of the moment.

Wait!I recall the song -- here it is (minus the glass-girls-chorus):


(Thinking back, it's not the first time this has happened. I recall the group of us singing gospel along with The Blind Boys of Alabama, as well as I Feel Pretty from Westside Story. I believe we've done this -- are you ready? -- time after time....)

Sometimes everything in the universe lines up just right.

The other day, Melinda, my boss, came back after running errands. C. and I were working down in the studio, and had left the iPod blasting a Johnny Cash playlist in the house. Melinda stepped into the house, and there was the momentary between-songs silence. Wondering where we all were she called out, "Hello?" And just at that moment, Walk the Line queued up where Johnny begins, in his deeply resonant voice, "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash!" --answering Melinda's query.

Sunday

First there was a cafe, with Red Pepper Bisque (which I did not order)...


And then a humble still life...


Followed by a stroll about Capitol Hill...


And a visit to St. Ignatius Chapel...


Textured walls...


Things made of glass...


And more things made of glass...


And odd things that swirl endlessly, whose images refuse to upload. Damnation.

Caution is Advised

Every now and then one stumbles upon a dessert so sublime that -- for an ephemeral moment -- the rest of the world ceases to exist. Last night I was blessed with just such an experience at a new Bellevue restaurant -- Cantinetta -- which specializes in Tuscan cuisine. The dinner and drinks were all indeed good and carefully prepared and presented, but this dessert brought me to my knees: Nutella Zeppole, Italian-style doughnuts filled with nutella, with a dollop (not enough!) of mascarpone on the side.

Definitely a fork-and-knife operation, as I erred in first attempting to bite into the zeppole, from which issued forth a geyser of warm nutella.

My friend S., beside me, was watching me, and said, "You're not going to share that, are you?"
"Nope."

I admit that I'm not especially fond of the popular practice of the server setting out forks and spoons for everyone prior to dessert when not everyone orders dessert. There's this assumption that dessert is to be shared, and I say bollocks to that. Order your own! (Unless, of course, you're my son or husband, where Permission to Taste is written into the mother/son, wife/husband legal agreement, section 7, paragraph 4, line 19.) Now I don't want anyone getting the idea that I'm selfish; I'm the person who makes multiple desserts for nearly every social event (from scratch, butter, bittersweet chocolate, fresh fruit, etc.), and encourages everyone to have a slice of each, please! But when I'm dining out, I rarely order dessert, and when I do, It Belongs To Me.

Plans are afoot here today to build a portable electric dessert fence, one easily plucked from my handbag when the need arises, that produces an unpleasant but harmless shock when a fellow diner attempts to graze over to my side of the table during the dessert course. Zap! In the meantime, I may have to invest in some yellow caution tape, and be on the lookout, fork tines poised, for the errant zeppole sneak.

Travails

A quartet of us on the job yesterday, and the conversation zigged and jagged every which way. Amidst the loading-up and unloading of boxes of glass, the packing for the Philadelphia show, the box-building and box-dismantling, the heaving and the hefting and the wrangling of packing peanuts -- all the to-and-fro-ing required to keep a small business ticking -- some days we do all manage to sit down at the same time at the long sturdy wood table where all the painting and the detail work happens.

Thursday's conversation began with an elementary (or, more accurately, kindergarten) discussion of Quantum Physics. (I say elementary because none of us are scientists, and I doubt any of us took a physics class in college -- though I may be wrong here.) I'd done some introductory reading about parallel universes the night before, and discovered, quite literally, an entirely new world out there. Or, even, several new worlds. I kind of like the notion that we're floating around up in the clouds on a magic carpet membrane. (Like I said, elementary.)

A part of me wants to believe that my epic recurring dreams, some recurring for 30+ years, with settings and characters that reappear and develop with each night's chapter, are indeed plucked from the parallel universes that I inhabit out there in Quantum Physics Land. I want to look beyond Freud and Jung to find not greater meaning, but greater explanation. I'm bored to tears with symbolism!

But I digress. Back to the conversation:

1. As I stated, Quantum Physics, multiverses, etc.
2. Did you know that if you're a middle-aged woman who experiences severe hot flashes, your chances of developing either of the two prominent types of breast cancer are greatly reduced?
3. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
4. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts (who was the best man at my cousin's wedding).
5. Cognitive therapy.
6. The Seven Deadly Sins (a list of which now appears on the parchment which protects my work surface).
7. The fact that all of us are guilty of all seven.
8. The Ten Commandments. (Don't you just love the word covet? It's highly underused.) Three of us have not coveted thy neighbor's wife, one of us has.
9. Carlos Castaneda.
10. Acid.
11. Text from my husband: "hematopoetic". (Written in blood??!!)
12. Dog treats made from buffalo penises. (Not sure if these are actual in-the-flesh buffalo penises or if they've been ground up and reformed.) R. was in the other room when this subject was introduced, and she heard, instead of buffalo penises, "buckle of peanuts". (Interpretive Hearing is a common occurence at my job.)

And when R. isn't pondering belt buckles fashioned from legumes, she dons her barista cap and treats us all to cappuccinos. Yesterday C. treated us to amaretti.


And when the verbal soundtrack became too frantic, as can happen, R. queued up some tranquility on her iPod, and we settled it down to a soothing Erik-Satie-pitch.

It's not all fun and games, but we can damn well pretend it is.

Sun Color

Even my myriad descriptions for that which is grey in the skies above fall flat in this winter of myriad grey day, upon day, upon day....

Yesterday, just as the last light eked from the sky, a crack opened on the clouded horizon and lo, sun. The light in the work room shifted dramatically, and every piece of glass took on new color and intensity. I announced that we all must hurry outside and soak up, if only for a single minute, this rare sliver of sun. Grumbles from my compatriots "I'm busy working", but I insisted, and so the three of us tromped out in the mild afternoon where the colors went from this:


to this:


in as long as it took me to shoot the first photo.
Carpe diem.

We spend all day inside working with color, struggling with angles of light from the work lamps, mixing colors on the palette. M. painted a new batch of glass the other night and in daylight all the colors appeared muddy. And then we are given this gift from the universe of less than five minutes of intense natural light, and then it's gone, and we must go back to trying to recreate that in the studio, hoping that some neural pathways in the brain made their infinitesimal chemical connections so that it's not lost to us.

As I sit and type this, the first streaks of the dawn sky appear through the leaf-stripped maples -- a black lacework against blue and pink rays. Need I mention that, once again, I rush outside (this time in nightgown and bathrobe) to soak up yet again those fleeting bits of of the troposphere? The spin of the planet, celestial bodies in motion... Welcome back, Sun. And stick around this time, will ya?

Best Rester & Spicy Eggplant

Ate dinner last night with two of my sisters at a Seattle Chinese restaurant -- Tai Tung -- and found out that it's been continuously open since 1935. I doubt they've updated the interior since then. What an odd, funky place it is. I first ate there 40 years ago, and nothing -- NOT A THING -- has changed. The daily specials are written up in Chinese on typing paper and taped to the mirror behind the counter -- there are probably twenty specials posted. The English version is farther down the hall, taped to the outside of a booth. There's a musty scent interlaced with the amalgamated Chinese Restaurant Scents -- ginger? Soy? Rice? Our waiter was perhaps 80, nattily attired in black slacks, a white dress shirt and sweater, and with a heavy accent gave recommendations from the specials board. He claimed to remember us -- it's been at least a year, since the three of us ate there last -- but I don't doubt him. The lighting is startling bright, and the absence of any music makes it an eavesdropping heaven, although I'd venture to say that the conversation between the three of us made for some good listening for someone else, if anyone else felt so inclined.

At one point in the meal, I read aloud a hand-written letter from 1972 that my sister K. wrote to me when I spent two weeks with a friend at her grandparent's house in Twisp -- a rural town in Eastern Washington. Written on neon yellow notebook paper in my sister's precise eleven-year-old's handwriting, it described in detail a tiff she'd gotten into with another sister over the throwing-away of a wire twisty-thing that closes up a loaf of bread. Drama! Another description of a boat trip to Victoria B.C., and the joy in the freedom of being allowed to wander freely aboard the Princess Marguerite.

I produced a second letter (both plucked randomly from my recent excavations) written by the other sister present -- M. -- typed from her desk at her job at Boeing, written the same week as K.'s letter, describing, among other things, K.'s day-trip to Victoria! I don't know what the odds are that I'd grab two letters -- from a load of crap primarily headed to the recycling bin -- that date back to the same week in 1972. And trust me, these were in boxes of assorted paper stuff dating in my history from age zero to twenty. No organization other that the fact that it was all made of paper.

And based on the laughs that these letters generated, I'm glad I save them. My question now, of course is whether or not to throw them out. Neither sister wanted her letter back. Toss?

Among my findings was a sackful of school assignments belonging to K. of which I somehow gained possession. Good sport that she is, she promptly donned her "Best Rester" crown from kindergarten:


The waiter's handwriting on the bill both fascinated and amused me -- was that really what we ordered?!


And who could possibly argue over such stunningly beautiful hieroglyphics? Certainly not us. Dinner at Tai Tung is always a bargain, musty odor notwithstanding.

And I have for lunch today some lovely leftover sizzling rice soup.
Yum.

From the Archives

I've been fooling myself these past few years that I've winnowed away lots of stuff from the Brandon Street house. Indeed, I've carted away boxes and boxes and boxes to Goodwill and even more to the dump. But the stuff, so far, is winning. Twice in the past two weeks I've filled my car with yet more boxes to disseminate, and I'm astonished at what I have NOT done and been rid of yet. Twenty, thirty + years of accumulations, and from someone who is not necessarily a good consumer AND who has regularly cleaned-out and disposed-of. This is true: I need less, and even less than that. I rarely even go into a store these days, except to purchase edibles or household necessities. I recycle, I reuse, I resew. And still, my mountain (range) of possessions has grown larger than I ever imagined it would. But it's getting mined, bucket by bucket.

(But I'm pleased as punch that I didn't ditch my "I buy logs" business card.)

Obit.

I've been subjected to teasing, periodically, because of my habit of reading the daily obituaries in the local newspaper. But gems like this make it all worth while:

"(The deceased) fancied keeping a stockpile of pens, laundry detergent, dish soap, Kleenex and hand sanitizer, and anyone close to him knows that (the deceased) always had hand sanitizer in his pocket."

Keep in mind that one is charged by the word for these obituaries.

When my mother passed away, I was assigned the task of writing and placing the notice of her death in the two local rags. The smaller of the two, published in the town where she lived most of her adult life, offered a free obituary, with the stipulation that they publish her age. Age was a closely guarded secret among Mom's vast network of friends -- and she was blessed with a rather youthful 85-year-old visage, all things considered. It didn't occur to me until right now that I could've lied about her age.... I did opt for the free obituary, and I'm certain there was more than one member of St. Anthony's Altar Society (seated directly behind the family at the funeral mass, each proudly sporting her official Altar Society insignias) thinking, she was that old?!

T.'s Kitsch'N

Cornmeal pancakes.
Vermont syrup.
Butter.
Scrambled eggs.
Bacon.
Grapefruit juice.
Coffee.
Persistent rain.
The Seattle Times.
Dozing cats.
And a considerable measure of darkness, still, at 7:47am.
Good morning January!

Hot off the press, er, the screen....

I'm not a poet into self-hype, self-branding and self-promotion, (which happens far too much online, IMHO), but indulge me a little here...

You can check out my poem "Last Rescued Bird" featured on the New Zealand based blog Tuesday Poem, where Wellington novelist Mary McCallum refers to it as "subversive, using the imperative mood and uncompromising language to attempt to silence the myth of woman as the unquestioning nurturer". Read more here, and read what Graham Beattie, former Managing Director/Publisher of Penguin Books and Scholastic, New Zealand, says about it here.

Cheers!
(And thanks for reading, even all you who never leave a comment. I know who you are.)

Dits & Dots

Six year ago, when I ventured into the world of online dating (where I met Paul!), one of the most curious things I discovered is that most men do not know how to: a)spell, and, b)use punctuation. (Um, you men out there seeking a date, there's this thing called spell-check.) My favorite -- and often recounted -- example of this is the man who wanted to impress me with his education, and wrote in an email that he had a "collage degree". And no, he wasn't an artist.

Yesterday while looking at frames at Target, I saw these frames -- multiple mini frames within one large frame:


And then I noticed this, uh, slightly different frame:


I chuckle to think of all the thousands of these "college" frames out there in the world, wishing, for all intents and purposes, that they could be so lucky as to have a collage degree.

But a little more about the online dating thing. After several months of atrociously bad punctuation, I edited my match.com statement of what it was I was looking for in a man to include the phrase "must know how to use punctuation". Well. The number of 'winks' dropped off significantly and at an alarming rate. I cringed to think that my little hint about dots and dashes could scare off most of the single male population. Did these men really go to college? (Or was it actually collage they attended? [Which might explain the lack of diacritical marks.])

And then, I received a sort of document, if you will, in my inbox, a perfectly-punctuated, perfectly-formatted, perfectly-spelled piece of writing which even included bulletted points. Hark! There is a god! I fell fast and hard for this God of Good Grammar. I married him. And yes, we have really intense discussions about punctuation. We are punctuation nerds. And while I've been known to dabble in collage, the degree I earned in college dealt specifically with the art of manipulating words and little black specks on the page.

Sparks

This is a day I observe with solemnity and gratitude, an anniversary of a fire and a rescue. More about it here.

In contemplating this fire, which occurred in 1987, I find myself going back to a post this week on Icelines, a blog by the New Zealand poet/artist Claire Beynon, where she excerpts a David Whyte piece from Huffington Post (full text here):

It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living. What is real can never be fully taken away; its essence always remains. It might set us a little freer to believe that there is no path in life - in the low valley, in the shelter of Keane's comfortable bar, snug by a turf fire or abroad in the mountain night, that does not lead to some form of heartbreak when the outer narrative disappears and then reappears in a different form. If we are sincere, every good marriage or relationship will break our hearts in order to enlarge our understanding of our self and that strange other with whom we have promised ourselves to the future. Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed. Following a vocation or an art form through decades of practice and understanding will break the idealistic heart that began the journey and replace it, if we sidestep the temptations of bitterness and self-pity, with something more malleable, compassionate and generous than the metaphysical organ with which we began the journey. We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming; as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.

This notion of what is gained from loss resonates deeply with me, now. Twenty-four years ago I lacked the perspective to see this, just as my son -- plucked from the jaws of fire as an infant -- attempts, at nearly twenty-five, to grasp the straws of his own deeply-felt losses. Because of this event, my family ended up living on Brandon Street, where a community of compassionate and generous souls welcomed my shell-shocked family, and where, over the course of the following twenty years, informed & reformed my notions of family and community. The fire was, in essence, a stroke of good luck. My children grew up loved and treasured not just by their birth family, but by a larger family of musicians, gardeners, artists -- one that was culturally and ethnically diverse, multi-generational, blue-collar to highly-educated. I hate to believe that I literally had to walk through fire to arrive there, but nonetheless I did. And survived, with incalculable rewards.

When I look back on the riches and blessings I was so fortunate to count as mine because I called Brandon Street my home, I doubt I would choose any other life.

I shall light a candle tonight when the light wanes from this winter sky, a tiny contained fire, and drink a toast to this sliver of wisdom I can claim as mine, "informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances."

(With thanks to David Whyte and the "gifted appearance" of my friend Claire Beynon.)

Living Under the Lid of Winter

Color to drive away the darkness....

Irreverant

Every day on my way to work I pass by the Columbia City Funeral Home, and this sequence of nouns repeats itself in my head:

cream
creamery
crematorium
cremains

An unfortunate combination of like-sounding words, which prompts me to think of alternate options for what is left of the bulk & heft of the deceased. When my spirit makes its last presence known, I'd prefer to be sent to a creamatorium, and be rendered into a nice hunk of aged cheddar.

When I picked up the ashes of my late husband, I was handed a yellow shopping bag. Inside was a brown plastic box. Inside the brown plastic box was a plastic bag held closed with a twist-tie. And inside that plastic bag, well, looked a lot like what I sprinkle on my roses every March.

This yellow shopping bag, along with a box containing odds & ends from my late mother, got shoved into a spare bedroom of my Brandon Street house. My sons and I, who more often than not find great glee in black humor, started referring to that room as The Death Room. We became so used to that name, that whenever we had company, one or the other of us would say, "Take Ann's coat and put it in The Death Room." Matter of fact. And much to Ann's -- and every other guest's -- astonishment.

But no need to worry -- it's been transformed into an ordinary bedroom now, with fresh paint and absolutely no evidence of its prior use. The "cremains" have been sent on their way, adrift in the waters of Thornton Creek, which empties into Lake Washington, which connects by way of the Montlake Cut to Lake Union, which meets the saline waters of Salish Sound via the Ship Canal. And past that, north through Admiralty Inlet, in and out of the San Juan Islands, and finally west through the Straits of Juan de Fuca, where the waters of the Pacific stretch out beyond any visible distance. What cellular bits of those cinders have made it that far? Perhaps a smidgen of them are at this moment sunning themselves on a Fiji beach. Not a bad thought.

Cheese, on the other hand, would make a decidedly different journey.

I wonder if the pope would consider changing Ash Wednesday to Cheese Wednesday:

Cheese to cheese,
dust to dust.
From cheese we came,
to cheese we shall return.

In lieu of smudging foreheads with ash (messy, that), the Catholic Church could host informal cheese-and-wine masses to mark the onset of Lent -- "Casual Cheese Wednesday"!

This:


Or this:


Just a thought.

Inhabiting the Nest of Winter

Seven-grain cereal simmering (in milk) on the stove, P. listening to an Allman Brothers YouTube video, coffee cooling too quickly. The cats have settled, finally fed after their morning racing & antics. Rain and rain and rain, after wet snow last night. I stepped out into it in my nightgown and robe, to see the glitter of it, the landscape one giant cake with a dusting of white icing, white sprinx. I scooped up a handful, amazed at the bulk of snow with no discernible weight. It's still there this morning, thinned by rising temps, eking away into storm drains, making little flood plains where it melts too quickly.

I'll venture out in an hour and this magic will all-too-quickly vanish into traffic and exhaust and windshield wipers.

Sigh.

Maggots, Doom & Footies

A bit of a scare yesterday when the veterinarian's assistant talked to me on the phone and told me that Tip, my 15+ cat, could not come home on Saturday because his bloodwork didn't look good and would have to stay the weekend. Of course, I went into Doom & Gloom mode, only to get a call a little later from Dr. Young himself telling me that Tip is in great shape for his age, only a little UTI, and I could pick him up any time before 3pm. Ah. Had the assistant mistaken me for someone else? In any case, I was greatly relieved, and it was time to regroup, call off the kitty hearse, alert the grave-digger that his services wouldn't be needed. Cancel the eulogy.

I dated a grave-digger once, at the naive age of 18. He was ridiculously handsome but for all intents and purposes, illiterate. His idea of a Great Night Out was dinner at a tiny suburban restaurant where the food was squeezed out of tubes & dumped from cans but they also served up individual yeasty loaves, which, I admit, weren't half bad.

This grave-digger was also a compulsive gambler, and I spent many an afternoon at the track, placing my ill-planned bets on the grey roans because they were uncommon and beautiful. And, generally, slow. Once I won $10. So much for my gambling career.

The romance didn't last long; there was nothing to talk about, and I like to talk. Good looks only go so far. Then his brother -- no looks, and the ultimate 1975 nerd -- invited me to the drive-in to see Jaws. I laughed through most of the movie while he screamed and tried (in vain, judging from his shrieks) to escape the piscine incisors snapping at him from the screen. That was the end of that.

But getting back to my original theme: death. I have in my possession -- in the garden at the Brandon Street house where my sons live -- my father's gravestone (1918-1966). When my mother passed away, oh, eight years or so ago, we ordered a single stone to mark both their graves, and instead of letting the beautiful blue-glinted marble get recycled -- this was part of my childhood, for god's sake -- I opted to take possession of it. Remnants of not a few felines add a particular, ah, richness to the soil beneath its place beneath the Chehalis apple tree (whose apples succumb to apple maggots in lieu of an annual chemical application). My friend Peter, whose gardening skills I admire, sheaths each of his apples in what I call "footies" every spring, which block entry to those dastardly maggots. At this point, I look at my trees as only decorative, and sweep the apples into the city compost bin.

Footies:


I like the idea of an actual gravestone in the middle of an urban garden. Hell, I don't even live there anymore, but I certainly feel as if I've left my mark. And all those cats, left buried and unmarked in the back yards of houses I've lived, gone now to bone shard, to amulet and errant tooth. How much more tidy it is to abandon the euthanized pet with the vet for anonymous disposal, to become -- what? Someone else's dinner, I fear.

Well then.

It's winter, dead-center, and all good cheer has crawled under the gravestone in my garden and has passed out cold. Easter is late this year -- April 24th. I suppose I must wait until then to resurrect any semblance of a jolly good time. If I were more industrious, I'd lay in a supply of footies and make plans to decorate the apple tree with flesh-toned mesh. In the meantime, I'm open to suggestion.

Applause, Applause

"Wouldn't it be wonderful if ordinary people gave themselves a round of applause at the end of the day."

--from the movie Topsy Turvey.

(I'm clapping for you -- can you hear it?)

I love the way a piece of music has the ability to put a frame around a space of time. While cooking dinner (Balti chicken) I listened to Rosalyn Tureck play Bach's Goldberg Variations (I'm tempted here to write "Goldenberg" Variations or "Goldbug" Variations). Just when I was ready to sit down and let the cardamom pods and the garam masala do their work, the CD was over. Next it's on to Simone Dinnerstein's rendition of the same. Paul just ordered tix for us to hear her at Meany Hall later this month....I anticipate a dreamy evening. I'm considering getting the sheet music for this -- don't know why I don't have it yet, except that it's one of those Famous Things (as in Glenn Gould) and I tend to steer clear of such.

---

January has always been a beast of a month on my calendar, associated mainly with the grieving that comes after untimely death, as well as the polar opposite of summer's abundance here in the Northern Hemisphere. Every year I try once again to love the short days, the impenetrable sog and pervasive grey. How many shades of grey are there to learn to love? Too many.

Not much work; it's the seasonal lull. Dangerous, this too-much-free-time. I'm routine-ridden, dependent on a particular predictability with just enough spaces between the lines to pursue my passions. So today it was grocery shopping, 45 minutes of yoga, and getting on with the business of submitting poetry for publication (odious task, that).

So far, all is well. A glass of Sancerre, and dinner asimmer.

So many winters of living dangerously close to the bone -- to the marrow -- dependent on a cupboard of stored beans and 79 cent bags of pasta, the odd squash, some plums frozen in a recycled margarine tub. It was never a matter of rubbing two pennies together as much as locating the single penny. I'm not exaggerating here, unfortunately. It's a difficult thing to write about, and I relive it -- and every other dank & desperate fact of deep winter -- every January.

But then I count my friends and my wonderful sons and my five quirky & magnificent sisters and of course, my dear Paul, and the measure of abundance right here, right now, is spilling over the edges of the cup. And the cup dings when I tap its crystal edges.

Found

P. and I had two consecutive Ireland summers with camera fatalities:

1. Mine leapt to its death in a Westport carpark;
2. P. dropped his in a toilet at Yeat's gravesite;
3. P. lost his next camera in a sweater shop in the Aran Islands.

The camera gods were not looking down on us with benevolence.

At Aran Islands Sweater Market on Inishmore, P. left the clerk his email and home addresses, in case the camera showed up. And it did indeed show up, on New Year's Eve, via the U.S. Postal Service. Neatly packed in a box, all 500+ photos intact. Sixteen months after he lost it.

There was no note enclosed, but our guess is that it slipped down between fixtures, and made its appearance when things were getting moved around. Needless to mention that we are delighted and astonished! Now we are camera-rich, and, as always, have only good things to say about the Irish.

Grumble

It's January.

---

In other news, we've had snow, soft pellets -- unsifted confectioner's sugar -- which have lingered for a week --


Woods walk --


A few small puddly ponds have frozen and I'm six years old again, crackling the edges and tossing pebbles which skip off the translucent surface.



I'm enamored of leaves suspended below the surface,
of ice shards cracked away and refrozen.


Sugared ferns --


Looking for the beautiful in what I otherwise think of as the grimmest of months.

Oz, Pez & The Nativity

I kept meaning to post this earlier, but nonetheless here's my version of The Holy Birth. I like to think that Jesus had a sense of humor:

I'm especially fond of orange pez "straw":

And who's to say that Dorothy Gale of Kansas wasn't the real Virgin Mary?

Santé!

It's anniversary time for Paul and me: zip zip go the years! We had a completely over-the-top wedding feast for about sixty people at Cafe Juanita for which pacing was required; our menu can be found here. Tonight we'll enjoy a more modest meal at Luc. I'm considering trout....

December 29th, 2007:

Nog Circus

Prior to Christmas day dinner, I was sitting at the dining room table playing a board game with two of the boys, and R. was behind us in the kitchen whisking & whipping eggs & cream for his nog concoction: double boilers, nutmeg grater, eggshells, rum, vanilla, etc., when suddenly he let out a terrific yelp, dropped the stainless steel bowl of hot nog, which sent the eggy froth splashing in a lateral, circumferential sweep of the kitchen, managing to hit counters, hardwood floor, fridge, cupboards, cat dishes, windows, stovetop, rug, blender, toaster, microwave, wine glasses, champagne glasses, ferns, chairs, sink, dishwasher....did I miss anything? WHAT A MESS. He incurred a steam burn on one of his hands, nothing serious, but sharply painful, resulting in the sudden & fierce gravitational pull of the bowl. Paul and I jumped in with towels as R. ran his hand under a steady stream of cold water. Luckily, it was a rather large quantity of eggnog in the bowl, so all was not lost. It's amazing, though, how such a small amount becomes a really large amount when measured in splishes, droplets, dribbles and flat puddles.

(Note: the finished product, after all was sopped up, was sublime. The perfect accompaniment to my pecan pie, which I flavor with vanilla extract, Cognac, plus a splash of cheap Mexican vanilla.)

ho ho ho & ha ha ha

It's not Sunday but the Day After Christmas. (Or Recovery Day.) Just as Friday wasn't Friday but The Day Before Christmas. Is it this way for you too? The days leading up to Christmas lose their day-ness and instead become a lead-up to The Big Day. Tomorrow will be just a little bit Monday, Tuesday more Tuesday than not, and by Wednesday things should be back to normal, according to the Romans and their planetary naming system.

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with four delightful men: my husband, two sons and step-son, each one of them sharp as a tack with wit that cannot be contained and a sense of humor that left me last night completely spent of laughter, exhausted by So Much Fun.

My two boys and I compete every year for the goofiest wrap job, and I was once again left in the dust by my eldest, who made use of cast-offs from his restaurant job, packaging his brother's gift (a bottle of fancy tequila) in an empty plastic gallon salad dressing container, and my gift (Home, by Emma Donoghue)in a compostable take-out box. My use of mildewed vintage dictionary pages taped-together to make large sheets of paper just didn't cut it. Even when I tied the package with upholstery thread and glued triangles of red ribbon to it. Alas. I've been outdone by silly sons, once again. One year I contemplated sewing together used fabric softener sheets to form a sort of wrapping-fabric. (Recycled!) This year I thought about gluing large clumps of dryer lint to a package. But didn't. I really must plan this in advance next year.

My morning today was spent perusing the 800+ recipes in this book, a gift from Paul:


For not being a cook, my husband sure knows how to pick out cookbooks: he hit a home run outa the park with this one. The recipes, oddly, are arranged by major ingredient rather than category, which, after two hours with my head in these pages, has me convinced is the way to go. There's savory beside sweet, but if you find yourself with a bushel of overgrown zucchini, say, you need only flip to page 467 to find Fried Zucchini Matchsticks, Every Year Zucchini Bread and Savory Zucchini Pie.

Here are some of the chapters, with a teaser recipe:
Grits (Hot Tomato Grits)
Okra (Oven Okra Etouffee)
Bacon (Kentucky Baby Hot Browns)
Gravy (Sawmill Gravy)
Coca Cola (Cherry Coke BBQ Sauce)
Watermelon (Watermelon and Purple Onion Salad)

I'm an obsessive reader of cookbooks and online recipe sites, and it is with pure pleasure to discover an entire book of new cooking adventures.

And now it's on to that recovery I mentioned earlier. Perhaps a nap.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Yum!

Last-Century 'Joy'

Old cookbooks are always a curiosity, and I've long envied the fact that one of my sisters inherited my mother's old Joy of Cooking, most likely an early 1960's edition. A fortuitous benefit of marrying Paul is that he owns a 1975 edition of JoC. My more modern edition (the front 116 pages are missing so I'm not certain of the publication date) has been updated and, alas, purged of what I consider to be all the really great quirky stuff. There is no recipe for marshmallows, for instance, something I made as a teenager and finally do again thanks to the seemingly infinite number of recipes online.

But what's really been scrubbed bloodless of all interest is the "Game" chapter. Where now there is Lapin a la Moutarde, there used to be Rabbit with Chili Beans, and Jugged Hare. Gone is the black-and-white illustration of a rabbit hung upside down by its feet, being skinned by a pair of gloved hands, as well as this gloved-and-booted skinning of a squirrel:


There are instructions for the skinning and cleaning of porcupine, raccoon, muskrat, woodchuck, beaver, beaver tail, and armadillo. My favorite, though, is this passage concerning the preparation of oppossum:

If possible, trap 'possum and feed it on milk and cereals for 10 days before killing. [Does this mean that I should feed my 'possum Lucky Charms for 10 days? Quisp?] Clean, but do not skin. [Well, okay.] Treat as for pig [pig? I've never cooked 'pig'] by immersing the unskinned animal in water just below the boiling point [If any blog readers know where the boiling point of an unskinned 'possum is, let me know]. Test frequently by plucking at the hair [no, thank-you]. When it slips out readily, remove the oppossum from the water and scrape.... Serve with: turnip greens.

Got that?

As for beaver tail, "Hold over open flame until rough skin blisters."

And in case you were wondering, "small game such as rabbit, squirrel and muskrat may be substituted in most recipes calling for chicken."

I still haven't made peace with game meats after several winters of my childhood faced with a freezer-full of neatly-wrapped packages of dead Bambi and his cousin The Mighty Elk. Some aversion settled in me during those years of tender teen tastebuds where I suffered through elkburgers on Thursday and a bloody haunch of venison for Sunday dinner. I know, I know, venison and any number of odd meats (goat, for one) are fashionable dinner meats among current-day foodies, but if I'm going to eat something that tastes just like chicken, it damn well better be chicken.

So what's on your holiday table? Crow? Vole?

Tuesday Poem: Claire Beynon

GRAPEFRUIT

for Daniel



He has two wishes for his sixth

birthday; a pocket of ruby grapefruit

and a citrus knife with a bend in it.



It is the Fast of Ramadhan - the twenty-eighth day in -

and the weather shows no consideration.

Flies and an irreverent heat nudge Mr Sahlie

the fruit seller and his cart horse up the street.



The children are waiting. They know he will come.

He’ll spoil them with a fistful of pomegranate, a slice

of ice green melon. Upside down they wait, dangling

limbs and rinds of chatter from the purple crown

of a jacaranda tree. They swing from a sandpit sky,

scuffed toes bare, swishing through a thick mirage

of air. Up at the gate, in the post-box shade,

beach buckets brim with the horse’s drink.



Ramadhan. And today is the boy’s sixth birthday.



He drops to the ground with a ripe fruit sound

runs pelter, pelter down the street. There’s a horse,

a cart, an old man to meet (of course he’s remembered);

he whistles and grins, heaves the grapefruit down.

Next week, they agree, when the Fast is complete,

they’ll sit on the pavement, enjoy a pink feast.



“Mr. Sahlie?” I hear my boy speak.

“Why do these smell so wet

and so deep?”



CB 1993

---

Claire Beynon is a New Zealand writer and artist. Her first collection of poems - Open Book - Poetry and Images - was published by Steele Roberts Ltd (NZ) in 2007. When she isn't painting, her passions include Antarctica, walking along Dunedin's harbour edge, a cappella singing, gardening and paper-boat folding. . .

---

Somewhere in my travels in the blogosphere this past year, I happened upon Claire Beynon's blog Icelines, struck up a delightful friendship with this amazingly talented & energetic poet/artist, and from there connections with an entirely new group of international poets emerged through the Tuesday Poem blog. The New Zealand writer Mary McCallum, our tireless moderator, suggested a pairing of the thirty-or-so poets for this week's entry where we each post a poem by the other, and while the pairing appears to have been decided alphabetically, I couldn't have been more tickled to discover that I was paired with Claire. Getting a comment from Claire on my blog is always a gift -- thoughtful, insightful, loving. How she finds the time to comment with such presence is a mystery to me; I barely seem to be able to keep up with the few blogs I follow on a regular basis. But there is no question: my life is richer for this connection, and I am in awe of the community we've built here as well as the possibilities for community.

Cheers and the best holiday wishes to all the Tuesday Poem editors, readers, fellow bloggers!

Odds &

I can barely bring myself to sit down with my computer and do a blog entry. Something has shifted, internally, or maybe it's just a by-product of the ample darkness these days in our hemisphere, our northerly city perched up here close to the edge of the continent, the northerly corner of the country. I dunno. All I can say is that I've been getting sufficient brief blips of e'mail, blogs and facebook on my newest appendage, my iPhone.

Winding down the year at work. It's been an archaeological dig all week, in the sheds, the studio and the dungeon aka the basement. I assembled a new shop vac today and went berserk (I've never actually written that word before) sucking up every last bit of broken glass and spilled packing peanuts: the rubble & scraps of a year of working to get orders completed and shipped out with nary a second to do that cleaning thing. We lugged box after box of excess glass pieces to the car for repeated trips to Goodwill, broke-down teetering stacks of boxes and bundled them for recycling, arranged & rearranged every last piece of blank stock, fresh for a new year. All is agleam. It feels good to work. I like to work -- I like the industry of it. This end-of-the-year scrubbing-down is mucky & grubby, but we'll ratchet the production back up to a noisy bustle once the holiday dust settles. Another year.

Big doings here on Sunday: P. and I are hosting a family party, to the tune of 40+ people. I'm making three soups: meatball with kale, corn chowder and minestrone. I'm going to attempt six baguettes...I need a bigger oven!

Spontaenous (well, sort of) Handel

George Frederic seems to be popping up everywhere this December. In this video, Gerard Schwarz, Seattle Symphony conductor, directs a crowd of more than 600 in the flagship Nordstrom store. Singers on all three levels of the store participated.


This video has been making the rounds of facebook:


In my school days, we sang selections from The Messiah in our Christmas concert, and once you were a member of the a cappella choir, you were granted lifetime rights to join the latest crop of junior and senior high-school singers in the annual Messiah performance. Several of my sisters and I did this for a few years -- it was a great musical reunion. I suppose this tradition lasted as long as that teacher did -- a much-beloved Mr. McManus -- dashingly handsome, irrepressibly cheerful, and the best music teacher I ever had. You couldn't pass his class without being able to sight read -- solo -- in front of the class. He was so beloved that in my four years as his student, I never saw a single student fail to thrive.

I also had a tradition of putting on my Messiah records when I was carving my Halloween pumpkins. It got a little eerie, especially when I was done with the knife and lit the candle. Where, exactly, was that music coming from?!

Peacocks, Santa Bosoms & Parakeets

At the grocery store today a woman spontaneously said to me: "I love this music! And I don't even celebrate Christmas!" She was a breath of fresh air as she snatched up a bag of yellow onions and deposited them in her cart.

At the pet store, a man disguised as Santa was available for "Pet Portraits with Santa". When he stood up, his belt, which bisected his well-stuffed torso, cut him in half horizontally and he appeared to be sporting some very generous bosoms.

At the craft aka crap store, I saw a wreath made out of peacock feathers. There was one that was blue/green/black, and then one that was in shades of red. Uh, red peacocks? I think not. They literally stopped me, silenced me, they were exquisitely beautiful. But I just couldn't bring myself to buy one, dead peacocks et al.

I wandered the aisles (trying hard not to do a peacock call) amidst the chaos of artificial Christmas, in search of candle holders, but came up short. I think I'll carve some out of red apples -- I've done this before, the only trick is getting the hole the right size so the candle doesn't wobble. I'll level each apple with a neat trim across the bottom, et voila! Bingo. Candle holders. Compostable candle holders.

The only small animals at the pet store were mice, rats, Guinea pigs and ferrets, so I lingered in front of the aquariums for a long time. I've never had fish save for the odd goldfish which, for some reason, upon its certain death, got flushed down the toilet, but I was so taken with these lovely shimmery critters that I actually looked at aquarium hardware. Too much work, though, I think.

The parakeets were equally lovely, particularly an-almost completely white one with blue underpinnings. Again, too much work.

As a child I spent a lot of time in the pet department of our local W.T.Grant store, which was an easy walk from my house. It's been an age since I looked at fish and birds, and I don't know exactly what compelled me to do this today, but it was the perfect antidote to the rain, the Saturday traffic, the holiday frenzy.

(When I mentioned to Paul that I didn't buy the wreath because all I could think of was dead peacocks, he said, "well, maybe they, you know, just fell off....") Hmm. I might have to make a trek back to the crap store and get one tomorrow. And, if I get tired of it as a wreath it could easily double as a hat.)

I could sit here and complain about the darkness but a part of me loves it, how it encompasses everything. And I dearly love the rain. But darkness + rain + driving = a particular kind of craziness.

Wasn't it just a blink ago that I was sitting in warm dusky light, lingering over a glass of Spanish wine? Wasn't I just leaning into the velvet faces of roses, inhaling their lemony-apple essence?

Apparently not.
Autumn is just about over, and I have yet to accept its presence.

January looms, with a silence known only to winter.

Bits, Bobs

A glass of Williamette Valley Pinot Noir.

---

I'm working on a project which gets into the corners of my brain cells and tangles things up. This involves pages back-to-back, photo corners, text, etc. The good part is that I'm learning one helluva alot and the bad part is that there is often an urge to scream. And that it's costing me a heckuva lot more than I expected. Sigh. But it's going to be fantastic, I do believe.

---

A big push at work these past few weeks, getting the last of the holiday orders finished and shipped out, lickety split. The annual home show/sale was today and then again next Sunday, which involves breaking down the home-factory and building the home-showroom. Glass shelving, fancy halogen lights, all excess paint/tape/buttercut pried free of all surfaces. Reports are that today went very well. A good thing. Job security. I work with a great group of three women, all of us artists in various disciplines. I regularly slay them with puns, and sometimes they laugh. Sometimes. (Not often enough.) The food is good -- lots of homemade soup, an occasional salad, freshly-ground coffee. Bits and bobs of this and that. Last week C. brought in remnants of pumpkin pie: one bite each. And then there was bittersweet chocolate with sea salt. And believe me, we work hard. Really hard. The hands ache, we manoeuver heavy boxes around precarious corners, battle spiders and wasps, go up and down steps over and over again, into the dungeon (the basement) for packing peanuts, bubble wrap. Glass is heavy. Sometimes it breaks. And sometimes at quitting time there's a nip of single-malt Scotch.

It's these small things -- soup, Scotch, puns -- that keep things simmering along at a tolerable pace.

Uh....

Periodically a silence overtakes me, in either the form of a silent voice or a silent pen. One or the other. All I desire to type here is the word anyway. Followed by a period.

Every day on my commute to work I compose blog entries in my head, which evanesce the moment I have a space in my day where I can sit down and approach the keyboard. Not sure what's up, but something in the gutters and margins of my life is sucking up the words.

___


Anyway.

We thawed, and the 2-inch snowfall which brought our topographically-challenged city to a halt has melted away down into storm drains and low-lying fields. I'm always thankful for the rain that returns after a temperature plummet. (I'm going to whisper now: I love the rain.) (If I say that too loudly I'll get pummeled with rotting apples.)

On Thanksgiving, I did not deep-fry, in a vat of boiling butter, a cube of butter dipped in a butter-batter. God knows there have been times when I've wanted to, but I've always managed to stop myself before I went too far. And for this restraint, I am thankful.

---

Shiver

A winter storm swooped down on our city yesterday, and it's not even officially winter yet. Three weeks ago we had a 74-degree afternoon, and this morning it was 15 degrees. Before leaving for work yesterday, I had a robust crop of nasturtiums; this morning their sad remains hung limp beneath snowdust. It's all so odd and we are all so unprepared. While other commuters suffered through blocked freeway lanes and ice-sheets and a journey home taking six, seven, eight hours, somehow I slipped through a hole in the chaos and made it home yesterday, late afternoon, in normal time. In fact, I had to keep reminding myself that it was snowing, that it was icy, and that I should slow down.

I'm a bit of a weather fanatic, and upon waking at 4:30am, with no hopes of further sleep, I took out my iPhone and checked the temps, and was stunned to discover a reading of -6 in my fair town! The forecast for the next four days promised little better -- all these negative signs flashed before me on my tiny screen, tiny frigid barbs. It felt as if a gigantic shift had taken place in my universe while I'd slept; that a ferocious cold front had whisked down from Canada, compliments of El Nino (or Nina, can never remember which 'little child' we can blame). It was massively unsettling, and my mind began to race with the prospect of frozen pipes, frozen plants, frozen everything. Had a Midwest-style deep-freeze really settled in to our temperate region? This is Seattle, for god's sake, home of ever-present winter drizzle and gloriously-habitable summer. What was happening?

And that hour, the four o'clock hour, with its own other-worldly sense. Many dreams have placed me waking to a blue 4am light where the minutes cease to accumulate and possibilities abound in the eternal present, like an unexpected gift -- a present! -- of time and an infinite supply of benevolent blue light --

Then I suspected something -- a nagging inkling -- and checked the iPhone again, to discover that somehow the temperature reading had shifted from fahrenheit to centigrade. Ahhhh.....

My insignificant sliver of the universe righted itself, anxieties dropped away one by one, and I slipped into dreamless sleep.