What an odd, odd year

Friday we harassed the children into bathing suits, sunscreen and bug spray and my husband drove them to Todd Lake to look for pollywogs.

There weren't any.

Three miles away at Sparks Lake, on the same day, Sasha caught 14 frogs.

I'd rather be a marsupial than a mammal, but I'd rather be a mammal than an oviparid

Immediately after my son was born, I wished I were a marsupial.

Marsupials have a short pregnancy, then give birth to itty bitty teeny weeny creatures – the size of a jelly bean – which hang out in a pouch as they grow. They say placental mammals like me have the advantage, evolutionarily speaking, because a jelly bean in a pouch is more vulnerable than a jelly bean in amniotic fluid: but! After nine months of pregnancy and a painful, traumatic labor, I sure envied kangaroos.

Right now I'm just glad I'm not oviparous. Through the door of the little house I've been watching a pair of robins, a mother and her baby. The baby isn't really a baby; he has all his feathers and he can fly and he's just as big as she is. He's a juvenile, I guess. He has the breast markings of a juvenile. But lord almighty he acts like a baby. He follows immediately behind his mother and chirps nonstop. He's the noisiest thing I ever saw. His mom makes three hops and he makes three hops and hey! hey! hey! he says. Every so often she'll turn to feed him and he'll be silent for a moment and then hey! hey! hey! he says again. Once the mother turned on him and shouted S Q U A W K ! and I laughed, because although I'm not oviparous I'm sure I've said the exact same thing to my children.

I am from

I did this once before but I didn't know, at that time, that there was a template. Maggie just pointed it out. So I tried it again. I think that in my original version, where I'm from sounds like a happy, interesting place, while this updated version just sounds lonely.

I am from card games played around the kitchen table, from Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit.

I am from houses chosen with active children in mind yet full of books and the space to be alone, from gnats and grass and unassigned land that may be, at least temporarily, claimed.

I am from flowering annuals.

I am from a table set for five, fork on the left knife spoon and paper napkin on the right, and dishes washed immediately after dinner. I am from Harry and Donna.

I am from independence and self-reliance, criticism and laughter.

From "You're smart; you can figure it out" and "I can't make that decision for you."

I am from an unspoken belief system.

I'm from a birthplace I wouldn't recognize and can't reliably spell, from ancestral American towns visited on occasional summer vacations. I am from steak and potatoes.

I am from stories that begin, "Remember when we went to..."

I'm from a place very far away, greener and wetter and more humid and full of bugs than where I now make my home; but I from people who often come by.

The view from here

The view from the Little House, 4:45pm Tuesday.

When my kids returned from camp they sat beside me in the Little House awhile, exclaiming over their day; but since I still had an hour of work to do, and since Tuesday is No Screens Day*, I helped them find something to do.

Water + bubbles = happiness all around.


*On our bi-weekly No Screens Days we turn off all mobile devices, computers and the television (except as needed for work). To my surprise, the children always abide by it. It's harder for me!

You can run but you can't hide! Well, ok, you can hide

What does she see?



A family of lizards. She spooked them and they slid into this space. You can just barely see a tail in this picture.

Look closely

In the end we hadn't time to see Meek's Cutoff (thanks for indulging my pique, by the way), but we did spend an overcast Sunday in the Badlands, where the terrain is similar to what those settlers encountered. Wildflowers are blooming. I took pictures.*

We also saw lizards, one snake, a pair of Clark's Nutcrackers – who were very upset at our presence – ravens, a hawk and several rabbits. Oh, and gazillions of red ants. We had to eat lunch on a boulder to keep them from climbing our legs.

Tidy tips blooming, cheatgrass in seed

Sand lily

Death camas

I'm not sure if this is a penstemon or
a larkspur. (My mother would be
horrified that I don't know!)

*The internet boasts much lovelier pictures of the wildflowers in the Badlands, but these are representative enough of what we saw yesterday: dirt, mostly, with a few flowers here and there.

Meek's Cutoff

I hope to see "Meek's Cutoff" this weekend. The NYT review makes the movie seem promising – all of it except for this paragraph, which is the sort of thing that drives me completely nuts.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the silent expanses of virgin territory that confront the pioneers at every turn: undiscovered country that presents a glorious but unyielding vision of what’s to come. 

Ursula LeGuin writes a lot about a frontier's two sides: the yin side, the side which calls itself the frontier, "in which you boldly go where no one has gone before," where nothing is real but is instead full of promise; and the yang side, the side on which you live, on which you have always lived.

Americans nearly always speak from the yin side, subconsciously or at least without acknowledgement, just like in this article.

People have lived in Central Oregon for 13,000 years. It's hardly "virgin territory." It's true it was settled by Americans quite recently; but there's a difference between a place being populated by people you distrust (and who distrust you) and it being untouched. I mean, according to the review itself, the would-be settlers in the movie keep seeing a Native American from whom the women want to ask directions.

(That's funny, isn't it? The women want to stop that guy and ask directions, but the men are all, oh, dears, we can figure it out...)

So let's rewrite that paragraph.

Yet as with a western, the [movie's] greatest eloquence can come from the panorama that confronts the pioneers over every ridge: a vast, glorious, alien landscape which fills them with fear and hope.

Wordless Wednesday

Twilight

Boy in a tree

My son was so hungry after mountain biking club that I served dinner early, leaving plenty of time for a walk along the river. My daughter kept posing ("Make a movie of me, Mom!") but I could only get action shots of the boy.

Little House in the Backyard

Now that daytime temps are consistently over 50 degrees, I've moved my home office into the backyard.

In the backyard we have a little house – a converted one-car garage, I think – with electricity but no plumbing. People have suggested we use it as a kids' playroom, a yoga studio, a guest bedroom or a rented bedroom. My mother-in-law thought she might use it as a painting studio.

For the first three years we lived here, though, we never did anything with the little house. The kids didn't want to play in it; I don't teach yoga; and when people visit they'd rather stay in the main house, even if it means they have to sleep on the floor. We left the little house closed up: not mildewing, since it's dry here, but definitely moldering. Finally last month, however, a straw broke. I decided I needed a fixed office – not a spot at the dining room table or in my bedroom, which needs to be cleaned up every day, but a place of my own.

And so: since it is now consistently over 50 degrees during the day, I'm working from the little house .. with all the doors and windows open and a fan running. After three years it's so dusty and cobwebby it makes me sneeze! Opened like this it's more a pavilion than a house; it's just like being in the backyard. I can hear the birds and my neighbors and the train whistle and, in the morning, the parkway buzz. Today the neighbors' cat came by and licked my lunch plate.

Gathering

Every few years my parents gather their daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren from hither and yon for a grand family vacation. They rent a house big enough to hold us all; the house is usually on a beach where we can swim and hunt for critters and roast marshmallows over bonfires. My dad likes to do things so he usually plans expeditions during the day – fishing, sailing, snorkeling: whatever there is to do in this place – and we kids & grandkids join or don't. In the evenings we gather for dinner and then play games or just, you know, hang out. My sister Joie and I fight at least once, and our little sister diffuses a fight a least once, and each grandchild melts down a number of times in inverse relation to his or her age.

It is always absolutely lovely.

This year we stayed in a house in Haena, on Kauai's north shore. Two years ago we went to Orcas Island, in the San Juans. Three years before that we stayed in a house a little ways from Cancun, Mexico. Ten years ago, when I was pregnant for the first time and my littlest sister engaged, we also went to Mexico.

After each of these trips there's a flurry of email and phone calls and, this year, text messages: continuing the laughing and joking that began on the beach when we were all, for a little while, together.

You say three hours, he says three days

We flew from Kauai to Honolulu to Portland, spent the night in a hotel and then began the three hour drive back to Bend.

Just this side of Mt. Hood, when alpine trees cede to ponderosas, we passed Lee the Horselogger. (Go on, click through. His rig looks exactly like that. I couldn't take my own picture because I was too busy gawking, and also wondering how he keeps his wagon from running away on those steep declines. My husband says the wagon has brakes. STILL.)

Welcome back to Oregon!

Ooooooooooo

One of our guinea pigs died last week* and has been reincarnated as a mouse.

Sweetie – the former-guinea-pig-now-mouse – lives in the wall that divides the stairwell from the dining room. For three days I heard her scrabbling about while I worked. The wall is about 10 feet from where Sweetie's sister sits in a cage; I imagine Raincloud can hear her, too, but Raincloud always has been quiet (Sweetie was the squeaky one) so I can't tell if she recognizes the sounds for what they are.

On the other hand: Sasha says that it's not a mouse, but Sweetie's ghost. She might be right; I haven't heard the scrabbling in a day or so. Maybe Sweetie just wanted to say good-bye.

Oooooooooooooooo!




*She died while we were on vacation. One of my daughter's school friends was babysitting her. I waffle between blaming him for Sweetie's death** and feeling horrified for that poor seven-year-old, who had his friend's dead guinea pig in his room for a day.

**We don't know why she died. She was four, which is I believe late middle age for a guinea pig.

Wordless Wednesday

Last Wednesday: my son in foreground, local kiteboarder in background. Near Haena, Kauai.

1/4 of the way to the sun: in the middle of nowhere

Thomas Sieverts quoted by Matthew Stadler in the Spring 2011 issue of Oregon Humanities:

"Where we live lies between the singular, particular site as geographical-historical event and the sameness of all space in the global economy; between space as a field of immediate experience and space as a distance measured solely by time[.]"

I've been thinking about this all day. It brought to mind a conversation I had at Baldface Lodge. A man trying to understand where Bend is located asked me how far it is from Portland. "Three hours," I said. Then he asked how far it is from Eugene. "Two hours," I replied, and added, to forestall further questioning, "It's six hours from Boise." Ah, said he. "So it's in the middle of nowhere!"

Bend lies in the space between two cities, Portland and Boise; it is also my field of immediate experience. For me, therefore, it's the center of the universe.

*

If Bend is three hours from Portland – speaking of distance in terms of time – then at age 40 (speaking of time in terms of distance traveled by car) I am about 1/4 of the way from Earth to the sun.

How about that.

The monstrous music that runs through our mind

Adam Gopnik writing in The New Yorker about the Internet. 

"What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own. ...Thus the limitless malice of Internet commenting: it’s not newly unleashed anger but what we all think in the first order, and have always in the past socially restrained if only thanks to the look on the listener’s face—the monstrous music that runs through our minds is now played out loud.

"A social network is crucially different from a social circle, since the function of a social circle is to curb our appetites and of a network to extend them. Everything once inside is outside, a click away; much that used to be outside is inside, experienced in solitude. And so the peacefulness, the serenity that we feel away from the Internet, and which all the Better-Nevers rightly testify to, has less to do with being no longer harried by others than with being less oppressed by the force of your own inner life. Shut off your computer, and your self stops raging quite as much or quite as loud."

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1KYMdSL5p

Anisoptera

My daughter is studying dragonflies for school. We've been reading about them nearly every night (the Deschutes County library has a lot of books on dragonflies, turns out); after the reading, she writes or illustrates a page in "My Insect Report." One day last week she wrote this:

Interesting facts about my insect

It can't fly in cold wether.
It livs most of it's life in water.
It can fly baqurds.

The best fact of all!

It evolvd 300 million years ago – be for dinosaurs! It was as big as a crow!

She's been telling everybody about this. Before dinosaurs! As big as a crow! People are always exactly as amazed as she; they act out being dive-bombed by a giant dragonfly, covering their heads with their arms and ducking. And then they'll say (if they know anything about dragonflies at all): Imagine how big mosquitoes must have been back then!

So. As part of the report, she and I are making a crow-sized dragonfly. It has old socks stuffed with plastic bags for its abdomen and head, pipe cleaners for legs and – well, we're not sure yet how to make the wings. She thinks we should cut them out of cardboard, but I thought we could reshape wire hangers and stretch cheesecloth over them. The wire is heavy, though.

Ideas?

---

There is such a creature as the Himalayan Relict Dragonfly. It is not as streamlined a flier as the dragonflies we know; it's slow and rather uncoordinated, they say. It is more nymph than dragonfly, in fact, living for up to nine years as an aquatic insect before making its final transformation.

Scientists originally theorized that this Relict Dragonfly was a predecessor of the dragonflies we know, but now they say that the two have a common ancestor; the Relict and our dragonflies began to separate around the time the Himalayas uplifted.

Around the time the Himalayas* uplifted**! 

That makes me feel young, as a species.

(If I had to do a report, I'd call that the best fact of all.)



*About the Himalayas, Wikipedia says, "Topographically, the belt has many superlatives." I love that.
**Beginning roughly 55 million years ago.

Apparently the cougar is not in my neighborhood

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deer. Easy pickin's for a cougar.

Ten things

Ten things I admire about my mother (in honor of her 40th Mother's Day):

1. She is such a private person that she'll hate this list.

2. She can make a lovely, fulfilling meal in an empty kitchen. She's like Westley on the balustrade, exclaiming, "Why didn't you list that among our assets?" when she's cooking at my house and discovers that I also have a tablespoon of peanut butter and half a chicken leg.

3. She does what needs doing.

4. She has been married to the same man for over 40 years.

5. If I see a bird that interests me and describe it to her in even the most general terms, she can tell me its name and how it behaves.

6. She can kill a rattlesnake with a shovel.

7. She's determined to eradicate the cheatgrass around her cabin here in Oregon, Sisyphean task that it is!

8. She is still in touch with the family that were our neighbors 25 years ago, when I was in high school – three moves ago.

9. She always gives the perfect present: not what she wants, and not what she wants the receiver to want, but what the receiver actually wants.

10. She listens.

10 things

Ten things I learned from my dad (in honor of his bajillionth birthday):

1. If you make a mistake, analyze why it happened and change the way you work/live/behave so it never happens again. Then move on.
2. If you can't change the circumstances which caused you to make the mistake, accept the fact that it will occur again and mitigate it. Then move on.
3. Science fiction rocks.
4. If you want something, go get it. Don't steal it – but go get it. 
5. You can't have everything. You can have that one thing you really want, though, if you work hard.
6. Illini! Illini!
7. Schrodinger's cat is the one that's both alive and dead until you open the box, at which point it is either alive or dead.
8. People are interesting. And weird. They follow a pattern, though. They're worth analyzing.
9. Trust. 
10. My kids are totally normal.