Quail!

I saw a quail!

A squirrel sat in a flower pot on the deck and I called Sasha over to watch him, funny little squirrel; and we saw a quail! Poppa quail I think, the look-out, perched warily on the top of our neighbor's fence.

Spring spring spring spring spring!

//

Monday we visited the old cemetery near the Camp Polk Meadow Preserve. It reminded me of cemeteries in Russia, where people enclose their plots with fences.

The meadow was filled with spring peepers -- frogs. I took a video so you could hear them. The sound on my computer is busted so you'll have to let me know if the peepers come through the wind and crackling.




Central Oregon calendar:

• Yellow crocuses blooming in my front yard
• The sunniest spots have daffodils blooming; north side of the house, just stalks
• Iris spikes about 2 inches tall

Climb on

Ponderosa pines are known for growing perfectly perfectly straight, but the ones along the Deschutes River are gnarled old things. My sister-in-law says the porcupines do that. She says that when a porcupine builds a nest in a ponderosa, it splits the trunk, forever altering the tree.

Last Sunday while barbequing near the meadow at Cow Camp, my son and I discovered the only ponderosa we will ever be able to climb. It grows sideways, straight out of the bank and over the river. We all walked up and down it.

Thanks, porcupines.

No, not quite

I may have misled you as to the nature of spring in Central Oregon.

It's not green here. The shrubs and deciduous trees look dead. When we walked through Shevlin Park on Sunday and I exclaimed to my brother-in-law, who lives in Portland, that the bitterbrush was getting its leaves, he just laughed at me. Excitement over bitterbrush stubs is funny to someone who lives in the Willamette Valley, where the streets are littered with cherry blossoms.

Still. If you look very, very closely, you'll see new growth.

Bend calendar:

• The hawks are back. I noticed them this week, first time since fall. Leisurely circles overhead.
• A week or two ago the mourning doves again began their familiar cry.
• Redwing blackbird singing by the river.

Sunreturn

Today for the first time the sun is high enough in the sky that at 4:55pm it shines through our west-facing windows and touches the disco ball. Today it was just a glancing touch, but in a few days it'll be a GONG. The disco ball will reflect spots of light all around the kitchen and living room, and the kids will run around trying to catch them.

*

My mom says that the real reason people do a massive spring clean is because of the sun's return -- because now all the dust is visible. And lo, the sun did shine on the disco ball, and lo, the sun did highlight the dust on the stereo and speakers and the fingerprints on all the pictures!

Monday mission: book jacket blurb

The Lure of a Mountain

In the darkest months of the year, a woman leaves her children in the care of others and trudges up a mountain. Every week she does this, stopped by neither snow nor sleet nor howling winds. She is joined in her trek by hundreds of other people, some from towns nearby but others from cities a thousand miles distant. Emergency personnel stand by. Support personnel supply food, water, shelter.

In her most ambitious novel to date, Jen Ponderosa examines the impulses within a quiet, suburban mother which lead her to undertake this dangerous pilgrimage.

The Wilderness Within

This is the story of Jen Ponderosa, a housewife and mother of two who lives in a society that values safety and the reduction of risk above all else. Chafing at what they view as the excessive caution in this society, Jen and a band of "adventurers" begin brief but regular forays into the wilderness areas which surround the town. Upon return they bring a smell of freedom which begins to subvert the quiet order of things. In the conflict which follows, Jen must re-examine her notions of acceptable risk.

This is the second in Andrea's Monday Mission series: a blog post written in the style of a book jacket blurb.

The first is a fair description of my Saturday, on which I snowboarded ALL DAY! (Big thanks to my mother-in-law.) The second is just something I thought of while I was writing the first.

Who I am from

Updated 3/1: Forty years! My parents have been married forty years. I know that because I'm 35, and they were married awhile before I came along. (I'm 35? When did that happen?)

I first saw this meme at Charlotte Otter's. I kept thinking about it because 1> the syntax drove me crazy and 2> her childhood was so place-based and mine was not. I couldn't imagine how I might adapt it... But then I came up with this.

I am from a country so big that I grew up near one ocean and am raising my children near another.

I am from possibility. I am from opportunity. From a father, the 2nd oldest of 13 children, who lived (is living) his dream, who retired to accolades, admiration and respect. Who paid for my college education and encouraged me to do whatever I liked. Who encouraged me to want something and then go get it.

I am from a mother raised on a farm, who knows how to be still so that the animals gather around her, who watches birds everywhere she goes, knows their names and their calls. I am from a mother who values small creatures, who values quiet and harmony. I am from a woman who's proud of her work as a wife and mother, who knows that what she does and who she is matters.

I am from freedom of movement. I am from a childhood lived in three states, six towns. I am from an itinerant early adulthood, I am from travel through 13 countries. I am from parents who own two houses, one on each side of the continent, and who now travel abroad three times a year.

I am from physical grace, from a body strenghtened and controlled, in balance. I am from physical ability. I am from parents who climbed a mountain in their 60s. I am from a sister who raced a half-Ironman.

I am from intelligence. I am from competence. I am from responsibility -- for oneself, and to others.

I am from generosity. I am from a woman who cared for her mother for a decade. I am from parents married for 35 years. I am from sisters who are married to men they loved in high school.

I am from parents who keep their personal lives obscured from their children. I am from emotional stoicism. I am from silence. Yet I am from laughter.

I am not from a place, but I am from a family.

Ssnnooooooooooowww!

After weeks and weeks during which I envied all y'all's tales of snowstorms, we are finally having our own. It makes me so happy. A good storm wakes me up.

Thursday snow fell all day, wet but not slushy, with no wind: the kind of snow that clumps on pine branches and changes the color of the world. It was perfect snowman snow. The kids and I spent the morning constructing a veritable giant which -- just like the giant up the beanstalk -- succumbed to the wiles of a small boy. We tried to make an igloo, too, but hadn't enough snow for a roof; we settled for a fort and hid from the neighbors.

Friday the kids had daycare. I stayed in the house with just my job for company and listened to snow fall onto the roof with every squirrel's movements -- ka-pow! -- as startling as an explosion. I heard each car as it passed, crunching snow; I heard my neighbors' footsteps. Thursday during the snowfall everything got quiet but Friday was loud.

My in-laws' Camp Sherman house is like a den, as I said; it protects its inhabitants from the outside. My house is different. Mine is a modern house: it lets the outside in. Thursday the trees drooping with snow seemed to reach inside. Looking up through the skylights I see the sky through tree limbs just as if I were standing on the forest floor. It's not an old-growth forest far from humans; it's more like a campground with neighbors 50 feet away. Hello everyone! Isn't this wonderful?

A study of the negotation of parental responsibility on a two-parent family

Updated Mar 12. Better late than never. My post won an award! It's my first award. Thanks Mayberry Mom.



Post begins:
This is a mock journal abstract. It was Andrea's idea. It was really, really fun.

In the middle decades of the 20th century in American society, childrearing roles were clear: in a two-parent household, the woman was the primary caregiver. The man may have been involved in caregiving, but he was not primarily responsible for fulfilling the day-to-day, minute-to-minute demands of small children. Now, however, these roles are in flux. In some households, women are still the primary caregivers, and in some, men are the primary caregivers. In yet others the role can vary by month, by day or by hour, depending on various factors.

We are interested in households in which the role of primary caregiver switches between the two parents over the course of a single day. How do they manage the hand-off? Are the children aware of which parent is on-duty, so to speak?

To address these questions we studied a single household in a small Oregon town on one day. The family includes a father who works outside the home, a mother who works part-time, and two children ages 5 and 2. On the day we visited this family, the children were not in daycare and the mother did no office work. The father left before anyone had woken, returning home at approximately 6:30pm. Both children were in bed at 9pm. Over a period of 2 1/2 hours, then, the parents were both in the house, constantly negotiating who was primarily caregiver.

For most of the evening the atmosphere in the house was not tense. The child* was always within arm's reach of one parent or the other and it did appear clear to both him and the parents that the adult nearby was the one in charge of him. (He did not, for example, misdirect requests for food or water.) For most of this time the hand-off occurred with no visible negotiation. We did not witness any gestures nor hear any statements regarding the swapping of responsibility.

However, there were two notable exceptions:

* At approximately 8:30 pm, the mother said, "You got to take 1/2 an hour in the bathroom. Now it's my turn!" She then retired to the master bedroom, leaving the child with his father.

* At approximately 9pm the father was heard to say, "It's time for bed now, Blake. Mom will help you brush your teeth." As the mother was still in the master bedroom at that time (but clearly was able to hear the statement), we infer that the father was stating his desire to reliquish his role as primary caregiver. This inference was later corroborated in a follow-up interview.

In conclusion, it appears that parents use a sophisticated form of ESP to communicate which of them is primarily responsible for the children. The children are included in this "invisible" communication. That system breaks down as bedtime nears, when parents and children must rely on the spoken word -- usually uttered in a raised voice -- to communicate their roles.

*Design notes: Because the mother was the only adult at home with the children from the moment she woke until the father returned, she assumed the role of primary caregiver for those eleven hours. At the time he returned, the youngest child had fallen asleep on the kitchen floor (a situation we were led to believe is unusual) and was put to bed by the mother. It is therefore possible that our sample size was too small and duration too limited. More study is needed.

Ah, this is the life

RSS: small edits at 7:15p. Really, I shouldn't read these after I post!

In winter my in-laws’ house in Camp Sherman is like a den. Snow calves off the roof into piles before the picture windows, foreshortening the view and blocking the light. It’s a wooden house, made not of logs but of rough-hewn lumber, unpainted: so one might also say it’s like the inside of a tree, if the tree had a stone fireplace in its center.

For a day or two in winter, maybe as long as a week, the house feels safe. It is the cozy center of the world. Then it becomes both claustrophobic and lonely, like a cage. The internet says 250 people live in Camp Sherman, but I can’t imagine where they all are. Hidden among the trees, I guess. To borrow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s description of her little house: “The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods.” Woods and mountains.

So my husband and I only visit the Camp Sherman house in winter when we know there’ll be a crowd, a noisy and boistrous group generating its own light. We made an exception this past weekend for some friends of ours – a couple and their 4-year-old son – who requested some time out there. OK, we said; let’s embrace the idea. We’ll ski at Hoodoo! We’ll snowshoe! We’ll sled! Then we’ll come home to soup and a blazing fire!

It was 65 degrees on Saturday.

We adults basked in the sun on the deck, coatless, shoeless, slurping cans of PBR. So content we barely spoke at all. Ah! This is the life! The children did no basking, of course; they ran playing with sticks and rocks and boxes and (yes) plastic dinosaurs. All three ended up in Lake Creek, the boys up to their waists. This distressed the other mother (her son had a cough). Her husband kept exclaiming, “They’re boys!” in a way that suggested the inevitability of their dunking; I think he meant to say that it was fun. The kids certainly enjoyed it – right up to the moment at which they were abruptly, unbearably cold. Then we adults laughed to hear their boots squish as they walked. “Catch any salmon in those boots?”

The kids threw rocks. Sasha chased the geese. Blake lost a shoe to the mud. I built a catapult for them but Blake had recently seen “Pippi Longstocking” and wanted instead an airplane that can be pedalled; he and Talkative Boy devised a plan to fly to Mexico and dive for treasure. We drove to the fish hatchery, nearly losing a car to the mud; then we walked to the Metolius (where I took yesterday's picture). We brought entirely too much food and ate it all.

We woke Sunday morning to snow squalls.

Homeward! Escape homeward!

Sacrifice

RSS note: I enlarged the photo.

We often say that by living here, we're making a sacrifice. Our friends say this too. We mean financial sacrifice, mostly (Central Oregon pays notoriously low wages), but the complaint also may refer to Bend's cultural or retail offerings.

On the other hand.



Yesterday: Blake clambering over a downed ponderosa near the fish hatchery, Camp Sherman, OR.

Friday morning snowboarding

Rewritten 2:44pm

Weather report from Mt. Bachelor at 8am: 32 degrees, raining, moderate to strong winds; more than half of the lifts on stand-by.

Er.

I still wanted to check it out, but Artist Sister-in-law said it would be a waste of gasoline. So, so. I brought the kids to my neighbor's house anyway and Artist Sister and I walked up Pilot Butte. Wet dirt underfoot, the smell of sage and juniper in the air. Mountains had disappeared into the gray sky. So much of this landscape is just stones and sky.

Hello, we said. Hi, how ya doin', hi, hello: lots of other people chose to walk the butte this morning, too.

Stones and sky -- and junipers.

Saturday morning snowboarding

Old snow up there: hard, icy, covered in tree debris. Some exposed rocks. Wispy clouds hung on the summit of South Sister in the morning, then traversed the gap to Mt. Bachelor. At first we said, "It's fogging!" because the air seemed to condense onto our goggles. Then it turned to ordinary rain.

Sometimes snowboarding is swooshy and peaceful, but on Saturday it was loud. Board scrrrrratch, scrrratch, scrratching against the ice, and running so fast into the wind -- well, it was like hanging my head outside a car window. And of course every so often I'd shout whee-haa! Partly in fear of falling at speed and partly (simultaneously) for the joy of it.

*

The competition was cool. I watched a little from the Pine Marten chair -- just practice, I think. Those kids fly!

Ponderosas

RSS note: Republished to remove photo

Jennifer from Penguin Unearthed did that green meme about a tree in her yard, the Port Jackson fig. It sounds like a noisy, boisterous, fecund tree and I would love to see it in person. It is not at all like a ponderosa. I was thinking about this around 4am, after I'd coughed myself awake and couldn't fall asleep again.

Ponderosa trees grow very tall and very straight. Their branches start up high, typically higher than my one-storey house*, so we humans experience them more as trunks than as trees. If you are in a neighborhood rather than a forest, they're like poles; they're background; you barely notice them.


Here's a picture of wee Sasha in our front yard, May 2006. The tree trunk you see in the background is a ponderosa.

[picture removed]

And these are baby trees.

I live pretty close to where the mill used to be, so I figure this place was logged in the 1920s, maybe 1930s, which would make the eldest ponderosas about 85 years old. Infants! You can see a more mature ponderosa forest around the Camp Sherman area, which wasn't logged in the same way. Here's Blake alongside Jack Creek in 2002:

The needles of ponderosa starts are the same size as the needles on an "adult" ponderosa, which makes the starts look ridiculous. I mean, in some cases the needles are as long as the tree itself. Young ponderosas -- those my age, for example -- have a black trunk; as they grow older, the bark turns an orange brown. When the morning sun strikes them, they look like gold.

Anyway. That's what I was thinking about at 4am this morning.

*The trees in my neighborhood have been limbed. But still. A person could never climb a ponderosa by grasping onto its lowest branch. (And now a whole lotta Bendites are going to write me with exceptions. But! You know what I mean!)

The green meme, var. 1

I'm editing this to link to a few other bloggers who wrote about trees they love. These trees have layers of meaning for them which I find fascinating.

Jennifer from Penguin Unearthed: on the Port Jackson fig which takes up her whole yard and her grandmother's pohutukawa tree, which grows on the beach in New Zealand

Sandy from Imponderabilia of Actual Life: the elm tree in her yard which died and yet continued to nourish several species, including human

Anthromama: the maple from which she made leaf crowns for the children

And then I elaborated on the ponderosa.

*

Think of the plants (trees, flowers, etc) which grow within 50 yards of your home. Which is your favorite?

Ponderosa pine tree, pinus ponderosa.

Is any portion of this plant edible in any form? Can you boil the root, eat the berries, make tea from the leaves?

I haven't ever done this, but one could eat the seeds raw. They're small, it would be a lot of work to get a handful. Also one could grind them and use them as flour.

Can you use any portion of this plant to make something that would be truly useful for you? Alternately, can you use any portion of this plant to make something just for fun, just one time?

One could make a basket from the pine needles. They teach classes on it at COCC. I personally could use such a basket for holding dirty laundry, if it were big enough. Or to hold the children's toys.

If I were willing to cut my trees down (and allowed to by law) and had them processed at a mill, I could sell the wood; or I could give the wood to a craftsman and have him make some funiture.

The pitch is awfully sticky, I'm sure I could use that for something.

Can this plant survive on the groundwater available to it, or does it need to be watered?

It can survive on its own. In fact my trees would probably do better if I stopped watering my lawn.

Do you see any other creatures -- birds or bees or squirrels -- using this plant?

Squirrels break open the pinecones and eat the seeds. The blue jays might eat the seeds, too, I'm not sure. Woodpeckers (the flicker) eat the bugs out of it. Black ants live off it.

What does this plant look like right now, during this season and at the time of day you're writing?

It's January 17 around 3pm. The tree out my study window is sick, I think, because it has a lot of dead needles and there's pitch oozing out one side. It looks the same as it does at any time of year; it's not seasonally variable, as far as I can tell.

The green meme, var. 2

Just for fun, I'm doing it again. I modified the date stamp so this would appear after var. 1.

Think of the plants (trees, flowers, etc) which grow within 50 yards of your home. Which is your favorite?

Runner up: Columbine. I love the flower.

Is any portion of this plant edible in any form? Can you boil the root, eat the berries, make tea from the leaves?

According to the internet (second source here) the flowers are good in salads. Huh. I didn't know that. They say you can chew the boiled roots, too, but it doesn't sound enjoyable.

Can you use any portion of this plant to make something that would be truly useful for you? Alternately, can you use any portion of this plant to make something just for fun, just one time?

One-time use: Make a chain for the kids from the stem.

Can this plant survive on the groundwater available to it, or does it need to be watered?

The particular plant I have in mind is in my yard and would probably die if I didn't water it. However, an orange columbine does grow wild along the Deschutes and Tumalo rivers, mostly on the hillsides, and all over the Camp Sherman area.

Do you see any other creatures -- birds or bees or squirrels -- using this plant?

I have never seen this happen, but mustn't bees and butterflies use it?

What does this plant look like right now, during this season and at the time of day you're writing?

It's January 17 around 3pm. You can't even tell it's there. In the fall I cut back the dried stems, so at the moment it's just a small pile of potential!

Ski season arriveth

Two mornings a week I bring my kids to daycare, so two mornings a week I drive a short ways along Century Drive. Before me: a vehicle with snowboards or skis strapped to the roof. Behind me: a rig packed with people in ski hats, goggles dangling from the rearview mirror.

Then I turn and they continue on to Mt. Bachelor.

*sigh*

Last Friday my husband took the morning off work to join me and Artist Sister-in-law on the mountain. "I am entirely too well to work," he said.

Friday morning snowboarding

Sunny today and so clear the sky is everywhere. On the mountain I felt like I was in it. Artist Sister-in-law and my husband and I sat in the middle of one of the northwest runs to admire Sparks Lake, frozen way down below, and across from us -- at arm's length -- South Sister and Broken Top.

My sister-in-law was giddy with happiness. "I'm just glad to be here!" she said. "I'm just so glad to be alive!"

But it was cold. Eeee ya! The wind howled at the top of the Outback chair, -20 degrees with the wind chill. The only way to stay warm was to get stuck in the deep, chalky powder in the trees, which I did a few times. Oh, yeah.

Hwy 372* closed

My water-loving brother-in-law says that one winter day many many years ago ODOT closed the road to Mt. Bachelor. I can't remember why. They closed the road after about 500 people had arrived in the parking lot. It was like the 500 had their own private mountain. The weather was fine, the snow was new. Fresh tracks for everyone!

*

This morning -- for only the second time in the family's memory -- ODOT again closed the road to Mt. Bachelor. My husband didn't believe it. He saw the note on both ODOT and Mt. Bachelor's web sites, but it hadn't been updated for two hours. We could see clouds to the west but at our house the sky was clear, the wind silent. So we did as we had planned, rushing through breakfast and gearing up and then dropping Sasha at her grandmother's house at exactly 7:50 and then heading up for Blake's first ski lesson...

...and were stymied by a huge digital sign just past the final Century Drive traffic circle: HWY CLOSED 5 MI AHEAD.

Hrm. Amazing. It's still closed.

Artist Sister-in-law lives in one of those new subdivisions along Century Dr., so we stopped by. It's really closed! Isn't it amazing? Why is it closed? What does the web site say?

Artist Sister's husband cooked breakfast while we exclaimed and watched the ODOT channel and hit "refresh" on Mt. Bachelor's web site. Artist Sister fielded calls on her phone, my husband on his cell phone. Is it still closed? You're in line at the roadblock? The line is how long? Well come by! So Artist Sister's husband made more coffee as various colleagues U-turned out of line and stopped by to give us updates, rumors. They said the wind blew so hard last night that the groomers had trouble grooming. They said the wind blew so hard it covered the roads as fast as the snowplows could plow. They said the sky was white, that in places along the road visibility was close to nothing.

Finally at 9:30 the web site said GET READY and some of our visitors dashed to their cars. We waited for them to report back. At 9:45 the web site said LIFTS ON STANDBY -- the three most insignificant lifts on the mountain. Just past 10am our friends reported that another lift seemed to have opened, but that the parking lot was not at all well-cleared, and we sat for awhile speculating on what a godawful mess it must be up there. Should we brave it? I don't know, I don't know...

*

No, no, we didn't take Blake up there. His class was cancelled. We went ice skating instead. And no, the ice skating did not stop him from whining about how much he would rather be skiing!

* Surprisingly fascinating article about Hwy 372 on Wikipedia.

Let me try again

Did nobody like my post about hiking up Broken Top?

I labored over that thing, I'm telling you -- labored. I wrote about a dozen different versions & then decided to focus only on the quiet part, when I played with my kids in that beautiful, alien place.

Wrong choice?

*

Blake hiked all the way to the snow by himself, did I mention that? Then he hiked one mile down by himself, and I carried him on my back the last mile. Forty lbs of wiggly boy on my back. A group of older women --in their 50s? 60s? -- charged past us, cooing with sympathy: "Aw, is the little guy tired?" I replied, "Is the boy tired?! The mama's tired!" But they had no sympathy for me.

By the time we returned to the trailhead, Blake and I and my mom lagged behind the others. I didn't know precisely how far behind we were, but we hadn't seen them since before Blake declared himself too tired to go further.

I wanted Blake to walk the last little way, so that he would finish the hike under his own power and also so that everyone would think, if only for a moment, that he had completed the four-mile journey on his own. On the other hand, I wanted to limp into the parking lot fully loaded so that everyone would cry, Jen! You're amazing!

In the event, Blake wanted to be carried until he saw our car -- and the family saw me carrying him -- and then he ran to them. (Yes, he ran, the little bugger.)

No one was particularly impressed by my, um, prowess. Because my husband carried Sasha the whole four miles, so he was a hero; and my dad carried the backpack that Blake displaced, so he was a hero, too. My mom has really bad knees, so even attempting the climb was heroic; and Artist Neice has run up and down Mt. Bachelor so many times that for her, a little hike to the glacier of Broken Top is blasé. I suppose it's a risk I took when I hiked up there with my kid -- that if he got tired, I'd have to carry him.

I would, however, like a small badge. A Girl Scout-type badge. You know?



Surfing Uncle, Blake and my husband with brave Sasha on his back scramble for a good view.

Stones, snow, sky

The ten of us stayed together, tramping happily through spare alpine meadows -- about two miles in distance and 1000 ft. up, up, up – until the second patch of snow. At that point Sasha determined that she could not ride in the backpack for another minute, and in truth I’d breached my tolerance, too. From the trailhead to the summit, the volcanic soil on Broken Top decreases in granularity; by the time we reached the second patch of snow we were traversing boulders as large as my daughter. Enough, I thought. It’s too dangerous for the children to hike any higher.

So my mother and I and the two children stayed to play in the snow while the other adults hiked further up the cirque. They wanted to see the stream which emerges from beneath the glacier. That stream eventually joins Tumalo Creek; water from Tumalo Creek comes out of the taps in my house.

Our patch of snow was not (according to the internet) a glacier; certainly "glacier" seems an overwrought term for the stuff my kids played on. It was just snow, wet and grainy, like the snow that stays in patches in the forest until late spring. We were hiking in the heat of Labor Day – but it was the same kind of snow. The kids slipped and slid on it like otters. Sasha threw some of it at her brother. Blake walked the edges, which are undercut by a runnel of water. I told him he’d get doused if he kept it up, but you know Blake: he stomped along the edge until he did in fact collapse it, soaking his socks and shoes.

The water from our melting snowpile ran around and under and through the rocks, so walking up there was more like criss-crossing a marsh than a stream – or maybe quicksand is a better analogy, because nothing grows in it. There are only rocks. The kids threw rocks into the water; they moved rocks aside to release a stream, then dammed it again; they stacked rocks into towers. My mom and I followed them anxiously, trying to corral the children in that wild place. Watch your aim – don’t hit your sister! Sasha, don’t hit your brother! Don’t climb that rock! Don’t walk so far up the snow! Blake, if you wet your shoes one more time…

Eventually we settled down. We sat with the hulk of the mountain at our backs, uncomfortable but comforting, and had a snack, some water. Stones and sky everywhere. The breeze hot on our skin. Crickets made a strange wapping sound; water whispered around and beneath us. A brief rockfall. Listen, kids! Just listen!

The other adults returned after awhile, appearing one by one over the ridge. My children shouted Daddy! Grandpa! Uncle! and scrambled to them – joyful as if it had been days since we’d seen them.

Then we started back down the mountain.



My parents: Dad in orange and Mom in blue.

Cross-posted at The Green House.

Tags: Nature+Parenting, Broken Top, Hiking