Ekwerkwe

I got stuck in the little house the other day. It was 5:15; I'd finished my last conference call, sent my last email and changed my status on Lync; I'd unplugged my computer and gathered up the dirty dishes.

But I couldn't leave. The backyard was full of quail.

Several coveys of quail, maybe 100 birds altogether, use the area where I live. I suspect they bed by the river, then come up the cliff to forage in our yards during the day. I see them as I drive through the neighborhood, and they often cluster under my arctic willow, near the street. In early fall, though, they fly right into the backyard – and the other day at least twenty of them clucked through the grass, with more on the roof and in the spruce beside the little house.

How could I disturb them? I stood in the open door of little house, watching and listening. They make such a peaceful sound, those quail.

After awhile, though, I realized I was also hearing my children laughing in the main house. I walked along the garden path, slowly, slowly, slowly. The quail skittered a bit but they didn't flush. They stayed. Talking amongst themselves.

**

While reading Jane Eyre last night, I was suddenly struck by all the references to nightingales. We don't have nightingales in the Americas. I've never seen one nor heard one.

This, my friends, hints at why I find this book so fascinating. Jane Eyre is part of my canon – as a white-skinned, English-speaking American, it's part of my heritage – and yet so much of it is alien to me. Nightingales are alien... I keep thinking of this book as science fiction.

Anyway, if you've never heard a nightingale either, you can listen online. I imagine it's a pale reproduction of the original.

Hello, Broken Top

Disorienting

What's on my nightstand

"Half an hour later Jennifer and the two pirates were through the turnstiles and inside the circus itself. The pirate with an accordion pretty quickly began to feel more like the pirate who was a gooseberry, so he wandered off to look at an exhibit that claimed to be 'the dog that wore sunglasses,' and left Jennifer and the scarf-wearing pirate to their own devices."

Defoe, Gideon. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. New York: Vintage Books, 2006, p.57.


For Jennifers everywhere. Some day this sentence is going to be true

Wednesday Wondering

My seven-year-old daughter, speaking to me: People call a house a home, but people sell their houses.* So a house isn't a home.

Me: That's true, Sasha.
Me: I think home is where the family is.

Sasha: I think the whole earth is our home.

Said she. Spreading her arms wide.


* At Christmas my Artist Sister-in-law sold her house and moved to Portland, and this spring my parents-in-law put their Camp Sherman place on the market. Also Sasha's best friend recently moved to Portland, and one of her classmates moved to North Carolina**. Sasha's been thinking on that for awhile. She keeps asking me why people sell their houses, unsatisfied with the financial answer.

** I had thought that by enabling my kids to spend their childhood in one town, they wouldn't feel loss in the way that I did. (I attended three different elementary schools and two junior highs.) In fact I think they feel it more keenly. The person who moves has a whole new life; the one who stays behind has a hole in her life.***

*** I'm not saying we ought to move.**** There are other advantages to staying in one place. And Central Oregon, as you know! is in my heart.

**** This post inspired by the Penguin family's travels.

My whole body sings

When I'm content and sort of absent-mindedly going about my day, I sing to myself. I don't usually notice that I'm singing until someone comments on it – or until I realize I'm singing this, as I often am (!) "And when I laugh out loud, my whole body sings! ha ha, ha ha ha haaa, ha ha, ha ha ha haaaaaaa!"



in my brother-in-law's presence. Then I ask, self-consciously, whether it's strange to hear other people absent-mindedly singing songs that he wrote.

*

Was that a great segway or what? Yes, my baby sister's husband's band has released their second album of children's songs. Go have a listen. (That link goes to my other favorite song, which is very wise; I wish he'd written it when my own children were babies.) The CD is for sale, or you can buy digital downloads.

The first song, by the way, is a re-telling of the incident which made Radiolab in 2009.

Work is the last thing on my mind

Well, right. I did spend time this weekend folding clothes, cooking dinner, washing dishes, sweeping the floor, coercing recalcitrant children to brush their teeth and all that – all the daily maintenance that's part of a parent's life.

I meant to say that when I close my laptop on Friday nights, I don't feel like I'm going home to a second job; I don't feel overwhelmed by all the housework that needs doing. And we've spent at least one day of every weekend adventuring, so for 48 hours I completely forget there's such a thing as a computer!

Building sandcastles on a black sand beach, aka the First Street Rapids. The one on the far left is mine.


[Title explanation: This morning my kids were playing this song. I was all, have some sympathy, little dudes.]

Time on, time off

Itty bitty girlie in the Big Obsidian Flow, Oregon's most recent lava flow. (It's 1500 years old.) Thirty miles south of Bend. 

At work I've been critical path; it's required from me 40-50 very stressful hours a week for the past month. My husband (who laughs at me every time I use that term) has picked up the slack at home, enabling me to be free on the weekends – and so my weekends have been tiny, delightful vacations.

If it's a phase, I should document it

The water balloons were too hard to tie, so Sasha used them to make other things.

A bracelet. She made a necklace, too, but it itched.

"Balloon toys." They're intended to be thrown like a frisbee. (The X in balloon ends is just a pattern I made.)

An octopus.

Makers

My daughter's been busy today. She just now finished sewing together two pieces of purple fabric she had found at the High Desert Museum; it's a blankey for her snow leopard. Earlier today she decorated my room for a snow leopard party. (I bribed her brother to attend.) And before that – this morning – she made these little purses with paper and electrical tape. They're a kind of Advent Calendar; each person in the family gets two, and every day, she says, someone will get a surprise in theirs!

She's like this every day; she has been like this every day for at least two years now. She draws, she colors, she makes gifts for people and for stuffed animals. She designs games for us all to play. She made paper dolls -- except they were dinosaurs: one of every kind plus a tree and a volcano and a little carrying bag for them all. (One of my co-workers bought it for $1.) At my mom's house the other day she made intricate designs from colored ribbons, these amazing little bits of engineering.

My son used to be busy like that, too. And now he's not. He's just not. He doesn't invent things the way he used to.

It must be a phase, this uber creativity.

Growing up is so sad!

Ponderosa tree as seen through a water droplet. Sunset.

What I learned from Alejna's Project 365.

Quote of the Week

My daughter, commenting on an explosion at the end of the movie The Wild: "Now that's high viscosity!"

High Desert Museum Camp, you rock.

When the cat's away

With the children away my husband and I get vast amounts of time together, which is sort of lonely, you know, and quiet -- and the height of luxury. Excepting the time we're at work, we get to do what we want when we want without worrying the children will interrupt us.

It's the height of luxury, I tell you.

Wednesday evening we canoed at Sparks Lake, where I took this picture for you. I call it Hail to the V.

Grandpa Camp

My husband came out to the little house with his cellphone in his hand and a big smile on his face. I looked up from the computer. "Here," he said. "Look."

My dad had texted us a picture of our kids. They sat outside near some long grasses; Blake had lain his head on Sasha's shoulder; Sasha was laughing. "Love B&S," my dad had written.

I grinned at my husband and said, "Awww," and then noted that the kids must be obeying our injunction NOT TO FIGHT! while they're with their grandparents. Then he and I put our heads together and snapped a picture: one of those goofy cellphone self-portraits. "Love M&D," we wrote. My dad wrote back, "Sasha says u look cute."

For the last few summers – since I paled over the cost of summer camps, which must be booked for a solid week regardless of the number of hours a parent actually needs daycare coverage – my kids have spent a week or so at Camp Grandpa Harry. My dad has the same level of energy and enthusiasm as the children despite being nearly 70, so he makes a perfect camp counselor. (My calm, quiet mom is the Den Mother.) For a week the kids eat chicken nuggets and pizza every day and stay up late and sleep in late and swim in hotel pools and generally run around like wild people. My parents have taken them to every corner of Oregon, just about. This week they’re in southern Oregon, tromping through caves and Houses of Mystery and jet boating on the Rogue.

I always expect both the grandparents and the children to return exhausted, glad to be home, glad to separate, but that's never the case. They're happy. They giggle. Last year when they returned my husband and I fed them dinner and Blake sat in my dad’s lap while Sasha and my mom put their heads together, examining some small thing. My husband and I looked at each other. Huh. How about that. It’s like they’re the parents!

Snooooooooooooooooooooow!

Each summer my dad and I climb together. We've been up Broken Top, Mt. Washington, South Sister, Tam MacArthur and a couple times we've hiked up Black Butte. Usually we go up in August but this year my peripatetic parents are traveling in August. This year we had to hike in July instead.

And we were stopped by snow.

It's such an odd year! Snow fell and fell and fell throughout winter, and then it fell and fell through spring, and spring stayed so late – until last week, basically – that the snow is still up there. My dad and I tried to climb Black Crater, which is only 7000 feet high (Mt. Bachelor is 9000); but about 2/3 of the way to the summit we had to turn around. Snow completely obscured the trail.

*

I took a picture for you but it's on my dad's phone, and my dad is now at Crater Lake with my children. Crater Lake, by the way, just opened today.

(When I grow up, I want to be my parents.)

Like mother like son

The trail to Alder Springs starts on a ridge above the south bank of Whychus Creek, where one will find a rock comfortable enough for a few stolen moments of reading.

Flying

On the ridge between Fremont and McKenzie Canyons, not far (as the hawk flies) from my parents' place. Saturday.

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.