Settling In Gently

The tempation to reflect as the calendar year flips over is too great for me to resist. I've ordered my 2021 calendar ( a pinup calendar, yes. Of Norse goddesses. Yep. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.) So I think that means I can, gingerly, gently, with much deference and genuflection, put this cluster of a year to rest.  But it eludes examination. It slithers out of my awarenss. What was this year, even? I have to consult outside sources. My memory is just a gray haze of heat, cold, panic, and immobility.  So I go to instagram. This is why I have it, by the way. It is a net to catch memories that my sieve-brain just lets dissolve.  Last January 1st, 2020, we got up before dawn, parked at the closed gate of the parking lot on Spencer's Butte, and scrambled up the bitter cold stairs. I had just pulled the kids out of bed, as is, so they were draped in blankets instead of coats, with thick fuzzy socks stuffed into slippers (aka flipflops). We looked around for the rising s

My GOD, we will be in this quarantine for a year, won't we. Will we be the same people on the other side?  Last year, last Christmas, 2019, 1000 years ago, I was tired. The kids were tired. They had been running at full tilt in new schools, new middle school, new Japanese immersion school-- and the 2 hours of daily commute was killing us all. So when school got out for the winter break, I didn't plan a trip.  Usually, traveling is our family culture. Since Matt died, we've criss-crossed the country, gone up and down the West Coast, gone to Scotland, Denmark, Mexico, and to the Big Island.  But we were just tired. I had finished up my masters in instructional design, writing a hundred pages of curriculum and analysis. I was sick, but didn't know it yet. RJ was sick too, and I didn't know it yet, although I suspected. But I knew we needed a break. I figured we'd hole up for the holidays, gather our strength for the year to come. Who cares if it would be lazy, a co

Jeff Peterson, the slack key musician from Maui, a tall white dude, led a ukulele workshop here in Eugene last year. We were on a back porch, rows of folding chairs nested us elbow to elbow, smiling at each other, ukuleles nudging each other. He has an easy teaching style, encouraging and flexible. He passed out simple sheet music with the tabulation for a well known Hawaiian song. He played the simple version of the song a few times, and then taught it to us piece by piece, with the tab. I hadn't read tab before, but I caught on pretty quickly, and Jeff explained things clearly. He was encouraging to the audience of middle aged, mostly white Oregonians, gradually added new and challenging chords, while telling us about his slack key teachers-- famous Hawaiian names and beloved Hawaiian musicians, like George Kahumoku Jr., and Keola Beamer.  I took home a new tune, pretty well mastered, three new jazzy chords, a stack of sheet music, and puzzled over how different this workshop was

Sentiments are not enough. Shock, heartfelt grief, horror-- not enough. Today the supreme court said that you can't be fired for being LGBT. It doesn't feel like a victory or a celebration. It feels like meeting your absentee dad when you're 36. Like, yes. It's good. But... isn't this ridiculously late? Black lives matter. Why is this a debate? Whiteness bestows privilege. Your life may be hard, but it's not because you're white. So taking action in support of black liberation today, as a white person, feels like today's supreme court decision. Yes, it's good. But no cookies for timeliness. The news is unreliable. Fox is faking images, and all outlets are showing things through their own political, ideological, and corporate lenses. It's a lesson: we need to be eye witnesses. We can trust our own eyes... and that's about it. What a strange time to be alive-- we all have little electronic eyes recording what we witness. We can

We're slip-sliding offkilter (23.5 degrees to be precise) around this eliptic plane. We are careening PDF (pretty darn fast) around the sun, sometimes veering closer to the rays and sometimes shying away. And because of the dapper-doffed-hat angle of our planet, we get Demeter and Persephone's yearly push-me pull-you, with the swell of springtime flowers and the burst of heavy harvest, and the long cool rest of the earth. The waves reach up to moonlight and the stars move over us, hanging changing sheets of constellations across the sky. We're little monkeys and we like stuff. We're science monkeys and the world is neat-o. So we notice things like the planet hotting or colding, or the lights lining up, and the stars holding still. Also, we like parties. Hence, seasonal festivals! Also, we are worried little curious monkeys, and the fact that we grow up and die is freaky. So we try and puzzle it out, mapping our wonder and worry across the sky. When it's getti

My mom died slowly, and at home. She had a soft blue recliner that she sat in, below a skylight. Oxygen hissed into her canula, snaking from a noisy pump set to maximum. She struggled to catch a breath. Her lungs filled with water. Cancer is terrible. The treatment for cancer is terrible-- a long path of ordeals. Bone marrow transplants, many rounds of chemo and radiation, near-remissions and heartbreaking relapses. Cancer is something that happened to her. But death is something she did. There was a hospital bed beside her chair. I slept there some nights, in her last few weeks. I remember one night, lying beside her as she struggled to breathe. The gap between her breaths grew impossibly wide. I could picture the tall mountain she was climbing. Death was a place she was going, but the path was unclear. Death was a thing she was doing-- the name of the journey and the destination. Death was something she was becoming. Eyes closed, I watched her struggle up the mountain. Footstep

After Liko was born, I was in terrible pain. Sciatica, or something like it, made every step shoot sparks up and down my legs, up to my shoulders. I got a referral to go see a physical therapist. She told me that I didn't have sciatica, but rather I had an old injury, a bulged disc, that loosy-goosy pregnancy hormones had flared up. She was working with me, helping me stretch my back and build up supportive muscles over the next few weeks, when one day, when Liko was about 6 weeks old, I couldn't get out of bed. My knees had totally given out. Every step was agony, my knees felt like the bone was grinding on bone. My legs shook and I wanted to cry. Even lying down, if my leg bent the wrong way or anything brushed against my skin, I wanted to scream.  She said to just get into a painless position for 24 hours, and then come see her right away. Good thing tiny babies are happy to stay in bed all day and nurse anyway, and the big girls, 5 and 8, could fend for themselves a little,

I vaguebooked yesterday that it was a hard day-- a day to just survive through. I tried to think of some pithy feel good silver lining to add to it-- "At least the sun is shining!" But it rang hollow. It was a -my feet are jelly-lead, my head is blinking batting, my hands weak- kind of a day. It's just bad. I cried uncle, I gave up on being productive or even functional today. I tapped out. Breakfast was toast and butter. Liko announced that toast with butter is her favorite food. Yesss, nailed it. My dad called-- we chatted about our gardens, the wild weeds we are eating and the berries we are planting, about my new bee hive and the arbotivae he sent me to grow my hedge along the back chainlink. He mentioned that the old Scottish detective show Hamish Macbeth was back on Amazon. Ah-- that's it. Hamish will get me through the day. Maile and I settled in. She was giddy that I was breaking my own "no screens before dinner" rule. And there's Hamish M

For the first week of schools closed and everyone staying home, it was the most beautiful spring weather imaginable. Every plum and cherry tree on the street was a sweet cloud, the sky was clear west coast blue. All the little plants in the yard grew fuzzy little buds, all at once. The kiwi vine and the apricot tree I was sure I had killed through last summer's negligence put out tiny leaves and buds! The daffodils and narcissuses nod their yellow manes on the back hill. I stomped around outside in my pink muck boots and pajama bottoms, listening to Hadestown and Post Modern Jukebox on my headphones, while Liko played with the gravel from the path. The other afternoon I stood outside watering the garden boxes where Maile had just put down the seed potatoes and where the pea shoots just starting to nudge their pale green bent necks out of the cold black dirt. I heard a chirp and a zoom-- and a hummingbird swooped nearby. It paused just a few feet away from me, and levitated in the

I woke up this morning at 4:30. The cat was resettling herself on my hip, where she likes to sleep, balanced on four needly claws, rotating with me when I roll to my side. It was still dark, and I felt calm and rested. Just a quick peek. I turned on my phone-- facebook scrolled. My early morning/late night softness ground into the tinnitus of screen-light anxiety. No. Somebody dead from Covid19 at the hospital down the road, right here in Springfield. No tests available yet. How do I mitigate this, what's the lamb's blood I need to splash across the door? The facebook algorithm reads my mind: Buy this Jewish holiday box and learn to celebrate Jewish holidays at home. Oi Mama.... I suddenly remember my mom's sweet crooning in her Dutch-accented Yiddish and I am crying. How I wish she was here to joke, comfort, share vision, extend healing from the spiritual power of motherhood, of cronehood. Would we blend the sacred and the silly, light the candles and braid the c

Today was the first day of cancelled school in Oregon-- a cold bright day, snow on the hills to the east. I cranked the heat up to a steamy 63. Last night when I saw the announcement that Govenor Kate Brown had ordered schools to close, I lay panicking in my bed. The community spread, the lack of tests, the relative severity of this virus-- it overwhelmed me. For months I've been wanting to build up good food storage, to prepare to be self-sufficient, to make my own medicine and food. But when the prospect is now, I feel underprepared. By the morning, that anxiety had congealed into something more like a plan. I got up and made routine checklists for each kid, with their chores and meals and vitamins and water, and also things like, Art, Read, Go Outside, Read, Music. Maile and Liko loved theirs, printed on bright cardstock (ah, out of printer paper!!) RJ, nearly 13, was out cold when I went up to give him his to-do list and confiscate his phone. I was worried it would be