Today is National Parents’ Day.

My family has been visiting this beach for 110 years. The only way to get here used to be on the beach. My great grand aunts purchased the property in 1911 precisely because it was so difficult to get to. Not so hard to get to now. My mother and her sister spent all their summers here from infancy. They cried with each “improvement”: the highway, electricity, indoor plumbing. My grandfather lived here full time beginning in the 1940s. We moved here in 1979. Our sons and grandchildren are the fifth and sixth generations connected to our squeaky sand.

Gary reminds me to thank not just my birth parents and Garys’, but the people who most influenced me, teachers who were kind and inspiring. Mr Finley for Science and pre-algebra in 6th grade. Mr Shipman for English in 9th (though he was later revealed to be a child molester, he only did good for me), Mr Adler for Algebra beginning in 7th grade, Darlene Sherrick for World History in 10th, James May for English. But really, I should be thanking those who pushed my creativity. Del Hansen in Cordell Junior High and Shoreline High School. Bob Gee at Shoreline. And then Hazel Koenig who led me to teaching at the University of Washington. Patti Warashina and Howard Kottler at the UW. Judith Barrington, Marilyn Chin, Sandra Dorr, Molly Gloss, Karen Karbo, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Suniti Namjoshi at Portland State University. Judith Barrington and Ruth Gundle, Charlotte Watson Sherman, Janice Gould, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Molly Gloss, Gish Jen at The Flight of the Mind. Later, Valerie Miner, Claire Davis, critical essay advisor Jack Driscoll, and creative thesis advisor David Long, as well as Marvin and Dorianne at Pacific University during my MFA program. Others I never even met taught me: Sam Clemens, Toni Morrison, Vonda McIntyre, Kaffe Fassett, Antoni Gaudí, and Alexei Panshin. I knew Molly and Ursula and Sandra, who stuck with me. But the poets would be another list of people I knew or knew of. The painters. The philosophers. The filmmakers and dancers. The danger of the long list is there is less excuse when you discover you have inevitably left out people. (And Dr Walker, head of the Botany department—I nearly changed majors.) I have been well parented.

Thank you, parents of my students and my family. Thank you, parents and all who have parented. Thank you all.

Among our recent visitors are wildlife. Some passing through and some permanent residents, like we are now ourselves. We had a rabbit in our front yard yesterday, the first rabbit to nibble our dandelions since last summer. Each generation has a smaller white spot on its head, a legacy of the tame hutch rabbits released to pollute the local gene pool.

Gary spotted a skink the other day but no snakes so far this year. Hummingbirds vanished from the neighborhood weeks ago, but have returned. The raccoons have also returned to climb over our gate. (We’re less happy about this, but the job site next door is messy with lunchtime trash just tossed rather than placed in the garbage can, and that food trash might be the draw.)

But the pelicans, oh, the pelicans! We see them every day lately. On our walk this morning they were a mile ahead of us, a couple of dozen of them fishing well offshore.