The first time I ran the Hood to Coast relay, I was not expecting 96° on my first leg. Six miles in the heat of day was entirely new to me. I ran in the mornings in temperatures below the 60s. But I was in the middle of my life and managed to maintain about 9-minute miles even in heat. I did see people drop on the course, and one poor runner had collapsed from heat exhaustion. Someone tried to hold her up without getting wet himself while someone else trained a fire hose on her.

After the residency I feel a little bit like I’ve had a firehose on me for a week. Yes, that tired. But good too.

More about writing, goals, and recovery…

[I scheduled this post to go live while I’m on my run this morning. I ran every day of the Residency, but usually I only walk on Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays.]

Gary says he appreciated being able to hang around through two faculty readings and the alumni gathering and the Anniversary celebration. He says he understands better how important the residencies have been to me throughout the years (I always visit the January residencies). He enjoyed talking to authors and especially W. Ralph Eubanks’s reading and that got to talk about music with him.

We arrived home at the coast and the rain came. We talked about what we would miss after a permanent move to the city. We’re glad that’s still a while off. I paid bills, Gary did laundry. I sliced bread to make French toast for breakfast this morning, I sorted yarn for my last two warps this summer; I have about used up my stash. I did not weave, but intend to continue resting, curled up on the couch. I’ll be fine in another day. Gary is more sensible and took a nap.

This is an old photo, probably from the 1990s when I was teaching, maybe even before the time I was running the Hood to Coast and our hair was graying but not yet turning white. We are each sitting in the old “purple chair.” Zora Neale Hurston Cougar Cat was with us for nineteen years. She’d been over the rainbow bridge two weeks when Leaky, who had lived wild the previous winter, showed up, “I hear there’s an opening.”

I decided when I was young that I wanted to do most “everything.” Everything, as it turns out, is not possible, but most things are. I wanted to live far from the city, love, raise children, design houses, learn how to make everything it’s reasonable to make, earn an MFA, and work hard. I stopped teaching when my boys were little, because even though I had ambitions, I knew I couldn’t do everything all at once. My ceramics work and some of my silversmithing and enamels were shown in museums and galleries before we left Seattle; in Oregon I would teach college writing and high school English—the very thing John Garner warns writers not to do; I took care of my family and baked bread, canned peaches, and made marmalade. I never bred horses as I’d dreamed as a girl, but I bred show and Field Champion Afghan Hounds and traveled all over the US and Canada as a licensed field trial judge. I presented teaching strategies at state, regional, and national conferences. I took writing workshops, attended The Flight of the Mind and worked with Gish Jen, Molly Gloss, Janice Gould, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Charlotte Watson Sherman, completed NaNoWriMo five times. I wrote, as John Remember would say, my “million words.” Later this summer I will be working with editors from Ooligan Press on my novel.

For twenty years or so, I worked as a freelance graphic designer. For a few years after I began teaching I also drew for a local architect, and on my own I was designing homes and remodels. I can bake a cherry pie from sour cherries purchased at the Farmers Market in Portland.

My life took a turn once my children were both in school all day, and I went back to teaching and began writing stories. I’d thought since graduating from the UW that I would eventually earn my MFA in Metals, but instead I completed that Master of Fine Arts in fiction. I am proud that I worked my way through those six years of undergraduate school at the University of Washington. (I’m not sure that’s possible anymore.) And except for one term, I paid my own way through Pacific.

Who knew when I was 23 and graduating with three undergrad degrees in the visual Arts that the art I’d most invest in would be on the page?

I know how to do a lot of things, but I still can’t do them all at once.

Pelicans are spending the summer here.