Author: janpriddyoregon

THE DUTY OF CARE

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And now. The election. I do care. I do believe I have a duty of care not only toward myself but toward others. I want to make clear that the only people I blame are the Americans who believe that in order to win, “Other people” must lose…

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I took off all my rings and refused to leave my bed. I worked on revising for NaNo with a kind of despair; read Virginia’s Apple, found delight; waited for Gary while he did errands alone because I had been too depressed to leave my bed; and read a friend’s blog that reminded me I needed to do something,.

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HELLO AGAIN

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Many things have happened that got in the way of blogging, but the gist is: Facebook, a minor medical issue that got complicated (not mine and mostly okay now), and developmental editing of my novel. Reading. And now NaNo.

I am told I should explain about NaNo. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is November. It is online, motivational (for me), free, as private or public as you want it to be, and I’ve done it before a few times. Each morning this month, I write on my laptop—the laptop I am using to write this long-overdue post—and then I post my progress on the NaNoWriMo website.

Gary waits quietly in the other room.

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OPTIMISM

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I am at heart an optimist. I was reading books about faith and ethics while I was still a child of ten, looking to find my way toward goodness. I was taught and believed and still believe that goodness matters, that what we call goodness is something to pursue and to praise.

This is a jellyfish, the orange west coast “sea nettle”, Chrysaora fuscescens. I have seen this jelly cast on shore my entire life; it is the one my dad warned me about because they do sting like a bee. [The “moon jellies,” water jelly, Aequorea sp., are mostly colorless or blueish and I herded small ones in the water without harm when I was younger.] This one is upside down and much, much larger than any I saw as a child, though not quite as large as the one we found recently that measured more than 22 inches across. The beach is littered with sea nettles just now, mostly broken but also some whole like this one.
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MARRIAGE

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When we’d been together a few years, people frequently asked us how we’d managed to stick together. It seemed odd at the time. Three or four years is not long enough to prove permanence, it seemed to me. It feels odder now that no one asks us how we managed to stay together—we were only asked that back in the early 1970s.

Here we are at our wedding fifty years ago today. Gary is feeding me cake I baked from the Fanny Farmer Cook Book. I am wearing a Bedouin wedding dress I bought while I worked at La Tienda on the Ave. It was not new even then, and the embroidery included birds. Gary is wearing a Guatemalan shirt from the same shop and a vest I made for him.
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INHERITANCE

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This morning, I read a column, “Dividing assets in your will can split siblings. Here’s how.” at The Washington Post, about the damage that can result when a parent favors some child or children over others or cuts a child from their will, especially without explanation. Aside from permanent rifts that can result between siblings, there is also the lingering unresolved hurt. A comment from an attorney reports that his experience is that giving more to dysfunctional [addicted, mentally ill] children is common. However unrealistic, many parents hope to equalize situations that are out of their control by gifting one child more than the other in life or in their wills. Some felt permanently injured by fathers who seemed to have abandoned them in favor of a second family. Some inheritors in control have corrected an imbalance as best they could. There were a lot of issues.

I could relate.

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SCIENTIFIC NAMES

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Arctostaphylos ura-usi is the scientific name of kinnikinnic, an evergreen trailing plant related to the broad-leaf evergreen tree we called “madrona” when I was a girl, Arbutus menziesii, and more distantly to Gualtheria shallon, salal. Kinnikkinnik is found across North American and was smoked, though that’s not something I’ve ever tried. The name kinnikinnik, derived from the Unami Delaware /kələkːəˈnikːan. is enough to make me fond of that plant; I recall climbing a madrona when I was no more than five and tearing open a plastic packet of soy sauce to rub on the smooth red skin where the papery bark had already flaked away; and this morning, I picked and ate what are nearly the last of the salal berries on my way off the beach from a long run this morning.

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HEALTH care

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This is not a cheery post. I am going to rant about health care. A bit. You don’t want to read my complaints. It’s what old people do, complain about their health. Except I’m not going to complain about my health; this is about my health care. In the mean time, enjoy the herons on the shore.

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THE CAT DID IT

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Our Zora used to lick the butter. If we left it uncovered we’d come down in the morning to find tiny grooves in butter from her cat tongue.

When Gary or I confront something neither of us is willing to admit we did, we say, “The cat did it.” It is a none-too-subtle admission of fault. Sometimes we don’t remember breaking a glass (nearly always Gary) or losing track of something (mostly me), or which of us cut a sandwich on the baking cabinet (me again), or we’d like to blame our children or housebreakers. It was me or it was Gary who did whatever it was because we are the only two living in our house. But even when we are certain who “done it”, we might say: The cat did it. Mind you, we were saying this when we had one or the other cat, and we’ve not stopped saying it merely because our last cat left the planet some years ago. We could have blamed our dog Yeti, but she would have been offended. The cats did not care.

This vine grows on the corner just west of our condo. It has orange trumpet-shaped flowers, and is one of my favorite volunteers. To find out what it is, I did a Duck-Duck-Go search for “orange trumpet-shape flower vine.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what it is: Orange Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans). It is considered a noxious and invasive species, and “should be planted only where it can be contained” but this one is growing out of a crack in concrete, so I think we’re safe. Someone has recently hacked it back to half size. It’s still huge but with fewer buds.
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TSUNAMI

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If I stood close to the window of my classroom and looked hard west, I saw the estuary and beyond was the Pacific Ocean. The waves seemed to march endlessly to shore, but after the Alaska earthquake in 1964, a friend of mine saw water draw back below any low tide he’d ever seen, the seabed exposed before the tsunami pushed east and took out bridges and houses.

The last “great quake” in the Cascadia subduction zone, a magnitude of at least 9, took place more than three hundred years ago. It’s likely that most every human soul on what would later be called the Oregon coast drowned.

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MY FAVORITES of the 21st

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I pledge on Goodreads to read 52 books each year but generally read more. (I actually read 33 from TNYT list, but I didn’t like them all.) My list of “bests” is almost entirely different.

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