An imperturbable demeanor comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune and misfortune at their own private pace like a clock during a thunderstorm.—Robert Louis Stevenson
Vivaldi – Summer from The Four Seasons | Netherlands Bach Society. These are the original instruments that would have been used in Vivaldi’s time. No director; the soloist, Shunske Sato, is the director. The entire sound is far more startling—a shocking break in weather! You can hear it HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8TFQFQeL0o
In my teens, I attended a lot of concerts. Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, The Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, the Kinks, the Birds, Ravi Shankar, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel (acoustic at the HecEd), Moody Blues, then Laura Nyro and my favorite Joni Mitchell. I’d had guitar lessons from Candy Mack and played a number of folk tunes from The Joan Baez Songbook. Then college.
My birthday is two months from next Friday. I will be 74, the age my grandmother and also her elder daughter died. When my mom turned 80, I teased her that she hadn’t expected to live that long. She laughed and said it was true.
Gary and I walked four miles this morning, meandering to Hug Point beach. That parking lot is still closed, which means the beach there has been pretty clean for most of the last year. What you see in my hand are shards of hard plastic from illegal fireworks last week. Yes, the pieces are every bit as sharp as they look. Had I trod on one in the sand, I’d have cut my foot. We mostly ignore the cardboard debris, but we pick up and dispose of the plastic remains and the nasty plugs of spent explosives. We have to be home for the 4th of July to ensure someone doesn’t burn our house down. This year was not the worst, but aerial explosions were right in front of our home and one tourist accidentally sent his rockets not up but across the sand. Fortunately, the tide was well out and nothing hit us, but do we enjoy the toxic and illegal display? Not so much.Continue reading →
My goal was to post once a week on Fridays. I had posted randomly, sometimes a few times in a week, sometimes a few times in a month. It seemed to me that reliability should count for something. Mostly often, I plan ahead; sometimes I write a post at the last minute. Like today.
I can’t tell you how often I have seen bald eagles depicted with their white heads but with brown tails. Adult bald eagles have white tails—clear in this image of one of the local flying away from a carcass on shore. Our eagles rarely kill. They are not ambitious birds that will approach a dying animal, but I’ve seen a single crow drive an eagle away from a dying seagull. We’re particularly fond of crows in our house.Continue reading →
On Monday, Gary and I covered at least ten miles. I ran two of them. Wednesday I ran three miles and we walked. I scheduled a 3-mile run for this morning, but Gary wasn’t feeling well so I went out alone. I’d decided to run two miles instead of three. How many did I run? One. I came home and worked for a while, and then I lay down. I felt rotten too. We tested for Covid and that was negative, and we’re feeling better after hot showers.
I generally introduced assignments with a story, so here it is: Before we married, and while we were both students at the University of Washington, Gary and I managed a once-notorious apartment building in the University District known locally as Big Pink. The FBI and the Seattle Police came several times while we managed the building, but the last of the prostitutes had just left before we moved in, and the last drug dealer accidentally set fire to his kitchen soon after, so he was gone soon enough. This was in the early 1970s, and my memory is not entirely reliable, but what I’ll write what is still vivid and accurate.
One of two knobs I put on the bottom drawer of a pie chest we bought out of an old barn—made by someone who did the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair beginning in the 1970s. The other has a woman’s face. These porcelain works combined simple shapes with molds of antique pieces and applied bits. Our first grandchild was fascinated as a toddler. I remember the artist’s name as David Keenes, but that seems to be incorrect. I’d hoped that the sugar bowl I have, also made by the same artist, would be stamped with a name. No such luck. It has TAR and KSM. Then I checked the parrot coffee cup I got for Gary back in the day and it is stamped DK.Continue reading →
Six months ago, Gary and I stopped drinking altogether. Gary tells people who ask that he stopped because I asked him to as a birthday present. Okay. Maybe. It saves money, spares us hangovers, and mostly preserves our minds. We would deal with the pile of diapers, the alcove deep in gin bottles, and the damage—the work cleaning up the mess in our rental ADU had only just begun. For years, Gary talked to our longtime tenant most every day, sometimes for an hour or more. He’d been afraid the man would kill someone or at least himself driving drunk. Fortunately, he survived. We finished the repairs and improvements right at the beginning of last month.
Three black oystercatchers (only two visible at lower right)—the parents who nest nearby, and this year’s juvenile has flown out of the frame. They are my favorite bird.
Yesterday, we disagreed about how far to walk before heading out for the day. I said four miles, Gary lobbied for two. We were a few hundred yards out when the hail began. If we’d waited ten or fifteen minutes, we wouldn’t have been wet by the time we scampered home!
I’m running a mile every other day now. Not easily, but I’m making quicker progress than I had any right to hope for. I started with a challenging half mile on the April Fool’s Day—yes, a joke on myself and also the anniversary of my first run decades ago. I’m starting from scratch—no condition at all. Last year, I injured my feet doing very long planks, and then again while on my hands and knees working on that rental. Gary pruned (butchered) the escalonia in order to give the new tenants a broader and clear view of the ocean. Apparently, they don’t look west and hadn’t noticed. sigh I’ve been walking daily but had been injured out for most of a year. At my age, “coming back” is not a given.
The other morning there was only the gale wind and a little rain. Tuesday, there was a “dust devil” in the sand just up shore from where we walked. We walked about four miles, all the way to the waterfall just south of Hug Point. The rain started right then and poured all the way home, right into our face with a full gale. A dead owl, we think, lay in the tideline, head naked, short and dark hooked beak, dark flight feathers well over 12″ long, barred tail. By the time we got home, we were soaked and cold, had oatmeal for breakfast, curry for dinner, and went to bed early. But this morning I managed my planned 1-mile run. Best I can tell, I’m managing miles in under 12 minutes, which is not bad considering everything. My realistic goal is a 5k run by August. My “secret hope” is to do the Bridge Crossing in October again. That’s a 10k, 6.2 miles, and usually bad weather, but I’ve done it several times. At least Gary I expect to do the Zoo walk/run in Portland on Thanksgiving—that ranges from a 5k to 6k, with no warning in advance of distance—and we can walk as much of it as we choose. I ran it last fall.
In the mean time, Gary is playing his guitar as I began writing this post on Wednesday morning. That alone could make me cry. It’s been too long, his fingers sore and cracked, but he rested after our soaking walk, and maybe he’s back. He’s taken each one out and tuned it, played a bit. He says his guitars are “not in bad shape. I don’t see any bad things.”
The focal fabric of my next quilt, “Otherland II”. This is a hand-dyed “batik” and I’ve studied on it for a couple of decades, maybe, trying to decide how to cut it. It’s just so gorgeous on its own. Last month, I thought I’d cut triangles—a design I’ll save—because this will zigzag.
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It’s a rare fabric, not stenciled or printed, but with both color and resist hand applied—spaced and dripped—and similar in process to the fabric in the quilt top waiting for quilting in my closet. I hope to be able to have this new quilt and the earlier “Otherland I”, below, machine quilted this summer.
Shown in progress. The center of “Motherland I” is done but only the lower portion of the wide border—with fabrics laid out for top and sides of the border. All the batiks used here are atypical. The background fabric in the center panel in not actually “batik” but another more hands-on technique. This top is complete and waiting with the backing fabric for me to spare the money to have it quilted.
In other news, I have chosen a press for self-publishing my novel. No money for it at the moment since it all went on repairs, but in the fall, perhaps. I am thinking of my birthday in October. A friend has given me notes on my ghost story, so there’s that to work on.
The signature CALYX image celebrates fifty years of CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women+ founded in 1976, on the 200th anniversary of our nation. It served as a reminder of the great ambition of readers and writers, makers and thinkers, a reminder that we have not yet reached our ideals.
Last weekend, Saturday the 14th, I was in my hometown, Corvallis, Oregon, for the 50th anniversary of Calyx: A Journal of Literature and Art by Women. Gary doesn’t care for events (to be honest, neither do I), so I would have attended alone. Fortunately, I was joined in the day’s events by my friend, once-writing partner, former student, and current popular college professor Rebecca Olson, author of ARRAS HANGING: The Textile that Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama (2013) and Early Modern Reading and the Imagined Self (2025), as well as numerous articles on Shakespeare, early modern textiles, and inclusive pedagogy.
In the first episode of the new series, Scarpetta, a scene from “28 years earlier” (1996?) had “The House of the Rising Sun” playing. Good cover. Gary would know the group, the guitarist, and the guitar the lead guitarist was playing*, but I’m not so knowledgeable. Absolutely everyone performed that song in the 1960s, mostly men and boys. I sang it too, when I was playing guitar and singing, because it has—what?—3 chords, 4? The fingerpicking is simple too, though I don’t remember any of that now. There’s a violin on the wall in that show, and I have to say that people do put instruments on the wall. It’s a show-off thing to do. But no one who really loves their guitar or violin or gold flute, leaves it out, not even to show it off. Displaying your instrument is about yourself.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about those days, about guitar lessons and singing. Candy Mack taught me to play “The House of the Rising Sun” out of The Joan Baez Songbook. When my mother heard it, she insisted it made more sense for a woman to sing it. “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl…” works best, I’ve always thought. Men change the words to make it work.
Everything comes with a story. Every porcelain ornament, every basket, and everything hidden inside—pieces gathered, gifted, and made. That’s my two-headed dragon in the middle of the top shelf. The stories only matter to me, but I’ll admit that basket-weaving is one craft I’ve never tried.
I never claimed to be “blocked.” You know that word, right? It’s a term familiar even to many people, even those not devoting their days to being writers. Visiting my MFA Residency as an alum this past week, I am reminded there are several ways of being “blocked” as a writer. I’ve denied it until now, but yeah, I’ve been blocked. I have experienced at least three kinds of blockage: not writing much is rare for me and usually just means I’m resting and doing other creative work; writing badly, something that’s absolutely useless but at least it shows on the page‚oh, yes; and writing something I can’t let go of but keep fussing over and fiddling without getting anywhere. That last is where I am now. The most recent novel is done and however eager I might be to continue working on it, it’s time to set it gently aside.
I imagine the Parks Department is trying to figure out what to do here. Last Saturday, we walked to the headland a little over a mile north of our home, then around that headland and the next headland, and all the way to Hug Point beach. If we’d waited another hour for the tide to be fully out, we could probably have reached Hug Point proper. Instead, we were curious about what exactly had closed the parking lot for this popular park. The broken railing you see in the photo was washed away last winter. It’s worse now. The Parks Department probably tried to fix it because you can see fresh wood, but a few months ago, they blocked off the entire parking lot. We are accustomed to seeing the steep lot packed to overflowing in summer and pretty much year around in good weather. But most of last year, the descent was scary. We assume someone was injured trying to get around those broken stairs. We saw people both giving up and working their way around all last summer and into the fall before the lot was barricaded and the weather and tide shortened our walk north. We wonder when this mess will be repaired but expect the Parks Department is waiting for late spring and lower high tides.Continue reading →
I may be repeating myself here. I found this essay on my computer, and it’s mostly about my novel, which I’ve been writing about too often and will remain my obsession until I start another one. I’ve finished three book reviews and two short stories recently, found a draft of one that is a long way from being finished but I’m working on it, and two collections of short stories that I might send out. And the novel.
For the first couple of years she lived with us, our dog Yeti, a Saluki, never barked. And then one predawn, she “boofed.” She was standing on her personal oversized ottoman at the front window looking down at the garden. Outside the gate, a coyote was looking up at her. Since then we know the coyotes are around, but they are generally hidden. We recognize their footprints in the sand. [Larger and light and the toenails rarely make marks.] We saw her [the coyote in the photo] on our walk. Our friend said, “Whose dog is that?” No dog. Continue reading →
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 