CURRENT EVENTS

PROGRESS

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On Tuesday, I “won” the National Novel Writing Month (NaNo) challenge by completing fifty thousand words. It needs at least twenty or thirty thousand more words, but I have identified the arc of the story, my two main characters in their parallel experiences, a structure that imposes both tension and order, and some sort of closure. Words, words, words. I am not done but have the beginning of a novel, and I have cheated, which is totally allowed.

Once a week I play Scrabble with a friend and we cheat. We do not keep score, we use  the dictionary and a page with two-letter-words to check spelling and aid our choices, and our goal is interesting words and enjoyable play. We have never actually traded tiles, but we frequently lament picking a third and fourth A from the bag of letters. The letter I seems to gather too often as well. We offer to move our new word to another part of the board in order to make play easier for the other. We both celebrate a new word neither of us has used before. We laugh when each of us manages to put down the same word: OATH or QUIET. We play until we have used all the tiles, and then we play a second game. We have been doing this most weeks for a couple of years.

My husband and I began playing Scrabble in 2015 when I retired from full time teaching. But I usually won because I like winning competitive activities and I am a strategist. It was not so much fun for Gary. Running had to be abandoned because of my arthritic feet. Instead, we began taking our daily walks together. Yesterday, we walked for over two hours. We do not go so far from the house, even in two hours. We walk up and down the beach, and gather a lot of plastic, until my back aches from bending over fifty or a hundred times to fish a bit of blue plastic or cup lid from between stones. On certain parts of the beach we follow a very close zig-zagging course, searching every inch for sea glass. Yesterday I found a nub of thick brown glass. Gary found an impressive lump of clear and pale green larger than a quarter.

He tells me I am grieving because I have left teaching. He was delighted that I retired. (Gary takes exception to the “delighted” because “from the situation you were in—yes. From the work that you loved—no,” he says.) It was the right decision, the situation was too stressful, and it was good that I retired. But he still says I am grieving.

I have gained ten pounds, and my days are a muddle. I hope, once an entire school year has passed that I will be in a better state. We miss our children and grandchildren though they are not so far away. We miss the dog. We miss the cat. We are clearing out the house. Only one bedroom is piled with gifts waiting to be wrapped, and my work space is pure chaos. I have three quilts wanting binding. Three knitted items being blocked. Boxes of materials and piles of scraps that want sorting.

My life wants sorting. I recently read Gail Collins’ new nonfiction, No Stopping Us Now, which chronicles the accomplishments (and struggles) of older women in the United States. Despite medical opinion over the decades that women are unfit, insane, or simply dangerous in age, older women have managed to change the world. My personal favorite example is the author of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson. Carson did what many women I have known and worked with have done. She sacrificed her ambitions, abandoned her educational goals after completing a Masters and went to work as a marine biologist for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in order to support her family. When a friend begged her to find out why all the songbirds were dying after a community DDT spray, she looked for someone in that field to write about the danger of pesticides. She was in her 50s when she accepted that no one in the field would risk the backlash from industry, she devoted the remainder of her life to documenting the dangers of the poisons spread on crops and neighborhoods.

“Although Silent Spring was met with fierce opposition by chemical companies, it 1024px-Rachel-Carsonspurred a reversal in national pesticide policy, which led to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides. It also inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.”—Wikipedia

Rachel Carson was 56 when she died of cancer.

November is the beginning of the dark days of the winter season. It is a false glittering and interior time. I tend to look inward, to make plans, set goals in this season. I have no illusion of contributing to the world as Carson did, but I am not done contributing. I will complete the projects currently cluttering my work space, clear it out and begin cluttering it again. I am teaching a workshop for Willamette Writers in April, and perhaps I will complete a novel over the coming months.

SIN OF OMISSION

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Many times crows forage beside eagles. The crows cannot pierce the skin of most dead creatures, but the eagle can. (In the wild, ravens hunt in tandem with wolves. The raven spot game, the wolves open the body.) I have seen crows drive raptors from a wounded gull and from their own nests. The smaller birds win their point.

“A man has been arrested after antisemitic abuse was directed towards Jewish children on the London Underground. … Wearing a cap and hoody, the man is seen in the video threatening a man off-camera after he tries to intervene before a woman in a hijab – Asma Shuweikh – confronts him.”—The Guardian

The Muslim woman is a mother of two and wishes more people would intervene in such situations.

“Wilshire Bus,” a short story by Hisaye Yamamoto, concerns a woman taking the bus to visit her husband in a VA hospital post-WW2. Japanese-American herself, Esther says nothing while a drunk harasses an elderly Chinese-American couple on the bus. She bursts into tears when she reaches her husband’s hospital bedside. He believes this is because she misses him, but readers understand that she is suffering from guilt that she failed to defend the couple on the bus. When I first read the story in graduate school, the obvious ironies of the situation and her feelings of guilt reminded me immediately of my own experiences.

I would have been twenty-one or twenty-two, an undergraduate student at the University of Washington and taking the bus home alone. My husband and I had bought a house on the other side of the zoo. I was sitting toward the back and a drunken man began harassing an adolescent child. People nearby looked nervous but avoided eye contact. I thought we all hesitated to say anything because the man was big and we were afraid. A young black man stood up from his seat and told the drunk that he needed to stop what he was doing. It’s been over forty years and I do not remember everything, just that the young man was slender and the drunk outweighed by fifty pounds at least. I remember that the drunk got off the bus at the next stop. I remember we were grateful to the young man. I remember thinking the drunk was twice my size and wishing I had done something myself and trying to think what I should have done.

The next time was also on a bus, and I was also alone, but instead of the route that ran east-west on 45th, I was heading downtown. I can no longer remember the bus numbers, but this one took Eastlake Avenue NE, traveling south from the U District. Again, I was seated near the back and again a man began harassing someone smaller, a racist harangue. I got up from my seat almost immediately and walked to the front to tell the bus driver. By the time I got to the driver, there were three of us. And this is very clear: The bus driver did something I would never have thought could happen. He pulled his bus over the the side of the road, on University Bridge. He stood and walked to the back of the bus and told the drunk, “You’re going to have to get off my bus, or I am calling the police.” And the man got off and passengers clapped and cheered.

Sometimes doing the right thing is frightening. It might even be dangerous. I did not directly confront a drunken man who outweighed me by close to a hundred pounds, but I found a safe way to intervene. In Yamamoto’s story, many people were offended by racist language, and every one remained silent until after the drunk had left the bus. Esther suffers from her sin of omission. She fails to act as she knows she should have.

So did I.

Fortunately, I learned my lesson and I like to think so did Esther. I think the courage to act in such situations sometimes requires rehearsal. We need to think it through in our heads and balance what we know is right with known risks.

Mob rule is not right and speaking up can be dangerous—we mostly all learned that in school. Silence in the face of abuse can be more dangerous. The assumption when we are silent in response to abuse is that we agree with what is being said and done. And that perpetuates the evil.

How many times do we need to learn that lesson?

PRINCESS

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I have tried to stay away from making political comments here. (Readers “unfollow” every time I do.) But Prince Andrew.

This is not about the disastrous interview on the BBC where the royal admitted to being “too honorable” but with no memory of abusing a child. I did not watch the interview. I cannot avoid the excerpts.

This is more basic. (My grandfather was born in England and his son, my father, was an historian. I had more than my share of British history as a child.) I will set aside just for now the immorality of British behavior in the world. My immediate anger is reserved for the assumption that anyone is born royal. The concept of royalty is at its base both immoral and unAmerican. Nobility and aristocracy are notions that rely on a simple, magical concept: God chose these people to be better than the rest of us.

Is it possible for an American to believe this?

While my country is obsessed with the individual, powerful people in my country are nevertheless earnest in their support of inherited rights.

I tried watching Merlin yesterday on Netflix because the series is leaving that streaming platform next month. So cute. Arthur is a spoiled brat, Merlin is initially magical without effort (I assume this changes as the series progresses), and all the young women look alike. The music is spritely and everything is charming and funny. Young adult fare. I paused the show when Merlin is put into stocks and fruit is thrown at his head. This was treated as comic relief. (I could hear my father sigh, his patient explanation of what happened when a person’s head was locked into stocks. No one would have wasted edible food and stones would have been throw. People sometimes died in the stocks.)

Every Disney princess film plays to this assumption of privilege by birth. Fathers are significant in most of these films, the choice of female villains is misogynistic, and the assumed beauty and inevitable ascendancy of the heroine are damaging to the character of impressionable children. How to reconcile American “rugged individualism” with the concept of royalty?

It cannot be done. It should not be attempted.

I have been thinking a great deal about the presumptions of power. About how we view the rich and powerful. About the Puritan faith that worldly success reflects God’s favor. That seems entirely counter to the ideals upon which our nation was later founded. (And which we have repeatedly failed to make manifest. What we believe is right vs. how we behave.)

Andrew apparently thinks he did well in the interview. He thinks his explanations and noblesse oblige were enough to excuse the photo with his fingers on the bare midriff of his accuser, his tour of the palace enough to excuse his lack of empathy, his precise memory of pizza and his four days spent in the mansion of convicted child molester excused because sex “is a positive act” for men.

But no. This is about power and the presumptions of power.

I have tried to recall if my father every called me, as so many fathers have, “princess”? Perhaps. I recall him calling me, in rare and precious incidents, “daughter-of-mine.” It felt likely an honorary title, that I had earned that designation. As a nation we are founded on the principle that each person earns their way. Yet here we are rewarding torture as if it were comic relief. Making birthright preeminent rather than accomplishment. Admiring bullies and power over decency and righteousness.

We should do better. We should feel determined to do better.

The sky is pink in the east this morning.

DECLINING BOBS

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In the satellite photo, there is an ancient white Volvo parked in the driveway and a waterbed tipped up on its edge where both have been for at least a decade. A surveyor was here the past few days, locating property lines and updating contours for the new owner of our neighbor’s house. The sale closed a week ago but the previous owners have been slow to vacate. The locks have been changed. The buyer is land developer and we fear he will try to create a triplex out of the building and flip it. That is one rumor.

The good news is that we are not built on that property, as our previous neighbor believed. She based this on a survey completed by another neighbor. That neighbor had been half responsible for inaccurate work in two counties. (Thirty years ago I was doing research for an architect, and the county engineer told me that surveyor and another one had been told to retire, that their work was so bad they would no longer accept it. Nevertheless, that neighbor was the one who surveyed that house when it was built in the 80s though that survey was not, of course, recorded with the county. At that time the area was so badly out of kilter that local firms refused as there were no reliable markers to work from.)

Times have changed.

The waterbed is gone, but the Volvo is still there. Last week, the former owners took out a few things on a flatbed truck, always in the middle of the night. (Make of that what you will. Marijuana is legal in Oregon.) Moving didn’t really take off until the day after closing when an enormous U-Haul blocked the entire road. There was a great deal of shouting and banging.

It was my grandfather who surveyed property lines for our house in the 40s (the older one was built by his aunts in 1911), and his third wife Genevieve who had walls built at the north and south in the early 60s. The wall on the south side is entirely on our property. Turns out the neighbor’s dog is buried mostly on our front yard, and so are all their downspout drains that have given us so much trouble. Ruby’s fort is well within our property.

There are still three Bobs left. One is a tenant, one owns the rental across the street, and a third lives a block away. The new owner is not a Bob. We hope the new owner will not create a triplex of short-term rentals. We hope that will not happen. We like having real neighbors.

NaNo is going fine with over 33k words. There were briefly over 34k, but then I began butchering.

One of my favorite websites is selling little bags to use for sandwiches in the toaster—reusable “up to 50 times” and “completely food safe.” The trouble is that they are made of fiberglass and PTFE (DuPont’s Teflon). Teflon has been labeled carcinogenic by some (many), but there is considerable disagreement about that. (My husband points out that overheated Teflon releases fumes that can kill pet birds in the house. Trust him to know that.) Fiberglass can release tiny particles which are not healthy, but there is such a thing as “food grade fiberglass.” So maybe okay? . . . Even if it’s chemically harmless to use in a toaster (really?), such bags make nasty trash.

fyi When I want a heated sandwich, wrap it in parchment paper in the oven or a toaster oven. I reuse my parchment paper over and over, too, and it’s a lot cheaper than bags that might kill the parrot. If we had one.

a funny incident

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My husband is one of those older men who have routines. One of Gary’s involves our walks on the beach, another is burning debris. He generally goes out very early in the morning to burn junk mail, rose clippings, and other papers and wood trash he can’t recycle—going to recycling is another of his routines. If the wind is blowing onshore, he can’t burn, but during an offshore breeze, he will dash out to get his job done.

The other day, a member of the crew putting a new roof on the house next door ran up to him and began yelling. “You should be composting—global warming—CO2!” Gary thought he was kidding at first, and then realized that he was being confronted by an angry young man waving a shovel. Gary listened and then walked away when he was through.

If you know Gary, you probably know he is a pretty even-tempered and completely non-confrontational man. He did tell another young man who was harassing me on the beach to “back off” last summer. He was determined and calm and the guy did back off, but generally Gary avoids trouble on principle. This incident troubled him more the more he thought about it.

He has been uneasy for two days since. He didn’t want to walk by the house after eight the next morning. And then . . .

And then this morning he found out who it was that had yelled at him. A former student of mine. I wrote that boy a letter of recommendation that helped him get in to Reed. Since then his mother blocked me on Facebook. I had written a post on my old blog that addressed the cost (actual dollars) for women trying to maintain the beauty expected of them. Cosmetics and hair care do not come cheap. She accused me of “hatin on folks.” (Yes, she spelled it that way.) It was one of those bizarre exchanges that has made me grateful I left that platform.

My computer won’t open that young man’s recommendation. It’s just as well. I recall him as a very intelligent student, creative but entitled. Anyway, apparently he graduated from Reed in order to invest energy in harassing 70-year-old men, and now Gary is chuckling about this and I am allowed to tell the tale. There is a great deal more, of course, which comes from living in a small community for 40 years and teaching entire generations of teenagers.

Had he come over and simply talked to Gary, my husband would have apologized and explained that we do have a compost heap, that we have been largely vegetarian for decades (wild seafood a few times each month) and that we absolutely support Greta and efforts to curb greenhouse gasses. The only packed foods I buy are small jars of avocado oil mayonnaise and the occasional bag of honey-dijon chips. We do drink bottled water when we can find it in glass, but that would not have mattered, I guess. We wrestle with long-cherished desires to visit sites in Europe, but flying . . . Barcelona and Crete have been on my wishlist since I was ten or eleven. But we respect that flying has a terrible impact on the environment. Gary points out that the young man wouldn’t have cared since “it was never about me [Gary], it was always about him.”

The sky is blue and I have a sinus infection so we missed our walk this morning. Yesterday, I made stock from vegetable trimmings (a weekly routine of mine) and I mean to make soup later this afternoon (another routine). I have completed 5644 words since yesterday morning for my NaNo challenge. If my head didn’t hurt, I’d be feeling pretty great about now. In fact I do.

COLD WALK

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Sand dollars are covered in short, deep purple spines when they are alive. It is rare to find one still covered in prickles—this one is dead but still faintly violet.

We walk most every morning, usually for an hour or longer north or south or north and then south. We waved at Tammy when she came out n the sand.

Gary spotted limpets. I often think through blog posts as I search the sand for plastic trash and pretty shells. I consider politics and friends and weather and projects. What I really want to find on the sand is seaglass. Lately I have been picking up cigarette butts. I would like to get within shouting distance of the man who walks out in the afternoon and tosses his filter tips on the beach. I would like to visit with friends struggling with illness, I would like not to think about the 400,000 fewer kids who had health coverage last year than in 2016. I would like to find a pattern to make the dress I have promised my granddaughter. Her birthday is next week and she will be eight.

The beach was very cold this morning. Wind blew less hard than yesterday, temperatures were up a degree or two, but it was still cold, the moon a sliver in the pale but sunless sky. I found two pieces of glass and many “ugly clams” (Pododesmus macrochisma) which are not the lest bit ugly when you pick them up and turn them over. Portland Review published my poem a year or so ago. I have not been able to figure out how to make WordPress single-space. Never mind.

Pododesmus macrochisma: Metaphor for Girls 

Each morning I walk the sand, searching 

for what my grandmother misnamed 

the “ugly clams” caught in foam left behind 

by a retreating wave or stranded high on shore 

from last night’s tide. Smaller than my thumb 

or filling my palm, they might come to rest 

among seaweeds torn from their beds, 

half buried by wind-driven grains. Often 

when I find a shell, there is another nearby. 

Is it too fanciful to think they gather to die?

Perhaps because the first makes me alert 

to the next. Every one I have seen lies 

face down, resembling nothing much of note. 

Some thinner than drawing paper, sometimes 

thick, calloused like my toes. They lived wild

in depths to three hundred feet, here adrift 

and dead, their softer life dissolved in the sea. 

Only rarely are the unequal halves complete, 

shaped back shell still attached to the round. 

Sometimes only shards remain, wholeness 

crushed by the careless heel of an earlier walker

passing by, oblivious to the gift underfoot. 

One reason to search at dawn. Turn one

over, see what hides—that nacre, sometimes 

scarred, dark glimmering, pearly sheen—alive

amber and green, holding captive light. 

These days, most of the shells show a black stain inside. There have been black stains on the sand, too. Diesel from watercraft or leaking from shore? I do not know, but I think it kills them.

We are careful not to disturb resting seagulls. Sometimes dozens gather, usually at the edges of a creek north or south. My neighbor Barbara used to yell at tourists to leash their dogs around the gulls. Visiting dogs chase them, and most people do not mind seeing them or even seem to enjoy seeing them flee into the air. It made Barbara wild.

The sun had not yet risen when I headed back. The house next door is getting a new roof. As I turned up the path to my home, a dog suddenly rushed at me, growling and with his shoulder ruff raised. A man on the roof called him off. A job dog. He bumped by me as if I were a post. Such dogs used always to be some sort of retriever, thick tail wagging. I know people love their pits, I get that. But the breed was created to fight and kill other dogs, an “unnatural” behavior for a domestic animal. Behavior like pointing or scenting or sighting prey is automatic. People want to say it’s the owner, not the breed, but what many owners have said they most appreciate about their pits is how loyal they are, how protective. Wishful thinking. I wish they were all sterile and gone before my great grandchildren must walk past one.

The ocean’s surface seems shivered, broken into blue static, the waves smaller today. Yesterday huge breakers bent over backwards and flew up in the stiff east wind. Today they seem tamed by the cold, three breakers at a time heading in white rolls onshore.

NEIGHBORING MYTH

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Myth is scripture. Myth is wisdom. Myth is sacred story. Myth is magic and meaning. Myth defines and supports the goodness in us. It shows us a path, and as symbol—never underestimate symbols—myth is always true. Always.

As a public high school English teacher I was very respectful in using the word “myth.” I introduced it as a sacred story. However, like the authors of most every essay and study I have read, I did not address the obvious connection between the mythology of traditional cultures and the mythology of more modern ones. I was careful not to offend. I continued to be hopeful that others more powerfully placed will detail the parallels between Christian and other contemporaries mythologies and the ancient ones. They never do.

There is the “old wives’ tale” smear of mythology, as if the story your old grandmother told was a lie because it was not entirely factual. Or because it was told by an old woman. As if the decency and honesty rewarded in her story were not the point. As if she meant harm.

I used to hope that a few of my students, at least, might eventually see how Spider Grandmother and an archangel might share a place in the human pursuit for meaning. That they might appreciate how our connection to decency and fairness is not merely regulatory, but human and humane, a spiritual negotiation that allows us all to survive. Goodness as a universal truth. A Truth.

Most creation stories involve animals, plants, and failure. The Haida allow that Raven created the world mostly by accident. The Judeo-Christian tradition made the world on purpose, human beings on purpose, and death as a result of error. It matters to some people whether all or any of these stories are literally true. To others the message is significant enough. Do the right thing. Do right. All mythology works that way. Was it Atlas who carried the world on his back or a tortoise? Is the snake a symbol of evil or, by shedding skin, of rebirth?

It depends on who you ask.

The Story of Job warns against assuming we understand the why of events, but all mythology warns against doing what we know to be wrong, even when we do not understand why.

Societies pursue various goals and notions of virtue, but theft and murder and deceit are common evils. Generosity, compassion, and patience are nearly always admired and spiritually rewarded.

We are capable of knowing right from wrong. We are even capable of changing our minds about how we define those terms—which is much harder to manage. It is easier to stick with what we always thought before. Easier to not think, not weigh options, not reconsider what we think we know, not question good. Easier to assume evil is somewhere else far away. Evil as something outside and Other.

Strangely, like most life on earth, we will sacrifice ourselves for others. Human beings will do this, even sacrificing our safety and our lives for others. Wolves will do that too. Trees will pass over nutrition to a neighbor tree. Insects, fungus, single-celled life—all willing to die that their fellows may live. Altruism is not a rare virtue.

Sometimes we become so caught up in competition, in winning, and in hubris (our inflated self-importance) that we forget what we know to be true: we live together and we must get along in order to live virtuous lives.

Perfect innocence was never our destiny. We must constantly choose to do the right thing. Some humans creep about like Cain, hoping no one will notice who killed their brother. But there is no future in worrying continually, in fortifying ourselves against the Cains among us. How can that profit our lives? Surrendering to such fears makes cowards of us.

The vast majority of us are only doing the best we know how—to be good, generous, compassionate, and patient. We do this not only from fear of punishment. We do this not only when someone is watching. Sometimes we fail and bow to pride, selfishness, spite, and vengeance. Most often we do not. We do the right thing because we know it is right and we are comfortable with ourselves in doing what is right and good.

If we were more bad than good, no child would survive past the age of two. It would not be safe for me to say good morning to strangers on the beach. There would be no one risking censure to speak back to those in power. I see goodness everywhere, because even in our failings, most of us are trying our best to do good. Virtue is not Other.

We do the right thing because that goodness is in us.

The wives told.

WEATHER CHANGE

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We like being the first out, while the sand is still unmarked by dogs and people. Usually we find prints and recognize by position who they belong to. That’s John out for his run because the bare feet make prints so close together. Larry drags a bit. Tammy walks close to the water. The tracks of dogs are familiar too. Roxxie and Charlie and Hank.

In summer we have been out on the sand before five in the morning. Real time is nearly 6am just now. [Have we all forgotten that time is not purely a human invention? Noon, for example, is a genuine natural event, that instant when the sun is highest in the sky, and is now marked on the DST clock an hour before it occurs. Like summer and winter, noon is not a fiction, but part of the natural way of things.]

Summer is long gone. Two days ago tides swept away our entire pathway cleared through the stony edge of our beach. Gary cleared that path in spring and it remained clear all this time. The beach is routinely washed free of sand in the winter months, but that day did not show a particularly high tide measured in feet above and below sea level. We check the tide table each day. Their numbers do not reveal the entire story. High surf from a storm at sea, a tame ocean under heavy clouds.

It is the wave action, sometimes showing only one or two low breakers, but this past Thursday breaking nearly to the horizon, breaking over the top of Castle Rock, thick and foamy at the edges. We had walked early in a gale. Our sitting log is gone and an enormous log that rested high up into the hedge fifty yards north of us. Thirty inches across and thirty feet long, that rotting monster has found a new temporary lodging further up the beach. Our sitting log (the one the visitor to a neighbor’s house used to pee in public) has vanished altogether. We walked a mile without finding where it had drifted.

I no longer take photos of waves crashing up into the air, a hundred feet above Castle Rock. I have those photos from previous autumns, dozens. Now I watch.

The surf is up, as they say. We watch with concern when tourists take their little children onto the sand during at out-going tide. A former student drowned, a strong swimmer, and on a pleasant day. No telling when the sea will swing her skirts.

A single wave in January of 1999 pushed the basalt stones up out of their bed and into a ridge along shore that we have never seen before. Until that winter, summer tides brought sand in from the offshore bar and nearly covered the rocky edge, and then for years we did not have a clear sandy beach at all.

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The sand has come back, though the rocks have not been completely covered for twenty years.

A friend came to lunch the other day and asked me whether I spent much time watching the ocean. Yes, both of us do. Even after all these years—forty so far—we watch the ocean and shore. When we think about moving, that is a major sticking point. We are accustomed to the view. Watching the weather come in, tracking the birds in the air and in our tiny front garden, the shift of sand and tides, wave action. Nothing new, always different.

When we walk north, the shoreline dips and rises on our right. Some neighbors need long stairs to get to the beach. Our property is set low, just a few feet above the beach. My grandfather’s old path through the hedge, built before the Great War, is completely overgrown. There were no more than a half dozen concrete steps. That stair might still be there buried under salal and sand and basalt rubble. From our western door we walk through a new path in the middle of our hedge and down a short stretch of stones Gary has placed to ease our steps down to the shore.

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This is what counts as “a lot” of sand. At low tide there might be a couple of hundred yards of sand between the black basalt and surf. I paced off the distance other day.

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The out-of-state owners of the rental north of us, after their first autumn, asked what happened to “our sand?” Gone for the season, I told them. Visitors have asked us whether the sand is trucked in, where we get the rocks brought in to protect the shore. Tourists try to “save” resting baby seals and fully grown eagles. It is hard for us, who live here, to imagine such ignorance. We have watched the flow in and out, the fledging of birds and the drowned onshore, the shift and shuffle of sand, the rare hard freeze, the slow progress of water and wildlife.

The sand is leaving. Maybe it will return in the spring. We watch for that.

 

‘in my great and unmatched wisdom’

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What are we doing here?

The President has invited foreign powers to interfere in the US presidential election.
Democrats want to impeach him for it.
Or, as my husband says, “We’ve been interfering in their government; it’s only fair that they should be allowed to interfere with ours.” Of course, Gary is being facetious.