A couple of years ago, I took a class at the Portland metal studio, Ninety-Twenty. I wanted to recreate a sterling ring I’d made for Gary while I was still in high school in the fall of 1968 or maybe 1969. At the University of Washington, I would complete two studio art degrees by 1976. When we married after Gary’s graduation in 1974, I borrowed back Gary’s sterling ring to add a gold bead for the wedding. On our wedding day, my mother accidentally flushed our rings—the two-color gold bands and his updated sterling and gold ring. (She absolutely denied doing this.) I remade the gold wedding bands the following fall but not the sterling one. I don’t remember why. Gary suggests, “Maybe we were too busy.” Gary was working full time after graduation and I was both working and in school pursuing a teaching degree, my third degree in six years.

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cover yourself I’ve got you covered that’s a great cover you’ll need cover

June was an eventful month, and I have a few photos to prove it. My MFA residency happened in Forest Grove and I went by a few times. We both caught a cold (tested) which caused us to miss our dental appointments, but we were healthy for our yearly medical. I am eating better. So is Gary. Both of us lost a couple pounds.

It was hot in Portland, mid-90s while we were there. It was also unusually hot at the beach for a couple days, high 80s. The heat at the beach is troubling. We’ve lived here since 1979, and hitting 80° used to be an extraordinary event. We prefer the cooler temperature. This past week makes me feel things how are changing.

An elk ate apples in the garden across the street and then I ran past it twice yesterday on the beach, a rabbit grazed the yard, and the raven couple have a youngster big as them.

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It is widely reported that given the theoretical choice of meeting a man or a bear in the dark, most women will choose the bear.

Men are justly offended by this report. Women take a breath and nod.

Last Friday morning, Juneteenth, Ron Charles (former WaPo book editor) wrote about the exploitive relationship of Thomas Jefferson with Sally Hemings, who was 16 years old in Paris and younger than his daughters when he got her pregnant. Yeah. Awful. There is no evidence, no signed contract or other document, that she chose to begin her relationship with the much older Jefferson, but that is the story. [DNA testing of her descendants proves the relationship.] As a free woman, why would anyone have chosen such a relationship?

Was Jefferson the bear?

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“However ill-founded, however misguided, hope is the basic stratagem of mortality. We need it, and an art that fails to offer it fails us.”

—URSULA K. LE GUIN, ”Facing It,” from Dancing at the Edge of the World

Years ago, as a “starving student” who worked every hour I could get, I also participated in psychology experiments that paid volunteers. I only did the safe ones, the sitting-in-a-sound-proof-room and repeating back numbers sort of experiment. I had thought I might major in Psych but Behaviorism was big, and behaviorists were very big on animal experiments and generalizing behaviors of animals in a lab to judge human behavior. I saw flaws in their logic. But I took classes and paid attention.

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