MAY GOD FORGIVE THEM…

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

Yeah, we knew it was coming. Despite the videos, the creepy calling after Nancy, the threats and racist catcalls that began years ago. Despite the ridicule of a disabled reporter, the ridicule of a Gold Star family, the infidelity during three marriages, the threats and bullying, we had every right to expect Congress, the Republicans in Congress to do the right thing. Gary likes to say: Didn’t they ever go to Sunday School?

Apparently all they learned was they were chosen.

Against the courage of Officer Goodman are the doors and windows broken, the officers who were broken, the oaths of office broken, the trust broken. The news has reported from the beginning that Republicans in Congress would never vote to convict. And those national media outlets were correct. Republicans in Congress chose party and power over people, party and power over the Constitution they swore to defend, party and power over morality and justice. It is unconscionable. The next time someone complains about partisan politics, look right. 

To paraphrase Fiddler on the Roof:
"Rabbi, if there's a blessing for everything, is there a blessing for Trump?"
"Of course. May the good Lord bless and keep Trump . . . far away from us."

Or to quote Jesus Christ Superstar: "Could we start again, please?"

Some deep housecleaning is called for. As The New York Times reports:

“Forty-three Republicans voted to acquit Mr. Trump of inciting an insurrection against the United States—more than enough to prevent the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. Mr. Trump was found not guilty, a verdict he immediately celebrated.

“And yet seven Republicans voted to convict him, making this by far the most bipartisan impeachment effort in American history. It is worth remembering that until a year ago, when Mr. Romney cast the lone Republican ‘guilty’ vote in Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial, no senators had ever voted to convict a president from their own party.”

“Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, an impeachment manager, put it bluntly: ‘If we don’t set this right and call it what it was, the highest of constitutional crimes by the president of the United States, the past will not be past. The past will become our future,’ she said in closing arguments. ‘Senators, we are in a dialogue with history.’ ”

“ ‘The people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president,’ Mr. McConnell said, ‘and having that belief was a foreseeable consequence of the growing crescendo of false statements, conspiracy theories and reckless hyperbole, which the defeated president kept shouting into the largest megaphone on planet earth.’ ”

Mitch McConnell voted to acquit. History will judge their failure.

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WEATHER OR NOT

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

We’ve been talking about moving. To be candid, we’ve talked about moving on and off ever since we moved to my family’s home on the Oregon coast in 1979. We missed family and friends. Now it’s the non-stop stream of tourists in a residential neighborhood that used to house people who actually lived here. The truth is, however, that we like the climate, the weather, and our permanent neighbors. We raised our children here, wetsuits dripping over the tub. They moved off but we stayed. We love our daily walks on the shore, even when our fingers and toes go numb in winter. We are accustomed to the continual roar of ocean and water shifting stone. We are used to silence.

We are used to seeing sky, to watching the storms roll in, the sea go high, the gulls and black oystercatchers and broken shells in the rocks. We enjoy finding the shoreline changed every day. This past year has not been easy for most people. The weather alone has been, as they say, interesting.

You can see the two fallen-over trees on the cape are still hanging on. So are we.
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The BREAD RISES

/ janpriddyoregon / 14 Comments

Since the beginning of the pandemic, and setting aside art purchases, our most expensive budgetary item for the past year has been food. This has been the case throughout most of human history. Food first, but the animals and manner of raising crops changed dramatically. We have eaten organic for years just like my grandparents would have. We prefer fresh or frozen food, strong flavors, and I am a good cook willing to try things.

I began baking bread as a child with my mother. I baked bread in college even as a full time student and working 18-30 hours a week. My studio classes did not meet on Fridays and I usually had that day off. I have always baked bread on occasion, but in the past year I bake weekly, usually sourdough, half whole wheat flour, and no sugar in my bread at all. It takes most of the day to bake sourdough, though less than an hour of actual work. The house smells of healthy yeast and the loaves that come out of the oven are tastier than anything I could buy. It is even convenient to bake it. 

Americans eat badly because we have failed to start at the beginning by teaching children to cook.

My most recent loaves just out of the oven: Sourdough raisin bread made with AP, whole wheat and einkorn flours, eggs, salt, and sunflower oil.

Many women of my generation were resistant to learning to cook because they were understandably resistant to a sexist notion of a housewife’s destiny. They saw cooking and cleaning as Erma Bombeck did, as a trap for women. My own mother loved Bombeck’s humor (If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? etc.), but she knew how to do all those chores of canning and cooking and baking bread. She didn’t like doing any of them.

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MORE, PLEASE

/ janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

I laid different shawls/scarves out on the bed yesterday afternoon, and then another row on the cedar chest (above), but already the light was too dim in this north and east facing bedroom. Ten stretch out full length over the bed, and another eight are folded at the foot. The photos are from this morning. Still not much light, but I’ve made no attempt to “correct” anything as the colors look accurate on my screen. (The greens suffered a bit.)

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THE COVID WEAVING

/ janpriddyoregon / 14 Comments

I planned to have a dozen shawls/scarves woven by this past December. But stuck at home, I began weaving and sometimes went on from dawn to darkness. The results are lovely, soft, and variously hued. Not to mention numerous.

Here are a few. They are each about 23″ wide, 65-75″ long plus fringe, and after weaving and fringing, they are washed in cold water with shampoo, hung to dry overnight without blocking, and then labels sewn on. Others like them are owned and worn by both men and women.

Four shawls/scarves from four warps. Each is labeled and tagged.
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QUILTED PANDEMIC

/ janpriddyoregon / 9 Comments

My work is meant to be handled and used. To that end, I do not make wall hangings or “art” pictures. My shawls belong on shoulders and my quilts belong on beds. I completed or pieced seven quilts in 2020. The five quilts below are all sewn from hand-dyed cotton batik fabrics, usually 60-100 different fabrics in each, shading dark to light and one hue into another. The photos are the best I can manage in such tiny form.

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THE MESS

/ janpriddyoregon / 22 Comments

The blanket will only be 45″ by 85″ unless I put on a second warp and weave another (third) length. I could do that. I still have some handspun. As I work on the second length of this warp, I think more and more that I want that third length. It is a goal, and I need goals just now.

There are the needs of my husband, children, grandchildren, friends, students—the people who matter most—and then the things I do—reading, writing, playing with color and making meals. I read the newspaper every morning online—several newspapers. I look at real estate I cannot afford, I draw houses, something I have done since I was a little girl. I have worked for contractors and architects and directly for clients, and I have seen my plans built, but it won’t happen again. Next door someone is shoving mud around in the rain. It is a messy job. And my brain feels a little like that sometimes.

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DREAMING IN COLOR

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments
It is always color that I return to—here I have yarn dropped over batik fabric. I could not figure out the quilt so I moved on to the weaving instead. The last quilt I pieced just came home, but I won’t get to open the package and put on the binding for a couple of days. Then we’ll see “Winterberry.”

The sky is vivid blue and the sun burns hot and yellow. The horse is flying. The flying horse soars beyond rust-brown dirt roads and gardens of red and orange flowers and sunflowers, over green hills and streams edged with trees in full leaf. The horse flies effortlessly. Cold air brushes past my cheeks and the flanks of the horse. I feel power in my legs. Sometimes there are feathered wings on the horse. Sometimes I am the horse. My own muscled wings carry me through the air.

It is my favorite dream.

When my husband and I are having a good time, I am smiling. My eyes are half-closed. He asks me what I am thinking, and I grin and close my lids and tell him I am thinking of colors. Red and orange, shocking pink with juicy slices of chartreuse and violet, deep indigo and amber flicker in my mind’s eye. The riot of hues shift and splinter and recreate new tessellations in the darkness. Joy is these brilliant colors.

I come back to certain combinations in my work again and again. Purples with olive and sage green; maroon with shocking pink and acid yellows and greens; pinks with orange and a slice of turquoise; soft gray with plum and black. I cut the colors in fabric. I weave the colors, and my pleasure in the patterns on my loom comes through sight and touch and juxtaposition. These are my personal choices. The world has others. Each year, a panel of experts get together to select colors that will show up on fashion runways and upholstery and even toys and paint chips. Color changes—gray replaces brown replaces navy as neutrals in suits and shoes. But this is marketing, not my real life. [For 2018, the color of the year was ultra violet.]

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EMAIL STORIES

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

We are continually surprised by people we thought we “knew.” Just the other day a local woman I’ve known for forty years asked for my email address, which has the word “pride” in it.

“Does that ‘pride” word stand for something?” she wanted to know.

“Yes,” I said, “it was my grandmother’s maiden name.”

Then she launched into a whole thing about the word “pride” is “triggering” and a “trigger-word” that “we need to take back that word.” 

And I thought, really? Gay pride is triggering? …Who are you?

My older son complained that he had emailed a journal three times last year asking when a paper he’d authored that was due to be published. They finally responded to his email the day before yesterday.

I’m not sure why, but I said: karma is a bitch.

He countered that I had corrected that use of the word karma decades ago.

Oh, right. I know better.

Westerners are inclined to use the term “karma” as shorthand for “What goes around comes around” or “As you sew, so shall you reap” and “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Which is not at all the meaning of the term, but we pretend it has to do with just deserts. (Yes, that is correctly spelled even though it’s pronounced in this usage as “desserts.”)

I do not believe we are being punished, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Life does not work that way. We do not always or with any consistency receive punishment in life for misdeeds and rewards for virtue. It seems like it might be nice, but no.

We should feel better about ourselves when we are kind and generous and open-minded, but too often the kind, generous, and open-minded among us are the very ones who question our own motives and experience remorse over minor failings.

Never mind.

And anyway, that is not what karma means, in its original use. Karma is more like destiny. More like the path we are supposed to follow at various stages of our life as child, student, parent, and on to a quiet retirement.

The other day we found 23 pieces of sea glass. This was not a reward but the result of three hours of searching. On our way home, the couple who were standing in the middle of our path thought I hesitated to pass them because I was afraid of their completely pleasant dogs. It was the people themselves I was afraid of. They seemed completely amazed when I told them this. Who knows where those people have been?

There’s this pandemic? Hello? I go masked if I might come within twenty feet of someone outdoors. I am always masked before shopping for groceries. On the beach I walk well up into the rocks when people come by on the sand. I wait for them to pass. I try to keep my distance. Rarely do the people we meet seem to understand that. Maybe they trust the same magic that sends them jaywalking in Cannon Beach, speeding or crawling along. They’re on vacation and can’t be touched?

I have often joked that tourists behave as if they think: I’m on vacation, the rules do not apply to me. Maybe I’m not far off?

A new member of Congress was complaining that we needed no laws about civil rights or freedoms since we are all free according to the founders, and it’s already guaranteed. I wondered what she was thinking? Does that mean that because the Declaration of Independence says we are all granted life, therefore murder need not be declared a crime? Her reasoning was ridiculous. Flat-earthers are ridiculous. QAnon are ridiculous. How do people believe this nonsense?

We live together in a society that agrees to certain truths. Murder is wrong. Every society that has ever existed agrees that murder is wrong. Human beings have always agreed that killing for personal benefit is murder and therefore wrong. Theft, cheating, lying, breaking our promises? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. We all agree. We have always agreed.

Kindness, charity, compassion, love, honesty, devotion? Right, right, right, right, right, and right. We all know this.

We do the best we can to do right. Sometimes we fail and when that happens in any society, we apologize and make amends. We do this not merely from fear of punishment, but because we want to be good. We want to be productive, useful, just members of society. We abide by laws that are not intended only for some but for all. We agree to do this as civilized people.

We do not always get what we deserve, but we should always try to give the best we can.

It’s not so much to ask.

IT MUST BE MONDAY

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment
This is what I think of as an appaloosa sky. Today the sky is pale gray, smooth as colorless butter, showing a horizon where it meets the green ocean.

This must be a more hopeful week, a milder and gentler week, a less eventful week, while still a week to get things done. We need a better year, and we’ll have it too… eventually. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of our lives. Whether we deserve it or not, we’ve got it coming. Ya’ think?

I completed a draft of our taxes yesterday. That wasn’t too bad, even though I didn’t have all the stuff I need. But since I can’t submit till the middle of next month (the IRS is running behind), I will complete the forms all over again in a couple of weeks to check for errors. Just in case. (Because, seriously, the forms have been changing each year which means I actually have to read all the instructions every year.)

I’ve only woven twenty-some inches on the new warp. It’s getting done as I figure out the colors a half inch at a time.

We got out for a walk this morning between pouring rain and snow on the coast range. We managed more than a half mile onshore without getting run over by a wave. Sometimes it was close.

Our friend’s medical appointment went well this morning—no major intervention and everything is functioning again.

Some politicians are already blaming others for not working across the aisle even though that first group has never made any effort to even talk to the others in the past years.

And we shouldn’t prosecute criminals, according to that party that has been whining about law-and-order for . . . ever. Because why exactly?

The new Cabinet is being confirmed, we’re insisting people from infectious areas prove they are not sick, the feds are going into war-mode to ensure supplies necessary to inoculate an entire country are available, and Harriet Tubman is going on the $20 bill.

The little dog that came to the ER every day, all day, for days was finally rewarded when her elderly person was released from the hospital. That happy story was in Turkey.

Right here in the front yard, a flock of birds landed and pecked at the ground. They are finding something to eat. Seeds or crumbs or new tiny seedlings. The jay came by and was underwhelmed.

I am reading a good book with an abomination for a cover design—the designer drew in a cartoon fishtail with a completely fake wave pattern on a painting by a famous, deceased painter. This should result in serious demerits.

And I am watching Season 2 of The Magicians in order to calm down.

It must be a Monday.

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