It’s been a wild, hot, and anxious month. On this last day of June, we walked north to the headland and then south to the creek. As we approached our southern goal, Gary pointed ahead. “There’s Tammy,” he said. “She’s waving.” He waved back.
“Where?” I said.
It turned out to be a whirligig he was waving at, and we both laughed. “Don’t tell Tammy,” Gary said. But you know I can’t keep a secret.
This single-flowing pink rugosa rose has an intoxicating fragrance and set huge apple-red hips. I let the hips set each year hoping to make jelly, but the chipmunk gets them every time.
Two months ago I wrote here about beauty and about the storks nesting in England for the first time in a hundred years. It seems a long time ago.
This lacecap hydrangea grows under, around, through, and over the windswept pine in our front yard.
Yesterday, for the first time in over four months, I ate a meal I had not myself cooked. It was a risk and we will not likely do it again any time soon. Most of our favorite places to buy food are closed (Ove NW and Pearl Bakery) or they have demonstrated a certain level of complacence or carelessness. And I am a decent cook and baker myself. Yes, I can bake a cherry pie starting with a hallock of sour cherries if I could get to the Farmers Market to buy them. I was baking sourdough before the pandemic. Usually by this time in the summer I have frozen pesto and huckleberries and the makings of pies. Instead my freezer looks barren. Continue reading
Yesterday, someone—I hope it was a visiter and not a local person—ripped the wild seasonal succulents out of the rocks bordering the sand. Ripped them all right out of the ground! The devastation began a hundred feet south of our path and continued north for hundreds of feet north. These people left a long line of plants littering the shore, tore them out by their roots just because they could. Like the party who started a fire of drift logs and abandoned it to smoke and smolder all night long. Like the people staying north of us who managed to drop their kite all the way over our house and into our courtyard (not the first time), and woke me with loud laughter at nearly eleven the other night. They seem like nice people, but they’re on vacation.
There is a hedge in front of our house, what we call the “front” because the ocean is too vast to be anyone’s backyard. The hedge is mostly salal that grows wild. The local rose, which is thorny and has dark pink flowers the size of quarters, is native too. The cultivar montbrecia, which will pop out in racemes of brilliant orange flowers any minute now, is a thriving but benign volunteer. The same cannot be said for English ivy that threatens to take over the world. My step-grandmother may or may not be responsible for starting ivy on its aggressive path in our hedge. I recall a two-inch pot of decorative ivy. Yes, she might have planted that in her garden as a ground cover. Many people did in the 60s. It was already thriving all over local beach gardens. We religiously remove it from the courtyard and fight to a truce in the hedge.
By contrast, I give Genevieve credit for planting honeysuckle, which has spread but without strangling any other plant. And it smells better than ivy, though its foliage is not such a stunning, healthy green.
The salal was not invited or planted. It belongs here. It grows in the forest and along the beachfront except where it has been pushed out by invasive ivy or deliberately planted rugosa roses. White or carmine pink. The salal has stiff, leathery foliage used by florists, and berries I use in muffins. I like that I had nothing to do with it, that I need not water or spray or tend it in any way. It is what it is.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, the night gay people stood their ground and refused to be passively bullied any more, the night they began a movement. Some call it a riot or a rebellion or an uprising. Stonewall works for me. Gay Pride.
Gary’s co-worker Chris took his draft physical the day after Gary earlier that same year, 1969. Both Chris and Gary failed the physical, Gary for his eyesight. They compared notes at the Book Store, and Gary asked how Chris had managed to flunk his physical. “I told them I was gay.” Oh, right.
When Gary went to Chris’s house to listen to Ziggy Stardust, he knew Chris was gay but he didn’t want to “try something new.” Chris took no for an answer and they remained friends. That’s usually how it goes. I’ve been hit on, so gently that I only figured it out later, and I’ve had gay and lesbian friends going all the way back pretty much forever. I knew who they were and who they were interested in sexually at least from my junior year of high school, but it was never an issue. Like someone being married or in a relationship: It only matters if you are romantically interested in the person. Mostly I failed to pay much attention. What possible difference could it make to me that the girl, who had done me a kindness when we were both six year old, liked girls? Barb was my friend and I valued her for her friendship. I miss her still.
The salal berries I use in whole wheat muffins and the wild huckleberries I use in butter cake are among the best things I know to bake. Published recipes suggest that blueberries can be substituted for these NW berries. Perhaps. Perhaps if they were wild and smaller berries I would love them. Perhaps if I could not get the real thing the substitute would be good enough. If I lived in Maine, it would make sense to me. But I live in Oregon and I am pretty sure that what grows here without my help or interference is the best of all.
We are all visitors here. Letting things be is the theme for today. Allow the natural to thrive and you owe it nothing more, no anger or resentment, no ripping up just because you have that power. A pact of noninterference because we all inconvenience and irritate sometimes. At least allow what lives to thrive. Enjoy it or ignore it, as you choose.
Taken on a winter day, the tide was out far enough this morning that I could walk well out on the sand beyond that triangular seasick I think of as a seal sticking his head up out of the sand.
Clouds like cobblestones drift over the eastern horizon. Light seams their edges. Birds join the morning music.
We might miss a half dozen days out of the year, but my husband and I try to walk each morning. We go out as soon as there is light or whenever I can get my behind in gear. Two cups of coffee, checking my email, and this time of year, it is light at 4 but even so we are usually not before 6am.
We are rarely first.
This morning was perfect, sun already over the coast range, reaching across the sand. Low clouds sliding down along the cape to the south and mist rising up off the ocean. A roll of fog out on the horizon, blue sky overhead. We walked south, Gary with the trash bag, mw filling my pockets with little stone, as is our habit. Sometimes we walked together, more often we wove away and back across sand and the rock edging the beach, looking for trash, agates, and glass. The tide was sweeping in, but there was a broad expanse of sand and last night’s high tide had left a stretch of dry sand along most of our shore.
We headed north, waving at locals as we went. I thought about going past the northern point, the first long distance of the year. Drift logs pile up in that little cove north, the way they once did all along Arch Cape beach. My mother used to play a game with her sister where they pretended the sand was poison and they walked drift logs all the way south to the big creek. I might have played that same game in my own childhood, but now locals cut up the logs and tourists place them whole across beach fires and walk off.
A group of campers were just waking up on the sand just south of the falls at Hug Point State Park. It can be a risky place to camp. When the tide comes in high in the dark, it strikes the cliff face and the only escape is pretty much straight up.
By the time I got to Hug Point, a hundred-year-old roadway carved into the rock, waves were already lapping around at the base of the rock. I went up anyway. This was part of my favorite run. No wind. No chance of drizzle. A bright blue, misty day cool enough that I would not be overheated. I ran this path for twenty years. This morning, I would have run all the way to Arcadia, if I had been running and not walking.
It was a good and healthy habit, my running days. Giving it up was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Ask anyone. Ask anyone who used to smoke. Kicking a habit is hard.
I never smoked, and experimented with drugs only briefly. When I was caring for my mother I drank too much, too much for me. Three glasses of wine and I am wasted, and I did that once or twice a week during those five terrible years. I gained weight, but kept running, which certainly shortened my running days. One bad habit destroying a good one.
I am trying to find better habits of eating and drinking, walking and work. I track everything and already, after almost four weeks of keeping track, I am doing better—drowning the bad habits with the good one.
It seems to me that there is too much talk these days about addiction and lifestyle. I was not addicted to running and I was not addicted to eating too much or drinking or writing. These were habits. That is not meant to minimize their power; I mean to acknowledge the power of habit.
When I stopped running I thrashed around, seeking some way to move. I swam when my boys were little, but chlorine and I are not friends and the pool is my only option. I tried bellydance for a while, but now I am a walker, which seems to suit me best.
We were out for two hours this morning, four mile as the crows flies, longer as a real crow might fly and as I walked up and down, up and down, my eyes examining thousands of square feet of rocky shore and sand.
We brought home a sheet of polystyrene foam the size of a lounge chair, a bag of trash, a pocketful of agates, two limpets, and ten sand-washed bits of glass.
Then I went out into the yard and picked the first salal berries from our hedge to make muffins. That is a habit too. At the peak of season, I could make muffins most very day from the berries in our yard. I will save the pickings from three or four days and make jam next month.
I have only worked on my loom for a short time this morning. A bit over four inches are done so far today, and I want twenty.
Some will call this a lifestyle. It’s just life.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 