Jaci Dawn

Shortly after my mom died, we went camping at a place called Fawn Meadow. It’s just a pull off by the side of the road that goes up to Granite Peaks above the Collowash River and close to the Bull of the Woods Wilderness area. Nothing special, really: deer hunters camp there in the fall. It’s not far from Hawk Mountain Lookout (or, rather, the trail head to the trail to Hawk Mtn Lookout).

I wasn’t much into camping or anything as grief was all-consuming that summer. We made several camping trips that summer and each one served to heal my broken heart a little more. But it started at Fawn Meadow.

I found this dried up old limb on the ground as we hiked out a ridge. It was the right size for a walking stick and was much sturdier than the silver-grey wood suggested it should be. All the bark had long since rotted away, revealing the traces of some sort of borer beetles in the wood. The intricate patterns of their paths fascinated me. So I picked up the stick. Don warned me that it was too old to be a good walking stick, but he was wrong: the thing was not brittle.

Then I found a couple crow feathers, so I tied them onto the stick.

I added things to it for a number of years, up until the time that Chrys came to live with us and the circle seemed complete.

At first, all I added were little wood-burned items, like check marks on a list. It is a list, of sorts.

I was consciously building what is referred to as a memorial to God, or an altar. In ancient Israel, the Hebrews were always doing that: anywhere they felt God talked to them, they built an altar of stones. I think a lot of cultures do that, but I know of it from something I read in the Bible at the time I was mourning my mother and i thought, “This walking stick is my memorial.”

I wrote down little things I considered miraculous, like the time I spied the bobcat kittens in the draw below us. There were two kittens playing on an old log and two human families up on the ridge above, enthralled in the deepening dusk as they watched the kitties romp. That is miraculous to me.

I wrote words from dreams I’ve had, like the words to a song i woke up singing once, “You don’t have to dance the dance your mother danced.” I took it to mean that I don’t have to die young and tragic, like she did.

I wrote the dates of my children’s births: 5/22, 9/6, 5/6. The day I got married to Don: 6/7.

I wrote answered prayers, even if it was as silly as finding a set of luggage on sale just when I needed a set of luggage.

And I started tacking things on to the crow feathers. One of my parrot’s feathers. Some “bear balls” (jingle bells) that a girlfriend gave me when she thought I might go hiking in grizzly bear country (trust me: we were in bear country, but we had more to fear from the mosquitoes than any bear that never materialized). Bits of ribbon. A pair of favorite earrings after they broke. The green glass pendant that Arwen bought me when she went to a bluegrass festival with a girlfriend.

It isn’t all seriousness.

There’s the crow, for instance. He was perched upside down in some craft store bin around Hallowe’en time. When I saw him, I thought, “Oh! A Two-Crow-Feather-Woman find!” He just gets dusty and looks rather moth-eaten, but I know my mom would like him.

And there’s the “coconut” bra that Arwen brought me as a souvenir from Hawaii. I like the way the bra halves clop together when I shake the stick.

Memorial to God: coconut halves and bear balls and stuffed crows. Oh my.

Today turned out to be a bit of a chaotic day emotionally for me. I feel guilty about it in the face of the chaos that is Haiti tonight. I will probably atone for it by making a donation to

Operation Helping Hands
c/o United Way of Miami-Dade
P.O. Box # 459007
Miami, FL 33245-9007
(305) 646-7129
http://www.unitedwaymiami.org/iwant2help_contribute.asp
THANK YOU FOR CARING!

(I stole that from a Facebook acquaintance who happens to be from Haiti)

Anyway, back to my own little corner of pain and suffering. I put my back out. Then I came home and my house was in a state of chaos. The almost-2 year old was hyperactive and testing limits. The dog (two and half years old) was behaving just as poorly. My husband was yelling at the dog. My daughter was patiently trying to tone down her son. My back was hurting which puts me into a non-communicative cocoon of pain.

My husband made dinner and cleaned the kitchen. That does not endear anyone to him, even the one who hurts too much to bend over right now. He was in a bad mood because he had to yell at the dog so much (the dog has been so good, I guess he just had to get it out of his system tonight).

The dog and the boy were both miscreants.

My daughter retreated upstairs with her children to give us old folks breathing room. I came and hid in the bedroom where I can put ice and heat onto my back alternately and be in pain without having to talk to anyone. My husband is sitting out in the living room feeling piqued at everyone and the dog.

It’s just in the air today.

And I feel guilty for feeling miserable because I looked at the photos on CNN. I knew better, but… Babies.

It is time to bring myself out of my own little pity party and corner of pain and think about what I can do to help the people of Haiti. Because they need us right now and they need to know we have their back. Somehow squabbling over who does what in the scheme of household chores seems pretty insignificant in the face of the earthquake.

My back will get better – that much is a fact. But for so many in Haiti, getting better is scarcely a goal when all you want to do is go back to the day before yesterday when everything was still whole.

Sure puts your own life into perspective, doesn’t it?

I can’t decide if my life has disintegrated or if it is being enriched. Life with two small children underfoot can do that to you. On one hand, every little thing is a miracle: a new word, a new gesture, a smile. On the other hand…

On the other hand, there are very busy little hands.

Zephan is a very busy little boy who is experiencing a sudden growth spurt in intellect. Words and meanings are suddenly coming together. He is developing motor skills. His newest word is “color” and he is learning to identify the colors.

Geen, Bleu (pronounced with a marked French accent), lell- lo, bow, back, roinge, red. (Purpur is missing. I just purchased these crayons last night and purpur has already taken off on an adventure.)

Arwen loves how Zephan says lell-lo.

I adored how she said it when she was little: “yehyo.”

Zephan is a tad bit obsessed with “color.” He can drive an adult to distraction. “Color. Color. Color.” All the while, he is pushing scraps of paper or coloring books under your nose and holding out a fist full of crayons.

“No, you color.”

“Color.” He wants you to color with him. Everyone hold a crayon.

He’s a very expressive colorer. He goes for the whole color approach: one color, but fill the page with bold strokes. Or a color in each hand and fill the page.

He’s driving us all nuts with his new obsession.

Stark raving nuts!

(OK, the last photo has nothing to do with Zephan or crayons, but it the funniest photo I have of my other grandson, the one who lives far away. I just love this photo. I just love that baby.)

When I was in high school sometimes we’d play this “game” in Language Arts: the teacher would pull out a subject and you had to stand in front of everyone and do an impromptu speech on that subject.

Everyone hated it.

Sometimes finding something to say to go along with a photo of the day feels the same way. I should have created a second blog for my 365 and just put the photos over there, then I could come here and blog thoughtfully. But, no, I didn’t want to go to all that extra work.

I will have to suck it up and blog every day about something, even when my ideas run short. My ideas for photos run short frequently as well, but I figure I started this and I should finish this.

Today’s offering is from a slug’s point of view: the gateway to one of my flower beds.

To the human eye, it’s just a lot of stuff in earth tones: bark, mouldering leaves, dead grasses, tiny green plants, a spots of blue on the copper tape.

I don’t even know if the spots of blue would register on a slug’s eyes, but a slug would certainly know the copper was there as soon as the slug touched it. The copper’s electromagnetic force combined with the slug’s slime creates a slug shock.

The copper is there to keep slugs out of my tender garden. It is the only organic solution to slugs that I have been able to find (mind you, I don’t mind non-organic solutions to slugs. Anything that gets rid of them, right? It’s just that what poisons a slug could poison the song birds and neighbor cats). And copper is a lot less labor.

The drawback to copper is that it is hard to find (I despise that sticky-tape cheap copper stuff they sell in all the garden centers) and when you do find it, it isn’t cheap. Then there’s maintenance: it gets stepped on, folds over, or leaves fall onto it creating little “bridges” of safety for the slug.

This year, I will need to invest in more copper. When we first moved in here, I was thrilled that there were so few slugs. What I did not consider was that there were also fewer flowers and flower beds and a lot more grass. There was no insect life to speak of.

But Don and I have cultivated an insect-friendly world, added more flowers and plants, and therefore more damp hiding places for slugs. And slugs find my irises alluring.

So I put up miniature copper slug fences and hope for the best.

And in the winter, I admire them for their colors. Those are pretty blue spots.

I almost cringe when I go outside to take photos now. I keep seeing things around the house that need repair, like getting all the moss off of the roof or the peeling paint under the eaves or the moss attaching itself to the end of the hand rail on our front steps.

But, then… it did make for an interesting photo, that end of the hand rail. The tree that was logged and cut into two-by-sixes had several consistent years of life. You can tell how hard a year was for a tree by the depth of the ring (or lack thereof) or how wet a year.

The heart of the tree is in this 2×6″, then each ring spirals out in almost exactly the same depth for the next sixteen years (at least – I only counted the rings in the photo). Good years by the consistency: plenty of water and nutrients in the soil, and enough sunshine.

When I scrub it clean this spring and sand it down, I will pay particular attention to this end and will try to imagine the life the tree must have led before it was logged and run through a saw mill. I’ll hope it was an Oregon sawmill. I will make note of what years were bad and what ones were good in the bit of life exposed on this plank. I will wonder how old the tree was and how many board feet of lumber it produced in the end.

Was it what they call a “toothpick” in logging terms? Or some giant in a growth of  “old growth” (that is a tract of land that hasn’t been logged in a hundred years). Or was it truly and old growth tree, one of those behemoths that take several log trucks to haul away to the saw mill?

My mind will reconstruct the tree’s story, from the time it was a sapling and through the seasons: all the coyotes that peed on it, deer that nibbled it, bears that scratched it, snow that fell on it, beetles that bored into it, and chickarees (Douglas squirrel) that climbed its branches. I’ll envision its trek off the mountain to the saw mill and the planer, then to the lumber yard and the lumber supply store. I’ll imagine the hands that nailed it to this spot on my steps and then painted it white.

It is just how my mind works.

In the winter, my garden turns to mush. And in that mush exists micro ecologies. Take the tiny “forests” of moss. We have moss in abundance here. Moss in the limb of a tree peony, growing like a miniature forest.

An entire forest of moss growing on the floor of my garden, tiny little moss trees reaching for the heavens.

An uncut, unlogged forest of moss in different stages of development, nestled onto the hard surface of a single rock.

The pine needles look like fallen timber, the moss looks like the green canopy of a woodland and the tall red spores look like… Look like some forest in Dr. Seuss’ “Horton Hears A Who.”

Especially with the tiny drops of rain water clinging like strange blossoms to the red stalks.

The hollow of a large rock propped up in my garden looks like some small “lake” in the Cascade Mountains where the salamanders swim, with a log jam of pine needles on the down-stream end. Prehistoric, even.