Jaci Dawn

Tonight is Day 5 in the mysterious disappearance of 7-year old Kyron Horman. From the beginning, it has been a baffling case and with all the news media chiming in and speculating, it has been difficult to sort through the facts.

Here is what I have gleaned: Kyron went to school with his step-mother on Friday morning. They toured the science fair and he posed by his project on red-eyed tree frogs. At around 8:45, he announced he was going to class and his step mother left him.

When roll was called during his 10:00AM class, Kyron was absent. The school does not notify parents when children are absent. (I have two thoughts on that: 1. did they not take notes when Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis were murdered in 2002? and 2. when we received calls from North Clackamas School District that Chrystal had been absent, it was after 6PM and Chrystal had already informed us of her whereabouts. For the calls to work, they need to take place before 3:00PM.)

When the bus arrived at Kyron’s bus stop, his step-mother and father were waiting. They immediately called the school & the police. A search was underway before dark, but it had already been several hours and a whole lot of rain later.

Kyron’s biological mother drove up from Eugene with her husband as soon as she heard the news. They were not in Portland when this all came down.

I have gathered that a lot of people like to point their fingers at the step mother. For some reason, I just don’t feel that vibe. I can’t tell you why because it is just a “feeling”. Maybe it is because I am a “step-mom” of sorts myself and I know that you can love that child as much as you love your own biological children. But I really can’t bring myself to point my finger at her.

There’s also the mysterious entry of the FBI. They were called in to the case early on, very early on. By Sunday, an abduction profiler was called in (but the police were being very careful to avoid calling this an abduction case and still are not saying that). Today, the FBI created its own webpage for Kyron. That makes me think that the FBI and the police know a lot more than they are saying.

There is a fan page on Facebook: Missing Kyron Horman

The police and FBI gave a press conference today which was best summarized by The Portlander: Police Give Subtle Clues in Kyron Horman Case. Reading that article made me realize that the police have always suspected something foul, but they are being very close-mouthed so as to not give away what they already know. It affirmed everything I’ve felt about the case all along. I just pray that what they know will lead to the happy recovery of a little boy wearing wire-framed glasses.

Sometimes a news event really impacts your life even though you do not know the parties. That’s how I feel about Kyron Horman.

Here is a link to a flyer for Kyron. He is also featured on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

Hopefully, all this attention will bring him home safely. The last time a news story impacted me like this was the 2002 disappearance of Ashley Pond. I had to drive the stretch of road that runs past the apartments where Ashley Pond and Miranda Gaddis (who also disappeared a couple months later) lived. Every time I drove by there, I felt like the air was sucked out of my lungs. In August, there was finally a break in the case and Ward Weaver was arrested. It happened that Ward Weaver lived right on that same stretch of road and that was the house where he murdered those little girls (who were nearly the same age as my son at the time).

I certainly don’t want any harm to come to Kyron and that is why I feel like I need to blog about him tonight. I want him to be safe.

Hug your babies tonight.

Our locally owned and operated market is closing this weekend.

Danielson’s Fresh Food Marketplace has been in business for 100 years, 35 of those years in this location. It was a Thriftway for a number of those years, but pulled out of that franchise some time back and went completely independent. Danielson’s has always been an interesting place to shop: there was a full post office in the back where you could pay your utility bills, mail packages, and purchase money orders. The hardware aisle actually had real hardware. The seasonal aisle was always a full aisle, unlike the chain grocery stores.

And the local color shopped at Danielson’s, making it a fun place to go people watch. And you never felt like you had to put on your makeup to go shopping there because of that. (Probably made me one of the local color, too – haha!)

The news that Danielson’s was closing has hit the community pretty hard. Most of us were blind-sided by the announcement. It’s an icon.

It isn’t just the loss of the Danielson’s (we also have a Fred Meyer, an Albertson’s and a Haggen Grocery, and Safeway is moving in to replace Danielson’s): it is the loss of the little post office, the immediate jobs lost for the employees of Danielson’s, the loss of the other stores in the Hilltop Mall and where will our library go?

The folks at Penny’s Hallmark right next door took the opportunity to retire and close their doors completely. Hollywood Video is hanging on, but they will have to close their doors soon, too.

And the library. The library is in temporary housing in the same mall, just a different corner of the building. And it will have to move out ASAP.

I have never been happy with the library in this location. It seems (I could be wrong) that since the library moved here in 1995, that it has been plagued by lack of funding. For years, it was only open four days a week. Every library levy that came up was voted down. Talk of a permanent home for the library has been impeded by voter’s apathy and city hall’s lack of direction. We finally changed how we fund the library and they recently upped their hours to five days a week.

But we’ve been no closer to a permanent home than before.

And now Danielson’s is pulling the rug from under the library.

I wouldn’t be so het up about it except my favorite librarian told me something: city hall and Danielson’s have known about this impending change for some time and they just sat on it until a few weeks ago.

Darn and double darn. So I did what I could for the library and joined the Friends of Oregon City Public Library finally. I should have done that years ago, but I kept forgetting to. Good intentions gone bad.

All these changes. Good, bad or indifferent: it is still the end of an era for Danielson’s, for the look of our dumpy little Hilltop Mall, and it spells a lot of changes for our library. And that is the news from Oregon City.

That is a rather ominous post title, but relax. I’m talking about these:

Rams & Impalas.

Rams are 1/4″ and Impalas are 3/16″. Pure rubber and marketed to orthodontists with adorable sketches of wildlife on the plastic bags. I have no idea who decided one was a ram and one was an impala, or what goats and antelope have to do with straightening teeth. I do know how inconvenient and uncomfortable the darn things are.

And I have “three to six months (more like six months)” left with them. That will make my tenure in braces over 2 years, but I will have a perfect bite when this is all finished.

I am not getting my teeth straightened for any vain reason (well, I guess keeping my teeth could be considered a vanity issue): I am getting them straightened because I was biting down on two molars and those molars were threatening to crack under the pressure. The rest of my teeth didn’t connect at all.

Most people never noticed my crooked teeth. I had this vampire tooth that jutted out almost at a side angle and front teeth that folded over each other. I was missing eight molars. Wow, that makes me sound like a toothless hillbilly – hardly! I had four molars pulled when I was a kid, to make room for the rest of my teeth. Those were replaced by my wisdom teeth. I lost four more molars to tooth decay and the oral surgeon, but they weren’t noticeably gone to anyone but me.

The amazing thing about finally going to the orthodontist has been how my teeth have moved forward and filled in those four gaps. My wisdom teeth have become my back molars. My vampire tooth has aligned with the rest of my teeth and looks normal. My mouth has come a very long way since I consented to the wire torture.

Actually, I haven’t had as much trouble adjusting as some young people have. While at the ortho today, there was a young girl who came in who was in so much pain she was nearly in tears. Me, I have something to compare the pain with: an infected tooth or a dry socket.

Let me tell you: getting your braces tightened doesn’t begin to hurt like an abcessed tooth or a dry socket. It’s pain that goes away. It’s pain that eases as the teeth settle into position. It’s pain that can be managed with Ibuprophen & Acetomenophen.

Anyway, back to the wild animals. The Rams and Impalas. These attach to little knobs on the braces. Forward to back, up and down and even from the left to the right. Oh, yeah. How fun.

Anyway, my mouth is a bit sore tonight and I need to go put the rubber bands into the medicine cabinet by my toothbrush so I remember to put them in at night and in the morning. I am determined to get my teeth all lined up so I can bite down on all my molars.

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.

The dog.

He has been in to the room to see me twice tonight. Actually, he isn’t here to see me. Oh, he likes me, but he comes in here to steal things.

Lately he has had a fascination for the stuffed Pileated woodpecker Don keeps on his dresser.

The toy makes a Pileated woodpecker call. Murphy is halfway convinced it must be alive.

He’s licking his chops in expectation.

Don’t worry: we didn’t let him have the bird. Some things are not doggy toys.

Like my gloves or the box of tissue on my desk. But Murphy keeps coming back and trying.

Gotta love dogs.