Jaci Dawn

I was going to title this “When I Concentrates, I Sticks My Tongue Out” but that seemed a little bit wordy (and a little bit weird). It’s true, but weird.

The boys came over to play with Gamma and Baba (and the puppy, but we put the puppy into his kennel because he gets too excited). The sun was out and the air was warm and we ended up in the backyard. Zephan was busy commanding our every move and to side-track him, we brought out his “tools”.

What concentration! I’m going to hire this kid. He’s already got a good work ethic.

He isn’t very good about sharing, though. When we asked him if his little brother could have a toy, he looked up and said, “no.”

He did let his little brother ride in the big red wagon with him.

Look Mom! No hands!

TTFN!  (Lordy, that baby looks like his great grandpa Sonny!)

The idea was to drive to Idaho to meet up with my childhood friend, Jodi. The event was the 2nd Annual Hillbilly Gatherin’ which is not just a party, but is a benefit fund raiser. This year all the proceeds (100% of the proceeds) was earmarked for Casting for Recovery.

The drive would take us 930 miles round trip and we wanted to break it up a little bit. We both had one extra day off (Friday), but had to be at work on Monday – talk about a marathon! We broke it up a little by driving to Don’s mom’s home halfway and spending the night there with family and on into Idaho on Saturday. Sunday was the marathon home.

Was it worth it? Oh, heck yeah!

The weather was perfect. The Hillbilly Gatherin’ was held in the community barn at Hidden Springs.

There was an awesome roasted pig (Thank you to Jodi’s husband, Ival)!

There was time to go fishing.

Some dancing to Cotton-eyed Joe.

Bet you’re wondering what those strange balls are on the floor of the barn. I’ll get to it.

There was a silent auction to raise money. Some really nice items, too: fly rods & reels, original oil paintings, hand made items, planters, vacations and more.

Those little round balls on the barn floor? Frozen t-shirts.

The game was to take a frozen t-shirt and somehow get it to thaw out enough to be able to put it on. Believe me, the winner put on a frozen t-shirt (that’s her on the floor next to my husband). How she got that t-shirt unwrapped is a mystery to me!

It was a whole lot of fun, earned a nice chunk of money for CFR (you can read about that on Jodi’s blog, The Hidden Springs Hillbillies) and provided a lot of comic relief. It was so much fun to reconnect with Jodi and her family. My brother drove up from Reno & had a good time visiting, too. Both my brother & my husband met people who were somewhere in the 6-degrees of separation, which made the time a little more personal.

Ival & Jodi are wonderful hosts and we are already penciling in next year’s date for the 3rd Annual Hillbilly Gatherin’. I may even go in costume next year…

I haven’t posted since Thursday because I just made a 930 mile round trip to Idaho and home. It was wonderful, but more on the trip tomorrow. Tonight, I’m playing catch-up, sorting through photos and cleaning house (ugh).

Tomorrow I’ll pick up the tale.

Here’s the teaser (and the photo of the day for each day):

Thursday. Gama & Baba had guests (I’m Gama now).

We went ‘Shrooming on Friday.

We made new friends on Saturday. They live in Idaho.

And today we drove all the way home in 7 hours and 14 minutes which is exactly how long the online map programs predicted it would take us.

All nine goslings are still hanging out around the ponds in the business park. Jane (my walking partner) and I make it a point to go looking for them on our breaks, an act that slows us considerably. We’re certainly not getting our heart rates up except to worry over stupid geese crossing the busy street with goslings in tow.

That’s a real concern, too: there are some drivers who do not even pause for pedestrians in crosswalks, why stop for a goose with goslings? That’s one of those rants I want to write about, but how do you find a photo to fit the rant? I once saw a car come too close to a pregnant woman holding hands with a toddler: she was more than halfway across the street with this idiot blasted by her at 35 miles per hour. I didn’t have my camera handy and even if I had, I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to take a photo. I was too outraged and too scared and … well, you get the picture (pun intended).

But I digress. Back to geese and ducks, which invariably are the subjects of our walks these days.

Jane & I decided to shake up our routine today and walk a pattern that takes us by all four of the major ponds (and requires us to take our chances crossing the street). Of course, the geese had moved on from pond #1 where they were when I drove in to work. So we headed off for pond #2, which is at the far end of our walk. Already we could see across the street to pond #3 where the geese were. They had to cross two streets with those goslings to get there.

But, oh well: we were committed to our walk to pond #2.

We wondered when we might be seeing ducklings. Our geese are getting bigger and we have not seen a hen mallard in weeks. Not one. Just a few drakes here and there.

Well, heck, Jane – there’s a hen over at pond #2. We might as well walk over and see if…

Oh wow! We’re “parents” again! We have ducklings!

We counted nine. It wasn’t easy: they kept bobbing in and out and around mom.

Nine ducklings and nine goslings, three happy bird families.

The oldest goslings are entering their awkward stage, so maybe they aren’t so happy. I remember my kids at this stage. Hormones just starting to kick in, fighting for little bits of freedom, jaywalking…

I remember being that age, too. This gosling looks like I felt when I was a preteen.

Again, I digress.

We could hardly wait for our afternoon walk: would we still have nine ducklings? Was this a smart mallard mama hen or one of those daffy ones that hops off the sidewalk in front of a semi going 35 mph? Mallards don’t have quite the parenting instinct that the geese seem to have and they’re constantly wandering off by themselves.

Well, maybe this mama duck does. Look at her tender face as she surveys her little darlings as they scramble out of the water for their afternoon nap. She looks positively maternal as she gazes at her ten little babies.

TEN? No, wait, we COUNTED nine. I’m sure of it. We both counted nine. I told Jane that I would have to look at the photographs because we were both certain there were only nine in the morning.

Definitely ten ducklings in the AM. How’d we miss one?

And ten ducklings in the afternoon, in the same pond.

We’ll see how many make it to next week!

One of our gorgeous tree peonies. The double blooms are 6-8″ (15-20 cm) across.

Random notes:

I am reading “The Children’s Blizzard” by David Laskin. This is a gripping “Perfect Storm” tale of the great North American blizzard of 1888 that caught much of the Midwest Plains states by surprise – and which killed over 100 school children as they tried vainly to get home without proper coats. I highly recommend the book on several levels: the history of the immigration to the Great Plains from Europe (mostly of Nordic peoples), the details of how the storm developed, the humanity and to give yourself an excuse to NEVER complain about the weather again.

I am procrastinating working on my website. Again. I think it is fear of the unknown.

I keep getting sucked into Ancestry.com. I have stacks of documents to scan and convert to .pdfs so I can share them with family. I don’t want to put this off until two weeks before our big family reunion next summer (2011).

I am on blood pressure meds. That’s new. Apparently my naturally low blood pressure is no longer naturally low. I had symptoms. My doctor told me that most people don’t know they have high blood pressure, but I can tell you when it goes up because I feel it.What does it feel like? Well, my hands get warm, for one thing. I don’t have warm hands. My heart races. And my eyes feel strained.

My hands didn’t get warm even when I still had hot flashes. But my feet got warm.

I no longer have hot flashes with any regularity. I miss hot flashes. They are the only time I am actually warm all over.

My hair is getting very thin. That’s a bummer because I have always worn it long and now it is beginning to look anorexic and long. I don’t think short will help. I miss my hair. But I don’t have any bald spots (yet). And I only have a couple grey hairs. One grey hair is 15″ long and is actually silver, not dull grey.

I did not grow up liking to garden. Gardening was used as a form of punishment when I was a kid: we were often grounded for two weeks at a time (I can never remember why we were grounded) and we had to weed out some portion of yard in the hot Nevada sun. I seriously thought my dad just grounded us so he could get some cheap slave labor and I often imagined him as some overseer with a long black whip.

My best friend when I was growing up was never afraid of my dad. She thought he was funny. She left him notes on the chalkboard in the kitchen and signed her notes Krazy Kat. My dad wrote notes back. He also taught me jokes about Catholics so I would tell them at my best friend’s house during dinner, preferably right after the perfunctory Catholic grace. My best friend’s father then told me Protestant jokes so I could tell them at our dinner table.

I like ballads. I love female vocalists who can sing ballads. My favorite female singer of all time is Emmylou Harris and my favorite male singer is probably Hoyt Axton. I think JJ Cale recorded the best rendition of “Cocaine” ever. Sorry, Eric Clapton fans.

“Our” song is “Tupelo Honey” but I don’t think my husband knows that. Or cares. He probably thinks “our” song is “My Sharona.”

I love horses above all of God’s creatures, followed by domestic cats. I cry every time I think about Old Yeller, Savage Sam or Flag dying. If you don’t know who those animals are, you need to read more. I’ve read The Red Pony too many times.

My favorite poets are John Donne (of Holy Sonnets) and Langston Hughes (Raisin in the Sun). I’ve read Langston Hughes’ biography and that only deepened my love for him. He was truly an incredible poet.

There’s a chance one of my ancestors knew John Donne. I found a side mention of him on Ancestry.com. How cool would that be?

Unlike many people, I do not think my childhood was a place I’d want to return to. It was hard being a kid. I cried a lot. I’m not even particularly fond of high school. I much prefer being an adult to those times.

I am a terrible communicator. I forget birthdays, anniversaries, and other life events. I mail cards late.

I really have no favorite food, but I always write “lasagna” on those silly surveys.

I can’t think of anything else important. Except I killed a bug today and immediately regretted it because I think it was a very tiny mayfly.

My photos lack imagination at the moment. I apologize for that. I do have deeper subjects to write on, but I can’t seem to find a way to tie in what I’m thinking about with the availability of subjects for photography.

OK, the geese are entertaining and I like watching the goslings grow.

There are still nine goslings even though they constantly negotiate the busy street that runs through the business park. How they make it back and forth safely is beyond me.

And that’s my post for today (hugely unsatisfying and shallow. I’ll try to do better tomorrow).

In typical graceful fashion, I fell flat on my face on the sidewalk Friday night. Ker plat! Well, I managed to catch myself with my hands & knee. I figured the worst would be a scraped knee (and bruised ego, but no one was looking and I only confessed to Don when I met him for dinner). But, no – I just hadn’t begun to feel the effects of my fall. By Saturday morning my upper arms were very sore. By Saturday evening, my left shoulder felt wrenched out of place and some muscles on my ribs had been sorely stretched. By today… let’s just say that I was not interested in any sort of physical work that involved using my left arm! I hate growing old.

But the bonus to the pain was that I could easily nix going out an picking mushrooms today. Not that I dislike picking mushrooms: I like to go. Just not today.

I decided I wanted to go for a drive up the valley to some favorite garden nurseries. I live where “up” is south and “down” is north, so driving up the valley means a long drive south. (All the major rivers in the state of Oregon flow north to the Columbia River: the Snake, the John Day, the Deschutes, and the largest that flows entirely within the state of Oregon, the Willamette. The Snake is not entirely within Oregon, but flows between Idaho and Oregon. Since we live near the mouth of the Willamette, driving south means to drive uphill or toward the headwaters of the Willamette. I know: it confuses me, too.)

We stopped in Woodburn and then we drove on up to Albany.

It was a gorgeous day, but the thunderheads were constantly on the horizon, moving steadily in from the south and east.

The nurseries were crowded with people, too: Mother’s Day is a busy day at garden nurseries in the Willamette Valley.

I didn’t have time to reminisce about my mom or to sit and feel sorry for myself because my should hurts. And we found so many things we want in our garden, from wisteria to clematis to dogwoods to espalier pear trees. All of which we did not purchase lacking the means to get them home (we’d need to take the pickup, methinks).

I did buy some plants, however. I couldn’t resist. At Al’s Garden Nursery (in Woodburn, which is the closest Al’s to us and on our way – I write that for my friend Jodi’s benefit), we found this interesting red flower: Armeria ‘Joystick Red’. There were several blooms on it and they are striking little balls of red that make great cut flowers or nice dried flowers for crafts in the wintertime. They bloom all summer, something my garden needs.

From Woodburn on south, we took the I-5 which sounds dull, but it plows straight through some scenic farmlands (marred only by political billboards and signs: I hate election years).  Past fields of hops, wheat, irises, grass and past fields being plowed, over hills covered in Scotch broom (ah choo!), oak forests and fir trees, wild lupins in bloom, and dreamy floating “cotton” from the cottonwood trees (ah-choo! ah-choo!). We drove on down to Garland’s Nursery in Albany.

Garland’s has one of the best Bonsai collections of any nursery we have been to in the Willamette Valley. But we weren’t there to buy bonsai.

We did leave with some plants, but only after we walked dreamily through all the nursery. I picked up two small rosemary plants that I am going to pot and force into a topiary design ( a large circle: each plant will grow up one side of the wire & meet in the middle. We selected small varieties of rosemary that only grow to 18-24″).

I found some blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium bellum) that I can divide and add to my garden. Blue-eyed grass is an Oregon native and very pretty when it blooms.

But the plant coup of the day was a ceanothus ‘Italian skies’.

I’m having a heck of a time locating a good website to direct you to so you can see one. I found a French site with the best photos (but the site is written entirely in French). Wikipedia has a good site, but the photos are not that great and the last one is of ceanothus as I know it in the wild: a white flower. A white stinky flower.

My ceanothus will be blue. Very blue. (Pronounced “see-uh-no-thus”: say it a few times and it starts to fall off the tongue in a sing-song way).

It will stink like the wild ones I am familiar with, but it is not an unpleasant stink: just a heavy sweet scent. I also learned that the blue ceanothus are native to some parts of Oregon; I just am not familiar with them.

We dreamed of ponds and garden furniture, too, but those will have to be for another time.

We turned around and headed back north, racing against the looming thunderheads. Looks like our sunny days are at an end for another little while. I’m just itching to put my new plants into the ground and to enjoy their blossoms!

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.

My husband is going to take me anywhere I want to go tomorrow and I am waffling between the Oregon Coast or up into the mountains lo look for morels. Mushroom hunting is the practical side of me: the ‘shrooms should be popping out of the forest floor now. Our next chance to look will be the weekend of our oldest child’s birthday, and that may be too late.

The coast is tempting, too. We rarely go down to the beach even though it is no further away than the mountains we love to hike in. I don’t know why that is, except the mountains are remote and the beach has crowds of people and not much parking.

It may not be so quiet in the woods tomorrow: the nice weather will draw all the dirt bikes and ATVs out. Our prime mushroom hunting grounds are riddled with off-road trails. And if we are successful in picking mushroom, I have to come home and take care of them.

Left? or right? Which way to go?

I’m struggling a little emotionally with this Mother’s Day. I miss my mom. She’s been gone for almost 15 years and this Mother’s Day is especially emotional for some inexplicable reason.

Her irises bloomed today.

My father dug all of the irises up and shipped them to Oregon shortly after my mom died. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to look at them, but my dad doesn’t like irises and they do grow like weeds once they are established. My mom had them planted in the gravel by the garage.

I happen to like irises. My dad took that as a sign of weakness and the box came with all the iris tubers. I love my dad for that.

Which opens a third possibility for tomorrow: staying home and working in the garden. That’s very tempting, too.

I don’t know what I want to do.

I do know what I do not want to do and that is clean house, make dinner, or do laundry.

Wishing a Happy Mother’s Day to all my friends who are mothers (birth or heart) and wishes for joy to all the moms I know who are bereaved – and to all the daughters & sons who miss their mom this day.

Every spring and every autumn, the grosbeaks travel through. They are here for a day or two, and then gone.

Last night, we noted our first black-headed grosbeak. It was traveling solo so far as we could tell (they tend to travel in pairs or alone).

This morning, woke up to find the feeder full of evening grosbeaks. They travel in flocks.

I snapped two hasty photos through the window.

and

Not the best of photos, but…

I really need a camera with a big zoom. 😉