anthem
All day Friday and Saturday and Sunday while I was packing and moving and unpacking boxes, what I wanted to be doing was camping, because it’s a long weekend and it was clear and beautiful, and because when I’m feeling uncentered it’s good for me to sleep under the stars. But the moving needed to happen, so it did.
Today, however, I left the stacks of boxes unattended and headed to the Columbia River Gorge, which was about as green as green gets. Joshua and I took one of those ambling plant geek hikes that drive other hikers crazy, stopping every ten yards to poke into the trailside: miner’s lettuce, cow parsnip, maidenhair fern, columbine. Plant names are near as magical as place names, and ever since I learned them I feel in on a marvelous secret. Now when I walk through the woods whispering, the woods whisper back. Trillium. Elderberry. Oceanspray.
We accidentally looped back to the car far too soon, so we drove on up the old highway to find a second adventure. A short break at a popular vista turned into two hours of people watching as the holiday crowds pulled their Jeeps and Suburbans and Harleys off the road, speaking (at last count) six different languages, dressed in saris and T-shirts and leather, taking photos with each other in various permutations. I couldn’t think of a more American way to spend Memorial Day.
Eventually we headed west again to
And here it is practically June, and here I am in a new house, and here we all are getting older and trying not to be bowled over by this new wave of decisions about what’s next – decisions that seem to be hitting half or more of the people I know right now about moving and working and family, decisions we are all trying to make and make well, though few of us remember seeking them out. And this is the motto of 2007, I think – not the motto I chose but the one that made itself known somewhere between noon on
Ready Or Not.
posted by tortaluga @ 10:33 PM
4 Comments:
You know, yours is the poet's life.
You write such strikingly personal and human things that it's as if we're close friends in the reading. Which is a terribly naive and invasive illusion, granted, except to say that your writing stirs than sense of kinship. And which is also just to comment on the nature of personal blogs like this, where there's a certain utility, in empathy, or poetry perhaps, to the reading. But that the one sidedness of the relationship is oddly impersonal and unnatural (save for the ridiculous comments, like this!).
I like to imagine what that awkward moment might look like, when a reader like me has somehow arranged to meet a writer like you in a coffee shop. Two strangers at a table. One with a profound (and profoundly skewed?) sense of the other. The other knowing nothing at all of the one. There are two differently colored coffee mugs on the table between them. A slow steam rising from each of the cups, dancing similarly. A point of convergence in a long sequence of nervous glances, obvious questions, and the sense that all will be well if one could just get past those first few awkward moments.
i approve
She's back. (She never left.)
thank you anonymous. that was just lovely.
hello again, b.
i am back.
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