One school teacher's thoughts on the shootings

I am a public school teacher. I am passionate about my work and the place of free public education in the United States (actually, everywhere). The violence of the last two weeks has sucked so much energy out of me. My thoughts here are not as articulate as I would like them to be. I would rather be writing something merry and Christmasy. But I cannot remain silent on something that touches my work and beliefs so deeply.

My heart is broken about the school shooting in Newtown. On so many levels. For the sweet little innocent children who died and their families left desolate. For the adults in the building who died trying to protect the children. For the survivors--the children and adults and their families--trying to put life back together. Who knows how long it will take? Months? Years? Always? How many generations will pass before time in Newtown is no longer marked "before" and "after" the shooting?

For us in the Portland area, especially Clackamas County, the Connecticut shooting came on the heels of the mall shooting at Clackamas Town Center. You try to act like everything is normal in your life, but there is an undercurrent of fear. Especially after we learned that the mall shooter, Jacob Roberts, had graduated from Oregon City High School. Shootings often seem distant and abstract, but with a face and a name--a local boy, one who had walked the halls of the school where I teach--the abstract becomes real and concrete. One of his victims, a 16-year-old girl on her way home from school, survived her gunshot wounds. Her aunt works at Oregon City High School. Once again, the abstract became concrete.

Last week our kids were afraid. Even the juniors and seniors. They acted tough and nonchalant, but you could tell. The high school classes averaged about 50% attendance on Friday. The convergence of the last day before Christmas vacation, the "end of the world," and one student's stupid comment--something like, "It's going to be the end of the world anyway, so it wouldn't matter if there was a school shooting next Friday"---that went goofy on social media...suffice it to say that many of our students started their vacation a day early.

With half the kids gone, the school felt might subdued last Friday. We tried to be cheerful, but the day went weird on us because 1000 of our families had bought into fear and sound bites, which especially bugs me because it's another little victory for Adam Lanza and Jacob Roberts. Anyway. I hope that things will feel more normal after the 2-week break. And I feel guilty for even saying that, because things won't ever be normal for the families that lost loved ones in the shootings.

Two more things about the shootings. I absolutely think Congress should enact a ban on assault weapons. And arming school teachers is a dumb idea. So is having armed security guards at all schools. No thank you, NRA. And I'm not sure what the lines are that Obamacare has drawn around mental health care, but access absolutely should be universal, and the stigmas around seeking mental health care and support need to be addressed with compassion and commitment. Drawing lines of "us" and "them" will not get us where we need to be.

They are all our children.

Rat Funeral

This morning the grandchildren called, in tears. Their pet, a rat named Maid Marian, was dying. She expired later in the morning, after they went to school.

This evening they called to ask if she could be buried in the orchard.

Grandpa Mark dug a hole near one of the apple trees.

We had a teary few moments out in the cold while Maid Marian was laid to rest. Sarah spoke some loving words in farewell to her friend. Kat said a prayer, expressing the hope that Maid Marian would be happy and pure in her afterlife. Josh hummed "God Be With You 'Till We Meet Again" as we walked back to the house.

Mark and I agreed that it was a lovely funeral, short and sweet and loving. One of the nicest funerals we've attended.

It is good that the children know where their friend is buried, and that they can remember her and visit her gravesite near the apple tree if they get to missing her.

Rest In Peace, Maid Marian.

The Homecoming

Have I mentioned here on the blog that Mark and I are in the high school play?

The show is The Homecoming, a play based on the original novel that eventually became the TV show and movie, The Waltons.

We play the parts of Grandpa Homer and Grandma Ida. He's nice and I'm a little cranky.

A happy portrait - back stage - when we can laugh about the foibles of our characters. The watch I'm wearing in this photo used to belong to my great-grandmother Grensted. It's authentic to the time period of the play (the 30's - Depression years), and the director allowed me to add it to my costume.

If you're in the area, I hope you'll come see the play this week! The show runs Wednesday 12/12 through Saturday 12/15. It begins at 7:30 pm each night and costs $8.00. (But do come a little early to get your ticket and a good seat!) It's in the Oregon City High School auditorium, of course. There is more information (and a few more photos) here.

Here's a photo from an earlier rehearsal, before we were in costume. This time I'm being snooty to Charlie, the local game poacher, who has just brought a "wild turkey-gobbler" to the family for Christmas dinner. Humph. "I don't think I could eat it," I say.

This is a lovely show to begin the Christmas season. Hope to see you there!

Many thanks to Karmin Tomlinson, who is also in the cast, for sharing these photos with me.

52nd Floor, please

Whew! It's been a busy day.

Not that you could tell from the following photos, but yes, I really did attend my conference session today. Our group skipped the afternoon session to go on a tour of Boston. I might have felt guilty about that, except that it was my boss who arranged for the tour. Who was I to say "no"?

But first of all, I had another wonderful morning walk. This time Detta and I walked about half of the Freedom Trail, filled with historic sites.

Of course we had to snap some photos with the amorous fishing frog statue near Frog Pond. (Correction to yesterday's post. The duck island is not in Frog Pond. The duck island is in an unnamed pond [at least I didn't see a name for it on any of the tourist maps, or on the pond itself] in Boston Commons. Frog Pond is also in Boston Commons. It is now a cement-lined "pond" where the only frogs are made of brass. It is a wading pool in the summer and a skating rink in the winter. We saw people ice skating on it.)

Sorry, Mark. Please don't be jealous of the frog.

 I forget which church this is. There are so many. This one is also near Boston Commons.

 And it has amazing architecture. Just like all of the other old, amazing churches. Loved all of them.

 This is the church where the Boston Tea Party originated from. Really? They had 5,000 people in there? That's what the guide book said. Not sure how they all fit in. The harbor is just 4-5 blocks from here.

 Just a random little alley way. I liked the fire escapes and the church window in the background. This is the last of the photos from our morning walk.

 Most of the afternoon photos from the bus tour had this problem - window reflection. So I'm not going to torture you with lots of amateur-tourist-grandma-camera photos. But it is fun to see the brownstones.

 This s the Charles River. When our handsome Italian waiter was talking to us about the river the other night, we all thought he was saying the "Chiles River." Or maybe "Childs River." Love the Boston accent. Actually, it hasn't been very thick on most of the locals I've talked with (not that I've talked with all that many locals), but he really had the classic Boston accent without any "r"s.

 The entrance to Harvard.

 The gate on the way into Harvard. I enlarged it so you can read the words. The older part of the campus is so much smaller than you would expect. A large green lawn in the middle with about 10 brick buildings grouped around the 4 sides. There are newer buildings off in the distance. We were hungry by this time, so we didn't explore very much of the campus. Rumblings in our tummies demanded that we keep our priorities straight.

 The five of us with the statue of John Harvard. He is commonly credited with founding the university, but actually it was founded by the town - 2 years before Harvard donated his estate and the school was renamed in his honor. His left shoe is all shiny from being rubbed by the tourists (and students?). We saw other tourists rubbing the shoe, so we all made sure to do it, too. We hope that it means good luck, and not that something bad will happen to us.

A funny note from the tour. The trolley drives had so many interesting facts to share. At one point as we drove past one of the original subway entrances from the late 1890s, the tour driver mentioned the old folk song about "Charlie," who got stuck beneath the streets of Boston because he couldn't find his way out of the subway system. He was "the man who never returned." Today the subway tickets are called "Charlies" in his honor.

I remember listening (many times) to the song on a Kingston Trio record my parents owned when I was a child. So when the trolley driver played a clip from the chorus of the song, and invited us to sing along, I belted out the chorus along with the recording. Haha! I think I was the only one on the trolley singing it. One of the younger TOSAs looked over at me and said, "Kathy, I think this means you're old." Yup, she is soooo right.

 On the way home from the tour, we got off the bus at the site of the Cheers restaurant.

 No, we didn't go inside. We were just being tourists, taking photos out on the sidewalk. Actually what was really fascinating here was that a school bus pulled up and a bunch of kids got off the bus. Mostly boys, but a few girls. All in school uniforms. Ages about 8 to a few teenagers. Several of them had GIANT bags with hockey gear inside. A bunch of them got off the bus holding hockey sticks. Were they a team? Or they just play hockey at school for PE? There were a bunch of moms waiting to meet the younger kids as they got off the bus. They all live in apartments nearby? I wish I'd taken a photo...

Then, this evening...
Carol took all of us out for dessert on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Tower. Very swanky.

We had a view of the whole city. (Sorry - grandma camera - but you get the idea.)

 I was good all week for the Healthy Challenge, so I used this as my treat day. Of course I ordered Boston Cream Pie. I had no idea it would look like this! I was imagining something like a slice of coconut cream pie with some chocolate on top. Mmmmmm...

 It didn't last long!

 Good to the very last bite. Now I need to go face my Weight Watchers food log...

 We wrapped up the evening with chatting at our table, enjoying the lingering glow of our yummy desserts, and the relaxed music of a jazz ensemble.

One more conference session tomorrow morning, and then we'll head to the airport. Portland, here I come!

Make Way for Ducklings

I'm having a lovely time in Boston, thank you for asking. This morning I woke up to beautiful sunshine. This is the view from my hotel window (21st floor of the Copley Place Marriott). Such a wonderful juxtaposition of historic buildings and modern skyscrapers.

I walked a few blocks over to Frog Pond on the Boston Commons. It was a lovely, brisk December morning. 

 Of course there were ducks. It's a park with a pond. Not only that, it's a rather famous pond. Remember Make Way for Ducklings? I read it as a child, and then read it to my own children.

This is the cover I remember as a child. Now the book has a green cover with just the mama duck. It tells the story of a mama duck who raises her ducklings in a park in the middle of a city. When they have to go somewhere else in the city, the policeman stops traffic so all the ducklings can safely make their way.

 Here's the lovely little island in the middle of Frog Pond, where mama duck needed to take her family.

Today it features a duck-friendly ramp from the water to the island.

I was so happy to find the statues of mama duck and all the ducklings (at the east end of Frog Pond), marching along in their Christmas bows.

 Off they go!

Even the fence around the Commons is historic. Or at least it looks pretty historic. Cool.

 Lots of old brownstone buildings mixed in with the new. This is Boston's oldest church.

This is another old church. I don't know what rank it has from oldest - newest. These buildings are right in the middle of the modern city, with plenty of modern traffic whizzing around.

 The tortoise and the hare are in Copley Square. The hotel concierge told me they have something to do with the Boston Marathon.

I love the grin on the plodding tortoise.

Tomorrow we'll take a bus tour of the historic sites. I would love to walk the Freedom Trail, but the daylight hours are short and I spend most of them indoors at the conference sessions.

Last night the five of us enjoyed a delicious Italian dinner at Limoncello Ristorante. We agreed that our waiter looked like he was an actor from The Sopranos. Unfortunately we had him take a photo of us, instead of the other way around.

The woman in the center is my boss at the district office, Carol. She's the one who helped arrange the funding for all of us to attend the conference. The other 4 of us are all TOSAs (Teachers on Special Assignment). Our work is to train other teachers and help them strengthen the work they do in classrooms. April, on the left, is a full-time elementary math TOSA. Holly, next to April, is the full-time elementary literacy TOSA. I'm on the right, and next to me is Detta, the TOSA who oversees the programs for English Language Learners in the district. She and I are both half-time classroom teachers and half-time TOSAs.

Airport

Sitting here at PDX airport before 7:00 am...yawn...heading to Boston! Friendly skies, here I come.

My school district decided it was time to send me to a conference aimed at "professional developers" (a.k.a. the teachers who train other teachers).

I'll be there for 4 days, and while most of my time will be spent in fascinating (I hope!) conference sessions, I plan to get out and do a little sight-seeing, too. Stay tuned for photos!

And if you're so inclined, be kind to my lonely boy...Mark is looking forward to Wednesday, when I'll return back to Laurel Lane.

What's For Lunch?

Mmmm...mmmm...

I realized as I was packing my (cute, red-striped) lunch bag this morning, that I eat a lot of fruits and veggies. Here's today's lunch:

1. Salad in a jar - this is very, very filling. And very, very delicious. The filled jars will last all week in the fridge. Amazing. Here's the recipe I've been using.

2. Bran muffin - this is not just any old bran muffin. I make them at home, and they are, hands down, the world's best bran muffins every. You can find the recipe here.

3. Baby carrots - crunch, crunch!

4. Cantaloupe - love those melons

5. Sliced apple - I think this was a Gala. I like Honeycrisp the best, but they're kind of spendy.

6. Raw almonds - a small handful - 12 or so - I love the flavor, they are filling, and they give me my daily dose of MUFAs.

7. Banana - need I say more?

8. Dannon Light Greek Yogurt - have you tried Greek yogurt yet? It has more protein, more calcium, and fewer calories than traditional yogurt. The texture is rich and creamy, even when it's low fat. Love this stuff.

What did you have for lunch today?

Broken

Sometimes I think we all try to look too good. We put on our happy faces. We say, "I'm fine" when someone asks how we're doing, and we try to keep our shameful dark wriggly things pushed down deep inside.

We act as if we aren't broken, when, in fact, each and every one of us is.

Not that I think we should go around parading our faults and goof-ups. But still, don't you long for a truly honest conversation once in a while?

Yesterday I caught up on a friend's blog. She and her husband adopted a third child this year, a Chinese son with medical issues including a cleft palate. (Her first two children are their biological children.) Her youngest son comes with a lot of baggage and a lot of unknowns. In a recent blog post, she talked about some of her worries around his development--will he ever talk? Will he ever bond after living mostly untended in a crib for his first 18 months? Will he ever catch up developmentally?

Even though many adopted children are able to overcome astounding deficits once they are part of a loving family, there are no guarantees. Who can blame this mother, who is, by the way, a woman of strong and abiding faith, for wondering and worrying about her son's future?

What really stood out for me in her post was this:
"These are just thoughts I have sometimes, thoughts I wouldn’t dare put on our family adoption blog because they are much too personal. I don’t want to scare potential adoptive families away from this amazing experience."

Wait a minute. She can't share perfectly normal mama-worries because it might scare someone off from also being an adoptive mother? She has to look perfect so that the next mother to adopt a challenged (and challenging) child will be able to rest assured that with enough love, faith, and hard work, we can overcome all?

Because we can't. We can love with every fiber of our being, we can faithfully keep all the rules, and we can work until we are exhausted, and there is absolutely no guarantee that everything will come out right. Let's be honest here: we can't fix everything. We are all broken people living in a flawed world.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not all doom-and-gloom. In fact, I'm an intrinsically optimistic person. But I think we do ourselves and our fellow travelers on the Good Spaceship Earth a profound disservice when we try to pretend that everything is always "just fine" in our world. Or if we do admit to having problems, we act like it's only temporary because of course we're well on our way to getting things fixed. 

People, we are not the fixers. Oh, we can try, and we do, and sometimes we get things right. But there are other times when we unintentionally offend, or do harm where we meant to do good. There are relationships that are irreparably broken, people with illness or disability that aren't going to go away in this lifetime, and seriously, we need to honestly admit this and then hold hands and stick together, and help each other along on this E-Ticket ride we call mortality. 

God keeps his promises. He didn't promise any of us that we would have a perfect life, but he did promise us that we could have eternal life. He allowed his perfect son, our cool oldest brother Jesus Christ, to come to earth and work out the Atonement so that we can be healed and forgiven. I believe this. I believe that I'm broken and flawed, and I believe that Christ will make up the difference in the things I can't fix. It won't happen tomorrow and it may take more than a million tomorrows, but He promised, and I'm on board. 

But in the meantime, can we please grant one another the space to falter? Can we admit it to others when we're the one stumbling? Can we be honest with our fears and our doubts? 

I think that my friend may do more good for potential adoptive parents if she is real with them about the doubts and fears she wrestles with right now. Rather than scare someone off, I suspect that as she validates what is real and hard, other people will catch her courage and dig deep to find that kind of pluck within themselves.

I work closely with the young women--the girls ages 12-18--at my church. In my Mormon world, it's part of the culture to be upbeat about the gospel, to make it look like we all live in ongoing joy and felicity because, after all, we have the true gospel. It's easy to assume that if we are living the gospel right, our lives will go right. Right? Mormons are really good at acting like everything is just fine.

Well, my young Mormon gal-pals have recently set some ambitious goals around missionary work. They aim to reactivate a number of their peers who have stopped coming to church, and to convert a few more non-Mormons in addition to that. Those are great goals. Of course we're supposed to be actively sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's what he said to do in the Bible, and it's what he tells us to do through modern prophets. 

But when we only present a cheery Molly-Mormon face to others, I think we're missing an important part of what the gospel really has to offer. Because every person out there knows deep inside that she is broken. And what we really need is not so much the promise of instant bliss when we become Mormons--because sorry, I have to be honest and tell you that there isn't any instant bliss no matter how good we all might look on Sunday--but what we really need is the promise that there are others out there who understand what it means to be broken, people who are real and kind, people who can help us when we're struggling to live up to the promises we make to God when we commit to being one of his disciples. 

What we really need isn't another perfect pretty face. What we need is Christ's Atonement, with all its messy demands on us here in mortality. 

Because we're broken, remember? And that's ok. We shouted for joy about it. 

Remember?

Ying and Yang

Two* of my amazing daughters are like ying and yang. Oil and water. Opposite ends of the magnet.

I felt grateful and happy to be able to spend some of my Thanksgiving weekend with each of them.

Polly and her family came to spend a couple of days. She gave me this handmade set of blocks as an early Christmas gift. (Because what's the point of opening a gift that is a Christmas decoration on Christmas? It's a little late to decorate then...) It is a lovely way to emphasize Jesus (rather than Santa) at Christmas, and it also makes me think of Polly. One of my favorite times with Polly on this trip was hanging out at Jo-Ann's fabric store with her on Friday morning. She lives in a small rural town, so she loves catching the Black Friday sales to stock up on fabrics for her coming sewing projects over the next few months. She consistently posts amazing ideas on her blog for upcycling used clothing, fun crafts to do with children, favorite books to read with kids, and a steady stream of gorgeous quilts. Now that she's caught up on quilts for her own family, she's starting to make them to donate to various charities that donate quilts to sick children. Anyway, it was fun just to hang out with Polly in the cutting line at Jo-Ann's and talk about the fun of creating things with our own hands. Polly inspires me to do more creating of my own, and I am so grateful that she and her husband made the trip with their young kiddos to have Thanksgiving at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

(My other favorite Thanksgiving moment was watching the cousins play after dinner on Thanksgiving. They created a "gym" in our basement--please understand that this is an unfinished basement with a leaky floor--by drawing various exercise options on the concrete floor with sidewalk chalk. Then they made up membership cards for the adults to use so we could get some exercise. Smart kids! We needed to burn off a few calories at that point... Polly said the gym reminded her of Caine's Arcade, and I had to agree.)

After we said goodbye to Polly and her family on Friday, Mark and I spent the next day and a half helping Julia and her husband move from their home near Mount Hood to an apartment in downtown Portland. The most amazing thing about their new home is what's outside. Their apartment is on the corner of the building, many floors above the street, and they look way out over the city to the north and the east. Julia sent me this photo. (It tickled me that the caption was "Dawn breaking," since the latest episode of the "Breaking Dawn" vampire movies just came out this weekend.) But back to the view...it was kind of hard to focus on unpacking boxes when the windows kept beckoning. Who needs pictures on the walls when you have several big windows with this? I think it is lovely, lovely. I am curious to watch Julia's blog posts to see if these views inspire her as she continues to write. Her blog began as a forum for her poetry, but in the last several months she has been exploring prose writing, too, finding voice for her testimony and views, shaping her thoughts and honing them to share with others. 

Oh, moving is hard work! I don't envy Julia and Scott doing the work of settling in to their new home. By the time we left them today, they had a bed, a sofa, and a dining table set up. The bathroom has toilet paper and hand soap, and Scott knows which basket the clean laundry is in. 

*I'm not going to write about all of my amazing daughters here (5 daughters, 1 step-daughter, and 3 daughters-in-law). Just these two for now. Except to say that Maleena and her husband, Max, made an absolutely delicious smoked turkey for our big family Thanksgiving dinner. They are pros with that smoker. Max even used some of the apple wood from our pruning project in May. You know your kids are growing up when they bring the main dish for a big family feast, and it tastes better than what you could have produced yourself. So awesome!

Friday Archive: Six Ways of Looking at a Blackberry

This is, of course, after the poem by Wallace Stevens. 

My love/hate affair with blackberries.

Six Ways of Looking at a Blackberry

One

It was August, and we were tired of Los Angeles.  On a whim, we drove to Oregon to check out jobs and real estate.  He was hired, I found our house, but what really clinched the move were the blackberries.  Oregon seemed a land of milk and blackberry juice.  We stopped along the roadside and picked blackberries for free.  We ate blackberries until our chins were purple.  We thought they were magnificent!  We loved them!  Oh, how we laughed at ourselves in years to come.

Two

After I’d lived in Oregon for a few years, I knew the true story of Sleeping Beauty.  Really, she lived in Oregon.  In Oregon it was easy to believe that someone could go to sleep for 100 years, and the thorny vines would grow up around the castle.  Who needs 100 years?  It could happen in twenty years here.  It could happen in ten.

Three

The air in the kitchen wraps itself around me in a steamy, sticky blanket.  Spilled sugar on the floor makes the bottoms of my shoes squeak as I walk from stove to table, cradling the hot jars of blackberry jam.  The pot on the stove bubbles like some weird mud pot.  The ding! of the timer.  The hiss of the steam.  The fragrant blackberries, cooking themselves into jam.

Four

Here’s a ten-dollar word for you:  ubiquitous.  Look it up.  It means “found everywhere.”  It is a blackberry’s middle name.  Without warning, they spring up in lawns, flower beds, along fences and foundations.  They will climb trees and smother hedges.  They especially love to grow intertwined with roses, their not-so-distant cousins.  Acting like they’re married.  There oughta be a law.  I asked an older lady, a gardener, how do they do that, and she said bird poop.  Really.  The birds eat the blackberries, and then poop as they fly.  The berry seeds are too tough, and they don’t get digested.  Bird poop is the reason for the ubiquitous blackberry.

Five

When I moved to Oregon, I learned that I had to be careful about telling people where I was from.  I, who had moved from an overpriced little house in Los Angeles, to a house twice the size for the same price, was being blamed for the high cost of housing in Oregon.  It wasn’t my fault.  I just wanted a nicer place to raise my family.  Besides, I would say, don’t you know about blackberries?  They’re not natives, either.  Hard to believe, because they’re everywhere, but they’re really the European blackberry.  Moved in and took over.  Who knows when, but I’ll bet that first blackberry just wanted a little elbow room, too.

Six

In the moonlight, they hang like Eve’s fruit, tempting me to taste.  I eat them as the stars wheel above.  I drink their juice until my hands are stained, as if some strange deed has marked me.  They pull me  in, taking me to themselves, pulling me through their thorns until my toes dig deep into the earth to stay, green tendrils emerge from my ankles and shoulders, knees, elbows.  Arms and legs are vines.  My hair grows leaves and thorns.  I will stay here forever in the moonlight.  I will grow new fruit.  I am blackberry.  Blackberry.  Black.  Berry.

Huff and Puff Before You Stuff

This morning we joined the Jenson-May clan for their annual "Huff and Puff Before You Stuff" event at a local park. I forgot my camera, but Dorothy had her camera with her as usual, and she kindly shared these photos.

 Here's the whole group. Left to right adults: Seth & Lauren May, Kara & Ben May, Debbie & Tony Epperson, Phil May (Geniel is out of state to welcome a new grandbaby), Ken & Dorothy Jenson, Polly and Eric Carlson, and me with Mark

 Eric with Anson, Mark, Polly

Katie, Becca, me

After several days of heavy rain, we were fortunate to have beautiful sunshine. 

After the Huff and Puff, we returned home to begin preparing for a feast. We had a lovely Thanksgiving celebration today...lovely and a little noisy...but that's the price of a houseful of young cousins having a grand time. Mark hauled in an extra table so we could seat 17.

Fun with Fabric Balls

Six months ago I gave one of my fabric balls to my colleague, Jen, expecting her first baby.

Today Jen showed me a video of her darling little guy, playing with the ball.

People, this talented child is only six months old! Check out the action with the fabric ball.



See why I love these balls so much?

They are so easy (and safe) for babies to grab. Such a little guy, and he already has the concept of catching and throwing.

Stay tuned in about 18 years when he's a star NBA player or something.

In case you're thinking he looks tall...ummm...he is. He has tall (and really smart) parents.

Healthy Challenge update

I've been doing the Healthy Challenge* for 4 weeks. It's working! I'm stronger and leaner.  I'm sleeping better. I feel soooo much better about myself.

(Oh, and did I mention that I've lost 8 pounds in the last 4 weeks! Woo hoo!!)

Yesterday I put on a pair of jeans and they did not fit. As in, they were way too big. Love it.

What's working:




Exercise
I'm getting at least 30 minutes of exercise almost every day. I vary what I do.

• On Mondays we have a little group that gets together for Yoga Group. We do yoga at one of our houses for an hour. So motivating to do it with buddies. There is a mix of gals and guys--Mark and one other husband are in the group. We've limited it to 6 because that's all we can fit in a house space with our yoga mats. I often do yoga at home on at least one or two more days during the week.
• A couple of days a week Mark and I hang out with Jillian. That's Jillian Michaels (the trainer on Biggest Loser) and her "Thirty-Day Shred" dvd. Ouch. She really makes you work. Twenty minutes of non-stop circuit training (strength, cardio, and abs). But so worth it. We really are getting stronger with our gal-pal.
• We try to get out for a good brisk walk at least a couple of times a week. This evening we put on our rain gear and grabbed some headlamps from the camping supplies and went out for a nighttime walk. It feels SO good to get out and move.

Eating

Treats one day a week. Eating within the Weight Watchers guidelines.

• Initially I said I wasn't going to eat any treats until Christmas. Ummm...that hasn't been so realistic. However, I have mostly limited myself to treats only 1 day per week. Knowing that there is a "rule" I'm committed to has been a huge help with my self-discipline.
• I love the Weight Watchers e-tools. Not only can I track my food choices, but the information on the e-tools helps me to make healthier choices throughout the day. If you're thinking about joining Weight Watchers, definitely plan to use the e-tools. And I appreciate that the Points Plus system weighs food values based on a range of nutritional factors: fat, carbs, protein, and fiber. 
• Love love love Salad in a Jar. 
• Love my morning smoothies. 

Tracking my Food 

• See "Weight Watchers e-tools" above. You don't have to keep an electronic food diary for it to work. But writing down everything you eat really makes you pay more attention to what you eat. 

Drinking lots of Water

• 8 cups / day
• Glug, glug
• I'm going to hang up a pretty poster in the bathroom, since I spend so much time there.

Rewards

• It's just a small group of us doing the Healthy Challenge, so we opted not to create a $ pool for a prize at the end for the "biggest loser." We're each coming up with our own rewards along the way. I like doing it this way! Everybody wins. I'm having fun coming up with a small (non-food) treat for myself every couple of weeks.
• Black stretchy belt - here
• Silver scarf (today's photos) - This was today's reward for making it half-way through the Challenge. It was fun to wear it to Church today - elegant and warm. Definitely a win-win on a blustery day.

And by the way...
*I'm sure there are lots of ways to do a Healthy Challenge. I'm using the one the Six Sisters designed. If you want to start your own Healthy Challenge, you can find it here.

The Lonely Rocking Chair

It's one of my very favorite places in the whole house.

I've spent quiet peaceful times in this chair for nearly 30 years.

Not today. Too busy. Not done yet.

Friday Archive: Mattie's Song

Mattie’s Song

(An Acrostic)*

Apples almost gone, mostly kinda withered

hanging quiet, hanging still

hanging like moons on the branches by the wide

Yazoo River.

Branches hanging down, with their shadows

falling green on the cold, gray river by the trees.

Can’t hardly even feel the little bumps beneath her feet,

feet cold and bare on the

mud by the river where the edge is hard and ridged,

ridged from the ripples

slapping soft, slapping easy on the mud.

Don’t make a sound, Mattie,

someone might hear

in the quiet green air,

rub the panties soft in the still green shadows on the river.

Edith shoulda told her, shoulda said something, dammit,

but Edith never said it and Mama wouldn’t neither,

Mattie knew.

Forever only looking at her, looking kinda hard,

but still, don’tcha know, blood is thicker 

than the river.

Girls oughtta stick together,

specially when they’re sisters

and the shadows run deep on the rolling gray water,

deep washing water for the shame.

How was it now that the schoolmarm taught the colors?

Indigo she called it,

but you can’t fool blue,

and blue and yellow’s green, green like the shadows,

but the water runs gray, and the gray plus the

red is a dark color honey, on the Yazoo running Mississippi down.

Just the dark ring now at the edge of the stain that won’t never wash away,

funny how the red can wash into the river,

but the stain still won’t never wash away.

Kinda like them books on the shelf in the schoolhouse;

girls forget a lot,

but them books, they leave a stain,

and the edges, Mama, won’t wash away.

Looking right deep down through the rolling gray water,

looking at the fishes swimming deep,

swimming calm.

Mama never said, nor the schoolmarm neither,

if the fishes eat the red or if it kills ‘em.

Never going home, going back to be a girl,

never gonna wash away the stain and the shame.

Only going on, only going on.

Papa almost said it,

when he talked about the Indians,

said the women had huts where they went when they...

“Hush,” Mama said, “Quiet old man, hush your mouth and go away.”

Queer, don’t you know,

in the quiet of the morning,

with the tree shadows green on the cold gray river

where the red fades gray and the 

fishes swim deep.

Rinse the panties good,

rinse them wet,

rinse them cold.

Surely they won’t show beneath the dress if she stands,

stands in the doorway looking back from years away.

They’ll think she’s still a girl,

never knowing that she knows about the river.

Underneath the branches of the trees and the apples,

Mattie walking home 

to the home

no longer hers.

Velvet dust, honey, ‘tween her toes

on the road, ‘side the river running deep,

running dark beneath the trees.

Words in her head as she walks along the river,

words from the books going past the shriveled apples,

moons over Mattie walking home.

“Xeric,” said the schoolmarm, “means dry, really dry,”

but Mattie knows the river flowing deep.

Yazoo runs the river,

with the deep green shadows,

and the fish that sleep in red,

Yazoo running Mississippi home.

Zephyr of the river, take the girl

past the shadows,

let her cross the river flowing home.

*Acrostic: A poem, word puzzle, or other composition in which certain letters in each line form a word or words. This is an alphabet acrostic, where the first letter of each line forms the alphabet.

This poem is based on family history. My ancestor, Martha (Mattie) Clementine Rector, began menstruating one cold spring day in the South. She didn't know what was happening, so she washed her long panties (bloomers?) in a creek. She caught cold, and had a cough for the rest of her life. She used to smoke a white clay pipe to ease the cough.

 I wrote this poem in 1993. It was the result of a writing class assignment that I thought was so dumb. The teacher asked us to write a story of 26 sentences. Each sentence was supposed to begin with the next letter of the alphabet. Instead of writing a dumb story, I wrote "Mattie's Song," and I immediately stopped complaining about highly structured writing assignments. Sometimes the structure frees the brain to think of ideas in new ways.

The Big One

I don't think I'm afraid of very many things, but I do fear earthquakes.

It's funny that I grew up in California, but I don't have any memory of being in earthquakes as a child.

My dad has a great story about the big earthquake (7.3) in Tehachapi in 1952. It was right after he and Mom were married. He was working on a ranch that summer, so they lived in a little tiny travel trailer in one of the fields. One night they felt the trailer rocking and Dad went out to chase the cow away that (they assumed) was bumping up against the little trailer. As he put his foot down to the ground, the ground came up and patted his foot. He suddenly realized that the "cow" was actually a big earthquake. According to Mom, he promptly dived back into bed.

I remember two tsunami evacuations. The first one was in 1960, after the 9.5 earthquake in Chile. We were down at the harbor having lunch in the cockpit of our family's sailboat. I had just turned 6 the week before, and my brother was not quite 5. As the water began to get sucked out of the bay, the sailboat suddenly lurched to one side, tipping all of the condiments into our laps. My dad shouted for my mom to get us kids to safety in a hilly area of town, and he took the sailboat out to a deep hole in the bay. He anchored there and stayed overnight on the boat, as it swung back and forth on its anchor with the water rushing in and out of the harbor with the tsunami surges.

The second tsunami evacuation came in 1964, when I was ten, after the 9.2 earthquake in Alaska. This time we were at home in bed (Mom, my brother, me). Dad was already down at the harbor, where he worked as the harbor engineer. Mom got us kids us and wrapped us in blankets because she had to drive the jeep - Dad already had the car down at the harbor. Once again she drove us to a hilly area where we stayed for the night. I had tsunami nightmares off and on for several years after that.

We used to joke about The Big One when I was a teenager in California. There were cartoons about the western half of California falling off into the ocean. It was all just a joke. Earthquakes happened somewhere else, to other people.

A few years after I moved to the Pacific Northwest in the late 70s, geologists figured out that the Cascadia Subduction Zone was ripe for a major subduction earthquake. A few years after that, they figured out that the Portland area is likely to sustain major damage in an earthquake because the fertile Willamette Valley soil is sediment from 15,000-year-old floods. Even really old sediment tends to settle in big earthquakes, shaking buildings and making a mess.

We've had a couple of small earthquakes in the region since I moved here. One was the Spring Break Quake in 1993. We were camped out at the coast, but I happened to be awake at 5:34 and I distinctly heard a distant boom. Something changed. Polly's friend, Patti, was camped with us, and she also heard or felt something.

About 10 years ago there was a small quake during the school day. I was teaching in a ground-floor classroom. I was standing up, teaching, and I didn't feel anything, but my students felt it. Their chairs moved under their bottoms. A few years later there was another small quake, but we were out of town.

This region is ripe for a magnitude-9 earthquake. I live in a  stick-frame house that is 103 years old. I sleep in an upstairs bedroom. If a quake hits at night, will I make it out of the house alive? And if we survive, what will our lives be like?

I look at news and photos from Japan, superstorm Sandy, hurricane Katrina, Indonesia...it makes you stop and think. No matter how prepared you try to be, how prepared are you really?

A few years ago I took a short overnight backpacking hike with my grandson, Josh, when he was 8 years old. We camped just beyond High Bridge on the Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia River Gorge. During the night I woke up and had a hard time getting back to sleep. I lay there in our little tent listening to my sweet grandson breathe, and wishing I could get a little more comfortable on my Thermarest pad. Then, for some reason, I started thinking about earthquakes. What if The Big One hit that night?

You know how it is in the middle of the night when you can't sleep. My imagination just took off. There were downed trees all around us from the earthquake. Hmmm...would we be crushed? Dead - end of story. Not dead - now what? We'd have to hike out by climbing out over all those huge trees that would be lying in our way. No doubt the trail would be a mess. I mentally hiked along the trail until I got to...oh, no! High Bridge had collapsed in the earthquake! We were trapped. My cell phone wouldn't work in the narrow gorge. Maybe I could climb to the top of the mountain above us (not likely, by the way). Even if I could somehow get cell reception, what good would that do? Most of the cell towers would be down. No one would be able to come rescue us. How long would our food last? Could we hike out to Wahtum Lake? There was still snow at that elevation...

...and on and on.

It seems silly now. Except this evening I was in the shower, when I had a sudden thought. What if The Big One hit right now? Ack, I'd be naked. I'd have to grab my clothes (which were next to the shower) on my way as I ran down the stairs to escape the collapsing house. But it's November and cold outside! I'd have bare feet? Could I grab my slippers (back in the bedroom), too?

Stop. Breathe. I know that the likelihood of The Big One coming at any particular moment, just because I'm thinking about it, is almost mathematically nil. But still.

I have to admit it. I'm afraid of earthquakes.