Parental Visits, End of Summer Flower Farm Visits, August Birds

Glenn, me, my mom and dad, McMurtrey’s Flower Field

Parental Visits and End of Summer Flower Farm Visits

My mom and dad came out from Ohio to visit me and my little brother this week, so we decided to take them to some of our favorite local hangouts, including a couple of our favorite flower farms—McMurtrey Farm and JB Family Growers Lavender Farm. After a day of heavy (strange) August rain, during which we watched a Hitchcock marathon, we were able to get out and enjoy the flowers, sunshine, and fresh air (rain is good for that). It was very good to spend time with family in my favorite places. I know my parents are getting older, so I wanted to celebrate the limited time we get together.

Goldfinch talking

End of Summer Birds

At all these fields of flowers, the finches have been twittering around us in the air. The hummingbirds are dwindling in number but still busy at the flowers as well. I’ll miss their bright colors and songs when the winter comes back. Some small parts of late summer are my favorite parts. (Wasps, not so much, but the birds, absolutely, and the blueberries in my garden this year—especially sweet.)

Immature hummingbird taking a drink

This is a busy month—my older brother is coming out to visit the week after my folks leave—I am trying to look at my schedule for the fall, with readings and classes. After the health and dental dramas of the past weeks, I am ready to relax a bit, hopefully. I’m also hoping my next book gets picked up soon so I can start focusing on my next writing project, which might be quite a different creature than my previous works.

In the meantime, my friends, this seems like a rough and tumble world, but there are tiny moments of joy, beauty, kindness to be found. Sending you all hopes for tiny, good August joys.

Full Moons, Insomnia, Ends of Summer Gardens in Bloom, and Writing Questions at Midlife

Mt Rainier with Sunflowers

Full Moons, Insomnia, End of Summer Gardens in Bloom

The lovely full Sturgeon moon of the last two nights has been my companion during a stretch of insomnia. Doctors blame either the heat/MS or my hormones, or anxiety, but heck, it could be all three!

After a week that included a painful crown and TMJ, a doctor appointment that arrived with bad news for me (and another damn cancer scare), money woes, and of course the relentless terrible news cycle, I mean, if I could sleep like a baby, maybe that would be the abnormal thing.

On the plus side, the late gardens are blooming—two of these pics are from the local Lavender Farm, JB Family Growers, but the other photos are from McMurtrey Farm, which has opened for flower gathering until they become a pumpkin farm (although I’ve seen evidence of many pumpkins already!)

By the time I write my next blog post, my parents will already have been visiting for a few days. Hopefully we’ll have cooler weather and no wildfire smoke for that week.

Writing Questions in Middle Age

I’ve also been questioning things like—should I even still be writing poetry, or is it time I give up on it and try something else? Should I spend my time doing paying work instead? It feels sort of futile to write poetry in today’s political environment—rampantly anti-academic, anti-art, anti-peace-tolerance-environmental-safety and pro guns, business and everything evil and destructive. It feels like no one is listening, even with much bigger platforms than mine. Maybe, I wonder, I should take up filmmaking. Maybe I should leave America for the adventure of exploring another country, another country, which might be more friendly to the arts (which seems like almost any country at this point). I could take up working at the local pumpkin farm (though heavy lifting would be out). I could sell makeup again. This may be a normal part of getting older. I can’t tell as I’ve never been this old before! Maybe things will make more sense when I can get more than an hour or so of sleep a night. I’ll check in with you next week.

To August: Broken Molars, Garden Parties, Cats, and Cutting Flowers

Zinnias from McMurtrey’s

Here’s to August, everyone: Wildfire smoke blowing in, Molars blowing up, and Garden Parties

It’s been an eventful week—I broke a back molar (that I think had a filling from my elementary school days) and had a very painful crown (and a threat of root canal). Glenn bought tickets to a garden party at Willows Lodge with a French theme and visited the newly opened McMurtrey’s farm to bring home cut flowers (it will be a pumpkin farm soon, but is opened for limited hours for cutting, and has a gorgeous dahlia garden that I myself could only dream of). Also, wildfire smoke from the Olympic Park fire has started blowing in, not too bad yet but a gray screen on the horizon.

I’ve also finished up the essay class I was taking and wanted you to see where the cats are right after the Zoom class ends. The baby goldfinches and other birds have been fluttering about, and so too the Anna’s hummingbirds. My folks are coming into town in a week or so, and we’re cleaning out the spare room in the basement, donating items that have been taking up space (goodbye, old television set!) and I’ll be going to the endocrinologist and the endodontist this week (hooray) to check my thyroid and my back tooth. These crowns are so expensive and not covered by my insurance, so every time it’s like an expensive piece of jewelry or a nice fridge. (Boo…hiss….) I hope a future America with universal health insurance also covers dental health…which might be wishful thinking, as this horrid government continues to tear down everything good (this week, PBS and NPR). In the meantime, I’m still thinking about how to earn an independent living as a disabled writer in this economy where everyone is facing layoffs and inflation. I’m not doing the Sealey Challenge this year because of my family visiting, and I’m also judging the SFPA poetry contest, so I’ll have plenty on my plate. But I do love seeing other people’s reads!

A Change in the Air, Lavender Festivals, and Melancholy

Sunflower among wildflowers

A Change in the Air

I know it’s only late July, but I can feel a change in the air already, as days get slowly shorter, and the garden, still in bloom, somehow seems to be nearing its end. We still have another whole month of summer, but the sunflowers coming up remind me not to wait or postpone, because change is already here. I spent most of the week sick, but am getting better, and it allowed me to get some reading done, and some thinking about the upcoming season: Fall.

Lavender field with summer wildflowers

My parents are coming out for a visit in two weeks, and after that, I’m going to a short residency to work on my manuscript, and maybe on some more essays. I’m trying to be more deliberate with the time that I spend and still put time aside for joy, relaxation, and all that stuff we type-A folks are bad at. If I don’t put time aside for rest, I won’t do it. I’ve been writing essays for five weeks, and enjoying it, and even sending some out. I’m waiting to hear back from publishers on my latest poetry manuscript, but I’m wondering if putting together a book of essays might be a smarter way to spend my time. It seems urgent to get voices out about disability, and while both books deal with that subject matter, the essays might be a better choice for a wider audience. We’ll see.

Goldfinch

Lavender Festivals and Melancholy

This weekend was the lavender festival at our local lavender garden (JB Family Growers Lavender Farm), and we went both days and had fun, and the weather blessedly cooperated (no rain, but also not crazy hot). I also noted that a lot of my friends and family members are experiencing a melancholy that isn’t specific to one bad thing, but rather a pervasive mood. Maybe that makes sense, politics and plagues and wars are bound to make a dent in our souls, and if they don’t, maybe something’s wrong with us. Walking at sunset in a field of lavender does something good to our nervous systems, or spending time picking blueberries or watching birds and going to the forest. We need to remind ourselves of the good things still in the world, of the possibilities. We need to give ourselves something to fight for.

Ha! If all you saw were my smiling photos, you wouldn’t think I had a thing to worry about, right? But you and I know better. We know the happy times are fleeting, and the hard times long, worries and sadness and even disabilities sometimes invisible. (I learned a lot this week researching an essay about Elizabeth Taylor’s myriad health problems related to the same genetic mutation that gave her double eyelashes, and how they related to her death and multiple hospitalizations.) We have to appreciate the good days and cope with the bad and stay open to what life is still teaching us. Anyway, if you are struggling right now, you are not alone, and the bad times don’t last forever (though they can feel that way). Another day when the sun rises, or the moon rises, and you feel alive and yourself again, inspired—I wish this for all of us.

New Nature Writing Conference in La Grande, Oregon, Ecology and Hope, and Grateful for Home

Oregon Wildfire Sunset (From car)

New Nature Writing Conference in La Grande, Oregon: Ecology and Hope

Well, we drove through multiple mountain ranges and wildfire smoke both ways in the five-hour drive to and from La Grande, Oregon. Average temperature? 92°F—with red flag-level winds. I’d never seen how empty most of the states of Oregon and Washington are east of the Cascade mountains. Lots of twisty mountain passes, then miles of semiarid scrub, barely a McDonalds or Starbucks to be found. La Grande, almost at the very Eastern end of Oregon, is a little mountainside oasis—a drive-thru Starbucks, little Eastern Oregon University, where the low-res MFA program held its New Nature Writing Conference. We made it there the first day and we were pretty exhausted, the heat and smoke were hard on my MS symptoms, so I barely had any sleep before I had to get up, dress, teach a class on Solarpunk poetry, and then get ready for a reading and Q&A. Immediately after, we turned around and made the five-hour drive home, barely getting through the mountains before the dark settled in, and once again chased by wildfire smoke. The faculty, staff, and students at EOU were warm and friendly, and I felt very welcomed and thankful to be invited to speak—especially on nature and ecology, which are definitely subjects I’m very interested in, but man, physically this trip was hard. (Pics below include Glenn and I in the hot wind of the hotel parking lot, me with the director of the MFA program, and a pic from last week’s birthday celebration.)

One question I was asked during my class was “how do you keep your optimism with things like these wildfire evacuations?” (One of my friends texted me during the class she was evacuating her nearby small town.) How do I keep optimism? I wish I could remember how exactly I answered. There are always reasons to hope, however slight, and though I consider myself a realistic optimist—or an optimistic pessimist—it is hard, though imperative, to keep a view of the light, however dim. Hayao Miyazaki—along with Octavia Butler—sort of the godfather and godmother of Solarpunk—have visions of the future that, although dark, contain seeds (Parable of the Sower puns here) of how it is possible to have a more equitable, balanced world where technology, humanity, plants and animals co-exist in peace—usually after an apocalypse. So, maybe it’s around the corner any day now? During the class we discussed the Foxfire Books—rural surroundings mean someone in the class HAD heard of them.

We got home, showered, fell asleep exhausted, and today was mostly recovery (my body definitely showed me it was not happy with me with various symptoms) and unpacking and deciding if such a trip might be doable again. Next time, maybe not in the desert in the middle of July surrounded by wildfires?

Grateful for Home

Grateful to be home with my cats, my own bed, my own (allergy-safe) food, I considered how lucky we were to live in a place with such a moderate climate—today in Woodinville the high was 73°—and to live next to a beautiful lavender farm and have just enough land around my house to have a little garden. Pics here are from this evening, the last legs of the weekend’s Lavender Festival—so we mostly missed it but got there before closing to celebrate.

On the journey, I saw a LOT of closed hotels, motels, gas stations, and restaurants—and a LOT of wide-open nothing—no hospitals, no hotels, no restaurants at all. There were no Barnes & Nobles to drop into, no chain restaurants at all along the whole drive. The last place I’d seen with so many closed businesses was Akron on my visit to the University there almost twenty years ago, when the oatmeal-themed cookie shop was the only open store in the entire mall, and the hotel we stayed at was being run by one already-laid-off elderly employee and was being closed after we left. In Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky—places I’d lived in—there was a lot of poverty, and where my relatives lived in Missouri as well—but I guess I had not really seen it here in the Pacific Northwest (beyond getting lost in a particularly meth-riddled row of closed gas stations and restaurants in Eugene OR on the drive from California back here on one of our moves). Class inequity was really brought home for me on this drive—along with viewing a lot of Trump signs, which you don’t see in and around my home much. Seems like the billionaires in our state could be doing more to help out the rest of the area, but it seems like that isn’t happening.  If the farms in Eastern WA and OR are growing our food, but have no restaurants to sell it to—or hospitals to go to if they get sick—or hell, even a rundown mall to see a movie and get a pizza—what is happening to those farmers and the farm workers? I even passed, strangely, a couple of wine tasting rooms tucked into the middle of what seemed to be wasteland, and a few vineyards on sunny hills that were otherwise barren. Woodinville’s wine country never looked so good to me. This is truly my happy place—away from the severe weather of the desert (or even the Midwest) most of the time, green year-round, cloudy enough to keep me safe with my sun allergy, blessed with good hospitals and libraries and bookstores and indie coffee shops and yes, chain restaurants.