Day 2 – San Juan Island, Whiteley Center Residency Dispatch
- At September 16, 2015
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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We took a more low-key approach to today’s sight seeing, visiting the Pelindaba lavender farm (I got some lavender essential oil and a little too much sun) and American Camp’s beaches, where we saw hundreds of bunnies and a few foxes strewn out on meadowland, near a wide expanse of blue ocean protected by a dense fence of white driftwood.
This evening we decided to seal-watch rather than whale watch as the sun went down , down the dock where the UW center does its marine biology research, and watched four seals follow each other around, poking their heads and splashing around while we vainly tried to get a picture to do them justice. We were also being harassed by a kingfisher who kept chittering and flittering over our heads, a very busy kingfisher, we thought, until we noticed there were a pair of them! The deer are also thick on the grounds of the Whiteley Center, mostly around the parking lot, one of them even scaring Glenn off the path to our cabin late at night! Gotcha, says the deer!
On the health end, my ankle is not healing quickly so I was in a lot of pain today trying to make my way around all the bountiful nature. and I either picked up a bug on the way here or got ahold of something that disagreed with me, and spent part of Day 2 very sick and shaking, then sipping electrolytes. Unpleasant even when you’re at home, but I hope I will be able to shake off whatever had me today and get back to the business of writing, appreciating wildlife, etc. I am always nervous about travel because my immune system sucks and I tend to get sick whenever I travel, especially if I go on a ferry/airplane kind of mass human transport. It keeps me from doing as much as I want. As you may have read in previous postings, I was nervous about trying to do a residency at all. As much as I want to be normal, healthy girl, I am often walking with a cane, disappointed by not being able to eat much or at all when I travel due to a combo of food allergies and stomach problems, prone to waking up in the night struggling to breathe because my asthma has acted up. I have ambitions to do more with my life, to expand my possibilities rather than let my multiple health problems shut me into smaller and smaller circles. That is why I am here. I hope my body will come to agree with my heart and mind that this is a place to be well, to enjoy, to celebrate beauty.
PS Still wrote a poem today, though it was about being sick on the floor of a hotel room. With puns! So, you know.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
