Day 5 of San Juan Island Residency at Whiteley Center

I got off to a bit of a slow start today, but did have a few morning visitors at my front door! Bambi and friends! It is not an exaggeration that we see dozens of deer a day here, many so close you could touch them. We have two families – one doe and fawn, and another doe with three fawns. I decided to snap a few so you could see them, as I’ve been leaving them out of previous day’s records unfairly!

We ended up at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art in the afternoon to see the amazing suspended terra cotta sculptures, meant to look as if they were floating in water, by an artist named Kathy Ventner. It’s amazing that she did not cast them, but shaped them by hand from photographs of her models underwater in their regular every-day clothing. Her level of detail is amazing, and the space in the museum atrium is lovely.

No orcas to be found anywhere around the island, but my little brother and his wife, who came to the island for the weekend, did go whalewatching and see a humpback whale, which is pretty great. Then we had dinner at a wonderful organic restaurant (with lots of gluten-free options, naturally) called The Backdoor Kitchen. We went down by the ferry to see if there were otters (apparently they like the drain right by the loading dock?) but no luck, then down to the dock by our cabin where we were greeted by our friendly harbor seal (the same one as yesterday?) who this time poked her little head, out, then twirled around and floated around with her belly and nose up – so cute! My sister-in-law is also a biology fan, so she was fascinated by the floating jellyfish and bioluminescent shrimp in the water, which I hadn’t noticed before. It was great that they finally got see San Juan Island after living nearby for almost a year! It’s one of my top places – along with La Conner in tulip season – that I send people to because it illustrates why I love the Northwest and what makes it so unique, and part of what I missed when I spent two years in California. I don’t know if I would want to live here year round (see previous post re: power outages and such) but it’d be a great place (a girl can dream?) to have a summer home (maybe someday?), or for anyone who really wanted to live away from it all.

There was a fox much closer to the Whiteley Center today – running across the street that leads to the center! I didn’t know they were here, but of course it makes sense, surrounded as we are by fields and woods and water. This island continues to be full of surprises. I thought I’d post another red fox picture…

My time here is wrapping up, and I wonder about my productivity levels, whether I’ve accomplished enough. I’ve written a couple of pages of book review, a couple of pages of poetry critique, a handful of poems (and of course these daily blog posts), as well as a few pages on the PR for Poets book. I’ve certainly had more than my fair share of nature encounters, I was down with a virus for a couple of days, and brought far more reading material than I could actually get to in the time allotted (better than bringing too little, I guess!) Part of me has already started to look forward to returning home to my routines, my own bed, my cat…normalcy, even though “normal” has its own stresses (house hunting!) and irritations. Still, it was nice to be here, to have this time to claim as an artist and writer, to say “this is important and I’m going to spend time with my writing – in a residency which happens to afford a spectacular cabin in the woods on the water on a really fabulously unique Northwest island.” Getting away from it all can be overrated – but it can also afford perspective and give shape to new ideas (maybe a new manuscript?)