Happy Solstice! A New Poem in Crab Creek Review, Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, Birdwatching as Contact Sport, Cyclical Economic Misery

Poppies and Mt Rainier, Woodinville Lavender Farm

Happy Solstice!

Happy Solstice! I hope you are taking some time to celebrate, even if it’s just an American soccer victory or extra sunshine that you can feel good about. Our local lavender field had a celebration with vendors for the Solstice, and stayed open late, so we wondered around and took some pictures. It’s also Father’s Day, so for those who are fathers, who lost fathers, who celebrate their fathers, sending good thoughts your way. And Happy Juneteenth! It’s also been a crazy heat wave (nineties again tomorrow), and we are already eyeing with suspicion the fires that are popping up around us.

A New Poem in Crab Creek Review

Sylvia and Crab Creek Review

I just had a new Solstice poem come out in the newest issue of Crab Creek Review, but ironically, it’s about Winter Solstice. Here’s a sneak peek:

Great Blue Heron flying overhead

Readings and Birdwatching as a Contact Sport

In the last few days, I MC’d a reading at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville for their Wine and Poetry series, with poets Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, a local oceanographer. It was warm and sunny (you can tell I’m wearing sunglasses because there was so much glare inside!), but it was a good night AND Glenn did his first ever open mic performance, which I wish I had recorded, where he recited John Berryman’s Dream Song 14. I realized he is a better public speaker than I am, lol.

Catherine Broadwall with her new book, me, and Deirdre Lockwood with her new book

We also tried a real birdwatching trek because someone had posted about seeing a Lazuli Bunting at a local park. So, forgetting I don’t do well in heat, or sun, or, let’s face it, outdoors with hills and a lot of brush and non-paved pathways, we went on an adventure to a well-known birding trail at Marymoor Park. Despite wearing long sleeves, long pants, shoes and socks, plus sunscreen and two kinds of insect repellent, I still got attacked by a tick on my wrist while I was taking a shot (brushed it off within ten seconds, but still managed to leave a bite behind that required a doctor visit) and a black fly (which I am allergic to), so after an hour, I had to call it quits. It felt like nature had personally attacked me and told me I was an indoor cat, and keep to my own space, lol. On the birdwatching side, we saw about forty Great Blue Herons fly right over our heads, I saw Purple Martins and Tree Swallows and Yellowthroats, and multiple pairs of Lazuli Buntings (which is my first time ever seeing this dream bird). Oh, and did I mention my three-year-old Sony camera’s motherboard went out WHILE we were taking pictures? I didn’t get as many good ones, but it was still fun to see those birds.

Wide shot, poppies and mountain

Cyclical Economic Misery

I wanted to share some advice from my mother, who is 74 this year. I was discussing our money woes (too much outcome, not enough income) and the global stagflation that is making everyone nervous, and she told me not to stress out about money this year. I am 53, and the economy has never felt so bad to me—and I graduated into a recession in 94, lived through the dot-com recession, the housing recession—and this is definitely worse. My mother was recalling the seventies, when we also had a big stagflation problem, gasoline stations had LINES, interest rates for credit cards and mortgages were at 17 percent and higher. Of course, they weren’t coming out of a global pandemic, but they were at the tail end of Vietnam and a very unpopular President. She said in these years, we have to remember miserable economic times are cyclical, that we will (hopefully) survive them, and we won’t always be worrying so much about paying for groceries and student loans and medical bills. We in the Pacific Northwest are also in the middle of a nasty heat wave (record-breaking June temps, including nineties for more than one day) and so is France, where they don’t have a) ice and b) air conditioning. Seattle homes and businesses didn’t used to have air conditioning when I moved here but it is slowly becoming more widespread as global warming beaches gray whales and makes being outside or inside miserable, and people literally die from the weather. The climate, while some of it is man-damaged, is also cyclical—before humans arrived, we still had mini-ice ages and heat waves, California still had wildfires regularly, volcanoes caused their own globally important weather. What is the point of saying all this? Yes, we are in a hard time, the hardest time I remember in my lifetime, a time that can beat up hope and leave us cringing at every weather and news report and struggling to pay the bills and find work, and meanwhile it seems that billionaires are running the show while politicians get dumber and more corrupt. But people have felt this way before. We will survive this. I don’t know if we will return to the optimism that characterized the late eighties and the whole of the nineties, but I will sustain a hope that it will, that we will get a better President, better people in charge, a movement towards justice and protecting the rights of women and the environment. A recent poll showed that more people would vote for AOC than JD Vance. That’s got to be a good sign of something, right? RIGHT? Okay, economic musings are done.

In the meantime, enjoy your solstice, your World Cup, your lavender fields and anything else you can find joy in.