Category Archives: family

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Sun Tui

Sun Tui, my father’s boat and now mine, is back in the water. Two weeks ago today. Another boat ran into her and broke a chain plate and bent a stay last summer, just when I was thinking of sailing. I had not sailed her in about three years at that point, because of my sister having end stage cancer, my father’s emphysema getting worse, both dying.

Sun Tui means wind/water machine, I’m told. She is a 23 foot sloop, with a nearly full keel. She has plywood sides, not planks. She was built by American Marine in Hong Kong in 1959. She has a sister ship in the San Francisco Maritime Museum, the Mermaid. The Mermaid has a different keel. The Mermaid was sailed from Japan to San Francisco by Kinichi Horie, who made the first known solo nonstop crossing of the Pacific in the Mermaid in 1962. He was promptly arrested, because he was 23 and it had not occurred to him to bring a passport. He is known as Japan’s most famous sailor and has sailed many more boats all over.

My father bought Sun Tui in 2002, for $1900.00. Her sides were rotting out. He had the Port Townsend Shipwright’s Co-op replace the sides with 17 layer plywood. He said proudly, “The plywood is guaranteed by Lloyd’s of London.” He had a new jib made and a mainsail cover and a full boat cover. Then we sailed quite a lot, mostly in Port Townsend Bay. My daughter says she hated it when she was little. My father always brought oreos and orange soda. We would sail for a few hours because the kids would start banging against the walls and anyhow, I always had more work.

We raced, too. We were classed with the Thunderbirds, which are faster. They are lighter and have less keel. The trade off is that if one were to go out on the Pacific, Sun Tui is more stable. We beat the Thunderbirds once because my father knew the tides and that there was a backswirl along the shore. The tide carried us along more quickly, even though it seemed out of the way.

Once my father was out with the small fleet for one of the races and it was foggy. They were waiting for the fog to lift. The ferry goes back and forth from Whidby Island and the sailboats huddled to one side of the bay or the other, so the ferry wouldn’t squash them. Many boats quit, but my father stubbornly stayed out until the fog lifted enough to race. They gave him a pennant for tenacity on that one.

Sun Tui has had three major overhauls since my father bought her. The picture is from 2010, after the second, being carried back to the water, mast not back in place yet. I’ve sailed her three times since she went back in the water, now. I miss my father, but I think of him when I sail.

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Funeral pyre

The words for the Ronovan Writes weekly haiku prompt are inspire and loss.

the word inspire
I breath in, out, sorrow, loss
sister expired

The photo is of my maternal grandfather, my father, my sister with her back to the camera and a “shirt-tail” cousin. My cousin Katy who is not a blood cousin but is still family, and who is named after my maternal grandmother. From about 1967 or 8, I think.

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Hurricane Ridge

This is one of the watercolors in the Mother Daughter Show III by Helen Burling Ottaway, titled Hurricane Ridge. My parents moved from Alexandria, Virginia in 1996 to Chimacum, Washington. My mother loved the northwest and traveled out to paint, but they did not move to the northwest until my maternal grandmother died. My grandmother lived into her 90s. My mother was diagnosed with stage III ovarian cancer in 1997, one year after the move. She did not get to paint the northwest nearly as much as she and we hoped. She died in May of 2000.

Still, I do have some of her gorgeous northwestern watercolors. I have more to frame, but this show will have some of the ones that she framed.

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Mother Daughter Show III

The Mother Daughter Show III is hanging, with a few additions still to come, at Pippa’s Real Tea, in Port Townsend, Washington.

Gallery Walk is Saturday June 6, 2015 from 5 to 8 pm and the first Saturday in July as well.

The photo is of four framed etchings: state I, II, III and IV of the Four Seasons. Each is a limited edition etching individually run and numbered, twenty of each edition. Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall. These are by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, not by me.

I have not done a full inventory of our art, so I don’t know how many I have of each of these etchings. These are 18 by 24, so technically difficult. I do not have the press, but I may have the plates, though they may have been damaged. And even though I know how to run etchings, I don’t have her skills in inking the plates and more importantly, wiping the right amount of ink off. I may have notes about the ink colors, but the trick would be finding them. And is the same paper still made?

At any rate, I am really delighted to have our work up and ready to show for the months of June and July.

I lost my father today two years ago, so am thinking of both my parents.

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Nuf canoe

Platosgroove asks for a picture of the Nuf canoe I am repainting. Here it is sanded. It is a flat bottom plywood canoe that was designed by Carl Chamberlin of Basic Boats originally for a child to paddle around it. My two kids and I built it over ten years ago at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, Washington. The family boatbuilding allowed us to pay for materials, plans, space and volunteer help. My father came and provided tools. My daughter was four or five, I think, and son around ten. At one point my daughter said, “Mom, let go of the drill.” I did and she drilled the holes herself.

I have two coats of paint on the inside and one on the outside. I am painting it red to match “Sun Tui”, the 23 foot sailboat. One more coat on the outside and it can go back in the water.

This canoe weighs only 30 pounds, so I can move it from car to water easily. However, if we use it in the sound, we stay very close to shore: too tippy in the cold sound water.

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Ink

I for Ink in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

I have three bottles of ink, by Windsor and Newton. Violet, Emerald and Silver. I have hardly used them, but I keep them. They are from my mother.

My mother was an artist and she also did crafts. She bought art supplies. When I was first married, my husband and I each bought a used gold chain. I started medical school and used the chain to put my rings on when I changed into scrubs for the operating room. Many people tied their rings to the scrub pants. At 2 am after a difficult surgery or delivery or cesarean section or premature baby or a trauma patient that did not survive: it’s easy to forget the rings. Lose them in the laundry. I hung my rings on the chain.

My sister told me that my mother complained about the chains. “Why would they spend money on something like that?” My sister replied, “What did you buy last weekend?” “Um,” said my mother, “Paper.” “Were you out of paper?” asked my sister, silkily. “No,” said my mother. She had enough paper for art for years, but she loved paper and art supplies and would buy good paper on sale. “De gustibus non est disputandumm.” said my sister. To each his or her own taste.

I have little caches of art supplies that my mother sent me. Beautiful ink. Beautiful paper. When I paint a watercolor postcard, it is in her style. She sculpted with clay, became a potter, did silk screens, etchings, watercolors, oils, pastels. She did crafts: glass beads. My sister did a glass bead class with her. They reported giggling that they had both made glass beads, quite hideously ugly. My mother bought the glass bead equipment. Woodcuts. Paper mache. She sewed costumes when we younger, though she didn’t like sewing very much. We both had japanese kimonos when we were little for Halloween. This stood out as too weird among our social group.

I have nibs somewhere, to dip in the inks. I have a fountain pen with an italics point. I have paper.

I look at the beautiful inks and remember my mother and my sister.

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Egg

E for egg and Easter egg. I was up very early this morning, excited about returning to work tomorrow, and am dying eggs. When my mother was in hospice in 2000, she said, “This will be the first time in 42 years that I have not dyed eggs.” My sister and I looked at each other and went to buy dye and eggs. My mother was staying in bed most of the time, but she got up and came to the dining room, to dye one egg. We hid the eggs and baskets on Easter and she watched out the window while her three grandchildren searched for the eggs. My daughter was two, niece was one and 1/2 and my son was seven. My mother died in May. I remember her every time I dye eggs.

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Daughters and dinosaurs

D for daughter and dinosaur. Here is a poem I wrote quite a while ago, though it is about my son rather than my daughter.

Dinosaur Dreams

The problem
With Intelligent Design
Is those old bones
Those dinosaurs

Also that of 10,000 dreams of creation
One would be right
And the followers of all the others
Consigned to hell
If so, I go gladly, clutching
Dinosaur bones to my chest
And will enjoy the diversity
Not the narrow heaven with a narrow
Small-minded deity

But is evolution right?

Well, I think it’s on the right track

But wholly done and all correct?

After all, think how often
Medicine has been wrong
Think of tobacco and vioxx
Think of Galen, over 2000 years ago
Thinking that evil humors built up in the uterus
Causing hysteria
External pelvic massage was the cure
For over 2000 years
For old maids, widows and nuns
Who had no male to cleave unto
Massage was a treatment into the early 1900s
And now we wonder about prozac too

Evolution is an evolving science

I think of when my son was four
And he watched “Jurassic Park”
Against my wishes
Because I thought it was too violent
He studied it carefully many times

One day he asked me, anxiously,
“Mom, is DNA real?”
To check that it wasn’t another of those Santa stories
I was able to reassure him
Yes, I think DNA is real
He was pleased

A few days later he announced
That when he grows up
He wants to be a plant and animal scientist
Extract DNA from amber
And grow those dinosaurs

A laudable ambition
For any four year old

If God left the dinosaur bones
Around to fool us
And they never lived
She has a nasty sense of humor
And my son and I will not forgive

I believe in evolution
And dream of dinosaurs

first published on everything2.com in 2005