This is a sunset, not smoke. Right now the east coast of the US has spectacularly bad air quality from forest fire smoke. My son is going to work out indoors today, since he is in the DC metro area.
When I moved here, I was delighted by the air quality. That was 23 years ago. In the last five years, we have had smoke blowing in from forest fires to the east or south or north four of the five. Last year I built a home air purifier because the smoke was bothering my lungs even inside the house. It helped very much. I stayed inside for 8 days. The cats did not want to go out either.
“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” Ironic if it is smoke that takes us out.
I walked on Marrowstone Island yesterday, south from East Beach. There was a super low tide, to -3.38 at 1:07 pm. When the tide came in, it was at +8.76, so that is a huge difference.
There were almost no people, but the group enjoying the low tide were the great blue herons! I counted 14. At one point they all alerted, and a bald eagle came down and perched on the rock that a heron had been on. There must be some very delicious food for the herons with the low tide. The eagle seemed to be considering heron to be a delicacy.
Here is the eagle (and the great blue herons moved!)
He likes to be the smartest. She doesn’t care and anyhow, people don’t like smart women mostly. Men show it off. Women mask it. She can only partially mask with her professional degree.
He’s pleased to walk on the beach with her. She is withdrawn, down. He can feel that. He does not ask why, ever. She slides neatly into the space his wife’s dementia left. His wife who was also depressed. He does whatever he wants, he’s not available, he won’t be trapped. Control.
She is withdrawn, down. She has a difficult task in a year that might kill her. Closing the clinic and working elsewhere. Maybe she only gets pneumonia when a loved one dies. Or maybe COVID-19 will kill her. There, the range is from make a lot of money to dying. It is hard to explain and people don’t believe her.
Tendrils from her time in the ocean brush him. Then they are longer and lit in the sun. They wrap around him, very slowly. The first after a year. Where the tendrils touch, he has scales.
Neither sees. They are too busy laughing. They are small children, wordplay, in the woods, on the beaches, talking, singing.
She thinks her mermaid self is separate, her dream self. She is safest in the ocean. Her microbiota, gut bacteria, are all from the ocean. Symbiotic. He has land bacteria, at least, he starts with them. They change the longer they are together. He says, “I can read your mind!” But he can’t read emotions, since his are locked away. They bang on the dungeon doors howling but his heart is locked there too. His head can’t hear, can’t feel. Only when the small child is out playing.
He is slowly turning green. Now he has a few small leafy tendrils too.
She goes in the sea, the ocean, the unconscious, daily. Unworried, free, happy, healed.
The year goes by. The clinic closes, she has a job.
“Why are you afraid?” He says.
“I am afraid I’ll get sick,” she says.
He has tendrils running all over from her. Half his skin has designs, stripes and patterns. The earliest ones have thickened and spread, rooted wherever they touch him, scales edging the roots. She is fully scaled, with the tendrils from fins and tail and hair. She smells of the sea.
She goes to work and is sick after two months. Very very sick with all it entails.
“You didn’t tell me about this!” he says.
“Why would I?” she says. “No one believes me.”
“I am watching and I don’t believe it.” He hates that her mind is unmasked. “I can follow you and it makes sense but you jump topics so fast!”
She shrugs. “Well.”
He tries to cut ties. Once. Twice. He can’t see the tendrils, so how can he cut them? But now she looks from the ocean and sees. The third time he tries, she grabs a shell and slices through the tendrils and dives deep. He could come in the sea. But he will have to choose.
He chooses not to. He thinks she is calling him from the sea. Every day he drinks a little more, smokes a little more, trying to drown the call.
But it isn’t her. The tendrils are his, now. The dungeon is flooded and the monsters and the small child swim in an ocean, fully scaled. They call him daily, to open the door, to let them out, to join them.
The network of mycelium can be enormous and there is increasing evidence of communication between species: mycelium to trees or rhizomes to trees or trees to other trees. But it isn’t infinite, is it?
Funny how our brains work. I think of going to the other computer and then think I will look in this one for a moment. I have photographs from years past of the New Old Time Chautauqua. I open the file of Nikon photographs. There are 28 subfiles. I go to July 2018. At the end of the file, here is this motley parade. The New Old Time Chautauqua with our local Unexpected Brass Band and Other Friends.
I didn’t “know” that these photographs were even on this laptop. At least, not consciously. These are taken at the fairgrounds, August 11, 2018, in Port Townsend, Washington.
The New Old Time Chautauqua is the last one on the road. They are fundraising to go work and play with the Blackfoot Confederacy in Canada and the US. There are too many people dying from fentanyl, so the Chautauqua is part of the healing process. They are fundraising as they hit the road. I wish all of them the best.
And here is the Unexpected Brass Band at THING last year. You can hear them even if you can’t see them!
I make Katy B’s fruit torte, recipe here. Katherine Burling was my maternal grandmother.
The friend worked with me for five years and is surviving lung cancer. She has one of the new treatments. She gets an infusion every three weeks. “For the rest of my life.” she says, but they may come up with something new eventually. She feels pretty terrible after the infusion for a few days.
I use this tea set. I love this set. It says Rose China, Japan, on the bottom. What I like best is that the lid of the teapot has the roof of the pagoda, to line up before I pour. There are six plates, but only three cups and saucers. The sugar bowl and creamer are intact.
Naps are for the very young, then we forget or scorn naps for years. We think of those who nap as old when we are 8 or 10 or 20, still wet behind the ears. Once we climb down from the laps of those who try to teach us about the whirled and we’ve mastered running free, we fight the time for bed. My son would cry right before the pearled evening would close his eyes, fighting sleep with dread. He might miss a fun filled happening. We run fast and learn until we reach an age or illness where we tire and fall asleep in day on a couch in spite of sun. Wake climbing out of sleep like from the ocean or swampy mire. Our children now make fun of us, they fill the gaps, as we have reached the age where we once again need naps.
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I took the photograph from a train in 2017, going from Edmonds, Washington, to Chicago.
Discover and re-discover Mexico’s cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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