Stream of Consciousness

Summer Spritz!

We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.

- H. L. Mencken

It's still early morning so I can still have windows open before the wild heat returns and I have to shut the house up to keep it cool. Yesterday was...sultry.  The heat felt like New Mexico desert. Even the browned-out front lawn crunched under my hot feet. 

Last night, I ended up moving all my herbs (in pots for now) and various flower (pots as well) from the patio/driveway to the back garden. Then I turned on the irrigation and got completely SOAKED moving the pots around so they will get enough water from the Rain Bird when we are gone this weekend. I was dripping. It felt wonderful. I felt cleansed. Then I sat outside reading Wallace Stegner essays about living in the Western US until John got home (late, 8 pm) all the while also hearing the clapping and the singing from a band over at the park, a celebration for National Night Out that I was too heated up to go to...another exercise in giving myself permission to be here now. We then ate a lovely cold, late supper and then early to bed. A good, slow day. Today is all that last-minute puttering before the road trip across hot northern Oregon on Thursday afternoon. A long to-do list but mostly minor stuff that won't take long, leaving me a day for some poetry exercises, I think. Usually, we try to take one road we never have before and make it a bit of a discovery/adventure. But this is now the 4th time we've been to Joseph, plus I once drove this road on a solo trip to/from Boise, Idaho. And John's been over that way a few times for work as well. The best news of all? New York Richie's Pizza awaits us like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow now in two locations, Island City and Enterprise. I guess I'll wait until after this weekend to start back on my calorie-counting...

Photo: Aperol Spritz on the table in our garden. Summer!

Saturday Night Thunderstorm Blues

After a day spent outside, much fun with gardening, puttering with house chores while surrounded by sun and shadows and the happy red of geraniums in window boxes, we're now having one of those rare Pacific Northwest thunder-and-lightning fests this eve. I think since we moved here ten years ago this is maybe #4 or #5 -- that's how rare. But before the rain and fireworks began, the skies were gorgeous: violet, orange, mauve, salmon, and a muted rainbow. How fabulous is that? 

Another work outside day because the sun and clear skies were unexpected. So, more pruning, more pole pruning of the giant Oregon maples that offer a green-dappled canopy over our back yard garden. Re-painting of the back garden furniture. Window cleaning. Scrubbing and then painting of the front door steps. Replacing the terra cotta pots of geraniums, begonias, and the gerbera daisy on the freshly greened steps. Dinner and then a sunset passegiatta around the Woodlawn neck of our neighborhood woods. A good, simple, hard-working, easy day. 

Another friend's parent died this morning. We seem to have clearly entered that phase of life. Passages, losses, transitions, mourning. Still, a violet-and-salmon sunset can bewitch and beguile. 

 

House of Echoes

The full moon is rising over this almost-empty house as I listen to This American Life on KLCC-FM 89.7 Eugene, Oregon where Shelly and Becky in the story being told are from. Becky is 15 (I think I heard that right...no, likely not...), Shelly is 48, a fundamentalist Christian who has home-schooled all her children. The usual sordid suspects and the moon still rises as my cats sleep on the chaise longue brought in from the deck to be living room furniture for a few days.

I think I've like the quiet, the unquestioning silence out here, these nine peaceful years. And the quiet this full moon night, in spite of the radio station I tuned in. One of the major life lessons learned this time in this silence has been just that: most people talking is mostly unnecessary noise. So the radio story continues, on and on, in its specifics and particulars. I could turn it off but, predictably, I'm curious now. But isn't one of the life lessons of this story: don't spread your seed so much? Playwrights certainly can't afford to support nine kids.

Last Night with Furniture, Music, Among Other Things

Well, the men who pack the boxes were here today. All that makes the kitchen now is a table, Si's chairs, and a phalanx of thirteen boxes filled with our kitchen-related crap. Yikes. Do we really have that much stuff? The stereo is still working because the movers thought we might some entertainment options on this, our last night in this woodlands retreat where we've holed up this past nine years. So I'm playing one of The Sopranos soundtrack CD now after Neil from Massey Hall, k.d.lang, several Gary-inspired compilations of soul and blues and this-and-that earlier in the day. The cats seem happy to be sprung from their daylong prison cell of the guest room—they now repose on their various familiar pillows and blankets which remain strewn about.

J.'s outside doing e-mail on the rotting deck. I already started cleaning the kitchen, before the exhaustion and general moving ennui set in. Crickets, night sounds, almost full moon about to rise. Acorn squash to the compost for the skunk. We have clothesline yet to take down. The new Earth Machine composter bought on Friday at Down to Earth in Eugene to load into the moving truck tomorrow. Life lurches on.

I have no idea, really, why this past few months, ancient Pink Floyd music suddenly appeals. Maybe the cuts used on the last Sopranos episodes? Maybe the Enneagram 4 identification with the music? I will miss the brick hearth around the woodstove, the quiet, green-black, sunset darkness that descends, sometimes within minutes, over these tall, tall trees.

I tend to want to dignify these last moments in a space and place that has been so meaningful, so momentous but how, really, beyond cooking the food and watching the light fade and gathering one last time under the newly-cleaned goosedown comforter for the blessed peace of a night of sleep?