Güd wrtr

Boarding the 6:20 a.m. to Seattle,
the BFF nudges the Prius onto the main deck
behind a red Fiat with an Obama/Biden sticker.
“Fiat stands for ‘fix it again, Tony,’ ” she says,
as I, the good audience, chuckle.

We grab pillows and lamby soft binkits
from the back seat, settle in for the ride
that will deliver us to the cancer center,
where a machine will scan her tumors.
I close my eyes, the steady thrum beneath us
the only indicator of movement,
a low growl that softens to a purr,
and we rest, surrounded by all these Jonahs
in the belly of the great rumbling beast.

I drift to a place of early memory,
of being held close to my father’s chest,
cradled in his strong arms, lulled to sleep
by his young heart, his voice resonating
a lullaby I can feel through my tiny body,
his big hand rubbing circles of love
into my back.

Jan Haag

I am walking on a gravel road on Bainbridge Island in Washington state under a dove gray sky. There is no rain—and none is predicted—which is odd in this rainforest of a state. Sam, the golden retriever, walks ahead of me, turning now and then to look for me. I like that in a dog. We are walking just to be outside, because we can.

Sam and his mom

Someone I love lies upstairs in her house sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, of the chronically ill. For two days I’ve been here the BFF has been on her feet (“like a normal person,” she joked), and for a couple days before my arrival, cooking beef stroganoff, making potato leek soup and something in clear glass in the fridge that looks tomato-y and vegetable-y. Last night she whipped up cheese-y biscuits from scratch to go with the potato leek, topped with sour cream and bacon.

The BFF picked me up from the airport with two daughters in tow—Maggie, who is finishing her senior year of high school, and Emma, a year older, home for the weekend from her new house in Tacoma where she lives with two roommates and two staff people who care for them. The BFF looked better than when I left her in October—her face was cheery and her eyes bright. Her hug was as warm as her smile. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. And so was I.

Emma and her mom

Before we took the ferry home to B.I., as the locals call it, the BFF drove us all to Ikea in Renton, a place where they’ve spent lots of time in recent weeks, getting Emma’s new living space set up.

“How long have you been in your new house, Emma?” I ask in the car.

“Four weeks,” says Emma from the back seat. Then silence. I know that Emma is not big on spontaneous follow-up. I start to ask a question to prompt her, and she pipes up, “I like my house,” she says.

“Great!” I say. “I can’t wait to see it.”

I grin at the BFF, who nods at me with a half smile. She, too, is feeling better. Weekly acupuncture has helped. But living with cancer is not fun, no matter how you slice it. I know that for every day she is up and feeling relatively well, there will be corresponding down times, too. She’s had a lot of down times in the last six months.

Today is an up day. Today, it turns out, is also a knitting day, for later that evening, sitting up in bed, as we watch an older BBC series, the BFF starts knitting me a scarf. I have found in her ample stash of yarn some soft gray green wool the color of winter pine needles on this island. The BFF has taken up fat wooden needles and expertly casts on. By bedtime, she has five inches of new scarf trailing from them.

Scarf in progress.

We all go to sleep—two girls, two older BFFs and Sam—happy and warm, though it is literally freezing outside. If it were to rain tonight, we might awaken to snow on the ground in the morning.

The next day, too, is an up day, though the BFF rises to take her medications and goes back to bed around 9ish. By early afternoon, she is up and showered, and Emma is ready for her ride back to Tacoma. Maggie will spend the afternoon with a new friend—a boy, who is “not yet” a boyfriend, she tells us—watching a playoff football game that has everyone in this state ga-ga with excitement. The BFF, Emma and I load ourselves into the Prius for our drive south.

We make stops at Target and Trader Joe’s in Silverdale, and I notice the BFF looking weary as she pushes carts in the stores. She has said since before I arrived that tomorrow she hopes to make a trip to Port Townsend. Every time I visit, she talks about going to Port Townsend, just for a brief getaway, to visit a bookstore dedicated to writers. We have yet to make it to Port Townsend. My BFF has the biggest heart in the world, but her energy levels are not what she’d like them to be. I doubt that we’ll get out of the house tomorrow, much less to Port Townsend. But that’s OK. That’s why I’m here. To help with household things, to feed and walk Sam, to pick up Maggie from school, to be the other grownup in the house when the BFF’s husband is in California, working.

Emma at peace

At Emma’s house, we walk in with soup for the fridge and fresh flowers and a new Ikea vase for the table. There are two roommates and two staff people there, the young women in Emma’s life. To my surprise, the BFF takes to Emma’s room like a tornado, making her bed with new violet sheets, shaking out two duvets and an electric blanket. I hand Emma her half-consumed Orange Crush and a half sandwich from lunch for the mini fridge in her room. We retrieve bed pillows from the floor and replace them on the freshly made bed. Emma poses for a photo under the rainbow-striped flag she got on a family trip to Italy that says, “Pace.” Pah-chay. Peace. Oh, yes.

On the way home, the BFF and I retrieve Maggie, then open the door to a happy-to-see-us Sam. I feed him while the BFF whips up a wonderful supper of potato leek soup and cheese-y biscuits. After dinner, we tuck into episode 2 of this season’s “Downton Abbey.”

There is the sound of my BFF’s wooden needles clicking in the chair next to the sofa where I sit. There is big Sammy dog on his soft bed in front of the TV. There is the knowledge that one daughter is safe in her Tacoma home and the other is in the living room watching a different TV. There is a son in Utah in college. There are grown children in California with their families.

Though I know I will not see Port Townsend tomorrow, though I know tomorrow will be a day of rest for my BFF, I am not disappointed. I am happily here, safe and warm, too. I will take Sam for a walk on the beach. These are the ups and downs of love. We talk, we knit, we cook, we rest. We do it again. And we are oh, so, grateful, my BFF and I, for this time together. We would not trade it. Ever.

Amene, as the Hawaiians say. Ahhhh-men-ay.

I can hardly think about a new year. I’m sitting on the sofa, typing on the laptop, the detritus of Christmas just past in front of me on the coffee table–the cardboard rolls of ribbon, the tape dispenser, the marking pens and little sticky gift tags staring at me defiantly, as if to say, “When are you going to put us away?” (I realize that I may be projecting just a teeny little bit. I suspect the ribbon is not nearly so bitchy.) Combine that with two female cats (both spayed) in the house battling one another because I had the nerve to bring in the newest one a couple of months ago, which still has the queen cat royally pissed. I’m recovering from a cold, my feet are never truly warm in winter, and I could use a nap. So really, a new year just around the corner? A fresh beginning?

Well, yes, actually. It’s what we do in the last gray days of the year, which, truthfully, have held some nice bits of sunshine in between the storms… not a bad metaphor for what we’ve lived through and what’s to come. We get to start anew every day, of course. But like many people, I am not a fan of new year’s resolutions. I heard a psychologist on the radio today say it helps if you have people on your team to periodically remind you of your resolution (“so how’s that daily yoga plan working out?”). But I hate being reminded of what I’m not doing. It makes me feel guilty and nervous, and no one needs that on cold, dark days.

Nevada City poet Molly Fisk agrees with me. “Trying to improve ourselves in January is just silly,” she posted on her Facebook page. “In January, we should be sitting in front of the fire reading books or dozing, like the big mammals we are. Attempting to change ingrained habits when our brains are sluggish and it’s snowing is a set-up for abject failure.”

This led to Molly’s friend Jane’s idea for the new year: one word. Just one simple word that sets your intention for the year.

“This is something you can ruminate on before the fire or curled under your blankets just before you fall asleep,” Molly writes. “You can even turn it over in your mind while stacking firewood or replacing those pipes under the house that burst in the last freeze. Choosing a word doesn’t go against the seasonal requirements of your inner Grizzly.”

I like the sound of that. So the search begins: What’s my word? One year, Molly writes, hers was “surrender.” Another year it was “austere”–not meaning poverty so much as self-containment. Molly recommends looking up a good dictionary definition of your word, one that really rings for you. Immediately I realize that even if I can choose one word–one single, meaningful word–it’s likely to disappear in a cloud of life stuff.

“Sometimes you’ll forget your word,” Molly writes, “and need to be reminded… But it’s working on you nonetheless, whether you pay careful attention or not. You’re in a relationship with it that will unfold, as opposed to a resolution, which is more of a chore to be done: It’s a finite idea with no room for movement; it chides you.”

So in considering 2012, I’m now searching for my word. I’ve had seven months away from teaching this year, a sabbatical from heaven, which is a possible word–“sabbatical” (“any extended period of leave from one’s customary work, especially for rest, to acquire new skills, or training, etc.,” says dictionary.com). It’s from the Greek sabbatikós, which I like the sound of, too, and, of course, it also refers to the Sabbath as a day of rest and religious observance. Which, truly, this has been. Each day has been holy–and not just because I didn’t have to grade papers. But because I’ve gotten to sleep a whole lot and travel and be in service to others, a perfect blend of “for you” and “all about me,” which I love. A new edition of my book of poetry, “Companion Spirit,” was published in the fall. An agent loves my young adult novel and will send it out to possible publishers early in  2013. I have spent wonderful hours with dear friends, old and new, and written with wonderful people in my writing groups when I’ve been in town, and read and read and read pretty much anything I wanted. OK, I worked a little, editing some friends’ manuscripts of their forthcoming books, but that was wonderful, enriching reading, too.

Honestly, I can’t think of anything I would have done differently on this sabbatical. I’ve pretty much checked off most things on my “to do” list, except clean out my home office and bring the books in boxes up from the basement. But there’s still time for that, and friends are lined up to help with that, too.

I say this all the time: I have lived a charmed life, and I am beyond grateful for it. To the ancestors who came before me and left me so much, to the companion spirits who make their voices heard and presences felt, to my colleagues at the college, to my writing group folks who show up for each other and for me, to my loved ones who take care of me so well on the planet. I am one lucky, lucky woman.

There’s my word for 2013: Lucky. “Having or marked by good luck; fortunate.” Yep, that’s me. Don’t hesitate to remind me should I get whiny or crabby in, say, March or October.

What’s your word?

I have been negligent about posting in this blog for some time, as I have been reminded by one of my long-time supporters (thanks, Mom!), so I am posting my annual Christmas poem. Some of you may have gotten a copy from me, but here it is electronically… with a promise that I will post things more often!

———

We return thanks to the moon and stars, which have given
to us their light when the sun was gone.
—Iroquois prayer, circa 1800s

Light of the world

You’d think the earth slept in darkness until then,
that the sun lay banished just below the horizon,
stealthily traveling the circumference of the blue planet

like a great whale, never quite lifting its head
for a breath. That people shuffled instead
of picking up their feet, moved through a world

swathed in dusk and dust. Forgot “let there be light.”
Dismissed the candles that burned for eight days.
Darkness rained crow feathers across the sky.

Until she heard the news from an angel, who,
it is said, dazzled her with pyrotechnics
and beating wings. Until all her labors brought forth

the light of the world, swaddled: a love so new,
so dangerous, it could not survive. That it did,
with great tenderness, so bright and clear,

that this genius of spirit stays with us still,
has given light unto light, allowing us to vanish
into longing, like bare trees remembering leaves.

Jan Haag
Christmas 2012

Well, now. I got a birthday present when I came home from the recent travels that did my old heart good. Make that “gud.” It came from a friend in Colorado who reads the blog and who is herself a darn “gud wrtr,” too.

It arrived in a Land’s End bag that I was pretty sure I hadn’t ordered. But my heart leapt a bit when I saw it because I am a big Land’s End fan. Wear their swimsuits all the time. When I opened the bag and pulled out a big towel, I was surprised but even more so when I unfolded it.

Check it out:

I am grateful to Connie Raub, who had the great idea to get me a ginormous beach towel with the blog name on it. She is a woman I admire for many reasons, not the least of which is that she spent 30 years teaching music and history at junior high and high schools in Southern California. Rounding up and whipping into shape kids in high school. Junior high. Coaching them through school musicals and performances. Teaching social studies and world history, European history, U.S. history. In high school.

In 1997, she and her late husband Richard (a crackerjack community college choir director) retired to Colorado Springs.

Pike's Peak from Connie's living room.

Among other hobbies, he carved out hiking trails near their lovely home in the foothills below Pike’s Peak, painstakingly, with hand tools, for fun. Connie still lives there with two dogs and sings in local choirs and works as a freelance florist out of her home. (Go, Connie’s Creations!)

Connie going flower shopping

Though she has some of the prettiest hands and most perfect nails I have ever seen, she dons heavy gloves and wields a mattock, a pickax-like thing used for digging and chopping, helping to maintain Richard’s trails. And she’s taking hula lessons, too.

She is my hero. Not just for the towel but for all she does and the enthusiasm and good cheer with which she goes through life. I aspire to that kind of retirement one day—full of pursuits that enrich not only me but others, too.

And now, my BF, who came up with the GUD WRTR concept, can say that she has been published on a license plate and a towel.

Thank you, Connie!

All across Canada, the last weekend in July is a bank holiday–that is, the banks and governmental services shut down for a three-day weekend. But in Victoria, it’s more than a three-day weekend. It’s Symphony Splash weekend, this year nicely timed for the day after my birthday, which made me feel even more celebrated.

OK, really, they’re celebrating B.C. day, honouring their province, and this year the 100th anniversary of B.C. parks. But I felt honoured, too. (When in Canada, we spell in Canadian.)

The crowd on the causeway waiting for the annual Victoria Symphony Splash.

Imagine 40,000 people gathering outdoors around Victoria’s Inner Harbour to watch the diminutive Victoria Symphony play their hearts out (all 54 of them–I counted) under the direction of a small woman on a barge, for heaven’s sake. They’ve done this for 21 years in what has to be one of the biggest outdoor concerts on the West Coast of this continent. Rock concerts don’t generally attract that many people.

Did I mention that they play the Splash on a barge?

The Canadian Scottish Regiment Pipe and Drum Band with Victoria Symphony conductor Tania Miller in pedicab.

And the musicians parade across the grounds of the Parliament building in Victoria, led by the Canadian Scottish Regiment Pipe and Drum Band, through the crowd, down the causeway and climb up stairs (some of them with upright basses) to the stage. On a barge.

The Vic Symph on a barge with 11-year-old violin soloist Alice Haeyko Lee.

It looked rather like the hovering barge in the second “Star Wars” movie that Luke and Han used to spring Princess Leia from the clutches of Jabba the Hut. Only it was tethered in a seemingly too small space in a very tight harbour that made Dick and me say to each other, “How did they get that in there?” (Dick, by the way, who covered the Splash as if he was still working for a paper, while I sat in the bleachers. Whadda guy.)

This is even more impressive to someone who mourned the loss of the symphony in her town when it disbanded in 1997. We live in the capital city of California, and we can’t field a symphonic organization like this. And though a newer orchestra has regrouped in Sacramento, the Philharmonic is indeed smaller and plays perhaps four concerts a year.

The Victoria Symphony, in a much smaller city, just performed ten concerts over twelve days, culminating in The Splash. This year they will perform 200 times, an astonishing number for any musical organization.

And all this in a city of about 330,000 people. (Sacramento has three times the population.) Plus the Victoria Symphony (known as VS, for short) sponsors concerts for kids, a new composers workshop for young people, youth volunteers as well as adult ones, young performers, a speakers bureau and (this is my favourite) an instrument petting zoo. You can go pet a clarinet, if you like. In public.

So they put on this big pops concert, and Dick sprung for the expensive seats in the bleachers set up on Belleville Street in front of the Parliament building. It was very festive–lots of Victorians out and about waving free little B.C. flags, wearing temporary B.C. flag tattoos, and sporting moose ears in honor of the parks’ 100th anniversary.

An honorary Canadian celebrating B.C. Day at the Splash.

People everywhere. Ev-ree-where. And, this being Canada, one of the most polite huge crowds you’ve ever seen. Apparently, on Canada Day (July 1), the crowds have gotten rowdy and in some cases violent, breaking store windows even. But on Splash Day, all was genteel. People even shut up so we could all hear the orchestra play a nice program of mostly pops music. Really. Very little crowd noise.

The Splash crowd on the lawn of the Ledge, the Parliament building.

The star of the evening was an 11-year-old violinist named Alice Hayeko Lee, who wowed 40,000 people with the first movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto No. 1. She looked pretty cute onstage in her little white dress with pink sweater (and orange tennies, which maestra Tania Miller pointed out to the crowd). From the first notes of that concerto, Alice had our attention, and we all forgot how cute she was and listened instead to a young master coax stunning music out of her instrument.

The orchestra also debuted a new piece by an 18-year-old composer, Jared Richardson, called “Winds of Kananaskis,” a county outside Banff National park in Alberta. Seventeen years old. He composed it when he was 15, just one of 70 pieces he’s written.

Sheesh.

The concert ended with a very show-offy finale that never fails to please even the most clueless or the most jaded about classical music: the 1812 Overture, complete with cannon and fireworks.

The finale of the Splash: the 1812 Overture and fireworks!

It’s hard not to get jazzed when the sky is shot through with color and the orchestra swings into the final part of that number–the chimes chiming and the trumpets blaring. People were on their feet cheering and stomping their feet, whistling. It was a happy group of people, lemme tell you, their problems forgotten for an evening of great music with their community.

This is what music does, if you let it. It can grab you by the ears and say, “Listen. Feel this.” People who have never experienced a fabulous symphony orchestra miss this. The people of Victoria get it.

And, not incidentally, by 8 a.m. the next day, the barge had disappeared from the Inner Harbour, as had all the signs and bleachers. Dick went on walk-about and took photos to prove it. There was not a speck of garbage anywhere on the lawn of the Ledge in front of the Parliament building. Some 400 volunteers did that. This is Canada. They clean up well and fast here.

Bravo!

For those of you suffering with unbearable heat in places like, say, Sacramento or Texas or anyplace on the East coast, I’m going to suggest that you might want to pass on reading this post. It might make you a little jealous or hostile. On the other hand, if you want to look at the following image and imagine yourself in this lovely spot in the middle of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, it might reduce your blood pressure a bit and make you feel just a bit cooler. Go ahead. Look:

Lake Crescent on a July morning

This is Lake Crescent, Washington. If I am very good and work my butt off over the course of a school year, I get to have about two months off each summer. In 1999, way back in the previous century, Dick and I “discovered” this place in the way that people think they’re the first ones to find some idyllic spot. We had decamped to Victoria, B.C. (my first time in that lovely city) not long after Dick’s mom had died, seeking refuge and solace, as well as cooler weather. While there, we read in a tourist mag about Lake Crescent. On a whim, Dick called and secured lodging in a historic cabin for a couple of nights, thinking that “it looked kinda pretty in the pictures.” Whoa, baby, was that an understatement. Take another look here:

Lake Crescent Lodge, dusk

This is the lodge built in 1916 by a guy named Al Singer who decided, I suppose, that this was the perfect lakeshore spot for one. He was right. It’s still there, along with some outlying buildings that total only 52 guest rooms in this sweet spot. So getting a place to stay there can be tricky. Especially if you dilly-dally about making vacation plans till, say, June, and you want to be there in late July. Which is what happened this year. But I hang with the master vacation planner (no one can pack as much stuff into the trunk of an Accord as Dick Schmidt, baby), who has the best travel karma of anyone I know.

Dick Schmidt on the Lake Crescent Lodge pier

With many persistent phone calls and calendar juggling, he made it happen: three nights at Lake Crescent. For which I am deeply grateful. Especially in light of recent water pipe breakages at my house in Sacramento, if you’ve been reading previous posts. (God bless you, Sonya, for handling all that. Can we send you here as a thank you?) Here’s another Dickie photo (have I said that he is the best photographer I know, up close and personal? or how lucky I am that he likes to travel with me?):

Watercraft on Lake Crescent

Here’s another reason I love to return here. If you look at the photo atop my blog, that’s me, writing–working on a novel, actually–in the sunporch of the Lake Crescent Lodge at dusk, which, in summer, can easily run till 9:30 p.m. I wrote big chunks of the novel set in British Columbia on that sunporch. I am tweaking it still on this trip late at night, alone on that sunporch. It is a heavenly place for me to get my work done. Also, the Lake Crescent gaggle of Canada geese inspired a scene in that novel. No geese this year. Don’t know where the flock’s got to. Just these guys:

It’s a place that works for me as a writer, and I can never have too many of those getaway spots. My friend Pat Schneider, founder of the Amherst Writers and Artists method, is fond of saying that writers need to get away at least once a year to a place where they can relax, recharge and then write. “Spend the first three days sleeping,” she advises. “Then, and only then, can you start your work.” I didn’t sleep for all of the first three days at Lake Crescent, but I sure did take a long nap every afternoon. Woke up from one nap with the beginnings of a poem buzzing around in my head–always a sign that my mind has finally gone on vacation, too, and that it can finally hear the creative parts that want to be put on the page.

This, for someone who spends way too much time dealing with the minutae of life rolling around the brain cells (and I know I’m not alone in that), is what vacation is to me. People tease me about taking my laptop with me on vacation.

Yep, this is what I do...

It’s not that I need to check the email as much as I needneedneed to be able to capture stuff that hasn’t been able to be written for the rest of the year. I am grateful for the company of my Saturday writing group, for the space and encouragement those writers offer me to put words on the page. Without them, I think I would be a much unhappier creative person with far fewer spaces in my life to do writing. But this–this is the time when I know, as Tess Slesinger, a terrific author put it in her good short story, “A Life in the Day of a Writer”:

I am a writer if I never write another line. I am alive if I never step out of this room again. Christ, oh, Christ, the problem is not to expand a feeling, but to condense a feeling–all thought, all ecstasy–tangled and tumbled in the empty crowded head of a writer, to one clear thought, one clear form, and still preserve the enormity, the hugeness, the unbearable all-at-onceness of being alive and knowing it, too.

Amen.

This may look like I’m fishing for presents, or at least birthday greetings, but it’s not. It’s just that not only does July 30 happen to be my birthday (the 53rd this year, if you’re keeping track), but it also happens to be my niece Lauren’s (24–happy birthday, sweetie!) and that of my across-the-street neighbor, Sonya (70), who looks fabulous. I’m not nearly as gorgeous now, let alone when I’m 70. Yet I love Sonya, who is also a great friend.

Sonya might tell you that it’s also the birthday of the daughter of her former next-door neighbor, and I would add that I know at least two other people born July 30 (but I can’t for the life of me remember who they are now). It’s a good day for a birthday.

Actually, it’s a perfect birth day, I’ve always thought. (Thanks, Mom!) I showed up weeks early, apparently, because even in utero I coveted a mid-summer birthday, almost perfectly positioned for swim or water skiing parties at the lake next door. It falls in that time between the end of one school year and the beginning of another, and it is no accident that now, as a middle-aged person (I guess I am living to be 100 then), I try to be out of town on vacation on our birthday.

Not that I don’t want to celebrate with friends and family, but I love being out in the world at this time of summer. Even at Lake Crescent, where it is often gray and chilly, which it was yesterday. Today, however, the sun is shining, turning the lake a color I can only describe as azure, the breeze is blowing softly, moving high, wispy clouds high over Pyramid Mountain.

But I digress. The point here is that Sonya, my loyal, across-the-street neighbor for the past 24 summers, is woman-ing the home front in my absence. She usually does, God bless her, as I do for her when she’s out of town. Typically that consists of Sonya running across the street a couple of times a day to feed my tribe of cats, or me doing the same for her single boy named Dakota.

Sonya Hunter, best neighbor ever

Unfortunately for Sonya, this summer’s vacation began with discovering a small lake on the north side of my house that was suspected to be a sprinkler leak but turned out to be a major water line break. Since I left town, Sonya has been jockeying between Paul the yard guy and great fix-it man, who has been removing stray privets and other invaders, and Ed the plumber, who called me this morning to give me the bad news.

“I can fix the break,” he said in that way that always makes me think that’s not the best idea, “or I can replace the whole line.” Pause to let that sink in; I imagined the dollars that go with each option. “It’s the original water line.” Pause as I did the math: house built in 1921; it’s now 2011… good heavens, that line is almost 90 years old!

“Replace the whole line,” I said, and I could hear Ed sigh, whether in relief or not I couldn’t tell. More work for him, but it has to be done.

“OK,” Ed said. “It’ll be done by the time you get home.”

So in the meantime, to feed and water my cats, Sonya has to import water from her house, check on the (diminishing) lake on the side, still find a way to water plants on the deck and by the garage, and, and, and…

And she’s turning 70 this week, too. Did I say how wonderful she looks? She looks fahhhh-booo-lous. And she is equally fabulous on the inside, too. Truly!

Sonya, this is a public birthday greeting and thank you. All the flowers and gifts I might send can’t adequately convey my gratitude to you, dear neighbor and friend, for all you do for me and mine. You deserve a fabulous getaway or celebration on our day. And we will celebrate when I return home to a new water pipe and far less foliage on one side of my house. (Thanks, Ed and Paul!)

Mahalo nui loa for making my annual birthday vacation possible, for being the best neighbor/pal a gal could have! I owe you a big one!

I can’t believe how easy it is to make butter.

This is not a metaphor. I’m talking literal butter here, the kind you spread on good, home-baked bread, like the kind my BF makes.

It’s really no big deal.

Georgann and the snazzy Kitchen-Aid makin' butter.

A pint of cream and a serious mixer (the BF’s is a honkin’ red Kitchen-Aid). Turn on mixer. Stand back and watch liquid become butter. Stop the blade from turning like a bad carnival ride. Spatula the sides of the metal bowl. At some point, the butter begins to leak (what else?) buttermilk. That’s how you know it’s done.

This is what I learned from my BF this week at her new home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, known locally as BI: Butter is a breeze. And the sun shines every day on BI.

I believe the first one because I saw it. But as for the second… I know the Pacific Northwest. The sun, most emphatically, does not shine every day. Well, maybe it does behind the clouds. But the BF loves the clouds and the mist; this is her kind of weather. Which comes from spending too much time in Wales, I think. Or San Francisco. Or Pacific Grove. All places she called home for a time.

But the BF, husband Ron and daughter Emma have forsaken Sacramento, her hometown and now mine, for BI. And who can blame them? Sacramento in the summer can fry you. Her new place, dripping with pines and so much green you can taste it, suits her, as she likes to say, down to the ground. She is beyond happy. I have rarely seen her so happy. And she deserves this.

I mean, check out this house.

Ron, Emma and Georgann Turner at their new home on Bainbridge Island, Washington

It’s a cute-as-spit two-story with a front porch at the end of a cul de sac that runs into forest on two sides. Deer emerge from the greenery across the street and disappear into it like the baseball players in “Field of Dreams.” It’s beautifully furnished (Ikea rocks!) and, though they’ve been there a little over a month, the house feels cozy and settled, as if they’ve been islanders for years.

It helps that they rented it from people who have decamped to Norway for a year or two and left them with some furnishings and a nicely tended yard. But still, there are BF touches all over the place–notably the red accent pieces in the black and white kitchen. “It’s a newspaper!” I said.

“Black and white and red all over?” she said, peering into the mixing bowl as butter was being made.

She gets me. “Yeah!” I said.

Georgann, Ron and Emma spent two afternoons touring Dick and me around their new island: to their local public beach, which is about forty feet long (homeowners with beachfront property apparently have possession of the beach, too). To the harbour (Canadian spelling on the sign because they’re so close, I guess) to watch the ferry dock through a sea of masts. To Bay and Hay Feed, which is also a nursery and cafe, clothing store and lunch spot–not to mention an actual feed store. To Eagle Harbor Book Co., where I redeemed my birthday gift certificate for books by local authors. To the local museum, which currently has an exhibit of Ansel Adams’s photos of Manzanar, a WWII internment camp (some 227 Bainbridge Islanders were interned there).

Georgann and Jan at Fort Ward State Park, Bainbridge Island

To Fort Ward State Park to walk Sam, their sweet golden retriever.

And at the end of the second afternoon, after lunch at Cafe Nola and picking up groceries at Town and Country, we headed home to practice Skype-ing (a new thing for me) and start dinner. The butter-making came first.

After it becomes butter in the mixer, it begins to separate. “Into what?” I said.

“Butter and buttermilk,” said the BF.

“Wait. It starts as cream, then becomes butter, then goes back to liquid?” My mind boggled. Chemistry in action.

“Yep,” said the BF, stopping the mixer to show me. Sure enough, a milky liquid in the bottom of the bowl. “We save this and make biscuits with it.”

Labeling the buttermilk next to the brand new butter.

She scooped the butter out of the bowl and mashed it around like Play-Doh, rinsing it under running water, squeezing it, then rinsing it again. Then she plopped it in a small bowl, poured the buttermilk into a lidded jar and labeled it.

“That’s it? Butter?” I said. “No salt? Nothing else?” I tried to imagine our foremothers with a churn, turning and turning all that cream. It must have taken forever. They must have had forearms and biceps like pitchers.

“That’s it,” she said.

And it was. Simple. Clean. Easy. More things in life should be that way. Perfect on her homemade bread, which Ron offered to Dick as a pre-dinner snack. He smacked his lips in appreciation. And we inhaled the pasta carbonara the BF made later, too–more cream and onions and bacon over linguine. Good salad. The exquisitely simple bread and butter.

So I am happy to see the BF so happy. It made me forget for a while that she has moved two states away to begin a new life. It helped me forget the year and a half she spent so sick, recovering sllllloooooowwwwwly from cancer surgery. It reminded me again of how lucky she is to have this second chance–or maybe fifth or tenth, she says–to start over in a new place that suits her down to the (very wet) ground.

I had feared that an era had ended. But, as she has assured me, our friendship will not end.

The BFFs on BI

It began twenty-three years ago writing letters when she attended college in Wales. Now, instead of aero-grams, we will email and Skype. It will take on a new form, like turning cream into butter.

The sun may not shine every day on BI. But the BF is shining on her path to wellness. She is the sunflower lifting its head to the light, the bird tweeting a song from the depths of its grateful heart. And that makes me very, very happy, too.

I awoke this morning in Vancouver, Washington, in a big, soft bed with a line from a song in my head: “We take so much for granted when so much comes free.”

It’s a great song, “Falling in Love in America,” written by someone I’m proud to call a friend. But then, Antsy McClain calls all his fans “friends.” He’s the lead singer guy of the Trailer Park Troubadours, and he and the Troubs played their first gig in Portland last night at a charming old refurbished theater called the Alberta Rose. They rocked the joint, even if they didn’t pack it (“the Trailer Park what?” said the polyester-clad Antsy onstage, resplendent in a blue plaid sport coat and two-tone shoes). And yes, Portlanders didn’t know the Troubs before 8 p.m. July 22, but some of them did by 11 p.m., lemme tell ya. And they were laughing on their way out the door.

Antsy does this–puts smiles in our hearts every time he takes the stage with songs both goofy and touching–from the opening “One Less Trailer Here in Pine View Heights” to, yes, “Falling in Love in America,” which he calls his “love song to America.” That it is. And you can’t not love a guy who sings about and lives by the Aluminum Rule: Thou shalt enjoy the ride. Amen!

Antsy and Polly Esther McClain

(Every so often, Antsy’ll shout out during the show, “Gimme a big amen!” And the crowd–even the newbies–always responds, “AMEN!”)

And I didn’t know how much I needed that “amen” and those goofy and touching songs until last night. It’s been a year of change and loss, and the grief of so much of that has just hit me… now that I’m finally on vacation, now that I’ve allowed someone I love to drag me out of town for the seventeen days. (Thanks, Dickie!) We’re driving north to two places we love–Lake Crescent, Wash., and Victoria, B.C.–where I wrote and researched much of a novel that is now done and is looking for a home publisher. We will visit friends along the way, like Antsy and his lovely wife Polly Esther and their Troubs buddies last night. And I’m amused to note that this surprises me: I didn’t know how much I needed this break from my regular life.

When I sit and think about all that’s happened in the last six months, I’m a little surprised. Not that I didn’t feel it as it was happening–I did. But the cumulative effect of so much change stuns me.

I was lying in bed this morning as a screamingly lovely sunny day blossoms outside, and I made a list:

• I broke my left foot in February in the little trailer where I teach, moving too quickly (me?) from one room to another. Klutzy me fell off my clogs–stupid clogs–and I spent 12 weeks in a knee-high boot, part of it on a kneelie-wheelie scootin’ around, trying to be patient with healing.

• A dear friend from my second newspaper job, Brian Hamlin, died six months after a diagnosis of stomach cancer. He was the light and heart of The Reporter newsroom in Vacaville, known for leaving funny notes and, for some reason, rubber rats on people’s desks. He mentored more young journalists than anyone I know.

• My BFF picked up and decamped from Sacramento, moving herself and husband and two daughters to Bainbridge Island. After two years of illness that has had her in bed much of the time, this is a great move for the newer, healthier Georgann.

• I spent time sitting in a chemo suite and going to some of her radiation treatments with another dear friend, a woman who has been a second mother to me, diagnosed early this year with lung cancer. Ruth Rita did not lose her hair until the very end of the ordeal, which, I think, is a testament to her tenacity.

• I finished up a 17-year stretch of advising a literary journal I created at the college where I teach. Next year, a new advisor will help a new group of students create Susurrus, which means “a light whispering or rustling sounds; a murmur.”

• Another friend, Judy Parke, who has battled breast cancer for the past five years, died in early July. It had spread to her liver and bones and brain, and she fought that disease with a ferocity I have not often seen. We sat together during some of her infusions in a hospital chemo suite, me writing in a journal as she talked story to me, both of us drinking her favorite peppermint tea. She used every means she could find in traditional and alternative medicine to keep herself alive, and she did it for five years. Judy will always be, to me, the poster girl for metastasized breast cancer.

In all those difficulties there were blessings, of course: I did not have to have surgery or so much as a cast on my broken foot. It has healed nicely, thank you, and it reminded me how lucky I am to be, as I often tell doctors, chronically healthy. I was fortunate to visit Brian a few times before he made it home to be with his family in his last days. I had one of the best Susurrus classes EVER and fabulous assistance from a volunteer writing coach (thanks, Katie!), a terrific designer (bravo, Laura!) and a fine manuscript wrangler (mahalo, April!). I have spent more time with my BFF in and out of Sacramento since she moved (we’ll see her tomorrow on her new island, in fact). Ruth Rita has finished her treatments and is home resting and recovering.

And I was fortunate to be with my friend Judy in the last two weeks of her life, holding her hand, stroking her forehead and temples, singing to her. One of those songs was “Scrapbook,” an Antsy McClain tune, as a matter of fact, with the memorable line: “I won’t cry because it’s over; I’ll smile because it was.”

That’s where I am today… smiling because it was. Every so often a student will write in a journal or a paper something about “taking things for granite.” It always makes me smile–me, the girl who grew up in a place called Granite Bay. It’s become a metaphor to me for the rock that underpinned my early years, the spine-stiffener that holds me up, even when I forget it’s there.

It is my mantra for this trip–and beyond, I hope. It’s the kind of thing that Antsy McClain might put in a song.

Ansty and Hot Rod Todd

Indeed he did: “We take so much for granted when so much comes free.”

Thanks for the reminder, the music, the lifting of my spirit last night, Antsy. I’m not takin’ stuff for granite. I am beyond grateful for my lucky, lovely life; for people who love me and take good care of me; for the good friends and great experiences that have added up to the me who is typing this now in the big, soft bed.

Gimme a big amen!

(Thanks to R.D. Schmidt for the new photos! He rocks!)