Here in Chiloquin the Shell Station gets the Oregonian newspaper, except on Sundays and Mondays. The mail people bring the paper, so it makes sense we can't get the paper Sundays, but the Monday missing paper is a mystery. The clerk behind the counter with the plastic wrapped muffins on it told me sometimes the Oregonian doesn't get here cuz the Oregonian people are late and the mail people can't wait.

September 23, 2009 Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

Scared to be paired, you stomp
the street in your ratty coat, owl
hoot out the back window, awl
in your hand, not ready to accede
to what you don't understand:
area of Mobius strip, weevil path.
You don't believe in evil, sky
brightening, door bolted, humanity
on the other side of the road. Is art
the only answer you have? Pascal
in velvet cloak, no camera snap,
but you're held rapt by any story.

Sunny and warm in Chiloquin, Oregon,
I'm once again at the back table at the library
checking email and listening to conversations
between the librarian and whoever comes in.
I arrived Saturday, in time to meet my landlord
at 10am. The new house is on Agency Lake.
ON AGENCY LAKE. Out my window are
cottonwoods and beyond them AGENCY LAKE.
This morning I took out one of the kayaks -
sadly the one branded "Emotion" is too large,
but I wore the radiation yellow life vest
and once I was afloat - butt in the boat,
then feet tucked in and no turning turtle,
I was level with abundant water bird life
and the whutter of wings as flocks lifted
to set down further from my whisper paddles.
I set off towards the Wood River Wetlands,
until recently somebody's farm reclaimed
from wetlands, water drained and a dyke
put in place which was dynamited to restore
the wetlands - "Only in Klamath County"
my informant told me. Ah but the result!
I paddled over algae green water, then
over water browned by peat, keeping my
eye on the broken peak that once continued
up as Mt. Mazama. On the water were
what looked like two rafts of white pelicans
so far and so immobile I began to doubt
and thought them first duck blinds and
later chalk graffiti, though they were
two rafts of white pelicans, dozens in
each, and three posed on an underwater
island closer to me, one of which fumbled
into flight and joined one of the rafts.
I didn't get close enough that they would
all take wing, deciding to leave them
to their fishing and visiting, while I
turned back to my house. I panicked
momentarily. How would I recognize
where I'd come from? I remembered
the large green house I'd walked past
yesterday, very close to shore. If I
got to that I'd know I'd gone too far.
It took me nearly an hour to reach
the pelicans, maybe twenty minutes
to get back to the cabin, where I
successfully disembarked without
falling into the lake, losing neither
kayak nor paddle.

Scattered every which way
every room humped with mess in progress
brain hot with synapse fire
mired mainly in too much to do
no time to see it through (no will
most of the year to do) And how
are you?

Is there a wonderful new feature on blogger that disallows you to copy and paste, even from your own blog, even when logged in? This will reduce my paranoid fantasy that other people are copying my blog poem drafts, recrafting them and making millions in the frenzied money making world of international poetry. Someone has written a book entitled FINANCIAL LIVES OF THE POETS. Jess Walter. Coming to the U Village Barnes & Noble on September 22. I'll be in Chiloquin, Oregon. But you could go. Will he speak about Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot? Period? Subtitle: The Music of Failure. An actual book. My current favorite title. Not about poets and finance. I was going to quote myself from early 2006 but I'll leave this.

Texas Crazy Ants aka Rasberry ants are real. Also Caribbean Crazy Ants. Their generic names: paratrechnia species near pubens and paratrechina pubens. See their blog.

Moisture Ants Are One Thing

But when Texas Crazy Ants amass
we flee, cow poke congressman or co-ed
grab skivvies and our horn rims
run for the hills "Not it!" "NOT IT!"
we choose our molten thoughts in lieu
of creativity. We'll go you know - atop
the onion domes of former Doodyville
nurse ants ferry larva and we're nada
how's that gotta carve your melon?
You're hell on wheels, ants smile
whether Lancaster and Ewing
you won't be doing what you're doing
when Texas Crazy Ants scramble
like the anarchists they are. Fazed?
oh I suppose. I'm scared
this drama is worse than opera
larvae nurseries in mailbox, vases,
so we retreat with diddly squat
trot off as these ants carom
harem scarem over every place
obliterate your face not even in a rage
I may exagerrate a tad
hordes eat hot dogs and your honey
and also honey bees. Oh, jeeze.

9/10/09 Daily Crossword Puzzle Poetry Draft


Ballet pink I find to my dismay is passe
though who am I to know, my toes enclosed
in solid shoes and this a pedicure?
She diligently saws at dried out skin
as I doze, an oaf like hobbit Astin
until the flip flops and I shuffle off
a pretty city girl about to head to RFD
these shrimp boat OPI dyes affect
a happy change from grumpy to belief
I'm just the chick to change the clime
for kids whose crappy hands aren't dealt
for keeps for good and all and all the heft
their tragedies that tend to other ports
than mine and time declares a truce
is there a use in all of this? You bet
or sing me arias from Carmen.
You trip and scramble far as
anyone can go and still you have an ear
for injustice even when it's not sci fi.
But why (we're talking of Antietam)
do the rapists claim the staff of life?
Point at the chart say fish will spawn
again and all your bitching's moot.

9/9/09 (!!!!) Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft

If only life made sense like math
the satisfying grids and graphs
no fool's grin to make you ache
or take you, just one long hora
hour after hour, no Eva or Evita
yelling in your ear, a peer
appearing when predicted halts
and bows and hey it's Parker
or Joe you like or maybe Bob
if you want it snow, no Bozo
Mr. Green Jeans, Captain Kan-
garoo appearing by the Erie
but dearie this ain't true you
got that neurosthemia mold
those Irene blues bed all red
and you know who has landed
your nephew uncle lover son
have done what no man done
before so you're a whore Bebe
Jeeze they'd never if not teased
ah please court date soon in re
who asked you it's after nine
sine wave calculus bestow

---

Some days its yay hurray
others it's oh brother

---

Moving back into our house, this is no poem, it's real and I don't want to strip sheets and mattress pads, sort towels, vaccuum, make sure we're where we should be financially etc. I want to stare into the sky and look at my fingers and have the duties my granddaughter has - just figuring out how to use this amazing engine that runs me. Sigh.

Poem Draft from the Wenatchee World Daily Crossword Puzzle for this Tuesday's WW


Well, I'm finking out on writing this poem, can't stop thinking about other things, especially since the first two "words" across are "kwh" and "tsp" and the third is the flat and unmusical "chow". How now brown cow where's your chow? Chew your chow now, won't thou? Sheesh.

Last evening, moon waxing gibbous (god I love to write that word), over the lake flat as seran wrap stretched over a bowl of really great leftover potato salad, Jim said, "let's take a boat ride," and we got into our boat with UNDERWORLD by Don DeLillo. Duh. We've begun to read it as a read aloud. We've had several halts on the read aloud front lately. The 1951 Dodgers vs. Yankees? Mets? crap, I loved the scene, but baseball team names fall from my consciousness like factual details so often do for me. Every trip down lake is a revelation - I don't remember the coastline, the mountain peaks. I do remember the Seuss house and the house with the Hobie Cats out front, the property with the fussy gazebo and mobile home by the shore. What else do we need to be happy along the lake? I forget constellations and which direction the earth rotates. I have the eye of imagination but the eye of organization has miazmal glaucoma. I'm reading Ruth Gendler's NOTES ON THE NEED FOR BEAUTY, which has a lovely bit about eyes. She cites an essay in Bill Holm's book, THE MUSIC OF FAILURE, which I immediately looked up on Powell's (no show) and then Amazon.com, where it is available for $38. Um, the credit card went back into the duct tape wallet at that point. If anyone owns the book and wants to photocopy the essay "Horizontal Grandeur" I'll pay for the copying and postage! The piece I'm going to quote really hit me since I'm going back to the high plains of Chiloquin, Oregon for nine weeks on the 18th. Here's the passage I underlined from Ruth's NOTNFB:

In a brief, beautiful essay, "Horizontal Grandeur," Minnesota writer Bill Holm distinguishes between two ways of seeing, which he calls "the prairie eye" and "the woods eye." "The prairie eye looks for distance, clairty, and light; the woods eye for closeness, complexity, and darkness. The prairie eye looks for usefulness and plainness in art and architecture, the woods eye for the baroque and ornamental."

Holm describes how someone with a woods eye looks at twenty miles of prairie and sees nothing but grass. The one with a prairie eye "looks at a square foot and sees a universe; ten or twenty flowers and grasses, heights, heads, colors, shades, configurations, bearded, rough, smooth, simple, elegant. When a cloud passes over the sun, colors shift, like a child's kaleidoscope... Trust a prairie eye to find beauty and understate it truthfully, no matter how violent the apparent exaggeration. Thoreau, though a woodsman, said it right: 'I can never exaggerate enough.'"

On the next page, she writes : "Because by nature I readily identify with the eye of the imagination, I have been deeply moved by exercises that strengthen the eye of observation."

It is easy for me to depend on my eye of imagination and my quick facility, but these limit what I write and what I think about - wall off possibilities and make it easy for me to stumble downward into not seeing anything at all. I'm always having to haul myself up out of the awful well I've fallen into because I wasn't paying attention. Did you hear the "This American Life" segment on cruelty? I listened as a man began a story about he and a group of friends out playing, hearing a man weakly calling out, having heard them. He set up how wordlessly the lot of them, after an initial burst of rescue motions, chose not to help him or tell anyone. I couldn't stand listening. The tension was horrible; I could not hang with the story, couldn't bear the thought that man might have died for lack of rescue by those boys. As a little girl I could not watch "I Love Lucy" once the plot began in earnest. I jumped up and ran to my room as my parents sat and guffawed, smoking their headache causing cigarettes, my father in that green chair with the coppery brads making a border up the vertical fronts of the chair arms. Dreading something awful in the offing I retreat. I label myself emotional coward. I am cowed by emotions and events that have nothing to do with me. Worse when they HAVE something to do with me. My father is 84 years old. His doctor recently said, "You look like a man of 60 and you're robustly healthy, outside of the strokes." My father says, "I sometimes wonder what I will be when I grow up." Is it a family trait to put off till tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow since we look so much younger than others our age that we really might have that much more time, or maybe all the time in the world? Maybe we like Highlander are IMMORTAL, though I would hate to have to be on my guard all the time, have to sword fight my way to permanent immortality, the immortality even being conditional. So what you hung out with Mozart? Today I lop off your head and get stronger! I move toward The Gathering getting more warlike every encounter! RARRRR! Immortality does not convey maturity. And see how far I've wandered?

Looking at Jupiter through our bad telescope, we could see one of its moons. Jim said, "people used to call the planets 'The Wanderers.'"

After a meditative moment enjoying that phrase, I thought how I've lived all these years and have never particularly noticed planets. I haven't had to of course, my life doesn't depend on the night sky for navigation by land or sea or even within my imagination. My thoughts garble in the day's news, other people's needs, and I need a post-it note to remind me to look up on a clear night, to lie on the ground and stare into that vastness and marvel if not remember or even note what's up there in a naming/knowledge way.

Yesterday Jim harvested several of our tomatoes and many of our basil leaves. I'd remembered to buy fresh mozzerella at the Chelan Safeway, so we made caprese salad, mozzerella slab, basil leaf, tomato slice, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar, eaten on our deck staring at the placid lake, the wild mountain the other side of it, feeling the air so perfectly the right temperature it felt soft and no temperature at all. And then I awoke to Jim shutting windows and the french door, rain slapping the trex deck, smell of newly wet cement, Thor rolling his bowling balls along the lanes above the bruised clouds.

September 2, 2009 Newsday Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft


Hey you in balaclava drinking java
thick as lava, wanker' to my banker's urge
one hand is flush with spades and clubs
the other out in orbit or Hanoi
you excavate my foundation
like crustaceon or yeast, no east
to orient your beast, or is it me?
What I say is less than what I see
seems to me wit separates us from nit
but I digress. You bet me odd or even
we both know we'll never be on par
you at the bar me Carrie Nation avid
do you believe in gravitas? At our age
we should rage but we're too small.

Seattle Times Daily Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft
September 1, 2009


As Sly Stone said you don't have to be a star
baby but those were the days before eBay
when you knew a blackberry by the thorn
and porn was Playboy not plastic to ogle
blue lit online. Nobody's avatar sang alto
your identity equaled you tap tap no erase
you knew your place and everybody died


---

for the second day in a row our neighbors at the idyllic *SIGH* lake are having their septic tank pumped. This is very very very loud and my brain is ahum with the thrum of the motor sucking muck from underground two doors down. What an awful soul-snatching sound. Omnipresent as mosquito hum in the middle of the night, reverberating off the mountains on the opposite shore, pounding through my pores like guilt or fear of the dark. They don't admit defeat these neighbors and whatever is wrong with the plumbing - sludge coming up into the kitchen sink or a stink behind the house after a washload - they will wrestle it into submission through whatever noisy and neighborhood disturbing means money can put at their disposal. Disposal is a problem here where nothing untoward must fall into the lake, though make no mistake these folks put plenty they shouldn't into the lake. Their lawn in the desert uplands along Lake Chelan could be a putting green. Men don't only come to mow and loudly weed whack the perimeter, they pour onto it nitrogen and potassium soon to be to dear to add to crops and that other p chemical my mind is too full of hideous hum to come up with. It sounds like a plane coming in to land on a tether to stop it landing so that the jets perpetually fret just above the runway right next to our house.

8/28/09 Daily Crossword Poem Draft


If beauty hired district reps
and all the world was stage
you'd drop crutch and soar
let's listen as we hum our tune
as good for us as daily fiber
so what the traffic's daily roar
they're out for blood? We stroll
and loll and all, we seek relief
from grief and wave our flag
a rag as clean as any and solid
as the scraggy hat we doff
to anyone who stops lenient
as all who lean and loaf at ease
and these are all the arenas
needed. Pines don't cost a cent
and we've sent back the modem

Daily Crossword Puzzle Draft 8/25/09


In the days when armpits were arid
in all the streams squacked fowls
far away where air was clean and char
was for marshmallows we made
our mothers sent our food to India
davenots and grammas all lace
doilies, arms shivery not to ogle
though we did possessed by demon
and most of my dinner was on me
we wept but kept going
and now it's we who've aged
photobooks yellowing spent
like broken teeth as we reseat
at the hat dance at the fiesta
whoever's at the altar isn't us
and all history is ours to amend
as we attend to other woes than ours
for all we preen we won't be seen
for long so grab your uke
and sing another sec
who wants to find that sketch
he made when you lay nude
and all your bits stood firm

Participated in a Five Strokes poetry happening (sorry - 60's language, but it WAS!) at SAM Thursday night. Four poets, a stack of sumi painted art critique pages, a microphone, clipboards, blank paper and pencils (no pens in the galleries, alas.) We were situated in the SAM Next room - first exhibit: photographs by Corin Hewitt that resulted from an installation he did for a week in 2007 at the Portland Art Museum. All about gesture and pasta, and I hadn't eaten any dinner.

Writing poems, gesturing towards or in the direction of poems from the words on the art critique pages and the sumi gesture paintings was not a problem, was familiar, was enjoyable. I love to write in company with other poets. We were a bit of an art installation, some on the floor, some on the gallery bench, all hunched over our writing.

Our instructions were to go to the mic and talk about the process we went through to write each poem as we completed the gesture toward a poem. This was complicated. We couldn't then read the poems aloud, but had to lay them on the floor and return to writing. I stood at the microphone, turned it on, looked out and was surrounded by other human beings - audience! - but how to connect with audience with no poem? How to talk honestly about process while trying to connect with audience with no rehearsal, no product to share? Was I supposed to pretend they weren't there? Our commentary was being broadcast in the main lobby. Was my job even to try to connect or only to report? I gave a report. I didn't look at anybody after the initial reflexive hello and smile. I felt guilty having cheated audience of an expectation that I would perform. I felt like a middle schooler. Each time I got up to present, I used larger words to explain my process, at least I felt that I did. I separated. I only marginally listened to my fellow poets present. At the end I read their poems on the floor. I was the only one to gesture at signing my name. I'd signed "lg" to my first couple of poems, then noticed nobody else was attaching attributions, so I quit. I took some of the sets home, they're beside me on this desk. Not because I wanted to save them but because I didn't want Greg to have to fuss with them, get them to recycling. Anyway, here's one of my poems. The epigraph is from the text of the page I was looking at.

"Nothing could be further
from the authentic art
of our time than the idea
of a rupture of continuity."

And I'm delighted to find
a typo on top of the second page
"an" for "and" deflating
scholarly elevation, illumination
under the watchful eye or breast,
scrumbled cloud, perhaps toupee.

***

Ciao for now.

Poetry in 5 Steps at SAM last night



celebration of the new moon

silvery white balloons

white horses with baby carriages

white owls with electric eyes

white rabbits, black tuxed people

in white face, all waltzing

Benaroya, Triple Door,

dancing downtown and

uphill - every new moon

somewhere in Seattle --

New Moon Lullaby

AT THIS FAR REMOVE





To study Norway's elusive narwhals

scatter white floats along fjords and wait.

When sea water flattens they can't hide,

tricky as they are. It helps you've studied

ballet - learned how to suffer -- so that

when, sea clear as a wild hare, pod

cruising close to shore, you shimmy

into red dry suit, grab a sensor strap,

you won't collapse in tears as they veer,

unicorn horns twisty gleam against

high dry cliffs on the opposite shore.





Daily Crossword 8/18/09 Poem Draft





If I had a new idea would you ask?
Were you the check to my payee?
Mitochondria to run my solo cell?
Who the Great Dane, who flea?
Me? Itch to scratch unstung areas
My tongue along reed, your oboe
A hundred rooms lit by dawn
your chest hairs in my grasp
my whimper and your bang
if your dog had been ring bearer
if I'd baked love charms in the rye
beaten more sponge cakes rise airy
high as shoulder pads, poof hair era
nail bit quick pickpocket on the Metro
if I were Ichiro's knee you'd be the base
or I the ball your bat would hit
I'm two percent and you the Oreo
eye of newt, frog skull, the curse --
the blooming plastic bag, the ode,
your belch my box of chocolates
angle into shore some more, ahoy
I 'm semi conscious, you aren't neat
bicycle bag, slide rule, yesterday's news
you've got tools we've taken orally
Rescued Sara Lees in the sink, age
of silverfish, beer traps, slugs
closer than two smashed bugs
in a rug. Crowbar, SOS for help
sacred narwhal horn wide as Asia
voodoo doll, droop bellied idol
Rumplestiltskin, Cinderella, mend
us like think system in our sleep
bottle or wise orca carries note
to change your life or make it start
my heart my art my clock to set
and as I always say: and yet.

Perhaps I can add a stick figure image of my grand daughter (granddaughter?) to this blog. I try to download images from my computer and the command line shows a whirring do hickey while the blogspot drafting board shows a couple of little chicklets lining up along a line with spaces for many little chicklets - I go off down the hall, return to the same scene and conclude that the stick figure or imagination are my choices as far as image goes, at least as long as I'm here along Lake Chelan, far from Comcast's fat fast cable.

In other news, it is cooler today at Lake Chelan, cool and quiet as even when there are folks in the houses along the cove they stay indoors on days like these or go off to wineries or town. Chelan now has its own appellation from the AVA - it is its own region, not a subset of the Yakima Valley appellation as before. Chelan growers specialize in white wine grapes - your Rieslings, Gewurztraminers, Viogners, and Pinots. They import the reds from the Yakima Valley and blend them to make many red wines, some good, all more expensive than the $10 a bottle I keep as my spending limit. I prefer to buy $15 wines for $10 - always look at those bright colored tags meant for those like me and perhaps factual.

I like words for commotion and disorder: hubbub, brouhaha, hurly-burly, hullabaloo, rumpus.

The satellite has no interest in my altering my blog title photograph. Perhaps the photo of one day old Quinn is gone, perhaps a blank space greets you as you enter my blog. In any case, I blog. I change my photo another day, a day when I am not living in Chelan with the satellite that feels reluctance to interact with blogger.com. It has delicate feelings this satellite dish. I don't actually have a satellite in my yard. I do not live on a tiny world sprouting trees the size of the Little Prince.

My daughter's mother in law who left yesterday speaks French, is in fact a high school French teacher. They spoke, my daughter and she, in French. My fellow grandma, memere to my ama, also spoke to the baby in French. And sang.

I should look at the poems I have on paper and type them onto this computer. I am afraid to look at them. This morning I thought of sending out some poems, putting cart well in front of oxen or mini horse. I did the laundry and the dishes. I rode my bicycle along the road for 48 minutes. Nine miles. My husband installed a device that includes odometer (not motor), trip meter, maximum speed, time, and trip timer. My maximum speed this morning was 28 mph. Graciously, it does not record minimum speed, which was 5.9 mph, so now you know.

Feet pad upstairs in a pattern that says someone is making a bed. Ahhhh. There's a bed I won't have to practice my hospital corners on, bending low, scowling, sweaty-browed. It is easy to describe any activity as difficult and joyless though I enjoy doing useful work, especially if it is repetitious and mindless. I like fugue states.

Yesterday six of us played "Scattergories" on the deck looking out at the lake. Seven were involved and five played any given round as Quinn requires a handler, soother, walker, cooer-to, ambulator, personal assistant who is undistracted by, for example, writing down a word beginning with S that is a household device or a word beginning with G that is a Halloween costume. Such is life on the lake on a Saturday.

Poem Draft From Scattergories words to follow.
Woodrow Wilson, Tipper and Al,
typhoid fever to the waffle iron,
wanker or tycoon we judge them.

Someday I'll tell you about my computer inexplicably crashing.
Nothing this time was recoverable from my hard drive.
Before I have been lucky. My husband who is a techie super hero
has been able to go behind a curtain and whirl dials and return
with all my poems and all my emails and all my spreadsheets
but not this time. I woke in a sweat missing the New Yorker cartoon
I used as wallpaper. I am deeply denying the years of poems
I won't be seeing again. Maybe this is for the best. My folders
were cluttered with drafts upon drafts and maybe these were
poems that needed to get written on the way to better poems.
Maybe this silicacious cataclysm is clean slate, tabula rasa,
do over and get it right this time with no evidence I ever flubbed.
Yes and you know what Mike Meyers said when he was not
Bill and Ted but that other duo with that blonde SNL guy - Dana
Carvey. You know what he said even though the fog won't lift
here in Pullman where I'm cobbled onto somebody else's
wireless. Not cobbled. Glommed. It is hot here and I don't
have any folders to browse through and feel smarty smart smart
for making so many folders full of poems that might some
of them have been poems. This will give me a chance to look
at the poems I printed out and decide if they warrant another
look. Today is the first day etc. as the golfer girl said in high
school, the one who collected those sayings in a thick binder
eager to share the sappy wisdom that embarrassed me even
to hear it near me. My legs are sweaty from my daughter's
tan leather couch that is her boyfriend's tan leather couch.
My husband is working on another computer. I am typing
on the tiniest computer I've ever owned, with the idea of
getting to a place where I'll know if I want to keep it within
the fourteen days that would let me get my money back.
I'm charmed by this box the size of a clutch purse (not a car
clutch, even that of a Morris Minor, such as mine.) My
Morris Minor by the way is for sale. Three years ago I said
$14,000, at last month's All-British Fieldmeet at the former
Bellevue Community College, now Bellevue College, I said
$12,000. Right now, I say anything over $9,000 and you
walk away with my car. I'll put in the fuel pump. I mean my
husband will. If he names the tool and maybe draws an outline
of the more obscure ones, I'll fetch them/it for him as he
works, but no I will not do car repair myelf much as I thought
I might when I was a radical woman in the early 70's doorbelling
for the ERA in Olympia where more than one woman told me she would not vote for the ERA because it meant unisex bathrooms. We don't have the ERA honey and we still make 78 cents to every dollar the men make for the exact same job, but hey! we got unisex potties when they're one-seaters.

On my old computer were photographs from the last five years, many of which have no backup as in this digital age who prints? My India photos for example are no more. No pictures from Greece either.

This is what death is. Unique memory gone. And life goes on. Which is cruelty.

Maira Kalman possesses curative powers!

See her Thomas Jefferson post from the New York Times for proof.

This hiatus has gone on long enough. I'm afraid to look at my site minder or whatever it's called. I'm afraid of a lot - other people's emotions, my faults, falling from high places, seeing anybody in a position to possibly fall from high places, how vulnerable our necks and wrists and fingers are to injury, my own ignorance and stubborn unwillingness to change. This morning I went on a long bike ride along Lake Chelan. It was actually a shortish bike ride for me since it was 42 minutes long and yes I keep track in my notebook of the length of my bike rides. They are fun and restorative and sweaty and healthy. But first off they are fun. I love wind whistling through the holes in my bike helmet I am so grateful is light and airy since I did the bulk of my bike riding in the 70's probably before bike helmets had been invented. Jim and I rode our bikes from Seattle to Disneyland in 1977 without bike helmets or diaper pants. I still do not wear diaper pants. I bought a pair without trying them on at REI the last time I was in Seattle. The pair I bought are meant to look like sporty beige capris, but underneath is the thick wadding that keeps the bottom from being in pain, or so I'm told. I bought size large, whatever that means in sport clothing, and each of my thighs looked like the arm of an overstuffed chair so I immediately wadded them up in the back of my closet muttering silent curses that glow on the inside of the back of my skull even now a month later. I did later unwad them and fold them neatly, tags still attached, and set them under two other pairs of pants on a shelf as if I might wear them one day, and maybe I will but not today. I already rode my bike today in a pair of capris without a wadding feature under the rear but with paint on them and also too small but they don't LOOK too small. I found a Scrabble tile with the letter R on it on the cement floor of the arbor on my return, while I was clipping extraneous grape vines with the dullish clippers we keep in a V where a brace runs from top lattice to 4x4 leg. I thought to myself "I have the habits of a gardener," which was a nice thought I thought though not true. In those moments though, puttering with pruners and then weeding on my knees, I was utterly totally all gardener, fused, knees, fingers and mind to the task which is what bliss is.

Riding home, almost hands free, I passed a bank of name signs and actually read them. Name under name under name, SUMMERS, WORTH, name, name, and I grinned and breathed the sage scented morning air and steered and stared out at the lake and felt happy. And then my friend emailed Maira Kalman and soon I'll hold my granddaughter so her mommy can sleep and daddy can work and and and.