A Party 75 Times More Wonderful than I Had Anticipated

        The theme for my 75th birthday party on July 20, the culmination of doing 75 items of 75 repetitions each since July 20 last year, was, of course, "75," and my guests responded with wit and enthusiasm. One guest brought a puzzle she had made: "Happy birthday, Diana," on 75 cardboard squares for guests to work. Someone else brought a bouquet of 75 bachelor buttons, beautiful blue wildflowers. Someone else brought 75 pennies to offer "a penny for your thoughts about Diana," which she had guests write on cards that she left in a pretty box for me. (All the thoughts, by the way, were kind.) Some friends from the Grants Pass Nordic Ski Club brought me a glassed-in box with a blue diamond from the cross-country ski trail – 75 being the diamond anniversary. I got 75 birthday wishes from one friend, each with adjective (all very complimentary, let me add again). At number 43 she said, "75 is beginning to sound like a very big number," and I thought, "Yes. Right. I learned that again and again this year." At the end she said, "All the above is true, by the way."

        One guest brought 75 blessings to hand out. Another brought 75 delicious bing cherries. Another put 75 tablespoons of sugar in the fudge she made to share at the party. There were 75 meatballs, 75 pieces of fruit in the salad, seven different kinds of fruit in another salad, plus one non-fruit item to make 7.5. One friend read a 75-word poem she had written about me; another brought a 75-word rewrite of a favorite song. When I brought out the cakes I had made for our dessert, 

they all sang "Happy Birthday" to me, a tradition I had forgotten would happen, while someone sprinkled over my head 75 pieces of confetti he had cut.

        Such enthusiastic participation made the party fun for everyone, but the other part was my contribution – all the 75x75 items I had done all year. I displayed the displayable items: the eight books I had made, the crafts, and a jar set out for Applegater donations in 75s. I put a list of all the 75x75 items on the wall above the display, with the names of the people who suggested each item.

On the wall on the left is "Power of 75," that my son made for me. The entire list of 75s is under the window.l

        During the evening I carried around a basket of the flash cards I had used as I memorized "Hello. What's your name? Good-bye" in 75 languages and invited guests to pick a card and ask me to say those phrases in that language. I knew them all. Before the dinner, I recited a 75-line poem, "Frost at Midnight," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, not perfectly (though I had done it perfectly many times to the mirror or while driving) but if I stumbled a couple of times, I recovered. I could also have counted to 75 (100, really) in Hawaiian, but I forgot to tell people to test me on those numbers.

        The whole thing was a great success; people had a wonderful time. It was a great culmination to a great year. I loved doing the 75 things of 75 repetitions each, keeping track on an Excel spread sheet and meeting one challenge after another: 75 yoga poses, 75 hours of volunteer work at a new place, 75 compliments, 75 wines – on and on it went. My year was sharply focused on the 75s. I was, maybe, a bit obsessed. I pulled Mike with me time after time: "Let's go to the redwoods so I can hug a redwood tree"; "Let's go to Wildlife Safari in Roseburg because I need more animals on my list"; "Could you make a base for my wine-cork trivet?" "Will you drill me on the languages?" He accompanied me on many of the 75 hikes, took the 75-mile hike with me, tasted many (maybe all) of the 75 wines with me, worked many of the 75 New York Times crossword puzzles with me, and ate many of the 75 new dishes I cooked this year. He listened patiently to my constant update on how I was doing with the project. He spent the day of the party helping me prepare for it, then helped me clean everything up so the bear would have no incentive to come around that night. 

        Best of all was what he brought me for the "75s" theme: "75 Things I Love about Diana." 

        "75 is a big number," I said, somewhat apologetically, as I read the list, knowing well how hard it is to make a list of that length.

        "It wasn't even hard," he said.

Mr. McGregor I am not

      When God handed out green thumbs, he either passed me by or forgot I was waiting, or maybe I was out trying to get a writing gene. Gardening is a mystery to me. Directions say, "Water until established," but apparently when I planted 40 lavender starts, I didn't understand what "until established" meant because they all dried up and died.

       Other directions say, "Plant in full sun," but "full sun" on a piece of land against an east-facing mountain apparently doesn't cover enough hours to fulfill the requirement. On the other hand, "Plant in shade or part shade" doesn't help, since before the "part shade" sets in, the intensity of southern Oregon's summer sun has fried whatever would otherwise have been happy enough in the part shade of the day. "Light shade" is also iffy, as the density of the tree cover makes all shade pretty heavy.

        Then there are deer to contend with. And drought. 

        When I complimented one gardener friend on her garden, she shrugged and said, "It just takes a lot of manure." But how much is "a lot" of manure? In bags or by the truckload? What about all those other kinds of soils gardening centers sell in bags? What works? How much? When to apply?

        Why do my eggplants at the front of the row grow bigger than those in the back row? The soil is the same. The water should be the same. The sun is the same. Who knows? Why is my new rose bush languishing? Too much water? Not enough water? Poor soil? Who knows?

        It's all a mystery the key to which is a green thumb, which I don't have.

        Not to give the wrong impression, however. My deck flowers look fabulous, and, as every summer, give me the greatest pleasure. 

        But I would also like a real garden, a place where flowers and vegetables grow luxuriantly, where one wanders or sits for the joy of being among such beauty and bounty. When I first built the house, nine years ago, I enclosed a spot for a real garden with a strong deer fence. The vegetables I planted were not eaten by the deer but grew sparsely. Weeds, however, proliferated, especially in the walkways. Watering with a sprinkler was inefficient and inaccurate.
        This spring Mike helped me put in a drip irrigation system. Then I covered the pathways with black plastic covered with bark to keep the weeds down. 

        I was on my way, but I still didn't have a beautiful garden. The bark moved around on the slick plastic, all a-jumble and awry. It looked atrocious. Besides, I was told soon enough that black plastic is bad for the soil, anyway. 

      I pulled up the plastic and threw away the bark and looked for a better solution. The answer, according to gardening friends, was to lay down landscape cloth and cover it with something better than bark. I decided decomposed granite (DG), inexpensive enough, would work. Last weekend Mike drove up with a pickup load of DG. He couldn't actually get the heavily loaded truck up the incline to the garden itself, so we hauled the DG in buckets the ten yards to the garden, our arms stretched like elastic For the second load, a week or so later, Mike did the hauling, one bucket at a time because he had a broken collar bone, while I pulled up weeds in the paths, cut the landscape cloth, and laid it in place. When Mike got ahead of me, he repaired the wooden chairs-with-a-table set that goes under the apple tree.

        It was a long day of hot, heavy, physical labor. Mike said he was willing to do it for the tomatoes.

 When we had finished, we sat on the newly repaired chairs in the shade of the apple tree and contemplated the results. I am very pleased. The garden is beginning to look like a garden, a place of beauty, a place where you would want to sit and sip your lemonade (or cocktail, as Mike suggested but didn't get). 

        I looked at my thumb. It is beginning to get a small greenish glow. I have a good watering system (even if I don't understand it). I have a good fence that keeps the deer out. I have beautiful paths between beds. Next I'm going to get a whole truckload of manure up here, even if I have to put it in buckets to get it to the garden. Soon, even if I don't solve the mysteries of gardening, the garden will mysteriously start blooming with color and fruits – tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, lettuces, herbs, and lots and lots of flowers.                

         I love my garden. It's beginning to love me back.

A Story to Make Us All Feel Good about Humanity

        Mike and I hiked up Mt. Elijah last Sunday. The wildflowers were spectacular. The weather was great for hiking. We weren't backpacking, but I also didn't see any reason to carry extra weight, so instead of taking my whole pocketbook, with its unnecessary paraphernalia, I just took out of it a small paper envelope with my driver's license, two credit cards, and my Golden Eagle pass to all National Parks and stuck it in my pocket. Then I drove up to the trailhead with Mike, many miles up gravel roads and at the end of a half-mile of a horrendously rocky and steep road. And then, as I said, we had a great hike.

        The next day I went to town, pocketbook in hand, but the first time I reached into my pocketbook to buy something, I realized I must have left that little packet of cards at home, still in the pocket of my shorts, I guessed. I wasn't too concerned about it; it was only a minor inconvenience. I went to the bank and got enough cash for everything I needed to do in town. I was a little uneasy about driving without my license with me, but I drive carefully, and my chances were good at not needing to show it.

      When I got home in the late afternoon and walked up to the house, I saw something lying on my doorknob. It was my little packet of cards – my driver's license, credit cards, etc. A torn scrap of paper stuck in the packet said, "Found at the Sturgis trailhead. Friends from the trail."

        I was, needless to say, profoundly grateful. (A concurrent emotion was horror at my carelessness and what an alternative outcome of that carelessness might have been.)

        I wish I had been at home to open the door and greet those friends from the trail with a big thank-you hug. I wish I knew their names so I could look up an address and send them a thank-you. Maybe "friends from the trail" is literal. Maybe they were friends of mine who already knew where I lived. Maybe they knew my name from my years on Jefferson Public Radio. Maybe they were hiking the Sturgis Fork trail because they had read about it in my book, Favorite Trails of the Applegate. Maybe, if they hadn't known me before, they'll Google me and find this blog and read about my gratitude.

        My carelessness in dropping my important cards is not the part of this story that should make us feel better about ourselves. Forget that part. The important part is that there are people in this world who not only are honest enough to return what belongs to someone else to that person but are kind enough to take the trouble to find out where that person lives and to drive to that person's house to deliver the lost items. I am profoundly grateful not only to have recovered my important documents but also for the reconfirmation of the goodness of humanity. It's that that I'm passing on to you who are reading this post: that there is much good in this world and many good people who are honest and kind.

      Don't forget it. And remember to always be one of them.

Celebrating a Long Association with JPR on the 4th of July

       Ashland has had a Fourth-of-July parade for as long as I've lived in the area and for at lest fifty years before that. I haven't been to Ashland for the Fourth of July for many years, but when my son was growing up, we did sometimes go to see the parade. Once he even rode in the parade, doing tricks on his BMX bicycle. Other years I helped at the food booth of Headwaters, an environmental organization in the Applegate that morphed into the Geo Institute, now in Ashland.     

        Gradually, though, I stopped making the trip into Ashland for the Fourth of July. Although I love my homeland (my house, the Applegate, Oregon, and even sometimes the USA, maybe its landscape and people more than its politics), I'm not too proud of our country at the moment and don't feel much like tooting its horn.

        So I was going to let this Fourth of July pass as that day has been passing for me for years – at home, unaware of celebration except for distant fireworks, which always make me so nervous because of the fire danger that I get grumpy hearing them – until Jefferson Public Radio invited me to accompany their fiftieth anniversary float as one of their alums (former JPR volunteers and employees).

        I am a proud JPR alum. My association with the station started in 1981, when I approached their producer, Tom Olbrich, asking if they would like to carry my commentaries. Although he was leery (not every good writer is a good reader, he told me later), he agreed to listen to me read.

        So I auditioned with the first of a ten-part series of short essays I had written about building, and living in, my little house on the mountain, without electricity, without a telephone, without a driveway (which didn't matter, since I didn't have a car, either). I called the series "Ten Rules for One-room Cabin Living." I talked about living there with my young son, emphasizing not what we didn't have but what we did have: an endless forest to play in, wild animals and birds at our doorstep, a moon that shone full through the skylights, and time that was our own. Tom thought listeners would be interested (as indeed they were) and said I had a good voice for radio, which many listeners since then have also told me. I wrote and broadcast essay after essay for JPR, one a week for seven years, then, after a hiatus of several years, one a week again until 2008, when the station stopped carrying commentaries altogether.

        I'll be glad to walk in Ashland's Fourth-of-July parade this year to toot JPR's horn. After all, Jefferson Public Radio launched my career. My first three books were compilations of selected JPR commentaries (the first was a finalist for the Oregon Literary Awards), and my next three books followed the same short-essay format. When JPR stopped carrying  commentaries, I started this blog. My writing, even my Ph.D. dissertation, has focused on the short, personal-essay format.

        JPR has invited its alums to march in the parade as a sort of thank-you for their part in the success of the station, but I'll be walking in recognition of what JPR has done for me as well. Come to think of it, I'll be in the parade to toot JPR's horn on behalf of all it has done for all of us for these fifty years. We would be the poorer in southern Oregon and Northern California without Jefferson Public Radio.