Earth Day

     It was a beautiful Earth Day, with warm, comforting weather and a cloudless sky that smiled blue all day. When I took a walk up the mountain, the birds were throwing their songs into that sky. In the afternoon, a wind wandered down from the top of the ridge and played with the trees for a while. If ever there was a day for celebrating the Earth, this was that kind of day. 

    This has been that kind of spring, too, with balmy days and an unusual number of animals blessing me with their presence. First, a northern pygmy owl flew into my apple tree. easily identified by the spots that look like eyes in the back of his head and because he was a daytime owl. I wanted to see him dive for a mouse, but he outlasted me, and I finally turned back to my work, glowing from the treat he had given me.

    Next there was a fox, which my son, visiting from his home in Washington, saw first. At his cry—"Fox!"—we ran to the window to admire the russet and silver coloring, the silky tail, the lithe, graceful movements. We watched that fox leap after the mouse the owl never found. 

    The next morning it was again my son who spotted the pileated woodpecker I had heard when I woke up, so big and beautiful, with his red head pounding like a jackhammer and then flashing through the woods. At that point we saw the second pileated, no doubt his mate.

    One evening after my son had left for his home in Washington, I heard the fox bark just outside the back door. When I opened the door, he twirled his tail and darted away. I think he had just stopped by to say hello.

    Then there was the hawk that flew to the top of a tall fir where I had stopped on my walk to listen to the birds. And the large bird that swooped from my house through the woods over my pond, maybe an owl, but probably a great blue heron.

    And, climactically, coyotes, calling from somewhere far up Humpy Mountain, lifting their noses in the air, stretching their throats and pouring out their songs. They were a rare treat.

    Today I was supposed to do a Facebook Live recitation of nature poems in honor of Earth Day, but something went wrong, and the recitation didn't go live, so I'll have to reschedule for another day, which, alas, won't be Earth Day. But nature poems are good to read any time. As one friend said, "Every day is Earth Day," as this spring has made abundantly clear.

"These Days of Spring"

For those of you unable to get to Table Rock Mountain to see the wildflowers, here is my poem that the Nature Conservancy posted on the trail. (See last week's post for a description of the trail.) 

These Days of Spring

These days the sun exhales with warmth and pours

Over the peak ablaze with smiles. It paces

In leisure through a lapis sky where soars

The big-winged hawk the glorious blue embraces.

These days, at forest's edge, the shooting stars

Flamingo-pink—and buttercups rich gold,

Camas blue as robin's-egg skies—set bars

Of color into which winter's wastes fold.

These days the fuchsia rows of redbud trees,

White clouds of flowering pears, and candy-pink

Crabapple waves present to eager breeze

Their petals, delicate flakes for air to drink.

Gathering all that glory on the wing

A bid's song colors air. These days of spring.

Poetry on Table Rock

     If July is the best time for wildflowers in the Siskiyou Mountains, spring—now—is the best time for flowers on the Table Rock Mountains, flat-topped, low-elevation, geologically interesting formations outside of Medford, Oregon. Both Upper and Lower Table Rock are famous for their masses and varieties of wildflowers. Usually the Bureau of Land Management and the Nature Conservancy, who co-manage the area, lead wildflower hikes at this time of year. This year because the pandemic has prevented those walks, the Nature Conservancy has encouraged individuals to hike there by posting poems by local poets along the trails.

    One of my poems, "These Days of Spring," is on the Upper Table Rock trail. I wanted to see how it looked and also to read the other poems and to witness the flowers, so a few days ago I left the house at 6:00am and was on the trail by 7:15.

   The trail led gently uphill through woods of oaks, firs, and madrones, on the floor of which were carpets of fawn lilies, with occasional accents of scarlet-red fritillaria and blue hound's tongue, then stripes of yellow buttercups. The birds were singing from tree-tops. Such a chorus for an early-morning hike!

Fawn lilies

   I also saw desert parsley, fiddleheads, blue-eyed Mary, ookow, buttercups, popcorn flower, larkspur, and mountain lupine. If I hadn't stopped off the trail, carefully avoiding the poison oak, to give plenty of space for a couple of hikers to pass, I would have missed the rush lily in the woods.

The trail is wide enough 
for the hiker to avoid poison oak.

    When I paused to read my poem on its placard by the trail and read its last two lines—"Gathering all the glory on the wing/A bird's song colors air. These days of spring"—I lifted my head and heard the birds, the perfect combination of poetry and experience. Reading about the turkey vulture in Dan Kaufman's poem at an overlook, I kept expecting to see a vulture soaring in the distance. And Pepper Trail's five haiku were written on Table Rock, so they evoked exactly where I was.

    From the wide, flat expanse of the top of Upper Table Rock, snow-peaked Siskiyou Mountains rickracked the distant horizon. Desert parsley yellowed the ground. 

Desert parsley and snowy Siskiyous

In the distance I could see a white tower of some sort and imagined it as a religious or ritual tribute to Table Rock. I was curious enough to decide to walk to it.

    To save you the hour's walk, in case you hike there and have the same curiosity, I will tell you that it is an ugly government tower with huge Keep Off signs. I could have saved myself the extra hour's walk by simply looking for information on Wikipedia later, which told me, after I got home, that it is a 25-foot tall very high frequency omnidirectional range aviation tower. In other words, a practical thing for navigation, but far from the lovely steeple I had imagined.

ORA tower

    Other than the tower, the hike was nothing but beauty—the flowers, the views, the woods, and the poems. If you live in or near the Rogue Valley, go to the Table Rock trails this April both to see the wildflowers and to read the poems. You're in for a treat.

Another view from the top

April Fool's Day

     April 1 is April Fool's Day. It's also the first day of National Poetry Month. Therefore, I post the following poem, which talks not about fools but about:

Foolish Money

                        

 

Foolish money is not the money you spent unwisely

on that pair of shoes that don’t match anything.

It’s not the ten-dollar bill you so foolishly dropped 

in the garbage bin when you threw away the receipt 

in your hand as you left the store. 

It’s not the quarter you bent over to pick up in the gutter,

hoping no one was watching.

It’s not the money you spent for a trip to Paris with your boyfriend,

who left you there to make your broken-hearted

way home, determined never to be such a fool again.

Foolish money is not the ten thousand dollars 

that built a pond that never filled.

And it certainly is not the money that bought 

the degree in English you “never used.”

Foolish money is the money 

my mother gave each of her children

after her annual Open House,

at which she sold the bins and tins and metal trays,

children’s chairs, china cups and saucers,

wooden boxes, Japanese screens

she had been painting for months.

“This is foolish money,” she would say.

“Don’t spend it on anything important,”

by which I learned 

that generosity is never foolish.

 Notice: Next Thursday  April 1, on the first day of National Poetry Month, I will be interviewed, along with Ashland poet Kim Hamilton and Rebel Heart Books owner, Eileen Bobeck, on Jefferson Public Radio, 9:00-10:00am (rebroadcast 9:00-10:00 in the evening).

    You can listen live on a JPR station or on the website (jeffexchange.org) and can participate by calling 800-838-3670 or emailing JX@jeffnet.org. The interview will be posted on the website within a day. But I hope you'll listen live. It's more fun.

    When I received my first vaccination, last week, I was so excited I wanted to shout the news from the rooftops. We're going to end this thing! I've taken one of the millions of steps, two from each of us, it's going to take to end the pandemic, but we'll get there. As with so many things, with all of us working together, we'll beat this virus.

    However, I quickly discovered that not everyone is excited about vaccinations. Some people are foregoing the opportunity, a decision that baffles me because do they like wearing masks? Do they like our social isolation and a stalled economy? Of course not, but that's what a choice not to vaccinate comes down to. The person not getting vaccinated either doesn't care if the pandemic continues or is saying, "I think the vaccines were developed too fast [or gives another reason] and in spite of what Fauci and the CDC say, I think they're too risky. I'm not going to get vaccinated. But you do it because if you do, we'll get over the pandemic." 

    In other words that person is saying, "You take the risk [if there is any] so I don't have to" because he, like all of us, would like the pandemic to end. Maybe his life is more important than mine or other people's who have taken or will take the vaccine, and certainly to him it is, but in the big picture, I think we're pretty much equal, all of us. 

    Of course, no one is going to force anyone to get the shot. It's your choice. But America's strong concept of individual freedom has preempted a sense of the common good. If we are going to pull ourselves out of the pandemic, it'll take a sense of responsibility from all of us to do what we can. And the most important thing we can do, in addition to wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and keeping six feet apart, is get vaccinated, not just to protect our individual selves but to keep the coronavirus from finding a foothold among us. The vaccination of me alone will do no good at all in stopping the pandemic. It takes a combined effort. 

    Some time last spring or summer (the pandemic months run together) I heard an interview on the radio with a young woman, in her forties, I think, who had volunteered for COVID trials and experiments. Of course, she was taking an enormous risk, but she had taken a look at her life (single, no kids or grandkids, ordinary job) and decided that it wasn't so important that she couldn't give it, if necessary, to help us understand and overcome the coronavirus. Even though I am much older than she, with much more of my life behind me, I couldn't have done what she did. But I can get vaccinated. Being vaccinated inoculates me against getting sick, for which I am profoundly grateful, but I'm also grateful to the millions of other people who, like me, got vaccinated as much for the common good as for our individual protection.

The First Thing I Will Do after We All Get Vaccinated

     The first thing I will do is get a haircut.

    The next thing I will do is sit for an hour in my favorite coffee shop with a book and a cup of coffee and partly read and partly watch the two women chatting at the adjacent table and the checkers players across the room and the Bible study group and the student with her books and love every minute of discreet comradeship.

    The next thing I will do is have dinner with friends at a restaurant, where someone else will do the cooking and the place is noisy with laughter and clamor from young people on dates and families eating out together and an elderly couple celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary and all the waitpeople, unmasked, walking freely between tables, pouring wine with broad smiles, bringing steaming plates of delicious food made by the happy chef in the busy kitchen.

    Then I will get on a train for eight hours and go visit my granddaughter, and I will talk happily with the seat mate I would previously have ignored so I could read my book because although I could read my book any time during the pandemic, to have a seat mate to relate to is a treat.

    I will say to everyone I see—the conductor on the train, the waitperson at the restaurant, the barista at the coffee shop, the hairdresser, everyone I pass on the street—"What a beautiful smile you have."

    I will say, "How nice it is to see your face."

    The next thing I will do is take a big plastic bag and pick up every piece of trash that has been collecting at the side of the road for a year, but maybe before I do that, I'll get a two-hour massage and let the trash sit for just another day.

    I will go to a concert and then to a play and then to a Fourth-of-July parade, sitting cheek by jowl with open-faced strangers, and I will smile radiantly at them as we enjoy together our common pleasures.

    I will have a grand party at my house, and everyone will eat great food and drink and talk freely without the muffle of masks, and I will hug everyone who comes in the door and again each person who leaves and probably do a lot of hugging in between, too.

    Then I will get on an airplane and go somewhere just for the experience of being on an airplane.

    I will hang my mask on a hook in the closet. I thought about burning it, but it is a symbol of our common suffering and our combined efforts to overcome this adversity, and I think I'll keep it.

    I will never do another Zoom meeting.

    

Vaccination Trials

    I was eligible on February 9 for a coronavirus vaccination. I was counting the days, and on that morning, I started calling places that gave vaccinations, naively thinking I would make an appointment for the next day.

    Friends and family in other states were already beginning to be vaccinated, many of them younger than I, but I was patient with Oregon's decisions. I supported their prioritization of teachers over the elderly. I am not an essential worker, not do I live in a nursing home or have to be in public places often. I recognized that I had a place in line and that my turn would come.

    On February 9, I thought my turn had come, but as I went down the list—Asante hospital, Jackson County Health Department, Bi-Mart pharmacy, Fred Meyer, Safeway—I got the same message: All appointments are booked. Period.

    My doctor's office suggested I call Asante instead of trying to book online. When I did, I got a recorded message that I had to be eligible before making an appointment, and I was, so I waited on hold until I was cut off. I called again and was cut off again.

    I was told from several people to go through Asante's app called Mychart, but when I tried to get an account on Mychart, I was told I needed a verification number, which, of course, I didn't have. Another dead end.

    Meanwhile, people were making other suggestions: Try this place and that one. None had appointments available. Some people had simply waited at the fairgrounds when mass inoculations were being given, but the county wasn't doing that any more. One had lied about her circumstances, but, really, there were reasons for prioritization and, in the end, anyone who wants a vaccination is going to get one. It's not worth lying about. 

    When I called my doctor's office again, she gave me a different number to call for Asante, where, she said, I could get a verification number for Mychart. In fact, that's what happened, and, in fact, Mychart worked, and I now have an appointment for a vaccination. It's more than a month away, but I am secured with an appointment. 

    It's really mostly the psychological impact that matters for the long wait. Friends and family who have already been vaccinated have all reported the same response: the immense relief, the opening of possibilities, the sense of a return to unfettered life. I can hardly wait. And even though I had a frustrating experience getting an appointment, I am proud of Oregon's response to the coronavirus crisis and its handling of vaccinations. Oregon ranks 11th in the list of states of efficient roll-out. April 23, my vaccination date, is just around the corner. I have an appointment. I will be vaccinated. And the pandemic will come to an end.