On the Last Day of 2020

     Well, it's almost over, this annus horribilis. We can look forward to happier days ahead, with a new president in the White House and a vaccine already making its way towards us.

    But so much of the horribilis of this past year for me has to do with Mike's dying. And nothing is going to change that.

    A year ago tonight, Mike and I went out to dinner, then walked back to his house through the brisk January air and stayed up till the wee hours of the morning working a jigsaw puzzle of the skyline of New York City, in anticipation of our trip there in April. We made our resolutions: Mike's to stay healthy, mine not to lose things. 

    Fat lot of good those resolutions were. 

Resolved: Not to Lose Things

My New year's resolve was not to lose things:

earrings that slip from ears, jackets left in restaurants.

I was afraid eventually I'd lose a precious treasure.

If I paid attention, I earnestly thought, I wouldn't lose things

like earrings that slip from ears and jackets left in restaurants.

My husband teased, "You can't keep that resolution."

"But if I pay attention," I earnestly said, "I won't lose thing,"

sure that being careful would solve the problem.

My husband teased, "You can't keep that resolution,"

and, indeed, it slipped from my grasp in five short months.

though I thought being careful would solve the problem,

I lost my husband (most precious!) to death's cruel clutch.

My resolution slipped from my grasp in five short months.

No wonder I was afraid I'd lose a precious treasure.

I lost my husband (most treasured!) to death's cruel clutch

That mocked my resolve not to lose things.

    By February Mike was losing his resolution, too, with bad back pain that we thought then was just the muscular kind of pain anyone might have.

    Then everything came crashing down. The coronavirus erupted, and Mike became seriously ill with cancer. He started radiation treatments but rapidly realized they were useless, so suddenly he was on hospice, and he was dying, and I was in a three-week frenzy of pouring as much love into him as I could in the time we had left.

    And then our time together came to an end.

    After Mike died, life was a blur of hiking and hiking and hiking, sometimes with friends, sometimes by myself. 

    Then the fires came. 

    And after the fires, the election, with all its divisiveness and anger, its lies and disinformation and unbelief. The country seemed to teeter on the edge of collapse. Then the strengths held. The system, badly strained, came through. There was no widespread corruption. One man lost. One man, and his woman running-mate, won. 

    Voila 2020. 

    During it all, I was writing poems. Now I end the year with a new book, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years, a book of poems about Mike—the early years of our relationship, our wedding in May 2019, the vicious return of his cancer a year later, the three weeks on hospice, my grief poured onto the page, the healing balm of nature and friends. 

    Tonight, as I take down the Christmas tree and contemplate the year ahead, I am grateful for that book that has so much of my love for Mike in it. I am grateful for my friends and family who have been so good to me during this year, especially for my son and my sisters. Without their love, I think I would have sunk. As it is, I am still swimming. I miss Mike badly. I regret all those good times we could have had in the years to come. I chafe at the unfairness of the universe. But we all know the world is not fair. It isn't picking me out for special unfair treatment. I will swim into the New Year without Mike, with an ache in my heart, but also with love and gratitude and brimful of hope.

You can order books from dicoog@gmail.com. $10 plus shipping. 

Christmas 2020

     It's Christmas Eve as I write but will be Christmas Day when you read what I am writing. 
    I have cut a tree from the forest and decorated it with my decades-old ornaments.The paper star that goes on top was made by my son forty years ago. 

    I do miss Mike. Christmases were always fun with him, usually at my house. Last year, we started working a diabolically difficult jigsaw puzzle my sister had given us: the skyline of New York, in anticipation of our planned trip there last spring. Of course, that didn't happen, coronavirus and cancer both conspiring against it.

    I will be by myself this Christmas but not alone, as I'll Zoom with my son and his family and will talk with my sisters. I'll make chicken Wellington for dinner, with bourbon-glazed carrots on the side. I'll have a simple panna cotta for dessert and maybe a piece of Harry and David's chocolates from the gift box my siblings sent me. I have many gifts under the tree. I feel surrounded with love.

    Tonight I opened a bottle of very good Cabernet Sauvignon that was supposed to be for us both. I raised a glass to Mike and asked him how the wine is wherever he is these days. 

    It wasn't too many years ago that I was falling in love with Mike. Here is a poem from my new book of poems, From Friend to Wife to Widow: Six Brief Years, which is my tribute to the man who brought me so much happiness, who deepened and broadened my life in the last six years. There was a whole lot of love between us.

I Knew I Loved You When

I knew I loved you 

when 

before you left

one morning

you chopped my kindling

and again

when

you brought me flowers

one non-occasion day of winter

and especially

when 

one late December day

you agreed to trim

my Christmas tree

and didn't fling the tinsel on,

as you intended

(your style)

but, sipping Zin,

watched me

meticulously bend

tinsel

over each limb,

and, the job ended,

said,

"The tree is splendid

with carefully tended

fastidiously rendered

icicle-pretended

tinsel."

    I am wishing all my readers a good Christmas Day and that the new year will bring us all the kind of happiness the world was so stingy with for most of 2020. Spread love. Spread peace. Spread happiness.

The Shape of My Days

     For years my days were shaped by the academic calendar. When the teaching came to an abrupt end, suddenly my days lacked any shape at all. I missed teaching. I missed being around young people and learning what they think. I missed the classroom and the challenge of teaching students how to write with graceful prose, how to apply critical thinking, how to recognize creditable sources. Teaching was my tiny contribution towards a better world. Even though I only taught two days a week, my days were shaped by grading papers, preparing syllabi, and brainstorming lessons in addition to the time in the classroom.

    I never worried about the shape of my days after I retired because, after all, I had been a part-time writer as well as a part-time teacher, a career that left me time to do other things, too: reading, sewing, hiking, backpacking, cross-country skiing. But then I was forced to retire. Suddenly my days were shapeless. It wasn't so much that I didn't know what to do with my time as that I felt my usefulness in life had been snatched out from under me. The days were turning into an amorphous blob.

    Gradually I learned how to give shape to my days, mostly by creating challenges for myself. How hard could I hike? Could I do seventy-five things of seventy-five repetitions each in one year? 

    Then Mike stepped into my life, and I began to shape my days around him. When we decided to get married, we agreed we would not live together day after day and night after night (after all these years? not a good idea). Nonetheless, my days were shaped by this relationship. And I loved their shape. 

    We can order our lives only to a certain extent. A year after our wedding, my husband died. I came home to my own house to learn how to reshape my days, this time around grief. I felt the way I had after I returned home after earning my Ph.D. in 2012: "Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water," as in this Golden Shovel poem I wrote (meaning that the Zen saying is laid out in the last word of each line): 

Living Zen

 

    I went and got my Ph.D. before

    I was seventy, and then with that intellectual enlightenment

    I came home again and found myself chopping

    Vegetables for dinner and hauling wood

    For the fire to warm the house and

    Wondered what difference it made, all that hauling

    Of books and stimulating the mind with ancient water.

 

    Then I got married, after

    I was seventy, and lived the enlightenment

    Of love until cancer came chopping

    Down my beloved liked a piece of wood

    For the funeral pyre and

    Left me hauling

    My emptiness around like a bucket of water.

    The emptiness comes to us from time to time, unshaping our days and forcing us to create ourselves anew. When it does, whether from retirement or a death or a pandemic that locks us in our houses, we have to create, again, the meaningfulness of our lives. Today I shape my life around the family that the coronavirus temporarily prevents me from visiting, the writing that has always been my mainstay, crafts that I enjoy, and, most of all, hiking day after day, by myself or with a friend, in these beautiful mountains I have called home for half a century.

France via Books

    A few months ago I wrote, for this blog, about the months I lived in France when I was a sophomore in college. (See post on October 15, 2020.) Because that sent me on a whole nostalgic spin, for today's post I'm reprinting an essay from my book An Explosion of Stars, about my life in Aix. I hope you enjoy it.

     One day while I was teaching at Rogue Community College, I went to a book sale in the library. There I found a dozen little paperback books in French that made me catch my breath. These were the same Classique Larousse editions I had used as a student in Aix-en-Provence in 1964. Their bright purple covers, each with its white square for the title and author's name, were swathed in a smoke of nostalgia. I picked up Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloise and opened it. Like a genie kept in a bottle for thirty years and now set free, the life I had once lived swirled around me.

    As I turned the pages I heard the Mistral rustling through the sycamore trees along the Cours Mirabeau. I heard the water of the big fountain at the end of the Cours, spilling from tier to tier, and, at the outdoor cafés lining the sidewalks, a subdued chatter accented by tiny espresso cups settling into saucers. I turned a page and saw myself sitting in one of those sidewalk cafés with my French Algerian boyfriend, Paul, and his pieds noirs friends. I turned a page and was in Cézanne's studio, gazing over his easel at Mt. St. Victoire; I turned another page and was sorrowfully telling Mme. Herbeau that Vanderbilt University was moving me to another house—Mme. Sévin's—because they objected to my having to bathe at the communal baths down the street.

    When I lifted the book to my nose, I smelled, in the old paper, the musty stink of socks from the ground floor of the movie theater in Aix and saw myself in the balcony watching Un Homme et une Femme, Jules et Jim, and the American westerns my French friends loved. The smell of the book was close and warm, like the sun at Les Calancs on the Mediterranean, where I sunned on white-sand beaches in my first bikini; like the hot yeasty smell sifting through open windows of cellar bakeries as I walked to early classes; like the steaming cup of café au lait Mme. Sévin gave me every morning for breakfast. The smell had something of a bare wooden floor in it, too, the old-house smell of my room at Mme. Sévin's, where I studied at a tiny plank table and where Gunilla, my Swedish roommate, would lull us both to sleep in our narrow beds by speaking Swedish, the most beautiful language in the world, she said.

    As I touched the slick, brittle paper, I was not turning pages but walking down a Provençal road, reaching up to pick cherries dangling from overhanging branches, the sky so blue above the cherries and the wall over which they hung so white (and I so young), that I thought, suddenly, "Even if I were in prison, no one could take this happiness from me."

    I turned a page and read, "J'ai longtemps hésité a te faire cette confidence," but the words were mere sounds, the unintelligible flow of indistinguishable words of my first days in France. Then I turned the page again, and they flowed into the music of a beautiful language I once lived with and made my own.

    I bought La Nouvelle Héloise. I didn't want it to read but because it is a genie's bottle. To unstop the bottle and let the treasures tumble out, all I have to do is pick up the book and turn its pages. 

How To Make Even 2020's Thanksgiving Day a Happy One

           It has come to the point that if you say anything happened in 2020, we expect a disaster statement. And, indeed, "Thanksgiving 2020" sounded dismal, what with high coronavirus numbers canceling a visit with my son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter, and memories of previous Thanksgivings with Mike, my now deceased husband, gnawing at me. But family and friends are still abundant, and Thanksgiving can still be happy.

    (1) The first glimmer of a happy Thanksgiving 2020 was when a friend who is a chef said he would like to cook Thanksgiving dinner for me and a few other Thanksgiving orphans. He would have the dinners ready for pick-up at his house Thursday afternoon. Immediately I felt loved and included.

    (2) Cooking together. Many people say they miss the camaraderie in the kitchen this Thanksgiving, but my daughter-in-law's brilliant idea was for me to lead a Zoom cooking session on Wednesday with some select family and friends. I immediately started poring over recipes (a favorite activity) and finally chose a sweet-potato cheesecake, the grand prize winner for the Sunset Thanksgiving recipe contest in 2005. 

    At the appointed time all the cooks gathered on Zoom, each in our respective kitchen, and started peeling sweet potatoes together, making crusts, and mixing the baked and mashed sweet potatoes with the cream cheese, cream, sour cream, eggs, and sugars. Finally we put our cheesecakes in our ovens and said good-bye. Any of us could have done all this alone, but it was a barrel of fun to do it together. 

The finished cheesecake, already sliced

    (3) A hike is always a good idea. The weather was fine on Thanksgiving morning, so I walked up the Enchanted Forest trail, where bright yellow maple leaves, still autumn-rich, glowed against the dark trunks. I walked down the mountain composing a poem.

    (4) Family connections, such as a heart-warming phone call from my sister Laura just after I got home and, later, a text from my sister Sharon describing her dinner with her husband and a couple of friends. 

    (5) Even though there was only one place setting at the table, I could still make it beautiful, using my heirloom silver and folding the napkin in a rose shape. 

    (5) I could also wear special Thanksgiving-dinner clothes, so I did. 

    (6) Connections with friends. Mid-afternoon I drove down the hill to pick up my dinner. I visited briefly (outside), left some cheesecake with Andy and his family, then drove over the pass to deliver another Andy dinner to friends on Carberry Creek. We had a short visit (everyone masked), and Tracy packed up some squash soup and caramelized Brussels sprouts for me to take home. Then I left to put my own dinner to warm in the oven and to open a bottle of red wine.

    (7) Zoom works. Before eating I did a Zoom call with my son and daughter-in-law, who had prepared a gorgeous Asian meal. We showed each other our Thanksgiving tables and explained our foods. We toasted each other with much love, clinking glasses against computer screens. I sent Thanksgiving greetings to my granddaughter, who, being a 'tween, had declined to join the Zoom call.

    (8) Thanksgiving dinner. Finally I sat down to eat my Thanksgiving dinner. It was superb and beautifully displayed. 

Not quite as beautiful because I had already
dived in, but you get the idea.

The cheesecake was also delicious, a judgment corroborated by all reports from participants and recipients. 

    (9) Give thanks. I poured myself another glass of wine and toasted all the friends and family who had helped make Thanksgiving 2020 an occasion to be thankful for. 

For Thanksgiving, Coming Up

     Food is often the carrier of cultural tradition. Goose and plum pudding were as important for a Victorian Christmas dinner in England (at least, according to Charles Dickens) as turkey is for Thanksgiving dinner in America today. Sometimes, as in the case of Thanksgiving, the food is symbolic of a historical occasion, though maybe as much mythological as historical by the time the food has become traditional. Did the pilgrims really eat wild turkey, corn, cranberries, and pumpkin pie on that first Thanksgiving? How much of our tradition is myth and how much is history? And how much do we really care? It's the food that carries the tradition.

Thanksgiving pies, years ago, when we could be
so close together. I am the pie-maker,
third from the left, in red.

    In today's immigrant-rich world, such food customs mark both the continuation of cultural traditions and their gradual, sometimes grudging synthesis. One of my favorite Thanksgiving stories comes from an essay by the California farmer David Mas Masumoto. He grew up with a Japanese mother who cooked a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner even though her Japanese husband preferred white rice to rolls and no one ate the cranberry sauce because to the Japanese, fruits are desserts.

    "We knew what a holiday table was supposed to look like," Masumoto says, "but no one told us how it was supposed to be eaten." His father didn't know how to carve the meat, either. After a poor show of an effort, he always gave the job to Mrs. Masumoto. who took the turkey into the kitchen, where her family could hear her "whacking and tearing the creature into tiny shreds, as if she were preparing strips for a teriyaki sauce."

    Masumoto himself avoided the carving task until he married a woman from Wisconsin, whose family served Thanksgiving dinner completely comme il faut. Then he learned to carve, prompted, he says, "by my frantic wife when she hosts the family holiday dinner. 'Here,' she says, thrusting the golden brown bird into my hands. I imagine her adding, 'It's time you became a man.'" But in true fusion fashion, the Masumoto family celebrates annually a thoroughly American Thanksgiving and also hosts a thoroughly Japanese open house on New Year's Day, when they laden the tables with "plates of teriyaki chicken, sushi, and somen salad, along with symbolic dishes—long… buckwheat noodles for long life…black beans for good luck, and herring for virility and the blessings of many children." And of course, there is salmon served to the guests with the Japanese explanation: "It's the one fish that always returns home."

    I know that turkey is Thanksgiving food, but maybe this year, when we can't return home because we're COVID-restricted, we should all eat salmon, just to remind ourselves that there'll come a time when we can once again share the Thanksgiving tradition together.

Election Celebration

     When Biden was proclaimed the winner of the 2020 Presidential race, I immediately missed Mike with a pang. Oh, how we would enjoy a celebration together! We might already have had a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, ready just in case, and I would have cooked something special, and we would have sat down with such celebration in our hearts, so different from the moment in the middle of the night, four years ago, when Mike climbed into bed telling me Trump had won, and I cried. Now, if Mike were here, we would be enjoying the sudden wind of hope for our country that came blasting in with the election results.

    But, of course, Mike isn't here, so after that moment of missing him acutely, I decided I could celebrate anyway. So I went to town and bought a bottle of champagne and came right home to put it in the refrigerator. While it was chilling, I looked through recipe books and decided on crepes with champagne-poached pears that I would make with the Harry and David Royal Riviera pears a friend had sent me. Using half a bottle of champagne for the poaching, I reasoned, would keep me from either wasting the rest of the champagne or getting roaring drunk, which I didn't want to do. I made the crepe batter and set it aside, per instructions, to rest for an hour.

    Then, since Mike wasn't here to open the champagne, I looked up a YouTube video for instructions. Following those instructions I successfully opened the champagne. I poured half of it into the pot for the poaching, then refrigerated the bottle for dinner.

    I poached the pears, then made three crepes, filled them with pear slices, and poured over them the poaching liquid. I topped them with a couple of scoops of ice cream, poured myself a glass of champagne and sat down to eat. 

    But, first, of course, the toasts.

    First I toasted Joe Biden. Well may his time in office thrive.

    Then I toasted Kamala Harris and her beautiful acceptance speech.

    Then I raised a toast to immigrants. May their families never again be separated.

   I toasted the environment. Welcome back to Bear Claws (I hope) and good tidings to all wild things.

    I toasted good leadership in controlling the coronavirus pandemic.

    I toasted the possibility of reversal of our rapid decline into disastrous climate change.

    I toasted the warm welcome-back our allies will give us, especially in the Paris Accords.

    I toasted all people of all colors and ethnicities in this country: may you find peace and justice, which goes for all of us.

    Then I toasted or started to toast the end of the electoral college, but here I think I was veering into lala land. I don't think Biden said word one about the electoral college in his acceptance speech. Maybe after all these toasts I was getting a wee bit drunk. 

    Maybe it was time to eat my crepes.

Thistle Update

   While we're waiting for an election update, I'll give you a thistles update. You might remember how fierce I was about decimating bull thistles. (See post on July 30, 2020.) I did a remarkably thorough job. I missed one patch of thistles and a few stray individuals, but on the whole I prevented millions of thistle seeds from finding ground.

    You might also remember that I carefully placed purple thistle heads in paper bags because, I said, "buds, even beheaded, can still burst into wind-borne seeds." I stored the sealed bags in the tool shed for burning later in my wood stove.

    Two months later, when I opened the tool shed door, I was shocked to find avalanches of thistle down pouring out of bags.

Mice had smelled the seeds and ripped open the bags, thinking God had sent them manna from heaven. Exposed to the air, thistle blossoms exploded. Invisible seeds borne on feathery wings came tumbling out of the bags like bubbles. They flowed over the shelves like waterfalls. The slightest movement of air from the opened door sent them rising like songs on a breeze. I watched in horror as they floated towards the open door, realizing that I was about to plant a million thistles in my own yard.

    It was a disheartening sight. I would somehow have to clean the mess up, but every movement sent a dozen thistle parachutes into the air. My son suggested I spray them with a very fine water spray, enough to tame the puffs but not enough to dampen the shed.

    That worked. Even a very slight spray made puffs of down sag and cling to each other. I put a snow shovel over the thistles on the floor of the shed, a large piece of cardboard over those the shovel didn't reach, knelt on the ground, and started spraying cascades of thistle down and scooping it into paper bags. I caught large handfuls and compressed them gently, catching with the other hand the floating escapees. 

    I learned to scoop gently, wary of a thorny thistle flower buried inside a thick pile of down. I worked slowly and carefully, clearing one surface before moving to another. I filled one paper bag after another with water-compressed thistle down. I gathered stray floaters and stuffed them, one at a time, into the bag.  I found middens of tiny husks of thistle seeds the mice had left. 

    In the end, I succeeded in cleaning the shed of thistle down, 

but the project isn't finished. I still have loose down in the collection bin, 

and it turns out not to be easy to stuff a bag of thistle down into the stove, whose door is about the same size as a paper bag full of thistle down. Inevitably pieces of down escape and have to be chased down in the house. 

    But once the thistles are in the stove, they make a very satisfying flame. 

Bear Grub Gone

     Yesterday I joined a rally in front of the Bureau of Land Management office in Medford to protest the timber sale in the Applegate known as Bear Grub.

    Some of the most beautiful places in the Applegate are included in this sale, such as, for instance, the beautiful East Applegate Ridge trail. Since the East ART was built by the Applegate Trails Association four or five year ago, it has become one of the most visited trails in the Appleagate, and for good reason. Its views over the Applegate Valley—Ruch, the Thompson Creek valley, the Little Applegate, up into the Red Buttes, the Siskiyou Crest—are spectacular. Wildflowers grace its shoulders in profusion in May and June.

Now, however, when I walk the East ART, I see large swaths of trees with white rings painted on their trunks—trees marked for cut. The East ART would be a different trail if the Bear Grub Timber Sale went through.     

    Other areas I love to hike are included in Bear Grub: the Sterling Mine Ditch trail, the Jack-Ash trial, the beautiful, wild, unroaded Wellngton Wildlands, an area that the BLM itself at one time designated a "land with wilderness characteristics." Let loggers in, and it no longer qualifies for that protection, which wasn't much, anyway, if Wellington Wildlands could be given away as part of Bear Grub.

    It also seems wrong to be cutting the largest trees in our forest when wildfires are so rampant. The large trees are fire resilient. Younger, thinner trees, and the brush that grows up in overcut areas, burn hotter and faster, increasing the fire danger. What are our forest managers, BLM and Forest Service, thinking, to be cutting our big trees?

    So I made my sign for the rally—"Keep your grubby paws off Bear Grub"—and yesterday morning joined a group of other forest enthusiasts, masked and spaced well apart, in front of the BLM during the time bids from timber companies were being accepted (if there were any). 

Other signs gave similar messages as mine: 

    "Farmers for protected forests." 

    "No Sale! Save our big trees." 

    "Trees=oxygen. To cut them is an act of suicide." 

    "Forest protection = climate protection." 

    "Don't grub our mountains bare. Stop Bear Grub." 

    "Big trees are fire resilient." 

    "We ❤️ big trees."

    Judging by the reception we received from the traffic on the road, the rally was a success, as we received some honks and no fingers. The driver of a big semi drove past with a wave in our direction. Our aim was to make it clear that the community was not in favor of the Bear Grub Timber Sale. We hoped to deter bidders.

    For that aim, the rally wasn't quite so successful. In the end Timber Products bought Bear Grub for about a million dollars. 

    And so go our big, beautiful trees, our shaded trails, sold, for a million dollars, when their value to us is a million times more. 

    I am sick at heart.

    

Why I Voted for Biden

I turned in my mail-in ballot several days ago and there was no argument in my mind about whom to vote for. But a few days ago I heard on the New York Times's radio program an analysis of how well Trump has kept his campaign promises. That he followed through fairly well is part of the horror, you know, for those of us who are concerned about things like immigrants' welfare and global warming. But if you like the kinds of things Trump accomplished, maybe I began to understand why you voted for Trump (the first time around, anyway). And so I wrote a poem:

 I Finally Understand Trump Voters

If you think the country shines
And you want to antagonize Iran
And think China's evil, Putin's fine
And Erdogan, too—then Trump's your man!

And if you think that immigration

Of Muslims means they'd take a stand

To make sharia law our nation—

That immigrants should all be banned

And if you think that every cop

Who kills an unarmed Black man can

Go free of blame, no need to stop

And think, just shoot to get your man

And if you think we should bring back coal

'Cause global warming's just a scam

Or that COVID's just a big black hole

Of lies and hoax, and masks be damned

And if you believe not a jot of science—

Let "alternate facts" inform the plan—

If you like the courts' reliance

On bible and bully, of honor no fan

If you think a woman's nasty

To speak her mind against a man

That the man who lets her's just a patsy

And ought to grab her where he can

And if your pick-up flies two flags:

Big "Trump," Old Glory, hand in hand,

Banners meant to boast and brag

That bullies rule—that Trump's your brand

Well, then, I get why Trump's your man.

He's done all that and more and worse.

You've helped him build an empire on sand.

All woe to our country for such a curse.

French Lessons

     The Applegate Poets' assignment for this week was to write a poem about journeys, so I've been thinking about the significant journeys in my life, of which one of the most important was the semester I spent with Vanderbilt-in-France, in Aix-en-Provence. Those six months in France, February through July, 1966, were a pivotal growing-up experience.

Pont du Gard, 1966

    I was suddenly thrust into a different language. I had studied French for five and a half years before I went to France, and I am a good student and got As in every class, but when I stepped off the airplane, I couldn't understand a word. I was linguistically lost. 

    I was socially lost as well. I was not friends with the Vanderbilt students, but, trying to find a social footing, I joined a group on an excursion to Geneva soon after we arrived. I was painfully ostracized and never tried to be a part of the Vanderbilt group again.

    I was cut off from my family. Before I went to France, family was never more than a long-distance phone call away.  It's hard to imagine now, with our modern communications, how extremely far away I was, living in France. Communication was solely through aerograms, which took weeks to arrive. 

    I also found it disconcerting to be in a country where the dominant religion was Catholicism. I was already in the process of withdrawing from the Methodist church of my childhood, so it seemed odd, even then, that religion mattered, but the prevalent Catholicism intensified the sense I had of being a foreigner. 

    The language was different. The religion was different. The customs were different. The food was different. Living in a centuries-old town was different. I was alone and unsupported. I am not an extroverted personality; I didn't know how to make friends. The first few weeks in France were hard lessons in growing up. 

    But I loved living in France, I was determined to speak the language, and, gradually, I found a place. It helped when I was taken out of Vanderbilt's over-crowded dormitory and sent to live in a French home,  Mme. Sevin's, where I had a good cup of cafe au lait and good French bread for breakfast every day. I had a Swedish roommate, Gunilla von Arbin, whom I liked and who befriended me.

Me (left), Gunilla (right) in our room at Mme. Sévin's

I became a part of a group of pieds-noirs, exiled French Algerians, and the girl friend of one of them, Paul Merlot, so I had a social circle. My French improved to the point that even the French were telling me I spoke "presque sans accent." I loved living in Aix, with its eighteenth-century architecture and good food. I went to concerts; took excursions—to Cézanne's studio, to the Provençal countryside, to the sea; learned to sit in a cafe on the Cours Mirabeau with a tiny demitasse of espresso and watch people greet each other on the street. I bought my first bikini

In my bikini, at a pool in Aix

and swam in the sea at the French Riviera. I did a two-week mountain-climbing school in the French Alps, with a climactic ascent of Le Rateau, 12, 497 feet high. 

Climbing Glacier de la Rose, to summit at Le Rateau, 3,809 meters

    By the time I left France, six months after I arrived, I was thinking that I could live in France, if that's the way my life went. I had found a way to make it my home.

A Day Hike on the Wild and Scenic Rogue River

     A year ago last June Mike and I hiked the Wild and Scenic Rogue River trail forty miles from Galice to Illahe, where we spent the night in the lodge before returning to Galice. (See post on June 20, 2019.) Eightly miles.

    Mike died last May, not quite a year after that hike. Last weekend, after weeks of being house-bound because of the smoke, I did a twelve-mile day hike on the Rogue River trail. I dressed in hunting-season hiking clothes and took some of Mike's ashes with me.

    As I drove over the bridge and down the steep incline to the parking lot, my eyes filled with tears. We had had such a good time on that hike. Why, remembering it, was I crying? I always expect to be filled with the happiness of good memories when I return to a place where Mike and I had been together. I'm always surprised when those memories evoke the tears of loss instead.

    Once walking, I was better. The trail, bordered with wildflowers a year ago last June and now just beginning to show autumn color, is always beautiful,

as it follows the green, white-rushing river west towards the sea. There was no one else on the trail. I was walking fast over rocky ground, up and down the hills. I hoped to hike the six miles to Russian Creek, the site of our first and last campsites, to spread ashes there.

Mike's and my tent on Russian Creek, 2019

    I got to Russian Creek in about three hours, around noon. I sat on a rock by the creek with my feet in the cold water and ate my lunch, letting the memories flow with the soft gurgle of the creek. Then I walked to our tent site and poked into memories there. I read a poem I had written about hiking this same trail, from Galice to Illahe, with my son when he was around eight years old and then again with Mike forty years later, when Mike was only a few weeks past six months of chemo-therapy. It ends with these words:

            We change like the bears and the birds

            We change like the trees, susceptible to fire

            We are not the master pattern.

I spread ashes on the tent site itself and chose three rocks from the creek to carry home in my pack as mementoes. They would join rocks from other places of ashes ceremonies now outlining my Zen garden.

    The trail was hot on the way back, with the afternoon sun beating on the trail from across the river. It had been even hotter in June 2019. The day Mike and I arrived at Illahe Lodge that year, the temperature was 103 degrees. The swimming holes all up and down the river had been godsends.

My swim in Flora Dell, 2019

Now, I stopped at Whisky Creek and took a good long swim in the swimming hole there before continuing back to the trailhead.

Swimming hole on Whisky Creek, 2020

    About a mile and a half from the trailhead my feet began to hurt. Rocky ground is especially hard on my feet, and a rocky downhill is the worst. Unfortunately, much of the last mile and a half of this trail are on rocky downhill terrain. As soon as I got to the parking lot, I took off my boots and put my feet in the cold river.

    My feet were still sore the next morning, but so was the rest of my body: my legs from tramping up and down, my back from carrying rocks, and, strangely, my chest. This was the first strenuous hike I had taken since the smoke came in. Maybe I had overexercised after the long days indoors, but why would the exercise have affected my chest?

    I think maybe it wasn't the exercise. I think maybe my chest was sore because I had loosened the emotional burden I carry in it.

Weather and Smoke Report

    Welcome to your weekly weather and smoke report from the mountains above the Applegate River of southern Oregon. 

    I am sorry to report that the smoke has moved back in. It's only half as bad as it was before (I can still see Humpy Mountain through the smoke), but half as bad is only half comforting. Williams was back on the AQI chart yesterday, fourth in the country, with a 298 rating. To be "unhealthy" might be one step better than "hazardous," but it still means staying indoors. [UPDATE, Friday morning: The smoke has disappeared again!]

   I took advantage of the clear days before the smoke returned to hike a bit on the Upper Rogue River trail. It was so beautiful! A soft rain made it even nicer. 

I was hiking with my friend Barbara Holiday, who has participated in the Bay Area's Bay2Breakers marathon every year for many years. Because the race was virtual this year (run or walk wherever you are and record your time), we hiked the seven and a half miles of the marathon on this beautiful trail. Our finish time was two hours and fifty-five minutes. We stopped often to take pictures or just bask in the colors. 

     During the clear days I took my fan back to the tool shed. Since there are no more mosquitoes and many fewer bees and flies, I opened all the windows, letting the butterflies flitter in along with the cool, clean air. Now, though, if the temperature goes up much more, I'll have to put on my smoke mask and walk to the tool shed to get the fan.

    It was such a relief to see Humpy and the blue sky behind it during the day and Orion rising over it at night that I wrote a cheerful poem. It was a relief not to be writing poems of doom. Here's my poem (the cheerful one):

The Day the Smoke Lifted

The day the smoke lifted

the sky discarded her smoke-stained frock

and slipped into her silkiest, sexiest, bluest dress.

The wind skipped in, waved, and went on.

A frolic of butterflies giggled and drifted.

At night the shiny-faced moon moved in

and when it docked

the night sky adorned herself with jewels

polished to their shining, sparkling best.

The air held not a taint of fire

no smoky pall of gloom.

The best-dressed sky and skip-to-my-Lou wind

uplifted us smiling from our sense of doom.

Fire update

     The smoke is better. The mountain is almost always visible these days, though blurred with what we might call haze but is really smoke. I've been able to take walks on some days, not today because the smoke is a little thicker today, probably "unhealthy for sensitive groups." We have had some cool weather and a dab of rain two nights ago. 
    I have unpacked the car with its evacuation gear. As I unpacked, I made a list of every item so next time I won't have to think about what to take. I'll just throw things together according to the list and avoid the anxiety of decision making. 
    A few days ago the sky was so clear and blue (I was relieved to see it had not turned red while I couldn't see it) I put on my hiking boots and got in the car to go up Stein Butte, maybe, at the Applegate Lake, or the Charlie Buck trail to Baldy Peak on the other side of the Applegate. But once I went over the pass into the Carberry Creek drainage, the smoke thickened badly, and I knew I wouldn't be able to hike. When I reached the Applegate Lake, I saw that the road towards Stein Butte was closed, anyway, and the same thing was true for the road leading to the Charlie Buck trail. The best thing, then, would be to circle around to the Applegate valley and drive home, but when I got to the valley, I decided to make something of the trip and go into Jacksonville for a cup of coffee.    
    The air in Jacksonville was clear. The sky was its usual beautiful blue, so I parked the car and walked for two hours in the Jacksonville Woodlands.

There were lots of people walking the trails, glad to be outside, glad to be getting outdoor exercise, glad to be walking in the beautiful woodlands again. Everyone was in the best of moods.

    The Slater and Devil fires are still burning, but they are burning low and slow and are no longer threatening my house. The air is still smoky but not oppressive and no longer in the hazardous zone, as it was for so many days. Williams, Oregon, eight miles down the road, no longer has the worst air quality in the world and, in fact, doesn't even show up any more on the AQI index as one of the ten worst cities in the country. I'm sorry for those ten California cities on the list. I hope they, too, will wake up one day soon under a smokeless blue sky. 

Where There's Fire There's Smoke

(Before beginning this post, I want to express how heartbroken I am for all the people in Oregon who have lost their homes because of the fires. My heart is especially heavy for those who live in Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, and Medford, and for all the businesses that have suffered loss as well.)

    In the pall of smoke descending on my house from the Slater and Devil's fires, burning only a few miles away, I have lost track of the days. Did the fires start a week ago? More? How long have I been ensconced here on the mountain, imprisoned by the hazardous air outside? How long has it been since I have seen the sky or known any weather? Has it been hot? Have clouds been gathering? I hear it might rain in the next few days, though you couldn't tell by looking out the window. 

I used to see a mountain outside my window. That's smoke, not clouds.

    Actually, the smoke is better today. Twice there was a reddish spotlight glare, which I assume was the sun, not flames. Today I can see the trees beyond the garden, though Humpy Mountain, of course, is completely obscured.  You would never know I had a mountain view. 

    The smoke is bad everywhere in Oregon because the fires have been bad everywhere, but Williams, eight miles down the mountain, has had the worst air in the state, according to AQI levels. In fact, it has been the worst air in the country, if I'm reading the chart right. Is it worse up here on the mountain? Or better?

    When I first learned of the fire, my neighbors told me they were packing their cars in case of evacuation and putting sprinklers on their roofs. That was scary! I don't have the capacity for putting sprinklers on my roof. I felt alone, isolated, and very much at the end of the road. Maybe the fire chief who came knocking on doors wouldn't know I was here. Maybe I would miss the evacuation notice. Maybe I should pack my car for evacuation. But with what? What are "important papers"? When I looked around the house, nothing seemed important, really, except my computer, or else everything seemed important. What would I take? I was worried, confused, directionless. When a friend told me she would be feeling the same way except that her son was visiting and could function as her brain, I realized that what I needed was a brain. 

    I called my son.

    It was like a breath of fresh air. Ela gave me sensible directions for evacuation and told me that, if I did have to leave, I should go straight to his house, on Vashon Island in Washington. 

    Now I felt directed and could move into action. Following Ela's advice, I made a list of priorities of things to take. To my surprise, I easily found my important papers (deed to the house, will, marriage certificate, etc., though I guess the marriage certificate is only important sentimentally now). I packed a bag of clothes and my camping gear. I made clear decisions about what was irreplaceable (computer; phone; shoes, including hiking boots and ski boots, because my feet are so hard to fit, and if I took the boots, I might as well take the skis, too, so they went into the "irreplaceable" pile; cords and chargers for the computer and phone). I packed a suitcase with clothes. Then I thought about what I would want if my house burned and I had to start all over again, and I took some things people had made for me, including a stained-glass gift from Mike. I took a few photos I had hanging on the wall. I put everything in the car. If I have to evacuate, I am ready.

    Then I put on my N94 mask and raked dry leaves away from the house and the woodshed and swept the deck clean. If the fire does come here and it's a ground fire, there's a good chance my house will survive. If it's not a ground fire, it's lost, anyway. 

    I found that all that preparation helped me be psychologically ready, too. I can't remain in perpetual anxiety about danger I can't do anything about, so, except that I stay indoors, I follow normal life. Because I don't have an air filter in the house, I avoid strenuous exercise even indoors. My hiking muscles are atrophying. Political news, coronavirus news, family news from the east coast—it all seems like another world. In this tunnel of smoke, I sit in my house, read daily updates on the fire, and wait, hoping I won't be joining the crowds of fire refugees all over Oregon.

Fire

        A few days ago I received a text alert: "Extreme Fire Risk Alert. Gusty winds through Wednesday afternoon with dry conditions."

        And indeed.

        The Almeda fire struck at the north end of Ashland on Wednesday morning, and, without dawdling or wondering what to do, it roared into action down Highway 199 and I-5, into Talent and through it, into Phoenix and through it, and on to the south end of Medford. It jumped into a trailer park here, a business building there, a block of homes in another place, licking up whatever looked good to eat, then turning its back on other possibilities on the same block and continuing its destructive path north, leaving behind a 13-mile swath of calamity. 

        I haven't been there to see it. I'm staying away so as not to exacerbate traffic, but I know that when I do drive into town, I won't be prepared for what I'll see. There is no way to prepare myself for the emotional impact of seeing places I love leveled by fire. I've seen the pictures online and I've heard people talk about what they've seen, but I dread seeing it for myself. I have lived here for almost half a century. These are my towns, places where I shop, places where friends live, sights I am familiar with, places I love. I am heartsick, and I haven't even seen, yet, what the fire could do.

        In Europe, the fourteenth century was called the calamitous century. That's how I see the summer of 2020 in the Rogue Valley. First the coronavirus pandemic hit, causing people to curtail social engagements and businesses to shut down, some of them, no doubt, permanently. Then the fires came, destroying businesses, homes, and ordinary life, such as it had become during the coronavirus. How many businesses will recover? What will life be like, for those who lost homes in the fire and for all the rest of us, who were also affected, though less directly?

        Am I safe in my house on the mountain? Of course not. None of us in southern Oregon is safe from wildfire, as the Almeda fire has proven. There is no fire threatening my property at the moment. The Slater fire is not far enough away for my comfort, but all I can do is watch the reports, stay in touch with neighbors, and be ready for the next step, if it comes. 

Destruction by Fire

by Diana Coogle

When fire erupts, it seethes, then leaps and dives,

Or sprouting from a tiny spark, it blooms

Into a monstrous Frankensteinic ‘shroom.

Wind, its accomplice, pushes, whirls, and drives.

Tongues of flame cut buildings down like knives,

Lick the inside of cars as clean as tombs,

Enter doors and roofs to slurp up rooms.

Fire that’s red-hot happy to be alive.

 

When pestilence crept in with stealthy feet

To crush with cold disdain and still the street,

We turned our homes into safe sanctuary. 

But now we know: if pestilence is scary

So is fire—and earthquake, famine, war.

God’s bosom’s bare. No place is safe anymore.

    

    

Pipe Fork Creek

    I have lived here, on this piece of land in the mountains above the Applegate River of southern Oregon, since 1974. My property is nestled among blocks of land owned or managed by the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service, and Josephine County. An old mining ditch runs from Pipe Fork Creek to my property and straight through it.     

    The ditch trail to Pipe Fork became a favorite walk almost as soon as I got here, and then on up the creek, walking on the steep banks or in the creek itself when the banks were too steep or further access was blocked by downed trees or thick vegetation. 

I found small waterfalls tumbling into pools or sliding over long, slick rocks. I found the Siskiyou salamander and fish in the pools. I found a bigger waterfall, where water fell over the lip of a rock eight feet above the pool. I could submerge in the cool, forest-shaded water of the pool. The waterfall splashed into it with therapeutic music.

    I knew at once how special a place this was. There was no other such waterfall that I knew of in this area.

    For years few people, if any, seemed to know about the ditch, the upper sections of the creek, and the waterfall. I sometimes took visitors there, but the waterfall was difficult to get to, so they had to be hearty folks. The last time I was at the waterfall, earlier this summer, I was with my son, who, because he had grown up here, remembered well the creek, the difficult access, and the waterfall itself. He remembered fishing on the creek, the waterslide falls, the mosses and ferns, the giant cedars and pines, the steep canyon walls.

    I have seen fishers scampering around a tree in these woods. I have seen a cougar walk her majestic pace in these woods. I have seen bears run from me up the hills as I approached on a trail, and I have seen a ringtail cat, at my house, in these same woods. I hear the call of a barred owl almost nightly, sometimes close, in the woods just above my house, sometimes far away, as though at Pipe Fork itself. I know the skinks and skunks, the salamanders and lizards that scurry under rotten logs. I know the moist and rampant beauty of Pipe Fork.

    Five years ago Josephine County cut some timber along Pipe Fork, some beautiful tall trees along the old logging road that winds up the mountains above the Pipe Fork canyon. That was bad enough, but now the county wants to clearcut 140 acres in the Pipe Fork drainage, right on the banks, the steep canyon banks, of the creek. 

    I cannot bear this. I talk about Pipe Fork in personal terms because I have lived so long in its ecology, so of course, I don't want to see it logged, but Pipe Fork is now recognized by others, too, as a gem, a rare treasure of Williams, an ecological niche important for the purity of its water that feeds the Williams watershed, the variety of its flora, the health of its fauna, and the big trees still standing that keep the canyon full of water.  Even more important is to pull our vision to a greater height, from which we can see the 140 acres of Pipe Fork the county wants to clearcut as an ecology we can no longer squander, a tiny part of a larger whole that is being fragmented too fast, a part of the larger environment of nature of which we are a part. We do not live on this earth, in our personal habitats, alone. Thomas Berry, in The Dream of the Earth, says, "Any progress of the human at the expense of the larger life community must ultimately lead to a diminishment of human life itself. A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. An enhanced habitat supports an elevated mode of the human." 

    This is no time in our nation's history to be clearcutting a forest, degrading a habitat. We need everything we can find and keep to support an elevated mode of the human, which is so much under fire these days. For my sake and for the sake of human life itself, it is my fervent hope that there will be a way to prevent the degradation of the larger life community of Pipe Fork.

(All photos by Kevin Peer)