College swimming class

            When I was at the University of Oregon for graduate school a few years ago, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to take swimming lessons, but for two years I was so intimidated by the thought of appearing in a bathing suit in my mid-60s in front of 20-year-olds that I shunned swimming class. Finally I told myself that that was ridiculous. If I wanted to swim, I should swim.

            But if I were going to swim, I would need a swim suit, since swimming in the nude is fine when I'm alone in the wilderness but not so appropriate in a college class. Just before the first term of my third year in graduate school, I swallowed my pride and marched into the swimming supply store close to campus to buy a swim suit.

            I was glad to see no other customers in the store. Skulking around the young salesgirl (probably a UO student and maybe even someone I would see in swimming class, too, I thought in panic) and then hiding behind the clothing racks, I looked for something appropriate. When I found a bathing suit I thought would do, I took it to the dressing room and wiggled into it. Then I took a deep breath and stepped in front of the mirror.

            I was horrified. I looked like every middle-age woman who ever poured herself into a bathing suit – the bulky figure, the rolls of fat. There was no way I was going to appear in a college swimming class looking like this. I flung off the swim suit, dropped it on the bench, and fled the store.

            It took me another year for the desire to swim to overcome the embarrassment of my figure and my age, but before fall term the next year I bought a swim suit in a department store in town, where other women my age and my look might be buying swim suits. When I got to campus, I signed up for swimming.

            I tried to look nonchalant as I entered the women's locker room the first day of class, but that part wasn't too bad. I could dress in a private cubicle, and students were dressing and undressing hurriedly, having to get to class, so no one was paying attention to anyone else. But then I had to walk through the door into the pool room, and then I had to walk in front of the cluster of students on the bleachers to find a seat. The students were all, of course, decades younger than I, and, of course, they were eyeing each other, those young men and young women. I felt completely out of place and conspicuous, but I WANTED TO SWIM, so I stubbornly reminded myself that I had every right to be there and that I was there to swim, not to socialize or impress anyone. It's the swimming that's important, I said to myself, tucking my hair inside my swim cap and slipping into the pool with the other students.

            Swim class was, in the end, one of the best things I did in grad school. My instructor, Dan, the erstwhile coach of UO's erstwhile swim team, enjoyed having me in class – because I was an unusual student and because we were, after all, the same age. After I gave him a copy of my book with the essay about swimming in Crater Lake, he liked to tease me about swimming in cold lakes. Most of the students ignored me, but to my surprise one or two every term were as friendly to me as to anyone else. They ignored my age and related to me as a fellow swimmer. It didn't take long before I was comfortable in class, bathing suit notwithstanding. I wasn't the worst swimmer, though I always swam in the slow lane. Many of the students had been on swim teams in high school. They didn't give me the time of day, but I didn't care. We were all there to swim and to learn something about swimming, both those who snubbed me and those who were friendly. I took swimming every term until I graduated and then all during the following year, when I had a post-doc for teaching at UO. I loved swim class.

            For obvious reasons, there are no photos to go with this post.

My Sacred Place

            Last week I received a poem from a poet friend, suggesting that everyone should have a secret place, a place to be alone for renewal, reflection, and recharge, for counting one's blessings, he says, instead of curses. He suggests some possibilities: "a hidden waterfall/a garden corner/a favorite walk/a mini shrine in a bedroom." "It's personal," he says, "not advertised, no chorus girls, no signage," and he suggests that it might include "a photograph/a sea shell from that day/a broken toy/a lock of hair."

            I like his poem a lot, but reading it makes me anxious. As a person who likes to think of herself as the sort of person the poem suggests, I must, therefore, have a secret and sacred place, but where is it? Is it my writing nook,

 where I sit at my computer, alternately gazing at the mountain and putting thoughts on paper? That is a way of reflecting and recharging, but the writing nook is also by definition a work space, which, by definition, doesn't sound sacred.

            Maybe my sacred space is the couch, where I sit to gaze on the mountain and reflect while I knit and where I renew my intellect with the New Yorker or the latest book I'm reading. 

 But there doesn't seem to be anything sacred or secret about a couch against a wall in an open room, and if I am sometimes contemplative while I knit there, at other times I'm learning the hard lessons of patience as I undo my mistakes. There is no photograph near the couch; all my seashells are in the bathroom, and the rocks, bones, and pieces of wood I've gathered over the years are scattered throughout the house, so there is no meditative focus, except that I do keep a coffee-table book of flower photographs on the table at the side of the couch, turning a page once a day, so that, as I walk by the table, I stop for a moment to admire the photograph that has caught my eye. That's hardly a meditation, just a quick moment of admiration.

            Because the couch lacks privacy, it seems more reasonable to think my sacred space is my bed. Sleep is renewal, and when I awake every morning and gaze at the mountain, I am always, always counting my blessings,

 though it seems a cheat to call the bed a sacred space, since I'm there by necessity, sort of like saying my sacred space is the bathtub. We go to bed to sleep and we bathe to get clean, although rest and renewal and also reflection come with those activities, at least for me.

            The fainting couch in the library might seem like a secret place, except that I don't use it that way.

I don't go there deliberately to renew but only when I need a book from the library or wander into the library just to enjoy looking at my books. This place only looks like a meditative spot. It doesn't function that way, sort of the way the bed looks like a functional space but functions like a meditative space.

            I do have a favorite walk, up the mountain. I also know of a secret waterfall I can walk to from my house, but it's hard to get to, and although I certainly consider it sacred (all nature is sacred), I don't go there very often, and either walk, like the bed and the bathtub, is functional with the side effect of meditation.

            So where is my sacred place? If I am that sort of person, I must have one.

            I do. It is big and spacious, not the sort of exclusive place indicated by the poem, but, still, my place of meditation, renewal, reflection. It is my home, inside and out, here on the mountain – all the places I mentioned above, its zen garden with canvas-back chairs, its deck with its flower boxes, its garden with take-a-rest chairs, and, from everywhere, its view of the mountain. It is not advertised, and there are no chorus girls, but its signage speaks truth: "Wonderland": where wonder fills the psyche and gratitude spreads bright wings.

           

Sacred Place

by Andy Anderson

Everyone should have 

a secret place

a sacred place 

to be alone undisturbed

a meditative moment 

brief 

or fasting for days.

a special place to recharge 

renew

reflect 

count one's blessings 

instead of curses.  

Be it a hidden waterfall 

a garden corner 

a favorite walk

a mini shrine in a bedroom.  

It’s personal 

not advertised 

no chorus girls 

no signage.  

My place.  

Your place.  

Don’t mess with it 

or with my ancestors.  

Perhaps a photograph 

a sea shell from that day

a broken toy

a lock of hair 

or nothing 

just space to be in 

a simple shack 

a cathedral

a sacred place.

Trip to Atlanta

            I had a wonderful visit with my siblings in Atlanta a few weeks ago. 

Laura, me, Sharon, Lee

We laughed a lot, as only we can do and only with each other. We watched a pastiche of Coogle family home movies, ourselves as babies and children, our parents so young and active and, as we acknowledged to each other, so playful with us when we were children. We had a pizza party with Laura's daughter and grandchildren on Laura's patio, where she has a wood-burning pizza oven that she loves to bake in. We drew names of Kentucky Derby horses from a hat for a dollar each, then watched the race, mint juleps in hand, with great excitement. We played croquet. We spent a night at Laura's lake house where we took walks and had lunch on the dock and I had a swim and my sister Sharon, who traveled in southeast Asia this winter, made us a great Asian dinner. The four of us enjoyed hours together working a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, which we exultantly completed. 

Lee isn't pictured because he's taking the picture.

            One evening while we were working the puzzle, my sister Laura left Sharon, Lee, and me to fit pieces together while she played the piano in the other room.

            She has been playing for years but has recently been taking lessons again. She can play very difficult pieces. I remember some Chopin that she played last year. She was very competent with the keys. She could crash-bang her way through those difficult pieces with alacrity. 

            This time was different. This time when she played, music poured forth. The listener didn't think, "How impressive she is!" but "What a beautiful piece of music." She was playing Mozart's Sonata Number 5 that evening, a piece I didn't know but which I found delightful. I loved its minor-key truthfulness, its refrain that sounded like, "Ha-ha, ha-ha." I thoroughly enjoyed listening. It was beautiful.

            Laura had found the essence of the music in the pieces she was playing. She said her teacher told her she had to learn to relax her hands, so she spent days of practice with her hands hovering over the keys, willing them to relax. And when they did, suddenly what she was playing was music. Somewhere between her fingers and the keys of the piano, she had found that essential quality. Instead of making music, her hands were following the music, as though it were somewhere invisible until her hands found it and made it visible, not molding it into shape like a sculptor but stroking and caressing an existent, constantly flowing sculpture.

            I want to play the guitar like that, but I can't find the music. Where is it? Is it in my hand, which my guitar teacher also told me to relax? Is it in the fingernails, that have to be just this long and no longer, just this shape, just this smoothness, and without all that there is no music? Is it in the notes on the page? Is it in the accent, the dynamics, the rhythm? Is it in the guitar itself? Is it in the stroke of the fingernails on the strings? Where is the music? I am still crash-banging my way through my pieces, and I do so want to find the music. My teacher can pick up my own guitar and play the same notes I play, and when he does, there is music, so I know music lurks in my guitar, waiting to be freed. I want to find it.

            So I take my guitar home, I file my nails, I set my music on my music stand, I tune the guitar, I will my hands to relax, I stroke the strings, and in my head I hear the music. Somewhere between my hands and the strings of the guitar there is music. I know it's there. Someday I will find it, and when I do, I will relax and sit back and listen as my hands follow the sculptured form of the music and bring it into the room.

My First Political Rally

    

            If there were ever a time to be politically active, that time would be now.

            After decades of cheering activists and supporting organizations like Planned Parenthood and ACLU and letting my years on the boards of the local and state Sierra Club be my political activism, I am stepping up my involvement. I've seen that numbers make a difference and that crowds grow one person after another. It was high time I walked down off my mountain and took part in a rally, to swell the numbers, to show the world (that part of it that was paying attention) how many people here in Southern Oregon feel, in this case, that it is important, even crucial, that we take action to rectify as much as we can the blame we bear for global warming.

            So I joined the climate march in Medford, Oregon, on Saturday.

          I had mistakenly thought it was a march for science, like marches in Washington, D.C., and other cities recently, so I made a sign that said, "My granddaughter wants to be a scientist." It wasn't inappropriate, though, for a march for the climate, and it generated many comments, especially from people who told me about their grandchildren who are scientists. 

         Other signs were more pertinent to the theme of the march: "Don't be a fossil fool." "Love wins." "Leave it in the earth." "No LNG pipeline." "There is no alternative planet." "If it's not fact, it's fiction." I was encouraged to see these signs and also by the large crowd gathered in the park – about 900 people, the paper said. 

The speeches were fairly generic except for the one by the high school junior, who talked about what it felt like to face such an unknown future as we are leaving her unless we take action to stop or at least to amend climate change. Speeches were translated, phrase by phrase, into Spanish and simultaneously into sign language, a generous gesture, but the dual language presentation doubled the time of the speeches. There was a Latino speaker and a Native American speaker, and there was a Latino dance performance. I wasn't sure of the point of all that, and I was surprised at the almost a-political focus of the rally. Trump and other perpetrators of climate crimes weren't mentioned.

              Then we marched through downtown Medford with our signs.

            The political chants petered out right at the beginning. There was very little traffic on the streets and no one walking around, so our march had little impact. There was no call to action by the speakers and no riling up of emotion over the issues. My first political rally felt low-key and fairly impotent except that the people who were there felt strongly about the importance of their positions and what they were doing to make things go right. I was glad to be among them. I'm glad the people I knew whom I saw there saw that I was there. I was glad that I stood up to be counted. I was glad to add my voice, my presence to the large numbers of people all over the country who are trying to prevent the disasters that Trump is trying to bring down on us all, from environmental to judicial, from immigrant-related to the economy, from international affairs to local effects.

            I'm glad my granddaughter wants to be a scientist. I want her world to be one in which she can be proud of that vocation. I'm glad we live in a country where each voice counts. I'm glad I stood up to be counted.

The Kinds of Places We Choose to Live In

            When my friend told me he was thinking about building townhouses on a piece of property he owns, I blanched.

             I like my friend, but I loathe developers. I think sprawl is one of the worst of our environmental problems. I don't think we need an influx of people with all their cars crowding the roads, parking places paving over Paradise, and houses squeezed onto formerly "empty" lots (never mind their flora and fauna).

            Trying to be reasonable, though, I admitted the financial wisdom of building rentals as an investment in retirement funds, and I recognized the practicality of the townhouse design – two-story houses with front doors facing the street. But all attempts at fair-mindedness were defenestrated in the face of garages as big as the fronts of the houses.

            "Hide the garage!" I cried. "The front of the house should invite the visitor in, not just emphasize the importance of the car."

 

Emphasizing the importance of the car

            Considering my social-architectural theories, my friend pointed out that putting driveways in the back of the house would take up most of the back-yard space.

            "Well, that won't do, then," I said in a pout. "We live too much indoors. How can we begin to know more about nature if we don't provide places where people can be in nature, even if it's only a patch of weeds under a tree?" I ranted on: "Children, especially, need to be outdoors." My friend said there was a very good park only a few blocks down the road, with a playground and lots of open space, and I said that that was very good, but that nothing could take the place of a child being able to step out the door and play outside. If we are going to encourage children to know nature, I said, we have to provide them the opportunity.

            Adults, too, need that expansive sense of space that comes from the outdoors. Thoreau would take visitors to the pine woods behind his house, which he called his withdrawing room, so they could make conversation there. "You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they make their port," he said. Thoughts bang into walls, no matter how big the house.

            My friend the potential developer pointed out that he had included an open space with his townhouses, I think by law, but I hooted at the postage-stamp size of this open space.

A small square of open space at a development in Grants Pass

These nods towards the outdoors don't contain the mysteries of nature that intrigue children – and adults. I had in mind, if not Thoreau's withdrawing room, then the sort of continual back yards of a neighborhood I had once seen in Atlanta, where all houses on two streets opened to a large common back yard with slopes and trees and ravines and all sorts of mysteries for children to explore and for the soul to contemplate. That wasn't possible here, but, still, I argued, we needed to make the common outdoor area larger.

            Well, said my friend the developer, if he built three houses instead of four, he could create more open space, but that would mean less income. I said maybe the larger open space would make his townhouses more attractive to buyers, so he could charge more for each one. It is of dubious truth, but surely there are other people who see the value of this kind of living space.

            My final point was trees. Where were the trees? The landscaper's plan included some hawthorn and other smallish trees here and there, "but," I said, reaching the ultimate in unreasonableness, "where are the 100-year-old trees to put swings on and for the children to climb into and test their strength on?"

            In the event, my friend decided not to be a developer. He sold the land instead, and, as usual, the new developer will jam in as many houses as legally possible, giving residents a postage stamp of grass for outdoor space, emphasizing garages, and planting spindly little trees that won't ever grow into mighty giants, and children won't be encouraged to be outdoors and adults won't know the benefits of nature in their lives. My attempts at creating a better society through better living spaces came to an unfruitful end. But, for a while, I tried hard.

The Way My Brain Works

           Mike handed me his jumper cables and explained carefully how to use them, including telling me how the electricity goes from one car to the other because, he said, if he understands how a thing works – how or why – he is more likely to remember directions.

            But that's not how my brain works. I remember how to use the jumper cables by visualizing the scene – RAV4 on the right, Yaris on the left. Attach red to the dead battery (on the right), then red to the good battery (on the left), then black on the good battery (the left one), then black on the dead battery (on the right). I see it all as I repeat it: red to dead, red to good; black to good, back with black. How and why it works is no help at all. I don't even remember it. I visualize what to do, so I can do it. Words help, too.

            The difference in the way our brains work came up again when we played a game of "dictionary." We found some fabulous words: wittering (a token or hint), twire (to peep out), opsimath (a late learner), ponty-pool (relating to japanned metalware, not, as Mike would have it, the pool of water around the pilings of a bridge, or, as I would have it, the biggest stakes in a gambling game). Later when we tried to recall as many of those words as we could, thinking we might want to keep them in our vocabularies for future use, I was running through the words as they appeared in my mind, visualizing them in the column I had made of them, on paper, after the game.

            Mike said he didn't see written words in his mind. He just remembered them by remembering them.

            But I do. I see the column of words I wrote down. I see where on a page I was when I stopped reading. I see the written word when I want to know how to spell it. I see the jumper cables being put first on one car, then on the other, accompanied by the jingle. It isn't a photographic memory. It's just a visual memory, and it works best with words.

            I asked Mike what he saw when, for instance, there was a December 2016 date and an April 2016 date. How did he know which date came first?

            Okay, that was a dumb question.

          He knew which date came first because April comes before December. Yes, I know that, but I made a mistake recently, when the question was asked me (in circumstances that made it not such a dumb question as it sounds), thinking that December came before April because I see the calendar as a circle in my head: December (spelled out) at the top, April on the extreme right, July on the bottom, and October on the extreme left, the other months filling in the quarters. The year revolves clockwise around that circle. That seasonal calendar ignores the years, only referencing the months according to seasons. Therefore, when the question came up of whether December 2016 came before April of the same year, well, yes, in that calendar in my mind, which shows the months but not the years, December, being on top, does come before April. It's very rational.

            Curiously, this kind of visualization doesn't work with maps. I don't visualize the land as on a map, and I often get east and west mixed up. My internal compass doesn't orient me easily in the landscape, and I get confused. I asked Mike how he knew what was where, and he said he had a map in his head. If my brain can see words on a page, why can't it see formations on a map?

            This way of "thinking" isn't something I consciously decide to do because I think it would be helpful, for instance, to see the calendar as a circle of months or remember words by visualizing them. In fact, it's probably not a good idea, as the December-April example proves, and I see that although I have a rational explanation of why I made a certain mistake, other people can't know the rationale, and I look kind of dumb. Oh, well. I know that the thinking was perfectly rational, and whether it's a good way for the brain to work or not doesn't matter. It's just the way my brain works.

Sin Crops

            The Applegate is going to pot.

           It used to be ranches and farms. When I first arrived, in 1972, the Krauses were still running cattle on Grayback Mountain, herding ten or twelve head twice a year up Thompson Creek Road, not on horseback but from their pick-up. That only lasted a few more years. The Applegate was mostly cattle and sheep farms then, and hay fields.

This is not in the Applegate, but you get the idea.

Farmers would get at least two cuttings of hay every summer. Bales would stand in the cut fields, ready for pick-up. Seeing them always reminded me of a home movie of my mother as a young woman, "helping" with the haying on my grandfather's farm. She is struggling to haul a bale to the truck, laughing, calling out, "Help me!" We can't hear her words, of course, but the shape of her mouth makes the words clear. In the Applegate the smell of dry hay used to permeate the air, as it did on my grandfather's farm.

            Before hay, tomatoes were king. When I arrived in the Applegate, they were just being phased out as the main crop. I worked one summer picking tomatoes at Messinger's Farm, the last commercial tomato field in the Applegate. When tomato was king, the air in the Applegate at harvest, I've been told, smelled like catsup.

            The main crop on my grandfather's Kentucky farm was tobacco. The barn, with its long leaves of tobacco curing in the rafters and its bales of hay stacked on one side, smelled of a rich mixture of tobacco and hay. When we were little and visiting our grandparents, my sisters and I used to jump from the top hay bales to the rumpled piles of broken bales on the floor, sending up poofs of redolent hay dust. After my grandparents died, the farm was sold, the barn torn down, and the fields made into a golf course.

            In the Applegate, after the tomatoes, came the hay and corn, and, more gradually, organic vegetable farms. But if there was an "after tomatoes," there was also an "after cattle and sheep, hay and corn," and what came after was grapes. Hay fields were supplanted by vineyards. Trees were cut down, and grapes went in. Wineries won awards and opened tasting rooms. People began referring to the Applegate Valley as another Napa.

Troon Vineyards, in the Applegate

           Then marijuana became legal in Oregon, and, more suddenly than grapes displaced corn, marijuana snatched up land. Suddenly landlords could raise rent on agricultural lands to such exorbitant levels that organic farmers were forced out.

Three guesses who'll be buying this property!

Suddenly large fences blocked the views of fields along the highway, and we all knew what grew behind them.

Suddenly greenhouses glowed with blindingly bright grow lights for indoor marijuana,

and the smell in the air at harvest in the Applegate was no longer either catsup of years gone by nor hay of recent years but the pungent odor, some say the skunk-like stink, of highly resinous marijuana buds.

            Maybe the Applegate hasn't entirely gone to pot, though. Sheep with their leaping lambs still dot the pasture down the road, and organic vegetable farms still thrive in the Applegate. Still, the money is in the sin crops: wine grapes and marijuana in the Applegate, tobacco in Kentucky.