through judith gap

Trust me when I tell you we slipped through the thinnest fog.There are no photos  to share here because the photos I took from the back seat of my ex-husband's car couldn't capture the magic of being the only witness in a stretch of fog. That happens sometimes -- a defying moment, shared while enroute to some place else. With someone else. For years to come, we will hear the word, fog, and remember who we shared that moment with. Often, it's not who we would choose. 

But still: wisp.

Say the word and the four of us who shared the same pre-dawn ride through Judith Gap, will pause for a moment to remember shared glances through rearview mirrors and headrests as we slipped beneath ground cover floating in thin waves four feet above the quiet earth. We'll remember how we held our breath and how that breath held us. 

over the river and through the woods

This is where we are headed for the holidays.

Last minute text from a favorite nephew: Don't forget your ice skates.

Wishing you many blessings and the opportunity to gather yourself anew.

photos, untaken

Turns out that waiting for the coal train to wander its way along the downtown tracks lasts as long as it would take to smoke two cigarettes. This I hadn't known, and I also didn't know about counterweights on the railroad crossing bars. You have to watch out for them when you are crossing the tracks on foot, after the train goes by.  Standing in zero-degree weather, waiting to cross from the south side to the north side, I listened to the slow-moving westbound coal train. Train wheels on a frozen track produce a continual ringing. Unlike church bells where you might hear the moment when the bells are struck, the train wheel ringing goes on and on. And on.

Stomping my feet to keep warm, I wondered outloud, in a Sherry-Being-An-Idiot moment, how many people had ever heard such ringing. The musical, cylical tones were new to me. The man who had informed me earlier that the end of the train wouldn't show up until he had lit his second cigarette, blew a ring of smoke towards the full moon above us. "The hobos," he replied.

When the last coal car slipped by, he offered to show me the best way to weave through the cross bars and piles of shoveled snow. We needed to hurry, he warned, because the eastbound rail was next.

"Are you after a tree, too?" he asked as we worked our way between the chain link fence and loading dock behind St Vincent de Paul's. I didn't know what to say. Really, I had only stopped by to take photos of the donated trees lining the front of the charity store.  

pompey

Solitary. Outside, watching in.

One of the neatest experiences I've had in the writing world happened when I was writing the poem, This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But it Didn't End up That Way. It's just been published by a journal I admire, PANK. I hope you click over to read and listen. At the time, the poem didn't make entire sense to me -- I wrote it down as it appeared. Now, about a year later, it speaks for me. Mysteries aren't always meant to be solved before their time.

on the corner of 5th & wesson

I buy groceries at the same store I shopped when my toddlers fit in the grocery cart. The butcher knows to wrap my meat in 1/4 pound packages --the babies are adults now. Everyone knows everyone, even when they don't. There is a general sense of neighborness going on.

Sunday I stopped to buy  bananas and red potatoes. The clerk, the one with the crooked grin, was wearing an oversized Eagles NFL t-shirt. She chatted about how every employee in the store was cheering on the Eagles today because it was her favorite team. Eagle bling was everywhere. I swiped my debit card, she bagged my produce. Behind her, two other cashiers worked at their own registers. The dark-headed high-school clerk had just finished loading water bottles into a customer's cart. He grabbed a sheet of cardboard and a black marker. Scribble scribble scribble, then quickly  held it over his head so I could read it: We hate the Eagles! 

Behind him, the short and dumpy assistant manager, right wrist in a carpal-tunnel wrap, reached under his counter, producing a bright orange poster: Go Broncos! Eagles suck!  I grinned. My clerk grinned back and handed me my receipt.

armchairs and unfolded globes

Travel on a budget - check out the BluePrintReview project, a journey waiting for you to experience with the click of your mouse. The second edition of this blog carnival is being hosted by Nicolette Wong at her blog, Meditations in an Emergency.

alley shots

Our streets are rutted with solid ice. I can't think past the tracks.

When I get to this point -- where I have no appetite and have ceased to engage in my surroundings, I find fresh batteries for my camera, slip into sturdy hiking boots and head out to find a different view.

skitter

"The buck is here with his seven does."

He tells me this, using his quiet voice. I imagine him, leaning against the thick cottonwood trunk in his mother's yard, one hand in his coat pocket, the other holding a cell phone to his ear. Breath-marks steaming when he exhales. The light over the kitchen sink casts a yellow smudge against the thick frost on the window. Inside, his mother is sleeping. He's come back to take care of her since she slipped and fell last month.

In the grove of pine trees twenty feet from the back door, the deer are finding breakfast in the exposed patches of last summer's grass mixed with this morning's issue of snow.

"Bucks are different than the does."

He tells me what we both already know. I turn over in bed, pull the comforter over my head and listen to his narration. The buck stares at him, glances at his women, stares back at him again. The does nibble on the old grass, obediently. That's Bimbo, closest to Snow Buck. And over against the lilac hedge is Bashful.  Each time the buck brings his does by, one more doe is named.

The silence between where he stands and where I lie half-asleep is filling with the stir of sunrise: bird chirps, dog barks, a neighbor warming up his car. Snow crunches underfoot -- he's moving slowly toward the hummingbird feeder. The one we'd hung in our own back yard, once upon a time. I hear a hint of labored breathing when he kneels in the snow. In his best Mutual-of-Omaha-Wild-Kingdom voice, he announces in a barely audible whisper that he plans to extend his phone through the branches of the chokecherry bush. If we are both very quiet, I'll be able to hear the doe he wants to name Dancer eat.

But all is not to be. The doe starles and bolts. Commotion ensues. I hear rustling static, more snow-crunching and labored breathing. And then a round of quiet settles and spreads out.

Probably he dropped the phone in the snow. I listen for him to find me, for the sound of his approach. Wallflower, he says to himself as he retrieves the phone, not knowing if I'm still there.

The sounds of sunrise once included the sounds of heading off to school. Sleepy breakfast, lunch money transferred from my pocket into hers, homework slipped inside her backpack, and then we'd rush outside. Back then it was customary to share our driveway and front walk with a herd of antelope, wintering along the vast expanse of space between our house and the golf course on the edge of town. We never left the house without first checking to see if our leaving would startle them.

By the time we reached the corner of Wicks and Saint Andrews, the windows would be defrosted and we'd have agreed on a radio station. Came the day when she turned seven, we almost hit a deer as it skittered across the road directly in front of us.

"That's a deer, isn't it, Mama." She calmly pointed with her red mittens.

I thought about all the road trips we had shared over the years and how we had tried to teach her a cow was not a horse, and a horse was not a cow. In Montana, roadkill alongside the highway is common. As we would count horses in the fields: horse horse cow, we could count the roadkill. Deer, deer, deer, deer. Deer.

The little girl, who'd remain confused about horses turned to me, her feet not touching the floorboards, the seatbelt-restraint tight across her chest. "Antelope wait before crossing the road. Deer get too anxious."

I'm still working on this poem

                                          You are stillness. I am roam.

something something twenty feet below

Remember this-- I run when I am lost.

This was on my mind yesterday morning while driving to work. My street was ice, the next street -- deep ruts, steep hill. The backroad into town dips around and down into the river bottom. Up ahead, a solitary deer skittered across the road, caught between two oncoming cars. I held my breath. She was akimbo. I could feel her panic in the way she rushed. She runs, too, whenever she is lost.

Is panic the right word? Later in the day, I asked the most intelligent man I know. What is it that makes us anxious? Why is it some of us run?

As he spoke, I chose a seat that offered a fine view of his profile, one of his best sides. He told me about the Heisenberg Principle: the very act of observing something might change its behavior. We can't know for sure why the deer runs, why the antelope stops and waits. When we don't know our place, we waver with indecision: should we run and skitter or should we stay and stop?

 "Uncertainty," he offered as a reason for the doe's run and for the reason behind my poem, "It's life at a subatomic level."

ponding on the lowlands

What we sound like when we don't think anyone is listening. Facebook Status Updates.

Note to Self:

   * stop losing stuff that matters -- keep track of your chocolate sooner.

   * chose one POV and stick with it -- no wonder there's ponding on your lowlands.

    * to rise above the triple-tear-off status, learn how to clear out slush.

not even my horse

In writing about writing and how it removes us from our tangible world, unbeknownst to me, I was contacted by Her Circle Ezine about writing a guest-post for their wonderful on-line journal. *Blush*

Here is my post they are running in this week's issue of The Writer's Life, a section of their journal dedicated to exploring "the feminine experience in the world community."

So yeah! I am honored to be included in their lineup of guest writers. So is Annie the dog in the bio photo featured in the journal. Actually, Annie's mom is pleased. My own pups wouldn't understand why their cousin, the spirited German wire-haired pointer got to sit in the truck (an old Willy Jeep, my heart-throb) with me and not them. Well, it wasn't my truck. And not my red barn in the background.

I was out on my sister's farm taking photos last summer. Two hundred and twenty photos, some of which have appeared in this blog. One thing led to another. Cameras were exchanged. Mittens. Clothing. Candy wrappers, even.

slipping in on a silver fog

He's waiting for the fog to clear, he can't see past the steps on his back porch. I'm still in bed, slightly sleeping -- aware of the contrast between my warm comforter and cool blue sheets. There are ten miles or more between us. The sun has yet to rise. He calls to tell me he's waiting for the fog to clear because he has a three-hundred-mile trip to make in order to retrieve a snowboarding son stranded without a ride. To the other side of the divide and back. I mumble something about kitty litter, back-up-Hershey-chocolate-bars ,being safe and then I fall back into a sort of grizzly bear sleep.

I'm still in sleep mode some time later when my cell phone announces a text message: look outside. see what slipped in on a silver fog.

At first thought: just step out on the back deck with the camera. No reason to get dressed.

But from the deck, I was lured down a flight of slick steps. The bird feeder was beckoning me.

 

From there: twenty more shots of frost. I forgot I was dressed in long boxers and a t-shirt. Sans socks. Sans mittens. Sans coat. Sans any common winter sense.

lemon jell-o

 

Her mother let us bake whatever we wanted in her kitchen. I knew my way around in there because my family lived in the same-but-different sort of power camp house. Those old company houses came with twelve-foot high ceilings, no insulation, and heater boxes mounted underneath the single-pane windows. Bare wood floors and cupboards so tall you had to stand on the counters to reach the good stuff hidden on the top shelf.  Nadine lived more than thirty minutes (by vehicle) downstream from my family's home. 

We were seven, mixing flour and baking soda with cinnamon and chili pepper and two scoops of powder from a Jell-o box, finding out nothing good could come of that sort of combination. No matter. We also had several science experiments taking place in the bathroom sink. We made jars of  snotty-soap from left-over slivers of Ivory. Spending the weekend at her house was akin to 48 hours of discovery.

I tell her this now, and she tells me my family's home back then was more magical -- with all our noise and laughing and commotion. But back then, I thought nothing could ever happen in my house quietly. In her home, we could spend hours in her bedroom drawing and playing music. Scratch that. She drew, I colored. Even back then, Nadine had the eye of an artist. I sensed it, just didn't know how to define it. She played the violin; I sat back and listened. Discovery, awe. Adventure. Eventually, I went home and found a way to say: I want to learn to play viola. I want to learn to draw.  I want to learn.

So, some things I never learned, but I did learn to play the viola. And when her family moved to a power camp too far away to visit, we both learned to write novels to each other. In this way, sharing the world of art with each other has never ended.

In art, the sense of discovery is waiting to be found out. I realized this  in her finger-painting, her water colors, (maybe not so much in the way she played violin when she was eight). I sensed it, even, in the way she mixed ingredients in her mother's kitchen. In scrolling through her online photo albums today, I came across this photo she took last December, eight hundred and fifty-seven miles away. I can smell the cinnamon and lemon Jell-o.

Photography by Nadine Hergenrider.

one tag for two trees

There was the year she mistook a moose for a horse. Easy enough to do when ploughing through hip-deep snow holding mittened hands with me, trying to stay on the trail her father and brother were breaking up ahead. So intent on studying each pine tree  -- is this the next Christmas tree? -- the shock of a cow moose trailing after her brother didn't seem real at first. At six, the similarities between horse and moose were striking. (Later, in the warmth of our home in the city, we read about a crazed cow moose that had attacked skiers and broken into cabins. A wildlife ranger had to put her down. She had been our moose.)

Then there was the year the keys got locked in the cab. I stayed with the kids in the forest, easily twenty miles from the nearest town. Their father, who I think was born with the ability to hitch a ride from the edge of any wilderness, was actually able to hitch a ride to the nearest sheriff's office and return four hours later with tools to unlock our truck. While he was gone, we stayed warm in our snow gear, trampling through the snow in search of a Christmas tree.

Keep in mind, none of the trees we cut down were keepers except in our own minds. We remembered the trees by their location. Remember the tree hanging from the cliff? What about the one we had to cross the creek to reach? And the tree we got the year the spring froze early, leaving a sloped ice rink?

When we set out to raise our two children, we wanted to raise them hands-on. To participate, rather than to observe.  To do, rather than to have. To be, not only with each other, but to be with the spirit of the land.

Now they are old enough to cut down trees on their own. Now their parents are divorced. And yet.

And yet, they still crowd sans mom into the cab of their father's pickup and drive back into the shadows of the Beartooth Mountain Range. Each year someone forgets extra gloves, or snowboots; sometimes someone can't find the saw. But each year they return with a tree for his house and a tree for mine. I meet them in my driveway, a jacket hastily thrown over my shoulders, sans mittens. We laugh over who gets to have the least-kept tree, knowing someday they'll be coming home with two more trees -- one for each of their own homes.

* letting in some light

Notes While Reading Kittredge

*Who are we to think we can regulate the ways of water? Where did the waterbirds go?

My daughter pulls on mittens, zips into her parka. Tells me: we are going to garden a moss mansion.

*You can lose a life in the work.

We recall our last family vacation. Remember, my son says -- the trees were stunned by salt winds.

*Reimagine desire, power over nature.

Driving to work in two feet of snow this morning I listened to a friend on my cell phone talk about Montana history: Whiskey follows gold. Gold led to brick buildings.

*Useful dreams -- what is this?

I ask Sebastian. He tells me: I don't have one friend who isn't from somewhere else.

*Stories are a thicket to catch the mind from falling.

Lately I've been thinking of a farmer's field skidded in with stones. My ex-husband, the father of my children, grew up picking rocks from his brother-in-law's wheat fields. Every spring he would fill another skid with stones. This is how he knew rocks grew.

*When we wake up, what comes back in the morning?

It's taken me until now to believe him.


***************

* denotes phrases from Who Owns the West, by William Kittredge

sans parade

See the stack of snow on the table? Double it in your mind and then you'll know the depth of today's snow. Thirty miles outside of here, ground blizzards held our countryside hostage. Somewhere -- on my sister's farm, for example, Thanksgiving arrived without turkey dinners. Sturdy as she is, she was glad to have fresh bread in the bread box and cold black olives in the frig. Not being able to get to the relatives for a holiday dinner is something to take in stride, when you are a striding-type of person such as my sister.

When the wind let up, she and her husband booted up and headed out to load bales of straw. In town, lazy after our turkey dinner, we were living the unbooted life, playing games at the kitchen table . . .

until I biffed it as the tea kettle on Pennsylvania Avenue. $1275 for one night in my son's hotel? No favored- mom discounts?!

The bales of straw came to town the next day -- the weather had warmed, the wind had died, the tea kettle was put away. My daughter and her first-graders had plans to be in the Holiday Parade that evening, riding on  a flatbed, singing carols, sitting on straw bales. In return for picking up horse feed for my sister, we got not only a pickup-load of bales but the use of the softest, creamiest, warmest bale-totting gloves in any five-state area. 

Really, that's all I wanted to write about: totting the bales with my daughter, slipping on ice together, holding each other up by the elbow. Fun!

Here's a random sans-creamy-bale-totting-gloves photo to look at while I confess to you: I entirely missed the parade (insert guilty-mom-face-thingy here.)

under snow

If you fish the river, you know snow puts the river out of shape. This I did not know. And when I say know I mean I don't walk around with this knowledge in my head. But having been told this it makes sense that snow on water would change the conditions of living beneath the surface. An avid fisherwoman mightn't let the discomfort of a snow storm keep her from fishing — she waits until the river is back in shape. What goes on below the water line when snow falls?

In other news, my poem about scraping honey from a jar while sitting at a kitchen table among friends on a ranch, waiting out the weather, is due to be published in THEMA, a print journal. I can't share the poem here until after its been published. But I've been wanting to return to said ranch and take photos of said jar and unsaid wood stove and the not-yet-mentioned fence line. My rancher friend tells me if I get out his way we could take photos. But know this, he says, his fenceline is under snow.

water water snow

North and west of here, the front reached my parent's house in time for them to slip out of their house, work their way to the river for this early *morning* shot. When my alarm went off on my Blackberry, I noticed a new email from my folks. I wasn't thinking of snow when I saw the photo, I was thinking more about the water -- webbed feet under water. I got caught up in thinking what it might be like below the surface of the water while all around the river, snow was falling and the temperature was dropping. The geese and ducks seemed immune. (I'd like to have more of that.)

 My parents, on the other hand, were thinking about the snow, warning me the front was just hours from reaching me. Off to work I drove. Mittens, parka, shovel, scraper. Another email came across my phone, this time from a friend sharing a Miss Lonelyhearts quote with me:

What goes on in the sea is of no interest to the rock.

That's all his email said. Nothing more, and yet it was an entire gift of words to consider as my day wore through. Later, when temperatures dropped thirty-five degrees in thirty minutes and strong winds rattled the windows in my office, we had a short talk. I had turned on the heater by my feet, slipped into an extra sweater I keep hanging behind my office door. I might have snuck out to the lobby for a cup of hot cocoa, but was too cozy to move.

What were we talking about? Something about travel, and how I'd like to go out to the coast because it matters there when the tide comes in.

 All this water talk. Listen, he said. Your talk of the tide is speaking back to the quote I sent.

I hadn't realized this. When I read his quote, after studying my father's photo, I'd had a flashback of another conversation some time ago: Something something twenty feet below. Not to be indifferent to what he was sharing, but all I could think about was getting home and finding that "twenty feet below" quote in a journal from that time long ago. Before I could do so, the front blew in. At home, I got the dogs in, battened down the hatches. The Blackberry chimed -- this time with a winter hazard text alert.

Crap. I mean, crud! Everyone was safe at home except for my son who was working late. I did the mother thing -- sent him drive safe  good-will telepathic messages akin to the look both ways before you cross the street reminders every parent thinks keep their kidlins safe. Then I found my journals and started looking for that quote.

About the time I started thumbing through journal #3, my son arrived home, safe. But with a story to tell: icy overpass, 180 spins, backing down the overpass, zero visibility.  So yeah. He was glowing from handling a series of near-hits on ice and I was the mother who aged three years listening to the story of how he almost died behind the wheel. (Mother's License To Be Overly Fearful For Her Kidlins). He was perhaps overly confident. (Son's License To Know All Ends Well No Matter What.)

Oy. Hot cocoas all around. (Chocolate soothes the worry-beast within. I am sure that is written in a journal as well.) Once the commotion of his story had passed through us, I flipped through three more pages and found the quote I couldn't remember at the beginning of my day:

We can measure the ebb and the flow, but we can't measure what's twenty feet below the surface.

Ah yes. Webbed feet under water.  Water water snow.  Random random lack of connection. 

And then this, immediately above the twenty-feet-below quote, a quote from my son a year ago in November:  Mom! I am so close to good.

Final bit of random: the Arctic Front is here.



nine doors down from the alley

You are stillness. I am roam.

This is the beginning of a poem I am working on. The rest of it won't  come. And so, this past weekend I went for a drive, looking for moments like these instead:

On one side of the alley, the mixture of sun and shade apparently had been just right (said Goldilocks). The opposite side of same alley, too much sun and not enough shade had finished the berries off (said Sherry who writes about there being too much August and not enough snow).

I was feeling fairly pleased with myself, finding the photo-ops I had hoped for. Autumn here is uncertain, sometimes it wears an exaggerated face. We never know when the Artic Front will blow in, wiping out fall colors.

So caught up with withering and ripe berries, I had my macro-focus going on. This means the batteries  drain ten times faster. And this means not being aware of the background. I had forgotten about the poem I could not write, about the lack of balance in my life (of course I had to bring that up), about the approaching northern front. I didn't think about how I might look to the casual observer: my face two inches from the vines, scrunched down in muddy tire ruts in an unnamed alley (are any alleys named?), two feet away from a collective dumpster.

Eventually I stood up. Stretched the kinks out of my legs, my back, my feet, my macro-focus trigger finger. And noticed what I hadn't found. What had been waiting for me to notice. This was when I saw the doors, and when more of the poem showed up.

 When I leave I’ll do so poorly. Remember this — I run when I am lost. 



sans canoe, sans castle

Catching frogs in a pond, tipping precariously from a canoe. This was what I had in mind when I whined I was in the mood for fun. Something and somewhere outside my daily drive between work and home and work.

Lately, I have the days memorized. I can move through them in my sleep. Nothing here feels new.

In photography class a few weeks ago, we walked into Lab 116 and were greeted by a large photo of King John's Castle in Ireland. Our instructor had a point to make. In our search for the remarkable, we tend to dismiss what is all around us. We've seen what there is to see, we've tasted what there is to taste.  My classmates and I nodded in agreement as he shared his diagnosis with us.

He pointed to the photo of the castle, telling us he grew up two hundred meters from its walls. Only when he moved to Montana, asking where our castles were, did he realize how remarkable his former surroundings are.

Here, castles  are all about hay fields and silos. (Perhaps a sister shepherding with a snake-flinging hoe.)

I haven't the funds to fly to Ireland in order to revitalize the way I see my world, to reboot my own taste buds. In the past, tipping out of canoes was a sure way to reboot.

With this in mind last weekend I ventured out and about, beyond the fields — finding a pond and a pole sans canoe. I walked the water's edges  lined in mud and brittle cattails. I didn't wish once for a canoe — I was too caught up in new discoveries.

releasing aung san suu kyi

When I started my research earlier this year on my third biography for Morgan Reynolds, a publisher of fine YA nonfiction, I wasn't prepared for the sense of grace and humanity I encountered as I read stacks of books and newspapers about Aung San Suu Kyi, a political prisoner of Myanmar (fka Burma).

After Myanmar's recent election, Suu Kyi has been released. What about the thousands of other political prisoners still being held? Will her release last this time? Will she be safe?

found poem from behind my parent's home

During World War I 

there was a railroad  that ran the hill

behind where we are standing now.

We have gotten into taking

an afternoon walk along this old roadbed --

aren't the views great? The Highwoods

and the Little Belts  --they are twenty-five,

thirty miles from us.

The  patches of timber closer in --

those are the graveyards.

seeds over water

First we start with this: Olive seeds over water.

It was my job to keep the pups out of water.

Sometimes it isn't a photo opportunity that takes me out of the walk along the water, sometimes it is a poetry opportunity. Seeds over water, water under sky.

Focus tightens. Sound and distance fade.

chuck sawyer circa 2010

 

Tom Sawyer needn't live inside a book. Remember how he charmed others to whitewash his fence? Remember how it felt to open his book and step inside his adventures? Somewhere nearby he still lives.

When we sit inside our homes and offices, sometimes we get an unnamed yearn. For what we don't know, hence: unnamed yearn. Some of my friends may not call so often anymore because I have become an advocate of going for a walk with a camera. Call me, find out. Tell me the dark is not dark enough, tell me even your pizza tastes like mud and carp. I'll say - get a camera and take a walk. Send me back the photos.

You'll say- but what will I take pictures of? And I'll say- you'll know when you find out.

And so. Over this past weekend someone sent me photos of an area they are so familiar with it was hardly worth the walk. But they walked the walk they always walk, but this time with a camera. They came across The Beaver Plan.

How did they know they came across The Beaver Plan? Because it said so on the back of the diagram  they found. A diagram rolled up in twine with a pencil secured to the bundle. The bundle secured to a log. A beaver-gnawed log. 

  

If any of us had gone looking for this, we wouldn't have found it. Perhaps one hundred years from now we will be reading a book about Chuck Sawyer trapping beavers in Montana, and how one day  his plans were stolen from a secret place. And how two days later the plans showed back up, as though they'd never been gone at all.