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.