Cookie Physics

Since my undergrad years long ago, I have linked physics and cookies. Cookies present an ideal microcosm of the handful of laws I tried to grasp while earning a C in Physics 101, a class I was taking as a free elective. How that came to be illuminates the laws of the cookie/physics bond.

In my kid years, my dad lived with a woman who had a daughter my age. We became default sisters, though I was not as nice to her as she was to me. I was envious of her only-child status, all the extra Christmas presents she received from her relatives, and how her mom was in her life (ah the enduring mother issue).

When we grew up, or at least got old enough for college, we studied together. I was a math major and she  physics, so we spent many late nights trying to decipher complex differential equations and quantum mechanics. On nights we studied into the witching hours, at some point she would stop scribbling equations, look up and utter the one word I had been waiting all night to hear: "Cookies?"

I'd nod and she'd dash off to the kitchen, me following behind like a dutiful elf. Without recipe, she'd scan the cupboards, pull down whatever caught her eye, toss them together in a big bowl. My job was to stand by, fetching eggs, holding the sifter, only tasks that had no particular skill requirements. She'd drop small mounds of her concoction onto a cookie sheet, tuck them in the oven and ten minutes later we were back at the books nibbling her cookies.

Back then baking cookies from scratch seemed magical.

One semester, fishing around for a fun elective, my cookie-maker suggested physics: "It'll be fun, you'll love it."

She left out the caveat that love for physics is a slow-burn kind of love. It creeps up on you, like a sloth out for a stroll. One minute your stuck in a physics class surround by engineer majors who nod and scribble down everything the professor, just a speck in front of the giant lecture hall, pratttles on about on the subject of friction, coiled springs, how to determine when a ball will land after shooting it in the air, while you scream with your inside-your-head-voice: "who the *&%! gives a flying *&^$!!?."  And then twenty years later you find yourself fondly explaining to your tiny children: "It's physics" -- your pat reply to just about every "how come" question. Boom, you love physics, just like that.

And in that twenty years, I came to understand the magic of making an excellent cookie from scratch. It's physics.

Everything from the careful bonding of butter and sugar or the thermal conductivity of a cookie sheet. It's physics and it tastes awesome. 

my peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

The Pros and Cons of Being a Recluse

On the up side, there is ample time to groom the cat. And there are all those books to be read. And the knitting. Here is my latest project (note the holiday pencil added for scale).

But then there is all that time to think. I know I'm shrinking into my little world of one when I wake up thinking about things that make me feel like pulling the pillow over my head and going back to sleep. Take this morning for instance. It's a lovely winter morning, birds are flittering in the tree in the backyard. The tree I can now see through my new sliding glass door. The polydactyl cat is eying the birds from the end of my bed. It's Wednesday and I don't have to go to work. . .until January. And yet.

And yet, I open up the day with thoughts about my mother. Why did she send me an e-note to" take a look" at her new family tree on Ancestry.com, if I'm not on it? Why, then, send me one of those mass-mailing holiday letters (the kind that tells all the people you don't care about what the people you do care about have been up to all year), again noting the family tree? And why does any of this surprise and bother me?

So I get up, brew coffee, ponder my options. Return to bed and wallow in the sad reminder that my mother seems vested in creating a reality in which I was never born. Or, return to bed and watch, through the new sliding glass door (yes, this is my favorite home improvement), my twelve-year-old border collie sneak about the yard eating poop.

Whatever the choice, going back to bed is the obvious first move. I crawl back under the covers, turn on the laptop and lo! Someone wants to friend me on Facebook. I have an e-vite to a holiday party. And a comment on my blog. And look, the border collie is rolling with blissful abandon on a turd. Life is full of magic after all. So, suck it Mom.

Here's my reality. Being happy in the winter requires me to redirect my thoughts constantly. It's like driving an old car with faulty alignment, the kind that wants to veer off the road into a ditch, so to keep straight you have to fight it. My brain is an old mis-aligned jalopy, especially in winter. And yet. . . I'm still on the road.

Wintering

It's sock weather and time to spend as much time in bed as possible. I try to accomplish one thing each day so I have something to talk about when the family comes home from being productive citizens.

"I cleaned the cat box," I announce by way of hello.

"I pulled a child from a car, birthed a baby, and then figure out how to save the university $100,000," my husband responds.

I don't bother mentioning how the laundry room now smells of vanilla and citrus.

Time to Go: specimen #2: Portfolios for Jobs I Didn't Get

In my last year of graduate school (the first of three stints in graduate school), during the recession in the late 1980s, I applied for every available assistant professor position in the United States in my field, all ten of them. Each school required examples of my work, so I put together eleven portfolios, one to keep and ten to send out. To do this, I needed to get PMTs made of all my design presentation sheets. I can't remember what PMT stands for, so I googled it and the acronym dictionary has 59 options for me to choose from, including Post Marital Tension, Pearl Milk Tea,  Percutaneous Mechanical Thrombectomy,  Police Mentor Team, and  Photo Mechanical Transfer. I'm going with that last one. Well, they were too expensive to do multiple times, so I had to find a place that could produce color copies. Two buses and a subway later, I arrived at the professional photocopying establishment, the closest one I could find that had the special equipment and expertise to make color copies. I had to reject the first batch, because the color was off, too much blue. They toiled away for another day and finally created acceptable color copies. The cost: about a hundred bucks ($180.00 today).

I sent away these documents and waited.


Turns out that lots of people in my field apply to be assistant professors when the economy is tanking, people with loads more professional experience than I had. I got nine rejection letters and one, from Texas Tech in Lubbock, telling me I had been short-listed.  They would be bringing me out to interview soon, the letter went on to say, and to look forward to hearing the details in the near future. In the mean time, I dashed off to the library to find out as much as I could about Lubbock, Texas. I found three notable facts about Lubbock.

1. Buddy Holly (of That'll be the Day fame) was born there
2. In 1930 the first authenticated death by hail occurred there
3. The first line of the chorus in a Mac Davis song is "I thought happiness was Lubbock Texas in my rear view mirror."

As interesting as Lubbock sounded, I had mixed feelings about the prospect of moving to Lubbock. My new boyfriend, despite his cowboy charm,  had no interest in relocating to Lubbock and I had never lived so from from the beach. Thankfully, the economy continued to decline and Texas Tech issued a hiring freeze and the job evaporated.


In the end, I had a stack of returned portfolios and my keeper set, that I packed up and toted off to my second stint in graduate school, my solution to living through the dismal economy. The portfolios have sat in my closet gathering dust ever since. So Time to Go.


P.S. I am keeping the one keeper portfolio, since it is the only record I have left of my design school days. Other than that old boyfriend, who also turned out to be a keeper. Our 15 year wedding anniversary is next spring and we may be celebrating in Lubbock. That'll be the day!

Time to Go: specimen #1

When I was growing up, Pack Rat was the term people used to describe those of us who struggle with throwing things away. "Oh, yeah, Mrs. Noodlebaum is a Pack Rat," my dad might say with neither disdain nor admiration. It was just what some people were. Like being blond or tall. I'm an animal lover, so I liked this term. Pack rats are intriguing critters who build their houses from their collected debris and instead of holding it all together with nails, they use their own pee. Truly a model of sustainability, what with the recycling of found objects and repurposing of bodily waste. So being a Pack Rat seemed a fair thing to be, especially for me since I didn't grow up in abundance. What could be wrong with hanging on to a few old treasures?

The new word for our kind is, of course, hoarders. Hoarders are not cute little rodents that live in snuggly dens made of pee junk. No, something more pathological, more in need of treatment. I am fortunate in that, like all my neurotic tendencies, my hoarding is a mild condition, slight bibliomania with a good dose of waste-not-want-not sensibility. My dad always fixed things instead of throwing them away. We ate dinner off an old spool for giant electrical coils that he had refinished. We recycled everything, composted, patched our clothes. Without a steady income to rely on, we had to be thrifty, another nice word to describe people who reject the throw-away mindset of American society.

All good. Fix before you pitch. Makes sound ecological sense. So I'm a thrifty Pack Rat. I can hold my head high and walk with proud intention, until I trip over all the crap in my house. I've been trying to battle my clutter for years and have made little progress, other than to keep it in the corners, most of the time. Today I thought of something less military than battle. What if I photograph something I need to let go of and make a brief record of why I might have hung onto it for 5, 10, 20, 30, or 40 years. And then throw it away.

So here is my first specimen: stack of flash cards I made for my geology class in freshman year (1979). I had a big crush on my teacher and because he thought I was really interested in rocks, he encouraged me to major in geology. So I studied compulsively, creating this heap of flash cards in the process. This tale is a tragedy though, because when I handed in my final exam, a blue book full of geological genius, I overheard him make a reference about his wife. I looked at his fingers and sure enough he was wearing a gold band. (Gold, Au for aurum, meaning shining dawn in Latin, number 79 on the Periodic Table of Elements). I got an A+ and a harsh reminder of my nerdiness. At first I hung onto the cards because I might use them for another class. Then I graduated, taught high school for eight years, went back to college, graduated, moved away, went back to college, became a professor, got married and had my first child in 1997. I was glad I hung onto the cards, because I knew my child would eventually grow up, go to school and have geology lessons. Finally junior high rolled around and I pulled out the cards. When I found the card called U.S.S.R. Oil that explained that the Soviet Union was the largest oil-producing country in the world, I just set them on my dresser where they have been for about a year. Time to Go.

In the picture I chose to pull out the card for the Velocity of a Glacier, because it reflects the pace at which I let things go.

P.S. I did hang onto one card, the one on the Rock Cycle to give to my second child, because he has a vial full of dirt he wants to turn into a rock. "Just hang onto that vial for, oh, a million years," I said as I handed him the card.

Happiness in the Fall

Maybe it's the change in weather, but when Autumn roles around the world begins to feel as if it's moving through syrup, slow and sticky. But not a sweet syrup, like maple oozing down the sides of a hot stack of pancakes, more like motor oil. Get a taste of that and you can't help but grimace. That's how Autumn feels.

Thank goodness for kitties. Several times each day I get to peek at the litter. They move with a wobbly walk, like people trying to stay steady on a trampoline. Yesterday, one looked at me for the first time.

Maybe that's how life is sometimes. No big blasts of joy, just glimpses of kittens on my way to the car.

Kitten Update

The kitties are a week and a half old and just yesterday began to venture out of the box. Trying not to get attached to any of them since we can't adopt any more animals, but they are extremely adorable and will soon need to be held, just to get them used to humans so they don't get too wild.

House Flies and Stray Cats

I just killed a dozen flies. As a generally nonviolent person, the kind who carries spiders out of the house, I try to find more diplomatic ways of getting unwanted guests to leave my home. But I kill flies. Lately, be it weather shifts, global warming, hints of Armageddon, I've been doing a fair share of swatting. They have invaded my home, landed in my son's ranch dressing on his dinner plate, on my daughter's knee, and my maternal instincts have kicked in. A swatter and a hand vac makes me an efficient killing machine.

Speaking of mama instincts, here is the first photo of the brood. Last night it rain and she carried the babies out from under the shrubs and had tucked them on a shelf in our carport. We found them this morning snuggled between potting soil and a bag of lawn fertilizer. They lay so motionless and she clearly couldn't fit in the space with them to nurse or keep them warm, so I thought they might have died. My husband put on his EMT gloves and investigated. They still breathed, so he lifted them up and placed them in a cat carrier I had out-fitted with an old towel and placed by the babies. She's in there nursing them now.

What is it that makes it so easy for me to kill flies, and so essential that I help this stray cat with her litter? Cat babies are definitely more adorable than maggots. Maybe I'm just a sucker for cute.

Birth Announcement

Remember that male stray cat that had moved into my front yard? Well, he had three kittens under some plants in our courtyard. Guess I'm not the cat expert I thought I was, since I couldn't tell he was a she and was pregnant. They are totally adorable at one day old. No pictures yet, because the mom growls at anyone who comes near the babies.

The white cat on the left is Bigfoot, the 26-toed kitty born in our backyard last summer. In case you're wondering, we don't feed strays nor do we encourage them to birth their kittens in our yard. I think they just like the landscape and don't feel either of our three ferocious attack dogs are a threat. View other small pics of dogs to the left to see the dangerous pack of highly trained poop-eaters.

Walking by a March

I grew up in Berkeley in the late sixties, not so young that I can say I learned to march before I learned to walk, but pretty darn close, so I'm familiar with the concept of marching. As Americans, we have a constitutional right to freedom of speech and to peaceable assembly. And as coordinated creatures, we can exercise both of these rights and walk at the same time. There is something profoundly moving about marching with a bunch of people who, at least on one point, agree with how you feel. Whenever I have marched for a cause, I have felt empowered and connected to something larger and more important than myself. It's uplifting.

I've marched for lots of reasons. When I was young, I marched because my dad was marching and I, like an imprinted duckling, followed. I marched in protest of a war I didn't fully understand, but felt out of principle war was a bad idea. I marched to Save the Whales and that helped for a while. It's probably time to march again for that. I marched against military invasion of Granada. In college by then, so I had a little more political savvy than I had had the first time I protested war when I was still young enough to ride a banana seat stingray. But, in truth, I still don't understand the nuances of war. I see them as an action of absolute last resort. If I believe a war is treated as any way otherwise, I'm against it.

A few days ago while walking around Washington D.C., I came across a march of Tea Party constituents. I have to say, it was a strange experience. On the one hand, I recognized the slow gait of the marchers--the sign-holding, chanting, and crowd makes marching a low cardio form of exercise. I felt that familiar twinge of excitement in seeing a big group of citizens taking to the streets to get their voices heard. I love it when people exercise their constitutional rights in ways that don't cause physical harm to others. Regardless of whether or not I agree with whatever it is they are saying, I think it one of the coolest things Americans do.

Yet, while standing by a lightpole, watching the marchers march by wearing bright yellow tee shirts and chanting "Who are we?. . .Americans!",  I also worried about media and business propaganda and the manipulation of citizens with fear-mongering and its affect on our exercising of these rights. The cynic in me wonders who is financing the Tea Party movement. Is it really a grass roots movement or does it have corporate sponsorship? Why is everyone Caucasian? And generally old? Why was one guy carrying a sign in support of Sheriff Joe Arpaio? What is this all about? I didn't ask these kinds of questions when I tagged along behind my father. I took it on faith that his views were right. Or right, by being left. Why am a patriotic cynic now?

My faith in the American structure of society took a huge hit when the Supreme Court weighed in on the disputed election results in Florida during the Gore v. Bush presidential race. In my mind, if the Supreme Court was going to enter into politics, then nothing was sacred. Everything, including the Constitution was fair game for political manipulation. I used to really admire the Supreme Court, but I didn't even bother to stand on the famous front steps of the courthouse on this recent visit to Washington. Some of the justices who made the decision to render a decision on the election were already retired or deceased, but I'm still disillusioned. Had I just been illusioned for most of my life? Is truth really fiction? Are our rights inalienable or are they manipulable? Is Right all that's left? Is Right right? Has Left left? Politics hurts both hemispheres of my brain.

When I came home, every morning this week I was roused awake by my radio alarm to a story on the tea-party movement,  parts of a week-long series on NPR. Here's what I learned in between snoozes:

• Tea Partyers are, according to Jonathan Rauch, contributing editor at the National Journal and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution: "White, Bright, and Right," meaning they are in fact mostly Caucasian, and are also educated and right-wing conservatives.
• Tea Party backed candidates are also funded by the medical community and oil industry. Not sure why.
• Tea Party constituents don't agree on everything, just like most any big groups of people

Personally, I'm a coffee drinker, but marching for a cause is still a really cool inalienable right.

We Do Too Have Seasons

The grass along the canal has turned golden, so to all naysayers that claim the Southwest has no seasons. . .I say Ha! We may not get drowned in Autumn leaf drop, but there are signs of change. Soon I will need my slippers which I keep at the ready under my writing desk (see below).

Goodbye August

So in the last storm my internet, phone, and TV went out and I'm ambling back into digital communication. While I was gone, August took a final hot breath and died. In memory of this late summer month, I give you these microfacts from the Googlesphere:

• August is named in honor of Emperor Augustus Caesar, grand nephew of Julius Caesar, who got the month of July and the Orange Julius named after him. Neither of them invented the Caesar Salad.
• Because July had 31 days, August got 31 also, so Augustus wouldn't seem a lesser Emperor than his grand uncle.
• William the Conqueror replaced England's name for the month, the month of weeds, with August when he returned from conquering.
• The Dog Days of summer come in August
• August is National Psoriasis Awareness Month
• August 8 is Admit Your Are Happy Day

Here are some dirtmen, our desert equivalent to Frosty and friends, my children built a few years back during the month of August. 

 

"August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied."
Joseph Wood Krutch

Walking to the Polls

Yesterday evening I tucked my sample ballot into my bag and marched off to vote. The air blustered and slapped big rain drops onto the dry ground, creating that dusty smell of a brewing storm. I looked up at the sky and saw a double rainbow emerging from billowed clouds. A good sign. Maybe my vote will help change my state's politics, maybe schools will get proper funding, maybe people won't lose their homes, maybe emigrants won't be run off like mongrel dogs. Get to work rainbow, time's a wasting. But storms blow across the desert landscape so quickly and today blue sky has pushed the clouds to the horizon and I still live in a red state.

Yesterday I did what I do every election, completed the arrows on my ballot, selecting candidates, with a black marker while standing in a booth scantily draped for privacy in a church community hall, exercising one of my fundamental rights as an American citizen, me and an estimated 25% of registered voters in the state. My husband votes by mail-in ballot, but I hang on to the ritual of walking to the polls, being greeted at the door by a volunteer, showing my picture I.D. to another volunteer, signing in, being handed my ballot from yet another volunteer, marking my ballot, and feeding it into the ballot-counting machine while the last volunteer hands me a "I voted today" sticker and asks me to have a nice day. Voting by mail seems a lonely practice by comparison. Though it is less convenient, I make myself walk to the polls to vote, because my whole body gets to be reminded that voting matters, it is an active and vital part of living in a democratic society. I think of my great grandmother who was born long before women's suffrage and how she drove rural women to the polls in Santa Barbara so they could vote for the first time. I try not to think of hanging chads in Florida.

Postcard from Greece aka my face when I found out Reagan had won

I have only missed one election since turning 18, the year I made my first trek to Europe, at 19. Yes, I was in Athens when Ronald Reagan became the President of the United States. My old governor became the oldest American president while I was buying postcards in the Plaka. Too excited about the three months I was going to spend touring the Old Country with my best friend from high school/current college roomie, I never thought about absentee ballots. I didn't vote, so I had to spend the next four years not complaining about Reagan, his trickle-down economics plan, cuts to welfare, education, and the EPA, or any other policy and practice he established.

Never again. I always vote, but secretly feel guilty that I will probably never volunteer to hand voters a sticker and tell them to have a nice day.

The Stand Off

My husband and I had an argument this morning, about returning phone calls and text messages, but it was really about who was right and who was wrong. The presumption being one can't be right unless the other is wrong. One can't validate his opinion without invalidating hers (and by using gender-biased possessives, I have communicated who I believe was right). But just yesterday, I was talking with my daughter about the importance of providing ample room for differing points of view, in the context of discussing the anti-Obama rhetoric expounded by her classmates. My daughter is way more people smart than I am, so she has managed to survive and make friends among people whose political beliefs differ from her own.

I grew up in the epicenter of the Free Speech Movement, Berkeley late sixties, yet watched as the Hippies evolved into what I call Conservative Liberals, people who always approach from a position of moral high ground, people who always know what is right, because they proclaim their opinions so. Self-righteousness used to be a dirty word when I was growing up. Now it is worn like a badge of honor.

When my children are bickering (a verb I use to describe any argument that has devolved to the repetition of "nuh-uh" and"uh-uh.") I tell them, "just agree to disagree," a phrase my daughter accepts, but my son dislikes for its inherent ambiguity. If there is a argument, someone should win, someone should lose. Someone should be right and the other person should be wrong.

My husband and I both enjoy arguing, when we play by the rules of engagement:

1. maintain a sense of humor
2. listen
3. agree to agree to disagree (i.e. be content with Stale Mate, as in chess, not matrimonial boredom)

We didn't do that this morning. We didn't argue, we fought, and broke all three rules.
When the house emptied and it was just me and the animals, I sat by the window trying to figure out whether he was right and I was wrong, or I was right and he was wrong, or we both were right, or both were wrong, or we were both right and wrong.

Then I heard a sound my 26-toed cat has never made inside. We were both sitting by the front window that looks out to the courtyard garden, me gathering my wits, him licking his butt. Or so I thought. Then he made an angry noise, a kind of growlish hiss. That's when I saw the stray ginger tabby sitting on the window ledge staring in at Bigfoot. The tabby has adopted our front yard and carport as his territory, but this is the first time I've seen him look in the window. So far, we've co-habitated, him owning the wilder parts of the garden and Bigfoot claiming the house and courtyard. The tabby stared with such unwavering intent, a stare that seemed to say, I'm considering expanding my territory and your front room will do just fine. Bigfoot bristled, but he's a naturally friendly cat, lets our Golden Retreiver puppy wrestle with him, lets our crabby old Border Collie nip at his face like a mad badger when she imagines he's planning to steal her kibble, so it was a half-hearted gesture. Clearly he was perplexed. His body language seeming to say should I fight this cat? Is it okay for him to be looking in my window? Shouldn't he be sleeping under the jojoba? Why isn't he playing by the rules of engagement? Or is he?

What kept them in a stand off was the thin pane of glass between them. "Fences make good neighbors." Is that what Frost said? So do windows. Without the glass, I'm pretty sure Bigfoot would've gotten his ass kicked. Despite his awesome moth-hunting skills, he lacks a killer instinct. The ginger cat needs one to survive, since our neighborhood has a bounty of stray cats. He's out battling in the real world, while Bigfoot enjoys the luxury of insulation. He should back down because his world is so much nicer than the ginger cat's.

Now I'm not saying I'm Bigfoot and my husband is the ginger cat, but we could learn from their eventual decision (aided by the window) to shrug their little cat shoulders and go their own ways, contented for now to agree to disagree.

Three Laps Around the Garden

I hear what I need to hear when I need to hear it, if I am listening. Last night I walked in the botanical gardens, during the flashlight tours, so the path was lined with docents showing families snakes, lizards and night owls. I had just participated in a one-day writing workshop with Laraine Herring and she made us breath before writing (she let us breath during writing too). Whenever I focus on breathing I realize I'm a shallow breather, so I wanted to practice deep breathing. As I walked in the garden I tried to be a deep breather, which was pleasant since the air was fragrant with creosote. Walking seems to make me listen better, and so, apparently does breathing, or at least breathing attentively, because while I'm walking and breathing I hear a docent say "Anything with an exoskeleton has to shed it if it wants to grow." She's talking about me, I thought to myself.

The docent thought she was talking about a scorpion, but the statement holds for any hard-shelled creatures, like me or my hermit crab.

When my daughter was in kindergarten she came home from a play date with a hermit crab. We went through a few small crabs with brightly painted shells before we learned enough about hermit crab natural history to keep one alive. Turns out hermit crabs breathe with gills that need moisture to function. In a desert climate they need a daily misting or they suffocate. They also need a range of shells to accommodate their eventual growth. The lone surviving crab is Crabicus and he/she (it's hard to determine gender) is at least eight years old. Crabicus sheds his (I think of him as a boy, not sure why, maybe because he's shy and pinches me) exoskeleton a few times each year. He finds a quiet corner of his crabitat and throws off all his armor, exposing the tender soft new shell. There he'll sit while his new shell hardens.

Here's the crazy part. He eats his shed skeleton. He eats it! From an ecological/sustainable point of view, this isn't so crazy, since the discarded shell is a good source of calcium. And there it is right next to him. He's too vulnerable to crawl around to the food bowl, so Crabicus eats his old self in order to make his new self stronger. There's a metaphor for personal growth there.

Weeding

A beautiful morning, the air cool, sunlight glinting through the trees, sparkling with sprinkler dew. Perfect for weeding, so I set my morning coffee on a ledge by my front door and begin to yank up plants that tend to invade the garden, burmuda grass, spurge, Mexican primrose. The primrose, once a popular drought tolerant landscape species has fallen out of favor because of its tenacity. Ours stowed away in a pot from the nursery. The plant I had purchased has long since passed away, but the tiny sprig of primrose that had hidden under its foliage crept down the pot and furrowed into the soil. Now it has spread across the entire front garden. In springtime we enjoy a fleeting burst of pale pink bloom. So why pull it up? If I don't, the plant crawls up and over all the other species and chokes them to death, a slow strangulation followed by pink flowers. It's not a fair trade.

And weeding relaxes me. I get to spend time in the garden yet still feel productive. I'm not just lolling around, enjoying the cool morning air and fresh scent of the earth. See this handful of weeds? That's me being industrious, earning my keep, making my puritan and Victorian workaholic ancesters proud. At least until angry ants swarm my feet and bite me. The garden ants, a particularly irritable breed, will froth into a frenzy at the slightest provocation. What goes on below ground to give them such short fuses? The teen ants leaving their dirty socks on the dining room table? Mother-in-Law ant wants her tupperware back, but the ant-dog ate it. Father ant snores all night long. The Ant boss is an insensitive S.O.B., gave another bad annual ant evaluation. "Your dirt-carrying performance is below expectations." Do ants have a metaphorical set of ant-like irritants interupting the zen flow of their days too?

 Their anger only equaled by their own Victorian work ethic, thay can build a mound in a day. Not a neat conical hill like gentler ant species create, more a formless pile, sand and ant-mouth-sized bits of soil flung about. A lesson in watching them: don't build fast or when furious. (Of course I already learned that one during our 12 year bathroom remodeling project.)


My lone nontoxic defense against their bites is the garden hose. When they bite me, I retaliate with a deluge, knocking their pile flat. Ant Armageddon. Never a natural bug squasher, the ant slaughter is out of character. But they are like insect weeds in my garden. If I let them flourish, the garden will be overrun with angry ants, leaving no safe footing for the rest of us critters. Like the stray ginger cat who lives in an old bath tub in my carport (from bathroom remodel #2 in its 5th year, still no finished walls). I kill for his comfort. . .and my own. Sorry Buddha. Sorry God, the one who used his lightening finger to write the Ten Commandments in stone on Mount Sinai. FYI: I also swat house flies.

The ant bites win this morning and I head back into the house to continue weeding. Where does all this clutter come from? Trees (paper), old dinosaurs (plastic toys, containers, bags, wrapping. . .), fabricated  combinations from the periodic table of elements. . . star dust. How can I throw out old star dust?

For the Love of Sauntering

It seems that every effort, every action, must always present an opportunity to examine personal flaws. The flip side of flaw exposure. . .growth.

I have abandoned my pedometer ap, because it made me walk wrong. My doctor said "get more exercise" to lower my LDL cholesterol. A measurable act for a measurable problem. But, as I figured out by my reaction to walking with a pedometor ap, the one that daily declared me overweight based on my BMI, that shifts my focus away from being present on the walk to trying to up my step count, my pace, my calories burned, and on and on.

Numbers are abstract external measures, and though I love numbers, math, rational thinking. . . healing the body needs to extend beyond the measurable, the quantifiable. On my walk yesterday, I just walked and took pictures. I'm trying a new camera ap and so the pictures came out crappy for the most part (note: CameraOne ap not worth 99 cents). Walking with a camera makes me look more closely. It's an instrument that brings my focus to the present moment, no numbers, just a fresh perspective that there is beauty in my neighborhood. Here are some that came out okay. My neighborhood lacks iconic beauty. I don't live in a quaint hamlet in New England or Old England for that matter. My neighborhood is part of a huge sprawling 20th-century metropolis, laying on the desert like a big-footed teenaged boy plops himself on a couch. But what we have here that gets lost in trees and green hills of more compact romantic landscapes is sky. The sky is my surrogate Pacific Ocean, a vast blue that can stretch to the far horizon. When I'm feeling sorry for myself because I don't live at Baggins End in a hobbit hole, I pay attention to the sky.

Yesterday the canal water was running high and the park had been flooded for irrigation, so I could see the reflected sky. Like a Claude Glass, the reflection softens the view and allowed me to crop out alley trash and other scrappy bits of my neighborhood.

Clearing House/Feeding the Family

Below is a piece I wrote in 2006 and here's why I'm posting it in 2010.

(1) I'm a natural procrastinator. In college I carried an announcement for a procrastinator's support group meeting in my wallet for a year, but never got around to going. True story.

(2) I'm a natural hoarder, not level 5, but the scrapbook I made in high school is on the floor by my bed even though I graduated in 1979. I'm clearing house right now, going through my writing too, and want to share pieces that seem worthy. Anyone who reads this also has to take my broken pen collection :-)

Here it is, a piece called Feeding the Family:

Ever wonder why the airlines tell parents to put on their oxygen mask first before tending to the children? This morning, while getting everyone ready for the first day of school I figured it out. Why tell us every time we fly to save ourselves first? Why do that? Because it goes against natural parental instinct. Take care of the kids first. Take care of the kids first and then and only then do you tend to your own needs. Survival of the species trumps survival of the self. Despite their selfish efforts, even the last few decades of me-gens can’t compete with thousands of years of instinct. The feeding order at breakfast in my house is a daily reminder of this drive to keep the species going strong. Feed the kids first.

Sure, that’s easy enough. But as they’ve grown older, we’ve added pets into the mix. Where do they fit into my theory on species perpetuation? This morning I fed two children, two dogs, two lizards, a hermit crab, a praying mantis, and a few dozen crickets who eat like little pigs and need to stay fattened up (it’s called gut-loading in the exotic pet industry lingo), so the lizard and mantes can get their nutrients. The children are the easy part. I’ve lost so many crickets while trying to use my son’s bug vac during feeding time that my house sounds like a forest, full of cheeps and scurrying noises.

At least the mantes have outgrown their appetite for fruit flies. And thank goodness, since my husband (yes, there is a husband, but he has to forage the forest for his own grub) was getting tired of smelling the tub of fly larva I kept in the kitchen cupboard next to his ice tea glasses. This summer, I learned that fruit flies can be bred not to fly, which technically makes them fruit walkers. They come in a plastic tub, like the kind an old aunt might pack a nice potato salad into for the family picnic. At the bottom of the tub is a gooey mixture that squirms. On close inspection, which I don’t recommend, it’s easy to see that the squirming is hundreds of maggots as small as dry risoni pasta. They smell like old garbage, the moist sticky bits that cling to the edge of the trash bin. The forty praying mantis hatchlings that dripped out of the two egg cases I had bought at a plant nursery for my four-year-old son’s bug habitat must have thought the fly smell was delicious, since they hovered at the habitat opening every meal time.

Praying mantes are fascinating to watch. They grow like mad, shedding old tight skin every few days, emerging big, soft, and younger looking. A bit like a skin peel/reverse lipo combo. After they harden back up a bit, they can snatch prey with lightening speed and graceful dexterity. According to a praying mantis web site (yes, there are many such sites), they bite the neck of their prey first and paralyze them so they can devour a meal that doesn’t fight back. And by the by, they are cannibals. I know some bug advocates might send me scolding letters if they read this next paragraph, but here goes.

I allowed the mantes to eat each other. Yes, I confess to turning a blind eye to cannibalism in my very own kitchen. Here is how I rationalized it. In my house the mantes were guaranteed a last meal, while out in the garden it was anybody’s guess. I live in the desert where all summer long outside temperatures hover in the triple digits. It is hot and miserable. While my garden offers insects more than the usual fare found in the outlying desert, it’s not air-conditioned and fruit flies don’t fall out of the sky like manna. Of the forty or so baby mantes, three survived to be big fat ladies. I call them the three witches, like the ones in Macbeth, since they ate their siblings and looked like they could still go for a little eye of newt or toe of frog. It was only a matter of time before they made a meal of one another, so we released two when the fruit flies ran out. The lone captive moved up to eating crickets.

I’m hoping the two out in the garden among the vinca leaves make egg sacks. Before releasing witch one and witch two, the headless carcasses of smaller males that lay on the floor of the habitat suggest they may be with child. That’s right. The preferred après amour snack of the female praying mantis is its lover’s head (minds out of the gutter ladies, I’m referring to the part of the male body with eyeballs and a brain). For now we’ll search the undersides of leaves for their babies, at least until it’s time for me to go in and prepare lunch.

That was then. Now my family includes the same two kids, same husband, three dogs (new golden retriever), two cats (feral mom birthed in our back yard. Husband still mad at three dogs for allowing this to happen), the same hermit crab, and a psychotic fish that eats all our other fish. I'm retired from bugs and maggots, except when I forget to change the hermit crab's food dish.

Google Research?

When memory fails to conjure the precise shape of a tractor I road as a child, I know I can turn to Google to help me figure out where I sat while plowing fields of Lima Beans with my dad. So I just did an image search for "Lima bean cultivation tools 1965" and wanted to share with you a taste of what came up:

• Julia Child holding a dead naked bird with its wings spread like Jesus on the cross
• Back end of a restored Volkswagen bus
• Coffee table
• Martin Luther King
• George Bush senior
• Mr. Potato Head (George Bush junior?)
• Blue and white polka dot dress
• Man's hairy chest with "do not resuscitate" tattooed on it
• Philly cheese steak sandwich
• Murphy's Law
• Four soldiers posing next to bombs in Okinawa
• and this cartoon

Old Eyes

To look up a word today in my bible of words, the Oxford English Dictionary, I had to use the macro lens on my camera. The standard magnifying glass I've been using just wouldn't do. Maybe by the time my eyeballs fail to focus at any range, the e-version of the OED will be down-loadable on an iPad and I can use the Talk to Me ap. But that won't replace the tactile joy of hefting my two-volume set off the shelf and squinting at the tiny font for the origin of home.

A Post for my Woman Hero Topic

Getting back for a moment to the original idea I had for this blog: my woman heroes, I want to add Ariel Gore to the list. I just finished her book, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead, and loved it. I recommend it to anyone who:

• loves to laugh
• wants to write
• wants to be read
• needs a good dose of Girl Power

The book includes interviews, great advice backed up with personal experience, a funny and authentic voice, and, my favorite part, conversations between Rising Lit Star and Magnificent Meteor:

Rising Lit Star: How can I make a living from poetry?

Magnificent Meteor reveals: Print poetry on sexy T-shirts and sell them on the internet.

I'll leave you with this from chapter 16: Devlop a Superhero Alter Ego:

"When I'm trying to do something beyond my known powers and I feel wobbly or fear failure, I snap my magic gesture and my superhero alter ego emerges.

When a bout of low mama-self-esteem comes rumbling on the horizon like a thunderstorm, I repeat after Alli Crews: "Girls like me have raised presidents. We've raised messiahs and musicians, writers and settlers. Girls like me won't compromise and we won't fail." And my superhero alter ego takes control."

Shock of the Ordinary

I hear the phrase “shock of the new,” a lot, the idea that you need novelty to knock you out of your stupor, but, while I believe that is sometimes what is needed, what about the “shock of the ordinary”? Newness and novelty requires energy to seek it out or craft it and this energy could be used to grow food for hungry people, build houses for the homeless, or protect fresh clean water. Isn’t it more sustainable to find wonder in what you already have at your disposal? Ordinary gets a bad rap, it’s too boring, too accessible. Our overly stimulated society needs to be wowed to wake up. If that’s true, why is the sleeping aid market so robust?

can you see the garden

in their eyes?

Finding Our Place

Today an old friend is surveying our property. At dawn, he began three blocks away, where he and his partner found a known point, a spot marked and recorded, or geo-referenced in the GPS lingo. Setting bright orange cones around this known spot, they place the tripod just above it. One man shoots a laser beam from an instrument perched on the tripod to the other who stands by a metal pole adorned with a prism mounted at the top, like a wizard wand. The laser beam strikes the prism, which separates the light waves that then bounce to the laser instrument. The two men shout numbers back and forth, like secret code. By nine thirty, they have found a line emanating from the known point to a metal pin half-buried in asphalt in the street in front of our home.

“It all starts from the point,” the man shooting lasers tells me, “and everything works from that point outward.” He moves his hands in an expanding circle to emphasize the radiant nature of finding one’s place. I think of the axis mundi, the ancient and enduring practice human beings have for locating themselves in reference to earth and the cosmos.

Our old friend walks to an unremarkable spot in our front grass and waves another wand over the ground. The yellow box on top, the wand’s talisman, begins to whine like those plastic pipes that make whoo-whoop sounds when children pull the metal rod.

“I found it,” he says and takes a shovel and begins to dig. Two feet down, he hits a rusty ½ inch pipe poking up through the damp rich clay soil.

“There it is,” he says in the clear language men who work their hands use. He found one of the property markers that another man hammered into the ground in 1954. He unearthed another under the Chihuahuan sage that was just setting an after-rain bloom. By noon, we will know our place in the world.

Weird but True

Coffee this morning was accompanied by a litany of strange facts, one of my son's favorite topics. He told me that a pet hamster can run up to eight miles each night on its little metal wheel. I quietly kicked myself for skipping my two mile walk yesterday. Then he said that if a person bicycled none stop for three years they could bike to the moon. I quickly calculated the odds that I've biked to the moon in my lifetime, to temper the guilt for being more of a slouch than a caged rodent. My dad taught me to ride a bike when I was five. Here's an excerpt from a long poem I wrote called "The Bicycle," about learning to ride:

I learned to ride on a gravel road,
dad running alongside, promising to hang on.
The day I turned five we walked the blue Schwinn
out of the house, across a wooden foot bridge
onto the dirt road that wove like water through the woods,
where rattlesnakes sun themselves,
poison oak softening the edges. I walked with my dad---
the air smelt like drying pebbles,
hung like a shawl
around the shoulders of the afternoon.
Woodpeckers tapped a metronome beat.
Dad's breath even as he lifted me onto the bicycle,
placing a hand on the seat,
the other on the handlebars,
we began to roll.

At first I dangled like a string,
scared I wouldn't learn, scared I would.
Dad made jokes, chuckling even before
he spoke. Eased by him
I reached for the bars, my feet on the pedals---
riding began to overtake my fears.
My sisters zoomed past, turning to lift their arms to the sky,
their endless way of saying
look what you can't do.
"I can't; I won't; I'm too little," I shouted, then
leapt from the bicycle and ran back to the house
leaving my dad standing like a still life.

I can still hear the powdery soil beneath my tires
that blew like flour down mill pipes the day my dad
let go. Spring waxed into summer,
no rain since April, the road dried to a soft talc---
"Good for falling on," he thought. I pedaled off
accustomed to him trotting beside me. Over the weeks he shifted
behind. I only felt his breath, his steadiness.
"He's always there," I thought, his voice fading away
like a man falling into a hole. Like distance.
I turned my head, the tapping woodpeckers seemed to go quiet, and I saw him
standing, hands on hips, so far away.
"There you go," he shouted;
I fell to the ground.

From then to now, I would've had to average 1.6 hours of cycling a day to be standing on the moon today.

I leave you with this fact: a caterpillar has more muscles than a human being.

A Breezy Ramble

When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park, they created a section called the Ramble, a hilly woodland with meandering footpaths meant to allow park visitors to escape the hustle and bustle of city life and let their feet and minds wander. Olmsted believed in the restorative powers of nature and the importance of mental escape. In contrast to the Promenade, the  razor straight road in the park designed for social intercourse that was chock-a-block with benches and given ample width for carriages, the Ramble paths were designed to wander through a thicket of trees that masked views to the city. The Ramble was designed for walking. Walking in a particular way, a way Henry David Thoreau, who said "It is a great art to saunter." would have endorsed. Or Jules Renard, the French writer who noted that in walking "the body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird."

Rambling has purpose.

I want to yell this at the editor for whom I was, until last night, revising a piece of writing. If I were reading the emergency instructions for what to do if my child accidentally wrote on his eyeball with a Sharpie, I would want it written like the Promenade, straight and to the point. (FYI, a long saline rinse and time seems to do the trick). But if I wanted to escape from the toils of my days, be transported away from my own world, I may take a ramble. I delight in following the mental paths of other writers, through the wooded thickets of their own design, seeing how they sculpt the views, revealing glimpses of the world I may not have noticed otherwise.

He said I should remove my "too-breezy" voice and  the "ramble through [my] own stories, places of youthful discovery," and replace it with more clear and backed up historical reference. More mile markers, less unmarked forks in the path. He wants a promenade. I gave him a ramble. The choice: stay on the meandering path I created or blaze a straight line through, so the journey from point A to point B is clear. Hmm, I wonder where this foot was going? I don't care, I just want to follow it.

 

The Name of the Lizard

I love knowing the name of things. Plants, animals, towns, rivers, continents, gardens, mathematical theorems, stellar constellations, old dead philosophers. . .With the name, I can begin to trace its origins, its story. Despite Shakespeare's famous quote: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." So says Juliet from her balcony whilst (Shakespearean for while) the love-struck Romeo looks on (Romeo and Juliet II, II, 45-46).

True, names start wars, names do hurt, sometimes more than sticks and stones, but I still love the naming of things. Today I found the name of the lizard that I saw fighting in the botanical garden: Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister) and now I can learn more about this native species, its penchant for eating ants, and sometimes small lizards. Though I haven't found references to the habit of biting the sides of other Desert Spiny Lizards.

Walk In and Drive Out of Bliss

One reason taking pictures of plants is so satisfying is they don't have legs. They stay put, allowing me time to take the lens cap off, focus, set my aperture (if I'm using the DSLR), and frame the shot. Plants are patient subjects. No so with critters, which is why I usually get blurry snaps of their rear ends.

I just got home from a walk in the botanical garden, just around sunset, and these are some of critters who were kind enough to sit still while I fumbled with my point and shoot. I was thrilled, especially when that bad ass looking lizard had a fight with another lizard of his species. I missed photographing the brawl that went on for many seconds right at my feet on the trail. I don't usually like fighting, never watch boxing, but I've never seen a lizard fight.  It was one of those moments when the whole world shrinks down to one point of focus. Nothing existed but those two bad boys biting one another's sides while they swirled around in a circle and me watching.

Then I saw the bunny. :-)

As I drove out of the parking lot, I felt completely relaxed.

Then I got flashed by a photocop while I was driving home, writing in my head, a habit that distracts me from things like speed traps.

Then I got stuck behind a bus, my zen spilling away. Once it's flowing away, it's hard to get back, except by writing and looking at pictures of bunnies, and reliving lizard fights. Ah, bliss.

Virginia Woolf and Walking

A year or so ago, feeling that I should improve my knowledge of the classics, I decided to read Virginia Woolf, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Bible. Actually Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was on the list too, but I couldn't finish it, despite the images of my father's face in rapture when discussing it with me. Maybe I'm too much of a feminist to read Canterbury Tales. The depiction of women was so distracting I couldn't get carried away in the language like my dad seemed to have been. Discussing literature with my dad is always bittersweet, because he has a magnificent memory and in every conversation he will at some point tilt his head up, as though he were browsing a high shelf in the library, take a breath, and quote from whomever we are talking about with beautiful inflection. No matter that he read the words as a freshman in college (about 50 years ago) and hadn't seen them since. It is an awesome thing to witness, though it makes me wonder why I can't do it. Did growing up in the sixties give me brain damage? Or was I just not passed on the gene of awesome literary recall. Or do I just not practice enough? To my dad's credit, he used to keep himself entertained while driving a tractor by memorizing all the lines of Hamlet. Yes, all of them. And I am one of the billions on earth who can't get past "To be or not to be." Okay, I can remember to "outrageous fortune," but that's it.

Anyhow, I couldn't undo the sixties brain damage, nor recode my genes, so I thought maybe I could improve my brain with classic literature. Here's a quick review:

The Bible: really long, took me two years to read, and in truth, SPOILER ALERT I was appalled at how many people die in it. I had no idea. There's the hopeful beginning, but after that it's centuries of death, mostly fighting over the number of gods there are, one or many, and whether or not gods should be worshiped on high, no if one, yes if many. Thank God for the new testament or the whole thing would be a downer, like a really long version of The Road (SPOILER ALERT, no happy ending there). Actually, the Song of Songs is beautiful. The happy abridged version could be Genesis, up to but not including the expulsion, the Song of Songs, a few Psalms, and the New Testament up through the resurrection. True confession: I still haven't read Revelation. I've seen too many horror film villains borrow lines from it and that creeps me out.

The Odyssey: great romp. Loved it.

Beowulf: kind of a thin tale, though the original text sounds awesome read outloud. Big brave guy kills a monster. Odysseus rocks over Beowulf.

Which leaves Virginia. I read Mrs Dalloway, because I felt I should,  and A Writer's Diary, because I love reading other people's diaries. I have two older sisters and, growing up, reading their diaries was one of my only forms of revenge for whatever mean thing they had done to me. My oldest sister had a very active and creative mind, so she was the interesting diarist.

Now I'm reading Moments of Being, Woolf's memoir writing. She reminds me a little of my dad, in that she is obviously really smart and has a way of making me feel a little dumb by comparison, but in such a lovely way that I don't feel resentment. Here's something I recognize in myself and in both Woolf and my dad: personal drive. When she takes on a project, she doesn't tootle around with it. She digs deep and hard, driven by a desire, it seems, for perfection and by an intense habit of self-criticism. My dad doesn't talk much. Neither do I. I imagine that Virginia Woolf didn't either. Sometimes this quiet is perceived as snobbery, but I think it is because we all have (or had) intense internal dialogue going on and can't (or couldn't) get a word out edgewise. My internal dialogue is almost completely self-critical, or impulsed by my intense trepidation about speaking. I plan my comments three moves ahead, like playing chess. And then replay the conversation and critique my performance. It's very time-consuming and can leave a person looking distracted and preoccupied (which looks a lot like snobbishly bored)

Now to the point: Perfection and self-criticism have this to do with walking. I have tried to resist my impulse to become obsessed with my new activity. When my dad took up running, he was soon running marathons and eventually ran from Kansas City to Boston. So I've been walking for about three weeks, trying to take it slow and make it fun. Yesterday, I went to REI and bought $90 walking sandles, a new BPA-free water bottle, and a book of all the hiking trails in town. Then I down-loaded a pedometer app for my phone. I can now be reminded everyday that my BMI (body mass index) is 26.4 so right above the little body graphic (a well-built male figure) in my app is the word "overweight." I paid $1.99  for that information. And when I walk, my phone counts my steps, calories burned, distance traveled, and progress towards my goal. Occasionally it beeps at me. But my goal was to enjoy walking. My phone can't measure that. I wanted to be more like John Muir ("I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown; for going out, I found, was really going in.") and a little less like the hyper-critical side of Virginia Woolf ("Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?") and get my LDL count lower in the process. Should be as easy as a walk in the park.

Dog Heaven

Our golden puppy has learned to walk on a leash, no longer laying down and refusing to move when she feels like it. We've been walking along the irrigation canal, which was running high yesterday evening. The park was getting its share of irrigation flooding and looked like a calm lake. The puppy loved it after our hot walking. The sky reflected in the water all around her.

Robin54

When I was a freshman in college, I had one requirement to sustain a scholarship into the next year: write a one-page essay at the end of the year to illustrate how I had enriched my educational experience with the funding. In retrospect, I should have written about the classes I took, my great grades, and how much more I could study since I didn't have to get a job. That was the obvious no-brainer essay, but the obvious is not necessary to write about, since it's so, well, obvious. So I wrote about the baby bird my roommate's cat brought into our apartment during finals week. Let me explain.

People who have cats know that cats like to bring their providers presents, usually dead critters. . .mice, lizards, baby bees. People who don't have cats probably don't for that very reason. But my roommate's cat had a habit of holding critters in his mouth in a way that kept them alive. At the beginning of finals week, he plopped a hatchling sparrow on the living room rug, looked up at us hunkered at the kitchen table, cramming for final exams, made a loud meowl, his way of saying "looky what I brought you." We lookied. From that moment, studying for finals became secondary to our round-the-clock feeding schedule for the sad little baby bird. It was in that ugly stage of infancy, when only a mother finds its baby adorable, all beak and bald wrinkled skin like an old man. It ate every two hours from a dropper. We would tap the side of its beak, the universal signal for myopic baby birds that mom has a worm or some barf to tamp into their gullets. Caring for the baby bird, I explained in my essay, gave me a renewed perspective on my schooling. Specifically, it made me realize that spending a year with my head buried in books had made me forget that life is happening, or struggling to happen, right outside my front door. I had decided, I wrote, that I needed to have more balance, study less, live more, that sort of thing. I sent off the essay, the bird died, and my scholarship was not renewed. Despite the outcome, I hung onto the idea that life is more than just getting more, more knowledge, more funding, more sleep. It's about giving.

On my recent trip north, I was reminded of the baby bird lesson, when a juvenile robin smashed into the big picture window of our cabin. At first it lay on the deck, too stunned to get up. I held it for a while and when it started looking more alert, I set it down. Often birds that hit windows will fly off after the initial shock wears off, but this one was clearly injured. My son, whose a fellow bird lover, and I got a box and kept it alive on droplets of water (since we didn't know what to feed him and couldn't google it since we had no wifi) until it was time to go home. After a few phone calls, I found what I was searching for: the little old lady bird rescue network. As far as I know, there is a kindly old woman in every community who takes in injured birds and nurses them back to health. We drove the bird to Wilma's house on our way back home. Wilma was probably in her eighties. She carefully placed the bird in a cage and made notes in a spiral notebook by her front door. Our bird was now Robin54, her 54th bird in 2010. I didn't have as strong a life-changing response to nursing this bird for two days, as I did when I was younger, in that I won't be quitting my job and embarking on a three month back-packing tour of Europe like I did after my freshman year, but I was reminded of the effect of caring for others and of the opportunity to pass this sense onto my children.

How to Live in the Desert

After living in a desert for nearly twenty years, I've learned a few survival tips, but this one is the most useful and effective in keeping me alive: follow smart critters north. Long before air conditioning, cheapish hydroelectric power, and couch potatoism, people who inhabited the desert regions of the world were migratory. They followed the smart critters north to cooler climes. When I first moved to the desert, I was told by the man who convinced me to leave the coast (yes love makes you do crazy things) that I would eventually get used to the summer heat. For the sake of love, he lied and, for the sake of love, I believed him. But after a few seasons of triple digit heat, love wasn't enough to maintain this delusion. I started to pay attention to what people who had lived in the desert for generations did in the summer and discovered they were all semi-migratory. Since then I have also become semi-migratory.

In a perfect world, my family and I would close down our desert home in early June and travel north to our cabin in the woods and stay there until August. But we don't have a cabin in the woods. So we rent one for as long as we can afford: four days. The rest of the summer we either look forward to our four-day jaunt or try to hang onto the memory of it. We just returned from our escape from the heat. It's 109 degrees and this is the last time, I hope, that I will ever have to endure the mind-numbing buzz of vuvuzelas as the World Cup final game plays on the television. I'm sweating and trying to hold onto the cool feeling of creek water on my feet, the gurgling sounds of the stream, the calming effect of having green all around me, the presence of butterflies. . .

Walking North

Looking forward to walking in cooler weather. It's hot, hot, hot and walking in Birkenstocks because shoes are too hot gives me blisters. Yesterday I walked for forty minutes and saw almost nobody at all. Of the handful of people outside during the day, I was the only one walking. I could have been the unsuspecting stranger in  one of those eerily-deserted-town films who stops for gas (though I should have been carrying a gas can to make this image work) only to find that the entire town has been infected by a terrible virus and everyone has become flesh-eating zombies. Needless to say, I never walk at night. But it's not a zombie virus, just a case of too much sun and not enough water. So I'm walking north, but I'll be back before the antidote to desert conditions has been found and get back to wandering alone through the neighborhood.

Here's one way to respond to too much sun and not enough water: be a cactus, all plump and fleshy on the inside, extra scary and prickly on the outside, and then, just when your type of pollinator buzzes by, pop out an outrageously gorgeous and seductive blossom.