Into the New Year, with Gratitude

Purging is a process of unearthing, of rediscovery. You can discover old pastel china from your former life, and you can discover essential truths about life and love, if you can look far enough past the drudgery to let them come arrowing in. 

I found an envelope addressed to my mother, Ida, at the first retirement community she inhabited. It was Phoebe's original birth announcement.

Dad had already died when Phoebe was born, but I was so elated to be able to present a grandchild to my mother’s arms. 

July, 1996. She only made it out here twice. Once for our wedding, and once for Phoebe's birth, and then her traveling days were over.

Phoebe’s birth announcement was a perfect time capsule. 

Inside the capsule, I found my drawing of an eastern phoebe and twinflower, Linnea borealis, the plant that gave her her middle name. There were photos of the Earthlings we once were. Phoebe was such a sprite, such an old soul,with dark blue eyes that looked right into your core. She still does that. She was so bright we called her New Penny, shiny-fresh and coppery. 

She was amazing. All new babies are, but this one...she watched everything, took it all in, and seemed to understand.

 

This photo says it all to me. The wonder of looking down at a squirming, kicking infant and thinking, “We MADE this!” How did that happen? Look what love has done!

But the wonder only grows. You see your kids becoming who they are meant to be. I watch Liam scrambling over wet boulders to capture sunset bounce light on wet black sand, risking wet sneakers and turning an ankle for the light, the light. I watch him finding secret hidey holes and branches to climb on, watch him soaking up the past and immersing himself in the present, watch his considerable imagination running away with him, and I understand exactly what he’s feeling, and how great is his need for the undiscovered and mysterious, and how, though he doesn’t quite grasp it yet, beauty is his primary motivator. It’s not a bad coach, beauty. Works for me, and I can see it working for him.

Roman Theater, Merida, Spain

I watch Phoebe’s clockwork clicking along, getting everything planned out in the manner of her sire, and I feel him smiling with pride at her quick decisiveness and her seemingly effortless way of logisticizing our peregrinations. We’ve just finished a trip to peninsular Spain and the Canary Islands with Phoebe entirely at the helm.

 She did all the booking and planning and marshaling of her brother and mother; even all the driving! I see Bill’s ridiculously acute logistical skills coming to bear with everything she does. There’s his intensity, his tightly-wound drive to get it all right. Of course, no matter how smooth it is, it’s not effortless; I can smell the smoke coming out of her ears. The truth is she can’t help but do it; she’s like a hunting dog trained for the point and fetch, because it’s in her genes.

It was very, very windy in Extremadura.

 But she got something from me, too, to balance that intensity. Phoebe can plan and logisticize like a demon, but she is then blissfully able to stop the whirring of her gears and let herself sink into the moment. She wants to set it all up just right, but then she can enjoy herself and be present for whatever unrolls from there.  That, I think, is a balance that I gave her, one her dad was always and forever yearning for: the ability to turn off the yammering left brain and let the right brain just be. Thank God that girl can sink into the moment, drive roots deep into any place she lands, and not yearn for something else that must be better than the here and now. She can thank her mama for that balancing influence. Genes, mixing, tumbling, and creating irreplaceable beings, beings that in many ways surpass either of their parents. The genes he gave her, the genes WE gave her. I won’t forget the we of it all. I won’t let bitterness in the door. I’ll keep sight of the gifts and forget the travail. 

Watching the combination of genes from each of us play out in these kids, I feel incredibly lucky to be here to see the show play out. I also feel a deep sadness that I’m the only one now who gets to experience this, the watching and the wondering and the sometimes searing jolt as I figure out the provenance of every little one of their traits. I wish Bill could have been here to see that. We all wish he could have been granted a full measure of years, perhaps to realize and reap the rewards of all the things he initiated, all the seeds he sowed. But no, he had to go at only 57.

They’re gifts, these kids, and he gave them to me, he who hid the LuRay dishes and he who left the jumbled gyre of his belongings. And nobody else but Bill, with his tremendous talent and humor and boundless vision and creative energy (and his utter disregard for anything resembling drudgery) would have left such an intractable mess, or could have given these irreplaceable human beings to me, and to the world.

Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, 2000. Liam was celebrating his first birthday. Phoebe was 4 1/2.
See the poster art behind us? Green kingfishers, by JZ.

So Bill Thompson III gets a pass on all this—on everything!— and my enduring love and gratitude for being exactly who he was. And now,  if my luck holds out, I get to be the one who sees these good young people through the portal to their futures, who maybe someday gets to see them lay out the train tracks, sliceable wooden food and herd of wild plastic horses for their precious and irreplaceable beings. 

And won’t that be something?

All this, from cleaning out the disgusting mess of 27 years of hard, good living. If you go at it with an open heart, you can get a lot from purging, much more than the expected rewards of order and cleanliness, though they are great indeed.

 Watch Liam see his basement transformed, for the first time. Happy New Year! Throw some stuff out!
    

          

Watching Pinky

Thanksgiving night, 10 pm. I'm feeling very thankful. I got a chance to cook for my little family today, and cook I did. Just me, Bill and Liam,  and we were missing Miss Phoebe badly, but oh it was so nice to be able to make a whole Thanksgiving meal. Bill made his signature mashed potatoes, and I did the turkey, stuffing, gravy, creamed limas and pearl onions, and Ida's Corn Custard.

Liam begged for corn pudding, so I riffled through my mom's recipe boxes until I found her Corn Custard. Because I know many of my readers love recipes, here 'tis, in Ida Lucile's signature backslant, on a slightly stained and yellowed card with quirky 1960's graphics. (I'm not sure what the big brownish thing is..some kind of cheese?) She was a lefty, and back in the 1920's, they forced left-handed kids to write with their right hands. Arrgh. How I love her handwriting. It's so antique, slightly tortured, and beautiful.

I used only 1 T sugar, and I had to use frozen corn, because I loathe creamed corn. Probably because my dad told me they make creamed corn from the late-season ears that have so many borers there's no other choice but to cream it. He said the ramp leading up to the processing plant would be slick with squashed borers, so much so the horses would slip and fall. OK, so this is many years ago. Horses and all that. (DOD was born in 1912).  But still. No creamed corn for me, ever. Yecccch. 

I used my fabbo stick blender, a gift from my friend Annie, to sort of grind up the frozen corn in the mix. And I baked it at 325 for an hour and it was fine. Ida was smiling down, I felt her in the kitchen with me. Ida's Corn Custard was faaaaantastic, my favorite thing on the plate. Thanks MOM!!

Lest you feel sorry for Phoebe, here's what she had while waiting out Hurricane Otto at Bocas Del Toro in Panama:

Poor lil' baby.

I put that 12-pound turkey in the oven and got the cornbread stuffing started and went outside and cut the morning glory vines, all blackened with frost, down from their trellises. I was not sad, not one bit, any more than I'm sad to take the Christmas tree down each year. They had had their season, and it was fabulous, and now they were dead and it was time for them to go, every last depressing limp bit of them. Buh-bye! I am using my deadly Soil Knife, a gift from my gardening friend Vicki, to saw and thwack them down in a matter of minutes. LOVE that tool. I gave it to Liam to cut some high vines I couldn't reach and he was so thrilled with its power, he wouldn't give it back. Now THAT's a KNIFE.

photo by Liam Thompson. Phoebe says it's BADASS and she's using it as her phone home screen. :)
Well, I can't have a buncha dead plants on the house when she comes home in 17 days, now can I??

I was so psyched to get rid of the dead vines so quickly and easily that I did all the hanging baskets and all the planters and zinnias and hostas and daylilies... I moved all the way around the house and cleaned out every bed. I've never cleaned my gardens up like this in November, but I'll be so glad I did come spring when I'm too busy to do it. That Soil Knife.  Just a sawin' off those hostas and fuchsias and salvias...seconds to level them, instead of hours of laborious hand-clipping. Wow. Thanks, Vicki, you Garden Weasel you!

But wait! this post was supposed to be about deer. Two mornings ago I peeked out the bedroom window and saw a little form sneaking through the frost-whitened goldenrod. I raced soundlessly through the house to get my camera, threw a coat over my PJ's, and went shivering out onto the deck to shoot. I had a feeling something good would happen. 

I think I know who that is. Yep, there are the little buttonbumps on his forehead. It's Pinky!

Who's a good boy?

Pinky heard someone coming through the frozen meadow. He turned and watched.

I followed his gaze to see two more deer, both does, one big and one small, picking their way through the rattling weeds.

I didn't recognize the closer one, but the big one in back looked familiar to me. She was a very handsome animal, with a pronounced high forehead.

She looked like Boss Doe, an old comrade of Ellen's, who almost always traveled with her. It made sense to me that she'd keep company with Pinky, Ellen's slightly crooked son. 

Look at her face and tell me if she doesn't look like this photo of Boss Doe from 

February 16, 2015. 

And a closeup from last February: 

This individual deer ID is pretty subtle stuff, I know, but I felt pretty sure I was seeing Boss Doe again. And that made me happy, to see her coming to meet Pinky.

She approached Pinky, and he went into full submissive posture, head down, ears back, tail fluffed, his back hunched. 

Any doubts that the big doe was Boss vanished. I'd seen this kind of interaction many times before. She always pushed Ellen and her fawns around! By now I was shivering hard but grinning like a fool, clicking away, enjoying documenting the continuum of whitetail life in our meadow.  Look at that ugly face on Boss Doe! Coiled to strike! Does lord it over young bucks, perhaps to discourage any possible teen-age notions of their trying to mate with them. Spotty's Mom has got it goin' on...

It's a standoff, then exit, stage left!

Pinky dodges by, hoping to escape a bap from Boss Doe's sharp hoof. 

He stands a moment, considering his options. 

And, being a herd animal, opts to join. He circles back to feed peacefully beside his mama's bossy friend. I heave a happy sigh that he's not alone.  Mean attention is better than nothing at all. And whitetail aggression usually looks a lot worse than it is. 

But who is the other, smaller doe? I focus in on her, searching in the hard backlighting for any clue to her identity.

She lifts a back hoof to scratch her neck, and I see the clean white stripes running down the backs of her forelegs. It's Flag! Just one more small bit of evidence that Pinky and Flag may be brother and sister, perhaps the twin fawns I saw with Ellen in mid-summer, in the same hayfield where their mother was killed.

I am filled with happiness at being able to identify my three neighbors, one I've known for years, and two others I've only just met. I'm glad the fawns are keeping company with Boss Doe. She'll push them around, tell them what to do and what not to do. These wee innocents don't know what's coming Nov. 28-Dec. 4, and can only copy the behavior of deer who do.  I envision old Boss Doe sending pictures to Pinky and Flag, that something evil this way comes.

 Pinky and Flag: stay scrawny, like your mama. Stay safe, stay here. Lay low, and I will, too. Along with your No. 1 Fan and Interpreter, there's a whole lot of people who'd love to hear from you again.

From 30,000 Feet

It was a day. I’d just had my third root canal since March 24, when I had my first on Molar 19. The second, on Molar 20, followed March 29. Those two teeth were crowned April 14, and that was unexpectedly delight-free, as well. Now it was May 10, and I was in for my fourth multi-hour session in The Chair, and on this beautiful balmy afternoon I slunk into Jim Murrin’s office like a yaller street dog, my heretofore cheery mien dissolved. I was thoroughly done with numbing and needles and pain, with shots of epinephrine (or whatever it is that numbs my jaw and makes my heart race) and the wasp-sting and giant bumblebee drone of drills inside my head. I was done with latex mouth dams and fighting back the sudden panic that I couldn’t swallow, cough or breathe. I was almost ready to cry for the gas of oblivion, but pride held me back. Not sure who I’m trying to impress any more, but there it is.

I don’t have bad teeth. I have great big, beautiful teeth, and I love them. This is not their fault. The problem is that my cavities were treated in the late 1960’s, when, as Jim explained, the conventional wisdom (or dumbness) was to carve out a whole lotta tooth around every cavity, and fill that great hole with silver. There. All done. Fixed it. This weakens the tooth structure, and eventually what’s left of the tooth is going to dry out and crack around those gigantic silver fillings. Eventually, apparently, is in the spring of one’s 57^th year.  As I understand it, eventually comes quickly if you grind your teeth in your sleep, eat kettle corn, muesli with dried apricot bombs, or almonds, to name just a few of my favorite things that have brought such joy and drained my bank account.

I find myself thinking about primitive dentistry. About cavemen, and what happened when their teeth cracked. Which they must have, given that there was the inevitable pebble in the roots, fruit or flesh. Dental pain is intractable and life-altering. What did they do when it struck?? They didn’t wait in a little anteroom full of alluring magazines to be put out of their pain. They didn’t have pliers or anything resembling them. How on God’s green earth did they pull each other’s teeth? Bash them out with rock and ice skates, Castaway style? I shudder to think of them suffering, perhaps for years. And I feel lucky that I, in my figurative silk suit, can go to Dr. Murrin and say "Please put me out of pain." I’ll sit still as I can. When you see my thumbs twiddling, or my feet describing little circles, you’re hitting pay dirt.

This array of magazines in the waiting room definitely helped, for it speaks volumes. Thank you, sweet Ida, for leading me here to this magical endopaintist, this paintodontist, who loves plein air, cityscapes, mountains, beaches, light, music, birds and my books, too. Who calls as I’m making the 2 ½ hour drive home to make sure I’m OK. I’m sure it was your doing that guided me here. What did DOD know of endodontists? I can recall my dad going to the dentist maybe three times in my youth. It was Ida who flossed twice a day, bought us all electric toothbrushes (with cords!) and spent far too many of her mornings in the chair at the dental school in downtown Richmond, returning silent and shell-shocked. She knew from tough dental work.

Close-up of central issue. This is an article about Jim Murrin's alter ego as a plein air painter. See his work at http://www.jimmurrinart.com

 Dad had enormous teeth in a robust jaw, which he passed on to me. He’d throw his head back and bare his molars so we could see all that gold. We liked to say that he could chew soup. And he did! We’d laugh to hear his choppers clop-clopping on Mom’s fresh tomato soup, islands of Longhorn cheddar melting in it, a to-die-for summer treat. Clop, clop, clop. When he and Ida were first married she made him a pecan pie, which is kind of like making a peanut butter and honey sammitch for a 200-pound black bear. She took off a little piece off the pie and offered it to Dale. And he bit down on it and by accident her thumb, too, and she said she was sure he’d bitten it clean off. She never hand-fed that man again.

And now I’m remembering Dad slicing things, summer sausage or cheese or apples, and offering bits to us on the tip of his pocket knife, which was always well-sharpened and likely never truly washed. He’d stick it into the dirt to clean it. Dirt, he liked to say, is an excellent cleanser. To him I likely owe my healthy stable of antibodies. I loved the little thrill of danger I felt when I picked a treat with a delicate bite off the end of that knife. That’s probably how the ancestral Zickefooses fed each other, no fingers in the way. I’m wondering where my first pocketknife is now, the one with sides made of furrowed antler, and a wolf-head insignia in the silver base. Dad gave it to me, and I’d give the world to pry it open again, swivel the blade between thumb and forefinger and send it spinning into a perfect stuck landing in the lawn, the way he showed me to do.

E.L. Doctorow said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Lately, I sit down to write about, for instance, the beauty of West Virginia in a rainy spring (my last post, which turned out to be about teeth) or garlic mustard (this post, which turned out to be about teeth), and what I get is teeth. With sprinklings of mortality, and Ida and Dale. I write about what’s on my mind, I guess. My son, once a nearly-spherical babe with white duck fuzz hair, has passed 6’, spends time building muscle, drawing amazing characters, fussing with his perfect ‘do, and driving himself to school. My daughter lives in Maine, is coming home for a couple of weeks this spring, and then spending the summer working at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. My much-too-beloved dog is growing old before my eyes. And look! so am I. What do you know.

 I don’t mean to sound forlorn, self-pitying, creaky or any of that, because I’m not. I’m riding this fresh and twisty bronco with everything I’ve got, and enjoying it immensely (well, all but the…you know). I’ve almost completely missed spring migration in Ohio; Chet and I haven’t had time for a good run since books started arriving in late March; but I’ve got a new book out, it’s got hard covers and gatefold pages and it weighs 3 ½ pounds! I’ve sold a pack of them, and people seem to like it. I get to zip around giving talks and meeting people, smiling and signing it. I’ve seen spring come on in Massachusetts and West Virginia and I’ve caught snippets of Ohio’s oriole, tanagers and bobolinks out the car windows as I flit around. In the one or two days at a time that I’m home, I plant and weed, piling straw around the tender peppers and tomatoes, and promise my gardens I’ll be back in late May. The house looks like several suitcase bombs went off in it—Bill’s traveling even more than I. I care, but not enough to do anything more than unpack, wash it all, and pack it up for the next trip. Thank God Liam can drive now, and is giving his rapidly-growing knees a rest from track this spring, because his far-flung parents would have missed every meet.

Me and Neka Roundy, Great Salt Lake Bird Festival mastermind and gracious host. Taken this morning, May 12. 2016

 I’m headed to Utah now to see what’s flying through there, take some field trips and give a couple of talks at the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival. I’ve shipped 30 copies of Baby Birds out here, and I hope hard I sell them all.  Being strapped into a small blue and gray seat is the only time I get to write these days. In fact, I just now yanked my laptop screen back from disaster, courtesy of the guy in front of me who, two hours into the flight to Denver, suddenly and swiftly drove his seatback into my space. Gotta love it. Yeah, I love it; love 35 minutes standing sock-footed in TSA processing, love the 36-carb pack of blueberry cookies that are my breakfast; love boarding position C-25 on a Southwest flight, which sent me to the why-me seat hard up against the restrooms, not breathing deeply. It’s all so glamorous, and I remind myself that it’s the life I asked for. But I treasure the time to buckle myself in, flick on the headlights, grab the wheel, and see where we wind up going.

Salt Lake City from Ensign Peak

I realized with an inordinate amount of glee that these pincushiony things are the seedpods of itty bitty alpine geraniums--the cranes' bills. Not an inch high, hugging the rocky slopes of Ensign Peak. Whoa!!

Not in Ohio anymore. Here be Lazuli bunting, black-headed grosbeak, vesper sparrow, ravens, magpies!!

These Bluebirds Know Me

December 28 was a stunning, crystal blue day in the upper 40's here in southeast Ohio. I had commitments all afternoon, but by God I was going to get out, so I set out on my run at 7:45 AM before it got warm. Now that Clarence the bus driver has retired, and I don't have to (or rather, can't) meet him at the cemetery for my morning story at 7:20, I can choose any time of day to run. So I often wait until the sun peeks out, if it's going to, or until it warms up, if it will, or until it stops raining, if it pleases the weather gods.

My agenda this morning was to make it to Waxler Church, two miles distant, while the early morning sun was hitting the building and the stones. I couldn't wait to see the transformation. I'd only viewed it in gloomy weather, and it was so beautiful then.

I kept hitting delays. The first delay was a row of a dozen (a dozen!!) eastern bluebirds, lined neatly up on a powerline at the corner of my township road and the county road. Oh, what a beautiful sight. When I see a whole bunch of bluebirds, I love to speculate whom amongst them might have been raised in one of my 25 nest boxes. Of course I generally speculate that at some point I've touched every one of them in my nest checks, and if I do say so myself, that's a fair speculation. I've had these boxes up since the mid 90's, and they crank almost 100 fledglings out each season. I probably started with the great-great-great-great grandparents of these birds, and I'd bet that every one of them has seen my face peering in at them throughout the first two weeks of its life, poor creatures. Kind of a neat thought.

So I peered up at these bluebirds, loath to frighten them by trotting by, yet wanting to get to the church on time for the sun which I knew would be blasting through its old panes in a very short time. I stopped and gazed up at them, making them nervous, and a few made little sorties out from the wire. They didn't want to leave the flock, but they didn't like being stared at, either.

 I shot a few pictures of this fine lineup, a dozen bits of pure beauty and song and life, the first such gathering I'd seen this winter.  And I slowly and respectfully started toward them, hoping to pass by without frightening them. They looked so cozy, lined up in the sun.

But of course, no bluebird in its right mind is going to sit while a woman and a dog pass right beneath it. It's got to fly. And sure enough, the flock lifted off when we got uncomfortably close. Well, most of the flock.

All but two. Two females. 

Who sat calmly looking down at us, this scary human and her predatory black animal. 

Hello there, Elsa! Hi, sweet Ida!!

Hi Zickmama! Hi Chet!

They never flew. We had quite a chat. I told them I was glad to see them, told them I hoped they'd catch back up with the flock, asked them to come visit me soon. You know where I live, darling girls! The rest of the flock had long disappeared over the horizon, voicing alarm calls, but Elsa and Ida sat tight and watched us until we were out of sight. If you don't know the story, you can find out how I obtained and finished raising these orphaned bluebirds here. 

Or you can simply peruse the July archives

and the August archives from 2013. Many baby bluebird posts there.

Seeing them and realizing who they were was a moment. 

It was so very good to see them again.

Empirical evidence only, of course. I have no bands or gizmos with which to prove my theory that these two unaccountably tame birds had been hand-raised. But both my head and my heart point to that.

We ran on.

And the song of the bluebird was upon the land, the first time I'd heard them singing all winter. A lone cardinal chimed in, and together they lifted my heart.