Neighbors

 

(Photo by Jeff Hall)

Yesterday morning the windows were all clouded from the heat and humidity and rain overnight, like stepping close to a mirror after a hot shower. On one screen a slug was making its way from top to bottom, on the window that looks out onto the front yard something had been writing asemic poems on the glass. Between sips of coffee and talking to Ursula I saw a movement like a shifting shadow outside the window, hopping along the sill. I picked up Ursula and peeked out. A Carolina Wren zipped from the window and into the tree. It hopped and flitted from branch to branch but always turning to look back at me, holding the blind cat behind the fog. Finally, it went up higher and then sang its clear loud song, a song that seems too brash for such a small being. A song I hear often and can identify and that makes me madly search for the body that sings it. And here it was, right outside the window, and the voice comes from this lovely wee bird. And it looks at me, holding my blind cat, the cat that is focused on the song, her tails twitching. The bird sang one more chorus and then disappeared into the morning. Soon after when we went outside for our walk I could hear the rusty brown wren singing far off in another yard as the day heated up.

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Over the river and through the wormhole

My great grandfather, John Murray Wortman, walked out of Nebraska sometime after 1888 to Oregon. He'd had enough of the Midwest apparently after the great 1888 blizzard. He left my great grandmother, Lydia Ann Etchesion Wortman, behind with nine (ten?) children. After he had established himself (bought a farm? got a job?) his family joined him; my grandfather, Ord Wortman, was born in Wallowa County in 1895.

With a little digging I’m getting information that they married in 1861 when he was 19 and she was 10. Hmmm. Then they married (again?) in 1872. Hmmm. No children born until 1873. And then if you follow the trail, it says they married again in 1878. 

When she died in 1922 she may have been married 60 years. They had 12 children. 10 survived to adulthood. John lived until 1926.

But what of that time when he was walking to Oregon? Did he go by himself? In one census count I see they had a border, in the chronological listing of children, a daughter, Cassie, dies in Oregon at age 16 in January 1892. Lydia and John have a son in August of that same year in Ord, Nebraska. This is Ancestry.com info. Looking to fill in some gaps, maybe help tell a story. A good story, a good tough pioneer story. John’s is good too. 

I’m more interested in Lydia. 

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Beasts we mourn

I’m grieving for a little cat that I wanted to be my friend, but she wouldn’t participate. Grendal, Ian’s monster and by extension, Justine’s, and by super extension, Prince Myshkin’s role model and antagonist. She was a beautiful creature, emerald green eyes and white and gray fur that glowed and spun. She will live on in film and literature, becoming immortal. Here is a formal portrait I received as a gift, painted by Ian. Good-bye, sweet kitty. Good night. 💔

Changes to blog subscription

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Enjoy your day!

Balance

Please hang on!

Still working the kinks out of this new system. 

The history of silence

Part of a larger poem:

Girls walking in single file

[British Museum, Elgin Collection (Parthenon Marbles) Block VIII (fig. 57-61) East frieze of the Parthenon, ca. 447–433 BC]

I was last, shortest of them all; head and shoulders
excised from time. Hint of fingers, feet just crumbled grit,
a body robed and sexless. Definition found in what we carried,
were allowed to carry. Incense burner, jugs and bowls.
For ceremony or libation or sacrifice.
Not for us, we couldn’t keep our faces, our tongues.
Nothing for us. Stone has become brilliant white, how else to survive?
Even our skin a lie.

Still working out the new email notification format. Test two launches tomorrow morning.

Notes on the weather

 Notes on the weather
 

My grandmother had locust seeds in a shallow basket
right by the window that opened to a view of the canyon
which yawned as far as the ridge at Chesinmus.
These long pods, the color of tanned leather, were polished
by our fingers, a slow mediation along the smooth length,
the play like prayer beads,  as we stood reading
her entries for weather, which she made five or six times each day,
noting the barometer reading, the temperature.
Outside the window hummingbirds fought along the garden’s
edge, sparrows looked for ways into the strawberry netting.
The pods weighed less than a sparrow and each vibrated
with seeds full of the dry heat of summer.
 
I wonder where these things are now, the notebook full
of careful records in a script no one learns anymore. Where
is the basket, a small hand woven object brought back
from New Mexico or Arizona. I wonder about the hands
that are touching them, or if they were long ago discarded
and no matter to the person who they came to. I often long
for the familiar feel of an object held so frequently
its skin became part of my own. Now I feel the heft
of my own heart is of no more consequence than the secret
weight of the salamander we found in the earthen cellar
one hot summer day waiting for the weather to change.

~~~

This is a poem about a place and time. The time was long ago and faraway, the place was my grandma’s house (my maternal grandmother). And this picture of us I just saw for the first time when I was in Oregon in May. On the back it says May 1983, but I know that is wrong because in May 1983 I was in Naples, Italy. It has to be from the summer of 1985, when missing the West, I flew home. I think it is my new favorite picture of my grandmother, she looks so happy and "conspiratorial": during that visit we shared a pony beer on the back step some evenings, or maybe she had told me something in secret, whatever it was I adore this.