Japanese Garden

Portland Japanese Garden

Davis Graveyard, Milwaukie

    Roxie and I usually tromp around Milwaukie on our weekly walks.  At Halloween season in our fair city, the front yards are alive with ghosts and ghouls.  This week, however, we decided to opt for serenity. We walked in the Japanese Garden.

Japanese garden maple

   It was a foggy morning, but the garden is on a hill in Southwest Portland.  We drove up out of the mist into a bright, sunny day.  The light through the leaves of the garden's Japanese maples was stunning.  We walked slowly and stopped often.  Mostly we were quiet.

Koi pond

    When we passed by the koi pond, Roxie admired the strong, shining fish.  My mind, however, was kidnapped by an assignment hanging over my head. I had that feeling of being in high school again, with a paper due and no idea of what to write.

Thoreau

     I've agreed to select some readings and give a very short introductory talk before the minister's sermon at church next Sunday.    She had just e-mailed me the evening before I went to the Japanese Garden.  She'll be speaking about  the impact the Transcendentalists had on the Unitarian tradition.  She suggested that I could find lots of good passages from Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, Theodore Parker.  As Roxie and I walked around the koi pond, my mind was captured and dragged to Walden Pond.  All I could think was, "I don't 'know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies! I don't know nothin' about Transcendentalism!"
    The feeling of being caught unprepared got even stronger when we went into the Pavilion to view a collection of large ceramic sculptures.  They reminded me of the wimples worn by the Daughters of Charity, my teachers in high school.
    I soon got over my fretting and began to pay attention to  the Japanese garden again.  I always feel peaceful after a visit there.  As Roxie said, "I feel like my soul has been washed clean and hung out to dry."

Simplicity

  
 

Lexie

Judy and Lexie

      I came into the house the other day after returning from the library.  Something was wrong. There was no frenzied barking, no whirl of light gray fluff around my ankles, no sense that someone was quietly resting in the bedroom. I looked all around, a little befuddled, before I remembered.  Where was the dog?

Lexie under the hearth

Chair mates

     Lexie had gone home to her real house the day before.  For the past few years  we've been taking care of her whenever her owners, Ed and Ruth, go on a trip.    Lexie had been abused before she wound up at  the shelter that Ed and Ruth adopted her from.  For several years, she wouldn't come out from under the couch for anyone but Ed.  Judy worked hard to lure her out.  Now, when there is a crowd at Ed and Ruth's, Lexie will emerge for Judy and sit on her lap.
    When Lexie first came to our house, she hid under the hearth, where she was warm and protected.  After a few visits she ventured across the room to sit with Judy in the brown teddy bear chair.  That position, plastered next to Judy, is still where she seems to feel most comfortable.

   Now Lexie acts like a real dog at our house.  She stands by the back sliding glass doors, plotting her attack on the squirrel.  When we let her out, she zooms to her position at the base of the big ash tree.  The squirrel teases her by clinging upside down to the trunk, two feet above Lexie's highest bounce.  The squirrel chatters and Lexie barks.  Then the squirrel spirals around the trunk and Lexie circles the base  of the tree and they start the standoff all over again.  Other times, Lexie races out the door to the side fence, to put Arnie, the big dog next door, on notice that she is a heavy threat.

Ed and Lexie

Arnie is not worried

    Lexie barks a warning when Sheila arrives to walk in the morning.  She barks in alarm when I come into the house, and keeps it up until I sit in my accustomed chair.  The she knows it's only me.   When she is ready to go to sleep for the night, she stands at the end of the hallway and yammers away, telling us that it's time for bed.
    Judy and I hate to give Lexie back to Ruth and Ed.  Judy finally admitted to me, "I don't want another dog, I want that dog."  We plot about how to keep her.  We urge Ed and Ruth to go on more cruises.  But the day always comes when she has to be returned.  Ed misses her, and wants her back the minute he arrives home.  When we see his joy at seeing her again, we know we have to let her go.

Gathering in

Limb about to come down

Limbs down

  

       In  September we had torrential rains for a week.  Five limbs blew down from the overgrown ash tree in our back yard.  Our backdoor neighbor alerted us to another heavy limb hanging by a thread over her garage.  Like many homeowners around here, we are waiting for the tree men to give us estimates.
   The big storm marked the beginning of rainy season here in Oregon.  It will rain until next June or early July.  Beginning in early March the grass will need to be cut every week without fail.  The first spring we live in  this house, I burned out an electric mower when I tried to cut grass that had not been attended to for three weeks.  Once the rains stop in June or July, they stop absolutely.  The grass gets brown and doesn't need cutting more than a few times until early November.
     The September storm has been followed by many sprinkling and showering days, all of them dim, damp, and gray. Before I moved here,  I asked  a colleague who had grown up  in the Pacific Northwest for tips about coping with the lack of light.  She cautioned me, "When the sun comes out, you go out, even if it's only for a minute.  Eat soup and bread, and  light a fire every night to break up the dark."

Glockenspiel at Mt. Angel

     I've taken care to follow her advice, but some years it's not enough.  I bought on Craigslist a full spectrum sun lamp, promising "Summer sun for winter blues."  When I arrived at the bungalow of the couple who were selling it, the wife started in  on her husband.  "We're moving to Arizona.  I used to use this lamp, but now I don't need it because we're moving to Arizona.  Three years ago we went there for two weeks in the winter.  Last year it was a month.  Now we are moving to Arizona.  I just can't take  the winters here anymore.  We're moving to Arizona, aren't we, Honey?"  It was like a skit out of Portlandia.

Chas and Kris with puzzle

     In autumn some people gather in apples or hay or Christmas plans.  I want to gather in the light.  We have some glorious days when the sky is high and blue and the vistas are bright.  On those days we find excuses to drive out into the country.  We drove south to Mt. Angel, a village settled by German and Swiss farmers.  We ate heavy food and  grinned at the Glockenspiel, mechanical figures that move to tinkly music and illustrate the history of the area.

Chas's cottage puzzle

     On gray days the colors of the leaves are even richer than on sunny days.  I drove to Manzanita to clean the library cottage, soaking in the golds of the big-leaf maple trees and gawking at the tawny hides of the elk in the meadows.   I had a special delivery to make: Chas created a difficult wooden jigsaw puzzle showing the old gal in all her glory.  It will now live at the cottage for those who want to  accept the challenge of piecing it together.
    The wet weather aggravates Judy's breathing problems.  It brightens up the pain in my arthritic fingers.  But when I  broached the idea that maybe we should spend some time in Arizona this winter, Judy looked at me like I had suggested going to the moon.

    

     

How far friends are

Nick

   Before and after Liz's wedding in Charlottesveille, I visited with old friends.  I sat on Marie and Nick's back porch, one of my favorite Virginia places, and feasted on Nick's cooking.  It was like old times to sink into conversation about family and  consciousness and the state of the country.  Nick describes himself as " a pretty conservative guy." I like to hear his take on things.

Marie on her porch

My last house in Virginia

   Marie drove me around the  neighborhoods where I used to live so that I can see the changes.  The modest post-war houses have been torn down and replaced with McMonsters, or have been remodeled into country manors.  Not jut a few, but almost every house on some blocks.  Who lives there?

Mary's photo of Maxine and Simone

     On Sunday morning after the wedding, my family was still in the hotel in Charlottesville.  Mary left Pennsylvania at first light and drove three and a half hours south through Virginia to visit with us.  She met Simone for the first time, and took some photos.

Josh drives the tractor

Joyce with toy     

   I spent Sunday afternoon along the Rivanna River.  Laine, the daughter of Rose's high school friend Kate, has a big farm there.  We tromped through the woods and across the hay fields and down to the river . My sister and Kate and I were glad of young Josh's hand when we crossed small wet places on slippery rocks.  At the shallow, slow-moving river, the  kids took off immediately in plastic kayaks. Laine pointed out monkshood and paw paw.  John found a snake, and Josh tore over the hills on  a tractor.

Surfer on choppy seas

   My friend  Joyce gamely found the farm and took me back to her house.  While she cooked dinner, I lost myself in a library photo album she had saved from 1987.  We all looked so young!  I was stunned at the amount of paper we used to do our reference work, when "we were Google before Google," as our friend Betsy describe it.   We used files and piles and acres of indexes.  It looked very different from any library or office nowadays, in this computerized age.
    Joyce showed me a toy, a cube with a surfer balancing in choppy seas.   "You gave it to me once, when I was having a hard time, "  she said.  "Over the years I've thought about giving it back to you when you needed it."  Joyce's husband has the same lung disease that Judy has.
    Earlier in September, Judy and I drove to Eugene to say goodbye to our dear friend Cathy.  Cathy is moving back to Atlanta to be around her family and medical specialists.  I've always wished that Cathy lived next door to us.  Now she will be far away.  Journey proud, Cathy.

Judy and Cathy

    Shortly after I moved to Oregon from Virginia, Betsy sent me a poem by William Stafford:

Friends

     How far friends are!  They forget you,
     most days.  They have to, I know; but still,
     it's lonely just being far and a friend.
     I put my hand out--this chair, this table--
     so near: touch, that's how to live.
     Call up a friend?  All right, but the phone
     itself is what loves you, warm on your ear,
     on your hand.  Or, you lift a pen
     to write--it's not that far person
     but this familiar pen that comforts.
     Near things: Friend, here's my hand.


  
  

Liz's Wedding

Liz at cocktail party

Cousins

  My niece Liz was married to  last weekend at a winery outside of Charlottesville, Virginia.  I had a glorious time.  On Friday night my sons took me out to dinner at  a restaurant that served fine Southern food (no longer an oxymoron in my book.)  We went from there to a cocktail party where we met the bridegroom's family.   The Justus clan is large and welcoming and happy with each other.   They do interesting work.   Luke's father works with  a non-profit that runs a medical school in Tanzania.  His uncle is a minister who participates in the Moral Monday protests in North Carolina.

Before the wedding

Simone

More cousins

      On Saturday we hung out in the large suite my sister Florrie had in the hotel where we all stayed.  Most of my family was there, except for Judy, who couldn't make the trip.   We talked and laughed and ate cookies.  The little girls colored and talked about their roles in the wedding.   Maxine and Lucy took their jobs as greeter seriously.  Jamie worried that, as flower girl, she had to walk up the aisle with the two-year-old ring bearer, and what if he wandered off?  My cousin Deke brought old photos of our grandparents.  Florrie read a love letter that my our father had written to our mother three weeks before their wedding.  Some swam, or worked out, or went running.  John led the kids on a frog hunt at a nearby creek.  Meanwhile, the bridal party was out at the winery an the grooms' party went skeet shooting.
     We took three chartered buses for the 45-minute drive  to the winery.  It was raining, so the ceremony was held indoors, in a lovely room draped in white. Two of the nine bridesmaids sobbed throughout the ceremony.  The minister quoted Amos ("Do  justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God") as one one of the couple's guiding sayings.  The string quartet played My Girl as the recessional.    Then the toasts and the dancing began.

Bridegroom Luke (r) skeet shooting

   While dinner was being served, Maxine had the large dance floor to herself for ballet.  The groom's brother could not get through his toast without tears.   Abby, the maid of honor, told about being a scared in the night and racing across the hall and leaping into Liz's bed, wedging herself between her sleeping big sister and the wall.  This went on so often that Liz threatened to put a dead bolt on the door.  "Why would she put a dead bull on the door?"  asked Jamie later.

Maxine and Lucy

Mother and sister of the bride

    We danced and danced.  The rain stopped and the full moon shone over the Blue Ridge.   We lined up in two rows out on the lawn, holding large sparklers.  Liz and Luke ran out between the rows of sputters and sparkles.   Then we got back on the buses.  My sisters and I were in the front of one bus, and Luke's college friends filled the back.  They sang all the way home, starting with fraternity chants and ending with the Star Spangled Banner.  We laughed with happiness.    As we rode through the countryside in the bright moonlight, I thought about how fine it is to enlarge one family with another family.

Happy vows

 
 
    

Quiet times

Abbey chapel. Photo by Westview Products

    I was feeling like my inner gyroscope was twirling too fast, and was tilted wrong to boot.  Life was speeded up, and there was not much laughter.  Judy said, as she does every few years, "Isn't it time you went to the monastery?"
    As I drove out into the rolling hills  near Lafayette I noticed many more blue  signs announcing wineries.  Land that  used to be prune orchards and woodlots  is now used for vineyards, and the country roads are sometimes clogged  with Portlanders out and about tasting wine.

     At the Trappist Abbey I settled right into the silence.  It was hot, 99 degrees one day, but country heat is tolerable in a way that city heat is not.  I rose early and went to bed early, and stayed quiet in the afternoons.  I took long walks, wrote, and let my mind be still. I sat by the pond and watched the trees reflecting in the water.   There were four other women guests staying in the small guests houses.   We ate breakfast and lunch together in silence, and talked at dinner.   At intervals, we crossed the courtyard between the guest quarters and the monastery to sat in the serene chapel to  hear the monks sing their daily office.

Sheltered by oak

     The monks chant the Psalms five times a day, beginning with Vigils at 4:15 AM and ending with Compline  at 7:30 PM.  There are twenty -seven men at Our lady of Guadalupe Abbey, only four  of them under fifty years old.  Four are over ninety.  "It's geriatric city," Brother Mark told me.  But Brother Dominique is a singing teacher, and the men take  singing lessons  with him every week.  The sound of the plainchant helped me to quiet my spinning mind.

Reflection

     The Trappist's rule of life requires each monastery  to be self-supporting.  The men at Lafayette can no longer farm or log or build church pews as they used to.  They make fruitcakes, and run a large bonded wine warehouse to store their neighbors' wine as it ages.
     Most of the abbey's 1300 acres is in second-growth forest that rises up in gentle slopes behind the monastic enclosure and the guest area.  The area was once farmed, and then logged.  Thanks to a large  grant from the Bonneville Power Administration and a conservation easement, the scrubby woods is being transformed into an oak savanna.   They are cutting out the underbrush, the pines and the smaller trees, and leaving the large oaks towering over grassland.  Big piles of brush, pine, and smaller trees sit waiting to be chopped for firewood or burned.  Someday the hills will look like the Willamette Valley did when the French and American settlers first arrived.  The local Indians burned the underbrush to make the grassland hospitable to their food plants, and to make hunting easier.

Oak savanna

       There are farm roads and logging roads throughout the new savanna and the remaining forest.  I like to take long walks in those woods.   The last time I walked through the woods  at the monastery   I emerged from a path into a clearing that had once been a baseball field.  Imagine  I was at  home plate in the cleared ball field.   At around the shortstop position there sat a cougar.  We looked at each other quietly, and I began to back up slowly.  She walked away from me, stopping every once in a while to look back.
    This visit, when I hiked in the woods I  kept my eye out for cougar tracks.  I saw a few tracks but no cougars. I also saw what sure looks like a bear print, and I wished I had a bell.  I was nervous but still peaceful.

Bear?

   When I returned home after a few days of quiet, I was no longer a flibbertigibbet.  The quiet time at the monastery had worked its ordinary magic.
    

Post Labor Days

Old deck

     We might be retired, but we still work. We have to make things ready for the people we hire to do what we cannot.

Lumber delivery

Sam

      In July we replaced our 40- year- old cedar deck.  This involved preliminary research, and then finding a lumber yard where the salesmen  didn't make me cry.  Some would make me  cry  because they were 20 years old and pretending to know everything.  Others  were 50 years old and did know everything, but they couldn't or wouldn't translate into my elementary spacial language. On every trip to a "Home Improvement (yeah, right) Center " I carried vivid memories of the time in Virginia when I was driving home from the Fairfax County permit office. I hadn't been able to make the permit clerks understand that I wanted to build a porch, and I couldn't grasp anything they said. I cried so hard that my sunglasses fogged up and I had to pull off onto the shoulder of I-95.  So this summer I was relieved when the salesman at Parr Lumber worked with me until I selected deck materials and we had the measurements and the order correct.   Thank you, Damian.

Space to work

     The lumber was scheduled to be delivered  by Sam the following Wednesday.  How can one person carry all that lumber?  Damian assured me that Sam was skilled with the mini-forklift.  I hope that the delivery driver could drive a forklift though our carport to unload the  lumber in the back yard.  The carport was filled with random stuff, leaving only a narrow footpath between piles.  I cleared it all out in one day without flagging, thanks to a year of strength- training workouts.  Thank you, Herta.

Precise support

New deck

    Sam drove up in the delivery truck and I thought, "How can a young woman lift  that lumber?"  But she was skilled, and didn't have to lift a thing.  She maneuvered the forklift without a false move.
     The forklift was too tall to fit under the carport cover, but the newly cleaned space was well used.  Carlos, a smart and skilled handyman, used it as a staging area for tools and materials.  He built us a fine new deck, just in time for the relatives' visit.  Thank you, Carlos.

Repairing first scratch

    Garrison Keillor often signs off his radio show with the admonition,  "Be well.  Do good work.  Keep in touch."  Now that we are retired, being well and keeping in touch take up a greater portion of our time than they used to.  But work, physical and mental, is still a good part of our lives.  Sometimes  we have big projects, like a new deck.  Sometimes there are smaller tasks, like retouching the paint on Judy's new car.  Argh.