Goldilocks

Metolius River, Camp Sherman

Judy at Camp Sherman store

Account books behind counter

    October has been a month of traveling.  We stayed in a cabin at  Camp Sherman, Oregon, a small town 3 hours away in the high desert east of the Cascade Mountains. It's dry country, where we smell the scent of Ponderosa pines rather than the heaviness of Douglas fir.  The light is different, too, shining on the reddish bark of the pines.  The Metolius River, a fly-fisher's dream, runs through Camp Sherman. When she was a young surgical nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital, Judy rented a house in from a couple who owned the Camp Sherman store.  Judy spent many of her free days helping out at the store.  The store looks a lot like it did 35 years ago, with cases of fly-fishing lures, and a cabinet of notebooks containing the accounts of locals who buy on credit.  It houses the community's post office and gas station.  From the bridge over the Metolius just in front of the store, we watched salmon and steelhead  trout migrating up the river below us.

Sign on the door of  Camp Sherman store

     We have been attempting to make this trip to Camp Sherman for two years. Twice we have had keys to the cabin in hand, and cancelled at the last minute because of wildfires in the area.  This time there were no fires reported, but we kept a careful watch on the sky. While driving the ten miles back from a side trip to Sisters, we noticed wildfire smoke to the south.  Judy, from long practice, could tell that the fire was on the other side of the Three Sisters mountains, and that the smoke would be likely to dissipate before it reached the road we were on.  It did.  However, Judy still struggled with her breathing, because of the altitude.  Camp Sherman is only  3000 feet above sea level; we were surprised that it was high enough to affect Judy's breathing.

At Camp Sherman

     I was eager to get her down from the mountain and on to our next trip, to Manzanita.  The ocean air at sea level will be just the thing, I thought.  We stayed home for 24 hours and then headed for the coast.  Judy and Mutt Leigh stayed at a motel while I participated in the cleanup weekend of the library cottage.  On Monday evening we moved into the cottage.  John and Rose joined us.

John and Mutt Leigh

The hated halter

     It was Mutt Leigh Mae's first visit to Manzanita, and the first time we needed to take her for walks.  (At home the fenced backyard is her territory, which she faithfully keeps free of squirrels and other monsters.)  We bought her a halter, which she hates, and a leash, and planned on taking her out into the front yard of the cottage.  John and Rose, however, took her for long walks up the driveway and around the neighborhood, poop bag in their hands.  Mutt Leigh pranced on ahead of them, eager in spite of the hated halter.  On our last morning at the cottage, I got up to take Mutt Leigh out.  John was eating breakfast at the table.  Miss M allowed me to put her halter on and attach the leash, but she balked at going outside with me.  She dug in her heels and put her whole 13 pounds into not moving out the door. Instead, she scrambled over to the breakfast table and practically attached herself to  John's feet.
     There was heavy fog rolling in from the ocean; it blanketed Manzanita most of the time we were there.  The moisture in the air caused Judy to cough and struggle for breath.  She need oxygen even more that she had at Camp Sherman.  When we got home to the Willamette Valley, the altitude and the relative humidity were what Judy is accustomed to. We were hopeful that her struggles were the result of environmental factors, rather than  marking a step downward to a new, more difficult plateau with her pulmonary fibrosis.

3:33. Fast for me

  Herta, our implacable strength training  leader, now presents us with a challenge every month.  In July we aimed to increase the time we could hold a plank position.  In August, we tried to increase the time that we could sit against a wall.  September's challenge was to decrease the time it took us to walk/jog around the quarter mile of Milwaukie High School track.

Not what I look like

Really not what I look like

   I am not a fast walker; in fact, I describe my preferred pace as regal.  My first time around the track was 4 minutes 37 seconds.  I improved by 15 seconds the second time, and began to think that maybe I could break four minutes.  Two sessions later, I had still not walked around the track in less than four minutes.
     I did notice that some women in our group jogged part of the way around the track. I  don't believe in running; it's really an  unnatural act, unless a wooly mammoth is chasing you.  However, when Sheila asked if I wanted to jog part of the way, I said yes.  "Do you want me to pace you?" she asked.  She walked with me, and, when I was ready to jog twenty paces, she said, "Do you think you can do twenty-five?"  So I did thirty, with Sheila right beside me cheering me on.  Walk, jog, walk, jog.  I completed the quarter mile in three minutes thirty-three seconds.  What a  difference a coach makes!

Me (tall one) in softball days

    From ages ten through fifteen, I played softball.  My father and Mr. Nelson were our coaches, teaching us girls the basics of how to throw, catch, field, and hit.  Our early CYO games had scores such as 46 to 0.  Sometime we were the 46, sometimes the 0. I was not a natural.  I could never throw far, but I was fast in those days.  Over the years, with lots of patient practice, I learned to be accurate. I developed into a good fielder and a dependable hitter.  I won a trophy, called the Ellen Mueller award, for overall athletics.  Our softball teams became a force to be noticed, and I loved the feeling of team play.

Linda ca. 1963

    One of my teammates, Linda, was a natural.  She was very strong, could beam the ball into home from center field, and was always our clean up batter.  She kept playing on regional teams after the rest of us had diminished ourselves into more feminine pursuits.  Forty-five years later, when my father was dying, Linda wanted to come over to see him.   She told him what playing softball had meant to her. "Thanks, Coach," she said.
     After Linda had said goodbye to my father, she and I caught up.  I told her about Judy, and how happy I was to have found her.  Here's the one question Linda asked me about my new love:  "Is she generous?"  Not the usual polite queries about a sense of humor or hobbies or shared interests, but "Is she generous?"
     I'm thinking now about the generosity of coaches, and I am grateful for the time they took to create a girls' softball league at a time when organized sports were the domain of boys.
   I had to boast to my kids about my breakthrough time of 3:33 around the Milwaukie High School track. David called me a speed demon, and Paul wrote, "Somewhere, Ellen Mueller is smiling."
 
   

Canary in the coal mine

   

Pit 36 fire

   We live on the wet west side of the Cascade Mountains, not on the dry side where the Pondersoa pines go up like kindling in summer wildfires.  But in this hot and dry summer, we have had a fire burning for 10 days along the Clackamas River in  Estacada, just 21 miles northeast of us.  The heat loosened boulders on the cliffs above the  road, and they rolled down.  Fire burned away all the vegetation from steep cliffs; landslides will be likely when the rains come.  Large trees with smoldering embers inside have fallen across smaller roads.  The fire is called the 36 Pit Fire, named after the abandoned gravel pit where the spark from target shooters' pistols ignited it.   It covered more than 5400 acres,  jumped the river, and closed a major road before the 1200 firefighters could get it under control. It is still smoldering.

Tree feller fighting fire

Animals in peril

  Our good friend Sally lives near Estacada; she was on high alert, ready to evacuate  with her horses and donkey. For the first few day of the fire, winds blew smoke an ash to the south of our house; then the wind shifted.  Ash fell on us like softly falling snow, and we wiped it off the cars  and patio furniture. There were two days when the smoke was so bad that my throat burned and my chest felt funny.  Judy did not dare step out of the house. We closed everything up tight and turned on the air conditioning.  Judy struggled with coughing and shortness of breath, and used her oxygen more than usual.  A week later, she can tell long before I can when the wind shifts and there is a faint smell of smoke in the air. The increased work of  breathing has worn her out.  She who never complains talks about exhaustion and sleeps for hours many afternoons.

The air we breathe

Homegrown tomatoes

     The extraordinarily hot and dry weather has been great for growing tomatoes.  Many years, tomatoes do not get red here before October, and gardeners hope they ripen before the first frost.  When I moved from Eugene to Newport,  my favorite parting gift was the one perfect tomato that my friend Izzy had managed to coax from her garden.  She presented it to me as the rare, precious thing that it was.  This summer neighbors and friends press tomatoes on us as if they were zucchini. Sheila brought fat red ones to distribute at exercise class.  Gail brought us rare heirloom types, Indigo Rose and Chile zebra and Cherokee purple.   Katie showed up at a women's dinner meeting with boxes of tomatoes, "Take more!  Take more!"  We came home last week to find a bag of large tomatoes and a bag of cherry tomatoes on our doorstep, stealth courtesy of our good neighbor Janet.  Even Holly, visiting around the Northwest in her RV,  had a spare tomato  to pass on.    I skin the tomatoes and freeze them.
    Be sure to visit us this winter.  The air will be clear by then, and we'll have stew.

Gardens

Gardener making patterns

Roxie, MJ, and Gene

    We were walking through the Japanese Garden, Roxie and MJ and MJ's mother Gene and I. Every blade of grass and patch of moss is attended to there, and every tree is lovingly shaped.  We watched a gardener drag a big heavy wooden rake across an expanse of shining white gravel.  She made patterns that would reflect the moon.  Roxie told us about tea ceremonies, and how the tea house becomes a sacred space.  "The labor is what makes this place sacred," said MJ.

Perry's raised beds

Lots of garden art

      Another kind of garden, also built by intense labor, graces a former dump in Sellwood. A man named Perry who mostly lives outside has worked over 4 years to clear the land.  He builds stone

Path through blackberries

pillars from the river rocks that he unearthed up when he tilled the soil for raised beds. Residents in the apartment house next door use the space as community gardens.  Perry has also  made a horseshoe pit and many seating areas.  He cleared blackberries (he calls them "stickers")

My feeble efforts

 into an arch leading to a long entrance path, and made an enclosure out of blackberries for the  more unsightly equipment and spare garden art that he collects. Called "Perry's garden" by the locals, and claiming pride of place on garden tours, this garden is a welcoming, evolving place.  When Roxie and I walked into it one of the community gardeners offered us jars of iced tea.  Every time I visit, Perry is eager to show me his newest project.

Perry

       Lisa has worked all summer to resurrect our garden.  She weeded and pruned and planted and set up a watering system for us.  She began to feel us out with some suggestions, "Maybe you could get some annuals for color out front and I will plant them."  She progressed to buying  plants on sale and putting them where they will look good.  Our garden has not looked so tended and beautiful in the fifteen years we have lived here.  This is the first time I have not felt both embarrassed and harassed by the huge amount of undone work in the yard.  What a joy, and what a relief!  Lisa will be back in the fall to plant and transplant.  Meanwhile, I hope we can maintain the garden with our level of involvement; minimal weeding, attentive watering, and buying plants.  

Grandparents

Josh in a tunnel

     John and Rose stayed with us last weekend while their granddaughter Megan played in a soccer tournament in Vancouver.  Megan's team played on Friday night, Saturday mid-day, and Sunday morning.  Back and forth across the Columbia John and Rose  drove, sometimes fighting traffic and sometimes sailing through.  In between games, they introduced Megan's sister and brother to some of the delights of Portland.

Jamie meets Mutt Leigh.  John's photo

    We spent Saturday morning in Powell's City of Books.  I wandered in overwhelm among the children's picture books while Jamie found the latest in her favorite series, Megan chose some fat and serious young adult novels, and Josh selected huge tomes from the science fiction section. I flashed on fond memories of my Fat Lady Skinny Book club, where we read slim volumes and ate rich desserts.

Josh and Rose

   Back at our house, Jamie and Josh played with Mutt Leigh Mae.  After lunch they all headed off to the Portland Aquarium to pet the manta rays, to Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to see the dinosaurs, and then to Vancouver for Megan's next game.  Back at our house again, John and Rose went with us to dinner at Sheila's. We sat in the soft summer night eating Chuck's barbecue ribs and fruit salsa with cinnamon crisps.  Early the next morning John and Rose went off to Vancouver for Megan's final game.  Then they made the drive back to Sequim.

Chuck, Judy, Rose

Josh meets Mutt Leigh
    

     Meanwhile, Judy has decided that she will just say no to the experimental drug perfiderone.  She values her quality of life and does not want to take chances with
disturbing the current slow rate of progression of her disease.

   

Busy in the slow lane

     Judy is playing Ashokan Farewell on the dulcimer, a hummingbird is thrumming at the edge of the deck, and the little boys in the corner house are giggling and laughing in their swimming pool.  Welcome to  to summer in the slow lane at our house.

Grandmother's rug

     I arrived home from Rehoboth with three small  rugs that my grandmother  designed an had made in China in the 1930s. The beige ovals with bamboo leaves had covered the living room floor of the house I grew up in.  They lived in my houses in McLean and Falls Church until I moved west, when I gave them back to my mother.  This summer my sister Eileen was ready to get them out of her ironing room, and I was eager to have them back home. But how to get them from Maryland to Oregon? The five Sullivan sisters went into action.  Vonnie and Eileen talked about shipping, but Rose suggested that maybe I could check them as luggage on the plane.  Three different pieces of luggage?  No, Rose the geometry teacher figured that we could roll them together and still conform to Delta Airlines' luggage guidelines. "If they give you a hard time," declared Florrie," tell them it's your prayer rug." We all trooped over to the Fed Ex store, where  I got to see Florrie in action.  She charmed the clerk into packaging the roll securely for under $10.  Delta accepted the  rugs without question, and they arrived safely in Portland. When I took them to be cleaned I was  lamenting the worn spots on them.   The nice man at Atiyeh Brothers said, "In our world, that makes them interesting."

Judy and autoharp buddy Holly

     Judy was unable to go to the annual Willamette Valley autoharp weekend because navigating the physical plant  would have been too strenuous in the summer heat.  I drove one of the performers out to the camp, and was flooded with the outpouring of love and be-well messages to take back to Judy.  One fine player is dedicating her performance of The Happy Wanderer to Judy.  Judy still got to see some of her good friends; they  came in from Forest Grove for an evening to have dinner with her and to jam.

Lisha and Kathe

    Kathe and Lisha came to visit from their sheep farm in Colorado. We stayed pretty close to home during the four days they were here, eating the Trader Joe's food that they introduced me to.  We planned to have another day with them when they returned to Portland from a wedding in Ashland, but Kathe had caught a cold that she didn't want Judy exposed to.  So we visited briefly in the driveway, and they went on to a motel.  Judy gave Lisha a drum she had made years ago.
     Judy has long made a practice of finding the right person to whom to give a thing that she is ready to give up.  Nowadays, though, she is doing more of that. "I'm giving things away so you wasn't have to," she says. The drum went to Lisha,  the satin blouse to Donna, the silver flute to Midori, the quilting squares to Roxie. The framing hammer with which she had built a house went into the bag for the church rummage sale, but I pulled it out.  The right person for the hammer will appear.

Judy with her framing hammer

This year at Rehoboth

Vonnie and Ernie's new porch

Vonnie

     This year, Judy couldn't make the trip back east to Rehoboth.  David and his girls and Paul, Tina and their boys had other plans. This summer at Rehoboth was different:  I was at the beach without my partner or sons or grandchildren.
      I hung out with my sisters.  What a good time!  Vonnie and Ernie have bought a house inland in Lewes, a rich and peaceful place where they will retire in a few years.  We christened their large screened porch with its first family gathering and its first card game.  Jamie did an experiment to see what trees from the lawn that the bunnies in the back yard preferred.

Hermit crabs (Bridget's photo)

      At Rehoboth I stayed with Rose and her family, 12 of us in the house.  The little girls formed a band, and we all played games.   Jamie challenged me to matches of Booby Trap; Lucy hooted with laughter during Attack Uno.  Florrie took each girl on a  shopping shopping trip.  Jamie chose a book of a hundred folk tales, and read almost all of them to Lucy. We  all watched the progress of the hermits crabs, Ned and Ted. My roommate was niece Angela, a newly minted lawyer who ran every day in the Delaware heat.

With Amanda and Alana

    Relatives and friends flowed in and out of the house. Vonnie and Ernie and Eileen came in from Lewes every day.  Amanda and Alana showed us the photos from their commitment ceremony.   John pressed on me the amazing book he has been telling me about: John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a love story told by a teen with terminal cancer. Megan, at thirteen, read it first. Tommy introduced me to the hard-boiled crime fiction of D.C writer George Pelecanos. Florrie, the intrepid driver and shopper, took Rose and me for surgical strikes at our favorite stores on Rehoboth Avenue. Eileen and I worked with my cousin's son-in-law Stephen to fill the some of the blanks on the family genealogy.  Rose and I walked out for ice cream every night.  Florrie, Liz and Abby kept bringing leftover treats from the wedding shower.  Of course we ate corn and tomatoes and cantaloupe and crab.

Girls'  breakfast out

Happy family

   The sisters and cousin and cousins' wives continued our longstanding tradition of a girls' breakfast out, this year without Judy. We went to the same place and  sat at the same table that we have done for many years.  Even the lurking photography visit  from the paparazzo husband, Deke, was the same.  Different was the way we had to make the space accommodate our aging bodies: we turned the light off so that the spinning fan wouldn't make  flashes and trigger migraines for me.  For Shirley, we hunted up something soft to cushion the hard wooden chair.  Even our phrasing must have sounded outdated to the young waitress's Amelia Bedelia ears: when Rose asked  for hot chocolate with skim milk, she was served a mug of hot chocolate and a glass of skim milk.
    I caught up with old friends.  Carol and Deanna are joyfully exhausted, raising their 3 year old great granddaughter.  Mary drove down from Pennsylvania for a visit.

Eastern Shore food

    When it came time to drive back to Maryland, John and Rose and I  started from Vonnie's house.  That enabled us to skip the heavily traveled roads and drive mostly through  farmland in the  part of the state that the natives call Lower Slower Delaware.  Somehow we neglected to eat lunch, and by 2:30 Rose was scanning the GPS for  places to eat.  The small roadside Burma-Shave style signs gave some hints, like Volunteer Fire Department Chicken Barbecue Ahead.  But our hopes were dashed when that event, when we finally passed it, looked sketchy. We stopped at a fruit stand, and John asked  the local people for the inside scoop.  That led us to the big find of the trip:  Jimmy's Grill in Bridgeville.   Oh, Eastern Shore food!  We ate lima bean soup with corn and tomatoes in a ham stock, corn pudding, and crab soup.  We will have to wait for our next trip to try  the fried chicken with oysters, or fried chicken with roast beef, or fried chicken with crab, and the peach pie.