Dog Ahoy

It's the Leaves More Than Anything

Frequently I am without my full wits - mind part here and part there and multi-parted drawn and quartered attending to otherwise occupations. Then once in a too-great while - startled and/or quieted - the wits they find me.

There was a moment two days ago and just returning home with two bags on my shoulder – a gray leather purse and a brown leather computer satchel, sunglasses pushed back on my head, keys in one hand, phone in the other, shoe heels clicking fast and loud on the previously quiet house floors - I was stopped in my next-thing, lickety-split tracks --

There on the floor and on the back of the sofa was a dapple pattern of sunlight filtering through leaves, shifting like water - but silently moving unlike water - the shadows different shades of black or gray, the sunlight various hues of bright. Rare enough to gasp. Beautiful enough to weep. One bag slipped to the floor, then the other, I sloughed off my shoes, kicking them behind me. Absently I placed the keys on the breakfast bar and I scooted my naked feet in closer to the sunlight until I felt heat on my bare toes there amongst the warm breezy treetops.

Leaves, I thought. Leaves like riches, millions of dollars just growing on trees. These green signs of life, sprouting out of silent skinny wood, nothing more than buds eight days ago, and good lord today – full and shaggy enough to make noise when the wind passes amongst them, voluminous enough to make shadows play when the sun aims through them. Dear world, yes, it’s the leaves more than anything, I thought, blue toenails wiggling in the light, gaze moving to the outside to the greenery, wanting the big green change to mean something more than expected cycle.

When children draw a tree they draw a leafy tree. So when leaves come back the perfect world of childhood imagination returns too. Fluffy wide tree (with or without apples) drawn next to the two-story home with a chimney (smoke curling out like a coiled pig's tail), windows teed through into four panes each, a daisy or two growing in the front yard, and mom, dad, a taller kid and a shorter kid all holding stick-figure hands in the front yard. There might be a dog on the lawn or a cloud in the sky, and almost always – a sun that smiles and sometimes will wear sunglasses. A youthful architecture that yearns for normal.

This, then, is the picture of happiness - sun and home and family and those luscious leaves framing it all, this snapshot of life. Makes me wonder if there’s a place where the leaves forever stay on the trees, where the sun in always at just the right angle to pattern the wood floors, where the demarcation between inside/outside isn’t so much wall and insulation as it is doorway and where you kick off/slip on sandals.

This, then, is the root of my love/hate with the far north. All the big outdoor wild beauty like nowhere else and then the tragically short season in which we scarcely remember to close the back door, letting the summer and the mosquitoes wantonly waft back and forth wall-less for three brief and glorious months. A pretense of living somewhere well closer to the equator than here in Alaska where the open door time is just too too short, but so sweet.



But. I am nothing if not forgiving of those bare branch months here in my upper room where the treetops exceed my second floor window when I glance to the left, and four types of trees - spruce, birch, cottonwood, mayday - when I glance to the right and painted-on back-lit clouds behind. I see them tall and moving, I hear them rustle, I feel the wind rustling their parts, and I smell - nearly tasting - the sharp tang of fresh spruce tips and their woodsweet but slightly acrid scent carried on the wind. They ache me with sense and memory and want - and all this brings my wits about me - something patterned and alive between me and the trees.

Dinner, Drinks & a Movie (With Myself)

(I dropped off Jim dear late Tuesday night at the airport to go be with his ailing grandfather in Kansas. (He's doing better!))

Day 1: Popcorn, 1/2 bottle Malbec, 1 episode of the Scottish half-quirk, half-soap "Monarch of the Glen"

Day 2: Pistachios, the other 1/2 of the Malbec, the exquisite and haunting "Black Swan"

Day 3: A giant salad, the opera auction 1999 Syrah that I was saving for the right time (felt right this Friday night), and the that's-right!-Susan-Sarandon-is-totally-a-fierce-dirtbag-shooting-Texas-avoiding-backwards-driving-badass "Thelma and Louise"

I SAID: "Babies rule, others drool!"

Greatest, Greatest, Greatest!

Once I wanted to be the greatest... - Cat Power

Once upon a time I sent out a questionnaire to everyone I knew and loved and whose addresses I knew and I asked them all about the idea of greatness - what did they think it was, how did they think a person became great, who is great and who cares, ultimately?

And then the other day I was going through my files, like actual paper files, and I found all those questionnaires, returned to me via post with answers about being "great" written in pencil and in pen. I opened those envelopes in a tiny 3rd floor apartment in San Francisco once upon a time. At a desk, then, overlooking a busy street below, people going to and fro, caring less about great, or maybe caring about it a lot. What did anyone have to say about being great? Those strangers and those people who I knew?

They answered a lot of varying answers - do what you love, greatness is overrated, what are you talking about just pay your bills, just be yourself - and so on. I haven't revisited that project since I was 20 years old. I should revisit it.

I saw this comic and remembered that project today -

- I'll take some life advice from Marie Curie (via XKCD) cuz that's pretty smart about this greatness thing / slash/ wanting to make a difference in something and somehow.

Hung up on great, then. It's a good adjective to aspire to.

If you see my reflection in a snow covered hill... well, the landslide will bring it down.