PROMISE OF SPRING

These buds are further along than the ones on that tree outside my window. So far mine are more of a promise that they will look like this in a couple of months or so. 

The tree in the courtyeard outside my window is looking preggy ragged. another good windstorm and most of those sade looking leaves will be gone; to be rounded up by the yeard service guy with the reall, really, loud gas powered leaf blower. 

As one season winds down the promise of another begins. the lefless branches show the  smallest promise of next spring's leaf and new branches buds. Very tiny, just a promise, but they are there. We're heading for the shortest days of the year, the darkest days. Especially if you live in states like Oregon or the New England states. After the dark days come the light days. If you live far enough north it doesn't really gt dark at night. 

I wonder who first realized that next spring's growth started in the waining days of Autumn. The Greeks compaged the Druids to their Natural Philosophers but the lives of the trees must have been discovered long before the Druids began codifying their knowledge. And who discovered that lighting smudge pots in an orchard helps to protect against frost damage.

We seem to have lost the awareness of the great cycle//spiral of time. Spring 's Maiden becomes Winter's Crone only to be reborn again in the Spring. The Oak King of Spring and Summer is succeeded by the Holly King of the days of harvest and Winter. And I do believe I will stop there. Have some reading to do before I reopen some of those mental file cabinets.

That's how my mind seems to work. I start out in one part of the puzzle aned other pieces make themselves known. Does make for some interesting, stream of consciousness entries though. 

FELL OFF THE PLANET. AGAIN

 I guess I did fall off the planet this time. I don't know. Time seems to pass differently these days. Turn around twice and a month or more has disapeared. Didn't help that I had another flare up that earned me almost three days in the high priced hotel down the road for another session with IV antibiotics. Turns out this was blessing in disguise. Finally realized that home health can only do so much, and to be honest that ain't much. So hi ho, hi ho it's off to out patient wound care three times a week. The hospital also has just opened a clinic specializing in lymph edema treatment. I've soon advanced cases and yours truly does not want to go there. 

Still reading Haikus.Does take some gettimg used to. But it's fun. And turn around and another afternoon has drifted away. 

I do get a kick out of Midge. She's getting used to the idea that Mom will be back. I'm not sure if it's I miss you or I'm glad you're back it's time for my snack and the box needs scooping. Ah well. I don't anyone else tol spoil. 

There's small flock of quail that visits every day. I can hear them calling early in the morning. And they really are a cross between beautifl and sort of silly with their beautiful markings and those two little reathers on the crowns of their heads. 

Sorry this ids more disjointed than usual. But then I'm more disjointed usual. 

POETIC REDISCOVERY

 Back in my university days I was fascinated with the style of Haiku poetry. Even tried my hand a time or two. I came up on a single leaf  that appeared to be frozen in the mid air over the bike path. It was hanging by a single thread of spider silk. It was a windless, cloudy Novenmber day. It was just hanging there. Wish I could remember because Haiku are very much of the moment and that moment was a lifetime ago.

Picked up a daily reader of one Haiku per day through the year. Glad I picked the kindle edition because this isn't just one poem a day. It's one poem per page. Oh well. Anyway I started reading and the next thing I knew I was rewriting the blessed thing. 

Book's haiku

Snowy woodland stream

Outer banks encased in ice

Center swift and mean

 

My haiku

Dark snowy branches

Hanging over icy stream

Between frozen banks

IMHO or not humble. The first one says too much. The traditional poems I’ve read imply more than they say. It’s cold enough for snow and ice. If the stream isn’t frozen it’s because it’s moving too fast. I just started the book, a haiku a day sort of meditation. Hate to say it, but these folks probably spend most of their time in the city.

My physical world may be smaller now but I have a lifetime of memories. Pacific beaches (this part of the country we go to the coast not the beach because you never know what you’ll find when you get there), the little valley where I grew up, mountains, waterfalls, the best.

I'M HOME

  Had a semi mind blowing moment of clariity this afternoon.  Obviously I knew this. In the front of my brain so to speak. I was reading, looked up and it hit me. It was a short reading that ended with Jesus offering to take the reader "home." That was the blast. We are home. You, me, the maple tree in the courtyard, the courtyard, that barn on the other side of the block across the street, the birds  diving through that maple, are made of star stuff created when stars went super nova and hydrogen mostly born when the universe was created. 

Currently there are questions about whether it was a Big Bang or an event astronomers haven't been able to describe yet. It's less than a century since scientists began to find evidence they believed aswered those questions we've been asking for generations. Where did everything come from" 

I've often wondered how we would look if we could see those around us glowing as the atomic level. I looked out the window and it hit me. What if we could see everything around us down to the smallest earthworm or sparrow glowing, sparkling and realize that there really is no difference. That as much as I miss the valley where I grew up, lived most of my life; I'm just in another room, I'm home. 

Absolutely beautiful image lifted from Spritual Ecology on Facebook. They also have a website. Be careful you could become lost in the eye gazing out inviting you to dive in. 

We are made from starstuff. The atoms that built the earth were cooked in the gases of an exploding supernova.

Just think about it. Before you were you, you were a star. What built you also built the tree across the street, the trout in the stream, the mountains half a world away, the moon, the rest of the planets and just maybe a star that's half way across the galaxy from us.

When the Irish poet Amergin made his boast; when he said he'd been a salmon, a stag, a wild boar he spoke more truth than he realized.

If you want to know what the building blocks of a star look like just g look in the mirror.

It also means that the homeless guy down the street has the universe in him too. That the undocumented immigrant in the the desert has the universe in them too. It also means that your crazy conspiracy spouting uncle is made of the same star stuff. Or whaever friend or relative that's no longer on that list of cards to be sent. What a world it would be if we looked at everyone and everything around us with the same wonder we give a full moon or the most beautiful waterfall we've ever seen.

WHERE I'M FROM

 Did this a few years ago. Along the line I discovered that Kaiser was actually spelled Kisor. All I can find out is that he was from Vermont. And got a message over ancestry from a lady who was familiar with his wife. Dexter Kisor was her relative's second husband and there was no information from her family about him. Total blank.  The Meyers line is solidly German. Arrived in the early seventeen hundreds from the Hanovarian lands brought into the Stuarts when Princess Elizabeth,daughter of Charles I. married the Elector of Palatine and that is a whole 'nother story as the saying goes. The daughter of James II either had no children or children who died well before adulthood. Exiled James II had a son, finally, but a snowball had a better chance of surviving in hell than a Catholic had of becoming king of England. 

Managed to trace a couple of lines to the late fourteen hundreds.Which means that they managed to survie the Protestant Reformation, the Peasant's Revolt, the Thirty Years War and various plagues and famines before emmigrating to the colonies and settled in Pennsylvania. 

There is information that William Penn sent Quaker followers into Germany to recruit Pietist Pretestants to settle in the new colony of Pennsylvania. Not Quakers but with similar beliefs. 

I’m a native Oregonian; a state that has the lowest per capita church attendance in the country. It doesn’t mean we aren’t religious or followers of the spirit. It does mean that we’re hard to pin down when it comes wearing a label. And to be honest all of us, including the remaining Native Americans came here from somewhere else. Some of us just happen to have more family members resting in pioneer cemeteries around the state than others. Me? I’ve got three generations and various cousins planted in a lovely cemetery on the north side of Chehalem mountain above the other side of Newburg. It's also one of the few pioneer cemetary that was planned large enough that it's still in use and well maintained. 

My genes are solidly northern European. Supposedly there’s a Cherokee in my dad’s family tree but I don’t have any proof so that’s a thread in my family tapestry that would be fun to claim but I can’t prove it. (shrug) There’s one German great grandfather; with a name like Kaiser I think I’m safe to assume he was German, not Dutch. The rest is Scots, Irish, English and Welsh. And heck, for all I know there could be a Roman or two in the family tapestry if I went back far enough. Hell, for all I know there was a British trader or two over the years who made it to Goddess knows where and left a calling card or two behind.

My dad’s family name comes out of Yorkshire in England and Vikings settled there in what became the Kingdom of York as well as Ireland so there some Scandinavian sea farers adding a thread to the tapestry. Near as I can discover the original Heaton ancestor was probably a Norman. A man at arms possibly who was in the service somebody and ended up in Yorkshire. For the next five hundred years or so. Have you ever wished you could invite your DNA over for tea, muffins and a good long sit down?

Anyway I originally did this back in my early J Land career. I got it from another writer who has since dropped off the radar. The original template was designed as a stream of consciousness exercise. And Russ was right. You do end up where you didn’t expect to. For the non-Nothwesterners out there; the Hanford reach includes a free flowing section of the Columbia river and the Hanford reactor complex. One of these days the leftover radioactive contamination will probably reach the river and we’ll all start glowing in the dark. Since I originally wrote this I learned that Hanford's reactors provided the Plutonium for those lovely so far never used nuclear weapons. 

As for the Umatilla arms depot? They used to store nerve gas there. That wasn’t so bad. The stuff doesn’t go anywhere unless you combine the two ingrediants and blow it up. So, some geniuses in the Reagan administration decided to make the stuff “war ready’ and installed rocket that would do just that. The government built a very nice, state of the art incinerator to deal with the little darlings. And they finally did. Then nerve gasses were brought in from other bases to be disposed of in Oregon. So, guess whose little sister lives smack, dab in the middle that little piece of God’s little acre? North of the arms depot and south oth the Hanford Reach. So far they aren’t glowing in the dark.

WHERE I'M FROM

I am from Douglas fir, hemlock, spruce and cedar.

I am from the Cascades, the Blues, the Siskiyous, and the Wallowas.

(Also turns out that these days I'm sitting on about a mile of lava spewed out from cracks in the land over about two million years. Some of the flows made it all the way to Pacific Coast.)

I am from clear cuts, choker cables, riggers and log trucks with one log loads.

I am from sandy beaches, basalt cliffs and mudflats.

I am from wild geese calling at sunrise, wrens in the thickets, and great blue herons on the other side of the river.

I am from the little creeks, the mighty Columbia and the Pacific breakers.

I am from tricycles, tetherballs, little sisters with skinned knees and a love for bugs.

I am from the ivy by the patio, the hydrangeas with dinner plate size clumps of blossoms and the garden in the back yard.

I am from a wringer washer, a concrete laundry sink and clothes full of the smell of sunshine.

I am from missionaries, Methodist hymnals, Quakers and fairy rings.

I am from winter gales, spring showers, sunny summer days and autumn fogs and winter frosts.

I am from a little valley in the Cascade foothills, the Hanford Reach, the Umatilla Arms depot, and the Columbia Gorge where condors may soar again.

I am from logging towns with no mills, harbors with no fish, and farms being swallowed by urban sprawl.

I am from shelves full of books, an old flute and feeling out of step on the march to wherever.

I am from feeling like I’m on the outside looking in.

I am from seeing what no one else sees to see.

I am from hearing what no one else seems to hear.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Russ you were right I did not expect to end up here. \

And if you’ve reached the final lines of the exercise this may be why you’ll find me out hugging the local oak trees these days.

THE UNIVERSE DOESN'T COME WITH A REWIND BUTTON

 To Vivek Ramaswamy who has stated that if he is elected he would ask Elon Musk to be in his administration because "he laid off three quarters of the Twitter work force." Ol' buddy, ol' pal just how long would you last if three fourths of the peons who make you life so comfortable decided not to show up for a a month or so. Ever get the feeling some of these wanna be politicians would put most of us in stasis and only wake us up to vote? Of course at that point they wouldn't neeD us anymore.

Caught a film titled Parkland this weekend. Movie is based on Four Weeks in November by Vincent Bugliosi. A minute by minute, hour by hour history of the murder of JFK. Parkland is the name of the hospital where Kennedy was taken after the shooting.

Which sent me back to a morning in eigth grade home room when Jack Carter, the vice principle, came in without a word, gave a note to Mrs Redmond. That's how the kids in a a logging town in the Cascade foothills of Oregon learned that the president was dead. For four days the country almost ground to a halt. There was literally nothing else on the tube. Sunday his assassin was murdered on live TV. 

Civil rights entered a new era, Politics entered a new era. Over the next five years Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bob Kennedy. Damn. Viet Nam heated up.Johnson had to choose between  guns and butter and chose guns. He didn't resig but he did choose to step aside. Took almost as much courage ias marching in that walk from the Capital to the church where the funeral mass was celebrated. Johnson told the secret service agants that "he didn't deserve to be president if he was afraid to go out where the American people could see him."

 Southern Democrats became Rebulicans. Watergate, innder cites on fire, riots on e campuses, Kent State. Nixon. Oh Lord, Tricky Dick. First president to resign from office for lying about the attempt to steal an election he was going to win anyway. 

Jump ahead to the Reagan years when the US chose to support tin pot dictators who were murdering their eir own people/ The excuse. The fight against communist subversion. And that hoary old accusation just won't go away even though the talking heads hurling the insult probably couldn't define communism if you asked them to.

Heck no generation has avoided the bad going on terrible times. But, it wasn't until the fifties and sixties that using police dogs on kids demonstrating for civil rights, jungle wars and murdered presidents, cvil rights leaders and senators were on on national television. Revolution, the decades leading up to the civil war, the civil war, bank failures, three presidentiala assassintaed, First world war, farmers losing their farms, the crash, depression, the dust bowl. another war. And. So. On. Heck reading this litany you'd find yourself believing that was all that was going on. There were a lot of good times. The country got through it and probably will again. 

One really big difference. Now the nut jobs that never got past the end of the bar or the low power local FM stations have a world wide audience. And the semi not crazy rest of us are still trying to catch up. 

Well this grew like Topsy. Sort of went all over the place. Got some some stuff I'd been thinking about for a long time off my chest. For what all that's worth. Sometimes I find myself believing that the day in Dallas was where step by step is how we ended up here looking backat all those forks in the road knowing that there are no do overs in this universe. Or crystal balls. 

RAISE ANOTHER GLASS

 This is the original companian piece to the last entry. Anyone else believe that we need more EMT'S, caregivers, cooks, truck drivers, and all the other folks that keep the country lurching along and few MBA'S  and so called financial planners. I love all those commercials touting this investment or that one and apparently assuming that nothing bad, like the great recession of 2008, is going to happen in their future. Without further ado, the first responders edition. 

I totally forgot about the police, fire fighters and EMT's when I wrote yesterday's post. I'm a fan of Blue Bloods and a first season episode pegged rookie Jamie Reagans's pay at under $47.000. Subtract the standard deduction and I guess Jamie isn't "pulling his weight." Even though like most other cops he's basically on call 24/7.

Big brother is a detective and their average salary is in the upper eighty grand neighborhood. Which is probably why the wife went back to work as an ER nurse. Still I'm betting their combined salaries don't put them in the $42,000 tax bracket. With two kids I guess they "aren't pulling their weight" either. Even though one of them is periodically risking his life and the other is trying to save the lives of ungrateful asshats like OldMan. 

I suspect that firefighters and EMT's probably pull down similar wages to run towards events that the rest of us run AWAY from. And remember that seventy one cops and over three hundred fire fighters died when the towers collapsed on 9/11. 

So Mr or Ms I pay eighty grand in taxes just what does it take for the folks who risk their necks to save your life and property to "pull their weight," If you're telling the truth about you taxes you are a sorry excuse for a human being. If you're putting out talking points to echo Romney's forty seven percent you are still a sorry excuse for a human being,