Migration Funnel

I woke to a deafening swamp of sound this morning. The cranes are stopping back at Creamer's field across the street. In the 50's and 60's the field was part of a dairy operation and the cow manure grew grubs and other edibles for birds. The cows are gone, but the birds still know to come. In the spring, with our brand-new daylight and sunrises at 5 am they stop over en route to points North. I missed it this year. (It was about goats and sheep in my world, instead.) Now they return with their fledged and flying young--doubled or tripled in number--to go to Texas, Florida, to fan out once they get through Canada.
Or, this is my understanding of what's going on.
Here is my poem (haven't been able to get the line breaks to transfer):

I have made my nest
Feather lined and fern bellied

I have fed my keepings
Gray down and whale-wide brown striding

I know what it is to rise-rise and fledge out
To keep kind and learn follow, to arc and then lift
I know what it is to recover the sky

I now know the leaving
The hollow loop inside keel, a boat-bender noise--
Calling field, under wing, a green brown red sigh.

You and I shoulder voices, half-measured caesuras,
Sonorous, verberate, the pluck of
Gone Gone
on our ears.




IN OTHER NEWS
1. Still writing and have sent some things out
2. University tech teaching job is still coming down the pike (expect ppwk done by end of Sept.)
3. Substitute teaching at Pearl Creek and West Valley and a few others
4. Occaisonal vet shifts
5. General, tearful life review over the past weekend, but fresh starts appearing
6. Monday and Tuesday next week going on road trip to AK State Fair-- source of all things agricultural-- in Palmer, AK.
7. I heart K :P
8. Did you know that a prime "senior doe" Nigerian Dwarf dairy goat can produce upwards of six pounds of milk DAILY? If I get two I will have a "Dwarf Dairy" or "Double D Farm"
hmm . . . and if I get seven . . .

I woke to a deafening swamp of sound this morning. The cranes are stopping back at Creamer's field across the street. In the 50's and 60's the field was part of a dairy operation and the cow manure grew grubs and other edibles for birds. The cows are gone, but the birds still know to come. In the spring, with our brand-new daylight and sunrises at 5 am they stop over en route to points North. I missed it this year. (It was about goats and sheep in my world, instead.) Now they return with their fledged and flying young--doubled or tripled in number--to go to Texas, Florida, to fan out once they get through Canada.
Or, this is my understanding of what's going on.
Here is my poem:

I have made my nest
Feather lined and fern bellied

I have fed my keepings
Gray down and whale-wide brown striding

I know what it is to rise-rise and fledge out
To keep kind and learn follow, to arc and then lift
I know what it is to recover the sky

I now know the leaving
The hollow loop inside keel, a boat-bender noise--
Calling field, under wing, a green brown red sigh.



You and I shoulder voices, half-measured caesuras,
Sonorous, verberate, the pluck of
Gone Gone
on our ears.
IN OTHER NEWS
1. Still writing and have sent some things out
2. University tech teaching job is still coming down the pike (expect ppwk done by end of Sept.)
3. Substitute teaching at Pearl Creek and West Valley and a few others
4. Occaisonal vet shifts
5. General, tearful life review over the past weekend, but fresh starts appearing
6. Monday and Tuesday next week going on road trip to AK State Fair-- source of all things agricultural-- in Palmer, AK.
7. I heart K :P
8. Did you know that a prime "senior doe" Nigerian Dwarf dairy goat can produce upwards of six pounds of milk DAILY? If I get two I will have a "Dwarf Dairy" or "Double D Farm"
hmm . . . and if I get seven . . .

Dial-up (and sleeping for a long time)

I've been home from house sitting for a week--and this is wonderful! Unfortunately, my home dial-up Internet connection strongly dislikes the "new post" page for this blog, and, as impatient as I am, I can manage to convince myself that whatever I want to sit and write isn't worth the download time.

And I slept for ten full hours last night, so everything feels rusty, especially linguistic synapses.

It's HARVEST TIME
1)raspberries
2)rose hips
3)snap peas, potatoes carrots (at Calypso)
4)broccoli and brussel tops from my own tiny plot
5) blueberries
6)high and low bush cranberries
I had some deep thoughts about hunting and gathering because I've actually found it one of the most "absorptive" activities I've found in a while . . .where hours can roll by and you can really call it pleasure when the weight of you sack, bag, bucket becomes more profound. For me, the ease of pattern recognition for the subtleties of these plants, the sense that in a single hour you've mastered what the really sweet ones look like (color, waxiness, feel) and you know right where on the vine the fattest fruits/sugar peas are hiding-- I find this an impressive part of human neurological history (It's nerd day in my world!)

Darla's wool from the farm has met the spindle! Drastically inexpert, whatever she becomes with be VERY nubby and original:)

Writing: yup, still going. Sending out some shorter essays and will have a poem at the Creamer's Field poetry walk at the end of the month.

Books: I was excited to use the Bookshelf facebook feature, but unfortunately that is VERY difficult to update with my current connection

Still doing some emergency work and was there some this weekend, one scheduled shift and one call-in

International Blog Against Racism Week

"Invisibility is an unnatural disaster"
http://rilina.livejournal.com/328778.html
Thanks to my friend on the other side of the continent for letting me know about this. Reading his blog actually saved me from a "pointless" writing day today.

TIHLFOPH part One: Gustatory Cautions

The entire "gift food mix" industry should be disbanded. Every house has a cloth, ribbon-trussed bag of blue-corn muffin mix from some friend's vacation in the Southwest, or a bow-tied bag of pineapple shaped pasta with a teeny-tiny bottle of rosemary infused oil attached with that gummy adherent they use on some magazine inserts. These things have no expiration date. Because they're gifts. But, they cease to be gifts when your house sitter(five years after the housewarming pineapple-pasta seemed like a good idea) decides to use them. You'd think dehydrated cheese flavoring would keep. It does. But not for half a decade. You'd also think that muffins and quick breads would rise to the occasion when you actually DO add water. Let me tell you --there's NOTHING quick about nut bread from a Christmas Harry& David's gift tower from 1989.
Again --how is unsuspecting housesitter supposed to know??

I have also found that, just because a small glass jar with artisan labelling says "Gourmet Truffle Sauce" you should not rush right out and buy a pint of Haagen-Daz.

A special "Off-road" caution:
If you are taking care of bird-hunting golden retrievers, you should check that unmarked "chicken" you pull out of the freezer FOR BUCKSHOT. I'm in the market for dental insurance specifically for that broken crown.

If you are housesitting for Juan and Crystal Goula learn Spanish before you accidentally drink decaf, or put cornstarch in your coffee (the packet had a picture of a GOAT! I thought it was powdered GOAT MILK!)

I have learned that some people do keep boxes of granola bars in their bathtub. Probably for the same reason that EVERYONE hoards frozen leftovers.

And finally -- though CANNED turtle food may smell like bananas and kiwis, it really doesn't spread well on toast

Still Life with Airport

Another great reason to call Fairbanks home is our streamlined airport with less than a half-dozen gate numbers and even fewer baggage claim areas. Park your car! Walk across the street! Wave to the two cab drivers! Stand under the mounted moose head and wait for the starter bell on the luggage merry-go-round and see twelve people you DIDN'T come to pick up from a flight arriving at 12:56 am!

So, I've been housesitting in North Pole and drove the family's very large truck into town to pick them up last night at 1230am. Their flight was late. Then they weren't on it. The next flight coming from Anchorage into Fairbanks was arriving half an hour later (and they were travelling with a toddler) so I decided to wait. After spending an hour reading "Hobby Farmer" magazine verbatim, including the adds (what are 'babydoll' sheep??) I decided to walk around. I'd forgotten that a long-time employee and friend of the emergency clinic where I live and work was coming back from Hungarian medical school for a visit (first visit in two years). I walked around the corner and there were all my co-workers IN COSTUME waiting for Eric to get off the plane. This kind of craziness is fairly normal behavior for this group, but after Eric DID arrive and my other friends did not, my boss--dressed in blue lipgloss and a blue wig-- gave me a five dollar bill to pay my two hours of parking so I could go home and check my answering machine messages. I took the money only because I remembered helping her when she ran out of gas making a deposit at the bank last winter. I got home around 3 am and found they're coming in this morning . . . in half an hour . . .
Oh! And apparently the only luggage Eric brought with him was his paraglider (Sp?)

Boobs on their backs

http://www.handsnpaws.com/product/PAUAPP0109BIKINI

MENDING CAT

Something there is that doesn't love a kitten,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the fatter felines in the sun,
And makes gaps even two(or five really small) can pass abreast.
. . .
Robert Pawst

OK, something needed to fit on this blog to eclipse the rant from yesterday afternoon. While I was writing that rant, yes, the serenity prayer did pull forward in my brain, but it didn't solve my writing problem. I had coffee with friends, another good cry, a bowl of spagetti, and some sleep. The problem still exists--surprise!--but I think I can come at it from another direction.

Anyway. Still housesitting. For four big dogs that are currently licking the outside of the glass door to the porch because I am having coffee before I feed them and they hate that (Hey, who wants the WRONG pills in their peanut-butter ball, boys??). BUT my real house is filled with TINY CATS. They are a thriving five weeks old now, cute as miniature toys with squeakers, and very, very social. When I try and shut the door behind me I have to lob them back into the middle of the room one-by-one like little grenades so I can get out of there without loosing any of them to following me.

There's a problem here (discernment)

I sat down to write about "learned helplessness"--the psychology term that grew up in the mid 1960's, primarily through the hands of American psychologists. There's thousands of articles about it and, grossly simplified, it's the idea that an individual has spent so much time learning that they can't effect their environment (social or otherwise) that, when they ARE faced with a situation they can change, they don't. They have un-learned personal power. As an American child of East Coast achievers, and having grown up with the buzz phrases "empower/ment/ing" learned helplessness has long been a kind of bogeyman. I am one of the white Westerners who's had the chance to muse at the different rates of "getting things done" in Village settings-- be they at the equator or at the arctic circle-- and has had the chance to sit in groups of other Westerners where base terms like lazy, disorganized, and on and on get bantered about. I've heard "Africa Time" and "Village Time". I've read a book entitled "The Man With The Keys Has Gone!" And, at first, my only clear rebuttal would've been "there's something we're not seeing" or, perhaps, to invoke the "learned helplessness" demon. These discussions can circle our issues here in the States as well . . .as in . . . if her mom had a baby at fifteen and struggled so hard, why would she do the same thing? Why doesn't she help herself?
Switch to the basements of churches and community centers around the world, where billions of people who've tried to 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps' have found the only success they know by "Letting go and letting God". They "admit they are powerless" over sex, alcohol, cigarrettes, coffee, co-dependency, workaholism, flower arranging, balloon-animal-making. They know peace for the first time in their lives because they are learning helplessness.
I know people have written volumes on this. What an incredibly complicated, large world. But look at it. Look at what we mark as progress and look--closely--at the by-products. What is addiction except the riot self run rampant, the me-me-me power? And then, when we run out of our ability to save ourselves, we invoke The White Man's Burden and go elsewhere.
Don't yell at me now. Sometimes I just feel like I can see the arguments from so many directions I want to cover my ears and rock back and forth.

Baa Baa Black Sheep, have you any wool

Remember Darla? (photo below!) She wasn't born on my watch at the farm, but she was still young enough to show us what "two shakes of a lambs tail" actually meant. Her wool, just underneath the mahogany surface, is a glistening black. Her fleece has been in a bag for two months now and--after much research-- she's just been washed! Karl has made me a beautiful, redwood drop spindle that I've been learning to handle, so, in the next few months I'll be a "spinster"--or attempting so. You MUST have some other hobbies besides beating your head against a writing wall!

I'll also be working the UAF alumni burger booth on Friday with friends, where I'll attempt to avoid the "finger mauled by hot dog rotisserie" debacle of 2005. Fortunately, the school borough already has a copy of my fingerprints on file, so, if there is trouble, I won't be in the same bind I was that year. As I recall, too, while wandering into the info booth with my bloody rag-wrapped finger, I got to answer some questions about "what is a cavy?" which made me feel smart, despite bleeding everywhere.

Minor thoughts on childhood allergies . . .Washing Darla, realizing the water would never run completely "clear", realizing that if you did wear natural fibers instead of synthetics that you would constantly be exposed to low-grade allergens. Well, school age children died of a gazillion things in 1850, but very few died of an asthma attack at recess, yes??