When I was young and we were just starting out the grand adventure of renovating Wake Robin Farm, I was constantly hurrying to finish projects. I operated on a foolish notion of fixing things up "once and for all." Life would start, I thought, when things were nice. Ha!
Now I know better. It's the journey, not the destination, as they say. In recent years I've been reading a lot of Pema Chodron and the principles of Buddhism. It all makes a lot of sense to me, relaxing into the inevitability of change, approaching each day in a spirit of curiosity rather than with a fixed To-Do list in hand, the day's score dropping to the extent it veers out of my control.
I love the idea of restoration, so when we built the little cabin I wrote about in Accidental Addict, I used salvaged porch posts from Aurora Mill Architectural Salvage. They look great, but sitting out there on that western facing ridge, the weather quickly takes a toll. Some weird fungus was even growing out of one of them.
Well, we've been trying to make lemonade during the pandemic, taking care of various maintenance projects, so a few weeks back we went out to the cabin armed with tools and supplies and I got to work. One post was just falling apart, with deep cracks. A startled spider crawled out the top when I started scraping. I used a lot of wood putty before even priming it.
"You know," I said to my husband, "this thing is in such bad shape, I'm really just doing a stalling action."
But then I remembered: everything's a stalling action. Everything's growing, dying, building up, falling apart. So what? My assignment for the day was to be doing this job in pleasant weather with a beautiful view every time I looked up. Nothing to gripe about. Moments to enjoy.
The trip to put the final green paint on the post was last Monday, September 7th, the day the historically unprecedented winds were predicted to blow into the Willamette Valley. On the way home, my husband said maybe it would turn out like so many other weather predictions…not the big deal they were saying. We got into a silly spat about how best to direct our energies the next day. Should we go back to the forest property for more work the very next day? It was one of those inane conversations which included a lot of lines such as "Well, I thought you said you wanted to blah blah blah," and "No, that's not what I said and don't we have the right to change our minds etc. etc." We were soon laughing it off, conscious of the ridiculousness of this debate, knowing we were just needing to blow off some steam thanks to the stresses of the pandemic.
At 5:25 our daughter Mary texted from Portland: You guys getting this smoke down there???? Super smoky and windy. Visibiltiy super low too. Happened pretty quick.
Just about an hour later the smoke started pouring in here too, and that's the last we've seen of the blue sky. Good thing we didn't spend any more time arguing about what to do the next day! The universe had delivered our assignment, loud and clear: Stay in the house. So my husband's been canning his amazing produce and I've been working on my forthcoming novel, Family Trees.
We are now on our fifth day of living under a cloud of the very worst air on planet earth. It's totally claustrophobic and reconfirms for us how good we've had it during the pandemic up until now: even if we can't be around other people, Herb and I could always go out to the garden or forests where we're happiest anyway. Now we're seeing first hand what apartment dwellers who have declined to be hoodwinked into complacentcy by the President have been experiencing for months.
Fresh air is a big deal to me. I've never smoked a puff of anything in my life. I'm thinking I probably wasn't the nicest daughter-in-law when we visited my husband's parents in LA. I couldn't get over standing on the beach and not being guaranteed a westerly blast of fresh, cool air. I was appalled. Worse, for house guest manners, I probably said so. But I'm a fourth-generation Oregonian! Land of the rose and sunshine, land of the summer breeze….
As I write, our pollution index in Corvallis is at 450, well into the hazardous zone. I really can't stand this. It's making me crazy, thinking about all the people evacuating for their lives ahead of the flames, as well as the millions of people with their own personal stories of what they're trying to deal with in the choking smoke and the fear of Covid. Children who can't go to school. Old people who can't understand why they don't have visitors. People of color faced with the choice of working in hazardous conditions or going without money for food. All of us cursed with the malevolent power and control of that sociopath, Donald J. Trump.
The news reports and stories of the fires remind me so much of all the research I did for my book about the Tillamook Burn of 1933, Fire on the Wind. Both historic fires, the old and the current, were fanned by dry east winds. Those winds have stopped now and there's currently not a breath of breeze. I keep staring out the windows for movement in the leaves. We're just waiting--longing--for the winds to shift and come again from the West with blessed moisture. I keep thinking of a scrap of a medieval poem I used in Fire on the Wind:
O Western Wind, when wilt thou blow?
That the small rain down can fall
Christ! That my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
Yeah. That.
Hang in there, everybody.
And be sure to vote Democratic.
