My Year in Photos

January

February

March (yes, March!)

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

My December Mountain

I get to live here.

Two Years

Two years ago today my high school English teacher Prudence Hockley was murdered on the sidewalk in front of her home. I love you, Hockley, and I miss you every day. You made me a thoughtful, perceptive person. You taught me to trust myself and to believe that I had so much to contribute to the world.

Because of you, I am who I am.

Thank you.

A Reflection

Juliet was my best friend in elementary school. She had wild blonde hair and this infectious happiness that was such a presence in itself that I felt utterly desolate and empty whenever she was absent. Jules and I were absolutely inseparable. We auditioned together for our school's annual musicals, made daisy chains and jumped rope, ran cross country. We were the third and fourth legs of our school's relay team and once the bell rang for recess we would sprint to the gym to borrow a baton, spending entire recesses practicing hand-offs on lower field. We timed each other on the fifty-yard dash; crept through the bushes by our classroom when the recess teachers weren't looking and searched for tiny cylinders of colored plastic that we called Indian Beads. We watched The Newsies like girls possessed. Eager to make our marks in the literary world, we co-authored a book called Thanksgiving on Mars, in which a young man is sent into outer space to give thanks among the curious life forms (Puffalumps) of the Red Planet. One summer while blueberry-picking with our moms, we found a sign with an arrow directing people to an unpicked row. We flipped the sign--the most disobedience either of us had ever exhibited--and proceeded to crouch in the blueberries, doubled over with laughter, as one after another people followed the sign into the bramble of blackberry thorns and chest-high grass, not stopping for a moment to consider how very un-blueberry-like their surroundings were. Every fall our families would drive north into the Skagit Valley to the home of a friend who owned a small apple orchard. We would climb up in the trees and jump on the branches, shaking the apples loose onto a giant blue tarp that covered the ground below. We would go for long walks on the tidal flats and race kayaks--me and Jules in one boat and her sister Sara and her friend in the other.

Our birthdays were five days apart and we protected each other and intuited one another's feelings as though we were twins. The only fight we ever had--and to this day have ever had--was when we both auditioned for the same role in our school's production of A Comedy of Errors and one of us got it. After witnessing our quiet, sour moods for an entire afternoon, our teacher, Mr. Watson, pulled us aside. "I've never seen anyone with a friendship like you two have," he said. "Whatever's going on right now, is it really that important?" Of course, it wasn't.

I spent most of yesterday with Juliet at her house baking cookies. Though we live less than five minutes apart, it's been years since we've both been in the same place at the same time. Driving to her home, past the old peacock and llama farm, past our beloved elementary school, made me feel like I had pulled out of the driveway of one home and was pulling into that of another. As kids we spent hours playing in the woods behind her house, picking salmonberries and building forts, pretending we'd been deserted like Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins, stranded like Brian in Hatchet. We created a make-believe family in her playhouse, played endless games of badminton in her front yard and tetherball in her cousins' (they live next door). We made up routines on the trampoline to our favorite songs. In so many ways, for most of my life her home has been an extension of my own. Both are places of love and laughter; the walls of both will forever ring with every line of The Princess Bride.

Our friendship, though no longer fueled by daily whisperings in class, is an easy, unflappable thing. We are bound by the hikes our families took together, by the dance we choreographed to the version of "Mamma Mia" sung by the ABBA tribute band The A-Teens. We are bound by the laps we ran in P.E. to No Doubt's "Don't Speak." We are bound by those ridiculous inside jokes, the origins of which neither of us will ever remember: "Charles Barkley in a can," addressing each other by the name of Uenheimer Smith, and our puzzling--yet masterful--musical creation entitled "Sour Cream and Happiness." They are small things, trivial to anyone else but the kind of moments that make you fear who you might have grown up to be if you hadn't had them.

It's easy to forget, when someone is so much a part of you, which parts of you are you and which parts are them. After a while, there's no clear delineation anymore. I would argue that in elementary school, Juliet knew be better than even my parents. She was--and continues to be--a calming, encouraging presence, and though she rolls her eyes when I claim to have brought back bell bottoms, she always assuages me with a loving, "Okay, Liv." I am so lucky to have someone who was such a wonderful influence on me in my formative years, and who continues to be a major presence in each consecutive stage of my life. I'm so lucky that of all the friends in the universe, mine are the very best.

Let's Settle This Right Now

As the days inch us ever closer to the new year, I am making a preemptive resolution to look older than twelve. To those of you who say I have a "youthful" face or that one day I'll be glad I look eleven years younger than I am: I appreciate what you're trying to do, but stop it. No, seriously. Stop it right now. I do not particularly enjoy looking prepubescent, and nothing anyone says will make me delighted to appear as though I've just walked in the door from my first day of junior high.

Thinking that my curls make me appear younger, I've tried straightening my hair. I have almost entirely eliminated my forays into the world of people while wearing my beloved sweatshirts and Keds (though if my soul could wear clothes that is exactly what it would wear). While shopping is an activity to which I will put a swift end once I am elected Ruler of the Universe, I have conned my friend Anneka into helping me purchase what I call "big girl" clothes in the hopes that my appearance has everything to do with my wardrobe. So far, I have yet to see proof that this has worked. I just don't get it--the "it" referring to both shopping and my age dilemma.

And so I am asking you, my ones of readers, to be blunt. What's wrong with me? I want to be twenty-six, not sixteen!

Contrary to what many might think, this was not taken last week.

Here I think I actually was twelve. I'm not positive, though. I could have also been SEVEN.

This was senior year of high school. Ellie--the most gorgeous human being on the planet--looks like she's in her mid-twenties. My hair is straight(ish) and it's a black-and-white photo so I look older than I otherwise might, but come on. Sixteen tops.

This was just over a year ago. Michael looks his age, Anneka looks her age. No way do I look older than eighteen.

There IS a God!

Of my top 50 favorite things in the world, I would say that a good 45 of them are directly related to the movie The Princess Bride. (The other five are Sounders players; in case you needed further proof that I have no life, there you have it.) Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered this last night right before bed:

Cary Elwes Memoir: Actor Writing Book About 'Princess Bride'

My first reaction was gasp so loudly that I'm fairly certain they heard it in Macedonia. The second was to run down the stairs and have this brief conversation with my mom:

Me: Mother?
Mom: Yes dear.
Me: I know what you will be getting me for Christmas next year.
Mom: Why can't I get it for you this year?
Me: Because it doesn't exist yet.

(For those of you who are reading this and don't know me--which leads me to wonder if my blog is being used as an instrument of torture--I am not the type of person to demand gifts. If I had my way, no one would ever give me anything and I would get to give everyone else as many presents as I wanted. I just thought I should clarify that.)

My third reaction was to text my friend Sara with the words "Oh. My. F&#@ing. God" and a link to the article, to which she responded, "Thank you, baby Jesus."

I'm sure the only people reading this are the people to whom I've already squealed the news, but I don't care; I love me my Princess Bride!

Carry on.

Poetry Corner Whenever I Feel Like It

Rumination

Jim Harrison


I sit up late dumb as a cow,
which is to say
somewhat conscious with thirst
and hunger, an eye for the new moon
and the morning's long walk
to the water tank. Everywhere
around me the birds are waiting
for the light. In this world of dreams
don't let the clock cut up
your life in pieces.

Poetry Corner Whenever I Feel Like It

The singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile has a steel hold of the womenfolk in this house. We find ourselves cursing her song "That Wasn't Me" more often than it deserves to be cursed because any time one of us utters the commonly used phrase "Hang on," we are helpless to keep ourselves from adding, in perfect harmony, "Just hang on for a minute, I've got something to say." In honor of a three-day stretch in which this song has not left my head, I present to you this week's Poetry Corner Whenever I Feel Like It. When I feel like it is now.

(I chose this video because it was recorded at Bear Creek Studio in good ol' Woodinville and because I don't think there's anything more perfect in the world than Brandi Carlile going acoustic.)

That Wasn't Me
Brandi Carlile

Hang on, just hang on for a minute
I've got something to say
I'm not asking you to move on or forget it
But these are better days
To be wrong all along and admit it, is not amazing grace
But to be loved like a song you remember
Even when you've changed

Tell me
Did I go on a tangent?
Did I lie through my teeth?
Did I cause you to stumble on your feet?
Did I bring shame on my family?
Did it show when I was weak?
Whatever you see, that wasn't me
That wasn't me, oh that wasn't me

When you're lost you will toss every lucky coin you'll ever trust
And you'll hide from your God like he ever turns his back on us
And you'll fall all the way to the bottom and land on your own knife
But you'll learn who you are even if it doesn't take your life

Tell me
Did I go on a tangent?
Did I lie through my teeth?
Did I cause you to stumble on your feet?
Did I bring shame on my family?
Did it show when I was weak?
Whatever you see, that wasn't me
That wasn't me, oh that wasn't me

But I want you to know that you'll never be alone
I want to believe

Do I make myself a blessing to everyone I meet?
When you fall I will get you on your feet
Do I spend time with my family?
Does it show when I am weak?
When that's what you see, that will be me
That will be me, that will be me
That will be me.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home

I've been in somewhat of a reading slump lately. In the month since I've been home from the island--plus, actually, the week before I left--I have started only four books and finished just two. Normally I can knock off double that in a week. No images have danced off the pages, no plot lines have pulled in me. I just haven't found anything that, as my emotionally unstable ninth grade English teacher would say, "speaks to my truth." That is, until I started Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home.

I won't say too much about it, mostly because I don't want to spoil it for anyone but also because as of this minute I'm only a third of the way through. What I will say, though, is that you won't need to read even a whole page to know that you never want it to end. I feel such kinship with the fifteen-year-old narrator, June, as she navigates her life after the death of her beloved uncle. Her observations are mature and poignant, and her sadness is so raw that at times I feel like I shouldn't be reading, like I should look away, like she'll only work through her heartbreak if I close the book and leave her alone for a while.

There are countless passages that I read twice, even three times. This one was particularly meaningful for me because I identify so closely with the way June approaches the world:

"Of course, I was relieved that the party was canceled. It wasn't only the shy thing, the total social retardation. It was more than that. I wasn't interested in drinking beer or vodka or smoking cigarettes or doing all the other things Greta thinks I can't even imagine. I don't want to imagine those things. Anyone can imagine things like that. I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors. I dream about people who don' t need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek."

I love this paragraph for about twelve different reasons. I love how well June knows herself and how comfortable she is with her identity. I love that she is clearly the type of person who thinks long and hard before she speaks, who knows more than she'll ever let on. Above all, though, I love that her mind inhabits the wildest of places. I love that she envisions a world nearly identical to the one in my own mind.

I strongly encourage everyone to procure a copy of this book at once.

In the Throes

Well, everybody, it's time once again for our annual Gibbs/Margoshes Fruit Fly Infestation Extravaganza! This is a joyous time filled with mirth and festivities for all ages. There's the Stand 'n' Clap, in which my father stands over the fruit bowl with his hands several inches apart, waiting until a lone fruit fly propels itself upward in an act of resignation (at which point my grandma looks up from her newspaper and asks, with great interest, "Did you get it?"). Then we have the Death Saber, wherein we all take turns dragging the vacuum cleaner around the kitchen and sucking up flies with the extension hose while a second person shakes the plants and flower vases. And finally there's the Sweet Nectar of Revenge, which consists of me filling Mason jars with apple cider vinegar and fashioning death funnels out of printer paper to attach to the top. Yes it's grotesque, and yes the one on the back of the toilet looks a lot like a jar of urine, but I can't tell you how downright fascinating it is to watch these traps in action. Hovering in front of the kitchen sink while an unsuspecting fly marches down the paper tube to its death; watching sixty or so of the little effers swarming toward the side of the jar closest to the window, hoping that if they all push hard enough at the same time the glass will give way.  Even my cat, who has demonstrated intense suspicion of the vacuum in the past, can't mask the delight in her eyes when we wheel it into the kitchen. It's just so much fun.

Gotta love that Death Saber.

What is not fun, however, is having this problem to begin with. Until recently, I seemed to be the only member of the household who noticed that our yearly infestations just so happened to coincide with my brother's winery's grape crush and the eight tons of grapes fermenting in plastic bins in our basement. Last night, implicating himself at least partially in the fruit fly breeding ground that our house has become, Pasha taped newspaper over the heating vent in the bathroom because he suspected the flies were using it as their own personal portal to and from the basement. This fire hazard would undoubtedly alarm any sane person, but we freaks will stop at nothing to fuel this genocide, even if it means taking our house down, too.

If I weren't so busy falling into the clutches of sweet, sweet villainy I would be impressed by the resilience of these things. Pasha spent a good ten minutes in the bathroom last night sucking them up with the vacuum, and even though he claimed to have gotten "at least 95%" of them, this morning when I went to take a shower a great black plume burst forth when I slid open the curtain. You've got to hand it to them: fruit flies are highly efficient procreators.

I should probably be embarrassed by how easily I have yielded to these obnoxious pests, and by my willingness to share my abovementioned breakdown here with all you fives of readers, but I'm not. The way I see it, everyone reading this already knows how much of a freak I am. The damage is already done. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some vacuuming to do.

The Upside of the Shutdown

Now, I basically live for the week before Valentine's Day when NPR releases its newest batch of public radio pun-laden V-Day cards. Immediately after they're posted I print them out and, delirious with dweebishness, I dance around the house cackling to myself as I hide them in the refrigerator or inside the newspaper for my parents to find. (I really shouldn't be admitting to this kind of behavior. It's just depressing.)

This year, thanks to our friendly neighborhood GOP, I have another reason to live: NPR's government shutdown pickup lines. Oooh baby. It's like Valentine's Day four and a half months early! I should be angry with NPR for being the overwhelming cause of my singlehood, but I'm not. Nothing will turn this girl against her public radio.

And so, without further ado, here they are:

8 Great "Shutdown Pickup Lines" - NPR

Poetry Corner Whenever I Feel Like It

It's been a while, but Poetry Corner Whenever I Feel Like It is making its molasses-slow return. In time I promise I'll post a happy poem; just not today.

Infinite Room

Tess Gallagher

Having lost future with him
I'm fit now to love those
who offer no future when future
is the heart's way of throwing itself away
in time. He gave me all, even
the last marbled instant, and not as excess,
but as if a closed intention were itself
a spring by the roadside
I could put my lips to and be quenched
remembering. So love in a room now
can too easily make me lost
like a child having to hurry home
in darkness, afraid the house
will be empty. Or just afraid.

Tell me again how this is only
for as long as it lasts. I want to be
fragile and true as one who extends
the moment with its death intact,
with her too wise heart
cleansed of that debris we called hope.
Only then can I revisit that last surviving
and know with the wild exactness
of a shattered window what he meant
with all time gone
when he said, "I love you."

Now offer me again
what you thought was nothing.

American Football: The Seattle Sounders Documentary

Hell YES.

Fare Thee Well, Little Island

Today I leave.

It has been four months. Four months of sunsets over Canada, four months of falling asleep to the sound of fog horns in nights that seemed more grey than black. Four months of lion-gold valleys and dusty woods, of garlic parsley walnut bread and more books than any mentally stable person should ever attempt to read.

For me, one of the hardest parts of leaving has always been the inevitable caging of experiences behind the bars of a single adjective. "It was great," I'll say, if anyone asks. One syllable. A single syllable to stand for everything from the sound of pebbles dragged backward by the tide to the smell of strawberries warming in the late afternoon sun. And the thing is, oftentimes that one syllable seems like the only logical thing to say. No casual asker wants to hear about the time you and a friend drove home from a hike with a dog in the backseat and a bag of dog poop on your windshield because there was no garbage can at the trail head, or how a woman asked if you were valedictorian simply because you knew how to spell "congratulations." Pinning that monosyllabic "great" to the walls of the atmosphere will keep it there forever--will condense all your stories into a tidy, manageable segment. It's the truth, after all; it was great, and great is what people want to hear. But it certainly doesn't seem fair to shrink-wrap four months of your life to a bit of idle conversation before the topic turns.

Consider this post my response to the question, "How was the island?" I know I can't very well use this platform as a replacement for a verbal answer, but at least I'll feel better knowing that in my small corner of cyberspace I have posted the full truth.

People Be Ridiculous

I spend an inordinate amount of time complaining to my friends over email and Skype about the annoyances of my days in the shop. Rude customers, people who obliviously walk through the gate at five minutes to closing, even people who open the gate after I've closed it. Retail is stressful and emotionally taxing. And great material for my future book.

Woman 1 was heading toward the bathroom at the same time that Woman 2 was coming out of it. Woman 2 paused a moment in the doorway with her hand on the switch plate. "Are you coming to use the toilet?" she asked Woman 1, who nodded. Woman 2 remained in the doorway a moment longer. "I was just trying to decide if I should keep the fan on." She smiled. "I'll leave that up to you, though. Enjoy!"

One woman who came in was just the most perplexingly clueless customer I've ever encountered. She first asked if "that pie plate out there" was safe to bake with, pointing in the general vicinity of the yard. Then she wanted to know if you could put liquid in the mugs. I nodded slowly. Muttering something like, "What a great idea!" (coffee mugs that hold coffee! Genius!), she wandered off into the yard to look at berry bowls. While she was gone a man and his wife started a pile on the desk: a teapot, two cups, and a mug which, for some reason, the man placed upside-down on the table. Then they went off to look for more and the clueless woman returned. She saw the couple's pile and pointed to the cups. "What might you use those for?" she asked. I stared at her a moment, convinced that she was joking. She wasn't. "They're teacups," I answered. "Ahhh," she said, as if I'd just solved the Riddle of the Sphinx. "And what"--she pointed to the upside-down mug--"is that...the teapot?" Now, I don't claim to be the most intelligent person who ever lived, and I'm certainly not in the habit of thinking myself smarter than anyone else, but I am most assuredly smarter than that loon. Stupidity of that magnitude is just overwhelming.

I was hanging out with Janet during one of her shop days when a middle-aged man came in looking for the bathroom. "That blue door there on the left," Janet told him. He tipped his hat and exclaimed, "Uptown!"

In a round raised planter near the entrance to the shop yard Syd planted a ring of red dahlias. The other day I was engaged in my newest favorite pastime--eavesdropping on customers' conversations from my upstairs bed nook--and I heard a woman musing to her husband about the flowers. "Jimmy," she started, "look at these tiny red flowers! What do you s'pose those are, Jimmy?" (Reads plant stake.) "Oh, dahlias! They're dahlias, Jimmy! Can you believe that? Those little tiny red flowers are dahlias! Dahlias! Well, I never!" (In case you were curious, yes, apparently people actually say that.)

A group of woman asked this man to take a picture of them near the base of the treehouse. He got them all assembled and in the buildup to the taking of the photo he said, "Okay, everybody say 'whiskey!'"

Yesterday a woman came in asking to use the restroom. "It's that blue door there on the left," I told her, pointing toward a short corridor. She peered through the entryway and gave me a strange look. "This right here?" She was pointing to the white and green-striped curtain separating the shop from the kitchen and studio. Yes, I wanted to say, the one that is neither blue nor a door.

"How old are you?" one man asked as he was paying for his pottery. I grinned. "How old do I look?" "Um..." he paused a moment, clearly trying to find the most delicate way to tell me that I look prepubescent. "It's okay," I assured him, "I guarantee that whatever you're about to say, I've heard worse." He seemed to relax a bit. "Okay, then. Seventeen?" I was delighted. Sure, I might be eight years older than that, but seventeen boosts my average! At this point, I'll gladly take anything over sixteen.

Big Appetites

This guy is a genius:

Big Appetites - Christopher Boffoli on NPR

Good Riddance to August

My coworker Janet hates August. This year I'm in agreement. August is poisonous. Family camps burn down. Beloved neighbors pass away. Customers are a particularly special breed of crazy. "When I die," Janet told me today, "I'm positive it'll be in August." (Out of concern for her life I took issue with the fact that she told me this in August, but seeing as how we're only a day shy of September and Janet is 75 going on about 50, I don't think I have too much to worry about.)

I'm choosing to cap off the month--and an especially unpleasant week--with some pictures that remind me how therapeutic it can be to simply open my eyes and breathe.

To the Ground

Rim Fire Destroys Berkeley's Tuolumne Family Camp