the last blue iris

 Yesterday, I fell down a rabbit hole and traced my family's ancestry back 12 generations to 1321 in a small town in Wales. Son of--son of--son of-- Included in this bloody stagecoach that points dead west (I write, while sitting in my office in Portland, a few hundred miles from the edge of the continent) are some knighted folks in the 1600s, a Reverend in the early 1700s, Jamestown settlers, a doctor who built a plantation in Rutherford County, Tennessee, his son a Confederate Colonel, a professional football player, a professional baseball player, dirt poor farmers, an Air Force pilot who died in WWII, and my own family who got planted in Chicago when my grandmother, who grew up on one of the Rutherford county properties, married a Yankee and moved North. Look up the family history of a white American and it seems likely you'll also see a history of Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, blood upon blood. I think about the times in grade school when I would proudly pipe up with ...

I took the dog for a wet walk this afternoon, the sky low and sopping, a fog obscuring the top of Mt. Tabor. Hell, it's 4.45 when I write this and outside it's already pitch-black, everything wet, everything dripping, the chicken run a morass, the yard a morass, everything mud and slick. The dog wears a raincoat, a fat raindrop plopped right behind the lens of my glasses into my eyeball. There were hummingbirds high in a tree, crows streaming to their nighttime roosts, the neighborhood flock of robins that visits every Christmas making their evening calls in some birch trees. R. and D. are in R.'s office playing some space-themed computer game, laundry churns in the basement. My backpack is almost packed--masks, hand sanitizer, a change of clothes,  my laptop, various chargers, a few granola bars--and my alarm set for 3.30 tomorrow morning.  In around 48 hours, we'll all be home again, though J and I  will quarantine until we can get a negative COVID test sometime early...