the last blue iris

Friday before Memorial Day I left work early; even now, there is guilt. A small lingering fear I might be caught out. And yet, while I was there, campus empty but for a few staff, a few dedicated math students in our lobby, I could barely focus. Department meeting, discussion of AI, walk to the pond to see if the heron was eating the newly stocked steelhead, watching clouds skiff over Mt. Hood. This is the first summer I do not have to fly my boy to Michigan for 10 weeks, that I don't have to spend a weekend in an airport Doubletree Inn. I never have to do that again: rent a house by Lake Michigan, spend a few days, a week, something --running and walking and writing and drinking wine--while my boy stays with his father. Will I ever see Lake Michigan again, from the Michigan shores? Suddenly, I am bereft. Suddenly, I am free. In two weeks, my boy and my stepson graduate from high school. My mom and sister and brother in law and in-laws and maybe my boy's father will be here. Th...

Monday, March 27th  This post is nine and a half years in the making. It is almost impossible to write, my mind skitters off, as it has much of this great year of change, from saying anything. Perhaps out of superstition. Perhaps out of terror. Perhaps because I can hardly believe we have arrived here, in this place where my boy is almost a man, where we get to become in charge, fully, of our own lives. For nine years, J. and I have traveled across the country so he could see his father. I imagine I am supposed to see this as punishment. Punishment for leaving at 29, moving into my own apartment. Punishment for leaving again at 36. I have known punishment for almost 25 years--for existing, for having an opinion, for desiring anything at all. But this has also been a kind of punishment for my boy.  I cannot bring myself to calculate how many trips, how many miles, how many thousands of dollars. Maybe someday I will, but tonight, in that liminal space between dropping J off and ...

Thanksgiving Week, 2022 I have been writing this post in my head for days now--three days walking and running and hiking through the beech-maple dunewoods, the small herd of white tailed deer meeting me at every turn in the trail, chickadees and titmice and bluejays, downy woodpeckers scrambling up from each high branch. How do you say goodbye to a place that formed you, that has been my place of exile for nine years while my boy sits silently at his father's house? How do you say goodbye to the woman I was when I first came to Michigan--eighteen, so desperate to matter I could barely see straight--at forty-five, the checker at Meijer hitting the I acknowledge over 50  button without even blinking when I scan my bottle of wine? When J. and I started to do this, I could barely stare down nine years--for nine years we would have to haul ourselves cross country multiple times a year, be hauled into family court, spend tens upon tens of thousands of dollars (we've probably spent up...

We drove from Portland to Seattle, walked through two colleges, one urban, one treed and full of enthusiastic undergrads. We ate at a vegan restaurant, we slept in a fancy Marriott hotel, we talked about music and art and then, when we got home, we bought wax pastels and mixed media weight paper, and talked about what to do when friends self-harm or we are afraid friends might self-harm.  We made three laps through Pike Place market, watched the sun set on Puget Sound. We saw Mt. Rainier shift through the clouds. We ordered burritos in the hotel, coffees in the morning. It has been sunny and cold.  We walked around the University of Puget Sound on Friday and I stopped being able to feel my legs. He slept on the ride home from Tacoma, and all I could think of was all the times I drove with him asleep in the car, in his carseat, or in the back seat, or with the seat flat in the front. Home to Michigan from Minnesota or Wisconsin, or Illinois while my folks still lived there or m...

It is coolish and breezy, and the sky has gone pearlescent, bushtits and finches and chickadees busy then quiet in the cedars. What is cool in August is different than what is cool in April or October. The  air smells like glorybower, someone barbequeing, dry cedar duff and dry earth, and earlier my hands smelled of crushed tomato leaf, begonia. Sometimes I think how did I get here, 45 and half a continent away from home?   But what is home? I am reading Louise Erdrich's The Sentence  which feels different and beautiful for Erdrich, and I am homesick for the Midwest, the white pines of Michigan, the two-note song of a Chicagoland cicada, the waters of Lake Michigan this late in the season. Mosquitoes and blackflies. Air so thick with humidity it feels like wet wool, like another skin, another body on your body. I am homesick and then I am not, for my home is here, salal and fir, cedar and problematic glory bower, sky crowding with crows as we move toward sunset, the Perse...

 The air smells of autumn olive, is thick and humid. When I walk outside, roll down the windows of the car, it is a solid thing. At the Lakeshore, biting black flies swarm when i move into the shade, my skin wet with sweat. 96 degrees, 60% humidity. Only a few gulls over the still water of the Lake.  * When I first started coming back here, 8 years ago, it felt like around any corner a ghost of myself would emerge, still living her life here. Today I waded into the Lake up to my waist, knotted my dress around my hips, watched the horizon. Women with families--women with lithe bodies and bikinis and toddlers--waded into the water and faced the shore. It is reassuring that I am now invisible to the beautiful young people on the sand. I turned my face to the horizon, felt as if I was moving backwards, spinning out of this  version of my life, the current tugging gently at my knees.  * I cannot write. My mind feels scoured of thoughts; I walk and walk and run and run and...

I am having a difficult time writing these days, or thinking, or doing much of anything at all. The world is terrible. I find myself disassociating regularly, crying at odd intervals. We spent the weekend in Albuquerque, with my mother and sister-in-law, the expanse of sky and sage and sand stirred up by fierce winds, sun unrelenting and thicker-bodied than the sun here. The pandemic is clearly over in the Southwest, or at least everyone has agreed to pretend it is so. We were the only family wearing masks in food halls, grocery stores, the airport. At the airbnb, my boy and R. and I played cards and laughed until our sides hurt, then spent the days quietly in my in-law's house, my mother-in-law ailing upstairs. Ailing, but still herself, still rolling her eyes at her children. We went through family memorabilia recently shipped from Nevada: Masonic regalia, cavalry swords from the Boer War, gold ledgers from 1868, war medals, old letters, and then shockingly, Nazi patches and a Na...