We (me, Pete, the baby) have had a wicked mystery cold going for 10 days and counting, and have reached the point where we can’t remember not being sick — have we ever gone anywhere, done anything? Adding to our dismal mood, arborists came to cut down the majestic walnut tree that has provided us with shade and comfort and more birdsongs than I bothered to count — I regret that now — for six years now. Half the tree had died from mysterious causes, leaving the whole dangerously unstable. It all feels too ominously symbolic to dwell on in this week of all weeks, so I am taking comfort where I can find it (including from Kate’s wise post last Friday). One of the things I find comforting is the good people can do when they work together toward a worthy goal, like playing a piece of music or electing a reasonable fucking person to lead the country. Anyway. This post first ran in November 2022.
My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians came from all over the world to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and rest my head on her shoulder, inhaling her Obsession perfume.
Nana’s mother didn’t let her listen to music of any kind, growing up, so as an adult she listened constantly to classical music and jazz, taught herself to play cello and taught her children and grandchildren to love music too. We usually sat in the first or second row, close enough to hear the academy students breathing and their shoes squeaking. Barely-out-of-college opera singers wiped their sweaty hands on their pants and pianists dropped their sheet music. Then the teacher would arrive, the students would pull themselves together, and they’d get to work.
These students were very, very good. But as we listened, their instructors made small adjustments that transformed their performances from good to shiver-worthy, perfect.
Continue readingThe maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground.
My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles through its litany of election dread, terror, and despair. I feel immobilized and powerless against a catastrophic, onrushing future. I feel every violation in history—personal, national, and global—crashing down on me at once.
With great effort, I turn my attention back to the tree. I can be a witness for her, if nothing else.
*
Look for the places where you do have power, my therapist says. Look for ways to do something. Look to your people, and art, and music. Look to the trees.
*
A bright bloom of color sways at the edge of my peripheral vision. I go to the maple tree window again, but this time I tilt my head. More bare branches, more broken limbs, and then—a shimmering, three-story wall of gold. A linden tree, fully leafed, lush and bright and exuberantly alive.
The sight of it lifts my scorched heart and gently turns it over. I want to bathe in that color. I want to know that feeling.
I excavate my only yellow shirt from the bottom of a drawer, tie a yellow bow in my hair, and grab my keys.
The moment I walk out the front door I burst into delighted laughter. The linden is spectacular—and one of so, so many. From my walkway I can see a half-dozen dazzling yellow trees of at least four different species.
I spend the next half-hour greeting every gold tree on my block, marveling at their height, their richness, the way their leaves applaud each other in the wind. Each tree, each leaf, and each yellow is different. Every last one astonishes me.
*
What happened to my maple tree* is real, as is what’s happening in America, and around the world. My life and the lives of so many others—all of us, I would argue—are in grave and legitimate danger. My terror and despair are justified. Unspeakable horrors are unfolding.
Other things are unfolding, too. Things I couldn’t see with my petrified gaze locked in on a single tree. Beautiful things. Joyful things. Tender, mighty things, reaching toward one another.
*Yes, I know that trees naturally lose their leaves in autumn. Try telling that to my traumatized poet brain. The topmost leaves changing color on the maple tree are also my first indication each year that summer—the worst season for my illness—is ending, so I’m pretty attached.
Today (October 29), I went skiing for the first time this season. Yesterday I drove up to the top of the Mesa to check out conditions, and the ground was completely bare in the sunny spots, with just an inch or less of snow in the shady spots.
What a difference a day makes! When my dog, Leia, and I got up to the Mesa this afternoon, the forecasted six inches of snow had arrived. I just tried to have as much fun as she was having frolicking in the fresh powder.
We’re predicted to get more snow in the next 24 hours, and I’m hopeful that we’ll have enough to do some early season pre-grooming of the trails by Halloween on Thursday. I think of Halloween skiing as a Grand Mesa tradition, but since I’m a data nerd, I decided to look back at the numbers I could piece together to figure out if that’s really the case.
I am not one of those people who use Strava or religiously track kilometers skied or training numbers, but I do have records of the date of my first ski from the last 12 years. I’ve pieced these dates together from my minimal training logs and (mostly) photographs.
2024: October 29
2023: October 13
2022: October 24
2021: October 13
2020: October 27
2019: October 31
2018: October 21
2017: November 18
2016: November 18
2015: October 22
2014: November 14
2013: first ski day unclear, but I have photos of groomed skiing at Skyway on Halloween.
According to these numbers, we’ve had Halloween skiing on nine of the last 12 years. (This assumes we’ll be skiing this Thursday, which seems pretty certain.) Some of these years we’ve had grooming, some years it’s just been backcountry trail-breaking like I did today.
OpenSnow is forecasting 8 inches of snow tomorrow (October 30) so the Halloween skiing should be great! Now I just need to get my costume ready!
Image: Halloween skiing at Skyway in 2009
Helen: Well, Cameron! Hello! Here we are again! I’m so glad we’re back two years after the original 100-days-in-a-dress post, because (a) I didn’t know what to write about for Monday and it was probably going to be something depressing about my dad dying (b) I am so obsessed with everyday, year-round wool clothing now. Ask me questions!
Cameron: I am so glad to be here again talking about dresses! But I also do not think it is depressing (at least not for me) to read the lovely things you have been writing about both of your parents.
Why are you obsessed with wool? Does this mean I can tell an inappropriate sheep joke? I also have some funny sheep-related placemats.
Helen: I certainly hope we get a sheep joke! And placemats. To catch our readers up, two years ago I did the thing where you wear this company’s wool dress for 100 days in a row (yes, you can wash it) and at the end they give you a $100 gift certificate to buy more stuff from them.
At the time of our conversation, I owned one dress and one pair of sweatpants that I had bought with the $100 reward.
Ask me how many pieces of clothing I have from that company now.
Cameron: Helen, how many pieces of clothing do you have from that company now? (And can you do all of my interviews with me and tell me what to ask people?)
Helen: It’s an embarrassing number and I don’t want to say. Let’s just say I thought it was maybe 6-8 and I counted and it was a lot more.
But here’s the thing: wool is amazing. This particular wool is so soft and it does not get stinky. IT DOES NOT GET STINKY.
Continue readingThe kids aren’t doing this any more. I miss it. I still have random people asking me about the kid arrangements, so apparently other people miss it too. But kids grow, that’s what they do; they move on. In this case, they’ve moved on to jumping rope, blowing conch shells, and digging bunkers — like “where’s the pickaxe, Mom?” I’m still convinced they’re repeating stages in evolution. This first ran July 10, 2020.
I walk out my front door after dinner to check on the night, and before breakfast to check on the day. And every now and then, on the porch table, or the porch floor, or the front sidewalk is an arrangement — rocks, berries, plants of some sort. They’re not put there at random, they’re definitely arranged, each rock or plant or berry chosen according to some criterion (pretty color, shiny, whatever was handy) and put down next to another rock or plant according to another criterion (circles, lines, rows, whatever looked nice). I started taking pictures of them.
She was in the narrow shed, on a high shelf, in a cardboard box advertising Dole fresh cut salads on the side. In black Sharpie on top, the word “Judi” in my stepdad’s scrawl gave away the actual contents.
“It’s time to get Mom out of the storage facility,” I told him during a recent visit to Santa Fe. Previously, Mom’s ashes were displayed in his kitchen in a fancy green-flowered ceramic urn (which was once owned by Madeline Albright, a gift from a foreign visitor, apparently, that she wasn’t allowed to keep). But when he moved in with a new partner, it just seemed wrong to have his deceased wife on display, no matter how grand the container. Thus, the urn went into the cardboard box (packed inside a purple velvet case first—we’re not barbarians!) in the shed.
When I say “shed” I mean, yep, one of those storage units you pay monthly for, to stash old bikes and broken stereos and golf clubs and other stuff you’ll probably give or throw away later (or your kids will). Mom shared the unit with some dusty boxes of files and mementos, wooden slats from a shelving unit, a huge frame. Some other stuff was stacked in there; nothing of major consequence. Too, there was an old empty Coke can on the floor in the corner and some mouse droppings here and there. It was an A1 storage place, if you’re wondering.
Once unlocked, the accordion door to Unit 91 made a horrible shrieking sound when we pulled it up. We got the box of Mom down and brought her with us in the car. The urn held not just mom but the ashes of three pets (including her very favorite black-and-gray tiger cat, April, and weimaraner Gretel). Plus, my grandmother, it turns out! Back at the condo, in the kitchen, we lifted the urn out and unscrewed the top just to see what we were working with. No surprise, it was a series of nondescript plastic bags of ash. One wasn’t sealed quite well enough to keep from spewing just a little gray stuff from the top when we moved it around. That was weird.
The plan was to take that bag of Mom and her pets and her mother either up the mountain to among the stands of aspen trees, or over to the Botanical Gardens. Mom died in 2006 and it was long past time to spread her ashes somewhere pretty. She loved Santa Fe in all its Santa Fe glory and probably would have liked to be scattered in the main square (near where the Native Americans sell jewelry) or inside one of her favorite shops, perhaps in a dressing room. (For the record, before she was cremated, we tucked her CHICOS customer card into the coffin with her.)
But those were both terrible ideas. Especially that second one. And the Botanic Gardens, well, people might not want us doing it there, where they walk and inhale a lot. So out of town, up where the wild things grow, it would be.
Would I feel unmoored once her ashes were in the wind? Would it matter that she wasn’t all in one place, and that I didn’t have a special spot to visit in a cemetery where I’d feel her presence? I wasn’t sure. I certainly didn’t THINK so. I’m of the “back to the Earth” mindset when it comes to death. I don’t like the idea of burial, unless you intend to be unboxed tree and worm food. I’m a bit claustrophobic myself. So, this should feel good and right, to let Mom out of her confines to fly free under the Santa Fe sun.
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I believe.
I don’t know in what exactly, but something is happening out there, gears and orbits turning, disparate points meeting, then moving apart. We’re bound in ways unexplained by simple principles of causality. That is my belief.
My youngest turned 18 last week as comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passed at its closest to Earth, which didn’t mean much to me. The night was cloudy and I shrugged off the viewing because cake and candles were on hand.
At dawn the next day, the two of us set off on a road trip from Colorado to California, camping in wide open desert as we crossed Utah and Nevada. Near the border of the two states, we drove onto the dusty hardpack of a dried up Pleistocene lakebed where we disgorged camping chairs, an ice chest, and sleep gear. This could have been another planet, and without a living thing to be seen we pondered whether it was the moon or Mercury. A near-full moon was up by sunset, a ‘supermoon’ on its closest approach to Earth, though I lose track of superlatives as events seem to grow bigger and more auspicious all the time. As dark set in, it was far from dark. Moon milk filled this ancient basin. We pressed our bare feet into soft, pale sediment, wandering this way an that, pulled by the gravity of the flat middle of nowhere.
I’d forgotten about the comet or which part of the sky I was supposed to be paying attention to when I spotted its long misty tail above where the sun had set. I shouted to my kid, who was strolling a few hundred feet away. The view clarified by the second and by the time we came together, this cosmic event was clear to our eyes. We were fly-by’s witnessing each other. Considering that it likely came from Oort Cloud at the outer limits of our solar system and would not be back for 80,000 years, if it ever comes back at all, the passing of this comet felt like a rare moment of eye contact, strangers from far away crossing for an instant. It felt meaningful.
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