Another poem

that rings true.

Found here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/249258

In Defense of Small Towns

BY OLIVER DE LA PAZ

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,

once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes

or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station

split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team

gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,

we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups

and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck

with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked

and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf

or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me

slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up

with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,

staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?

Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,

and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body

idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers

open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds

fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,

rising slightly and just out of reach.

Oliver de la Paz, "In Defense of Small Towns" from Requiem for the Orchard. Copyright © 2010 by Oliver de la Paz.  Reprinted by permission of University of Akron Press.

Source: Requiem for the Orchard (University of Akron Press, 2010)

Already

So another week goes by, and things are looking up already.  Most of our boxes are unpacked. A cross is on the wall, even if pictures aren't. High schoolers have schedules for classes that please them. Middle schoolers have met some peers. Fourth grader is going to Catholic School - a last minute shift in the plan. And tomorrow I leave to take our oldest to college! How is this moment upon us already?  I am not prepared. I hope he is!

This is to a daughter, not a son, but a memorable moment, found at The Writer's Almanac:

To a Daughter Leaving Home

by Linda Pastan

When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

It's late at night on a Thursday. I keep having to remind myself what day it is because everything is topsy turvy right now. A week ago, we were going about business as usual: taking books back to the library, arranging a trip to Magic Mountain for the next day, setting up a play date for the younger two. Today, we are in a new house, in a new town, about 2/3rds unpacked, the rest of our belongings (mostly books) still in boxes. Instead of listening to a few dogs barking, I'm listening to traffic on the busy street outside our window. The parakeets haven't made a peep in a few days. The 17 year old hates his dad and me.  I'm sick with worry about the baby drowning in the pool. The 8th grader is bitter. The 6th grader is angry. The 4th grader is clingy. The 10th grader is bossing everyone around.  The only happy kid is the oldest, who is still in Ventura working. He comes down next week, lives here for a week, and then heads off to college. The baby and I are going with him. It will be tempting to stay.

This is the worst part of being a military family. Ripping our kids, and ourselves, out of a community every two years is physically and emotionally draining. I keep thinking of Simeon's warning to Mary - my heart feels pierced times 7. Moving again, and again, and again doesn't make it easier, only more draining. We have more stuff, more memories, more stress and anxiety. More souls that want to follow their own wills.

I fret about our weight limit (we were a few hundred pounds under - but we loaded our car with at least 1200 pounds.) and discard things I wish we'd kept - like a rocking chair we got when our oldest was a baby, even though one of the rockers and a slat were broken.  I even mourned when we sold our junkie old Toyota Corolla - for more money than it was probably worth.  I am mourning the kids' Catholic school. I even considered homeschooling again, especially after the 6th grader asked for it, but he was the hardest kid to teach.

I know, I trust, that in a few months, we'll start to feel at home. Already we love the community library, which we visited on our third day here because unpacking books isn't happening until I figure out shelves. And my husband has safety proofed the stairs. The baby loves her room with toys - she didn't have a play space at the old house except in the garage.  But this house has unusual paintings.  It's on a busy corner. It has no yard. It has unsafe stairs and cupboards. And the rent isn't cheap.

So why did we choose it? It's big. The schools are supposedly good (smaller than most public schools, but lots of involved parents - which raises test scores) and close for everyone. It's a 15 minute bike ride from my husband's office. Kids are everywhere.  We couldn't find anything else in our price range that was big enough for our family and I was in reaction mode to the small house we lived in for two years.

Many people love this community here, but I miss the Catholic school where the teachers and the other students all recognized and cared about each other and shared at least the same mission to know, love, and serve God. I miss my job. I miss my moms group. I miss our fruit trees and I even, a little bit, miss the house that was a compromise.  And my heart aches for my senior, who would have been valedictorian of his class, was class president, and probably could have been student body president. He would have been eligible for several local scholarships, which won't be available here. He left his friend and band mate (who was off to Thomas Aquinas College anyway). And he left behind a girlfriend, which I'm a little relieved about.

But worrying about the stuff and the schooling is just a corollary of the different, bigger kind of worry about the state of the kids' souls. Will this challenge knit us together or will they hold this against us and reject everything we say and do and believe? Not only have their math lessons been interrupted and disconnected, but so have their lessons in the faith. Will they want to be like everyone else and let the world define them, or will they remember that in the big picture, they will pass out of the world forever, instead of just for a couple/few years, and their eternal home will be waiting only if they don't turn away know.

I think going to register at a new school was tough on everyone. We all were in tears at some point this week. Our experiences elsewhere should remind us that in a few months we'll be feeling happier about our situation. We'll start to make friends and figure our way around and find favorite things. We'll begin to dig into the community. And when it is time to leave this place, we'll mourn again. (But I won't miss the busy street...)

Things are a little messy

around here:

We'll just have a few days of interrupted service while the packers finish up, load, and deliver.  As of next week, we'll be residing on an island again - but one that is not tropical, remote, or moving on island time. Stay tuned for more.

This will be address number 13 since getting married. Pencil it in, although it should be good for at least three years this time around.

Summer Reading

Despite the long to-do list, I have been doing a lot of reading lately. We've made a few last minute trips to the library for something free to do and the kids have gotten hooked on some new series so we had to keep going back. Now I'm down to my last five days in the county, and I have library books in the house. Must return .... just as soon as I finish the book I have been reading...

Doesn't look like I will make it to the end of Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent. I read enough to want to come back to it, though. I picked up several books from the list of speakers at the Catholic writers conference - Alvarez's book, Peace and Something's Out There by Robert Bausch (really liked Peace - a novella about a small detachment of soldiers in WWII venturing out into no man's land to do a reconnaissance mission, and one of them commits a war crime - or is it? The second book is a collection of short stories, mostly about unhappy love affairs. A bit too depressing.) and I finally finished Gregory Wolfe's Beauty Will Save the World, which has some good quotes I'm meaning to type up, but since it is a collection of essays it does have some redundancy.  I agree wholeheartedly with Wolfe's premise, though - that Catholic artists have to engage the world and Catholic arts patrons do, too. Instead of fearing what is new and modern, or instead of retreating to a mentality that classics are best and what is new lacks depth, we have to look for the good, the true, and the beautiful in contemporary art as well. Granted, a lot of contemporary art does lack a Christian worldview or understanding of human dignity, but not all.

For instance, I just finished T. C. Boyle's San Miguel, which is a historical novel published in 2013 about one of the Channel Islands right of the coast of Santa Barbara.  After our trip to Santa Cruz this summer, the setting was very familiar, and the little bit of history I picked up from the visitor's center about the sheep ranchers who lived at one time on the island provided just enough background information for me to really enjoy this book. It told the stories of three women who lived on the island from their perspective - one who tried to like living in the isolated conditions, but didn't have the constitution, one who wanted to escape, and one who embraced the Thoreau inspired ideal of rugged individualism and made the best of island life.  In some ways these women mirrored the attitudes of three stereotypical Navy wives.  My only reservation about recommending it wholeheartedly to everyone are the few sex scenes - mostly unnecessary. The little bit of erotica distracts rather than adds to the story -- and could be a big part of why so many faithful believers shy away from contemporary art, literature and drama.

On the children's literature front - I finally got my hands on some Melissa Wiley fiction - Little House on the Highlands. I loved it, and read most of it outloud to my nine year old.  She doesn't really like to read, which breaks my heart, but she likes to listen to me read and to sit on the couch together. Hard to find time for that lately. She especially liked the bits of folklore sprinkled throughout this book.

My 11 year old wanted me to read some other Gordon Korman books. His new favorite series are the Swindled books. I finished Swindle and Zoobreak while sitting at the DMV for almost 3 hours the other day.  I also read a brief bit of A Mango Shaped Space, recommended by my 13 yr old, but ran out of time to finish it. She loved it. And Baby has been enjoying picture books, which makes me very happy.  I picked up some biography picture books and really enjoyed the one about Roget, The Right Word, although it has those fractured fairy tale illustrations that aren't my favorite.

More book reviews to come. Running out of time and energy!

Online Attention Deficit Disorder

This David Brooks article, "Building Attention Span," from the New York Times a couple weeks ago is brief, but interesting - and coincides with an ongoing discussion at our house about social media. Brooks reports on some research that suggests that the brain is being reshaped by online habits so that it is becomes more "fluid," meaning it moves easily from topic to topic, engages only on the surface level, quickly processes information, moves on, and forgets it.  Online socializing occurs with similar fluidity also - from one topic to another, little engagement, lots of brief encounters.

On the other hand, reading print matter encourages the brain to convert information into knowledge. The brain on print makes more connections, questions material, and ponders issues and ideas. Person to person socializing also occurs in this slower, deeper form - Brooks compares the difference between online learning to print learning as like the difference between attending a cocktail party and being at a book club.  Lots of flitting around between many topics vs. sitting and discussing one topic at length.  Brooks refers to the slower learning as "crystallized intelligence":

"Crystallized intelligence is the ability to use experience, knowledge and the products of lifelong education that have been stored in long-term memory. It is the ability to make analogies and comparisons about things you have studied before. Crystallized intelligence accumulates over the years and leads ultimately to understanding and wisdom.

The online world is brand new, but it feels more fun, effortless and natural than the offline world of reading and discussion. It nurtures agility, but there is clear evidence by now that it encourages a fast mental rhythm that undermines the ability to explore narrative, and place people, ideas and events in wider contexts.

There is a place for both types of knowledge - we need the ability both to gather information and to make a story out of it - as well as both kinds of socializing. Mixers and cocktail parties have their purpose, just as book clubs and long intimate discussions over coffee and dessert do.

I suffer from alternating attraction and revulsion to online socializing. My kids all want to be on Instagram now, and part of me thinks, fine, whatever, it's a nice way to share updates with your friends and family about neat things you have done and seen.  I like to see photos of my nieces and nephews doing cute things and making funny faces. Seeing photos of each other cements a relationship that can only be cultivated over a long distance at this point since we live far from family.

But on the other hand, Instagram, and other photocentric social media sites, are also a way of defining yourself with images.  What you look like, what you like to look at, what looks interesting/fascinating/pretty to you... It does not reveal much about your thoughts and your connections to these images or to anything else.  It is surface information only. And people "read" Instagram by scrolling quickly down a variety of similar photos.  Does the narrative that forms from this type of communication move beyond the barest elements of plot?  There is no doubt that it encourages more interest in appearance than in character - other than encouraging a development of a simplistic, stereotypical type of character (athlete, yogi, inspirational messenger, politico, fashionista, etc.)

I don't think avoiding social media is the right answer - that would be like retreating from the world altogether for teenagers.  But the time and attention devoted to it needs to be balanced by deeper moments, time spent reading or talking or playing or studying or working for pay or on hobbies. The temptation this summer has been to let the kids have extra media time because I have so many things to do, but this article is a good reminder to engage, to sit down to read a book together or play euchre or cook together. Summer is flying by - one more week in our current house.  Packers come on Monday.  Soon the kids will be back in school and we won't have time for these engagements.  And in a little less than a month, I'll be taking my first born off to college - my kid who uses social media the least. Hoping to stayed engaged through the good old fashioned phone.

Summer Vacation Part three: Macro and Micro

More photos from vacation!? Yes, -- what to do with them all? As I was taking pictures of the wildflowers, one of my sons asked me what I was planning to do with all these boring flower photos.  Once upon a time, I thought I would make a collection of these photos from the places we've lived and make a plant identification book for familial use.  Well, the kids are growing up too fast for that. Years and years ago, when the big kids were babies, I made a Mary Garden booklet for a friend's bridal shower present - gifted with a plant, of course.  I had something of a Mary garden going when we lived in Chicagoland - but almost every plant has a Marian nickname if you look for it. I thought I might expand on that someday, too, but those files don't exist anymore, and the concept has been pretty well covered in a much more thorough and professional way by others. 

Actually, in the moment of photo-taking, I didn't have any plan in mind, but was making a futile effort to try to preserve a moment, to capture the awe. I take all of these photos - landscape shots and close-ups and portraits and candids, trying to capture something of the beautiful view or amazing variety or someone's personality, but fail miserably at preserving either the vistas or the close views.  It is awesome how spectacular some of these places in the world are, but looking at a photo isn't the same thing as being there, as so many people sharing the trail in the national parks are aware.  It is a wonder that with the amount of foot traffic, so much is preserved.  

What is fun about photos is using them to relive the moments. My photographic talents are limited. It is impossible, of course, to pin down the sublime (isn't there a Wordsworth poem about this? Or some Romantic poet?) but I keep hoping one day I'll capture a really great image - as I suppose many of the other tourists wielding cameras at the National Park hope to do.  Or at least to create hard evidence that they were here, they checked off a bucket list item, they saw something other people have said - you must see this!  (The other day, one of my daughter's friends posted on Instagram after a visit to the National Gallery something about how much she loved Jackson Pollock's art. Hmmm. She's in 8th grade. She isn't really that into art. I suspect she has been told that Jackson Pollock is amazing and he's famous. I'm sure people find his work attractive, but I wonder if his fanbase is somewhat created by promoters.  Maybe I'm missing something in it.  Art can be the source of the sublime as well as nature  -- which is Wordsworth's point, right?)

But as you'll notice, these images not quite, or not anywhere close to a work of art - So if you don't care much for nature photography by amateurs you can click on by, but if you are planning a trip to the Rocky Mountains National Park, here are some scenes/flowers/animals you can anticipate seeing. 

My husband wanted to compare Yosemite and RMNP - they are very similar, but I think there might be more places to hike at RMNP. I have head that Yosemite is jammed in the summer and at RMNP, you do not need to follow the crowd. I would love to grab a backpack and head off on the deer paths to the more remote places, but for now here are some standard sites - memorialized much better by others.

View from our lodge

A bluebell variety

Sedum -  stonecrop

?

A glacier

Mountain columbine. We used to suck nectar from the tiny bubbles at the end of the globe.
But people are suspicious if you put wild things in your mouth. First, it is a felony to pick things in the Nat'l Park.
Secondly, people think you are going to poison yourself.

Look! A heard of elk! We saw several along the Trail Ridge Road drive

Clouds breaking above Rainbow valley.

The Loch - an alpine lake

Mariposa Lily

A clear view of Long's Peak, the 14000 footer we didn't hike because of rain.

Can you see the moose in the bush? Time for a new lens.

Attempts to capture a fabulous sunset in Utah

Double rainbow

Godlight - daylight's last glow.

Lilacs are still blooming 

late fiddleheads at about 10000 ft. elevation

Scarlet Penstemon?

Tundra wildflowers

Handy labels at the Nature Center on Trail Ridge Road. Rock campion all over.

Western wallflower

Maybe orchid beardstongue?
http://wildflowersofcolorado.com/html/blue___purple_pg_5.html

Tall chiming bells