Crime Scene

Did you get my two email responses to your X11 and Firefox problems?

From my ringside seat, I planned to snap close-up photos as the guys from Olympic Tree carefully delimbed, and finally dropped this thirty-five foot tall pine tree. I turned my back for a moment, sensed movement behind me, and then realized how old school my logging paradigm is.

Photo Sequence

Once they’d wrestled the tree to the asphalt, they cut-off and hoisted entire limbs into the chipper, and in twenty minutes there was nothing left but bare pavement. Contrast this to the worker bees who descend on Mark Queijo’s property every year. Well intentioned, and a larger work force, but soooo slow.

I asked, Jen, the woman who cuts my hair, “Now that you’ve got a tattoo, what about your fourteen year old daugther.”

“She can do what she wants, when she’s eighteen.”

Tricia Kibbe

I just returned from an incredible journey to Chartres, France. It was the first trip of my new tour company called Seeking the Sacred. I was privileged to be a part of an amazing circle of 17 women from around the US and Britain. My circle sisters and I spent 7 days experiencing the sights, sounds, tastes and mysteries of a beautiful medieval town and its Cathedral, which this year celebrated it’s 1000 year anniversary. Dana Reynolds who facilitated the circle gave us this poem for one of our meditations and I wanted to share it with all of you.

The Sacrament of Letting Go

Slowly
she celebrated the sacrament of
Letting Go…

First she surrendered her Green
then the Orange, Yellow, and Red.
Finally she let go of her Brown.
Shedding her last leaf
she stood empty and silent, stripped bare.
Leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust.

Shedding her last leaf
she watched its journey to the ground.
She stood in silence
wearing the color of emptiness,
her branches wondering:
How do you give shade, with so much gone?

And then, the sacrament of waiting began
The sunrise and sunset watched with
tenderness, clothing her with silhouettes
they kept her hope alive.
They helped her understand that
her vulnerability
her dependence and need
her emptiness
her readiness to receive
were giving her a new kind of beauty.
Every morning and every evening
she stood in silence and celebrated
the sacrament of waiting.

poem from “Seasons of Your Heart”
Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB

John McSweeny and Goose.

John McSweeny and Goose.

IM with Pesky Godson last night:

(I’ve scabbled with this point with Diane about MacIntosh long as we’ve been a couple.)

Me: Funny place to go to {La Porte, Indiana} ..how did you get there?

PG: By bus

Me: For the express purpose of apple picking?

PG: yes, and having fun
it was subsidised by the school
I only paid a dollar for the bus
(and over 20 for apple-related products)

Me: Did you tell Susan? She’s been picking apples for weeks now.

PG: tell her what? oh, she’s doing that after all? no, I hadn’t I should write her

Me: compare apples ; )

PG: to apples

Me: yes. what kind? Surely, not Macintosh

PG: Well funny story about that. we went and they took us on our little hayride out into the orchard and they stopped and said “there’s red delicious on this side and yellow delicious on that side” the problem is
red delicious are a poor excuse for an apple and golden delicious are good enough for eating, but not for cooking, which is what we wanted to do so instead, we spent most of our time walking around, I impressed some people by identifying apples by taste

Me: wow you would have me too

PG: And then we went back to the store, bought the varieties we actually wanted, and ate cider donuts and drank cider… it’s not that hard

Me: Sounds like such a wholesome, Indiana kind of activity now you know where I get my personality. You know my favorite apple is the red delicious.

PG: The ones I had to identify were red delicious (by shape, taste and texture), golden (colour), granny smith (colour), and fuji (size and taste), and Macintosh (taste and mushiness)

Really? I can’t stand the things

Me: Wait! Wait!

PG: What?

Me: You think Macintosh is mushy?

PG: More so than some other varieties it has a certain distinctive mushy quality.

Me: I argue that point with Diane all the time

PG: Compare it to, say, Granny Smith

Me: I agree Someone once said – some so-called apple authority – that red delicious were neither. I liked that line

PG:kind of like how the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.

Location/occasion: Late summer of 1998, Branbury State Park, Vt., – between Brandon and Middlebury, in case you’re curious, or have ever been there. Car camping.

Husband: bad knees, needs electricity or at least a car battery to run the machine to help him breathe at night, but eager to see (and show the kids) the night sky without much light pollution, scared of heights, a worrier and a careful planner.

Me: happy to assure husband I will “be careful” … no clue what that means. Generally my first thought when something goes wrong is, “What will I tell Lew?”

Kids: 10 and 12. Not the least bit scared of heights. Quite agile.

I think we stayed there two or three nights. Nope, must’ve been just two; the car battery couldn’t last three. One evening, husband explained over dinner (with a Styrofoam plate) what a galaxy is and why the stars you see are all in our galaxy and in all different directions, but the Milky Way IS our galaxy and appears as a band in the sky. (“How could a star over there be “in” the Milky Way?” Thinking back to the thick plate helped.) Then he had us stay up until it was late enough and dark enough to see the “teapot” constellation (which spews steam which looks like it becomes the Milky Way (which I hadn’t seen as well we could that night at any point since I was a kid in Western Mass.) and ALSO another galaxy (the only thing we could see which wasn’t in our galaxy) with the naked eye and also through the telescope he had brought. Great science lesson. (Is this why neither of them has any interest in science?)

This was the next night or the previous night. I noticed the rangers were leading a “sunset walk” to a nearby outlook at say, 6:30PM. I wanted to go in the worst way, and the girls were interested too. Bad knees/scared of heights husband couldn’t come. “Be careful. Do you have everything you need? Don’t let them … ” Of course, of course, of course not. (It must be safe; the rangers are leading it.) We got there … what, a few minutes early? No, must’ve been a few minutes late? In any case, no one was there. But there was only one place it could be; Cat had been there before. So we started the climb. The first part involved a lot of boulder scrambling. I figured we’d meet the ranger and the group on the way up. Then there were choices and Cat had crossed that stream, gone through that meadow – but the other way was the only one reasonable way to a sunset view.

We finally got to the place where you could duck under just a few bushes and be on an outlook. I can’t remember – was it a 45 minute climb? I don’t think it was over an hour. I hadn’t expected it to be more than a half-hour because I knew when the sun would set, and I figured the rangers would have planned for us to get there in time for the moment of sunset, let us admire it for a few minutes because isn’t it always best afterwards? and then head us back down, not wanting us to be hiking in the dark. We must have been just behind the group the whole time. We got on to the ledge/rocky outcropping. The view was just incredible – over 180 degrees with the color going from orange to deep blue; the layers of mountains in the distance each a different shade … just gorgeous. (“It’s nice to be here without Lew worrying the girls will fall off. Hey, if we cross to that ledge we would be able to see better. Good thing Lew isn’t here to be freaking out. It’s really quite safe – steep but not unstable.”) It started to rain a bit, then stopped. People appeared from the other direction than I expected – without a ranger – we chatted for a bit and they moved on. It started to rain again.

“Hmm. The ranger group still hasn’t come back and now that rock we crossed is wet and slippery. It must be closer back to the campground in the other direction – where those folks came from. It would be a bad idea to go back the way we came – we’d have to go up and over this bit and there were some pretty steep places other places … and we don’t have a flashlight.”

I’m not at all sure that we ever found the right downward trail. If we did, we lost it several times. It wasn’t rocky and steep – I was right about that. It was borderline swampy. It didn’t seem like it could get dark so fast but of course, we were no longer on a rocky outcropping. And where there had been a nice breeze before, now there were amazing mosquitoes. (Are you wondering about bug stuff? Look, we didn’t bring food, flashlights, or rain gear, you think I thought of bug stuff?) We could hear people in the campground, but a very different part of the campground, and we didn’t get to it for a very long time. I couldn’t see my watch, so I don’t know how long.

At some point the worry shifted from “Will we get back ok?” to “What will my frantic husband do?” Then the realization hit that he – bad knees and all – would start up after us, the way we weren’t going down. Ultimately we did get back, and first I tried to find the rangers who (I was sure) would help me retrieve my husband. That’s when I found out that the ranger-led sunset hike had been the previous week (which also explained why the hike started as late as it had … sunset had gotten noticeably earlier since then). And no, rangers do not hunt for missing husbands.