From Elation to Frustration

Just last Saturday 75 million of us in the U.S. breathed a sigh of relief as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 Presidential Election fair and square. It reminded me of when the mentally ill person in the family home finally gets removed by the mental Health Police and everyone in the terrorized family sighs and let years of anxiety start to drain away. Today, 3 days later it feels to me like I am back in grade school and the school bully who hates to lose is terrorizing everyone who he played against in the game. He has his sycophant allies standing next to him, parroting every insane issuance from his demented mind/mouth. The mentally ill member is back at the door, figuring out ways to get back in. The devious mind of the manic is a formidable force. Anxiety returns. I return to praying, which is what I did when I was a kid living with a manic depressive shizophrenic who had my parents hynotized into believing she was really Ok and it would just take time, we should all wait it out. Please hurry January 20, when he is ushered out of our home for real, then I will breath and of course thank the benevolent universe with all my heart.

Election Season, Fall 2020 -Longing

It is 5:00 PM on a Beautiful fall evening. I have just returned from a walk through my neighborhood to finish the very last of my election info drop offs. The people have been kind this year, in general. I love that about my fellow Democrats. They seem calm and equanamous even in the face of this year's trials, pandemics, insults from the other side, economic uncertainty and hardship, school closures... all the many events of this year that could cause a person to be negative. Now I say my prayers. I filled out my own ballot and toasted with a glass of wine as I did so. Here's to changing the leadership and repairing the country. The background worries and night sweats hover around the edges of every day. I imagine how devastated many Germans were when they got the results of their 1933 election. Tough cookies, many fought the regime any way. I think of the years we've spent in political activism and it brings a profound weariness. I send all my best energy out into my country, my cosmos. I wish I knew magic, I would cast a spell. For now the sweetness of this fall evening belies the dire events going on in my country. I won't list them here, it's time to watch the sunset and pray, pray, pray.

While the tomatoes cook

 I can smell the tomatoes cooking. I've gathered several hallecks full of the cherry ones and wonder if I might drop a container off to one of the many people on street corners with signs  that say "hungry" in big letters.

The raspberries got so blown in 75 mile an hour gusts (while the wild fires raged all around me) yesterday that the wind blew berries off, or dried them in place.

Blue sky is a thankful sight, even as I know loved people have only smoke to breath today, near me in Oregon and many parts of California and Washington. The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful and dear to me. It is hard to watch it burn.

The authorities made it a point to tell us that our pandemic masks are not effective to filter out fire smoke. I imagine us having then to wear space helmets in some not so distant future.

My yard is full of tinder dry spruce stems and needles, cedar and oak ends. I sweep and sweep, rake and pile to keep "fuel" from accumulating around my house. I harvest what has survived the rain and sun: cherry tomatoes, zuchinni, some raspberries and 2 more apples that fell from the winter tree. 

Meanwhile a presidential election looms, and the attack by the thugs is so disgusting I have to quarantine myself from all sorts of news. 

My city has been holding Black Lives Matter demonstrations every night now for 2 months straight. The crazies come out to torment them with guns and their giant flags and their insults and anger.

Families go walking in my neighborhood and everyone has the mask on. There is something heart breaking to me at the sight of a small child in a face mask, outside in summer.

And there are families sitting at the beloved Oregon State Fairgrounds, evacuated from their homes in Santiam Canyon, and elsewhere. They have to wear masks too, and maybe their home is burnt down.

In all of this I feel the president does not care. Disdain for the poor extends to disdain for the unlucky. How I wish for some really really, incredibly painful bad luck for him. That from the Buddhist acolyte who is taught to practice metta, the wishing well to all beings.

As I write the air turns orange to the south east. The morning winds are calming some. There are strong, brave firefighters and helpers out all over my beloved bio-region working in heat and smoke for long hours to keep the fires from taking everything. How fervent is my wish of metta for them.  

Last Sunday May 2020

My city was the site of 2 nights of rioting last night and Friday night. This is the response to a senseless murder of a black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Today felt mild, sun and breezy clean air after a heavy rain yesterday. I visited the farmer's market and wore my pandemic mask. I bought spinach to eat, basil to plant.

Home and my cell phone gives off a funny buzzing alert noise, not like anything I recognize, except I know the sound to be a public service alert. The text states that there is an 8 pm curfew tonight because of the rioting. Many cities, Seattle included, have the same. It feels like further straining an already pained world. We're in a pandemic, quarantined, stressed, and now this. Our horrid leader tweets off something supporting a violent response.

There is the body of a dead mole languishing in a bucket in my yard. I had to trap it to save my garden areas of garlic beds, new cucumber starts and whole sections of herbs and flowers. It succumbed to my trap. Donning my purple rubber gloves I loosen the cinch of the trap and drop the gray body into a plastic bag. I carry it down to my little side trail lined with thick black berries and wild clematis. I Drop it into the brambles, and continue walking down the Spring water trail.

No one is out. I look up and down and the trail is empty. I have never seen it so. People must be thinking that the curfew means they shouldn't even walk the trail.  The time on my phone -8:20. The evening is lovely, with rain washed, air and sunset fading in the west. A half moon glows brighter in the sky as I walk. It is freeing not to have bikes whizzing by me. I feel rare and brave.

I decide to walk to the creek, about a quarter of a mile. Finally I see a bike, then another. When I reach Johnson Creek and turn around  a walker is coming from the west. I nod and murmur "evening". He never looks at me (should note that he is my skin color, which is not considered a color, and he was much younger than me).

Another walker passes me, a young man, soft brown skin, beautiful face that looks my way and nods, acknowledging me as as I nod back. His hands are in his pockets and his face looks solemn. I imagine he is uncomfortable with the violence which caused this curfew.

The half moon is brighter as I walk back up the side trail to my little neighborhood.
Sunday night, the edge of June. Our town so quiet here. Roses in full bloom. Yet there will be no Rose Festival this year. Our routines have been upended, our souls set adrift in the increasing chaos. My garden sits quiet, blooming as though there is a sure tomorrow.

Long Memories of Hurt

Today my Dad has been gone from life for exactly 2 months. There seems to be an existential fissure created by this lunar mark, manifesting in my emotions, the remembrances of him.

Once he told me that in the Senko family, his mom's people, there was a brother who would have been his Mom's Uncle, who was killed in an accident in a brick making factory. This loss plunged the family into a deep sadness (dare I say "depression"?). I would guess that in the late 1800"s depression was not yet a concept.
The Senko family had this dark cloud, a much loved member suddenly gone. It was painful enough to be part of the impetus for Grampa Senko to leave Czechoslovakia and give the new world, America, a go. I know this feeling. I moved to the Oregon Coast after losing my husband. The idea of starting over in a fresh, new place is a balm to the pain of loss.

The Senko family moved to Kansas first. Farming was their goal. Life must have been hard there. Grampa Senko later bought land in Cornelius, Oregon, where my Grama Augusta was a young woman and met Grandad Louis somehow. This is where I wish I could ask my Dad what the timing was. They were both Catholic, which may have been a connection.

Well, The sadness seemed to linger in the Senko family, for the lost brother, because the lost Uncle information was passed on to my Dad. Augusta was not a joyful woman. She was a perfectionist, a person driven and seemingly tortured with the compulsion to social comparison. I wonder if she married quiet, handsome Louis because his father was the Mayor and an ambitious personage in the community of Milwaukie.

Grama became a hoarder in the years when I was a child. We would go to her house and she would be sitting in her chair. Grandad was usually outside puttering in the garden. I realize now he was hiding from her. She would bark out orders to him periodically. Her house was so full there were pathways to get anywhere. Eventually Grandad was forced out and ended up living in a cheap motel off skid row in downtown Portland. I recall one night we dropped him off in front of his hotel on our way back to Seattle after a Christmas holiday visit.

Grama stayed in her packed house, with the legendary boxes of unopened Barbie Dolls which I always longed for as a kid. She gave us a few, but bought many more and kept them in the stacks. I liked her. We were both an Aquarius.I  tried to have meaningful conversations with her when I reached early adulthood. What hung her up though was that we wore blue jeans then, around the 70's.  She thought they were dirty farmer's clothes. Her persona was virtually constructed of opinions. I see now that she was obviously very smart and ambitious. I just think she married the wrong guy, or maybe she should never have been married at all, but allowed to go to college and pursue a career. She would have been a formidable boss!

Her family story limited her. Her life function became critic to those she loved.If her family story had not been a sad one of trauma carried across generations, would she and my Dad been less critical, more easy in their skin?

I have to wonder, because as much as I try, I feel that sadness sometimes. I know my older siblings were crippled by it. There is not a day I don't have to talk to the little story teller in my head and remind her that I can take a breath, open my heart, access gratitude and go forward with generosity. I like to think that if there is a heaven, my dad and my grama are looking down and enjoying life along with me, happy that I've moved the story on to better gardens.