I’m going to say that there is not as much rain today as there was yesterday and count that as a win. The wind is at about twenty kph at our place here which means it’s much higher out in Sitka Sound. Our house sits right next to Old Sitka Rocks which are about two miles from the beginning of Olga Straits where boats can begin going up the inside passage with only a peak out into Salisbury Sound for some rough water, then back into Surgis Narrows and the relative calm of the inside waters. Our house sits really on the edge of the open water.
This morning I woke up with a headache. Not sure why, I drank some water and checked all my medications and made a couple of adjustments, but my head hurt as it often does after a low spell, which I’m pulling myself out of . But sometimes the best thing to do is just sit outside with Jan and Dot, undercover. Jan will have her computer on her lap and she will be taking care of business. She never stops, she is on the phone all day and night and she works on drafts of things all the time. I sit and watch her, today she is sending her foamier students off to do a necropsy on a dead Sea Lion in a joint effort with the Tribe and NOAA, which takes many phone calls as I have learned over the years. I drank some hot co co with some Mexican instant coffee. in it. I gave up seriously drinking coffee some twenty five years ago. Now I have just gone back to this concoction of half a teaspoon of coffee with some chocolate to perk up in the morning. when I’m down. Both Jan and I wear sweaters and we chat a bit and watch the water, for whatever might show up. This morning there was a doe and a fawn out on the lawn which is quite unusual for us. Dot wanted to go out and sniff their tracks but happily she didn’t chase them. When we called her back she came running straight back in. Jan and I talked about if at this point she was still frightened by their strange scent, and we talked about what to do to make sure she didn’t chase deer. Then of course we thought of Nels and how good he was at training his dogs not to chase deer, and I never asked him the particulars of exactly how he did it. I sat for a while and the rain patted down on the overhanging roof of our porch with covers our outside living place. We often see humpback whales, or Sealions from here, sometimes Harbor Porpoises or Sea Otters. Always the various birds that like our berry patch: the nut hatches or the song birds, and the birds who like diving on the tideflats: the Kingfishers, or the Greater Yellow Legs, Oyster Catches, and the Herons, most commonly the crows, Ravens and Eagles. Jan almost always has her binoculars on hand and a resource to look up the species, but my eyesight is not so great and I’m slovenly about the specific names of birds. I’d much rather just enjoy their visit rather than fumbling through a book. But I’m always grateful that Jan knows the names. Its part of the dynamic of our love. She knows things I don’t and I appreciate that.
Nels always knew so much and I took advantage of that all the time. I would call him rather than look things up and he was happy to chat and give me world class lectures on the birds I was seeing, while I teased him for being such a nerd, which was of course unfair. We had our unofficial birder voice we used when I made these calls. I think I stole it from an old Hanna Barberra cartoon character. We spoke in a slow squeaky voice that greatly accentuated the “B” sounds. So I would say in the voice, over the phone, “Boy, oh Boy, Buddy do I have a Beautiful Bird Behind the Barn.,” Then we would be off for twenty minutes or so talking like this about birds..
I was lucky, I really, really was. .
Anyway… our outside place has indoor outdoor carpeting, and comfortable chairs. I hung a painting my sister, Mary Worthington painted, on the porch. I hung it there because it looks great out there and we are running out of wall space inside. We also have a crate for Dot for when she gets the Zoomies. She likes being in her crate, particularly when we are out on the porch with her. When she is not in her crate Jan will often shoot her tennis ball gun out into the yard and Dot will run it around and mostly bring it back. Though Dot is not ball crazy. Dot rather enjoys dancing and wrestling with a large soggy crabbing buoy that has heavy lines attached to it. If I chuck it out into the yard, Dot will fling it and catch it and whip it around as she prances around the yard, again eventually bringing it back to me. In this she is unlike our old ball crazy retrievers we always used to have. She is also a LOT stronger.
Sitting in the Outside Place during this seventy two days of rain, is peaceful. Sometimes my brain just needs the world to flow into my head: the wind with the briny beach smell, and even the cantankerous crows, shouting, “Hey, Hey, Hey… Food. Food, Food.” as the bicker and fight over bread crumbs or some bug larva or another. Even this can calm me down, and of course the empty sea: grey/green and always moody this time of year reminds me that what I know runs out all the way to the horizon and connects to the grey sky and is so much more vast than the imagination inside my head that I sometimes get mired in. Even when it’s pouring rain, finding an outside place where you can spend a little time, where you can eat, or visit with someone, or listen to music, or just sit and relax, is a blessing to your sanity. It’s a connection to the world where you actually are at that precise moment. It’s pretty interesting to consider actually. It might even be worth considering sleeping out in a tent in your back yard, just to listen to the rain and the wind while you enjoy the comfort of knowing that your dry clothes and hot shower are just a few steps away.
Kingfisher hovers
above the clam bed outside:
drops her catch…. then dives.
jhs
Here is a reading from the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai.
