Northeastern Oregon Women

When I first met my friend, Elaine, I was a high school English teacher in a rural coastal town. She ran the office. Her daughter was my student. Maybe it was my black tights that fooled her or my bookish ways. Maybe because I can speak French.

Now she tells me that she still cannot believe that I garden, she cannot believe that I dig in the dirt, that I pull weeds, that I haul manure. Even more fabulous to her is that I then preserve, either by canning, freezing or drying, all that I grow. She loves my pickled beets and blackberry cordial.

“It just doesn’t seem like you,” she says. “I saw you growing up in a loft in New York, not in a quarter-acre garden in soil-encrusted jeans, an old straw hat on your head, a red bandana handkerchief hanging from your pocket, with sweat dripping off your forehead.

“You’re not carrying around a bucket full of hand tools and a bottle of water, a hoe and a shovel. No, in my mind’s eye, you have a bag from Neiman Marcus or Macy’s or Filene’s Basement and a bunch of flowers. Maybe a cheesecake from Junior’s.”

That she pictured me in a New York loft, so cosmopolitan, so cultured, makes me smile. That she saw old farm-girl me as a sophisticate pleases me.

Truth to tell, I no doubt could live that way, in a loft with books and art all around, good restaurants and even better theatre within walking distance. A place where I could find poetry and movies and stores providing every item I might want without driving two hours over treacherous mountain passes. Imagine the symphonies, the ballets, the lectures. And yes, the famous cheesecake might make its way to my hands and further yet.

A month maybe. If it were spring, maybe three. I could last that long. But then, oh then, my need for an open, flat valley with sun morning, noon, and night, a valley ringed by hills and evergreens, a valley full of pastures, crops, and animals, a valley of crossroads lined with turn-of-the century farmhouses and weathered barns, that need would overcome me. I would have to fly home where I could reach my arms out and not touch anyone; home, where I could walk a quarter mile and not touch anyone. Home, where I would not have to look straight up to find the sky.

We Northeastern Oregon women are like that. Our love of land is epigenetic, bred into us, I’m convinced. Elaine knows. She’s a Northeastern Oregon woman too. Even though we both live in Western Oregon now, as far west as you can go without falling into the sea, we chose a rural town in which to settle. We live on farms in valleys encircled by hills and trees, in places that look as much like Northeastern Oregon as we can get. Still, something is not quite the same. The sunlight year-round, the summer heat, the smell of dust and wheat? Sitting around the bonfire at night next to the slough catching catfish? The rustle in the grass that means snake?

Growing up when and where we did, we learned to be thrifty, to be gleaners. Instead of throwing things away, we saved things and figured out other ways to make use of them. We lived in a way that’s now back in fashion, now called “sustainable” and “organic.” Back then it was called making something out of nothing because nothing was what our parents had a lot of.

We Northeastern Oregon women can catch a chicken, chop off its head, pluck it, gut it, and cook it up, all in the same day. We can drive in snow up to the hoods of our vehicles and call it a good day outside. We can spend the day herding cattle and whip up a barbecue that night. We can sew our own clothing and have it win awards at the county fair. Our houses are decorated with natural treasures such as birds’ nests, rocks, and oddly-shaped wood. Moss and dried twigs, plumes of dried grass and cat tails.

We find our joy in other people. When you grow up living long distances from another human being, you cherish the times when you get together--dances, 4-H meetings, weddings and funerals. You care. You share, willingly, because you know each other. You come together because you want to, not because you are forced to by small or crowded spaces. Even if you move away, your Northeastern Oregon cells locate each other.

We find our joy in nature. We are poets and essayists, women of words, spoken or written. We are painters and musicians. We live where there is land between houses. We grow flowers. Don Gray’s paintings of Union or Cove or Joseph, rounded brown hills and bird-filled marshes, bring tears to our eyes.

That loft in New York would be nice and exploring would keep me busy. Just not for too long. I’d get nervous, needing my fix for home.

When we go home to visit, we breathe easier. We feel at peace. We may not live in Northeastern Oregon any longer but Northeastern Oregon is alive in us.

Rush

Here's a little poem I started writing in my head on the way home. It's not finished (or maybe it is) but I couldn't wait to share the sentiment:

Don't shush Rush.
We need an idiot
to know we are on the right track.
Kings had fools, right?
We have ours.
The Republican Party
Rigoletto.

Feline Poetry Fest

MISS EMMA’S POEM

Birdie, Birdie, in the sky,
Fly to me, I’ll tell you why.
I want to look a birdie in the eye,
Then cook me up some birdie pie.

SONNY’S POEM

Come to me, you skanky vole
Or I will claw you from your hole,
Bite off your head and spill your guts.
Escaping me is really nuts.

CHER’S POEM

Where’s my food?
Turn up the heat,
Cuddle near and warm my feet.
Don’t dare to tell me that I’m sweet.
My four legs are fully clawsome
And my aim is more than awesome.
Where's my food?

REMNANTS

REMNANTS
Remnants—the pieces of fabric left over from other projects which you cut and shape, then sew to form a quilt.
PAPER DOLLS
My childhood friend Janis’s father Bob was my father’s best friend growing up. Their fathers had been best friends too, thus, it was no surprise that Janis and I spent parts of our youth together as well.
Janis lived with her grandmother for her first five years and then, uprooted, went to live with her father and new stepmother. After that I saw her only once a year or so, when she came to visit her grandmother for summer vacation.
From the time we were in the 4th grade on, we enjoyed ourselves while the adults talked by designing paper doll dresses and accessories out of paper toweling. Regular paper must have been in short supply so we created our special designs on this soft, bubbly paper. Did we color the dresses we drew? I don’t remember but I do know we made fabulous gowns for our Lennon Sisters paper dolls. Our girls had extravagant events to attend where they consorted with such handsome types as Ricky Nelson and Tony Dow. Many hours Janis and I spent on the front porch with blunt-nosed scissors creating lifestyles of the rich and famous.
MAKING A MESS
Don’t you hate it when you make a mess, a horrible mess that needs immediate attention, and there’s no one to blame but yourself?
Not only do you have to take the time, energy, and resources to clean up, but you lose the self-righteous indignation mustered when someone else makes the mess.
I exploded tomato soup in the microwave. I heard a few pops but was not prepared for what I saw when I opened the door. I thought a blood-filled vein had exploded in there. I was sore afraid. Jackson Pollack would have been proud of my creation.
How best to clean it up, and clean it up I had to do, since the housekeeper was coming and it wouldn’t do to leave that for her to see. She might think it an exploded blood-filled vein, too, and call the cops. I couldn’t have that.
I began unrolling the paper towels, one, three, five, ten. I’ll start there. Here’s where the absorbency issue gets resolved. After 15 towel segments, the microwave was ready to be wiped out with soap and water. The revolving plate had to be washed off. Dried, replaced. Good as new.
I burned the evidence later in the burn barrel. I would not be responsible for a garbage collector’s shock at seeing those red paper towels upon opening the can lid. Lesson learned: for one cup of soup always use a four-cup measuring cup.
THE UNIVERSE PROVIDES
January and February are the worst months for me as the annual depression slides into place, my SAD Northern Light notwithstanding, and refuses to be shaken. These bad-weather months are when I should be able to take advantage of free hours I don’t have to work outside. A lot of things should get accomplished but these are also the months when I don’t feel like doing a damn thing. Even if I want to, I just can’t. My lists go undone.
This year besides the depression, I had anxiety so bad I needed medication and a flare-up of hiatal hernia hurtness so bad I couldn’t bend over or lift anything or breathe deeply. I take palliative steps, mind you, but that all takes time. Getting better doesn’t happen overnight.
This year, though, the universe was watching out for me, and I began to reap what I had sowed. Every few days gifts for no special reason came my way, gifts that showed I had friends who loved and cared for me. I had visits from family that included laughter and love. I started a new class that gave me hope. All those gifts helped me to wait knowing I was loved until I cycled back out into the light. Just what I needed.

Telling the Truth

Portland Mayor Sam Adams has told the truth. How refreshing. Now, if only all the CEO’s, managers, principals, superintendents, superior officers, judges, law partners, owners of businesses who have also had sex with one of their adult employees told the truth, the world would be truly refreshed or at the very least, shift on its axis.
I want those who hold or have held the power of a job over another and who have abused that power by demanding sexual favors to admit what they have done. Their apologies should be printed in the Oregonian in an issue dedicated to just that purpose. More than one apology issue may be needed, I realize.
If we hold Mayor Sam Adams to a standard of decency that is appropriate in the workplace, then we must hold all those in positions of power in the workplace, public figures or not, to the same standard. Urge those you know to have committed the same misdeed as Sam Adams to confess the truth of their actions. I weary of stones thrown by tainted hands. I am ready for a refreshing shift.

FLYING

FLYING

Skeeter and I often stood
on the colossal floor heat register
outside Grandma Eva’s bedroom
directly across from the towering oak buffet.

Waiting for the rush,
we looked up at the sculpture
of the brown-skinned brunette in a blue underskirt holding a corner of her red jumper to her mouth.
Placed on the buffet corner doily, her bare feet straddled a rock.
She gazed at an ocean that wasn’t there,
her golden pocket bulging,
maybe with agates and sand dollars.
I know she wanted to join us
but we didn’t speak the same language.
We wanted to see the ocean too, but instead, we flew.

When the fan blew,
our dresses bloomed open
like little parachutes,
our feet dangling jellyfishlike
underneath
straddling our own doily
of crisscrossed ferrum firma.

Karen's World

Andrew Wyeth died this week. I mourn his passing and I mourn the loss of the teenage me who lay in my father’s pasture looking back at our home the way his young girl does.
I loved Wyeth’s open spaces that reminded me so much of the Grande Ronde Valley where I grew up. Rolling hills of grasses where a single oak tree sprouted. Brown, weathered houses on the top of a hill backed by blue mountains and a bluer sky. Sun reflected by everything but shadow.
Why does every mention of the painting “Christina’s World” speak of the disabled girl in the field looking at her house in the background? The model for this girl, Andrew’s wife, was fully able to stand and walk. True, the real girl who lived in the house he painted was disabled, but why assume the girl in the grass was as well, just because she was reclining there gazing upon her house?
From my own experience, I can tell you with great certainty that Christina was not disabled. That you thought she was is fine with her. Your mistake gave her more time to be by herself out there in nature, her quite able body in repose.
When I’d had enough of the familial innards of my home, those grinding gizzards of parent versus child, I’d hike down to the bottom of our farthest pasture and lie down. In the spring, I’d smell the plowed dirt and feel it all crusty from the sun before it crumbled in my hand. I’d watch clouds scatter across the sky. Summers, I’d sit by the little creek looking for frogs under grassy clumps and pick watercress leaf by leaf to savor the peppery goodness. I’d watch birds bring food for their babies in the nests overlooking the slough. Come Fall, I’d lie on my back to watch the leafless limbs of the Alders rubbing against one another in the wind and when I stuck my legs straight up I’d notice how muddy, brown, and big my shoes looked framed by sky. I’d see the rusted barbed wire coils, iron rake and harrow and think about Time. Thoreau said we need room for our biggest thoughts and lying out in my father’s field I had space. Out there my mind was not defined by limits, I was not someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, or someone’s student. I was a soul who belonged to everything I saw. I let myself go into it, molecule by molecule. Out there, everything was possible. My thoughts were so big I sometimes had to let them pass, to roam some more until I could build a mind with stronger fences.
I could hear my sisters playing and calling each other names, hear Trixie and Stubbie barking, hear the Banty chickens clucking, the sheep bleating, my mother yelling—I could hear all that while pretending to be deaf so I wouldn’t have to go back quite yet. Lying belly to belly with the earth I heard a different sound and just then I could be part of both worlds at once or neither at all.
And who says Christina’s looking at her house by the way? She could just as well be looking somewhere beyond her nose in the space where it points towards her house, out there where thoughts swarm and you have to write fast to catch them. What we can’t see from our vantage point looking at the painting is that she has a small notebook in front of her in which she is composing a poem to lock in her diary that she will open only to show her true love when he comes along.
We can only imagine what Christina’s poem said. Maybe it was about unrequited love written in a Victorian tone. Maybe it was a simple one that floated in on the wind, like the one I wrote to my field.
FIELD
“I never would stay
Because of your thistles.
Now I have them
Mostly dug away
And
Lie
In your lap
Dreaming
Cloud and sky
Water rushing
Just beyond
My fingertips.”

I know what’s going on with Christina, and so do you, really. That’s why we all like Wyeth’s painting. It’s a landscape where we’ve all been, lying in the grass or the beach or on a park bench, lost in a tornado of our own thoughts, looking toward home—or not.