Squirrels of the Future

 I've never really liked squirrels. When I was a kid we had a next-door neighbor who fed the squirrels in her yard. She fed them Dubuque, Iowa's very fine Betty Jane candies. I can see her out there in her flowered housecoat with a box of chocolates, a squirrel eating out her hand. It seemed like things could take a turn at any moment, and I didn't want to witness it. 

My very first house in L.A. had a pecan tree. We never harvested a single pecan. My daughters, however did enjoy watching the squirrels strip it bare. They'd sit at our kitchen table and laugh out loud at the squirrels' ridiculous gymnastics. I was less than thrilled. I wanted to make something with those homegrown pecans.

Post divorce, the very first place I ever owned by myself, I had an apricot tree. That first apricot I harvested was the best apricot I've ever eaten. It was the last apricot I enjoyed from that tree. The squirrels also ate my lovely ruffled pink hibiscus. 

I tried everything. Bird netting. Cayenne. Nothing worked.

When it came time to move my mother in with me, I sold that place and bought a house that fit her needs. There were no squirrels there by the ocean. Until after DJT was elected. Then things changed. I gave those interlopers names--Evil Bannon and Kelly Ann. They pigged out on the bird seed and destroyed my geraniums.

Minneapolis is overrun with squirrels. Last year I saw a pure white one. On my walk the other day I watched the fat one at the top of this post for quite awhile. Do you know why he/she is fat? Because they're planning for the future. That's right. The future. That squirrel knows it's going to get cold. There'll be less to eat in our snowy landscape. Calories will harder to find. So the squirrels are chowing down. So they'll survive. Because they think there will be a future to survive for. I love that squirrel and all of their fat friends. I love the idea of planning for the future.

I'm just F-ing beside myself. You are too, right?

 

The news, the news, the news. What if we are on a rocket going backwards? Do we want the rocket to safely splash down in the 1950s, say--or do we want it to explode in mid-air? I'm asking. 

I made the mail art card above for a dear loved one. The king lying under the rock in the lower right hand corner might have been too subtle of a choice. 

Last night the wind roared for hours in Minneapolis. I've lived here in this building for 17 months. The wind last night howled like a monster and shook the things on our balconies.

This is what I see from my balcony at night. Like other things I've more or less taken for granted, it too is in the process of disappearing. A new building is going up. Every day, this vista is one day closer to gone.

This is this week's collage. When I can't follow a thought long enough to write, I cut up paper and make things.

Win Lose Draw

This is what the Mississippi River looked like in my neighborhood today as it experienced its scheduled drawdown. I think I read somewhere that it's so the infrastructure of the locks and dams can be inspected. Meanwhile there were flocks of gulls and human onlookers. Many people seemed to be treasure hunting.

 

I watched a crew of workers pull bikes and scooters out of the muck with ropes and hooks.

There was an immense tangle of stuff, including the metal box below. The workers tried for a few minutes to open it--to no avail. The whole situation seemed bleak to me despite the volunteers from the park service talking with visitors about the river and its original configuration before the sawmills, and the flour mills, and the shoring up of the ruined falls. All the while, the evidence of current stupidity and ruination is poking up from the mud. Hundreds of plastic water bottles, trash of every imaginable kind, including the Nice Ride rental bikes and the rental scooters that are a plague for pedestrians on city sidewalks. The pile above represents only five minutes or so of work. I suppose this went on for hours. We're a disaster, we humans. 

I hope someone found treasure. Gold, or silver, or a box of something precious. 

When I got home I opened the bill from my kidney procedure. 20,800 and some dollars--not including the doctor's visits and the testing beforehand. Because I have a Medicare Advantage plan that I pay 99 dollars a month for, all but 250.00 dollars of that was covered. I'll bet our president's care for his Covid hospitalization totaled a quarter of a million. It's disgusting that so many people do not have decent health care or insurance of any kind--especially during a pandemic. These United States are so far into the muck, I fear we may never get out. 

BUT I have cast my ballot. And I do hope for change.

Keep art alive so it keeps us alive

 

Whenever I introduce myself in an online art class, I say that I'm a writer and that I don't really know anything about art. Both these things are true, but I spend more time making things than writing these days. I don't know why. A craving for the visual? A weariness of words?

The book above is a riff on  the exquisite corps game. I made it a few weeks ago. Now there could be even more pages, I suppose, since the world grows worse.  It's a flip book. The pages are divided into three sections, no matter what part you flip all the sections of the body line up.

 You can have a person of color whose legs are standing in a pool of blood, a pregnant belly, and a child's head, for example.

Mostly I've been making blank books. The filling will come later. I have a drawer of handmade books.

And my desk is stacked with my next projects. A different style that I will be practicing. It's called drum-leaf, I think. I don't know why. They're real hard cover little books like the one standing on edge in the photo below. Sometimes I use my own hand marbled or hand made paper for the covers. 

I like turning their small pages.

I think my deepest passion is collage. I took a mail art class several weeks ago from an artist I met in 2009 at the Vermont Studio Center. I keep trying to remember a significant conversation we had--all I can recall is that he grew up in Iowa. Mostly we were in the meditation chapel together every morning before breakfast. So far, I've made over 40 collage postcards that I've sent to friends and family.

I can't wait to make more.

Now I'm taking a collage class from the same artist. We're studying a different artist each week and making bigger collages inspired by the works of that week's artist. Today was Hanna Höch, and I made this. It's 12x12 so I can't mail it to anyone. I love Dada. I love the surrealists. But you can't hang that stuff on your walls or no one will come to dinner.........oh.......wait......

I've now given myself permission to age ungracefully.

Hospital Socks

Several million years ago in an ancient age, still unforgotten, I had a basket of hospital socks in basket near my back door. My household accumulated these socks while I cared for my mom and the man who loved me. Red, blue, green, beige--a guest could choose a color that pleased them while keeping their feet cozy and safe on my slippery floors. 

They went somewhere, those socks. Goodwill. The homeless people in a Ventura park. The auction I had before I moved to Minneapolis. I don't quite remember. 

I have a pair of hospital socks now. Last week I had a lithotripsy of my right kidney. It was not as uncomplicated as I expected. Our bodies, and our Earth, are complex beyond our imagining. One thing tips into another. This causes that. That causes another thing, and another. A kidney stone might take 67 years to amass before it renders its agony. A planet rotates, tilts on its axis, while one era groans its hard birth to the next. Creatures who once ambled through ferns move toward the water, their legs and feet morphing into flippers. But when we look inside those flippers today, the fingers and toes are still there.

Everything we do to our bodies (and the things that are done to them) and our Earth have interconnected consequences. 

Remember the hanging chads? Remember that Al Gore could have been our president? Every vote we cast might have immense consequences beyond our imaginings. One thing leads to another. People jumping from burning towers, decades of war, unspeakable destruction of our planet. We got there one step at a time. 

I didn't especially want to go to my doctor's appointments or to the hospital during Covid-19. I wanted to walk through the pandemic the way I was taught to backpack in the Sierra. Leave no trace. But once I was in the hospital, I found that every single nurse, doctor, anesthesiologist was doing their own kind of leave-no-trace foray into the wilderness that is health care right now. Of course there were Covid screenings every step of the way, and of course everyone was masked and shielded to the max, but not one healthcare professional was even an iota less than kind, caring, cheerful, and patient. Once the mandatory screening was done, they behaved as if there was no extra risk for them that could get in the way of caring for me. I am grateful.

And I am afraid of the people who are none of those things. They are responsible for this moment where everyone has someone in harm's way. 

Dear friends and family do everything you can to help one another. I promise to do the same. I love you with all of my heart--and with my kidneys (sans their tiny blasted-to-bits asteroids.)

Watching paint dry

 That's what I'm doing. What are you up to?

Hand-painted paper to use for collage. My new favorite version of collage is mail art. I've been sending out cards like this:

I've been using hand-made paper from my paper-making internship, my hand-marbled paper, junk mail, and a lot of images and cuttings from magazines and catalogs. And today I unearthed all the pretty stamps my mom saved over the years.

I also painted swatches to try out on an accent wall in the guest room. Guests. When will there ever be guests? Maybe never. Maybe years from now. Do you find yourself thinking in years? Weeks and months seem irrelevant. Though a day is still something to get through.

And my tiny balcony garden is thriving.

You can't see the jalapeños. They're hiding.

Blossoms on the lemon tree that will live inside this terrible winter. 

I never thought I'd eat so much basil, but there it is right outside my door, fresh and delicious.

I never in a million years would have predicted how my life is going right now. How about you? Are you doing stuff you never thought you would do? Tell me what.

And here we are.

old dishes that belonged to my mom

I'm well. Are you well?
I'm not really okay, though. I suppose you're not either.

I have candy dishes now. And I walk by and eat a piece 10 million times a day.
I hope my teeth don't fall out. How are your teeth?

French peach cake from Joy of Cooking

I bake things. I could bake ten million things and eat them all.

New shelf/bench in my dining room

This is my addition to my dining room. I frequently have 10 million guests at my 10 million dinner parties. So now there's extra seating.

This is orizomegami--the Japanese art of dying paper.

I have 10 million sheets of paper in this condo--handmade, dyed, marbled--suminagshi and Turkish. I think in another life I was a wasp and made my house out of paper.

What were you in your other life?

Inside Out/Outside In...AND some writing news

OUTSIDE IN

On Tuesday night I saw "A Breath for George," shown outside on a tiny screen against the wall of the Guthrie Theater. It could have been shown on a grain of rice and would have still packed a punch. We said in the sanitized chairs provided, masked and socially distanced, some of us in lawn chairs carried from home-- a crowd, undistracted by birds, or motorcycles, or the voices of children somewhere in the park behind us. Only the helicopter flying too low pulled our eyes from the screen. I don't know if these showings will be only in the Twin Cities or if they will come somewhere near you, but the website of the theater that produced the movie is a must see. It is full of resources you might not have seen other places.

http://newdawntheatre.org/index.html

There's a mural of George Floyd on the front of the Guthrie, composed of little post-it note like squares. 

INSIDE OUT

It's amazing how much the sky can change in an hour. Nature shows us change every season, every hour, every second. We can change too.

This is the view I see from my bedroom floor--the place where I do my yoga practice.

WRITING NEWS

An essay of mine (along with 29 others) is on the shortlist for the Masters Review Anthology. I should know by the end of the month if I get chosen as one of the ten winners.

I'm just sitting here watching the houseplants grow

the dining room group

Many loved ones stand on the front lines of Covid-19 and racial justice.
I sit at my desk next to these plants and make things-- Monetary contributions to organizations that I believe will change this f-ed up world; making zines, origami boxes, small handwritten books, hand bound journals, protest posters that will probably not go out into the street.

masu boxes with lids made of hand-marbled paper

While I completely understand that I don't know how to draw, I still like doing it. Go figure.  This is a slipcase for a collection of zines.

coptic binding in progress

I'm growing things on the balcony that I rarely used last year. This year it's an oasis (relative term) despite the noise from the a.c. units next door.

First tomato (and maybe jalapeños too) are on the way

So, the houseplants are doing fine. And for those of you who might wonder, I'm not actually drinking myself to death during quarantine. I know. I'm surprised too.

How are your houseplants (dogs, cats, kids, parents, hamsters, chickens) doing? How are you?

The River

Dan Paik left this world six years ago today. 

He has not visited me in any dreams recently, but he and my mom are always with me. In the past several months my mom has had cameo roles in many dreams. 

It just so happens that this essay was published by a wonderful journal last week.

https://underthesunonline.com/wordpress/2020/the-river/

The Truck

"Let's go join in with those peaceful vibes," I said to a friend. We'd been watching today's protest on TV. There were thousands of marchers, proceeding into our neighborhood after a rally at U.S. Bank Stadium. We watched them kneel, group by group--because there were so many of them--on the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.

empty bridge last summer

Then the  designated pre-planned route led them onto I-35 which was closed to traffic to accommodate them. When we saw they were just a couple of minutes from my condo, we decided to join them for the very end of the route. We crossed the street at the back of our building and took the shaggy path behind the office building next to the embankment, thinking maybe we could get across the fence somewhere and onto the interstate (we'd forgotten about the fence.)

Then, the truck.

It came by so fast, horn blaring. The driver, pumping his fist (or is that how a trucker honks the horn?)

Oh!-- the trucker is supporting the march, honking like crazy to say yes, yes.

Thoughts in a crisis are so weird, non-linear, and simultaneous. So many thoughts, ricocheting off one another. No, no, there are people. He's going to hit the people.

Marchers flew over the fence and we all ran. People who'd been on the road were shrieking, traumatized. And then there were motorcycles. I've heard only one news report mention them. They came from the opposite direction--the more crowded side of the interstate, actually. Two neon yellow ones and a black one, going a hundred miles an hour. How they didn't hit anyone, I don't know. Two miracles. No one killed by the truck. No one killed by the motorcycles.

The rest of the evening was a mix-- marvel of relief that no one died, wafting clouds of tear gas, and lots of law enforcement.

Is the world being held together by fury and anguish or torn apart by it? It's hard to tell.

my tomato plant, state troopers, and Minneapolis police

Tonight.

This is my neighborhood. Lilacs blooming in the foreground. Boarded up businesses in the background.

Rumors abound here. People are tense.

But some facts are abundantly clear:
George Floyd was brutally murdered.
Many other African-Americans  have been wrongfully killed by white police. Here in Minnesota and in every state of our country. For years. For decades. For 450 years.

It seems there are people here, local or otherwise, intent on causing mayhem. And there has been mayhem. You've seen the pictures.

But there has also been peaceful assembly of thousands of people. Thousands. Of peaceful people, mourning and demanding change. Remember that.

Those thousands of people want the arrest of the other three officers who helped murder George Floyd.

I'm hoping for the best. In so many ways.

If you pray, pray for Minneapolis. Pray for the United States of America. Pray for change.

"It's not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist. --Angela Davis

Hey there, How's it going?

My little condo is in grave danger of being turned into a rainbow.  So far, I've done this.

The green looks nice with the balcony cushions. And the green will be especially nice during the winter, I think. The balcony is coming along nicely. There's a nice wooden bench now. And the pansies are finally raising their heads above the rims of the pots. A dinner party for four! Oh...wait...

I've also done this. Ditto the winter thing.

The kitchen is already bright enough. When the sun shines in at its afternoon angle, it looks psychedelic in there. I'm resolving NOT to put color anywhere else.

Instead of painting, I'm going to go back to demonstrating when I need something to do. Today I staged a protest at the Guthrie.

Honestly, if I see another anti-lockdown, anti-mask protester carrying a sign that says My Body, My Choice, I may totally lose my shit.

What's pushing you to the brink? There are so f-ing many things, right?

Song for a Ruined City

Mill City Ruins

In its earliest incarnation of white settlement, Minneapolis was a logging boomtown. One of the first saw mills in the area was constructed just across the river from the ruined flour mill in this photo. White pine was king, and the hardwood forests in southern Minnesota and neighboring area was once a vast wilderness of over 5,000 square miles. Prior to the 1800s the population (probably this count is white people?) was a mere 5000 souls.

Then came opportunity. Money to be made. People flocking to jobs. The largest raft of timber ever floated down the Mississippi was 5,500,000 feet of timber in 1902. Imagine it. What once stood tall, leveled. Gone. The supply of timber was thought to be inexhaustible then.

I read somewhere (back when I took long walks, lingering to read things) on an informational placard in my river neighborhood about how dangerous logging was. Legs were crushed or torn off. There was a booming business, not just in logging, but in artificial legs too. Probably loggers and their legs were thought to be inexhaustible. Not long after the peak, the much prized old growth pine forests were gone. When I imagine it, I see one-legged men hobbling into taverns.

Then came flour. Minneapolis transformed itself into the flour milling capital of the world. Enough flour each day for 12 million loaves of bread. Milling flour was dangerous too. In 1878, one of the big mills exploded and killed 18 workers. But the work went on. By World War I, commercial bakeries were making 30 per cent of the nation's bread. General Mills was king. Betty Crocker was queen. In 1903 there was a labor dispute and a broken strike. Workers building a city, stone by stone. Workers risking their lives. It's an old story. A recurring theme.

Meat processing. Covid-19. Healthcare. Write this paragraph. You know how it goes.

Last night when I thought perhaps I might be losing my mind after not being able to concentrate on a single thing all day, I went for a walk despite all the runners and bicyclists who zoom by not wearing masks. And there was this red-winged blackbird, singing his heart out.

I wanted to sing too--a song for a ruined city. No theater. No music. No bars or restaurants. No museums.  People I love being exposed to the virus every day.

I love cities. I didn't see a big city until I was 17. Chicago! I thought of it as my salvation. But that's another story.

I'll eat a lot of peaches. But I  don't want to blow up my TV and move to the country. (R.I.P., John Prine.)

R.I.P. to all Covid-19 victims.

R.I.P to all of those who have left us.

R.I.P. Minneapolis.

last night's sunset