Gasping stars

Around midnight, I drove out on old Hwy PB past Paoli and parked in the gravel driveway of a Christmas tree farm. I lay on my back on the hood of the car and waited for shooting stars.

The best time to catch the Perseid is around 3am, but it’s a school night, so I decided to come out early, expecting to catch no more than a glimmering. For awhile, there was nothing to do but lie there, easing my eyes into the night sky, feeling the heat of the car engine under the hood beneath my back. The air was filled with the songs of multitudes of crickets and a sole bull frog (who threw in the towel after fifteen minutes). One lonely mosquito buzzed briefly around my right temple, probably lost. (It’s been a tough summer for mosquitoes, what with the drought and all; I don’t think the poor thing had the energy to bite me.)

It’s been over 35 years since I last gazed into the night sky like this. I can remember lying on a picnic table in the middle of a KOA campground in Panguitch, Utah, in 1970, beside a boy from Eugene, Oregon, trying to locate the Little Dipper from among the millions of constellations in that cloudless desert sky. After an hour, we returned to our respective families’ campsites, without having so much as touched hands. A month later, when my family drove through Eugene on our way to Portland, I asked my parents whether Eugene was a small enough town that one would be able to find someone just by driving around for awhile.

Tonight, the shooting stars began to brush across the sky around 12:30am, some of them little white apostrophes, others long, sweeping strokes of green. There weren’t many — it was early — but there were enough to make me forget that I was supposed to be making wishes on them. A truck or two barreled past, shaking my car and leaving me with temporary headlight blindness. I wondered if, from far away, their trails of diesel fumes might look as beautiful as the burning meteors I had come out to watch.

I began to doze a little, when footsteps on the gravel shoulder — probably a rabbit — gave me a start. I climbed back into the car, wrapped my seat belt around me, and headed home.

In the company of clouds

My B&B hosts have finished their cigarettes, and taken their little dog into the house. My mom has finished her glass of wine, and headed off to bed. I’m sitting on the front porch, catching someone’s WiFi in the breeze, listening to crickets and deeply breathing in the soft, damp, evening air.

We flew right through the clouds this afternoon. My fellow passengers on our little low-flying plane spent most of the flight in sheer terror, the ride was so bumpy. But I was transfixed by the clouds that enveloped us, with the blue blue sky above. They were brilliantly white, enormous, rising around us like canyons.

Every now and again one little wisp would break off — I saw one that reminded me of the Wicked Witch on her broomstick. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of a larger plane flying high above us in the altitude. We seemed to be skirting around the billowed edges of the clouds, but every once in awhile, we just burrowed through. I expected them to part for us, as if they were made of something other than steam, but they just melted around the plane like fog. Then patches of blue would peak through the dim, and we would burst into the blue, riding in the laps of the clouds again.

I was talking with a friend the other evening about the yearning we all have for magic in our lives. We look for it in the i ching, in the tarot, in the bottle, in our prayers. He and I agreed that sometimes we should just look around us.

Saturday at Devil’s Lake

I’ve been to Devil’s Lake in Baraboo exactly three times since I moved to Madison almost twenty years ago.

The first time was shortly after I moved here. I went camping with a couple of friends in the early autumn, right after Labor Day. One of those friends, who shall remain nameless, spent the entire weekend in his sleeping bag or hunkered down beside the fire, moaning, “It’s so coooold!” My other friend and hiked I all of the trails, checking into the campsite occasionally to see whether he had moved/expired/washed the breakfast dishes. When we saw that he had done none of the above, we headed back out again. We shared the park that weekend with the annual Boy Scout Jamboree and the trails were crowded with Webelos. That turned out to be fortuitous, because I blew my right knee out and there were plenty of ace bandages to be found. I bought my campsite-bound friend a t-shirt that said, “Just because I’m irritable doesn’t mean you’re not annoying,” and we agreed to never go camping together again.

The second time was about ten years ago when I took a bunch of teens from my church on a weekend campout. All I remember from that weekend was (1) wondering what the kids were going to wear for the rest of the weekend when the first thing they did upon our arrival was race into the lake in their clothes and (2) twelve kids all trying to sleep at once on one kid’s air mattress, which, quite reasonably, exploded.

The third time was yesterday. I don’t have a non-lame excuse for having let so much time pass between visits except that, of all of the things I’m happy to do by myself, walking through the woods isn’t one of them. To enjoy the wilder world, I want to have someone beside me to whom I can say, “Did you see that?” Happily, this weekend I walked alongside a friend who has made something of an avocation of studying the flora, fauna, and geology of the area, so that he was not only eager to share the sights with me, but also saw everything before I did and was able to tell me what we were looking at. His passion was infectious and inspiring. When other hikers passed us, they couldn’t help but slow down to listen in. He was undoubtedly the smartest person in the woods that day.

It was lovely, lovely. We strolled along effigy mounds, observed mud dauber wasps working their way around a delicate blossom, shared an orange while a pair of turkey vultures circled overhead, and spotted the handiwork of a pileated woodpecker — which Stan actually caught a glimpse of, but I missed because I was busy taking a photograph of a blade of bottlebrush grass. Four hours worth of my learning to look at rocks, trees, and plants in a new way — with just enough getting-lost to make it an adventure. Lovely, lovely.

We could use some rain.

July 4th in the Dayton Airport

I am waiting for my plane to board. Wifi. Thank god.

I’ve been in cyber-silence for the past several days — my mother has dial-up internet access at about 48kps, and ohmygod is it slow. Plus, she has clogged up a third of her computer’s RAM with approximately 3,500 messages stored in the “sent” folder of her email application. Most of these messages are things that she’s forwarded to her friends — pictures of kittens and angels and commentary about what lunatics Democrats are.

My mother and I did not kill each other during my visit, although we gave each other plenty of motive. I got my hugs in with my nieces and nephews, and had a little private time with each of them.

Highlights:

• Nephew Duncan, who is learning the trumpet, played several patriotic songs, while we all accompanied him on kazoos.
• My sister Betsy and I kidnapped niece Karley for a “girl’s day out.” We had lunch beside the railroad tracks and talked about boys.
• Niece Mya taught me a song about penguins, complete with interpretive dance movements, that she had learned at Girl Scout camp.
• My brother Tom left me the funniest voicemail message ever.
• I shuffled through the Otterbein Retirement Community Independence Day parade with my mother and her neighbors, a surreal experience.
• We had a picnic afterwards, which was beyond surreal. My mother encouraged me to explain Unitarian Universalism to the Methodist minister who lives on her street, an invitation whose motive I didn’t understand at all, since she has informed me more than once that she thinks I belong to a cult. Maybe she hoped he would convert me back to the denomination of my youth. He was, fortunately, more interested in collecting everyone’s two dollars each for the picnic.
• I ate fried chicken for seven straight meals in a row, including breakfast. I am now a fried chicken.
• I spent five hours watching a two-hour movie with my friend Kathleen because we kept pausing the movie to tell each other stories and laugh hysterically about the ridiculousness of our lives and their worries.
• I danced to “Purple People Eater” with nephew Aaron, who asked me about six times in a row, “Aunt Micky, you’re not married and you’re so old?” He had no idea such things were possible.
• Mom’s neighbor invited us into his backyard to watch the evening primroses bloom. They actually bloom while you’re standing there looking at them. I had no idea that such things were possible.

Okay, gotta find something to drink before we fly. I can’t wait to get home. Every time I leave and return, I’m reminded of how very lucky I am to live in Madison, Wisconsin, where, even if I am considered a lunatic, I’m in good company.

I hope my cats had the good sense to not starve while I was gone.

Amazing Aunt Doris

In two weeks, my great aunt Doris will be 97 years old. Here are some things I think are amazing about her life.

• When she was about 30 years old and figured out that marriage was not in the cards for her, she pulled together all of the money she had earned as an art teacher and bought 14 acres of land at the edge of a cliff outside of Toronto. She built a house with her own two hands and called it “A Fool’s Paradise.” She still lives there. She has bequeathed the place to the Ontario Heritage Society, which will transform it into an artist’s retreat after she’s gone.
• When she was in her 70s, she decided she wanted a college degree, so she enrolled at Scarborough University as a English major. For her senior project, she wrote an autobiography of the first 40 years of her life, and published it. Three years later, she published a book about the next 40 years of her life, and published it.
• She has travelled around the world about a kazillion times, painting everything. (She wasn’t available to talk to me when I tried to call her on her 92nd birthday, because she was in Brazil at the time.) She has sat in the snow and painted pictures of icebergs. She has had a documentary made about her. She has been decorated by Queen Elizabeth.
• She can kick anyone’s butt at Scrabble.
• She used to come to the Stratford Festival (Stratford, Ontario) every year with a little gang of girlfriends. I recognized these women when I met them because I had read about them in her autobiographies. Some of them had been her friends for seventy years.

To me, that last point is the most amazing thing about her. More amazing than the fact that her paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars, that she has had hospitals named after her, that she is buds with some of the best classical actors in North America. She forged friendships in her youth that she nurtured her whole life.

I would like to be that kind of friend.

Aunt Doris is spending her days now in her little cottage nestled in “the Keyhole” in Parry Sound on Georgian Bay in Ontario. Here are some pictures I took the last time I was there.

Visit Doris’s web site.