An amazing day! Eagles! A dozen of them! In my backyard! Go to the Whaletails site for more pics - or, for a slideshow, visit the Picasa site: Backyard Eagles

(best when turned down [or speeded up, depending on your point of view] to 1-second intervals - you can almost watch them fly in formation!) Incredible!

See my Whale Tails & Quail Trails blog for some photos from a recent trip to the Crescent Beach / Salt Creek area (Olympic Peninsula, Washington State). Low tide, great weather, and cute grandkids made it a perfect day

Here’s a sneak preview:

Hello everyone -

I have had trouble lately writing about my mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s and our journey together in dealing with that gut-wrenching disease. It is hard to believe it has been nearly 5 months since her passing. I still think of her every day and in so many ways. I talk with her all the time. I play her music. I ask her to help me with problems. Is this normal? I don’t know. I do know that the garden is often a place of healing for me. Something about feeling the cold earth, something so very basic and so connecting. Pulling weeds with an absurd sense of order and control, I nurture my favored plants with loving attention, envisioning something of beauty in the coming months. My mother used to love to garden, too, and she left many behind - her small way of making the world a more beautiful place. She also loved birds, whether they were shorebirds, the backyard variety, or majestic raptors - but most particularly, she loved the little hummers. She had hummingbird calendars, blown glass hummingbirds hanging by the window, hummingbird magnets on her fridge, painted pictures of hummers on the walls, and of course, hummingbird feeders.

And so last week when Mother Nature must have been laughing as we dug ourselves out from an unexpected snow here in the Pacific Northwest - something we hardly see throughout the winter - I found myself talking to my mother, and we were worried about the little birds in this unexpected cold snap. I have several bird feeders around the yard, and I made sure everyone had plenty of seed. The quail were especially industrious at scratching around and were there morning and night, on schedule. As soon as the winds died down and the clouds parted, I hung up a hummingbird feeder. I wondered if I was too early, but within minutes, they were coming around. One even came right up and buzzed me as I refilled it. I looked at it closely. I could almost feel my mother’s presence in the vibration of its wings, saying, “Thank you for helping me.”

I posted more pictures of the snow, the garden, and sure signs of spring: the hummingbird, a frog, and cherry blossoms, on my Barbolian Fields blog. Hope you enjoy.

A quiet paddle today in Dungeness Bay.

This unusual piece of driftwood made a perfect frame of the outgoing tide.

You can read the full entry on the Whale Tails & Quail Trails site.

Do you get a lot of e-mails from well-meaning friends and relatives who want to enlighten your life with poetry, inspiring photos, motivational speeches, or even just tasteless humor? I admit, there are times I am moved to openly weep, to write my congress person in outrage, or even tempted to dip into my pocketbook. Most of the time, I am just moved to hit delete - but I almost always read them first.

What is curious to me is how these messages take on a life of their own. They circumnavigate the globe faster than a spy satellite. How fast is that, anyway? Pretty fast. They have further to go, because they are really “out there.”

My latest inspirational e-mail was “The Dash” by Linda Ellis.

It hit me at a particular vulnerable time, soon after my mother died, true, but also while I was doing my taxes. I was already worn down by the IRS intense self-imposed torture, more grueling than the “seldom used” water boarding technique. And then I get this welcome distraction:

The Dash Poem, by Linda Ellis

I read of a man who stood to speak
At the funeral of a friend
He referred to the dates on her tombstone
From the beginning to the end

He noted that first came the date of her birth
And spoke the following date with tears,
But he said what mattered most of all
Was the dash between those years

For that dash represents all the time
That she spent alive on earth.
And now only those who loved her
Know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not how much we own;
The cars, the house, the cash,
What matters is how we live and love
And how we spend our dash.

So think about this long and hard.
Are there things you’d like to change?
For you never know how much time is left,
That can still be rearranged.

If we could just slow down enough
To consider what’s true and real
And always try to understand
The way other people feel.

And be less quick to anger,
And show appreciation more
And love the people in our lives
Like we’ve never loved before.

If we treat each other with respect,
And more often wear a smile
Remembering that this special dash
Might only last a little while.

So, when your eulogy is being read
With your life’s actions to rehash
Would you be proud of the things they say
About how you spent your dash?

I am not saying this was bad poetry. Quite the contrary. I liked it. It gave me something to ponder.

So much so, I felt compelled to respond to my friend who dashed off The Dash to me at 11:18 p.m., probably with the warm feeling of sending out positive energy to all her friends on her mailing list. She was retiring inspired; I was still fretting over my taxes. It’s called insomnia with a capital bloodshot Eye. And so I wrote (this is called tax procrastination technique #23):

Late Night Bad Poetry (by blythe)

Ah yes! I, too, am up late
contemplating the meaning of my dash -
Or - more precisely - my cash -
And where it all went
in that fleeting moment of time
called yesteryear
As I try to justify to the IRS
I ponder my taxes…
And I gaze at that little dash
And know it represents not time -
but a minus sign
And I try to explain
It’s not the home, the cars…
How I contemplate what I’d like to change!
As well as the small change
left over
when it’s over
Oh, Uncle Sam
I love you
Remember that
as you write
My eulogy.

The end.

If moles are a problem in your yard, I just might have the answer for you. See my latest entry in Barbolian Fields. Good luck!

Two most certain and dreadful events: the death of my mother at the end of last November and the due date for tax returns, rapidly approaching. I will have to continue her story after I complete the latter. Thank you for hanging in there with me.

I can better relate to this variation on that line attributed to Ben Franklin and others:

“Death, taxes and childbirth! There’s never any convenient time for any of them.” –Margaret Mitchell, in Gone with the Wind

New pics on the Whaletails site: Roosevelt elk, trumpeter swans, and an old barn and field that seemed to bask in a natural sepia light. Hope you enjoy!

Did you catch it? In the Northwest, nothing short of spectacular! Set my tripod up, put it on time release, set a long exposure…not quite what I expected. You can see it on my Whaletails blog.

Mom busied herself with unpacking boxes. In truth, she had wanted something much larger; her buffet, table, couch, and chairs barely fit into this thing, even though it was slightly wider than most units of its kind. Although for years she had stood in line for commodities to make ends meet, she had fancied herself living grandly in at least a double wide. The days of not worrying about money had moved out with husband #2, but perhaps she should have gotten the Grecian tub option.  At least the place was clean and had that brand-new smell. Mom had always been an obsessive cleaner. Her mantra had been “There’s a place for everything and everything has its place.” Her new house was as neat as a pin, however neat that is. Everything was exactly where it should be. There was a certain comfort with order and control.

As for me, I thought that getting her out of our home into one of her own would give me some breathing time. Her constant hovering drove me nuts, as well as her compulsively having to put everything away immediately, of never allowing any task to wait, and of incessantly needing to be doing something to be helpful. She would work outside until her back ached so badly she couldn’t straighten up, but would get mad at me if I pleaded with her to stop. Admittedly, my garden and house never looked better, but I felt I couldn’t be comfortable in my own home. I felt like the little girl being told to clean up her room, “or I’ll do it for you.”

But things didn’t settle down just because we each had our own space. There was an assortment of details to deal with: changing addresses, getting a bank account, transferring funds, filling out forms and filing them, putting the old place up for sale. She refused to deal with any of these things.

What happened to my mother, the competent, can-do, independent woman I always looked up to? I was still living in my messy bedroom. She had been, I suddenly realized, perfectly willing, albeit with some resentment, to let men control her life for the past 40 years. In that time, I had grown up and moved away.

I sat there looking at this person I wasn’t so sure I knew all that well. She smoked a lot; drank pot after pot of coffee, even late at night (in fact, I think that’s all she drank), and poured a ton of salt on things, which I highly suspected she did purposefully to get my reaction, knowing I was an anti-sodium, vitamin-popping, wheat-germ-and-granola fanatic. I found myself repeating things to her a lot, not because she was hard of hearing, but because she wasn’t listening - just lost in her own world of thoughts - or maybe she didn’t remember because she wasn’t really paying attention. I was getting a little impatient. We were trying to work through some of this stuff, important stuff, and she couldn’t seem to remember from one day to the next how much money was where and why or where to find information we needed to move forward. Finally, she blew up at me, telling me I was treating her like a child and being overly critical.

It was one of those “ah ha” moments. I was going to have to step up and also step back.

The timing was really bad. I was going through my usual depression after taking my son back to live with his father for the winter, which was an 11-hour drive, one way, if the passes were clear. I would possibly see him at Christmas, if my ex was willing; he controlled visitations. I had already spent my children’s college education funds on attorneys who did not protect my interests; I could not afford to go back down that road.

My partner of nearly 10 years was recovering from a severe Crohn’s attack, true, but our relationship had been on very shaky ground and wasn’t getting any better. It was probably just as well we hadn’t legalized anything. 

Plus, I had been recently diagnosed with a different sort of auto-immune disorder: rheumatoid arthritis; I was also clinically anemic. And did I mention, a pathetic workaholic. I was working an extremely stressful job that required a lot of overtime, once logging in 48 hours in just 3 days in trying to meet some deliverable that must have been critical at the time but which now is not even memorable. It was a demoralizing position; I felt completely unappreciated and underpaid; but at least it allowed me to help my kids get through school and help my mother have a place to live.

When things get hard, I have a tendency to add one more thing to make them nearly impossible. I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to go back to school to get my Master’s degree before I turned 50. It was a distance-learning program, which had the advantage of allowing me to work at my own pace, but the disadvantage of everything taking longer because you don’t move up until you are ready - and I was never ready. If you don’t do your very best, what is the point? “Good enough” did not exist in my world. And by the same token, like my whole life, nothing was ever good enough. My room was still a mess.

In writing this, I realize I was a lot like my mother. 

I was lonely, depressed, and felt my best friend had abandoned me. Overwhelmed with everything going on, I managed to function day to day with little sleep, consumed with work and obligations.

It is like a spiraling whirlpool. As long as you’re looking down the center, you think you’re looking straight ahead.