Winter's Passages

Darn, people in my community keep dying. Rest in peace, Peg Morton, Mike Mortemore, Pamela Raynor, and all those we've lost and not forgotten. Sometimes it is a shock, sometimes more like a soft passing and a kind of relief that their suffering is over, but loss is loss and grieving is important. I really will miss Mike especially for his gentle sweetness, and wish I had given him a lot more of my attention. I guess if any lessons can be taken it is to give our attention more generously while we can, and be more aware that our time will come, and so will everyone's.

My dad's 92nd birthday would have been on Wednesday had he not departed 46 years ago, when I was 20. He has now been dead the same number of years he was alive, a strange symmetry that strikes me as important. The twenty that I knew him were packed with my growing up, seeking his love and approval, trying to get him to hold my hand. I have one photo where he is, quite poignant. Naturally I didn't stop seeking his love and approval after he died, that just shifted into other forms, much more complicated ones. Of course he is still with me, as our parents always are, grown into our responses and our very neural pathways. Running some of my self through the filter of having had him as my model for what men were made of has illuminated much over the years, and seeing my son grow up has shown how much I transmitted long after my father was gone. Humans are so very complicated. I'm so grateful to still have my Mom, who is turning 90 next week. Her filters have been more useful, or at least more functional, to run my thoughts through. She is dependable, good and kind, thoughtful and generous, and completely inspiring about passing gracefully through life.

I don't seem to have had a lot of awareness of life passages as I went through them, always in a kind of assumption that what is now will stay that way, which is of course completely false. Most of "what is" changes radically and often. In my twenties, the 70's, a lot of my life was just reaction. Losing my dad as I was entering the big world was jarring, made so much more complex by the political milieu of the anti-war movement that turned into the peace movement and earth day and the liberation movements and made me what I am today. I was filled with a bravado then that rarely surfaces now. That arrogance of our twenties that makes us think we not only can fix the world, but we must, pleases me now when I see it in our young people. It happens more in the teens, but lasts longer perhaps. Quite a few of the people who spoke at the City Council meeting last Monday were full of passion, and some of them were my age. They had settled on an issue, maybe just for the evening, but they picked something they cared deeply about and spoke to it. The resolution against the TPP and the climate change ordinance are small steps toward environmental and political sanity, but they are steps to take and we are all lucky that people are pushing for them, whether we recognize the benefits or not.

Then in our thirties and forties we tend to do our important life stuff, finding partners, having children, choosing a career. Without a lot of reflection I did what I was compelled to do, but I was 39 when I finally had my son, and although I had a well-established business at the time and a nine-year partnership, I had no idea that the motherhood piece was going to push the other two out the window. The relationship didn't have what it took to raise a child, I soon discovered, and within it the things I needed to fix in myself were not going to get fixed. I had to strike out on my own emotionally, with just enough resources to focus on my own healing and stay just a small step ahead of my son's needs. I did a lot of things inadequately during those years, but some things went very well and both my son and I did thoroughly enjoy his childhood. I took on the whole business without a partner and that has suited me well, and I got the house, which I took almost two decades to rebuild and have found my place solidly and with lots of love to surround me.

People I see in those decades now seem like I was, fairly overwhelmed with just the practical and necessary details of living and nurturing a family, but also full of energy to get the details of the outside world to line up better with our visions of what we want for the next few decades, and what we want for our children. Somehow the energy and vision survive the mountain of work for many people and I truly admire those I see in those middle decades, especially those who take the time to volunteer and join with others in creating community. They seem to be getting a lot done, even if some of it is change I don't like so much.

When we hit our fifties, some of us late bloomers flounder a little, and I made some attempts at partnership and intimacy and then gave it up for art. I decided to put my energies into what was working and let go of what was not. By my sixties I had re-established my strong connection with Saturday Market, had opened up new relations with OCF, and was the Queen of Jell-O Art at 62, me with my shattered heel and the long recovery from that. I mention it because it still hurts today, as I was out in the yard yesterday pruning trees and enjoying the winter mildness and I guess I did too much. For an old person.

And today is a Saturday in the offseason, one of the richest of days. I've been burning Sue's beeswax candles lately to keep the suffering and dying in mind, to add some life to the dim light of the season. I'm planning to type some minutes from one of the plethora of meetings I had last week and the week before, and clean house, watch birds at the suet. Stay warm and dry. Eat the delicious food. Play with my Jell-O.

I'll be turning sixty-six this spring (not until May) but that is somehow more significant than 65. Maybe because nothing happens, it's just another year of aging and another year of caution. Someone told me (thanks a lot) that 66 is when our health really starts to go. Of course I don't believe that and am going to keep using my Mom for inspiration as she is still healthy at 90 and mostly because she is still active.

I reposted the photo of me with my cart on the Park Blocks because it looks so strong and able, yet so determinedly original. Yes I am an old woman who wears carhartts and rides along with a towering array of Rubbermaid, looking unusual at best and wacky at my worst. It has gotten increasingly harder to navigate with the cart, not to ride it, just to interface with downtown. Raven told me he no longer walks his cart on Broadway because people would actually try to take his peaches (they would ask first, but he isn't one to say no that often) as he passed. He stopped using his bike for various reasons but I don't think I'll have the option of walking my stuff as many do. It's too far. Maybe us old people can get together and rent some storage downtown for our fixtures and the heavy things like the weight bags and thus prolong our ability to come to Market. I can maybe go back to my car if I can't ride. It would cause other problems and isn't my first choice, but it's a semblance of a plan. I have never been good at planning ahead, at least in the long term. I'm pretty good at organizing and planning a little ahead, those forms of control fantasies, but as a child of the fifties I have never felt that the world would really let me grow unmolested to old age. I'm a bit too aware of politics and the environment to feel safe out of my bubble.

I need the bubble of safety and comfort I pretend to live in. It's warm, dry and pretty with all the Jell-O and things I've created and collected. I get a lot of strength from my home base. I don't really want to go to other places like cities where so much is happening all at once. I don't really like to think about Eugene with a half-million people, all shiny and high-tech and moving so fast a bike cart can't get around. One good thing about some of these young urbanites, though, they don't really depend on cars so much. They want to live downtown so they can walk to work. A lot of their energy is going to benefit me, but it's so interesting to think back to my earlier decades and the way society was acting then in contrast to now.

Catherine Sluyter Davis

I finally get why our parents were so scared by the hippies. Part of it was just worrying about our safely and the long direction of our lives. Once our minds were opened, how would we face the day-to-day? We learned, and they relaxed and learned to value us again, but I know I have felt similar anxiety for my son's generation and how they will get the skills to thrive, as it seems much harder now. Cars cost what houses used to cost, houses cost what only rich people used to have. Certainly everything is faster, which sometimes can be a relief because any errors we make are also soon swept away by the next challenge or amusing meme. When you see interviews with people who made it to 103 or are in the last legs of their lives, they always seem to have a calm and ancient view of it all. Sure, we pass through, but individually we are not nearly as important as we feel. We're one of us, but we're lower case. I find that comforting now that my days of making big impacts are likely over.

This week I do get to go to a big city, Portland, to do some more research on the people I am studying in relation to my house. I will get to see a few items that Catherine S. Davis owned. A visiting card with her picture will surely be something she touched. She's 63 in the photo. There's an amazing quilt that she made and I'm curious to see if she used a sewing machine and when in her life they think she made it. It's a cool Dutch-looking blue and white style. Her family was Dutch, an affluent family from New York, the Sluyters. She was a Quaker, so I want to see evidence of that. I do have something I found in the earliest probate journals of Lane County, a list of the items in her husband's estate when he died in 1858. They had only been here a decade, and they didn't have a huge amount. As a woman she did not actually possess any of it, except for the part of their Donation Land Claim that was in her name. She got to keep whatever the court agreed she could keep, so she sold the fancy chairs and kept the plain ones. She probably moved in with her daughter, Samantha Huddleston, soon after, as her land was on River Road, close in, and in 1861 and 62 there were terrible, widespread floods that must have covered much of her land. Anyway, I hope to find out more about her.

The Holy Grail piece I will get to see and touch will be her medical bag. I don't dare hope it will still be filled with the instruments and tools she used to save many lives and attend many births and deaths in the early days of our area. She arrived in 1847 and was the closest we had to a doctor here for many years. She was famous for riding her fast horse to help anyone, day or night, and she must have been incredibly strong. I will no doubt be inspired to write a lot about her after seeing her possessions. I'm thrilled.I'm one of the few people who is still interested in her, outside of her descendants. I found one who was really instrumental in my research and told me about the objects, which are not listed in the catalog of the Oregon Historical Society. I also hope they find a few more unlisted things to show me. I got my own research all organized to show them and I hope they are interested in it. For some reason bringing this long-gone person to life has given me a really compelling aspect to my own life, even though she was not directly connected to my house which was what got me started looking. Stay tuned for that.

Be well, my readers. Grieve well. There's a lot of life still out there for us and I for one am grateful for it on this rainy Saturday.