Blackberry bramble over Puget Sound

Shilshole Marina through the fog

Dandelion in the meadow

Grass in the field

Sun breaking through the fog

Flower at Hiram M. Chittenden Locks

Creation

I made something tonight.

I put a couple of frozen chicken breasts into a pot and filled it about a third of the way with water. I chopped broccoli, celery, onion, and potatoes, adding them to the water bit by bit. I vigorously shook parsley and bay leaves into the bubbling mix. A few hearty dashes of salt and pepper, a half-cup or so of milk, and a quick stream of marsala cooking wine, just because I was curious what it would do. I let it simmer together for a while, then threw in a couple of handfuls of stir fry noodles.

Oh, it was good. We both ate a bowlful before sitting back with groaning bellies. There's a big container of it left over, too, which will make a fine little lunch to reheat tomorrow.

We've been so lax at cooking for ourselves lately. After being so good at alternating nights and cooking for each other, we got out of the habit over the summer, especially during the frenzied weeks before the wedding. Then there was that stretch where we mostly existed on ramen noodles for the last week or two of each month to make the dollars last without resorting to the credit card. And as hot as it was here this summer, neither of us really wanted to heat up the house to cook anyway.

When we once again gained two incomes this fall, it became so easy to continue our laziness and eat out. Or order pizza. Very shortsighted of us, we agreed, and pledged to be more responsible. Then we lost the special events coordinator at work just a month and a half before our one huge special event, and I ended up working 60+ hours a week to help out. That was also not good for our cooking schedule. Lots of Taco del Mar, those weeks.

Now autumn is cooling into winter, and the warmth of the oven is welcome in our apartment. I stir my cobbled-together chicken soup and glow with pride. (Pride and the heat of the stovetop, I suppose.) My husband has been sick, and we are both hungry, but I--I have created soup. And it is good.

Of course, some people might say soupmakers must create ex nihilo, so they will deny that I really had anything to do with the appearance of the soup on our table. I am, instead, a temptation to doubt in the divine providence of the soup--a lie of Satan leading witless souls to stray from the true origins of the soup.

Still, the soup was very good.

Last Leaves

"She makes me feel like a little kid," my brother said last Sunday as he walked into church with our mother.

He was three years old when I finished reading Lord of the Rings. My sister and I trotted through the field and the woods behind our house, describing our beautiful imaginary horses and lopping off weeds with our stick-swords. I called myself "Abner" and my sister called herself "Al." Abner and Al were Robin Hood-style warriors, defending the powerless against the depradations of the wicked. When he wanted to play, we called him "Angellor" to continue the alliteration, and the three of us wielded sticks against invisible enemies all year.

It was two winters later when we dressed up in Nana's old clothes, pulling her faded dresses over our grubby jeans and sweatshirts, and he begged until we gave him a dress to wear, too. Then the three of us preened together in our chilly bedroom, twirled and danced, pitched our voices an octave higher to sound like grown-up ladies.

That was the winter we moved. Our parents spent a week scrubbing dog shit out of the new house before we could move in. We spent the week with Grandma and Grandpa; they spent the week shampooing dog shit out of carpets, cleaning spiders and mouse droppings out of closets, and patching holes in the water-stained ceiling. "It's a better school district," they said while they scrubbed. "We're only five minutes from town here," they reminded each other when they lay down aching into bed at night. "Everything will be easier now," they told themselves.

But that house was still too small for their submerged emotions. The alcohol was gone, but that just gave anger and depression more space to sprawl out in, and they started taking their arguments outside where there was room to bellow. My sister and I heard him crying, and we crept down the hallway through the kitchen to our brother's room. We sat on his bed and tried to calm him down. We sang "Jesus Loves Me" and "This Little Light of Mine. When the fight outside filtered into his bedroom anyway, we sang louder, doing the hand motions.

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.
Ths little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? No! I'm gonna let it shine.
Hide it under a bushel? No! I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine...

He turned twelve just before I left for college. That year I had to write a paper either defending or questioning the GPA system. I attacked it, writing about my brother's ability to teach himself computer skills in his spare time from the time he was ten years old. I argued that the grading system did nothing to accurately gauge his intelligence, but only to measure his ability to complete rote assignments and memorize facts for tests--tasks he performed poorly. Of course, it wasn't my professor who needed convincing: it was my father, who had taken low grades as proof of my brother's "stupidity" and heaped scorn on him every chance he got.

He was nineteen last summer when he informed me that if I wasn't a Christian, he shouldn't be talking to me because I might corrupt his integrity. "I gotta keep my witness pure," he said. "And if you can't agree with that, I shouldn't be talking to you and letting you make me doubt things.

"I gotta keep my witness pure," he repeated.

As they walked into church together last Sunday, he announced to my mother, "She makes me feel like a little kid, and I just don't want to talk to her anymore."

Animal Dreams

My dreams often contain nothing of substance--no concrete symbols or colors on which I can build a translation using traditional dream interpretation. So I was surprised and amused to have two vivid dreams full of animals the other night.

It was Friday night, after the second presidential debate. The first dream showed someone bringing a handful of army ants to the next presidential debate, in Arizona. The army ants swiftly multiplied and began to swarm over one of the men attending the debate. In the process of saving that man's life from the ants, John Kerry fell into the horde of ants. Within moments he was dead, all his flesh stripped from him, nothing left but a pile of bones. I was horrified, crying, in despair at his death so soon before the election. "We don't have enough time to choose another candidate!" I wept. (Guess I forgot about Edwards.)

The second dream was more bizarre. I was back in Oregon, idly wandering in the abandoned orchard in front of my parents' house. Looking down the road, I saw an animal loping toward me. At first I thought it was a large dog, and slowly climbed back over the fence into the field next to the house as a precaution. When it was closer I realized that it was not a dog. Instead it was a donkey, carrying a monkey on its back.

When they reached the orchard, they turned and came toward me. The donkey repeatedly thrust its head between two of the fence's wire strands and pushed against the fence, trying to get through. I backed away a little, leery of its aggression. Then the monkey spoke to me.

"We've been blown off course because of the hurricanes," said the monkey. "Can you help us out?"

"I'm sorry, I don't think I can," I answered. I wanted to help, but honestly didn't feel capable.

Fortunately for the lost animals, a group of Native Americans came out of the house and offered to help them. They all sat down in a circle with the donkey and the monkey and began to speak with them. I went inside the house and watched through a window, trying to observe and learn without being intrusive.

I don't think I've ever dreamt of a talking animal before, and I'm not sure what to make of either dream. Obviously I'm afraid something will be done to sabotage John Kerry's chances of being elected President. I don't know much about army ants, and suspect that their appearance owes itself to my vague memory of a short story I read in high school, "Leiningen Versus the Ants." The donkey being the symbol of the Democratic party would seem to be relevant, but I don't know what the "monkey on its back" would be. Or how it got blown off course by the hurricanes.

So, hey, if you see any ants swarming ominously in Arizona tomorrow, warn John Kerry, wouldja?

"But I Want an Oompah-Loompah Now, Daddy!"

My husband and I recently took a long weekend to go visit my family for the first time since out wedding. We took our pictures to show everyone and spent every day visiting with a different configuration of relatives.

We had dinner at my parents' house one evening with my parents, my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents. After dinner my aunt and uncle and I were sitting in the living room, looking at pictures and reading magazines between snippets of conversation. Very relaxed and comfy. I flipped through a National Geographic magazine lying on the table next to me. It was the September 2004 issue, with many articles focusing on the effects of global climate change.

I made a comment about the article I was reading. My aunt, a very conservative evangelical Christian, breezily replied, "Oh, well, I know the Lord's going to be coming back for us before too long anyway, so I'm not worried about it."

I really wish some Christian who holds that attitude could explain to me how they think it is consonant with the teaching of the man who warned, "If you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?"* Don't you believe that humanity is to be a steward the earth, to care for it and nurture it not as a toy to use up and toss aside, but as a gift to be cared for and entrusted to God's other children when you are gone?

My aunt doesn't worry about that responsibility, because she feels certain that she's got a "get out of jail free" card--the Rapture! Hey, Jesus is going to come back any day now, and that means she doesn't have to worry about having a good earth to pass on to the next generation! It never occurs to her that for two thousand years Christians have been expecting "the End," and every other generation has been mistaken in their guesses about its timing. She refuses to consider that she also might be wrong, that there might be another generation, or ten, or a hundred, before her Jesus returns with a shiny new earth to play with.

Oh, Christian, explain this to me. Don't you talk a lot about family values and discipline, about responsibility and commitment? I hear a lot of Christians talk about the inadvisability of "handouts;" I hear them warn that people who get things for free tend to take those things for granted and misuse them. But then those Christians turn around and say, without a trace of irony, that it doesn't matter if species are going extinct, the ocean and the air becoming increasingly polluted and the earth struggling, "'cause we're gonna get a new earth any day now, just as soon as Jesus comes back! Hallelujah!"

Explain to me how you can say this without feeling like a greedy, spoiled child?

*Matthew 16:11-12