End of year writing stats 2023

Is August too soon to think of end-of-year writing stats? Especially, since, come December 31, I will be more or less homeless. I need to vacate my lovely large room at Donna’s house in Sebastopol by January. And I have nowhere to go. My cabin that I’ve been paying rent on for 40 years, is kaput, the roof fell in during an epic rainstorm. The cave-in created havoc, as I had archives stored in the cabin including all my letters and news clippings.

Luckily, I had either boxed or removed most of my stuff before the roof fell in. I lost most of my teaching archives and CPITS poetry books to water damage. But I have back-ups of most of that stuff. Not the end of the world. The cabin will be remodeled. But I doubt if the landlady will let me move back in. We had some words—she’s toxic. Besides, people are renting hovels for $1000 a month. It’s crazy out there.

My Plan B is to live in a tent on my grandmother’s property. Hopefully we won’t have another epic wet winter. And then, my cousin Dave decided to move to Missouri with the cnt-wife and sell the Nicasio house where I had the bulk of my belongings stored. Because it was an epically wet winter, most of my stuff suffered severe water damage. The metal shed leaked. 

And we were given one weekend (no warning) in April to huck everything out of Dave’s Nicasio place within 48 hours, and then we had to move what we wanted to keep over to Sinead’s storage shed in Petaluma. So, sadly, this means all my books are in bad shape, and I was hoping to give them to a library. 

We had an epic yard sale where I re-homed and got rid of most of my old tchotchkes, and the rest went to strangers, or to the dump. We put some tasty stuff out by the side of the road and people went completely nuts over all the goodies we were giving away. Sinead gave away crates of of Sean’s Legos and matchbox toys. There was a massive traffic jam out front of the house. Those who scored goodies will never see that particular bend in the road the same way again.

So though it has been an eventful year, I don’t have much to report by way of publishing record. I’m starting this dinky retrospective early, during the dog days of summer, as I’m sure I won’t have the time to deal with it later. The 2017 Tubbs fire certainly brought it all home that I need to scan and document my stuff, and move on, because nothing is permanent. Not even this blog.

Seeking relevance

Water walkers, pronouns sinking silence and sound, the slow surcease of trees, a reflecting pond, held captive by lights. The herons, rising like mist, fish and frog slap a dark designation of self ready to forge ahead. I am swallowing the year on the rock pile of regret. The trees bursting with unseasonable birds. Arrest that image. Book it, Dano. Give it a cellmate of regret, nestled along the edges of the universe. Like combing the dregs of the past, old poems from another time, are still seeking relevance in a century that got off to a rocky start, like during the middle ages, when the plague made desperate believers of us all. Wearing self-imposed ankle leashes during a time when the reflection in the mirror is always reversed. The cat cruises by for a petting. Pine trees, a thought, unseasonable leaves on the pavement, an urban escape, spinning itself into time present, then the future within its black hole of a throat and gaping maw threatening to swallow us all.

12/27/23

The age of the self disguised as an uncertain future

The cat seeks wild water,

    she doesn’t care     where 

or what     is found. 

For her,      everything 

   is in time present.

No matter what     my age 

   I am like a baby     on a runway.

I can’t walk, it seems 

        I am always

 learning to crawl,      then run. 

Then, fall     again. Again.

I scroll my name,

     a calligraphy of clouds 

across an uncertain 

    sky.         The journey 

is always running 

    up against     itself 

in a crowded elevator. 

        I am the agoraphobic 

in the marketplace 

and I steel myself 

    with florid words 

and no one notices 

    my breath     trembling 

like unseasonable leaves 

on a lone tree. The winter 

    is a demanding bitch dressed 

in fancy ribbons and bones. 

    Bless the living 

and the dying of the past 

and the future is a war 

that never ends.     The thing is, 

    the journey is always 

in front of you.     How 

    do we cope 

when the chains 

of change     attempts 

to escape the sordid

confines 

            of the past?

12/27/23 Write On! Nancy Woo

Thanksgiving

Give me those red viscous cranberries, cooked in sugar and nothing else, dripping off a silver spoon. Give me that explosion of flavor where sweet-and-sour compete, neither predominant, a palate cleanser, someone said. It was declared a winner in my book, as we slogged our way through a bargain basement of calories. Don’t add orange juice to it. Please. Mashed potatoes made with butter and sour cream, became snowcapped volcanic peaks with craters filled with pan gravy, the raft of turkey, like a tabula rasa. We suffered through the diabetes-inducing sweet potatoes, way over the top with burnt snowfields of marshmallows—that’s where my taste buds rebelled. All that over the top gilding of the lily left them in diabetic coma. The top I could at least scrape off, but I couldn’t avoid the damned canned concentrated orange juice my aunt Jane was so fond of. I grew to hate orange juice. Once the aunts got it into their heads to dress up what needed no dressing, like yams, it was all over. We were never going to go back to the simplicity of butter again. My formally favorite dish was forever ruined. At least they couldn’t do that to the stuffing. Until someone got the idea to add oysters. Just, no. And then there was the strange three layer Jell-O, salads, quivering on the table—grapefruit slices in lime Jell-O, cream cheese, with the lemon layer with filled with walnuts and celery. And then something darker at the bottom, perhaps cherry Jell-O, where the cranberries hid in their dark depths. Another aunt added raviolis to the mix, and green bean casseroles, which became a tradition I abhor. I could not stand the taste of mushroom soup and green beans. The aunts modernize the menu to fit the era, then got stuck in the 1960s, and my grandmother who was still directing, was not willing to let go of the basic plot—at least the plot itself was fixed, but the walls of her small kingdom were closing in. What I remember most are the black olives we wore on our fingers and how we shoveled celery stuffed with peanut butter and cream into our mouth as if we were starving and there was no food in sight. And that transition phase when you got to leave the kids’ table for the grownup table.

A cat called Cheetos

We drove to the back of the parking lot at TGAL where my cousin had been feeding a family of feral cats. All that was left of the colony was an orange kitten. Orphaned. His siblings and mother were long gone. Could his eyes be any bigger than they already were? Deep pools of betrayal and anguish. This was in an age where it wasn’t cool to feed the feral cats. We swooped down on him in my VW, with its valves merrily clanging like Christmas bells, and whisked him away, as if he was Cinderella in a fairytale, no glass slippers to transform him, but a bath and food. The fleas didn’t stand a chance. Cheetos knew he was saved, he knew what side of the bread was buttered. As far as he was concerned, we were his hairless tribe, his safety blanket. He groomed our eyebrows. Slept on our pillows. But when he got older, when things began to fail, when his bladder betrayed him, he moved out of the house and slept in a wine barrel planter filled with wild strawberries in front of the Nicasio house. We called him the potted kitty as he got pottier with age, all orange and aglow like a trapped sun.

list three daring things you’ve done…

A friend asked us to post three things that we did when we were young—those adventures where you look back on and say "I can't believe I did that.” Well, apparently I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I couldn’t choose just three insane moments in my life. True, I was usually with a boyfriend, but not always. And it’s probably not fair to ask me about during exploits, there were too many to list. Probably one reason why I became a writer.

My boyfriend and I hitchhiked up from Marin County to Victoria, BC in the early 70s, slept under a spruce tree in Stanley Park. Then we hitched up-island to catch the ferry from Cape Scott/Port Hardy to Prince Rupert, but we missed the boat, then had to camp on damp moss covered ledges for a few days until the next ferry came in as there was nothing there, not even a gas station, let alone, a hotel. 

The ferry ride to Prince Rupert took  more than 15 hours, we hit huge swells in the open water of the Queen Charlotte Straits. The massive swells rocked the ship around like a toy and everybody was barfing. When we got to Prince Rupert there was no place to stay so we camped in a graveyard on top of a hill and the sun absolutely refused to set, it was June.

Then we hitched over to Prince George where the mosquitos were the size of hummingbirds, the resident moose was not happy to share his boggy meadow with us. Then we hitched down to Banff, and Jasper, and slept in hotel doorways as all the campgrounds and hostels were full. It seemed that all of Canada was on the move. We camped out in day-use picnic shelters. They had wood burning stoves! 

The worst part of the journey was when we got stuck in front of the Columbia Glacier, I resorted to wearing my down sleeping bag as a coat, the ice field was so cold. I looked like a mustard colored abominable snowman in my down bag so no one would stop for us. The toe of the glacier hissed and sung. I wasn’t prepared for that. Then we went over to Calvary (why?), and headed back down through Kamloops, and down the coast to SF. An epic summer journey.

I went to the USSR several times in 1989-91, created a poetry and art exchange (it was Glasnost) and traveled from Kyiv to Leningrad on a train illegally, incognito, sans internal visa, because I was told no, I couldn’t go by the local authorities, then we couldn’t get a train ticket back to Cherkassy. In those days, Americans weren’t allowed to travel freely, without a pass, and certainly not on common trains for the ludí, the people. 

In Leningrad, on another trip, a Soviet friend thought I would like to help restore a fresco in the dome of the Church of Atheism & Religion (St. Isaac’s). To get to the outer dome, we had to climb up an iron catwalk to the top of the outside dome, the iron railing was coming off, it was midwinter, and a long way down to the ground, OSHA would not have approved, but Russia was like Mexico, everything was jerryrigged. When we circled the dome where there was a little door that let us inside the brass dome between the fresco, a tunnel to the inner dome. Wild. We had to leap down to a trapeze net stretched across the opening of the dome (I was scared shitless), then we were suited up in climbing harnesses and ropes, suspended like spiders to clean and scrape the old fresco. Getting back down to the ground was worse. I had never rappelled down a rope before, the marble floor was a long way down, my hair got caught in the cleat and I thought it was curtains. Oh, and neither my friend or his friend spoke any English—just to up the game. 

Another time we walked out on a frozen Ozirkii lake, but when we got to the middle, we heard it crack, the loudspeaker from shore was telling us to get off the lake, but I couldn’t understand Russian. We got off the lake quickly.

We hiked in to Machu Picchu in 1989 the long way, 42 km, through milpia forest fires, and so couldn’t see the Andes, we went through a cloud forest, saw many fantastic Inca ruins over Dead Woman Pass. I rode a pack horse that had never been ridden before, I was stuck with him because we dawdled and missed out on all the good horses. He had no bridle, so I made a hackamore from an old stiff leather lariat. 

We were cantering along a stream when he veered left up a narrow trail and ran full speed to a chicha hut. I had his head in my lap and still he wouldn’t stop. We slammed into that adobe chicha hut sideways, so hard, that dust rose from the roof like smoke. I lifted my leg over the pack frame and let the horse take the brunt. He slammed sideways onto the wall. All the Incan men sitting outside at the bar, scattered like the wind, drinks in hand. The horse got the message, he wasn’t going to lose me. He was much better behaved for the rest of the trip. So when we went up an incline so steep, I fell off his back trying to avoid a tree limb, because my backpack had made me top heavy. I fell under the horse. Luckily he froze and I crawled out from under him. 

Then the train to Arequipa and Lake Titicaca was stopped by the army in the altiplano, and they searched everyone, they bayonetted the natives luggage (looking for smuggled people) because of the Sendero Luminoso uprising. We had just seen the corpse of the defense lawyer of Manuel Febres Flores, outside the Chorillos Tunnel near Lima. It was a hairy time to be in Peru. Tanks in Lima. Car bombs.

Then there was the time the US invaded Tegucigalpa right as we were headed there, oops! We were stuck in the Guatemala Airport for days with no flights out. We had just come from the highlands, had met the Guatemalan army there and in Tikal too. They were not the good guys. Neither were the guerllla. We learned to tell who was who by their guns: AK 47s guerrillero, Uzi, GA. People were being disappeared, including tourists. I had nightmares for years.

I never did get married, though my Soviet friend proposed to me in the lobby of the Hotel Cosmos in Moscow…

Then there was the time a young bear slept on me in Little Yosemite….before I went up Half Dome, I did it twice, why, I don’t know…. And that time in the Galapagos between islands in the open sea with too many people, in a tiny open panga, when a drifting fishnet got stuck in the propeller. Oh, but the albatrosses and flying fish and the dolphins alongside the boat made it worthwhile. 

I won’t mention the time I snorkeled alone in a volcanic crater, called the Corona del Diablo, and a sea lion mistaking me for one of his harem because I was in a black wetsuit, attacked me. Maybe he thought I was a silkie. I had to keep spinning like a top to keep him from biting me. I thought I was going to drown for sure but no one would even know because I was far from the boat. I was a super snorkeler. And I often broke the rules, never snorkel alone. I could never get enough of it. 

Then there was that time I was snorkeling alone, far from shore with a shark in the Bahamas…

I could go on….

MoSt NYPC prompt # 1, a haiku

** Prompt # 1 (for December 15):

View this email in your browser

You and a haiku
in the first throes of winter
tapping out kindness.

Greetings, Poets, and Welcome to NYPC 15! Okay, here we go… For your first poem——and in keeping with what passes for NYPC tradition: write a haiku. This year, write to the energies of kindness, mercy, grace, compassion, and/or generosity of spirit. Feel free to create a haiku series of instances of kindness, etc. if it’s difficult to touch on these themes in just 17 syllables.  —Gary Thomas

Remembering Mary Smith Taylor, & a backstory of The Birds, & Warm Springs Dam

As I was moving boxes of old papers, I stumbled upon some writing fragments in a copybook dating back to a time before I became a writer. As I added the nascent scraps, written in a naive, childish hand (though I was 22), to my blog, and as I transcribed my notes, I also uncovered writing fragments with little pockets of memory attached. 

As I followed a wild hunch, I discovered that I was indirectly related by marriage to my Native American studies teacher, Mary Taylor, who was Coast Miwok. Then, I discovered a link that also led to the Warm Springs dam project (1974-1984), thanks to the internet. The aha! I always wondered how I became involved with the rescuing of native Pomo basket sedges.

Mary Taylor was a Bodega Bay Smith of Captain Stephen Smith infamy—who at 57, married a 16-year old Peruvian, Manuela Torres, in order to claim the Rancho Bodega land grant, but Smith also had a Coast Miwok "wife," Tsupu. The story goes, there were others.

Their son, Bill Smith had 12 children with Rosalie Charles after his first Miwok wife, Walla Walla, died. The Smith clan was a massive clan, with whom I would later be related to by marriage, when Bill Smith's youngest son, Young Eagle Smith, married my widowed aunt, Mary Azalie Howard Reilly (her husband Myles was my uncle) at St. Eugene's Church in Santa Rosa. 

I remember talking to Mary Taylor at the wedding reception in Santa Rosa. And I was puzzled as to why she was at our family wedding. Thanks to the internet which most definitely wasn't around in 1975, I was able to place her as Young's older sister. Wow! So my wild hunch wasn’t off.

GIVEAWAY

For instance, my floor is covered with discarding clothing, 

of other selves, Goodwill bound. I take photos—for taxes, I say. 

The 1920s tuxedo with its silk lapels, victim of catering ventures, 

next to bright summer dresses, tropical sheaths that held promise,

the blouses and over-shirts that shielded shoulders from the sun, 

the closeted unmentionables that kept the wobbly bits in line,

old knee braces, banished to the discard heap. The things we rescue:

a dress is given a last-minute reprieve, perhaps to be repurposed. 

Yet I know I will probably never wear its next incarnation.

The urge to hoard facsimiles of texture and floral meadows 

is entwined with memory—for a future that will never come. 

None of us knowing if distant visas of summer will arrive. 

Call it Covid, call it cancer, or fate striking at any given moment. 

Call it a Thanatos approach to death lurking in every corner, 

this moment shapeshifting, perhaps severed from chronology, 

with only a handful of digital photographs surviving the tangible.

Last night’s rain on the roof is already a distant memory. 

Today arrives like a knife. As we approach the long shadows of solstice, 

winter grips our breath as we steam ahead—locomotives of a lost era. 

Meanwhile, the chains in the bilge of the coffin ships of self 

remind us the death knell of distant bells is playing a dirge for the soul.

12/13/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Robin redbreast

One summer evening, I was crossing the Church St. footbridge over the River Teith in Callendar, Scotland, when a small bird hopped up to me, expectantly eying my red boot. I let out a little squeal of delight when I recognized what he was. A real robin! I didn’t dare move for fear I would disturb or harm him. 

Of course I had no idea that the diminutive European robin redbreast of English literature and fairytale fame, a flycatcher, was a bird of a completely different feather than our rather robust north American robin, a large thrush built like a Sherman tank. Or a hefty bird in hand.

Both birds are more orange than red, but there, the similarity ends. The word for the color orange was a linguistic newcomer to 16th c. Britain. In those days, the color choices were either yellow or red, or both. But robin red-yellow breast doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. And as it turns out that there are many species of birds that are called robins the world over. Australia’s flame robin is similar in size to our American robin.

Callendar was home to the famous Scottish outlaw, Rob Roy McGregor, or Raibeart Ruadh MacGriogair. Rob, or Robin was a diminutive form of Robert. In this case, Roy was an Anglicized form of Ruaidh, or the red one. Rob Roy Way separates the Highlands from the Lowlands. 

And Rob Roy, a Jacobite rabble-rouser, was a cattle rustler cum folk hero. The Highland outlaw, immortalized by Sir Walter Scott, became a legend within his own lifetime. Liam Neeson made for a big braw rogue in the movie.

The lingering twilight on the footbridge spanning the Teith River was beautiful. The long golden hours of summer, were as good as it gets. As I was taking photos of the river reflections, a tiny orange-breasted bird hopped right up to me on impossibly thin legs, and promptly fell in love with one of my red Reebok boots. 

I had never seen an European robin before, I had only heard about them from my Irish grandmother, and of course the Mother Goose nursery rhyme and finger games came to mind—for species identification purposes only, of course. 

Little Robin Redbreast
Sat upon a rail;
Niddle noble went his head,
Widdle waggle went his tail.— Little Robin Redbreast

There are many apocryphal stories associated with robins, mostly to do with Jesus and purgatory. They covered the bodies of two dead children with leaves in Babes of the Wood. In Irish mythology to kill a robin is to invoke bad luck for the rest of your life. There is no cure. They’ve become a ubiquitous symbol of Christmas, featured on Christmas cards and postage stamps. And of course, they’re also associated with Robin Hood, defender of the poor.

Legend has it that when Jesus was dying on the cross, the robin, then simply brown in colour, flew to his side and sang into his ear in order to comfort him in his pain. The blood from his wounds stained the robin's breast, and thereafter all robins carry the mark of Christ's blood upon them. —Wiki

It was not the first time my red Reeboks were siren sentinels to robins. Once, while I was exploring the Crystal Lakes rift near San Francisco, an American robin, perhaps seeking a sole-mate, became equally enamored of my red boot. 

I had to stand patiently on the Callander footbridge in the gloaming until the little love affair with my boot was over. The fading of the light brought a close to this little romance. Pure magic.

 robin redbreast

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Hoppity-hop picking in Sonoma County

Historic Walters Ranch Hop Kiln, Westside Road, Healdsburg, built by Angelo Soldini in 1905. California Historical Landmark No. 627 ©️ Maureen Hurley ca. 1981.

Before Prohibition, Sonoma County led the nation in the production of hops. Hops, a beer preservative, was first planted near the Laguna de Santa Rosa in 1858, and by 1899, more than 2000 acres were in full production. A story from 1900 in the San Francisco Chronicle estimated that 7,500 acres of hops were planted in Sonoma. From the early 1900s to about 1940, hops, not grapes, was king.

“Sonoma County produces the finest quality of hops grown on the Pacific Coast….there is more lupulin and a stronger aroma…which brings from one cent to two cents per pound more money in the market.”—Sunset Magazine Homeseekers’ Bureau, 1915

Apparently the top dollar paid for the superior California-grown hops was London, England. 

“From 1915 until 1922 California was the leading hop-producing state in the Union." (Tinged with Gold: Hop Culture in the United States, Michael A. Tomlan).

Hops (Humulus lupulus) related to cannabis, originated in Egypt and China; there is also a wild species native to the US. With hops, it's all about the lupulin. The unfertilized female blossom, or cone, laden with yellow lupulin powder and resin, is used to preserve and flavor beer. The hops varietals grown in Sonoma County were far superior to hops grown in other regions. During the 1930s, Sonoma County produced over 30 million pounds of dried hops.

Hop production survived Prohibition and the Volstead Act of 1919, but languished, shall we say, even tanked? during the post-war economy—despite the fact that Sonoma County was a bootleg capital of California. 

The use of nitrate fertilizers also introduced a mildew blight which ultimately killed the hops industry. By the 1960s, hops was no longer commercially viable, though escaped volunteers grew along the Russian River along with the native wild grape vines.

My first boyfriend's mother Leeta (a Petaluman who went to school with Lloyd Bridges) used to earn her pocket money harvesting hops (and fruit) every summer. During hop-picking-time, she waxed on poetically how families camped out under the stars all summer long picking fruit. 

However, she said that picking hops was brutal on the hands. Not to mention feet—they used stilts to reach the trellised hop buds. Hopping for hops. She preferred picking pears and prunes to hops. Hop picking season was short, at the end of summer. In 1940, when his hop pickers went on strike, Florian Dauenhauer of Santa Rosa invented a mechanical hop harvester that is used to this day.

During the 1990s, I was at Kat & Boz WIlliams' home on Peaks Pike Road in Graton and they served me steamed hop shoots and buds for dinner—they tasted like asparagus—and I was even given a furry feisty hop vine to take home, but it just wouldn’t grow under an oak tree in Forestville. It needed more sunlight. Or I was a lousy hop grower.

Hop-picking at Healdsburg, Cal. photo: MD Silverstein —Healdsburg Shed