We Have Some Answers

Here is another sunrise photo. I took this pic Sunday morning. I'm posting it because some of our commenters have asked how it is that we live on the west coast and can watch the sun rise over the Pacific. It's a good question. We live on a bend of the Monterey Bay that lets us look south and east, although considerably more east than south. Because there is such an expanse of sky out the window, we do get to see the colors of both the rising and setting sun. We don't see the sunset, per se, but the entire sky is typically colorful from one end to the other.

The above photo was taken from the upstairs window. The window is not clean (my bad, Roger's too! Hah!). Who has time between rain, fog, and wind to climb out on the slanty roof and wash these ancient pieces of wavy glass? Not me. Still, it is a pleasure to look out on any day, at any time. But sunrises and sunsets turn the world into art of a million colors. Hard to look away, ever.
This sunset photo was taken Sunday evening looking almost due south from the same upstairs window. A subdued event, but still gives you an idea of what we can see. I was leaning as far as I could and framed the shot with the window frame in it, so you could have a sense of our perspective.

Some of our lovely commenters have also asked how my mom is doing. My mom is doing incredibly well. She spent the holidays at my sister's. It's been a year since she was there last when her health began to decline. She's really back to her old self, and truly she's better than EVER. Quite a wonderful thing to know that an 83 year old body can recover and heal. Woohoo!!

Other than that, my sister just learned that her health insurance premiums are being raised beyond what she can afford to pay. Almost as much as her mortgage. I am starting to consider some matchmaking so she can marry someone with health insurance. That's what it has come to in our country. Appalling is not even the right word, but it will suffice.

And on a final political note, given the weekend's nightmare events in the middle east, I wrote the following haiku.

nothing reminds more
than flames of ardent worship
that there is no god

Will the New Year return us to some sanity, please.

West Coast Lady

How lucky to have photographed this West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella) on Sunday, our first day back at the coast after our long journey south. So much can transpire in such a short amount of time. Realizations about age and life, about strength and desire, about expectations and disappointments. Against the backdrop of one of the most important elections of several generations, we confront the personal, the smallest facets of what it means to be human, to grow old, to have to summon from one's deepest reserves the simplest energy to merely go on.

Beautiful West Coast Lady, when I see of you, I think of my mother who started life as an east coast lady, but who now lives here on the edge of time before it shifts to tomorrow, in shades of light and darkness that shape everything. I look at your beautiful wings and remember the bad knee on her good leg that must support the shattered ankle on the bad. So much pain. Is this how all things must finally go?

On Halloween in Leisure World, the gated retirement community where my mother lives, the retired gatekeepers were dressed as a nun and the good witch of the north. The good witch waved her wand and said, "Welcome to the Land of Oz."

Then she said, "No, really this is the land of Was."

Yes.

It is the Land of Was.

For a moment I thought of all the graveyards and of all the ashes scattered in the four directions-- all those artificial hips and artificial knees that promised everything, but most importantly, a future.

We left my mother in the kind, capable, and good hands of Nening, a woman from the Philippines, who in her own country was a civil engineer. We interviewed four home care agencies before we found this gentle, caring woman. When she came into my mother's bedroom, she and my mother hugged right away. It was the sign we were waiting for.

We're trying to figure out what it means to be human. No culture, no community, no history. We make it up as we go along. There are no reality TV shows about this. We are all that there is.

ON TUESDAY PLEASE GO VOTE.

OBAMA!

Updates and Surprises!

We're here in Laguna Woods, just a few short miles from Laguna Beach in southern California. My mother was moved to a skilled nursing facility Thursday afternoon and will begin her physical therapy soon. It will be a long road back home, to here, where I'm sitting at her dining room table typing these words. Ankle breaks are not easy, and that's especially true for old bones. We are hopeful, and my mother is incredibly strong-- both physically and mentally for the efforts that lie ahead.Still, I worry. How could I not? I woke at 3:00 am Thursday morning and could not fall back to sleep. After a while, I decided I should just turn on the computer and take a look at the news. It's all been bleak lately, and the 4:00 am perusal confirmed that was still true. Then I noticed there was new mail in our newdharmabums yahoo account with the subject line "duck in a box." What in the world could that be about, I wondered?
Aha! A stunning surprise awaited us. Back in September we wrote about a seeing an unfortunate duck that was being held in a box, in very distressing circumstances. In the post I was lamenting how some humans treat animals. But here was an email with tenderest story about how that duck, the very duck whose fate I had been lamenting, had been rescued by two wonderful and kind-hearted people. They wrote to tell us the news. The duck is now living with other ducks and returning to "normal" duck life. As the note said, eating grubs and rooting around the yard.
Is that not the most hopeful story? And then to top it all off, another email arrived as I was typing this post. It was from our dear neighbors back in Port Townsend. They sent these photos of the bobcat mama and her little bobcat babe. Sure made us miss our old backyard, but how could any heart not be completely lifted into orbit by such great news and photos? I know the stock market is crashing, and the world simply looks bleak, but my mother is in a convalescent hospital only two days after surgery, Rose the Duck is free and being lovingly cared for, and bobcats still saunter beautifully through the woods on a quiet October afternoon.

A Wednesday with Few Words

Today we are driving to southern California to see my mother who took a serious fall late Friday night and fractured her ankle in three (not two, as originally reported) places. She had surgery on Tuesday morning. All went well, but she will need several months of physical therapy. For now she will be completely off her feet and will soon be in convalescent care for a while. We're heading down to sit by her bedside in the hospital and oversee the move to the next facility. It's one of the reasons we moved back to the bay area. Close enough to get to her without too much trouble. Okay, the thought of driving through all of Los Angeles fills us with dread and trepidation, still we can get there in a long day's drive.

Not sure when we'll be able to update the blog. Until then, here's a photo of a sunset we watched the other evening. The sky was a different and changing color in every direction, and seemed suddenly bigger than what we could possibly see. It felt good to feel so small.

Suburbia Birds

above neighborhoods
shopping malls and parking lots
wild birds fly free

on backyard fenceposts
wee birds with their yellow rumps
stand out like candy

Update on life: My mom is out of the hospital. She's feeling much better, but tired. The doctors have no idea what's underlying her illnesses. There is a PET scan in her future. We're hoping for the absolute best outcome, of course.

Update on politics: We have become completely disillusioned, disgruntled, disheartened, and disenchanted. Don't like what's become of our democracy. We're old. We remember when it was not always like this. We are screaming most of the time. It's a good thing you don't hear us. We curse a blue streak.

Rest Stop

We drove back to Santa Cruz Wednesday. It's a 350 mile trip from my sister's back here. We know that part of Highway 101 pretty well, having made the journey many many times. Yet, we still managed to have a few surprises along the way, even though we stopped at the same old rest areas and parks. We saw three bald eagles for the very first time here in California. No photographs, but a sweet sight nonetheless.
One of our favorite stops is a little cliffside park in Pismo Beach. Quite a lovely spot to stop for a picnic lunch. It's midway, so we stop whether we're heading north or south. We always see pelicans here, but this time, we saw sea lions and this very friendly Heerman's Gull. (Check out those dark legs and feet!)
RCWBiologist suggested that we look for Yellow-billed Magpies, and it reminded us that we always have seen magpies in the rest areas. We stopped in one around Hunter-Legget, soon after we saw the Bald Eagles, but did not see any magpies. We did however get a good eyeful of this fantastic Red-Shouldered Hawk.

Still it was a long, tiring and sad journey. While we were heading north my mother was readmitted to the hospital. When we left on Tuesday she was really recovering well, but Tuesday night things took a turn for the worse. My sister is down there with her, and she also has some great caregivers who are looking after her. We plan to head back down when she is released from the hospital, or if the situation warrants a more quick return. Until then, we're going to take a nice long nap. We're beat.

We Took a Breath; We Looked Around

We are still in Leisure World, Orange County. A retirement village of 18,000 units. Golf courses, tennis courts, and palm trees. Speed limit 25 mph, gated community, and club houses. Now that things have settled down a bit, still one more doctor's appointment Monday afternoon, we have started looking for the little bits of wildlife that seep through the cracks.
First we noticed a flock of Bushtits in the flowers and bushes outside our window.
Then we saw this crazy paperbark tree. We'd never seen anything like it. A little research reveals that it is from Australia, a Melaleuca quinquenervia. Cool to look at, but an invasive species in Florida and Hawaii.
Then, I went to get the mail and heard a familiar cry from the sky. I couldn't believe it. I brought the mail in, and could still hear it from inside the house. So, I grabbed the camera and ran to the parking lot to see where it might be. There it was, in the tree at the edge of the parking area. A wonderfully wild Red-shouldered Hawk. Like a good friend, a reminder of the world.

Thanks so much for all your kind comments and emails. My mother is recovering. Little things are still going wrong, but the big picture is looking good. We are hopeful.

From Toilet to Tap

One of the reasons Roger and I moved to Washington was for the water. Not that it had any profound properties like magic elixirs, just the very fact of it. It rains in Washington. There is no water shortage. But now that we are considering moving back to California we are facing the prospect of coming back to a state that has to provide water for a population of nearly 38 million people.

Water. There's simply not enough of it to go around. But this post isn't about the coming shortages, the environmental crises. Nope.

It's about reclamation. I think it is a remarkably good idea to reclaim sewage and treat it so that it can be used to water golf courses, flush toilets, even irrigate agriculture. But, I don't think it should ever be used for drinking water. It sounds like a profoundly uncivilized and vile idea taking effluence and turn it into drinking water. Sorry. That's just disgusting.

I've learned that such practices are well under way in parts of the world, and yesterday's LA Times informed me that Orange County will be unveiling a state of the art reclamation plant that will be providing drinking water in a year. Here's how they're doing it:

Basically, the facility takes treated sewage, which would have been discharged into the sea, and runs it through an advanced filtration system.
snip
The effluent is first pumped into the reclamation plant from the sanitation district's sewage treatment facility next door. The brackish water, which smells of deodorizer, flows into 26 holding basins equipped with 270 million micro-filters -- thin straws of porous material with holes no bigger than three-hundredths the thickness of a human hair.

From there, the water is forced under high pressure through a series of thin plastic membranes housed in rows of white cylinders. Next, it is dosed with hydrogen peroxide and bombarded with ultraviolet light to neutralize any remaining contaminants.

At this point, the water is free of bacteria, viruses, carcinogens, hormones, chemicals, toxic heavy metals, fertilizers, pesticides and dissolved pharmaceuticals.

Though it is good enough to drink, the scrubbing isn't finished. Once the state approves, up to 70 million gallons of treated water a day will be pumped into the county's giant underground aquifer. It will be cleansed further as it percolates through the earth to depths up to 1,000 feet.

"This is as advanced a reclamation system as you are going to get right now," said the director of regulatory affairs for the Assn. of California Water Agencies..."

Would you drink this? Is it just me, or does this seem insanely wrong?

Updates:
Impersonal- It looks like Obama and Huckabee took the Iowa caucus. I don't think either of them will wind up on the the top of the ticket. Neither of them are electable. I think perhaps Iowa has finally been rendered utterly meaningless. As it should be.

Personal: My mother had an appointment with her primary care physician on Thursday. His interpretation of lab results from her emergency room visit in mid-December and her recent hospital stay was rather shocking and eye-opening. We have been seriously mislead about her condition. She actually may be experiencing congestive heart failure and needs to see a cardiologist on Monday to determine the cause of the fluid around her heart. Lab results also show that she has 30% kidney function. None of this was EVER reported to us in the hospital. Ah, American Health Care, the proverbial envy of the freakin' world, a lot of money for useless crap, like everything else in our culture. Grrrr.

Have a great weekend, friends.

Photo borrowed without permission. Chairman of the sanitation district board sampling the final product.

Life: In and Out of our Hands

What do we have control of? Not very much, when you think about it, certainly not life, suffering, or death. Maybe a little bit, when you think about smaller things like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The balance we strike must be between these things, or not. What do I know? I'm no philosopher, just a daughter, just a wife, just a Democrat watching Iowa. We want John Edwards to win. We have no control, only desire.

Hospitals can be bruising. My mother continues to mend, slowly.

(Photo of my and my mother's hands at the dinner table.)

The End of Day at the Edge of the World

Here the sun is sinking into the Pacific. At day's end, at land's edge we wonder where on earth there is peace? Has there ever been peace? Has the sun ever set on a day when no blood was shed in war or rage? Would we know ourselves in such a world?

**********
We may be away from these internets for a while. My mother was just diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. One of the reasons we came back to California is because our mothers are in their 80s, and both need our loving attention. We were supposed to see my mom for Thanksgiving, but Roger was ill and had to have emergency surgery on Thanksgiving Eve. This month my mom was supposed to come up to observe my father's birthday with us and scatter rose petals in the bay, but she had to cancel because she wasn't feeling well. Now, a week later, we know that she is really quite ill and had to be admitted to the hospital on Thursday. We came to California to help, and so help her we must. She actually does have a speedy wi-fi connection at her place (truly the fastest connection we've ever seen) so we won't be completely disconnected, but we may be completely pre-occupied.

Please keep my mother in your thoughts, friends. She reads the blog everyday. She loves you guys.