Check Engine Light

I have several beginnings for a blog post in my head this week, and no middles or ends. Truth is, my engine isn’t functioning very well at the moment.

1. My check engine light came on Friday. Again. It’s probably nothing. Again. But I will have to get it checked out. Again. It is very likely that I have written about this before; but it seems one such reminder to check in with my engine is not sufficient. Either in my car or in my life. It all comes back to the spiral: we spiral in and out, it is the way of life. Significant moments and learnings and experiences return over and over, allowing us to harvest insight.

2. For the first time in at least 16 years, I did not plant pansies this fall. In North Carolina it wouldn’t be too late, perhaps. Well, maybe it is. But I don’t live in North Carolina anymore, so it doesn’t really matter. It’s too late here. The rains and the gray have begun; the warmth is done. Unlike North Carolina, once it’s gone here, it’s gone for the duration. There isn’t enough warmth to give pansies a chance to establish themselves before winter. And I don’t really care that I didn’t plant them. And maybe that is the real issue.

[For what it's worth, the folk lore about the width of the brown band on the wooly bear caterpillar, when you mix science with lore, is that if it says anything at all about the severity of winter, which it doesn't, it is more about the one past than the one coming.]

3. The rains and the gray skies seem to have settled in here in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe I will get tired of it; I am not going to claim that I won’t. To make such claims, too often means eating one’s words. However, I love the weather over the valley; and I have not longed for the 80 degree sun that North Carolinians were still enjoying earlier in the week. I really have not. I am, however, longing for a fire in the fireplace, a cat on the blanket over my lap, candles on the mantle, and birds at the feeder on the deck that I can watch from my spot on the sofa, maybe a pizza or a bowl of pasta or popcorn-for-dinner while watching a movie on TV. None of that is going to happen this winter. So what is going to happen? How do we breath life into what is in front of us, rather than dying inside for what is gone?
 

4. I got from yoga to South Sound shopping center without consulting Phoebe or getting lost, for the first time this week. I was tempted to make one or another of the same wrong turns I always make, but I didn't succumb. I forged on, trusting that the right road was going to come up eventually－and that when it did I would turn the right direction onto it.



And three notes about the mixture of spiraling into new life and regret for the one I left behind:

1. Tuesday’s local paper contained a story about being gay in Lewis County; or more specifically about R-74, the marriage equality referendum on the ballot. The first two columns were an interview with my sister. The facing page was an interview with my mother on the referendum and the similarities she sees to the discrimination she grew up with in the deep south, and included a picture of my mother and sister. A previous page included a guest commentary by me, tangentially on the same topic. The Staebler women are taking on the world, or at least the city. My father would have said that we are locally world famous. The best part was a guest commentary in the next issue, by a man with a transgender child. If the out and honest stories that we were a part of, helped him not be afraid to tell his story, I am especially gratified. How many others, whom we will never know about, found their way because of us?
 
2. I need to find a new coffee shop, and it pisses me off. I miss my Cafe Carolina. The guy who sleeps in a tent and lives the rest of the time at Santa Lucia, it seems, and who talks non-stop to people at other tables, picked me as his target today. Maybe because I was the only one in there. Just as I was about to either leave or be more forthright than simply ignoring him－which wasn’t working－someone else came in and sat down with me, at my table. I know I should be more open to the possibilities that come from unexpected encounters, but I really wasn’t in the mood. And I was trying to get started on this post; and the thought train screeched to a dead stop, just as the did the one on the tracks beyond the window. The problem is, the only other coffee shop in town is Starbucks, which is not an option.

3. My new grandson is being baptized today in North Carolina and I am not there. Emma and Wynne came to visit last night, and we are going to brunch with my sister and a birthday-celebrating friend this morning.

New life and new opportunities and missing the old one spiral together, passing each other as they burst out and close in.


And that is what has been swirling in my head as I try to come up with a topic for this post. At the bottom of it all, is the sure knowledge that my check engine light is on. And I really don’t know, yet, where to take it for repairs.

Olly Olly in Free

"Olly Olly in Free." A phrase, or a variant of the words known to children playing hide-and-seek. While the seeker counts, the runners hide. As the seeker seeks, the runners either stay hidden－hoping their hiding place is a good one－or take the risky move of slipping out of hiding and sneaking to home base without being caught. Upon arrival, they call out "Olly olly in free!" to announce having pulled one over on the seeker. Or at least that's how I played it.

I slipped home yesterday, after traveling 3,985 miles across 12 states over 15 days in my 1998 Honda CRV (CuRVy)－which now boasts over 210,000 miles on the odometer－and with my 12-year-old diabetic cat, Smudge. We were helped along the way by Phoebe, our GPS navigator－and by friends and family in five states who gave me a bed and more; and by those who walked with us in spirit via FaceBook and text messages. Olly olly in free!

When Phoebe Goodell Judson, my ancestor introduced to readers in a previous blog post, traveled by covered wagon from Ohio to nearly the same spot I am occupying today, she faced outrageous perils: not enough food, illness and even death, broken wagon wheels, Indian attacks, wild animals, bad roads over mountain passes and through the North American desert (was there a "road"?) with no navigation system. The risks really boggle the mind. Smudge and I faced car trouble (with unneeded AAA back-up), full hotels, brush fires, wrong turns or missed ones (with Phoebe for help), unavailable cell phone signal here and there, dead computer, hotel cat-hiding places, a fall. Adventure is perilous; there is no doubt about it; but, for me, the risk is worth it.

I made a home (several of them) in three states in the southeast, but I never completely lost the feeling of being misplaced. Thirty-six years later I have returned to my soul home in the Pacific Northwest. Phoebe, following her parents and siblings from Ohio; my parents, who treked from Michigan and Tennessee; one sister, who returned home after a lengthy stay in Maryland; my niece and nephew from Virginia; my daughter from North Carolina; and now me...by wagon, automobile, and jetliner we have all made the pilgrimage to the state in the corner in search of home.

Traveling across this amazing country by car, off-interstate as much as I had time for－and given the restrictions of a traveling cat and an elderly car－has provided me with a snapshot of America. I was blessed by gift cards for gas, that couldn't be swiped at the pump, in addition to a credit card with swiping issues. Both resulted in the need to meet the locals working in gas stations. Reactions to my magnetic-strip-impaired card ranged from "I'm not supposed to punch in the number"; to having to guess at how much I needed, which they temporarily charged to my card; to "You have to leave me the card and your ID while you pump the gas"; to "Do you mind leaving the card while you pump?". Regardless of their rules and regs, I met friendly people everywhere from fancy city stations to truck stops in the tiny bergs in no-where America. Just because I can't imagine making home there, doesn't mean they haven't.

I found gardens everywhere. In the beauty of the stark white windmills rising in singles and random groupings on the hills above wind-swept deserts, their blades languidly turning around and around. In the big sky across the prairies, dotted with puffy clouds. In the sweeping grandeur of mountain passes in Wyoming, and the boxed-in-lushness of those in Colorado and Washington. In the gap-toothed smiles of the nations' working poor. In the skeletons of dead cottonwood trees flanking dry river beds and the hollow shell of a windowless farmhouse where even the low-tech windmill is stilled. In the public art of laughable grafitti-painted Cadillacs in a dusty Texas field to sober empty copper chairs by a reflecting pool in Oklahoma City.

I followed bits of the historic Trail of Tears, the Oregon Trail, and Route 66; and the newly designated Purple Heart Trail, named for America's many victims of wars across the oceans. I crossed the 45th Parallel on the open prairie and the Continental Divide in a mountain tunnel.

Yesterday, on the last day of my journey before the first day of the next part, I wept many tears as my wheels rolled over the mountainous terrain of the Blue Mountains, across the Yakima Valley and climbed again into the Cascades. On we rolled, my cat－oddly alert for the first time in days－and I. Finally, it was all familiar. We no longer had need of Phoebe as we traveled scenic highway 12.

Through the mixed conifer forests of fir, spruce, larch, and cedar as the eastern pine became more and more scarce in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. White Pass, where I skied until an accident in junior high stilled my downhill aspirations. Mt. Rainier; my mountain. The small towns of Packwood, Morton, and Mossyrock; the blueberry farm, Jackson Prairie, Mary's Corner. The connecting road between the Twin Cities of Chehalis and Centralia. Seminary Hill Road; the three-family driveway. And then the "you" "are" "here" signs my family put Burma Shave style on the fence posts to welcome me. At last we rounded the final curve to their happy faces and open arms, waiting at the end of the driveway.

And now to the beginning. I will make my new home, for a time, on the side of the hill where I spent my childhood. As Annie Dillard said, "I [have] found home, family, and the dinner table once again" (An American Childhood). Olly olly in free.