The Sparkling Pacific

I am really grateful that we made the trip by land over this massive country of ours. It was such a huge transition that I needed the long hours of driving and watching the land change. I have been through many corners of this country before, but mostly in my early twenties, and the wild western landscapes reminded me of my wild, indomitable spirit at that time. The wild mountains and ranges of the southwest feel like part of my personal landscape and past. This time I viewed things more calmly, but no less lovingly or critically. As Ani Difranco said….”and you’re surrounded by a world full of things that you just can’t excuse.” I love this country, there is no place on earth like it and our story is like nothing else, so full of hope and promise and brutality and almost magical good fortune on occasion. This country of ours is so rich in beauty and resources and story. And sometimes so horrifying in its abuses of those gifts.

In our drive through the belly and the bowels of America over the last week we have seen some excruciating beauty and some stunning horrors, next to or juxtaposed on each other on the side of the highway. The desolate, abandoned downtowns of Oklahoma ringed by corporate chains and lot after lot after lot of evangelical churches. The welcoming bustle and pride of a popular small town burger joint at lunchtime on a Saturday. The muddy, stinking factory farm beef feedlots in the Texas panhandle. The smell of sage and the magic and energy of the high desert in New Mexico. The incredible charm and plethora of beautiful things in Santa Fe. The unnatural, orderly, layered earth of strip mines and leachfields cutting into the mineral rich buttes of western New Mexico and Arizona. The red rock canyon walls of Sedona glowing in the sunrise as Oak Creek flows through the sycamores and the canyon wren trills its descending song. That miraculous, green jewel, the true desert oasis of Palm Springs amidst the creosote flats, using its precious groundwater on pesticide laden golf courses and misters evaporating gallons upon gallons of water each evening over bar patrons sitting on the patios. So much beauty and horror right next to each other!


Our arrival in L.A. was no different as drove through the scorched desert passes in 100 plus heat, and down into the LA basin, descending into a cloud of blue hazy smog. LA spread out in front of us like the great, stinking, hulking beast of a city that it is. The box stores and highway passes woven together over islands of trash, with flashing billboards of seminude women and famous TV stars sparkling overhead. We sped and wove through the traffic, still headed west. The I-10 finally dipped into a tunnel and shot us out onto the edge of the sparkling blue Pacific, with big sandy beaches stretching ahead and bluffs covered with glass mansions and outrageous flowers waving in the refreshing breezes. We tucked back up Temescal Canyon to our little rented house with the big back yard full of ever blooming flowers and a seemingly endless stream of hummimgbirds and butterflys. Beauty amidst the horror.

In the last three days we have celebrated Shannon’s birthday as we dropped her off at college for the first time. We have scheduled Nick for classes at his new school. We have moved a truckload of furniture off of the lawn and into the house. We have figured out what we forgot. We have dressed up and attended a movie premier. Nick had his first job as an extra in a film. We have driven quite a bit on congested highways and ridden our bikes on bluffs above the pacific. We have heard the waves early in the morning. We have eaten Mexican. We have seen and smelt the massive plumes of smoke from the wildfires in La Canada. We have witnessed the pain of teenage hearts in transition. We have played with the dogs in the backyard. We hung some pictures. And today we walked through the local farmer’s market with fresh figs and berries and gorgeous purple eggplants overflowing amongst the children and dogs and friends chatting under the flawless, sunny blue sky. The journey through this big, wild country of ours is over and the bigger adventure is beginning. Right now I think that I am just trying to keep my feet on the ground, and feel out the earth here as my spinning head comes to rest it’s eyes on this place as my new home.

Made it to the Mighty Mississippi!

(this is actually the banks of the Oconaluftee)
Today was an epic road trip day! We started out in that lovely haven of the hip hillbilly, Ashville, NC. I felt so right at home. Vermont, my native homeland, is kind of a northwoods Appalachia, and the combination of food traditions, folk art, local farms in the hills, a mixed population of hippies, yuppies and hillbillies, plus those lovely, comforting green mountains made me feel settled right in. This morning we were still pretty full from a dinner last night at the Tupelo Honey Cafe including fried green tomatoes on basil grits garnished with tupelo honey of course (yum!), and the butteriest, sugariest, yummiest pecan pie ever. Anyway, so we grabbed a quick breakfast bite and headed for the hills. The Smokey Mountains actually. We drove off of the highway and up and up through winding valleys. We stopped and bought some sourwood honey, fresh peaches and muscadines from a roadside stand. We were listening to Levon Helm's new album "Dirt Farmer", which is a beauty. He's returned to his roots and he's really got that 'high lonesome sound' as they call it. He's redone some old traditional songs, and his own songs blend with them seamlessly. There was one line sung in his ravaged voice that has been ringing in my head all day "I was born on this mountain, a long long time ago..." and then another sad one about a family that gets permanently separated from each other with a chorus of " I'll return to you dear, in the dimming of they day, as the sparrow return to the nest." As we entered into the Cherokee reservation, I was feeling overcome with waves of beauty and melancholy. In part from the misty, leafy, heartbreakingly beautiful scenery, in part from the sadness and struggle of all of the Cherokee and Appalachian people trying to make a living and hold onto their culture in this crazy world, and partly just sad because things can be just so beautiful, but they always have to change. Every time there's a change there is a loss. I know there is a gain too, but there is still a loss. Sometimes I get so sick of people and all our desires and dreams and projects and movement. I wish for a simpler life, a simpler time. There is an old Irish saying though that kind of sums up this way of thinking, "nostalgia isn't what it used to be." And I've tried the simple life and it turned out to be not that simple, and I am not a simple person, so a simple life may never actually work out for me....if such a thing could even exist anymore.
With me still slightly steeped in melancholy, we arrived at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center and walked the dogs along a trail by the Oconaluftee River. The sun shone through the leaves and dappled the river's surface. We stopped to turn around near a kiosk that said that rivers are sacred to the Cherokee, who would wash themselves in the river every morning to get rid of all bad thoughts and to bring themselves closer to their god. It also noted that 80 percent of freshwater originates in mountains, and that the water passing by our feet would end up in the Gulf of Mexico, to eventually evaporate and become freshwater again somewhere else. Now everyone knows this but I don't think about it much and that is some really cool shit! Certainly gave me an example of some healthy changes that take place in this world, and knocked my melancholy right on its ass.
We came out of the mountains and passed through Nashville for a late lunch of blackened grouper at BB King's. We asked the bartender if she was from Nashville and she admitted that no, no one in Nashville is actually from Nashville anymore. Well, maybe 5 or 6 people she said. She was from Michigan herself though she had acquired a bit of a southern accent. Tim asked her is she had country music ambitions and she said no, but her ex-fiance did, and that's how she came to be here. Now he's apparently moved on to Denver. Tim told her that she is living her own country music song. She agreed. That's about as much country music as we got in Nashville. On the way out we listened to a cd of "The Everybody Fields", a talented young group from Johnson City, Tennessee that I bet doesn't get much attention in Nashville these days.
By the time we left Nashville, and the hills changed into plains, all my bad feelings were washed away. We were rolling down the highway, listening to "Heart", (which Tim and I just discovered we both had a love of in the 80's.) We realized we ahve been on the road for a week already, (totally shocking somehow), and a week from now we will have spent our first night at our new home in CA! We were feeling pretty good and excited about our lives. After a few more hours we made it to Memphis, full of rocking and rolling energy. We drove into the city and caught a RedBird game, their local AAA baseball team. At the park I had a chicken stick for dinner, which looked like a shish kabob of very deeply friend chunks. The contents of the friend chunks ended up being not only chicken pieces, but also cheese, pickles, onions and potatoes, all fried to within an inch of their lives and put on a stick! Now that's an all-American dinner for you. Now we are parked for the night at a La Quinta owned by a very fastidious Indian family. There are lots of roses and fountains lit up with different colored lights outside, and inside everything is very clean and smells of various strange cleaning supplies. For example, the hallway smells like piney scented cleaning supply, the hallways smell like pepto-bismal scented cleaning supply, and the room itself smells like some kind of floral cleaing supply. They've done a lot of work and take great pride in their chain hotel here in Bartlett, TN. I'm glad I landed here.
Tomorrow we will cross the Mississippi. May that river as well wash away any bad thoughts and bring me closer to my God.

Prickly Burden

Written around August 8th

(me and crew at age 23 in Portland)

It’s been 3 months almost to the date since we found our L.A. house and I wrote my birthday journal entry.

I think it’s interesting that I am so not a morning person, but that’s when I write these. Fighting my way through insomnia, in the raw, exhausted moments and the clear morning quiet my most jagged feelings about my life situation come fighting their way to the surface in extreme clarity. The sun is coming up over Casco bay out the front window of my friend’s east end apartment. My first apartment in Portland, a tiny crooked little 3rd floor place with a view of the water and a rotting back porch that I loved, was just 3 houses down from here. I have seen the water from here in all it’s seasons, ice floes, fog, and glorious sunny mornings for the sailboats and tankers and tugboats and ferries like this one today.

It is exactly 1 week from the day we leave, and I am falling apart.

No move is easy and I have rarely been part of one that has involved so many life changing events at once. My husband is completely rearranging his professional and our financial lives in hope of being more able to pursue his dreams of writing and filmmaking. My step-daughter is leaving home for the first time and going to college. My oldest step=son is about to be able to really pursue his dream of acting in film in the competitive L.A. market. My youngest step-son is about to have his life changed completely by living with us half of the time during the school year, which he has never done before. And this is the end of an era of my life. And a big one. My twenties are over and I largely spent them here. I went from just out of college into my first real satisfying realm in the professional world here. I owned my first home here and went through a divorce here. I fell in love and got married again and became a fulltime step-parent here. I have watched my friends get married and have babies. My last childless friend here informed me yesterday that she is having a baby! This is a very old, very close, very good friend. The news is so bittersweet in that I am so happy for her, but so sad that I will miss it. I will be doubly losing her to a new life.

My heart doesn’t want to leave. My heart wants to stay here with my apple trees and watch my garden finish for the season. My heart wants to be able to drive to my parent’s house in VT. My heart wants to stay here and have a baby and raise him or her with my friends. Isn’t that what most women want at this point in our lives? It’s a longstanding biological and social tradition. I long for a home, a community, and a family in it. I long for the security of trusted friends and family. It’s time for me to settle down. My husband would remind me that I have that here. We aren’t selling our house. We will come back. But……we are leaving for 10 months of the year. We will cease to be a part of our friends lives in the way that we are now, and we will need to find new lives in L.A. to fill out the other 10 months of the year. We are embarking on a totally unsettling new adventure. Next week we will begin driving through the belly and the bowels of America on our way to our new westward home, visiting family, friends and old ghosts. It will be the first time that I have made the trip in almost 10 years. Pretty fitting I guess.

Today in my heart I wish it weren’t so. I wish that I was pregnant too and that I lived here and didn’t have to leave.


But I’m not, and I do.

This move has been coming for me like the tide. My love for my husband and his children has pulled me into it. I have to go. They need to go for so many reasons, and I need to be with them. And it also answers some wanderlusting some unsettled, seeking part of myself. I long to settle, I long to have a baby of my own, I long to sink my teeth into that slice of life. But…..the truth is that I have no baby, and at 32 I am finished with one career path and uncertain of the next, and the truth is that I am not settled, inner our out. Except in my love for my family, and that makes the purity of this decision trustworthy to me. I am going out there with my love for them, and a prayer. There has got to be some greater reason for this for me. What am I going to find? Faith is such a prickly thing to hold.

Leaving the Garden

Written sometime around August 6th
(this is my first peach on my peach tree to the left here...still too green)

I am preparing to leave my garden for the season. This feels quite premature. It is not even the middle of August yet here in Maine, and several of my crops have not yet come ripe. I don’t really feel ready but I need to go. Goodbye Maine, sweet land of fog and potatoes!, of fish and blueberries!, of coldness and dampness!, of tradition and roots! (like beets etc.) My life is about to change. I am pulling up and following my family to Los Angeles, that Pacific precipice of American ambitions and delusions, a place I NEVER thought I would end up.

Five years ago now I was living on a solar powered, off the grid homestead at the end of an un-maintained road in western Maine with my first husband. I had chickens and turkeys and extensive gardens that we had built by hand. We saved quite a few of our own seeds and canned or froze much of our produce. We had just incorporated as a CSA. We also worked within the surrounding communities as educators and community youth leaders. Occasionally people would come and visit our homestead and I felt that we provided an example of sustainability that could help the world, or at least help our local communities embrace more resource conservative living. My extremely unconventional lifestyle was an incredibly satisfying expression of my beliefs and ideals. I felt very strong and confident much of the time.

But my heart, that mysterious organ of true desires, didn’t agree. And I very unexpectedly fell in lightning-bolt love with another man from a very different walk of life. I got a divorce and left the homestead and all of its trials and satisfactions behind. I moved in with my new love and his several children, we married, and I became in an instant a live-in caregiver of teenagers. They’re really great teenagers, but tofu scramble or roast chicken, hand plucked and fresh from the yard were just not going to cut it for dinner anymore. It was a big adjustment in many ways. And then I unfortunately became quite ill and couldn’t work my nonprofit job or anything like it anymore. During this period I couldn’t live so starkly by my ideals, I lost many of my comfortable relationships, I lost much of my physical strength and stamina, I didn’t even have a garden for a while there. In effect everything that had held up my world and made me feel sure….it all systematically fell apart, and this emptied me out and totally broke me open.

Luckily for me a guiding light through the depths has been the complete and utter sureness of my love for my new husband and his love for me. It grew and blossomed in the darkness and saved me from a crisis of faith. I can’t argue with it. It’s so right, which must mean that through all of the upheaval, my life is headed somewhere right for me as well! I just really want to know what the destination might be though. So….as they say, (sort of), the universe helps those who help themselves. I intend to try to write my way back onto my feet.


Here is a slice of my journal entry from last May during our first visit to our new house in Los Angeles:

“It is 4:30 on the morning of my 32nd birthday. I wake up lying on the floor……like, flat on the hardwood floor on a top of a very flat, slightly damp air mattress. (In the usual mad rush of kids and dogs and work we forgot the charger for the air mattress pump.) There is no furniture, no lamps, and no hot water. It is just before dawn and it sounds like a jungle in the garden out there. Yesterday at this time I was waking to foghorns on the stormy, grey, austere Atlantic outside my house. Now the fog from the Pacific rolls through the outrageous tumbling bouganvillea and hummingbird filled trumpet flowers and jasmine that populate this strange seeming fairyland that is California.

All of this reminds me of my backpacking days in my early 20’s. Living out of a bag, sleeping on floors, surrounded by birds all of the time. Only then I was young and energetic. I feel infinitely older now, and it’s not just from the night on the floor.

The previous five years have proceeded like a ravine slicing through my life, carving the way from my twenties into my 30’s. My transformation has been dramatic, extreme, full of depths and heights, and totally unavoidable in order to get to the other side. I prayed for change and it came, as always. I just haven’t made sense of it yet.”

In this blog I’m going to try to make some sense of things…I hope. I intend to revisit my memories of my recent past in an attempt to knit myself together again and heal the chasm of the last five years so that I can step onto higher ground on the other side. Bring the old me integrated into the new me, pull together the east and the west in my life. I am going to try to write at least every week, reaching back into my memories of the adventures and routines of my previous life, and at the same time document what kind of new life I find and build for myself in the City of Angels.