In the Western Hemisphere, the decimation of populations of this species and other wading birds during the early twentieth century by overhunting helped spark the formation of conservation and environmental organizations, as well as of laws protecting these birds. Indeed, the Great Egret is the organizational symbol for one of the oldest such groups in the United States, the National Audubon Society. Photo by Steve Thompson. Text by Birds of North America/Online.
There’s something perversely satisfying about stepping on an acorn and hearing it crack beneath my feet. This year was especially entertaining as it was a “mast” year for the tophat-wearing nuts. (According to Pat Rubin, a writer for The Sacramento Bee, that’s what experts call a year when acorns are beyond plentiful.) Rubin explains why it’s been such a prolific season:
“…the wet spring of 2006 was the beginning of this year’s bumper acorn crop, says Ken Menzer, arborist for the city of Folsom. During March 2006, it rained 21 of 31 days. ‘It’s a two-year process. We need to have a really wet year, particularly a wet spring, then a dry spring,’ Menzer says.
2007 was a much drier spring, and all of the flower catkins the trees produced because of the previous wet spring had a chance to be pollinated. Says Menzer: ‘If it had rained as much as it did the year before, a lot of the pollen would have been washed off, and we’d have very few acorns this year.’”
My husband Steve and I have come a long way since our first Thanksgiving together. We were 20 at the time, living in a cabin in Trinidad, California, 250 miles from home. I’d never cooked a turkey before and there wasn’t much chance of impressing Steve with my culinary expertise, but I optimistically lugged a 12-pound bird home from Safeway, then whipped up a batch of stuffing the night before. On Thanksgiving morning, when it came time to actually dress the bird, I realized the thing had two holes – one on top and one at the bottom – and I had no clue which end served as the receptacle for sautéed onions and bread crumbs. I called my mother to ask.
“Mom! I’m ready to stuff the turkey. Which hole does the dressing go in?”
Snort. Laugh. Little sip of eggnog. “Oh, Rennnneee!”
Mom clued me in, and I stuffed the bird, then popped him into the oven.
Steve and I walked up to Patrick’s Point State Park while our bird incinerated, which we guessed might take an hour or two, since, regardless of setting, our gas oven cooked everything at 500 degrees. Sure enough, the little guy was done maybe 90 minutes later – crunchy on the outside, crunchy on the inside, just the way Steve liked it.
It was a crazy, happy time, and we were so grateful to be together. I’m still grateful – for Steve, our children, our parents, and our family and friends. I love you all so much, and as you spend time with your own friends and family this week, know that I’m wishing you all the best for a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Just finished Pete Fromm’s INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES, a story about the seven months Pete spent alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness guarding salmon eggs. There is much to love in this book, and several times I laughed out loud, as I thoroughly related to Pete’s fascination in his younger days with the mountain-man mystique. In describing himself as a nineteen year old about to embark on his winter-long endeavor, he says:
“At the last instant I remembered to buy a percolator and a few pots and pans, things I’d never owned or used. And finally I added a hundred pounds of potatoes, saying I’d dig a food cache to keep them from freezing. I didn’t really have any idea how to make such a thing, but the word “cache” was always creeping up in the mountain man books. It had a certain sound to it.”
I remember years ago reading a paperback based on the movie “Jeremiah Johnson,” and thinking warm biscuits slathered in bear grease must be the best thing going. I even fantasized about homesteading in Alaska, going so far as to buy a laundry basket and a spatula and other items I’d need for my new life in the wilds. I too was 19, and had never held an ax or caught a fish or picked a berry from a vine. But life in Alaska sounded divine.
The thing about Pete’s book is that it makes me realize how completely insane my plan was, and how much I missed by never having tried.
Buy this book, and when you’re done with it, stash it alongside Ron Carlson’s. Then sally forth and write your story!
When I wrote my October 31 blog, “Ron Carlson Writes a Story,” I didn't know I’d want to follow up a few days later, but having finished his book two nights ago (a slim volume comprised of 112 pages), and having dog-eared 11 of those pages and scribbled copious notes in the margins, there’s a passage I’d like to share where he discusses how uncomfortable it is to reach the point in your story where you don’t know where you’re going. Here’s what he says:
“But I am nervous. I’m thinking I’d like to get some coffee. I’m thinking I’d like the phone to ring and have it be any of ten people who would call and say meet me for coffee. A little coffee here after typing for an hour or so, why not? Stretch the legs, that’s it, and then while I’m in the kitchen, peek outside at the other world, see what’s happening, breathe the larger air, witness the passing traffic, every car full of writers who have already given up.”
Writers who have already given up.
I read that line twice, and then once more, knowing that was me, in 1998, a writer who’d given up.
I remember the night exactly – the feel of damp air on my skin as I walked home from a neighbor’s house, the streetlight glowing pink in the evening fog. I remember too the envy and anguish I felt over my neighbor’s excitement, and how difficult it was to share his joy. He’d just finished a novel, and believed, like we all do in those very early days, that the world was waiting with open arms to receive his special gift.
I’d been a writer, too, for a while, but put it aside to financially help our family. It was the right thing to do at the time, but nevertheless, I made a promise to myself that night that if I ever got another chance to write full time, I would never ever give up; that I’d keep at it forever, if that’s what it took, to write a novel a publisher would buy.
The other day, I was visiting my husband’s 96-year-old grandmother in her assisted-living facility when she leaned over and asked, “When you gonna sell that book?”
“Probably when I’m 96,” I said, “and living in assisted-care.” She laughed, and I did too.
And though I don’t know when I’ll get published, I do know I’m a writer who will not give up, so when Ron Carlson looks out his window at all those passing cars, I will not be in even one of them, but at home, nervous and thinking about coffee, and getting the work done.
The Sacramento Bee ran a piece in today’s paper by reporter Gina Kim on the origin of idioms, which, according to David Simpson, an English professor at UC Davis, is a “very loose term that can mean anything from the colloquial to a metaphor.”
Here’s a snippet from the article:
“‘It’s a way people establish subcultures with each other,’ (Simpson) says. ‘My kids, like totally whatever, are inserting themselves in a certain segment of the youth culture.’ So idioms and slang – such as the term ‘cool,’ which came from the jazz subculture – are born and spread within these groups.' It’s like birds and the slight variations in their songs. ‘I think language is the same,’ Simpson says, ‘just another kind of birdsong.’”
(The idiom “eats like a bird,” is inaccurate, by the way, as most birds eat 25-50 percent of their body weight every day.)
Idioms and slang are not only part of our subculture, but age-related as well. While working for a web-development company in Atlanta, I was reminded just how young my colleagues were when I mentioned I was attending a winding over the weekend. A bright-eyed woman of perhaps 22 turned to me and said, “What’s a wing ding?” Surprised she didn’t know, I asked an older coworker (she was maybe 25) if she knew what it was. “Sure,” she said without hesitation. “It’s a font.”
Ahem. Well, yes, but I was talking about a party…for geezers, apparently.
