LJ Idol Week 22 - Double Sudden Death! - Open Topic
Memorial Day, 2020. A long weekend in the midst of months where work and school, the things by which I usually measure the turning of the year, are all off kilter. My daughters finished school at the end of the week before last. There was no race to the finish line right before this holiday as there usually is. The school year, despite nigh-heroic effort on the part of all the teachers, kind-of went out with a fizzle. I was loathe to send the girls down to their grandparents’ this weekend because school gave hints of some kind of online end-of-year celebration that I didn’t want them to miss out on. But nothing ever really materialized with that.
My daughters, a pair of wild Tallahassee Tree Monkeys, in their natural environment last Thursday, after we decided school was over.
So finally because my mom wanted them so badly and because they wanted to go, I met my dad partway to Yankeetown on Thursday and let the kids go with him. So far, mom and dad’s sometimes spotty internet has worked well enough for the sports meetings they’ve wanted to attend. And I have spent most of the long weekend in bed, reading Babylon 5 novels about the Psi Corps, and future wars and future plagues of that universe, which I see through different eyes in 2020 than I would have back when the show aired. I also might have had a touch more sangria than was prudent on Friday night, sitting distanced from close neighborhood friends, doing our best to solve the worlds’ problems. So for me, the weekend started very slowly indeed on Saturday morning.
It wasn’t until today, Memorial Day, that I ventured out of my neighborhood at all on this holiday weekend. I wanted to go for a run somewhere special, because today’s run is the last run in my current workout block. Today, I finish the 8 weeks of the 5k Pacer program, and while the program hasn’t improved my speed and pace to the point where I am knocking on the door of my 2020 running goal (a sub 30 minute 5k), finishing the program is still a nice milestone for me. It isn’t easy for me to find time to run, even though I much prefer the way I feel when I’m working at running regularly. Finishing the 8 week program and getting back into the range of a 35 minute 5k is something, and hopefully if I go through the program again, I’ll shave another few more minutes off before fall when maybe our local run club will start doing races again.
So, this morning I headed out to the National Wildlife Refuge at the coast, where I know there is a trail I haven’t trod before that I will likely find beautiful. It starts in low pine flat-woods, and then turns toward the even lower coast, out across the salt marsh flats along a low levy road that was filled long ago. A few of my naturalist friends have been taunting me with gorgeous wildflower pictures all week long on social media, many of which were taken in the refuge. So I’ll finish my run training in a place that I love, even knowing that there’s a decent chance I’ll have some yellow-fly and mosquito company.
Swamp Hibiscus was blooming in different spots up and down the trail I ran.
***
I am surprised when NPR isn’t broadcasting some kind of Memorial Day programming as I make the thirty minute drive out to the trail I want. Instead, the morning show topic is the fifty year anniversary of the Kent State protestors being shot. I wonder what my grandparents would think of that. Lately I wonder what my grandparents would think about a lot of things. Both of my grandfathers served in World War 2. Mom’s dad was an engineer in the Army Air Corps and Dad’s dad lied about his age in order to enlist in the Navy in time to serve in the Pacific. Mom’s dad stayed in the reserve for a while, but not long enough to be caught up in Korea. I’m very lucky that they both came home.
Sometimes I think about how both of my grandmothers proceeded their husbands in death by long stretches, and I wonder which was ultimately more wearing- being at war or holding things together at home. I think it was probably being at war, during those war years, but I also think that holding things together was anything but easy for my grandmothers, both of whom were the siblings tasked with caring for their own aging parents along with their own families.
The announcement of my mom’s parent’s wedding. My grandmother had finished her degree at that point, but she looks so young in the pictures. I thought the lady-centric headline was fun and appropriate for my navel-gazing about the roles of the sexes back in the day.
***
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we chose to live and about my relationship with the land. I love being outside. I love to camp and hike and climb, and I do those things primarily on different kinds of public land. I like being out among the king’s deer, I suppose. Sometimes the king is the state, and sometimes it is the federal government. Or, my favorite place to sport-climb semi-locally is even a county park in Alabama that also allows primitive camping. But communities I started to discover online last year and the work that I’ve been doing for Florida lately have made me think more deliberately about how I relate to the public land that I use and enjoy.
Only recently have I started to think about how much privilege is implicit in my ability to travel and camp freely, without feeling unsafe or threatened. I want everyone to have the ability to enjoy the natural spaces that I love so much, but I’m also very aware of the danger those places face of being loved to death. When I first started camping on my own, in high school, it was never very hard to get camping reservations at the state parks I loved, except at certain holidays. And it was affordable.
Now a lot of the parks where I used to make last-minute plans are hard to get any weekend camping in, even months in advance. And I have climber and hiker friends who find the state parks to be comparable to commercial camping, too expensive and amenity-based to make sense. I didn’t realize how much road-life culture there is that prides itself on not paying extra for things that aren’t necessary.
Normally, there aren’t that many weekends that I spend at home, so these pandemic months have been a real change for my little family. We have a truce, my husband and I. Roger would prefer that we spend every other weekend at home, but I have promised only one weekend a month at home. Most months (pre-pandemic) we get two weekends at home, but not every month. And some of my weekend trips are solo or just with climbers, so the rest of the family can still rest up then. It’s not that I don’t like our home. It’s just that it is so nice to escape the complexity of normal life. Normal life can start to feel like we’re just living for stuff maintenance sometimes. Like our little house has become our only destiny. Like it has been illuminated that our highest purpose is sitting around and grooming our stuff.
I just counted them up. This is my tenth weekend in a row staying at home. I think that’s surely a record for me.
***
There for a while, and still now to a lesser degree, it felt like some people wanted me to gain a lesson from this time of quarantine that I just think is all wrong. It’s hard to explain because I think that for the most part, people are well intentioned. But I am afraid that the hunker-down mentality might be encouraging us all to think of our homes as isolated safe spaces, and as the only places that we belong in, and I think there is a big fallacy in thinking that way.
The property that we own doesn’t really stand on it’s own. It’s really privileged even to look at living situations in terms of people owning property. Higher and higher percentages of Americans live in rental properties every year. Fewer and fewer people own houses. Even in Tallahassee where I would imagine percentages tend more toward home-ownership than in true metro centers, I have professional friends with families who have considered selling the homes that they own in favor of going back to renting, because home maintenance isn’t cheap or easy (also our public school districts are terrifically gerrymandered, but that is a longer rant for another day).
But even for those who own property- you can’t get to your house without the streets in the neighborhood. You don’t get water and power without utilities. The myth of a place of your own rests solidly on shared common resources. Everything about the way we live is founded on shared common resources, whether you close your windows and use climate control or keep them open.
I feel like there a few people who want me to look at these ten weeks of being at home, and see the light of how I should always enjoy spending my free time working on my house. But as nice as it has been to sleep in a tent in the backyard and grow some pretty and useful plants, I find myself even more energized about running the neighborhood streets again, instead of the ones around my office, and enjoying the neighborhood green spaces, even if I do it with a mask on now, as long as I’m not running.
Yes, it’s fine to slow down and enjoy the space around us, but I’m afraid that the ethos of every-homestead-for-itself is part of what got us to this point of unsustainability where we’re facing a crisis with this pandemic. If we were better at thinking about things in terms of “we” instead of in terms of “me,” it seems like we would be better positioned to bounce back from this than we are.
***
The gate at the wildlife refuge isn’t manned today, so I just pull out my year-long pass and put it on the dashboard when I park. I glance at the map at the trailhead to confirm that I can get a good 45 minute out-and-back on the trail I was thinking of and begin. I got a later start than is ideal, but the wind is blowing through the treetops and while it is very humid, it isn’t that hot.
I walk for five minutes, thankful that the bugs aren’t horrible, and then I begin to run. Five minutes into running and I know I’m not very fast today, but I’m so glad I came out here. I hurt my right heel earlier in the week, jumping out of river trees with the girls, and it’s healing up, but slowly. I have to think about keeping my strides even not to favor it. But I love blustery days at the coast, and the wildflowers are everywhere.
Wet pine flat woods at the start of the run.
Clyde Butcher style cumulus-filled skies over the salt marsh and artificial ponds that are part of the refuge.
So many wildflowers out there today!
Pleased with myself at the turn-around point.
--------------------------------------
I hope you readers are enjoying your Memorial Days and getting outside a little if there’s a safe place for you to it and you’re so inclined. For me, it was nice today to be out there and to think about the things our soldiers fight and die for, and what they really mean.
My daughters, a pair of wild Tallahassee Tree Monkeys, in their natural environment last Thursday, after we decided school was over.
So finally because my mom wanted them so badly and because they wanted to go, I met my dad partway to Yankeetown on Thursday and let the kids go with him. So far, mom and dad’s sometimes spotty internet has worked well enough for the sports meetings they’ve wanted to attend. And I have spent most of the long weekend in bed, reading Babylon 5 novels about the Psi Corps, and future wars and future plagues of that universe, which I see through different eyes in 2020 than I would have back when the show aired. I also might have had a touch more sangria than was prudent on Friday night, sitting distanced from close neighborhood friends, doing our best to solve the worlds’ problems. So for me, the weekend started very slowly indeed on Saturday morning.
It wasn’t until today, Memorial Day, that I ventured out of my neighborhood at all on this holiday weekend. I wanted to go for a run somewhere special, because today’s run is the last run in my current workout block. Today, I finish the 8 weeks of the 5k Pacer program, and while the program hasn’t improved my speed and pace to the point where I am knocking on the door of my 2020 running goal (a sub 30 minute 5k), finishing the program is still a nice milestone for me. It isn’t easy for me to find time to run, even though I much prefer the way I feel when I’m working at running regularly. Finishing the 8 week program and getting back into the range of a 35 minute 5k is something, and hopefully if I go through the program again, I’ll shave another few more minutes off before fall when maybe our local run club will start doing races again.
So, this morning I headed out to the National Wildlife Refuge at the coast, where I know there is a trail I haven’t trod before that I will likely find beautiful. It starts in low pine flat-woods, and then turns toward the even lower coast, out across the salt marsh flats along a low levy road that was filled long ago. A few of my naturalist friends have been taunting me with gorgeous wildflower pictures all week long on social media, many of which were taken in the refuge. So I’ll finish my run training in a place that I love, even knowing that there’s a decent chance I’ll have some yellow-fly and mosquito company.
Swamp Hibiscus was blooming in different spots up and down the trail I ran.
***
I am surprised when NPR isn’t broadcasting some kind of Memorial Day programming as I make the thirty minute drive out to the trail I want. Instead, the morning show topic is the fifty year anniversary of the Kent State protestors being shot. I wonder what my grandparents would think of that. Lately I wonder what my grandparents would think about a lot of things. Both of my grandfathers served in World War 2. Mom’s dad was an engineer in the Army Air Corps and Dad’s dad lied about his age in order to enlist in the Navy in time to serve in the Pacific. Mom’s dad stayed in the reserve for a while, but not long enough to be caught up in Korea. I’m very lucky that they both came home.
Sometimes I think about how both of my grandmothers proceeded their husbands in death by long stretches, and I wonder which was ultimately more wearing- being at war or holding things together at home. I think it was probably being at war, during those war years, but I also think that holding things together was anything but easy for my grandmothers, both of whom were the siblings tasked with caring for their own aging parents along with their own families.
The announcement of my mom’s parent’s wedding. My grandmother had finished her degree at that point, but she looks so young in the pictures. I thought the lady-centric headline was fun and appropriate for my navel-gazing about the roles of the sexes back in the day.
***
For the last year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we chose to live and about my relationship with the land. I love being outside. I love to camp and hike and climb, and I do those things primarily on different kinds of public land. I like being out among the king’s deer, I suppose. Sometimes the king is the state, and sometimes it is the federal government. Or, my favorite place to sport-climb semi-locally is even a county park in Alabama that also allows primitive camping. But communities I started to discover online last year and the work that I’ve been doing for Florida lately have made me think more deliberately about how I relate to the public land that I use and enjoy.
Only recently have I started to think about how much privilege is implicit in my ability to travel and camp freely, without feeling unsafe or threatened. I want everyone to have the ability to enjoy the natural spaces that I love so much, but I’m also very aware of the danger those places face of being loved to death. When I first started camping on my own, in high school, it was never very hard to get camping reservations at the state parks I loved, except at certain holidays. And it was affordable.
Now a lot of the parks where I used to make last-minute plans are hard to get any weekend camping in, even months in advance. And I have climber and hiker friends who find the state parks to be comparable to commercial camping, too expensive and amenity-based to make sense. I didn’t realize how much road-life culture there is that prides itself on not paying extra for things that aren’t necessary.
Normally, there aren’t that many weekends that I spend at home, so these pandemic months have been a real change for my little family. We have a truce, my husband and I. Roger would prefer that we spend every other weekend at home, but I have promised only one weekend a month at home. Most months (pre-pandemic) we get two weekends at home, but not every month. And some of my weekend trips are solo or just with climbers, so the rest of the family can still rest up then. It’s not that I don’t like our home. It’s just that it is so nice to escape the complexity of normal life. Normal life can start to feel like we’re just living for stuff maintenance sometimes. Like our little house has become our only destiny. Like it has been illuminated that our highest purpose is sitting around and grooming our stuff.
I just counted them up. This is my tenth weekend in a row staying at home. I think that’s surely a record for me.
***
There for a while, and still now to a lesser degree, it felt like some people wanted me to gain a lesson from this time of quarantine that I just think is all wrong. It’s hard to explain because I think that for the most part, people are well intentioned. But I am afraid that the hunker-down mentality might be encouraging us all to think of our homes as isolated safe spaces, and as the only places that we belong in, and I think there is a big fallacy in thinking that way.
The property that we own doesn’t really stand on it’s own. It’s really privileged even to look at living situations in terms of people owning property. Higher and higher percentages of Americans live in rental properties every year. Fewer and fewer people own houses. Even in Tallahassee where I would imagine percentages tend more toward home-ownership than in true metro centers, I have professional friends with families who have considered selling the homes that they own in favor of going back to renting, because home maintenance isn’t cheap or easy (also our public school districts are terrifically gerrymandered, but that is a longer rant for another day).
But even for those who own property- you can’t get to your house without the streets in the neighborhood. You don’t get water and power without utilities. The myth of a place of your own rests solidly on shared common resources. Everything about the way we live is founded on shared common resources, whether you close your windows and use climate control or keep them open.
I feel like there a few people who want me to look at these ten weeks of being at home, and see the light of how I should always enjoy spending my free time working on my house. But as nice as it has been to sleep in a tent in the backyard and grow some pretty and useful plants, I find myself even more energized about running the neighborhood streets again, instead of the ones around my office, and enjoying the neighborhood green spaces, even if I do it with a mask on now, as long as I’m not running.
Yes, it’s fine to slow down and enjoy the space around us, but I’m afraid that the ethos of every-homestead-for-itself is part of what got us to this point of unsustainability where we’re facing a crisis with this pandemic. If we were better at thinking about things in terms of “we” instead of in terms of “me,” it seems like we would be better positioned to bounce back from this than we are.
***
The gate at the wildlife refuge isn’t manned today, so I just pull out my year-long pass and put it on the dashboard when I park. I glance at the map at the trailhead to confirm that I can get a good 45 minute out-and-back on the trail I was thinking of and begin. I got a later start than is ideal, but the wind is blowing through the treetops and while it is very humid, it isn’t that hot.
I walk for five minutes, thankful that the bugs aren’t horrible, and then I begin to run. Five minutes into running and I know I’m not very fast today, but I’m so glad I came out here. I hurt my right heel earlier in the week, jumping out of river trees with the girls, and it’s healing up, but slowly. I have to think about keeping my strides even not to favor it. But I love blustery days at the coast, and the wildflowers are everywhere.
Wet pine flat woods at the start of the run.
Clyde Butcher style cumulus-filled skies over the salt marsh and artificial ponds that are part of the refuge.
So many wildflowers out there today!
Pleased with myself at the turn-around point.
--------------------------------------
I hope you readers are enjoying your Memorial Days and getting outside a little if there’s a safe place for you to it and you’re so inclined. For me, it was nice today to be out there and to think about the things our soldiers fight and die for, and what they really mean.