Our life is not a movie or maybe

Moving pictures from last weekend's Thanksgiving getaway:

when I go out to the pier / gonna dive and have no fear

extra bright, I want y'all to see this

A group of us spent Thanksgiving weekend in a cabin on the Sandy River. We had a bunch of tame fun, playing board games and light painting. Comme Ça:







Click any thumbnail to see the whole, larger image.

swear I'm just a bird

For most of my life, I did not like children (Seriously, I would audibly groan if seated anywhere near them on an airplane.). I certainly never dreamed of wanting one of my own. But lately, I cannot stop feeling giddy at work taking pictures of kids. What have I become?

Anyway, yesterday I slinked around in the rain to take photos of kids racing to win a turkey.

Even cowgirls get the blues

This is not an end; it's a massacre.

This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about

'traveling, swallowing dramamine ...
i've said what i'd said, and you know what i mean'









'and i'm trying to understand myself
and pinpoint where i am'

And the world, fulgent & resolute, clicks on

I have not been making anything lately, so I'll offer you an intermission in the form of this poem, written by Aleda Shirley who taught at my college.

Song of the Abducted

The trees are full of owls. At night thousands
of them stare at me through the sunroom windows.
The phone rings; it is my dead friend, calling
from Boston. She talks & talks,
but I can get nothing out, I am choking

on questions. The owls' heads move so quickly
they do not seem to move. It started
when I was a child: late one night my father
stopped the car at a roadside park & dozed,
a silver thermos of coffee in his lap. I slept too,

in the back, & woke to a deer looking
in the window, its nose pressed against the glass,
eyes huge & glossy. The next thing I knew
it was morning & we were driving over the bridge
into Memphis. Later from a hotel room

I saw helicopters a few feet from the window,
but there was no noise. At night
everyone comes back to me eventually,
this one I loved & that one.
The air grows sharp as copper & there's

a beautiful green light that deepens
like water; I move through it slowly
but it is not wet & I never surface, no matter
how hard I kick my legs. Inside myself
I am several hours behind myself. From one summer

I recall flowers: sunflowers peering like faces
over a fence, knotted peonies fallen on the lawn.
For months, after I fell in love, I couldn't sleep
until dawn: nothing wedged itself between me
& the darkness. But passion dimmed to an ashy

smudge on the mirror & through the fanlight
I saw a collar of dead stars. The rumors you've heard
are true: behind danger lurks danger. Down
the street a house is on fire. Red light courses
through the room & I feel smoke like sticky oil

on my arms, the warm spot where the cat
was sleeping. When I come to I am peering
into the blue face of the television.
There is snow & in the snow a hint of static,
something cold & shifty I cannot turn off.

it’s true, we can’t go to Granada, but we can go on this walk

These uncharacteristically wide shots are behind-the-scenes looks into recent photos made by Ryan and Amanda. They both like to use Polaroids, and when we were all in Seattle last weekend, there was a lot of Polaroid making going on. I look pretty weird in all of the photos, but here are their shots: Ryan's Instant(ces) blog and Amanda's ::catalyst:: blog.

You should be dancin'

It's been a year this weekend since I spent a night at the Aloha Grange with about 100 square dancers. That one night set me up with enough interviews to keep me busy for months in the unincorporated community I cover. Since that night, I've been writing stories about the way this once rural area -- and supposed next great Portland suburb -- has changed despite no real planning efforts. Almost 60,000 people live there now, and for the first time since 1983, the county there is working on a plan for it. That probably sounds boring, but it matters to everyone there -- from the 83-year-old who told me stories about the way the now traffic-jammed road in front of his house saw more floods than it did cars when he was raising his kids to the teens I met last week who are tired of driving down sidewalk-less streets to other towns to find something to do.

Anyway, the night I went to the Grange, I didn't know any of that yet. It was my first attempt at really learning about Aloha. The first thing I learned is that place is full of sweetness.

Exhibit A:

ALOHA -- Almost everything has changed at the Aloha Grange. The farmers are gone. So are the strawberry fields. The square dancers have new hips and knees. And a few Saturdays ago, they debuted a new caller. He used a laptop, not a record player, to soundtrack the dance.

The story is the same across Washington County. When the area was predominantly rural, granges were the social centers of town. Though granges such as the Leedy Grange in Cedar Mill are still active, membership in most county granges has foundered. Statewide, grange membership has plummeted by more than 75 percent in the past 15 years.

But the Aloha Grange has adapted. When farmers threatened to shut down the grange two decades ago, a group of square dancers persisted. That's the best wood floor in Aloha, they said. So they took over the grange, and now, every Saturday night, a hundred people show up to dance.

Read the rest on Oregonlive.

the snakes I couldn't find

But their house was already burning,

Recent dried specimens: