2024 in Review: Blogging and a Bit More

This year started off wonderfully with family time on a visit with my younger sister and her partner, who live in Friday Harbor. Back from that refreshing break, I shifted into high gear for the legislative session, which always brings work with tight timelines that requires some deep thought for bill analysis. I love that part of my job so that's not a complaint, simply a reality. My sweetheart and I celebrated our 17th date-a-versary (anniversary of our first date), which happens to fall on the wedding anniversary of my parents. They were married for 68 years so I consider that fortuitous.

In late December 2023 I spent some time writing blog posts and setting them up to publish over the course of January so I could get off to a good start. Having some kind of recurring theme keeps me in the writing habit and for this year I took a run at having a round-up each month of poems about that month. I'll list the top 10 posts of the year below and we'll both know whether poetry draws as many readers as recipes.

January: Started the year off with A Year of Poems: January. Last year I wrote about my Grandma Humphrey's rocker and how I hoped to give it a new life; a local furniture pro took it on and gave me The Rocker, Refinished. Over on Bike Style I did my final post that revisited old posts with Riding Down Memory Lane: January. I didn't rely solely on those pre-planned posts, though; I captured a sunny-day ride to testify to the Senate Transportation Committee in First Ride of 2024. Slow Down captured some thoughts I've come to with time, age, and insight into what works for me. Reruns: January Posts Worth Revisiting was another version of reviewing old posts, both from this blog and from Bike Style.

Unfortunately, ride #2 of 2024 didn't end with me as happy as I'd felt from ride #1. A crash on my bike thanks to black ice in a shady spot resulted in a sprained knee and the ensuing thoughts, Thank Heavens for Kind Strangers and Transit. 

We spent the first 2-1/2 months living in a couple of different rentals while remodeling work continued on our house. Before my crash this meant walks to the park from a different starting point, a new perspective. 

February: Then it was time for A Year of Poems; February. Time sidelined on the sofa icing my sprained knee meant time to read through old drafts and decide if I wanted to finish any. That brought me back to Shared Streets: A Vision, based on a post I wrote years ago when we lived in Spokane. The transit story continued with my experience getting to a meeting in No Thanks to No Sidewalks! Time for another visit to the archives with Reruns: February Posts Worth Revisiting. My habit of collecting poems on various themes as I encounter them set me up to publish How We Get Where We're Going: Transportation Poems, the latest in a growing collection of poems about transportation over on Bike Style Life. Anyone who works with me knows I pay a lot of attention to the words we use. That led me to write Seeing and other Ways of Knowing, to prompt reexamination of common metaphors. 

March: As a word lover of course I own plenty of bike books; I've published a couple of lists of recommendations over on Bike Style and added another one in celebration of Women's History Month in March, Bike Books I Recommend: Women on Wheels. Even more word-nerd love thanks to my poetry reading came out in A Year of Poems: March. My trips down memory lane continued in Reruns: March Posts Worth Revisiting. March also brought A Thrilling Night when I received the Woman of the Year award from the Puget Sound chapter of WTS (Women in Transportation Seminar) International; such a joy to be there with my team and many colleagues! I take a run at #30DaysOfBiking more often than not and I've found some public accountability via social media helps me stick with it so I wrote Just Ride. Every Day. It's That Simple. 

A huge milestone: The remodeling of our kitchen and laundry and a bunch of other elements of the house wrapped up at last and we moved back in. It's wonderful! This is the last house we intend to buy and we're making it ours.

April: The first day of April brought not one but two posts on poetry, no foolin': A Year of Poems: April and Celebrate National Poetry Month. I celebrated the general niceness of people I encounter while riding my bike in Go Ahead, Make My Day and went back to more past posts in Reruns: April Posts Worth Revisiting. I celebrated Earth Day two ways: Earth Day Market Ride 2024 and Earth Day Poems for Every Day. And I quite happily wrapped up a successful biking April, as I described in How #30DaysOfBiking Rolled in 2024.

May: May is Bike Everywhere Month, which strangely I ended up not writing about directly as a thing to pay attention to. Maybe next year; after all, it does get plenty of national press. I added to my poetry collection with A Year of Poems: May and again rode down memory lane in Reruns: May Posts Worth Revisiting. While not a post about Bike Everywhere Month, Bike/Life Lessons Learned does share some reflections on what riding a bike has meant to me.

I got to attend the WTS International conference since I'd won the chapter award. Hehe in New Orleans, it was a fantastic exodus: seeing so many smart, talented women transportation professionals in one room. 

May ended with the fulfillment of a dream I've had since high school: seeing and hearing Billy Joel live in concert. So fabulous to be with an entire packed stadium, people of all ages singing along to every song. 

June: June got rolling with A Year of Poems: June and another collection over on Bike Style, Still Walking, More Poetry. Seems to me just about any topic can lend itself to a poetry collection if you're so inclined, and I'm inclined. I have plenty more collections started that will appear someday in the future when I feel as if I have enough to make it worth hitting Publish. My trips down Blog Memory Lane continued with Reruns: June Posts Worth Revisiting. In an echo of my posts for winter solstice in 2022 and 2023, I wrote Summer Solstice Readings to mark that longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. I decided one of my older posts was worth a refresh and updated If Electric Hand Dryers Were Bicycles.

I made it to Spokane for a celebration of another section of the Children of the Sun Trail being completed. My WSDOT colleagues, city leaders and the neighborhood celebrated with poetry, music, and of course riding along the trail. 

July: A Year of Poems: July opened the seventh month of the year. After fielding a request from one of my daughters to share our family's beloved bran muffin recipe with a friend, I realized I couldn't find an online version of the recipe I have committed to memory thanks to so many batches over the years so I put it out there for others to find in Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever. I wrapped up my visits to the past with Reruns: July Posts Worth Revisiting.

In July I got to travel to Baltimore for a conference and heard the wonderful Veronica Davis speak, the author of Inclusive Transportation*. I added on a weekend with one of my brothers and his wife and we had a great couple of days of exploring museums and riding a small ferry around the Inner Harbor. If you ever go to Baltimore, know that the Museum of Visionary Arts is well worth the visit and they have a fabulous art museum. I appreciated the easy light rail connection from the airport and transit around town.

 

August: By now you can guess that A Year of Poems: August published the first day of that month. I had enough gardening chores and other activities beyond work that this was the only post for August. Sometime in late July or August my Bike Style blog went down. With all I had going on it was going to take a while to work through the technical issues and restore it so I let it go for a while.

September: A Year of Poems: September led into a busy month of harvesting and preserving—so much preserving that I ended up with highly painful hand cramps at one point from all the slicing, dicing, peeling, coring, prepping, lifting and toting. I captured my various searches for recipes in a series of posts that tell you what I did every weekend: Future Marmalade, Pears, Pears, Pears!, Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!, Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini), and Apples, Apples, Apples!. When I created my own version of a recipe I included it in the post along with links to the ones I made or was inspired by. This way next year after all those chutneys have had a chance to mellow and I find out which ones really turned out great I can repeat the winners and tweak the also-rans.

I also got the chance to return to my former hometown of Spokane for a conference and go on walking and biking tours of sons of the wonderful additions to the local networks. 

October: A Year of Poems: October took me into fall. The gardening and harvesting work wasn't quite done and I shared some inspiration in Keep It Growing: Poems about Gardening. As the nights got colder and the days got shorter I finally gave in and dealt with Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes. 

October held travel I didn't have time to write about while it was happening, from a national transportation safety summit in Houston (really bad transit scenario: no light rail to the airport, a bus ride would take over an hour to the downtown area) to a great first-ever trip to Switzerland for an international committee meeting on transportation in urban and periurban (surburban) areas. I didn't have time to do a lot of touristing but it was wonderful to experience a country where trains, trams, buses, bike lanes, and sidewalks form truly connected networks for a carfree life. My sweetheart did the hard work of figuring out how to get the Bike Style site up and running and restored a backup from last year. Yay! I'd hate to lose all that writing and the memories I captured of so many rides and so much learning.

November: A Year of Poems: November kicked off my birthday month. I got back into bike blogging with Riding in the Rain, Wheeling through Winter: Bike Gear DEFGs (to follow the ABCs) as a long-overdue follow-up to one of my early posts on the ABCs of winter riding. I added to the growing collection of poetry roundups with A Dusty Collection: Poems about Dust, regular everyday dust and stardust too. I realized that with all my "canstravaganza" blogging I hadn't yet captured the recipe I used to make a batch of blackberry apple chutney. I closed out the month with Thanks + Giving: a bit of deconstruction of the word into its constituent parts and some poetry on each of the two terms.

December: With A Year of Poems: December I completed my poetic journey through the months of the year. In anticipation of the legislative session and thinking of the things I've learned along the way in advocacy and public policy, I published Actions You Can Take for Active Transportation: Homework. People tend not to think much about the state legislature until it's in session but some preparation now will help people get ready and be more effective. Listening to an episode of 99% Invisible while I walked in my neighborhood inspired How Many Minutes (by Bike) Is Your Neighborhood?. This year marks my third year of composing a post in honor of Winter Solstice 2024 with links to readings, a playlist, and my posts of the last couple of years.

We spent a really wonderful weekend with my younger sister and her husband at Point Ruston and Tacoma: Delicious food at several local restaurants, a visit to the LeMay Car Museum (yes, I know, unusual destination for me; they do have a few bicycles and did you know several auto manufacturers started as bicycle manufacturers?), and a walk on the pathway by the water, where quotations from Dune are inscribed on the walk because author Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma. 

Toward the end of the year we had a delightful, relaxed couple of days with my beloved sister-in-law snacking and watching Christmas movies, then headed home. I wrapped up the year with an unfortunate bout of some respiratory crud that made me miss the days of masking and no viral stuff being passed around. I get my flu and COVID boosters every time I'm supposed to but they can't catch everything. 

Thanks to being sick and ensconced on the sofa with generic DayQuil and cough drops, all those things I'd planned to get to before the end of 2024 will just have to wait for 2025. That's fine because calendars are a human-made imaginary line that doesn't relate to anything happening on the earth or in the sky. Tomorrow is always tomorrow.

Top Posts in 2024

1. Spokane Blogs: Help Build the List (2010). Note that I haven't maintained this list in over a dozen years since I moved away from Spokane. It's the power of lists on the internet at work, and older posts build up  more Google-Juice.
2. Is there such a thing as a lowercase Nazi? (2012). This one is a reflection on the power of words, inspired in part by "Seinfeld" and in part by my time representing the legislative district that housed neo-Nazis for a while.
3. Classic All-Bran/Bran Buds Muffin Recipe: Best Bran Muffins Ever (2024). Glad to find this delicious recipe, a family tradition, near the top of the charts.
4. I'm part Dutch, you know: What do YOU wear to bike? (2010). One of the shortest posts I've ever written, and an example of the kind of writing that led to me starting a whole separate bike blog.
5. Walking a Path (2021). My generally serendipitous approach to life, summed up well in this print by Oxherd Boy that I ended up buying for my office.
6. Kindness Matters (2018). Very happy to find this one in the top ten as well. This is one I'd include on a list entitled "posts I wish were in the top ten" if it weren't here under its own steam.
7. Paying It Forward: Why I Vote YES for Kids and Schools (2010). Not sure why a post about a school election from 2010 is so popular, but there it is.
8. Thank you for the gift of friendship: Goodbye, Christianne (2010). A tribute to a dear friend who died that year.
9. Seeing and other Ways of Knowing (2024). Thoughts on visual metaphors and how they leave people out.
10. Apples, Apples, Apples! (2024). Some of this year's harvesting, preserving, and canning.

*You should support, cherish and thank your local bookstore if you have one. Same goes for your local library. If you don’t have easy access, you can use the Bookshop affiliate link to order Veronica's book. If I ever get any commission through such links I'll donate the proceeds to organizations that support equity and accessible active transportation.

Reruns: February Posts Worth Revisiting

February is a short month even in a leap year like 2024, but some years it has been a fairly prolific blogging month (although nothing compared to January). 

I don't list every February post here; these are the ones I think hold up over time, or that provide a fun or funny trip down memory lane. I list the dates so you can decide just how interested you are in something I wrote 15 years ago. Wow, that went by fast. 

• Walking in February: Of Woods and Water (Feb. 25, 2023)
• The Rocker (Feb. 20, 2023)
• How Am I Going to Get There? Why We Need Each Other (Bike Style, Feb. 18, 2023)
• Bike, Transit, Car: Three Transportation Perspectives from Seattle (Bike Style, Feb. 25, 2018)
• Washington Counties Challenge: A Statewide Bikespedition To-do List (, Feb. 5, 2018)
• Bikes Are Being USED, I Tell You. Keep Up the Good Work. (Bike Style, Feb. 7, 2013)
• The Soundtrack in my Head  (Bike Style, Feb. 28, 2012)
• Consider Adoption--Of a Bike Lane, That Is  (Bike Style, Feb. 13, 2012)
• Unmindful Biking by Yours Truly  (Bike Style, Feb. 11, 2012)
• Mindful Driving, Mindful Biking, and "Accidents"--Part II  (Bike Style, Feb. 10, 2012)
• Mindful Driving, Mindful Biking, and "Accidents"--Part I  (Bike Style, Feb. 9, 2012)
• It Pays to Pay Attention (Feb. 8, 2012)
• Miss Manners Would Approve: Dealing with Drivers (Bike Style, Feb. 7, 2012)
• If Bikes Were Electric Hand Dryers (Feb. 24, 2011)
• Hint: It's the First Word in the Boy Scout Law (No, Not Brave or Clean) (Feb. 12, 2011)
• Making Soup--er, Bike Networks (Feb. 10, 2011)
• Head, Heart, Hands, and Health (Feb. 6, 2011)
• Political Scrapbook: Elected Officials I Have Known (Feb. 4, 2011)
• A Tale of Two Drivers (Feb. 2, 2011)
• Stuff I Didn't Do Today, or, I Know what Happiness Tastes Like (Feb. 27, 2010)
• Becoming a Bike Commuter: It's Pretty Easy, One Mile at a Time (Feb. 22, 2009)
• Fun with Numbers. No, Really, I Mean It. (Feb. 7, 2009)
• 25 Random Things About Me, in Random Order (Feb. 4, 2009)

Slow Down

On grateful.org they pose a question a day in a community space. One that I thought about from multiple angles: "Where, or when, could I create a bit of space to truly slow down?"

"Truly slowing down" may or may not be a desirable goal. I can read this question multiple ways.

Slow down: Don't be so hard on yourself for not getting 5,247 things done every day. 

I've gotten much better at that with age. Even if I had an empty in-box when I stop working tonight, more would show up tomorrow. There is no "done", there is doing and being.

Slow down: Don't try to multitask. 

My brain works well when I have many plates spinning and I enjoy that feeling of being able to shift from one topic to the next to the next (which is what's really happening when people say they're multitasking; we're actually processing in serial, not parallel). Each serves to cross-fertilize with the others. But they need time for that fertilization process.

Slow down: Don't over-commit or sign up for things you don't really want to do. 

OK, yes, I could work on this a bit and say "enough" when my plate is as full as I want it to be. When I do that I feel both guilt and relief. I remind myself the answer isn't just "no" to this, it's "yes" to something else.

Slow down: Giving your best doesn't require giving your everything.

In my younger years I sometimes burned the candle at both ends and from the middle and loved the intensity even if it wore me out at times. As a result of that investment (and recognizing that I have privilege that contributed as well) I’ve been able to build a career that means I don’t have to run at quite the same pace but I still feel the intensity and commitment.

Slow down: Don't work all the time. 

I'm very good at having real weekends. I read, I go for a long walk with my sweet husband to downtown, we might decide to go out for lunch, I might do a big cooking extravaganza, which is one of my favorite activities. Ditto for real evenings; when I sign off at the end of the workday I'm off and I ask my staff to do the same.

Slow down: Pay attention. 

I've had mindfulness practices in one form or another for years now. All of them embed some form of "pay attention". I can take a brisk walk for the health benefits of active movement and pay attention to the shapes and colors of fall leaves, the flash of white on a dove's back as it takes flight to join the whole flock of them that likes to roost in a tall pine tree I can see out my kitchen window, the sound of the frog that croaks somewhere in a neighbor's yard, the colors of the flowers my neighbor at the corner carefully selects so we have beauty all season long, the two-tone whistle of a bird I have yet to identify.

I can talk with my sweetheart or my daughters and make sure I'm really paying attention, not listening with half an ear while I work on something else. 

I can savor and appreciate the flavors of foods I'm eating or the aroma of something I'm cooking.

Slow down: Remember to breathe.

On my desk I keep a rock I found on one of my walks. It has three sides visible when it sits on its flat bottom side. On each of these I've written one word: Inhale. Exhale. Breathe. Some days when I feel as if I haven't really done that, I pick it up and hold it for a couple of full, slow breaths.

Slow down: Make room for slow.

Related reading

• The Quotidian: Poems Celebrating the Everyday, the Ordinary
• Setting My Own Pace
• More or Less
• Zen and the Art of Bicycle Riding
• Your "Right" to Speedy Travel Doesn't Exist 
• Biking as Downtime and Other Musings on Overproductivity
• It's All in the Attitude
• A Small Moment
• The Mindful Biking Series

We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For: Poems for Activists and Advocates

This collection includes harsh and violent imagery. You might think it needs a content warning. Yes, because the world we live in needs a content warning. Any day, every day, any of us might encounter harm, violence, the ending of our lives bit by polluting bit or all at once in the impact of a vehicle or the firing of a gun. Some of us move through the world with identities that increase the odds that we'll experience these as part of our everyday reality, one of the many injustices that activists and advocates speak out against.

This collection could keep growing. I compiled it the way I do all of my posts pointing people to poetry, by adding a link as I encountered a piece in my morning poetry reading that fit into this theme. 

At some point as the collection grew I got the book Poetry of Presence II: More Mindfulness Poems. I wanted it because I loved the first Poetry of Presence, not realizing that for this second volume editors Phyllis Cole-Dai and Ruby R. Wilson had also felt the calling to collect poetry that speaks to the urgency of our times. As they wrote in the introduction to describe their wonderful selections,

"Many poems in this volume therefore delve into varieties of suffering: woundedness, illness, loss, and death; prejudice, bigotry, injustice; violence and war . . . a host of tough stuff that, frankly, most of us would rather not deal with.

"But mindfulness poetry has the potential to crack open that tough stuff—one stanza, one line, even one word at a time. Enough light escapes through those cracks that we can edge forward when it gets dark or, if we need to, stay put a while and catch our bearings. By that light, we may begin to see more clearly and intuit more wisely how to be whoever we need to be, to go wherever we need to go, to do whatever we need to do. We're led more directly into the heart of the question that Ada Limón sets forth in the epigraph: 'What is it to go to a We from an I?'"

These words and those of the poets in the book and below remind, inspire, humble, and amaze me because poets can take these horrors and create such startling beauty, roses amidst the wounding thorns. 

A quotation by poet, peace activist and priest Fr. Daniel Berrigan fits here. I don't know which of his poems or writings it might be from; if you have the citation please share in the comments.

"This occurred to me, that faith is prose and love is music and hope is poetry." - Daniel Berrigan

What do you pledge, what actions are you already taking, to undo or prevent harms to each other and to bring justice and beauty to the world? How are you creating hope and going toward a We?

"Protest" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. 

"The World We Want Is Us" by Alice Walker

Yes, we are the 99%
all of us
refusing to forget
each other
no matter, in our hunger, what crumbs
are dropped by
the 1%.

"Of History and Hope" by Miller Williams

But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.

"V'ahavta" by Aurora Levins Morales

imagine winning.  This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry,

"Postscript" by Marie Howe

We took of earth and took and took, and the earth
seemed not to mind

until one of our daughters shouted: it was right
in front of you, right in front of your eyes

and you didn’t see.

"The Fallen Protestor's Song" by Mohja Kahf

So when you write a word
on a wall for all to see
and it doesn’t have to be in code,
and no one breaks the hand that drew it,
when freedom is no longer treated like a narcotic,
dosed in hidden little baggies only for the few,
but becomes like photosynthesis in plants,
processing light in every leaf,

"Blackbirds" by Julie Cadwallader-Staub

when, every now and then, mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we manage to unite and move together
toward a common good,

we can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it's meant to be.

"Democracy" by Langston Hughes

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

"I Believe in Living" by Assata Shakur

i have been locked by the lawless.
Handcuffed by the haters.
Gagged by the greedy.
And, if i know anything at all,
it’s that a wall is just a wall
and nothing more at all.
It can be broken down.

"Tired" by Cleo Wade

I was tired
of looking at the world as one big mess
so I decided
to start cleaning it up

"A Brave and Startling Truth" by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

"How Sweet It Is" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

When I lose faith
that my smallest actions
make a difference,
let me remember myself as one of millions,

"Gate A-4" by Naomi Shihab Nye

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This
is the world I want to live in. The shared world.

"Revenge" by Elisa Chavez

We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,

"For Those Who Would Govern" by Joy Harjo

First question: Can you first govern yourself?

Second question: What is the state of your own household?

Third question: Do you have a proven record of community service and compassionate acts?

"The Poems We Do Not Want to Write" by Maya Stein

The poems we do not want to write have the words “surveillance video” in them. Also,
”automatic weapon” and “body camera footage” and “assailant” and “victims.” 

"Breathe" by Lynn Ungar 

Just breathe, the wind insisted.

Easy for you to say, if the weight of
injustice is not wrapped around your throat,
cutting off all air.

I chose this image of camas flowers in bloom to close this collection because I grew up in a part of the Pacific Northwest where this plant formed a staple food for the tribes that lived in and moved through the area. As a child I wasn't taught the real history of these mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and cousins and all their relations. I was taught only their history as viewed through the eyes of people like Meriweather Lewis and William Clark, for whom my hometown of Lewiston, Idaho, and the neighboring town across the Snake River, Clarkston, Washington, were named. As an adult I have sought ways to learn the missing and deliberately omitted histories that underpin today's economy, cultures, and the forms of privilege I hold. In my work and the ways I give time and money I seek to utilize that privilege to rebalance the systems we all inherited, to work for justice and a better world for all.

Related Reading

• Riding Thoughts: Privilege Is a Tailwind 
• Personal Privilege and Biking: It Takes More than a Bike Lane to Start Riding
• How I Came to Be a Bike Advocate
• Street of Dreams: Can We Live the Martin Luther King, Jr. Way? 
• "Click" on Personal Safety and Privilege 
• Personal Safety and Privilege: A Vignette 
• Be a Green Dot on a Bike, Part I
• Be a Green Dot on a Bike, Part II--The Hard Part
• How to Be a Good Guy/Gal on the Street 
• Hate Cannot Drive Out Hate: Only Love Can Do That
• “I think/therefore/I ride.” A Bike Rack of Bicycle Poems 
• More Poems on the Bike Rack
• Making Soup: A Pot Full of Poems
• “Safe passage through countless intersections”: A Baker’s Dozen of Transportation Poems 
• “Do Not Drive Through, This Poem’s In The Way”: Transportation Poems Keep Rolling In
• Yes, Even More Transportation Poems

Walking in February: Of Woods and Water

February 2023 brought the opportunity for a weekend getaway to Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park to celebrate a friend's birthday. Some of the group drove to Montesano with their tandem and solo bicycles and rode the 50 miles from there to the lodge. Others, like those of us healing from a broken wrist who can't cover that much ground by bike right now, drove to the lodge.

As I drove out Friday afternoon, accompanied by the Eagles Live double album, the rain came and went and came again, reminding me with the watery blur and the slapping of my windshield wipers that I was heading into a temperate rain forest. (And, not incidentally, reminding me that I wasn't totally sorry I had to miss the bike ride in the cold grey wetness—cold makes my wrist ache even more.)

Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast meant pleasant socializing with some new acquaintances. We were going to gather again for Saturday dinner, and meanwhile the agenda was wide open for whatever activities appealed. For me, this meant a walk in the woods.

I headed first up the narrow, shoulderless road past the lodge to visit the World's Biggest Sitka Spruce. At 191 feet it's a neck-craning forest giant standing in a spot that felt sad, surrounded by the encroachment of spaces designed for tourists exactly like me. 

I tried to imagine it standing as one among many in a lush, unbroken tree canopy, birds and animals rustling in the brush that no longer grows around its feet, no signage prompting us to go visit other giant trees in the park, no people posing for a picture to put on Facebook.

From there, following the simple paper map available at the lodge, I headed back to the road and across, following the trail to Gatton Creek Falls.

I walked alone on the soft paths, surrounded by so much green! Mosses, mosses everywhere, reminding me of listening to the audiobook of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer with its rich description of their complex lives, structures, and functions.

Every so often I passed a gigantic stump, quite possibly a mother tree cut down to build the lodge I had slept in the night before. I could not help but say softly, "I'm sorry, Mother." Saplings sprang from each stump to fill the space left behind, fed by their mother's body and watered by the rain falling all around.

I heard a creek chuckling off to one side. A small wooden footbridge provided a place to stop and listen to the water rushing downhill before continuing cautiously across on the slippery wet wood, then on up the hill.

This wasn't a hike to cover lots of ground quickly or get somewhere by a certain time. This was a walk simply to be in the woods. I gazed up, down, around and along the trail. Every minute gave me something to look at.

The very small: Delicate traceries of mosses and baby ferns. 

The very big: Those mother trees, downed logs, and tall trees soaring up, draped in long grey-green beards of Spanish moss. 

The pale: The underside of a patch of lichen, fallen from a trunk or limb above. Perhaps all that sogginess was too much to hold onto? It's so moist, like walking on thick sponges. Weblike masses of another moss shrouding a tree as if I were in Shelob's lair.

The bright: Rusty red maple leaves decaying into the soil, the contrast of a log's interior below the dark bark, pale orange dead ferns.

Life, life everywhere. The full circle, with green springing up from brown, climbing, growing, falling back to become soil again. Walking in woods and water reminding me that this world doesn't require me, or humans, to be whole and beautiful.

Walking in January: Of Gloves and Poetry

 "Honey, look! It's your glove!"

"What?!" I stared in delighted disbelief. The glove I'd lost on a walk weeks earlier hung from the branch of a tree along East Bay Road, clamped there with a wooden clothespin. I happily stuffed it into my backpack and we continued our walk, one of many we've taken along the water since moving to Olympia in fall of 2020.

The saga of the lost glove starts in Port Townsend, WA, over Veteran's Day Weekend. On a weekend getaway I found and purchased a delightful pair of soft gray gloves with swirls of colored yarn appliqued on the backs. Loved those gloves! So warm, so soft, and so fun to look at with their splashes of bright colors.

We came back home to Olympia from our mini-vacation. I wore my gloves everywhere—right up until I lost one of them on a walk. Most Saturdays we walk from our home into downtown, going by the farmers' market and then running small errands and getting coffee or lunch. Somewhere after a stop at Olympia Coffee on 4th, one of my gloves disappeared. I called around to the places we had been to no avail. The next time I was in downtown I walked the same route hoping for the glove to be lying there waiting for me to reclaim it. Still no avail, whatever that is. (Okay, yes, "avail" does have a definition.)

I mourned my return to my boring plain old gloves. But then—eureka!—Belleza Ropa in downtown Olympia carried the same style of gloves, although in black rather than grey. Turns out they're a sister store for the one in Port Townsend. Bought the black gloves and wore them happily—right up until I lost one on another Saturday downtown sojourn. 

As soon as I realized it was gone I jumped on my bike and retraced our path, searching in vain. Apparently losing a glove was becoming part of my routine too. I would have been willing to wear one black and one grey but had managed to lose the right-hand glove both times.

I went back to Belleza Ropa. They no longer had the exact colors I really wanted, although they did have another pair with a quieter color combo. I settled for Pair of Swirly Gloves #3. Just for fun on some occasions I wore Bright Swirly Lefthand Glove #2 with the new Tamer Swirly Righthand Glove #3.

Weeks passed until that January Saturday when Lost Righthand Glove #2 reappeared pinned to that branch.

That alone would have made the walk a bit magical. We laughed about the idea of a "glove miracle", neither of us being much given to belief in miracles when simple kindness or coincidence offer sufficient explanation. That, and paying attention to what's around us.

Whenever we walk we're scanning for birds on the water, in the skies, or in the trees and shrubs along the way. We always see mallards, crows, and seagulls, sometimes Canadian geese (which we refer to as "our Canadian visitors") or the comedic black and white Harlequin-painted buffleheads. On really awesome days we see a great blue heron or two, and once we spotted a kingfisher. We watch the waters of Budd Bay for the sleek head of a seal, sometimes to avail. We note the plants growing alongside the sidewalk and whether they're showing the damp brown dormancy of winter or starting to poke out a bit of spring hope. My sweetheart keeps tabs on the various sailboats in the marina that catch his eye. We're noticers, we are.

On this particular journey, another touch of magic awaited on our path to reward our noticing. The light rain overnight had revealed phrases of poetry stenciled onto the sidewalk, something I had read about in an article on Olympia's poet laureate program discussing the use of a paint that doesn't show up until it gets wet. We made our usual circuit around the edge of the bay and went to the market. 

As we left the market I spotted yet another line of poetry on the sidewalk. I read poetry every morning and finding it serendipitously along our route on the same day my glove reappeared felt like an un-birthday present. Later search turned up the name of the poet, Zyna Bakari.

We walk more now than we ever did before the pandemic. Starting to telework 100% of the time in early March almost three years ago created the need to go somewhere, anywhere we could go without breathing someone else's air. Back then we lived in an area of unincorporated King County that lacked sidewalks. We roamed the empty streets lined with parked cars going nowhere and I realized just how much I really wanted to live in a place with sidewalks or paths to walk on—a place that felt like it had a place for us to move safely and comfortably. When we moved to Olympia that was on my list of must-haves along with a bikeable location.

We ended up in a fabulous neighborhood where we have sidewalks on most streets we'd want to use to go anywhere, with bike lanes and trails connecting us to destinations too. The trip to downtown and back comes to 5 or 6 miles or thereabouts, depending on how many places we stop. Sometimes we decide we'll bail out on the return and let Intercity Transit give us a nice warm lift back uphill to our neighborhood. Sometimes we choose a slightly different route to mix it up coming or going. Each walk gives us time together, movement, fresh air, and the chance to see our town at a human pace and get to know it better than if we only saw it under glass.

When we got back from this particular day's outing, I wrote a thank-you note and biked down to clothespin it onto the tree where some kind person had hung my lost glove. So glad we went for a walk that day!

And yes, I now keep very close tabs on my gloves.

Commitment, Bite-Sized and Tasty

This is the time of year for good intentions. Earnest intentions. Plans to be a newer, better YOU. 

All of which is pretty bogus. You're already you. If you want to start something new to become a slightly different you, an evolving you, why wait until January 1? 

On the other hand, the middle of winter may feel like a really bad time to try something new. In my part of the world the air feels cold, the sky looms grey overhead, somehow lower than in summer—or is that just the fog and mist? 

I don't know about you, but I feel like starting new things in spring, when the days are getting longer and the air feels fresh, or in fall, when childhood memories of back to school shopping make me long for new pencils even though I don't like writing with pencils. 

And why oh why are resolutions always about things that feel like work? What would be wrong with resolving to do something pleasant or restful or just plain fun on some regular schedule?

On top of that the resolutions so often are about going from zero to turbo overnight. Haven't been exercising? Commit to a daily run. Been meaning to start a journal? Get a new one with a format that will stare at you accusingly if you don't write every day.

Before my round number birthday this year I started a list of enjoyable things I could do to mark that number. Then I fell and broke my wrist, and most of the items on that list evaporated as possibilities in the short run.

Fortunately, at our house we laughingly refer to having a "birthdayweekmonth" celebration, because why stop at 24 hours? 

This year I resolve to make it a BirthDayWeekMonthYear. Over the course of the year I'm going to pick some of the things from that list of enjoyable possibilities and try to get to that round number mark. That's all.

If I don't get around to taking XX long hot baths or tasting XX different kinds of chocolate in a year (or longer), I will still have had a lot of long soaks and delightful tastes. What if these pleasures become—gasp!—a habit?! What if through committing to enjoyment I settle into the idea that it's okay to do something enjoyable on a regular basis? That in fact I should schedule those into my days, weeks, and months just as I do trips to the dentist and those pesky preventive health exams?

I had already started writing this when I ran across a Washington Post article by Richard Sima about research on the value of "joy snacks". They contribute to one of the ways we find meaning in our lives. In addition to having a purpose in life, feeling like our lives matter and make sense, reporter Richard Sima writes, "... valuing one’s life experiences, or experiential appreciation, is another potent way of making life feel more meaningful." 

Now, I did start keeping a daily journal a few years ago so I'm not incapable of forming habits. The power of writing things down and tracking works for me, probably thanks to those chore charts Mom used to put on the fridge with the gold stars. So another part of this commitment I'm making to myself is that I'm going to record these moments, these experiences, these joy snacks, these times when I do more of something that brings pleasure, less of something that doesn't. When I look back at a week, a month, a year, I'll remember those experiences. They'll form a part of who I am just like everything else that happens to me along the way.

My resolution: I'm going to fix myself a lot of tasty joy snacks this year. Care to join me for a snack? What's on your list?

Related Reading

• Keep that Streak Going: #30DaysOf Something that Matters to You
• Counting Up the Years
• Keeping Another Streak Going: #30DaysOfYoga
• An Easy New Year's Resolution: Write It Down
• 5 Behavior and Culture Hacks to Get People to Ride Bikes and Walk
• Set Down that Heavy Load: The Things We Carry
• Walking a Path
• How to End One Year and Begin Another
• More or Less
• Year Ending, Year Beginning
• Looking Back, Looking Ahead

An Alphabet of Things

The IoT--the Internet of Things--is a thing these days. The concept of things talking to other things doesn't really describe what goes on with most of the things in our house. In buying new appliances for a future kitchen remodel it was an actual struggle on our part to keep the amount of technology to a minimum because dinner shouldn't have to wait on a software update. The expense of things that can talk to other things isn't within reach for the vast majority of people on the planet, nor is their global proliferation sustainable within our resource base on the only planet we have. 

I remember seeing the photos years ago in Material World: A Global Family Portrait. Peter Menzel and other photographers took portraits of 30 statistically average families with everything they owned outside their homes. Having moved several times in the past few years this is the kind of thing that shows up in recurring nightmares for me. (He did something similar with food in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.)

Perhaps inspired somewhat by the memory of that photobook, my own efforts to reduce the number of things I own, as well as the opportunity for some wordplay that Sweet Hubs and I came up with when we heard someone refer to IoT recently, I present herewith a more realistic Alphabet of Things. It definitely represents mixed feelings.

A: The Anxiety of Things

B: The Blandness of Things

C: The Cost of Things

D: The Detritus of Things

E: The Evidence of Things

F: The Fragility of Things

G: The Gunkiness of Things

H: The Heaviness of Things

I: The Interior of Things

J: The Joy of Things

K: The Knowledge of Things

L: The Load of Things

M: The Messiness of Things

N: The Newness of Things

O: The Oldness of Things

P: The Patience of Things

Q: The Quantity of Things

R: The Rarity of Things

S: The Satisfaction of Things, or The Scarcity, depending on your circumstances

T: The Tonnage of Things

U: The Urgency of Things

V: The Value of Things

W: The Weight of Things

X: The Xenomania of Things (c'mon, X-ray was too obvious and kind of weird here, and now you get to learn a new word!)

Y: The Yoke of Things

Z: The Zest of Things

Having opened with Peter Menzel and photography that shows us the world in a different way, I have to close this with a bit about a British photographer whose works both are and are not about things, and the alphabet, and time, and paying attention to what's already there: Martin Wilson. 

I encountered him thanks to reading the poetry blog of his brother, Anthony Wilson. Anthony praised his brother's genius in a post you should read because it describes Martin's process. That led me to Martin's site where I hope to one day buy a print of one of his works, probably "Double Yellow Lines" because it's so on point for the work I do. The bonus is that Martin bikes around London to capture these images, so part of the story sometimes involves a really sweaty ride to get somewhere in time to get the lighting he wants or to avoid peak traffic that would get in the way. Go look, and be sure to click on See a Detail. Sadly, images don't appear to have alt-text. Anthony's post describes the process so I hope that gives enough of an idea of what Martin has captured.

Now, I'm off to do a closet purge or clean a drawer or empty a box in the garage or something else that enables me to say goodbye to some things. If any of this made you consider the things in your life in a new light I hope you'll come back and drop a comment about that moment of mindfulness.