Happy Birthday to Me!

There might be more than one post today, or maybe not, who knows. Maybe I'll be too busy to write about all the things I have to say. I have lots of fun things going on that I want to write about, but this post isn't going to be about them. I drove down to Boise yesterday and on the two hour trip I indulged in long internal monologues about turning 31 and doing it here, of all places, and, this is totally me exposing how ridiculous I am, but I may just have made myself cry once or twice. (I'm not depressed, just sentimental!) Is it self-centered to be sentimental about one's own birth? Indulge me.

When I was getting ready to be born, three+ decades ago today, my mom and dad were in Boise. I'm not actually sure what they were doing there. Visiting my grandparents? Shopping? But they were in a donut shop when my mother's water broke. Typical. My love of the sugar/fat combination was sealed. They took their donuts, got in the car, and with my mother in labor, started driving back up the very canyon I traveled yesterday. And it was June, and green, and the banks of the river, and the hills, were covered with syringas in bloom. Do you know about syringas? They're a leggy shrub, nothing special aside from a few weeks in late May/early June. But when they bloom they're lovely. Long boughs covered in tiny five petaled white flowers with the the strongest, sweetest scent. So it was sunny and beautiful and the syringas were in full flower and they drove the narrow winding road beside the river and up the mountain. And I imagine that the water was high and if it was warm they rolled down the windows, and mist from the river and the scent of the syringas was in the car where I was waiting to be born.

And they made it to the tiny hospital in McCall and there I was, and they named me Corina Syringa. They named me after a Bob Dylan song that my parents loved. And after the sweet smelling Idaho state flower that filled the air while my mother was in labor. Have you heard the song? How could one not grow up in the comfort that she was wanted and loved when named after a song like that? How could one not want to spend her birthday where syringas bloom? And I am loved, and I am spending my birthday where syringas line the banks of the river, and as freaked out as I am about turning 31, I'm oh so grateful to have been born to those two people, in this place.

1984

This fall, my mom did a little excavating in her storage unit and gave me some of her old winter gear. I've been wearing her wonderfully warm down jacket for months as my designated wood gathering wear, but hadn't really looked at the rest until today. Today I put on the full kit and spent half an hour shoveling snow and bringing in wood. Picture it, me in a scene from 1984:

Coat: imagine a simple western-wear shirt (gray and blue and complete with mother of pearl snaps) in hip-length down jacket form.

Pants: Skin tight (on me, because I'm larger than my mother was at my age. sigh.) navy blue bib overalls with suede patches on the inside cuffs.

Accessories: These were partly my own, a rainbow striped beanie, black snow boots, and my mother's old thick fingered grey leather gloves.

I remember my mother here, doing these things, wearing these clothes, and now I'm here, doing these things, wearing these clothes. It sort of befuddled me a little. But I liked it. A lot. I think my mom is amazing, has done amazing things, and I like walking in her overalls for awhile.

(As a side note, is it strange that I actually looked forward to shoveling snow as a study break? That's strange right?)

Winter Wildlife

On Friday evening, just as it was getting dark, I got an excited voicemail from one of my neighbors telling me to look out my window because there were six elk grazing in the pasture between our houses. Unfortunately, I was working and by the time I got home they were gone. But yesterday I went for a walk and just as I was approaching a bend in the road, two elk leaped across my path. I stopped and watched in awe as a steady stream of them came bounding up from the river and started climbing a ridge where my mother pastured horses before I was born, and where, when I was a child, we had a memorable encounter with a black bear while picking huckleberries one fall. I lost count at 15, and they just kept coming. There must have been at least 40. I was both too startled and too slow to get a decent picture. Can you even see them in the trees?

On a smaller scale, but just as startling, I saw this tiny creature skittering through the snow 15 yards or so from my front door when I set out for my winter walk. Guess what direction he was traveling? It had never occurred to me that spiders could survive in the open in such cold. He made good time. By the time I saw him on my return trip he'd covered about half the distance to my significantly cozier home (where, sadly, he'd find plenty of other creatures to keep his strength up until spring when I wouldn't feel so evil about banishing him back outside).

Go Brown

Red Fraggle and I were just IMing, and for some reason I mentioned that FedEx doesn't deliver to my house. She was aghast. I explained that it was OK, because UPS does deliver, and I've always liked them better anyway. The big brown trucks remind me of the excitement of getting a package when I was a child . . . and she totally couldn't relate. So I explained that when I was young, seeing the UPS truck was exciting in the same way that the arrival of the Sears catalog was exciting. Her response: "LOL! Sears catalog! I always wondered who that was exciting to. I remember reading a story when I was young about someone waiting with anticipation for the Sears catalog and thinking 'REALLY?!'"

See, Red grew up in the crowded northeast, near New York. For her, the ability to go shopping for a new skirt or to a toy store wasn't a big deal. But in the 1980s, in this part of the country, it was a HUGE deal. In some ways, my childhood bears a stronger resemblance to the average American childhood of the 1950s than the 1980s. The available shopping options, as I remember them, were Shavers, a sort of dry goods store combined with a grocery store, (sort of a smaller precurser to SuperTarget without the high-falutin obsession with "design" for the masses) and the old-fashioned drug store across the street that sold cards and tchotchkes and stuffed animals in the aisles between the drug counter and the soda fountain.

And even making the 200 mile round trip Boise didn't net much of an improvement. Back then its population was well under 200,000 and the shopping opportunities were accordingly slim. Boise didn't have many of the big chain stores . . . I think there was a JC Penney and a Sears . . . and the only mall in the entire state was in Nampa (another 30 miles away) and it boasted a Bon Marche, a fabric store, a three screen movie theater, an Orange Julius, and maybe a Foot Locker? It was TINY by today's standards. And that was it.

So for the things my mom couldn't make herself (she made lots of my clothes), and the things we couldn't find in town, the Sears catalog was IT. I remember poring over the pages and pages of toys for hours. And on the rare occasions that my parents could justify the expense of purchasing something from that glossy book of delights, the package would come via a big brown UPS truck struggling up our horrible driveway. And the excitement was real, and it was gleeful, and I still feel a little faint echo of it every time I see a man or woman in brown polyester shorts bearing boxes.

Movin' on out part 2

While I was packing for the big move this weekend, I came across a handful of photos from the last time I had nothing to do. After colllege, I took a year to figure out what to do next. (I should really change the description of this blog, the more I think about it, the more I realize time off track has always been part of the rhythm of my life.) I lived with my dad and some of his friends hired me to work as their receptionist. It didn't take much of that to realize that law school sounded a lot better than answering phones and filing. Before heading back to school, I convinced two of my best friends in the world (who had never met each other) to spend 6 weeks travelling with me in Italy and Greece. This was before the euro, back when the dollar was strong and travelling in Southern Europe really could be done for not much money. In one of the pictures that fell out of a musty book one of those friends gave me, I'm lying in the sunny grass in a public park in Siena laughing at something, anything, nothing. I hope I'm not asking too much of this next year to wish for just a few more moments like that, with sun, friends, laughter, and nowhere to be.