Dreams, Moments, Travels
It’s just after Thanksgiving, and considering we chose not to travel this fall, what was left to do but make Christmas cookies, cat-butt style! Obviously, we do not care if Santa leaves us a lump of coal after he sees that we signaled him to stare at a cat butthole and sip some almond milk because we’re holding out for a visit from his transgressive wife Mrs. Claus who turned bad over the last years.
Less than two weeks ago, the four-month intensity that included planning, the actual vacation, and the subsequent 60 days of writing created a situation where I was not ready to jump back into traveling. This is only the third or fourth time in the past nearly 25 years that we’ve been in Phoenix for Thanksgiving, and in celebration of that, we spared no expense and went all out. Yep, we skipped the Chinese restaurant and made dinner at home after buying a box of gravy, a box of stuffing, and a tub of cranberry sauce from Costco, rounding it out with a vegan Field Roast from Whole Foods.
As for fresh food? We passed on that because that’s just too much work when trying to capture laziness, which we did perfectly. Was the dinner ideal? On one hand, of course, it was, as it appealed to our sense of doing as little as possible, and like the year we tried Tofurkey or the Cajun Turducken, it was something out of the ordinary.
Also out of the ordinary, by foregoing our almost ritualistic Thanksgiving visits to the Oregon coast, we’ll have ended up not visiting the Pacific Ocean even once during 2023, the first time since 1995 that we didn’t gaze upon that vast body of blue-green water at least once over the course of a year. Noting this, I’m opening my 2024 travel itinerary and penciling in a reminder to visit the western coast of the U.S. next year.
It’s Halloween, and this is Caroline Wise, who was born in Frankfurt, which makes her a Frankfurter, wearing the costume of a Frankfurter, a.k.a. hot dog. But because we were recently in Norway, where she fell in love with Norwegian Frankfurters, her costume is that of a Pølse.
[You forgot to mention that I won first place in the office costume contest! Caroline]
I stepped out on our balcony for some reason or other and looked up to check on the mud dauber wasps’ nests that hold fast to the walls and sliding door frame and saw something out of the ordinary. While I thought I knew what it was, I wasn’t certain. After fetching my 200mm lens to zoom in but still a good distance from framing this thing on the wall, I got this shot, which is cropped in more than 50% to even get this level of detail. Sure enough, it’s a bat. This is the first time I’ve been aware of a bat taking refuge on our balcony! Hopefully, it will still be hanging out when Caroline gets home so she can see it with her own eyes. As this is already a violation of my self-imposed break in blogging I’m going to avoid writing anything else, though this discipline is hard fought for.
Maybe there’s a problem when one has four weaving looms, two spinning wheels, one backstrap loom, 3 sprang frames, one tapestry loom, and maybe ten drop spindles, and that problem is there are possibly a lot of projects going on simultaneously. How does one choose what to work on? Your guess is as good as anyone’s, and that helps explain why something might take years to finish. Take this piece here that was recently cut off from one of Caroline’s table looms (for clarification, we have two-floor looms and two table looms, not counting the others I mentioned); after a concerted effort over the previous month, this 10-foot (305cm) length of handwoven cloth was finally done.
Finally, you say? Not to shame my wife, okay, maybe a little, she “dressed” the loom, which means she wound a warp and tied it on the loom, for a workshop back in 2019. Should you go thinking that COVID-19 played some role in the delay, you don’t know fiber artists. Too many projects all going on at the same time is their signature malaise, a kind of chronic condition that sees them wanting to work on everything at once. Before they lose sight of an amazing new project, they just go to work setting it up, telling themselves and you that this is just a small one that will go quickly between the other stuff. If pressed, you’ll hear some cockamamie story about how the other partially finished project needs some yarn or requires a friend to be consulted on some issue or that they are stuck in the uncertainty of how to proceed. None of this is true: chaos is their domain, but you already know that as you have to bear witness to their ever-increasing supply of gear, yarn, and various projects gathering dust.
I do have to give Caroline credit as earlier this year, she cut off several handwoven towels that were on the Baby Wolf floor loom; she’s made great progress on an incredibly tedious and complex scarf she’s been braiding on the sprang loom, and she knit me a pair of socks, is working on a new sweater, and of course, the table loom is now ready to have another multi-year project tossed on it.
Should you sense that I might be poking fun at Caroline, you’d be correct, but I’m also delighted that she is so adept at keeping herself engaged with things she loves doing and feels inspired by. I can’t remember a day in the past 34 years that she’s expressed boredom about what to do with her time, so while I might give her a hard time here and there, I admire her tenacity and ability to ensure she’s always invested in doing things that bring her happiness.
Tomorrow, Caroline and I leave for a trip to the Great Plains. This will be the first time in 8 years that we’ve been out there and nearly 20 years since the two of us were as far north as we hope to get this long weekend. Our destination is supposed to be somewhere in North Dakota. I have to say “I hope to get there” because I finally checked the weather forecast, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s calling for wind, rain, and thunderstorms. It’s almost comical because it was on our last big road trip back in 2015 nearly to the day when we detoured from our itinerary due to flooding as we passed between Texas and Oklahoma. Certainly, a more favorable outcome is on the horizon this time around. The traces on this portion of our U.S. map are roads we’ve driven, the empty area is a mystery.
Should anyone wonder, where exactly out on those wind-swept plains are you two going? It doesn’t matter as all that’s important is we are going to where the rest of America is not going over Memorial Day. This journey will be a meander and has the flexibility to change course should we need to or simply want to. To those we told we’d be in Europe at this time: that was delayed while we wait for the economy to fall into an actual recession so the cost of travel can come down. We could have chosen the Oregon Coast for this getaway but flights and the crappiest of motels would have been more expensive than spending time in Germany. Driving to Oregon wasn’t an option, not due to the price of gas but the fact that we need 4 days of driving for the roundtrip, and that would then only offer us 2 days on the coast, and that’s no bueno.
There are aspects of this drive that have different meanings such as the fact that I simply enjoy the drive where my eyes fall upon different scenery and just might inspire something or other. For days, Caroline and I will be next to one another nearly 24 hours a day and will likely enjoy every minute of it. There’s also our trophy map of the United States on which we track the roads we’ve driven. The path we’re taking will take previously untraveled roads as much as possible. This feat will allow us to add two fat lines going out and coming back. And then there are the unknowns where little delights and unexpected surprises will help make the entire experience memorable. Even if it were truly boring, rest assured that I’ll get at least a few photos that show otherwise and I’ll write a simple narrative that will demonstrate that love and beauty greeted us at every turn, that is if there are any turns on this bolt north.