We're Goin' to the Zoo!

We went to the Columbus zoo on a winter Saturday in celebration of Liam's tenth birthday.

Phoebe and Liam, with dear friends Kelly and Anna, fell into line behind a little girl who was carefully stepping along a raised curb, as little girls will.

She was so intent on her balance that she didn't know she had an entourage.

When she discovered that she'd been leading the way for our party, she was delighted.

And just a wee bit smug.

As an Ohioan since 1992, I am proud to say that our Columbus Zoo kicks zoological park derriere. It is a wonderful place, staffed by people who really understand and dig the animals. It's beautiful and spacious and anything but antiquated. You might think I'd be the kind of person who declares, "I hate zoos." You hear people say that, but not me. I suspect that folks who feel that way haven't set foot in a zoo since they were small. Those people need to visit the Columbus Zoo. So much has changed for the better, for the animals and for the people who look at and care for them. And the Columbus Zoo does a stellar job of highlighting the vital role of zoos in endangered species stewardship.

Where else can you see Fluffy, probably the fattest python in the world?

Fluffy's coils look like Spin-Art.


Where else can you get eye-to-eye with some fabulous flying foxes, which look something like winged Pomeranians?


Stretching a wing, showing a band on his odd hooked forefinger. What a miracle bats are. A collection of bones and skin, formed into something wondrous, something DaVinci might have invented if it did not already exist. The blood vessels, supplying all that membrane with life. The membrane, stretched between fingers of a huge bony hand. All of it, bearing the animal aloft in the only true mammalian flight.


From wing to blanket. They fuss and vibrate and scratch and preen, rarely still, looking like a bunch of itchy umbrellas hung from the ceiling.

Lighting wasn't fabulous in the monkey house, but I caught a baby golden langur in flight.


He pushed pretty much all of our buttons at once.

Barely the size of a squirrel, he clung with authority to the narrow limbs, a 20' fall awaiting if he slipped. He didn't slip. Still, it was hard for Liam's mama to watch him cavort so high above cruel cement.

Give me a tail, willya, huh?


Adorable, that's all.

So. How's the twice a week thing treating you? I like it. But I spend four times as much time on each post. Oops. Still wobbling a bit in the new orbit, I guess. There are paintings coming out of it, however, which is the whole point.

By Monday, January 11, the kids will have had one day of school in the last 19. We will have enjoyed a peaceful Christmas, a wildly fun New Year's onset, and lengthy visits from acute viral pharyngitis and pinkeye, the guests who wouldn't leave. Hackahackahacka. We will have taken the sleds down the Bowl many times, and the Wii, which is worth its weight in gold, will have had an obscene amount of use. So far, we still have heat and power and I have not had to cook everything in the freezer at once, and for that I am abjectly grateful. As country denizens, we tend to associate this extreme cold and prolonged snow cover with the loss of electricity, heat, or both.

But the snow is light and fluffy and the winds are calm; no branches breaking, no powerlines snapping; and other than Liam's losing his glasses on a sled run, and our finding out that metal detectors can't find titanium frames, no matter how dear, it's been a pretty good run. We hope the same for you.

You Can't Have All the Things You Love

On our walk down Dean's Fork, our wandering horse friends come out to meet us, ignoring their shorted-out electric fencing. They have the run of the road, as the random piles of horsebockie attest.

Another pretty pair. The mare's a nice Appaloosa. Some people say they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but she seems both wise and kind.

What's lovelier than a young girl and a horse, talking?




If it weren't for the vet and food and shoeing and housing and fencing costs; if it weren't for the possibility of busted kid limbs and heads, heck, I'd have a couple of horses around. I love 'em. More than that, I love to love other people's horses. Having once been part-owner of a boat, I'd put hosses and boats in the same category. Sure, I'd love a ride on yours, thank you! And then when the engine (pastern, hoof, fence, barn) breaks down, you can be the one to fix it...


I could never understand why my dad wouldn't get me that horse I was dying to have. And now I do, oh how I do. It's one of those things that you can't grasp until you're in your parents' shoes, like wondering why your mom hated to see 14-year-old you take off alone on a 20-mile ride through the Virginia countryside on your ten-speed. What's the problem? you wondered. Why is she being so stern and worried? I'm FINE. Speedy! Alert! Immortal!

Dad, can I have a horse?

Farther on down the road, Jake found a stop sign, stolen from somewhere, lying in the ditch. All his switchboard lights lit up. He wanted it for his room.



Here they came down the road, carrying the dreadfully heavy sign. Click click click, aggh what a shot!

Liam's helping.
In the end we decided it was too heavy to carry the next mile. Whew. Not to mention that it's punishable by law to have a stop sign, even a found one, in your bedroom...

Back to the stream and the woods.


The Dean's Fork redtail circled, throwing spears down at us


and Cooper smiled in the sun.

Happy birthday, Shila, BFF, appreciator of all good things, fellow child trying to get in touch with her inner adult! What will the new year hold for you? Walks down Dean's Fork: a lock.

Walk On Down a Country Road

Careful kids are a blessing to a mom and dad. Our kids were never the type to stand up in a shopping cart seat; to climb out of their high chairs or topple out of their cribs. They've always been careful, smart about that kind of stuff. Liam's especially cautious. He waited to walk until he was 21 months old; plagued by ear infections and unsure of his balance for all that time, he walked for the first time the very afternoon he had tubes put in his ears. Wearing a triumphant grin, he also climbed aboard a rocking horse he had always refused to ride. On my birthday no less. From fainting dead away in the pre-op room as my baby went under in my arms to seeing that baby walk the same afternoon...what a day that was.

To this day, he's careful, remembering in some inner recess what it is to be out of balance.

Cousin Jake leads the way, hotfooting it across a fallen sycamore. He's careful too, in a self-assured kind of way. Liam's not liking his own odds.

He drops to his seat and scooches without a prompt. That's my boy.

No shame in coming out all in one piece, in hanging on for dear life. Well, life IS dear, and worth hanging on to. I wear my weeny crown with pride. I think it shows how much we value our strong limbs and unbroken bones, this immense gift of health and life. No bungee jumping, no whitewater for me, thanks. No thrill's so great as to be worth your life.

You just take your time.

Chet Baker really wants to trot across the sycamore, and whimpers to be lifted up, but Mether's heart can't take it. I know he'd be fine, but that cliff fall is a little too fresh in my memory.

Nice brindling, Bacon.
He's hangin' wit his homey, Cooper.

What a good looking pair they make. I'm glad Chet finally has a best friend.

Liam fetches up on a boulder, snowy hair backlit in the weak winter sun.

And eases his way down.

Hitting a Rhythm

I like blogging. I've missed it, being away, even as I've reveled in the guilt-free ease of being out from under the daily deadline. Giving myself permission to relax and not have to do it on my usual frenetic schedule gives me clarity on a number of fronts. I'm figuring out what it means to me, what it does for me and, through your wonderfully expressed and deeply felt feedback, what it means to you and does for you. I'm trying to balance the time and work that goes into it and the entertainment value it offers to you with the hard reality that it gets in the way of my income-producing work--writing for my books and for National Public Radio, and painting a huge passel of illustrations for my bird memoir.

What's shaken out of all this reflection is that I need and want to keep posting here. I want to keep my connection to you all; I want to keep my readers happy and, I hope, growing steadily in numbers. I want to keep it up for all concerned, but posting five days a week....ehhh... ees too moishe.

As someone who reads blogs, I find that consistency is paramount in keeping me coming back. A blog needs to be reliable and consistently readable. It's a waste of your time to click every day hoping there will be an update, so I'd recommend scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking on the link that says "Subscribe." You can choose to get an email whenever there's a fresh post. It takes the pressure off us both while I figure out a more sustainable schedule and hit a livable rhythm that keeps us all happy.

Speaking of keeping us all happy...yesterday, we walked the length of Dean's Fork, but this time we took Bill of the Birds! We had the most wonderful time. I looked in my blogfolder and whoops! there were a whole bunch of photos from an earlier walk that were just begging to be posted. So here is a bucolic critterkidfest for you.

Walk on down, walk on down, walk on down, walk on down a country road...


Photographing kids as one would wild animals pays off in unobtrusive telephoto shots that tell a story of ease and contentment. No grinny front and center camera smiles here, thanks.

Snacktime. Baker decides he'd better anoint a fencepost so everyone knows he was here with his homies.

I get so hooked on scenes like these that I can barely hang on until the next sunny day when we can recreate them. And I don't have to talk the kids into coming along--they're all over it like the sticky on sweet. Being outside is its own reward, once you get kids over the hump of relaxing into it...

hitting a rhythm.

Chet Baker and his friend Cooper look for voles and shrews.
I know it was in here somewhere...

Baker promises to be a gemmun, but we know his promises can be hollow where other dogs are concerned.

Still, the two get along better each time they play, and each pays attention to what the other notices, like good friends do.
When we reach the bend in the road with the old log cabin, the kids always ask to linger. So I lose myself in the landscape and the barbed wire and old wood while they explore. I would love to have a little cabin down here on this forgotten road. But I'd have to have a MONSTER TRUCK to get to it. And I suspect that that's why Dean's Fork is so unspoiled, so beautiful, so all our own little secret. You can't get your Ford Fiesta through. You have to walk. It definitely cuts down on the traffic.
The kids re-enact some kind of scene of pioneer tragedy and triumph before the old log cabin. Really, all they need is water, rocks and sun to have fun. No outlets required.

I'll see you in a few days.

A Slow Surrender to Winter

Here's Liam's first published photo. Not bad for a ten-year-old, freezin' in his dinosaur jammies while he takes a picture of his mama.





photo by Liam Thompson. I'm about to toss them all on the compost pile. Cold front coming.



I don't know who listens to All Things Considered on Christmas Day. I don't. I'm too busy laying around and eating altogether too much and the wrong things and then playing Wii Fit and finding out I should be 14 pounds lighter and faster on my feet, or Japanese, whichever comes first. I'm betting on turning Japanese.



One of my new commentaries aired today. It's about hauling dying plants and praying mantises inside when I really shouldn't. You can listen to it on NPR's web site.



If the player doesn't work, hit "Download" and it'll give you an MP3 that does. That worked for me.

Or you can just read the transcript below.



But I kind of like the idea to talking to you over your 'puterbox. I miss you. I know, I'm taking a break. But I do.

A Slow Surrender to Winter

The sky couldn’t be heavier, lower, grayer, weepier. It’s 38, going for low in the 20’s. It’s winter, winter, winter. And I still have blooming flowers in baskets and containers on the front porch. Geraniums, lobelias, blue marguerite; plectranthus that when you brush its leaves, smells like a lime margarita.

Sure, they’re a bit brown, nipped around the edges, but the geraniums are blooming, shocking pink, red, magenta, like there’s no tomorrow. And for them, there isn’t. Unless…

I keep bringing them inside. I pile them up in the foyer and they weep leaves and dirt and petals that track all over the house. They block the closet doors. I can’t keep them inside, but I can’t leave them out to freeze. So I shuttle them in at night and out during the day, groaning with the effort. I’ve brought them this far. How can I sentence them to death?

blue margeurite on the compost pile, sighhh

But there’s a string of nights in the 20’s coming up, teens, even, and sooner or later I’ll have to say good-bye to summer for good. There’s something about looking out the kitchen window on blooming baskets of flowers that feels increasingly wrong. These bright jolts of color are somehow unseemly, when everything else is dead. And it's not just the plants that are dying.

Three times in my life, I’ve found a big praying mantis staggering weakly around my garden after the first light frost, and I’ve taken her—it’s invariably a female—inside. I set her up on a big potted plant where she sits regally all day, a weird alien pet, watching snowflakes drift down on the roses outside the window, where she once lived. I do this, knowing it’s wrong, but unable to leave her dying outside. I feed her crickets and mealworms, spray the leaves down with water, watch as she grabs and stabs, delicately dines; bends to drink droplets from the leaves, grooms her forearms and feet like a little otherworldly cat.

She turns her head to watch me when I walk into the room, holds out her spiked forelimbs to ask if she might ride on my arm to another plant, to sit in a spot of winter sun. This goes on until late January, February. I get entirely too attached. And then, like Goldie Hawn in “Death Becomes Her,” she begins to decay. First it’s an antenna, then a foot, then a lower leg, simply falling off. And then she loses her balance and falls, and busts off a forearm. And I see why mantids are meant to die with the first hard frost, and it’s brought home to me why I should never have brought her inside.

So it goes with the geraniums. I have to let them die. Tomorrow. Or maybe this weekend, with a light snowfall for their funeral shroud. Oh, the intractable human heart. It does this every year.

Hope you had a peaceful Christmas. We did.

Thank You.

Thanks, everyone, for your input. I so appreciate the yeahyeahyeahs, and I also appreciate the nahnahnah’s. Much as a Leo loves approval, it’s actually kind of nice to know not EVERYONE’S here for the dog! How’s that for positive spin?

Whoops, Leona the lion is getting out of her little cage. Hello, Leona. Do you have something to say to everyone?

I want to reassure you that any book I write is going to have some tasty meat in the sandwich. Just to clarify, I’m not talking about a bunch of photos with cute captions here. I mean, people. You read the blog, right?

All right, Leona. Back! Back!

As a true creative hermit, I’m continually surprised at the extent to which my readers’ and friends’ thoughts are able to influence mine. I floated this book idea to my wise friend W., and his first reaction was that it needed paintings and sketches as well as photographs. Oh. Duh. Hadn’t thought of that. Well, all right. I’ll think about that. And here you are, saying the same thing. So now it looks like I’ll have to get out the pencils and watercolors. A good thing. Always a good thing.

To tell you the truth, thinking about the Chetbook is a little refuge for me when I’m deep into painting illustrations for my current book. As I laboriously create the paintings, I like to muse about how easy it would be, by comparison, to send my editor a compact disc full of photographs to illustrate a future book. So that’s partly where this idea is coming from. And now I see I shouldn’t rule out drawings and paintings. I SHOULD be drawing this dog. I should be drawing my kids, too. There’s another big Duh. You can’t do everything. Sometimes doing anything is a stretch.

Marcia, I am most grateful for your marketing ideas. The time I spend on the Internet has been given largely to blogging or researching, not surfing, and I don’t frequent Boston terrier sites or chatrooms of any kind. I had no idea there is a magazine devoted to the breed, though I shouldn’t be surprised. Smart marketing is key to getting a book into the right hands. I really appreciate your input, which was all new to me. When time comes, I will reach out again to the Boston terrier people and figure out how best to target the True BT Believers.

Anonymous (Leslieyosh), you get it. Thank you. More on your comment later. :-)

MojoMan, I hear you loud and clear about Chet’s story not being finished. God forbid the day it is. This book isn’t something that would come out next year. It would very much be a work in progress. Maybe a several-volume thing.

Chet Baker: The Early Years.

Chet Baker: Prime of Life.

Chet Baker: Dotage.

That was a joke.

As I found when he dropped off the rock cliff, Chet is far from done living his life and giving me thrills, inspiration, comfort, and hilarity in equal measures. I don’t know what happens to Chet in the end. Most of me hopes that nothing ever really happens to him. For every big event, there are a thousand little stories in this dog, and I’m grateful I started telling them when he was just a flop-eared pup. I want to keep telling them while he is here and warm by my side. You forget, day to day, all the little things. And it’s the little things that add up to something larger. All hail electronic archiving.

There will come a time to bring them all together, to sum it all up, and I’ll know when that time comes. I expect him to continue to teach and amaze me, to help me understand how one good dog can take someone from “No! I don’t need one more thing to care for!”

to “I don’t know what I would do without him.”

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Looks like we've pre-sold a hundred copies.

But onward and forward with the bird memoir. First things first. Thanks for your patience and your understanding. I wish you all a peaceful Christmas.

Well I'm learning

It's peaceful

With a good dog and some trees...

-Joni Mitchell, "Electricity"