These Days
Depending on when this goes live, there will have been 15 consecutive days without rain here on Orcas Island. I am determined to publish something before the first month of the year is over, and my weather app says I only have until 5pm on January 29th to write about the dry-spell in the present. (Author's note: I failed).
Sixteen days ago, I was trying to write this newsletter, and it was all about the rain. Boring even to me, but rain was all there was. December brought flooding all over northwest Washington, and the terrain turned spongy and sludgy underfoot. The surface water escalated into a moat around the house, but I'd been reunited with my all-wheel drive VW Sportwagen, and could get on and off the property without much trouble. I christened this period from early December to Mid-January "Soup Season," for the overall soupy quality to living in general. I was still drafting the piece, which included a recipe for my mother's Minestrone, when the rain stopped.
It didn't simply stop raining. After a solid month of permanently overcast skies and near-constant rain, the sun came out like that one story from The Bible. The temperature dropped, the barometric pressure rose, and for the first time since I bought a dehumidifier, the humidity in the house was under 50%. I started pruning the fruit trees, of which there are around 18 in total. The heritage apples and pears I'm afraid to prune, lest the wrong cuts disturb the homeostasis of a system that has been working just fine for decades without me. Grapes, I am told, you can't cut back enough. This leaves the peach, plum, apricots, fig, persimmon, cherry and loquat trees as test subjects. I'm not confident of my abilities or my judgement, but has that stopped me yet?
Grapes and peach, before and after.
On the third fourth day of sunshine, a distinctive ribbon of cloud appeared over Rosario Strait. For five days, this cloud transmuted but never left the vista. It hung there through evening of the 21st, when there was a slight chance of spotting the northern lights. The same evening, I also learned my friend Dan Pearson passed away at Yale New Haven Hospital a few hours earlier. The next morning, the cloud was gone.
Dan and I would periodically lose touch, but the embers of our love and friendship, forged in junior high and shaped in Edinburgh, never exhausted. Even before the news arrived, death was coming up in all of my squandered drafts of this newsletter. January is the anniversary of my mom's passing in 2022 from Covid-19. She's never far from my thoughts, but particularly close this time of year. When I tried to write a recap of 2025, I could only reflect on how it extracted so much, including the lives of 2 cherished and brilliant women I knew, Dinah Foley and Kathy Hepinstall.
The friends I lost in the last 9 months were all brilliant, talented, magnetic and caring people whose suffering eclipsed their ability to endure. In their wake, they left dozens of friends and family questioning what could or should have been done to change the outcome. It's the worst mind game in the history of mind games, and it distracts us from the more important questions: How do I honor this person? Who needs my help now? Does _____ know that they are loved? The only thing I know, for myself, is that it's hard to know what "staying connected" means in 2026, but I need to figure that out and be there for people who matter to me. And the irony of coming to this realization from an island is not lost.
These days, the temperature is in the low 50s, the clouds are indiscernible from the sky, and they're holding rain. The tire tracks that turned hard in the dry and cold days are softening and soupifying again. I think I'm seeing the sprouted seeds of red clover in a patch of bare, scorched earth where David and I had our last fire. There's a ton of work to do outside, but I have been spending a lot of time in my T-Mobile pink office, watching bald eagles take perch on the tall cedars and the rock that juts out into the sea from my window. The windows that overlook the pasture indicate that the woodpeckers, and blue jays have returned, but nobody is back like the robins.
This Robin is also back, though with not quite the flourish of the buxom, red-breasted boys darting through bare branches and yanking worms from the ground. I'll be posting more regularly as the pruning, clearing, planning, and clean up continues. The winds have picked up this morning, and I used that opportunity to burp the house and move some of the stale air; something found its way into the defunct sewer drain from the shower, and likely died in the p-trap, by the smell of things. There are at least ten more fruit trees to prune/butcher. The tansy ragwort Class of 2026 is starting to peek out of the ground, but Grampa's Weeder and I have been waiting for it all winter.
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