Mary Beth Writes

Here’s why I’ve not posted anything in nearly two weeks.

Last week Len and I took a trip to Duluth, MN and Ashland, WI. We hiked seven hikes, met new friends, ate too much. (We didn’t eat IN restaurants. We ate take-out dinners while sitting in our car overlooking Chequamegon Bay.) We marinated in the breezy Up North rhythms of woods, streams, rivers, and Lake Superior. 

Then we came home to all that stuff one does up returning; laundry, groceries, and bringing in the Big Dozers to deal with cat litter boxes. 

Monday I did a lot of catching up. Tuesday Michol and I drove 15 boxes of books (donated by a friend of Michol) from Waukesha to the Racine AAUW sale. I have decided my street name is Book Coyote, since my secret hustle is to ferry books safely across the border. (I’ll tell you more about the AAUW book sale for women’s scholarships soon.)

My right shoulder has been ached the past month so I saw my P.A. (Physician’s Assistant) yesterday. She says they are seeing a lot of this exact complaint! People at their computers, reading books, sitting around without proper arm support. I always knew that sooner or later I’d get a reading injury and here I am.  Upcoming physical therapy appointments are scheduled.

My P.A. asked if I would like to get my Covid booster plus a flu shot. Okay, that sounds exciting.  No side effects yesterday. Today I am sore at both injection sites and I’m extra tired but Ibuprofen and naps help. For all the drama vaccinations have become, the experience is generally undramatic.

Anyway, this is where I was.

I posted quite a few photos from our trip on my Instagram account. I’m mbdanielson and my icon is my face behind two green leaves. Feel free to follow me.  Warning: I post a lot of photos of cats. 

Our Trip Up North

I read this book back in February and then wrote about it. The book is Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This is the post: https://www.marybethdanielson.com/content/two-books-one-movie-reviews-me-2242021

“There is this: We know ourselves via the language that we speak. English is mostly nouns, with about 30% verbs. Ojibwe is 70% verbs. Much of English is about delineating gender. Anishinaabe doesn’t divide the world into sex.

Anishinaabe DOES describe the world according to the nature and properties of how things are changing, moving, growing, or interconnecting to something else. The example she uses is that a bay of water is not a bay. The Ojibwe word for bay is translated to a VERB meaning “to be a bay.” As if it might be something else tomorrow, which since a bay is filled with water, it might be. The bay is not the static noun where three sides of land are filled with water. A bay is the moving interconnection of trees, water entering from streams and springs, water moving outward to the lake or river, the interconnected life that happens in and around a bay. The bay is animate.

What Wall Kimmerer learns is that her native language not about what things are now, but about how things are connected. One does not own things. One is in a relationship for a day or a lifetime and the language speaks to that.

Most of the Christian theology and worldview we have been raised in is linear and future oriented.  We claim our faith because it promises us heaven when we die, which helps us endure so much of what we experience in our lives. We learn to make lists, think ahead, have a plan, work hard towards our goals. We “share our faith” by giving others the tools we think we couldn’t live without. Like how to make a list and have a plan. 

But what if we back away from seeing our world as on it’s way to being some other reality than it is today?

What if we understand the point and purpose of our lives in not a tidy funeral and well-provisioned kids?

What if we stop in our tracks and look around? What do we see? Where are we?

These questions were in me last week. Specifically, right here, watching the sun sparkle on Lake Superior. The lake was rustling and whooshing. Breezes moved through the pines trees. It smelled fresh and perfect. I could feel that nothing was a noun; air and water was moving all around me and the molecules of me were part of everything that was moving and swirling and changing.

We hiked around Gooseberry Falls, watched the river tumble over five waterfalls and then keep pushing and falling over the basalt rocks. Northern Ash dazzled with three colors of leaves all at. 

It helps to be old to think thoughts like these. When you are young you have to make sandwiches and find the restrooms and keep the toddlers from falling in the water and buy stuff in the giftshop. I liked those trips, too.

 

Gooseberry Falls State Park is 40 miles north of Duluth

We’ve hiked the Houghton Falls hike every time we have been to Ashland. It’s just a bit north of Washburn, there’s a sign on Highway 13 that says where to turn.

One parks in the small lot, walk along a plank path through the woods until you are suddenly right next to a deep ravine cut into the topography. (There were two kinds of rock there a bazillion years and the fluffier rock washed away.) At the bottom of the protected ravine there is a bubbling stream that flows over several small waterfalls.  Keep walking along the ravine and suddenly Lake Superior spreads out in front of you.

This hike we started commenting to each other, “What’s going on here? Why are all these trees broken? Was there a derecho this summer? There are broken trees in the ravine but not very much water. The little waterfalls are nearly kaput. There is some stagnant water over there.”

This is what I looked like a year ago:

This is what it looked like last week:

This is what it looked like this year. Global climate change is everywhere. 

...

We had a lovely trip. We avoided contracting Delta Covid by eating meals in our car instead of in restaurants.  We saw old and new places and one was very different due to a long drought and a fast storm.

here are a few more photos.

 

 

Tags

Comments

Leonard's picture

Keeps you from seeing things the same way, time after time. It was good to see how Houghton Falls had changed, and it was also good to see how we had changed (a little more stiff and sore going up stairs) since the last time we were there. And, finally, good to see if we were still a little bit changed when we pulled back into our own garage.

Loved all the pictures. Your vacation sounds relaxing and serene. I always admire you both. All the hiking you do ! Healthy living!
Mary Beth's picture

Thanks! Hah, we did all that hiking and then came home and slept...

Thank you!!!!
Mary Beth's picture

Anonymous, I missed you! Thank you...

You wild and crazy woman!! That's what you get for reading so dangerously.
Mary Beth's picture

Made me laugh out loud.. thanks!

I love it - a reading injury!!

Add new comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

Y is for Yellowstone

9/27/2023

Back in February I asked you to give me topics to write about that would correspond to the alphabet. Sometimes several of you sent ideas for one letter and sometimes I wrote about all of them (I’s and S’s) Here we are at letter Y for which your suggestions are Yummy Food and Yawns. The word yawn absolutely makes me yawn; no way I could write about that - I would yawn for hours. I worked on Yummy Food but could only find a scolding voice about Americans eating too much sugar. Bah. True but not interesting.

So, I gave Y a go again. Y is for?

"I was Scott Simon's teller."

9/22/2023

First of all - Thank you to those of you who came to the Wisconsin Writers Association zoom gala last night. I HAD received an email a week ago which said I would be reading my whole story. Cutting it in half while I was reading was awkward! It was still a happy event for me and the other writers. Thanks for being there! 

X is for Xeriscape

9/20/2023

Xeriscape is pronounced ‘zeer-eh-scape’ and it means landscaping with little to no irrigated water. Readers in the west already know about this. Those of us who don’t live in arid or desert places need to wake up to the incredible resource that water is - then begin to accommodate ourselves to “water all around and beneath us all the time” is no longer our reality. Nor is it our right. We’ve got to get smarter and do better.

W is for Wonder

9/13/202

To whomever suggested Wonder - Thank You!  ‘Wonder’ has been bobbing in my mind like a frog in a pond.

However, I have FOUR suggestions from you guys for X - but I do not want to write four X essays. These are the suggestions:

1.) X signature substitution

2.) xylophone on a string pulled by a toddler

3.) xenophobia

4.) Xmas. 

If you have an opinion respond with the one you would like me to attempt. I will choose whichever X gets the most comments.

There will be no gerrymandering in this election.

GNTL - NAMI

9/7/2023

Grownups Noticing Their Lives

NAMI

Most of you know about my former weird and lovely job of coordinating an employability skills program for Huber-qualified inmates in the Racine County Jail (that’s a mouthful). Early on I realized that most of the people I would work with were people with 1.) huge addiction problems, and 2.) underlying and over-the-top and to-the-side just lying around mental health issues.

V is for Vocabulary

9/6/2023 

For those who are new here - This year I am writing about topics, in alphabetical order, that were suggested to me by readers. Sometimes this is hard! 

IRTNOG

My cousin-in-law Dave has some powerfully thorough avocations (for fun and profit he earned a PhD in biochemistry; you will notice this in his list). This year, among other pursuits, he has been collecting words which have appeared in our culture since 1945, which was the year he also appeared in our culture.

Tag Cloud

9/11 17 minutes 500 Words A-Z AARPtaxes AAUW abortion Acadia accident Accountable Advent aging Alaska anniversary antibiotics antlers apples appointments Arrows art Ashland August Augustine aunts baby Badlands balance Baldwin Barbara Barkskins Beauty Becky Becoming Esther Berry birthday bistro BLM Blue BookReport books boy scout Bread BrokenDays BuyAngry Cabeza de Vaca Cahokia calendars Canada canoe cat romance cats cello Chicago China Choosing Christmas cilantro Cinnabuns circus climate change clouds Clowns clutter Colonialism comet ComfortZone CommonSense community consumerism Cops Corvid-19 Courage Covid-19 Crazy creditreport creosote CrimeShows danger DarkRiver death Debate December DecisionFatigue decluttering democracy dentist depression Destination Today Detroit Didion disasterprep dogs dollhouse Dreams Duty Easter eBay Echoes Eclipse election EmilyDickinson eschatology Esquipulas exit polls eyes Fable FairTrade family farmer Fata Morgana ferns firealarm Fitness Five Flatbread Flexible flu Food Pantry Fort de Chartres frame Franc FrancGarcia friends frugal FrugalHacks Frugality frustration Ft.Ticonderoga fungi fusion Galena Gannets Garden GarfieldParkConservatory Gaspe genius geode GeorgeFloyd gerrymandering ghosts gifts girls GNTL gorgons goulash GovernorThompsonStatePark Graduation grandkids granola groceries Guatemala gum guns Hair happiness HaveYouEver? hawks healthcare Healthinsurance hearings heart heaven HelleKBerry heroes hike History home HomeRepair Honduras Hope HowCrowGotOutofJail humor hurricane Ice Cream idiosyncrasy igloos impeachment Innkeeper Instincts integrity InternetPrivacy Interview InviteMe2Speak James Baldwin Jan 6 Janus jewelry JoyceAndrews Judy JulianofNorwich Jump justice Karen kites ladder Lady Lamb LangstonHuges LaphamPeak laundry LeeLeeMcKnight lemming Len Light Lincoln Little Women LockedOut Loki loneliness LouisArmstrong Love Ludington Macaw macho Manitoulin MargaretFuller Maria Hamilton Marquette marriage Marsden Hartley masks Mayan MayaWorks meme Memories men Middlemarch MilesWallyDiego MindfulChickens Mistakes MLK moon Mother MothersDay mounds mouser movies museums must-haves Mustapha NAMI Nancy Drew Newfoundland New Mexico New York City Nomadland nope observation OBUUC Ocotillo OnaJudge ordinary OscarRomero osprey Outside oximeter Parade mayhem PastorBettyRendon Paul Hessert PDQ Penny persimmon photos Pi Pies pineapples poetry Preaching privacy procrastination Protest QE2 Quern quest Questions Rabbit holes racism reading recipe recipes recommendations Remember RepresentationMatters Reruns responsetoKapenga Retirement rhubarb Ricky rime RitesofPassage romance Rosemary Ruether Roses Roti Ruth SamaritanWoman Sanctuary Sandhillcranes Santuario de Chimayo SaraKurtz SaraRodriguez satellites ScottSimon sculpture Seasons Sermon ServantsoftheQuest sewing Shepherd Shontay ShortStory shoulder sick sickness Slower snow Social Security SofritoBandito solstice South Dakota SpaceShuttle spirituality spring square feet staining stars stele Stereotypes stories StoryStarts stream monitoring stress Survival swim Talent taxes teenager thankgsgiving Thanksgiving TheBridge TheMaid ThePerpetualYou therapy ThreeBillBoards Three Thing ThreeThings Three Things TidalBore TimeBeing toddler Tom tortillas Trains travel Traveler Tubing turtle Twilight Bark Tyrone Ukraine Ulysses Grant Umbrella UnrelatedObservations Up North urgency vacation vaccine Valentines vanilla Vietnam vision VivianWokeUpDrowning Vocabulary vole volunteer WalkingAndSeeing Wampanaog war WarsanShire weather weaving Webs wedding whines WhyAttendChurch Wiley Willa WillaCather Wisteria Won! Wonder words Xeriscape Yellowstone
Ad Promotion