Mary Beth Writes

I received a warm, easygoing, and professional phone call from Sara Rodriguez this week. She is running for Wisconsin State Assembly in the 13th district. Not my district, but I am ready and grateful to support people who will fight for issues I care about. Especially women. We need them and right now, they need us.

This is Wisconsin’s 13th District. https://maps.legis.wisconsin.gov/?asm=13&single=y  It seems to roughly include Brookfield, Elm Grove, around the Zoo and the Wisconsin State Fair Park. This map was invented by Republicans to elect Republicans. What you are seeing is gerrymandering.

Look at the map if you are not sure if you are in it or not.

Sara is calling people who can work for her, vote for her, and donate to her. Read her bio and agenda and send money!  Like her on FB and invite your neighbors to do so, also.

https://www.saraforwi.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Sara4WI

It’s getting more complicated to talk about and write about things that are not directly about racial justice. When we live in a society where we have to talk about “racial justice” -- well, that says it all.  If it isn’t justice for everybody, then it isn’t and never was justice.

Our son dropped off some things to us this week and stayed for supper. Tacos in the garage (it was raining) with one’s kid, in this time of quarantine, is just about the finest dining I can imagine.

We are visiting our daughters in Chicago tomorrow. One has a new kitten and the other has our two grandkids. We will be wearing masks and when we are with the grands, we will be outside. 

It’s been a long time since we spent time with our kids. In some ways, we have communicated more via calls and facetime than we did before.  But we haven’t been with them in months.

So much of our information about each other is absorbed not through what we say, but through what we feel and intuit - that mystery of intermingling molecules that happens when we are in the same place as people we care about. Do you feel closer to your people or more cut off? I’m not sure if I could answer that but I am very aware that connections with family and friends have changed a lot in the last three months.

Our wedding anniversary is this weekend. We started celebrating wildly yesterday … by taking a hike and later by discovering a startling place we didn’t know existed.

Our hike was almost here. https://wisconsin-explorer.blogspot.com/2017/07/hiking-ice-age-trail-monches-segment.html  You park your car at a parking lot, walk a short distance into some woods, and then you turn left. Except we turned right and that, as Robert Frost promised when explaining about paths in the woods, that made all the difference. 

(We are going back to the Monches segment really soon. Looks lovely)

We hiked two hours on the Ice Age Trail as it wends through old forest. There was a place where the meadow was so green it was chartreuse. We saw a blue-bodiced damsel flies and chippy woodpeckers and all the regular small darty animals. Lots of trillium past their blooms plus some Jack-in-the Pulpits and other leaves of things I know are rare and native, but I can’t tell you their names because names of plants is not my forte’. (Ask Kathryn and Franc.)

I stood quietly on the path a while; Len was far behind taking photos. Wind was blowing way up in the tops of the tall trees. As I watched them sway sixty feet over my head, I both felt and saw how those bigger breezes gently fell and whooshed downwards, moving the air inside the woods, pushing into skinny saplings standing among their parent trees. Those leafy saplings’ thin and pliable branches rose and fell like lungs of the forest. All around me trees breathed and waved and I was more than a little awed to see it. I’ve been hanging out in woods all my life and I never noticed this before. That you can see and feel and hear the forest breathing.

...

On our way to find sandwiches, we saw curious signs that promised “Spectacular Sculptures.”. Len had seen this mentioned on a Google Maps list of interesting places. (Spectacular Sculptures)

We found it, dropped our jaws, and parked. Once again, all I’m doing here is telling you about an amazing place. Maybe you already know Paul Bobrowitz’s art.

It’s six acres of sculptures that are big and imaginative; there are LOTS of sculptures. Some are whimsical (a bunch of frogs-like critters riding bikes together). Some are edgy and feel political. Some are threatening. Think wendigo, boogeyman, nightmare creatures standing on slag heaps of broken sidewalks.

No one was there, we had the place to ourselves. (Another couple drove up as we were leaving.) The sculptures are created from recycled metal, wood, rocks, bikes, propane tanks. The artist lives on this property. It’s crazy but it is also under control.

Life is long. People honoring long decades spent together could do worse than wandering among chrome moons, painted suns, teapot bird houses, monsters, rusty lovers, and all the other symbols and prisms of a beautiful and complicated life.

 

Comments

I can't believe we are still doing this Quarantine Diary and yet here we are with no end in site... My kid sister went on vacation to free her brain of the burden she carries as a health care worker( Radiology Tec ) dealing first hand with Milwaukee's Covid situation... She got her resaults from her Covid test (negative ) before setting out... Had it not she would have cancelled... She asked if I would watch my two four legged nephews so she could focus on herself and nothing else and I agreed... I'm now five or so minutes away from my favorite Indian restaurant for the duration of her travel journey... Mr. B and I were supposed to have our flesh and blood second date on Wednesday, Ya THAT Wednesday, the one of endless rain... Mr. B called on Tuesday to cancel because of family issues and so we put the date off until next week the 17th, we'll be cooking Puerto Rican food and will see how well we work together... Instead of our cancelled date we had a three hour Zoom date today Friday... It was as they say "The next best thing to being there" it's amazing how we as a couple have relied so heavily on all this technology we have at our fingertips to move this *Relationship*( Mr. B's words ) forward... We are dating in the Age of Covid with all the checks and balances that entails, and yet it seems that we are growing closer and stronger every day...
Mary Beth's picture

I wonder if the LGBTQ community is doing better at starting and maintaining relationships during quarantine (than the rest of us) - because in general, the road to becoming who you are is not easy and requires years of conversations with oneself and then with others. So being able to express oneself is a survival skill.

Thank you, Mary Beth! I enjoyed very much your sharing of thoughts and stories, experiences and hopes. Happy anniversary! I can’t imagine a more perfect celebration of your life together than finding your way to where you can feel and hear the forest breathing, walking through the creative work of someone who knows how to create magic with old tools and natural things, and then, best of all, creating time and space for a visit with your kids and grandkids! You are the most creative quarentiner I know! Congratulations and best wishes!

Sometimes when I read the number day it is, I'm like, "Really, that's all?" and sometimes I'm like, "Wow, that's a lot of days!" Guess it depends on my mood. LOL. Thanks for sharing. Always up for a hike in the woods, even virtually.

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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
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