This is the artiest photo I have ever taken:

Isn’t that hilarious?

It’s two produce bags and a pair of Mr. Dingo Jones’s socks hanging off my little underpants-drying doodad in my front courtyard.

And yet ask me to take a picture of a human being! Yeesh! Blur city.

I love that drying doodad. My freshman year in college, one of the Japanese exchange students who lived on my floor had one, so the minute I got home for Christmas break I marched over to the Container Store to get me one. IF I bought it before my birthday, that means I bought it when I was 17, which means that I have had that thing for 25 years.

For a quarter of a century I have hauled it around the country and hung undies from it that have ranged from butt-floss to granny.

(The granny pants made a brief appearance after I had abdominal surgery. I needed them so I didn’t feel like my guts would fall out.)

87uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu: that’s from Jinx.

The warm and wonderful Terri Windling recently posted a quote about listening to the language of the earth and the trees. I thought I’d share three stories.

1. When I was about 18, we went to my mom’s family reunion in Virginia. My mother’s family is HYOOGE. It’s so big that each family unit has to have coded t-shirts. Grandmom picked baby blue, a color that looked great on her but hideous on everyone else. I laugh every time I think of it. In those days (late 1980s) when everyone was wearing clothes 19 sizes too big, she liked a nice fitted shirt, so there we all were, in tight baby blue, *suffering*. Now we all wear shirts that fit, so in the long run, Grandmom was right.

After the reunion, we stopped in DC to visit the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. When I was quite a tiny, we lived in Richmond, VA, and we visited the National Zoo now and again. I remember seeing Smokey the Bear.

On this trip, the current incarnation of Smokey had a special tree with little doors in it that would have different foods at random intervals, so Smokey would need to “hunt” on the tree. That bear was pretty attached to the tree.

In the reptile house, I was walking with my dad and brother. One green-glowing square promised an Australian snapping turtle, but the inhabitant was not to be seen. I stopped and pressed my nose up against the glass, trying to see.

The turtle swam out of the gloom, across the front of the glass. Then it stopped, turned its head, and looked at me. It stopped swimming and rotated to the front, where it put its little turtle feet up against the glass and pressed its nose up against mine.

“That turtle loves you!” my brother said. I knew it.

2. Many years later, I was walking with friends in Glen Helen Nature Reserve in Yellow Springs, OH. Yellow Springs is a magical place, firmly stuck in woo-woo hippie land. The glen is so beautiful. There’s a clearing surrounded by huge pine trees, where the ground is copper with fallen needles, and human voices are hushed, but if you howl like a wolf it will echo and echo. The air there is acid-spicy and clear.

Walking with friends along a river bank, I saw a tree that had been hollowed out by either lightning or disease, but it was still alive. “I’m getting in it!” I said.

I wedged myself into the tree, and it was the happiest thing: my hair stood on end, and I started to cry and laugh at the same time, totally overwhelmed.

“The tree is hugging me,” I said.

“That tree loves you,” my friend Peter said.

And I believe it. Even now. That tree is my own dear friend, and I will never forget it.

We have a pine tree in Vermont that I count as a cousin. It used to have a climbing branch, but that had to be removed. Trees are so different from people. They are on a different kind of time. My cousin-tree loves where it is, but it doesn’t always have the time to say hi. The tree in the glen was awake and loving just at the time when I was loving and standing inside it. It was pure joy.

3. Later still: my much-loved cat was Boadie. If you’ve been reading for a while here, you know about Boadie. She died about 2 and a half years ago. Lady cats are more ornery than boy cats, in my experience. Boadie had strong opinions about things. Mostly about how all my food should also be her food.

When I was going through Stuff at the end of my 20s, I did a lot of work to strengthen my beleaguered spirit, including some guided meditations. A lot of those ended up in a desert landscape, where I did a great deal of running and burning of things.

The first time I went to that interior desert, I found Boadie with me. I picked her up like a baby, which I did frequently, and which she never liked. In my mind’s eye, that internal Boadie wriggled out of my arms and started to grow and grow, until she was knee-high, with enormous teeth. She butted my knee, and after that, the big hunting cat ran with me while I sat, and breathed, and tried to find out who to be. I tried to respect it and not cuddle Boadie like a baby in the “real” world.

I love languages. I studied French and Russian in school. If there was a class for it, I would study turtle. I would study tree.

Inspired by a comment from my sister, I posted on my Facebook wall, ‘A school is not a business, and a kindergartner is not an “education customer.”‘

It boggles my mind, this trend of “corporatizing” education, trying to privatize it and assess “student progress” as if learning could be broken down into factory widgets, children as factory workers, teachers as – what? Overseers? Jeebus.

My sister is a teacher. My mother was a teacher. Year after year my mom spent her own money to make sure that all of her students had school supplies. Many times she spent her own money to make sure her students had warm coats for winter, but she always made sure they didn’t know the coats came from her because she didn’t want them to be embarrassed.

All the teachers I know are like that. They work all weekend, they work most of the summer, they spend what they need to in order to make their classrooms comfortable.

I can imagine how angry and frustrated the teachers I know would be if they were like some of the ones whose signs I’ve seen in the Chicago teachers’ strike – classrooms with no heat, not enough textbooks, not enough seats. How have we politicized education to the point that we let this happen? That it is OKAY FOR CHILDREN TO NOT HAVE A CHAIR IN THEIR CLASSROOM?

Every time I hear someone complain about not wanting their tax dollars to be distributed to less-wealthy local school districts, it boggles my mind.

Educating children isn’t just about putting facts into tiny heads. It’s not a simple matter of creating workers or constructing future producers/consumers.

Education is making people.

It’s giving young humans the tools they can use to dream and then work to make those dreams reality. It’s making citizens, who will vote and participate in society. Making neighbors, employees, future parents.

How could you ever suggest that the whole responsibility of making people rests with teachers, who only see those children for about 6 hours of every 24, 180 days out of every 365?

Making people is a complex, messy process. How could you ever simplify that down into a set of skills that can be measured by filling in small ovals with a #2 pencil? It’s absurd to even suggest that’s possible.

So my lunch is not sitting well AND I had a miscommunication with a friend AND I didn’t sleep well again last night.

I’ve already written about how sometimes I go make a Kiva loan when I feel bad (that’s my Dadda’s team! I miss your face, Dadda). But today I wanted something a little more active than just clicking a computer mouse.

So I wrote a love letter.

This is seriously the kind of utopian, squishy idea I can really get behind. Plus handwriting and stationery. It made me feel better, y’all. I hope it makes the recipient feel better too.

When I was quite young, we had an Impala. I remember the back seat being as big as a room, and surfing across the leather when my dad went around corners. I could lie flat and neither my head nor feet would touch the doors. The leather seats had little holes in them, and I discovered (and never told anyone until decades later) that if I stuck my colored pencils in those holes, the pencil would pop back out with a really nice noise AND leave behind a tiny, pale ring of color. That was so awesome. I loved that.

When my parents sold the car many years later, my mom described it as “grey.” My sister and stared at one another in disbelief. The car was clearly brown.

Then they bought a sofa. My mother described is as “grey.” Again: brown.

About 12 years ago, I had a bright-colored bathroom decorated around a gingham shower curtain in turquoise, yellow, and lime green (much cuter than it sounds). The remaining towels (now faded and relegated to the Gross Towel pile [for wet sweaters, large spills, and drying cats who have had misadventures in the bathtub]) inspired a whole conversation in which Mr. Dingo Jones advocated for them being “the yellow towels” and my calling them “the green towels that you think are yellow.”

Ever since then, I’ve called them “the green towels you think are yellow.”

Mr. Dingo Jones said the other day, “You know, I am a photographer, and I used to make my living restoring photographs, so if I were seeing color weirdly, you’d think I would’ve been bad at that.”

EVERYTHING I KNOW IS A LIE.

Damn, it’s a good thing most of my clothes are black and grey (OR ARE THEY BROWN), since I apparently can’t see.