A Phish Wedding #2

Five years ago on August 13 our first born son married his high school sweetheart in a charming country wedding at a renovated dairy barn called "The Blue Dress Barn."

There were nine bridesmaids dressed in rainbow patchwork dresses (one color per girl - our daughter was orange) and the morning of the wedding my best friend Carla, Tom and I went scavaging for wild flowers from the side of the road to make table arrangements in blue glass canning jars. The wedding cake looked like the rain forest. It rained early, then became sunny and hot.

It was a charming wedding that was exactly what these later-day hippies wanted. I, true-to-form, sailed through in a nervous and over-whelmed state. I wasn't doing much journaling at that stage of my life and I wish I had it to look back on and remember exactly how I felt.

This year brings us their 5th year anniversary, which they plan to celebrate by renewing their vows prior to a "Phish" concert. They are inviting all who attend to wear their most tie-dyed and hippie-like outfit. It will be interesting to compare their renewal pictures to the one I show here taken that sunny/rainy day in 2005.

This fall, our second born son is planning a wedding in October. It will be a much more formal affair - but it will also reflect the couple getting married. I am planning to take a much lower-key part in it, but I'm sure I will still be in a frantic state come Oct. 9.

Our daughter is only 20 years old - perhaps I'll have another five years before I have to deal with this again. And perhaps by then I'll take it all in stride.

But I doubt it!

It's too Darn Hot!

It's been hot in Michigan. And muggy. And we live near Lake Michigan, which is supposed to cool us off. But, it's still too darn hot to do most things - and one of those things for me seems to be writing.

What I want to do is take my notebooks and laptop out onto the deck and sit under the umbrella and gaze into our leafy green back yard and compose pithy prose while sipping iced tea.

But instead I'm stuck inside, a captive of air conditioning and staring at the same four walls I look at when it's winter and I'm longing for summer and complaining about ice!

In a couple of weeks we leave for a vacation in Santa Fe. It's a place we've never been to before, so each day will present new adventures and new things to write about. And, because we are renting a house with a kitchen, I'm planning to hit up the farmer's market and turn out a pie with a southwestern flair.

Of course, I also plan to write. Perhaps a piece for each day we are gone - perhaps a piece about pie!

Mobbing

Our family was sitting around the campfire at a cottage in Irons, Michigan, overlooking Maple Lake. It was early evening, not dark yet, when our conversations were interrupted by birds making a fuss high in the tree branches over our heads.

I was the first to notice it and I looked up at them three or four times before I remarked on it to the others. There were a lot of small birds squawking and flying back and forth in an alarmed matter.

We got up from our chairs and walked around trying to figure out what was happening and it didn’t take long to see the problem. A large spotted barred owl was perched on a branch high up in an oak tree.

About twenty birds were chirping madly and flying quickly back and forth past him. From down on the ground I could see that at least some of the birds were robins, but they were to far away for me to see if all of them were.

Then we saw something strange. A few of the birds, as they flew by, would dip low enough to strike the owl. This happened over and over again; we could see the feathers ruffle up with each hit, but the owl remained unperturbed. He did not make a sound. Occasionally he would fly to a different branch, but never very far away. He was silent and patient.

Later, when I asked a friend of mine (an avid birder) about it, she said it was something called “mobbing” and was often done to birds of prey by smaller birds, even though, as in this case, the owl was no danger to them or their territory.

Eventually we grew tired of watching, returned to our seats and broke out the som’ more supplies. As it got darker the frantic chirping gradually stopped as the torturers went to roost. As we sat around the fire, quiet and tired from a full day, we listened to the frogs croaking on the lake.

And from somewhere in the tall trees that surrounded us, we heard the owl call out.

Denise Kalin Tackett
July 10, 2010 – journal entry

Copper Top

July 1 marked a new time for me. A time I can put aside the trials of dealing with my mother's passing and closing her estate and begin concentrating on my writing again.

It also marks a time when I broke open my packed-away novel and began putting some serious effort to finishing it before the end of the year.

The working title is "Copper Top" and it's a "cozy" mystery set in the Southwest Michigan area where I live. It's about a young woman who is trying to become a mystery writer, but in the meantime works in a place that is a combination bakery and yarn shop, named "Copper Kettle Yarn and Bake Shop." She happens upon a mystery that is decades old and figures it can't hurt to look into it.

I've been working on this on and off (mostly off) for about three years, but I still love the characters and the plot - it deserves a fair shot at me finishing it. So I am fitting in time each week among my other writing projects to move it forward - 2,500 words a week - 10,000 words a month.

I've also decided to use the main character, Margo Lee Booker, as the central person for the series of short stories I'm writing for my Writing Quartet project of "birds." This way I can explore the personality of Margo a little more while I'm deep in the process of putting her through the paces in the novel, and still satisfy my monthly writing requirement for the Quartet (which, if you remember from an earlier post, has to include a bird somewhere in the text).

It feels good to just let my mind wander into these other worlds of my writing and not have to worry quite so much about the world I'm actually living in.