Here are some things that happened today and yesterday, both very fine and decent days.
Yesterday Valerie called me from Montana. She and the dog were (she explained) sitting on a hill in the back pasture, regarding the sky. Only Tuley did not think they should sit still when there were all these enormous dangerous animals milling about. Cows! Retreat, retreat! While Val sat peacefully gazing at the mountains, Tuley ran loops on her short fast legs, looking for a passage through the cows to clear ground. But the cows tend to scatter about, and in Tuley’s opinion they were menacingly, unpredictably dispersed and closing in fast. She tried to explain this to Val. She raced away and raced back, urging Val to get out while there was still time. Finally (and this is a first) Tuley assessed the situation and made her own choice: the pack would have to separate. Obviously Val was going down, and Tuley, being of sound if tiny mind, didn’t plan to stay for the bovine massacre. She ditched her idiot pack member and, with a final burst of courage and speed, zoomed off across the fields, threading her way among the looming, bellowing beasts, until at last she fetched up safe at the ranch house on the hill. Where Val found her a while later, barking indignantly (through the fence) at the offensive cows.
Val says she (Val) is feeling all right, if tired. Being home is wonderful: good company, good food, all the right smells and sights. She has had a couple days this time of a metallic taste in her mouth, and today she’s feeling “a bit punky” – some pain that can be managed with Tylenol, but mostly just very very tired. It’s something to do with insufficient red blood cells, and therefore insufficient oxygen getting to her muscles and other bits. She had chemo on Friday and this is Tuesday, which is about on track for being one of the lowest days after chemo. Also, most of the rest of her eyebrows and eyelashes fell out in the last couple weeks, making her beautiful brown eyes shine out even more. This is the first time her parents have seen her since June, before her hair fell out.
Meanwhile, I’m holding down the various forts here in Portland. Tonight several friends joined me for one of my very favorite Portland rituals: watching the September swifts.
A swift is a kind of bird, a bit like a swallow, sometimes described as a cigar with wings. It spends most of its life on the wing. At night flocks of swifts roost inside hollow trees, hanging from their hook-like claws (picture how a woodpecker sits on a tree) and propping themselves up with the spines in their tails. In the fall small flocks of swifts merge into bigger flocks and then migrate south, some as far as Venezuela (as we learned tonight from some Audubon volunteers).
So here’s the amazing thing: Every year, the world’s largest known colony of Vaux’s swifts congregates like an outrageously huge family reunion at Chapman Elementary school in Northwest Portland. The school’s one-time heating system features an enormous brick chimney that, to a swift, looks like a roomy hollow tree. In September, thousands upon thousands of swifts convene at the school, more and more every night. They swoop through the sky in enormous kaleidoscopic clouds, shifting and seething, when suddenly! right around dusk, they create a giant spiral formation and swirl en masse down into the chimney to roost, like coffee grinds swirling down a drain. They enact this drama every night (occasionally one is picked off by a sudden hawk, too) until one night in late September when they simply don’t show up – they’ve migrated.
There’s actually a new documentary about the Chapman swifts: you can see a trailer here if you like.
Anyway, the best thing about the swifts is how happy they make me: the birds themselves, and the fact that Portlanders are so charmed by them. They are entrancingly lovely, dancing their bedtime dance in the sky as the sun sets over the west hills of the city. And below them are all these people, hundreds of Portlanders, men and women and kids and babies and dogs, sitting on blankets, cuddled into sweatshirts, having picnics, peering through binoculars, leaning on each other, laughing with friends. And all there because of these astonishing birds, all watching the sky. All of us there to witness a tiny piece of the intricate beauty of this world, in fellowship and awe and giddy delight.
It makes me hopeful about people, and so glad to be in this surprising, hilarious, breathtaking world.
p.s. I borrowed these pictures from various sites – if you click on them you can see where they came from.