Devil in the Woodpile

22 October 10, Boise

Yesterday I went to collect firewood. There hasn't been much doing for work around here and it felt good to have a solid task at hand and to be in charge of it, to be able to make something which, if it wasn't money, was just as valuable as we'd be needing the heat this winter. After cleaning and tuning the Stihl 290 I loaded my truck with the saw and a shovel, gloves and ear muffs and saw tools, coffee thermos and a small lunch, and drove down the hill to Eight Street. The dirt road climbed steeply winding into the Boise Front. Below was the wide valley, the sky hazy from four days of high pressure and a fire somewhere off in the hills. Below timberline were sheep grazing among the sage. There was a white canvas shepherd's wagon parked on an open ridge and later, driving back down, I'd see the dark-skinned man in charge of the sheep and wonder if he was Basque or Latino, riding a horse and leading two hobbled horses down the hill.

The road passed the grey poles of standing dead from the 95' burn, then switch-backed into the living pines. It joined the ridge road and I followed the latter north, leaving behind a few kooky cabins in a draw for a sunny stretch of open ridge that picked my spirits up. I couldn't understand why, but I was strangely a little nervous about the venture. Nothing of the task was foreign to me, I've always felt comfortable and confident alone in the woods, and my objective was basic enough: find some good firewood in the form of dead standing or slash piles, limb and buck the poles, stack them in the pickup, be careful not to slip with the saw or trip over any rolling limbs, and enjoy the quiet and the view as much as possible while still hard at work. Yet I was on edge somehow, riddled by the feeling that failure was at my heals and unless I was diligent and even a tad lucky, I would be driving back down that road with an empty truck and perhaps worse, a bandaged limb.

And at first there were problems. I found a decent slash pile and hauled out the few long poles worth bucking and got to work. But soon the saw began dying on me. I figured the idle was too low for the altitude so I used my tiny flathead to adjust the carborator but the engine kept bogging down at low speeds. Every time I let off the trigger, the saw hanging from one hand, to haul over or reset a trunk, the saw would sputter dead. It became so unnerving, as though something larger was after me, a pestering fate that did not want me to succeed. And in my impatience, instead of taking ten minutes to sit down with the saw and solve the problem, I pushed on, gassing the saw in idle, the chain rolling while I worked with my other hand. It was foolhardy of me and I knew it. If I'd been my squad boss I'd have given myself a good earfull over the matter.

After gutting the first pile, the truck bed less than half full, I drove back along the road to another area I'd seen. It was less a pile than a clearing where some logging had taken place and there were skid trails running down through the brush to a stand of big grey widowmakers. They had left a number of logs and kiln-dry poles were everywhere. This was the pile I should have hit when I saw it instead of driving on to scout further. My spirits picked up seeing the stash. From down the hill I dragged about a dozen twenty-foot trees up near the truck, took a minute to eat an apple and granola bar, and before getting started fiddled with the saw. Indeed the problem was with the idle speed, and once I got the mix right, I felt some relief. I topped off the gas-mix and the bar oil, and pulling the chord felt the saw roar to life. Then positioning myself around the perimeter of the criss-crossed logs, worked my way in, lopping at the ends. The work began to calm me. It was going well and finding a rhythm I soon forgot my worries and the strains in my back and forearms and after a couple hours of cutting and stacking and hauling up new poles to buck, the truckbed was nearly full: close to three-quarters of a cord. I had to force myself to stop. I would have cut more, but time was running out, as I'd promised Anna I'd be back by mid-afternoon to watch Ada so she could paint.

I packed the saw and fuel cans and the empty oil containers some assholes had left on top of the stacked wood, took a minute to gaze out at Shaffer Butte, granite humps shining in the sun through the blue pines, then started the drive down. The truck moved like an overloaded donkey down the narrow, deep-rutted road. Which is to say, slow and sure-footedly. Once I had to pull to the side of the hill to let an up-coming truck pass, and suddenly I felt the bed slide and pitch into the gully. I had been feeling pretty good about my accomplishments, but in that moment of sliding all of my anxiousness returned. But what the hell was I so touchy about? And why wouldn't the condition pass, even after I'd achieved my goal? I put the Nissan in four and the old donkey pulled easily out of the gully. Everything would turn out fine, the trip would be fruitful. Yet my apprehension would remain until I pulled into the driveway of our home.

And I think to some small degree I can sympathize with what people were going through during the Great Depression. I have been without a steady dependable job since February, and our savings are getting low, the shrinking numbers like the shrinking hours of daylight as winter nears, and the one thing for now that I can do to stave off that mounting cold is to cut a truckload of firewood for the house; the one thing immediately before me, in my hands, that I can do and which no boss or no dithering potential employer can take from me: a cord of wood, better than money in the bank, stacked against the house like a big security blanket.

Yet if I should fail at this small thing, then what does that say about the greater project of bringing my family up here to Idaho? If I can't go up into the hills and come back with a load of firewood, how can I manage to find a good job and pay the rent and put good food on the table? That is what is weighing on me, I realize. Stacked atop the cord of wood is a much larger pile of worries. But I can't let myself be preoccupied with that larger thing. I must watch each step, each revving of the saw and sinking of the blade into each log, white petals of sawdust spitting onto the ground. I must watch the uneven ground and the growing pile of bucked logs and not stumble.

Birds Nest

27 Sept 10, Boise, Idaho

Just in time before the cool days of Fall, we've moved into a new house, a rental that we might have the option to buy. And after six turbulent months – involving three moves, and four different jobs for me – the place feels like a true destination for us, a homecoming. On the edge of the North End, where the hills begin to rise out of the canopy of trees above Eighth Street, our mid-century brick home is perched on a terrace that looks through sycamore and silver maple and crab apple trees into a wide western sky deepened with slot views through the roofs and trees across the street. We can see the high, grass-tan ridge of Camel's Back park glowing in the afternoon sun to our northwest, close enough it seems you could throw one of our crab apples and hit it. Our front yard is terraced above the sloping street with rip-rapped walls of basalt from the desert plain. A swing for Ada hangs from the bulking limbs of a sprawling sycamore right outside the living room window. The house has wood floors and a fireplace and its airy floor plan is at all times of the day dappled with light and adrift with the sounds of birds and lawn mowers and the occasional barking dog in the neighborhood. It's quite a gardened, day-dreamy little place. One of my favorite features is how my study (also known now as the guest room), like my study in SF, faces out with a view of the terrain and western sky ahead. There's a feeling of being a bird aloft in the trees, able to study the animal and human creatures below, to see what's coming from the weather, the scheming clouds. Able to daydream a little, or write, or ponder what needs or doesn't need pondering.

And it's a damn fine and fun yard for Ada to play in. The big canopies of limbs stretching above and the glimpses of limitless sky through their leaves. And of course the swing: she loves that thing like a pet pony and every morning now she points from the breakfast table window out at the dangling contrivance with an urgency that leads to tears if we don't go out. Once we do, and she's swinging away, she sings and hums and trills to herself as she takes in the world around her, the skittering squirrels and the scouting cats and the crab apples making a fruit salad of the yard. Anna loves the place too. Soon we'll have her studio set up in the garage, and the handsome house is suited to our mid-century-Americana-contemporary leanings in furniture and décor. But it's more than that. There is a serenity here, a garden calm at the edge of the hills, a good fung shui to the house's orientation and character, and Anna finally has a place that feels home to her, where she can decorate and create and flourish. We feel deeply good here, as rooted as the big tree in the yard, and I'm grateful for that. Though sometimes I come home from a night shift, walking up the rise into the opening stars to our sleeping home and wonder how I got so lucky, and thank whoever or whatever loaded the cards in our favor. Though I have a suspicion it was Anna who did that, as believing in and deserving of that kind of spiritual fortune stuff as she is.

All for His Country

15 May 10, Kuna, Idaho

We drive out onto the Snake River Plain to see my old professor and friend EB. It's been a warm weekend and the maples, elms, oaks, and lilacs are in full canopy as the dainty flowers have wilted away. The anticipation of summer is mixed with a sentimentality of spring's passing. When we pull up EB is sitting on his front porch, in the shade of his birch and Russian Olive trees, enjoying the panorama of his five acre property with a view of the snow-streaked Owyhees to the south above his fruit trees. EB hobbles across the yard to greet us. The tough old bird, gone portly and half-blind with illness, gives us hugs and smiles and lights up like a kerosene lamp when Ada reaches her hand out to him. We install ourselves on his porch and get re-acquainted. It's been two years since Anna and I last saw EB, and while his wits are still sharp, his humor still playfully cutting, his spirit tough and independent as ever, his body has suffered from the mysterious ailments that have beset him since the week he drove his truck to New York City and volunteered to help in the aftermath of the bombing of the World Trade Centers.

“Polymailgia is what the doc says I have. Many pains. Hell, I could've told him that,” quips EB. He shows me how he can move his left thumb like a flipper. “I broke it reaching for something that wasn't there. When the doctor looked at it, he said, 'I don't see it on your records.' That's cause I didn't come in. The doc wanted to know why not. I told him, 'You know, my dad used to say, if it doesn't hurt worse than a mule kicking you, walk it off.”

EB's story of late is an unjust one. Here is a man who flew reconnaissance flights over the USSR during the cold war, and over Algeria, Lebanon and Egypt during the years of struggle for self-rule in those countries, and who again volunteered his services for his country during 9-11, an effort that resulted in his present afflictions. Yet somehow he doesn't qualify for VA health care benefits and therefore must pay close to three thousand dollars a month for his health insurance and myriad medications, a cost that is fast eating away his retirement savings. Add to this scenario the temperament of its protagonist, an authentically independent Westerner, a man who's voted Republican his whole life and has rarely asked for help from anybody except when the orchard or fields demanded it (and then he paid for that help), and you get a very ironic study of the present state of health care in this country; of a society that promulgates the ideals of rugged individualism alongside heroic sacrifice for country, yet provides little or no reward, or social safety net, for those who act out those ideals. A man fights for his country, suffers for it, votes for a political party that is antagonistic to health care overhaul, and thereby must continue fighting the rest of his life just to keep alive. It's a story Anna has urged me to write, and one, as we sit around talking and catching up on our lives, I consider asking EB about. But the timing never feels quite right, and I holster the urge for another day.

After a little while we get up to walk around the property. I lend EB a hand to get him out of his chair. If he sits or lies still for more than twenty minutes, his body starts to seize up with pains. It makes for a rough night of sleep, he tells me, without a hint of complaint. We stroll through the tall grass down to the orchard. EB points out the tiny apricots starting on a bough and names all the different apple and apricot and nectarine trees. Every tree on the verdant property was planted by him, except for one big blue spruce, over the last twenty-two years. I hold Ada up so she can put her nose in an apple blossom. She's learning to smell flowers, artlessly breathing in through her nostrils as she clamps her mouth shut, her face pensive as if it were a vintage wine or cod liver oil being sampled.

“It's been a hell of a spring,” says EB. “I keep a weather journal, and this is the coldest, windiest spring I can remember. We used to pick cherries in early June. Now it won't be till July at the earliest. The farmers are all having to replant because the soil temperature hasn't gotten above forty-five. We're mid May, for cryin' out loud. Look at my roses there, died off from the frost.”

Anna asks when the fruit trees will be ready for picking, and EB tells her in August. He invites us to come out. “Hundreds of pounds of fruit that'll just rot on the ground if you don't come pick it. I can't do it anymore.”

“I'd like to can some of it,” says Anna.

“That's easy enough. Apple sauce is my favorite. Core, peal and chop, put it into a cooker, go off with a six-pack, and when you come back, apple sauce. Can it, and later you pour it into pies. That's what I like to do.”

I ask him about the plastic detergent bottles hanging from random boughs. “Fly traps. For the European fruit fly, also known as the … maggot around here. Put water and a little detergent in the bottles and the flies can't get out. Better than pouring pesticides everywhere. I don't go for all that. Besides, what's a little worm here and there? Cut around it, use what's good. The worm won't hurt you anyway.”

Listening to him makes me think of the summer afternoons I'd spend with my grandma cutting and canning fruit, and doing just as he described with worms or bad portions. Simple, practical, unsqueamish attitudes about food and making it.

The orchard is a serene and dreamy place, it's white- and pink-flowering limbs delicate against a pale blue sky marbled with clouds stretching above the Snake River Plain. Ada is as content as ever, and I want the feeling of the orchard to sink deep within her, to be there as a place, both of memory and of aspiration, a dreamy childhood sensation, and perhaps an artful hope and pursuit of her latter years. Speaking of pursuits, EB asks of our search for a property in the North End, and I tell him if we could find a place that had even a portion of his open garden space, we'd be delighted.

We make our way around the back of the house, past his bird feeders and the back porch that faces to the north, to his wide-open garage. There, among yard and hand tools and lawn mowers and old bicycles, EB shows us the project he's been working on the last years. From willow and other semi-hard wood limbs he's stripped and lacquered walking sticks of all proportions, fastening them with leather laces through a bored hole at the top and a rubber shoe at the bottom. He sizes us up each with a stick.

“You'll have to make one for Ada,” I suggest.

EB's eyes widen with the charge. He then instructs me to pick through some of his “redundant” garden tools, and encourages us to get to work planting. “At least tomatoes and peppers, in pots, so you can take them when you move.”

We sit again in the shade, and make plans to visit again when the fruit is ready, and soon it's time to go. As we say our goodbyes, EB hugs Ada and Anna, and reaches out shake my hand. There is a funny precedent here, one that EB and I have a habit of re-enacting. Nearly twenty years ago, after EB and I had first become friends at the University, I hugged the old codger after a long afternoon of walking out on the Plain. It took the man aback, and he said to me quite seriously, “You're the only man I ever hugged.” Since then he would bemoan the act, yet somehow expect it, whenever we parted or greeted each other. So now, after Anna has gotten her hug, I say to EB, “What about mine?” The old mule laughs, says, “You make fun of me every time,” and then gives me a warm embrace. “I don't hug men,” he re-affirms to Anna, “Unless they're gay. Gay men, I'll hug. That's what they do.”

As we pull out along the dirt road and drive around the back of his property, I give a couple taps of the horn, in lieu of the waves we used to exchange when he could make it to the top of the knoll in time to see me off through the olive trees.

Down from the Roof into the Garden

6-10 May 10, Boise

Coupeau, a roofer who occupied a 10-franc room on the top floor, had his tool bag on his back . . . “Say, what weather this is for May! It's biting cold this morning.”

– Emile Zola's L'Assomoir

Six am; the thermostat reads twenty-nine degrees as I happen to read this passage in Zola's novel and start at the coincidence; a little cozy reading before I go out into the cold to work on the roof and install siding on the neighbor's place. It's damn cold; how dearly I'd rather be reading about Coupeau's toils than have to go out and endure them myself.

It's been a blustery, dramatic spring. Whereas the winter was mild, with snow fall at sixty to eighty percent of normal around the state, its passing has been a convulsive death throe. There was one warm spell in March, but since then the weather has been at turns frigidly blue or stormy wet, providing only a handful of days warm enough to go out without a coat. The lilacs have bloomed early, their cones of purple and ivory held in the air pertinaciously as hail lashes down from torn skies. But if this sounds like a complaint, it's not. Yesterday, two stories up on scaffolding, I looked out over the greening trees at the tall white islands of cumulus drifting across the turquoise sky, the clouds shining and coved with shadow, the ranks of them going on as far as you could imagine to the west and possibly even to the sea. This last week our weather has arrived from Alaska, the chilled currents whipsawed down here by the jet stream.

A new friend of mine, M.L., who owns a modern furniture store here, loves the weather. He's from Boise and is accustomed to the usual warmer, more gradual springs. Yet being a gardener, he likes what this prolonged cool spell is doing to his garden. “The roots really get a chance to sink in, establish themselves, before the heat comes on.” I don't know much about that. I do know my hands are rough and split and the mornings require a hat, down vest, jacket and shell to keep the breezy cold from paralysing me up on the scaffolding. And that I'd rather be inside reading. But that's often my plight, regardless the weather.

And I know the Boise river is flowing high, nearly bank-full, though not as high as last spring. And if you go to the farmer's market on Saturday morning all you'll find for produce are hot-house varieties and starters and herbs. But most of the shade trees are in leaf now, their green a bright new shade that should darken in the coming weeks. Only the catalpas and sycamores in town and the alders and willows in the hills are holdouts. The warmth will come. And then the hard-driving heat. And hopefully by then we'll be inside doing the finish carpentry on the house.

- - - - - -

Yesterday we were the picture of domestic pastoral bliss: me mowing the lawn that had grown tall as alfalfa in the front yard, Anna pulling weeds from the flower beds and sweeping clean the sidewalk as Ada toddled about the mown portion of the yard, pushing up on three points while trying to put a stick in her mouth. The clouds had broken and the warm breeze tossed white shreds across the blue sky while we worked contentedly outside for an hour or so. I was tired from work, but nothing like a cold beer and a kiss from the wife to give you your pep back.

Going round the yard, ducking under the thick-leaved maple trees, watching Anna sweep, her fine brown arms showing from her blouse, glancing over to be sure Ada wasn't getting into trouble, I had the thought: “wow, we're Boiseans now. We're playing house and tending the yard and I've got a steady job and Anna has her routine and has found her way about town and it could be 1950, or even farther back, if it weren't for the cars passing on the street, and we're a little pioneer family settling the outskirts of the new town on the edge of the Rockies.” Or something a little silly like that. All we needed was a cow in her stall and chickens floating about the yard. (The neighbors do have chickens, by the way.)

There was such a serene and industrious pleasure in our all being at work together. I think that's my single greatest complaint about having a job: spending eight-plus hours a day with people who aren't my family, aren't even good friends. Certainly working with family has it's strains and dangers. But Anna and I work well together. We've got similarly proportioned senses of industry, completeness, aesthetics. . . and we've talked about going into business together. The field that keeps popping up is interior design. Anna with her artistic and design and color-consultant skills; me with my building, electrical and lighting and cabinet installing abilities, and my own decent eye for design. We might have something there.

Last weekend we went to the Boise Green Expo, where we made some good contacts that could provide a means of getting Anna more experience with interior design. Anna's big worry is that neither of us have any business sense: we're not coin-chasing capitalists, or even small-business savvy in the least. Of course that's key. But I think we've got something more than that. We've got taste. And the schooling and experience to back up that taste. And that's something most business types don't have. You see proof of it everyday here with poorly laid-out or decorated stores and shops (faux finish! faux finish!) and houses that cost half a million but look like they hatched right out of the suburbs. There are some good designers here, certainly. The question is whether there's enough demand to go around for them and ourselves, the new couple in town, looking like a pair of hayseeds in our front yard working away until the sky goes pink in the west and Ada starts to get fussy for dinner. We're all pioneers in some way or another, when you start out at something new.

By Art, Faith, or Cunning

4 April 2010, Boise

Easter Sunday. A cold bright morning, glinting with raw winds out of the north swooping down over the snowy front. Being Easter, the Italian in me wanted to go to church, if for only the ceremony of the day. There is a beautiful towering sandstone cathedral in the neighborhood where, when I was a boy, my mom would take us for the occasional church outing and always for Christmas Eve and Easter masses. The cathedral dates from the turn of the century and I always loved looking up at it’s stained glass windows and painted vaulted ceilings and the echoing voices of the ceremony combined with the incense and the grand feeling of the place to make me feel I was in Italy again. My mom experienced the same affect, and going to St. John’s was always a small nostalgic trip home for her.

This Easter, no different from others, the cathedral was gloriously crowded. We had to stand in the foyer to take in the mass, which turned out all right as other parents were doing the same, keeping back of the pews with their fidgeting kids and straining babies. Ada squirmed in my arms to be let down, relenting only when she had another little girl or boy to exchange gazes and squawks with. I was watching down the center isle at the priest swinging a chalice of incense over goblets of wine when I noticed a man waggling his finger playfully in Ada’s face. He had unkempt hair and a wild, wry look about him that belied his respectable Sunday duds of sport coat and slacks. For a moment I wondered who the hell the crazy cad was messing with my kid, and then I recognized him. I almost swore in church: it was B.N., old friend and Boise artist from way back.

“You’re back in town,” he said as we shook each other by the shoulders, trying to muffle our enthusiasm. He wiggled his fingers at Ada, “And you brought this cutie with you.”

I quietly introduced him to Anna and Ada, who kept her eyes on him, captivated by the man, sensing his enigmatic charm. “I was in the front pew,” B. whispered to me as we returned to watching mass, “but I couldn’t take it. It’s too close for someone like me.”

“The slightly unfaithful.”

“That’s it. Finally I had to find an old lady to give my seat to.”

A hymn was being sung as the priest and alter boys were arranging for communion.

“You going up?” I whispered.

“Don’t know. You?”

I shrugged. “There’s always that moment of doubt before communion.”

“About yourself or the whole show?”

“Both.”

“No,” said Bob, “I’m not going. They won’t let me. The last time I did I said to the priest, “thanks.” Guess that pissed him off.”

Just then Ada started to bawl. My dilemma was solved for me. I conferred with Anna and it was decided I’d walk around outside with Ada until she fell asleep. I carried the girl out the tall wooden doors and stood atop the steps a minute letting my eyes adjust to the brightness. Ada went quiet feeling a gust of cold sharp air. From the top of the steps I could see the mountains above town, white with snow and blue forested along their ridges; the snow level, after days of storm, coming right down over the foothills to the tan edges of the plain. I walked down the steps and turned onto the next street and walked a few blocks under the leafless maples and elms. Forsythia and daffodils were in bloom, lacing the yards and the front porches of the houses. When I arrived back at the cathedral, people were pouring down the long steps and gathering on the street. I waved at Anna and B. and they joined me on the sidewalk.

“Did you go to communion?” I asked Anna.

“Communion is for sinners,” she said.

“Don’t believe in all that, do you?” said B.

“No. It’s all too heavy for spring. David wanted us to go for the ceremony of it.”

“That’s why I go. Once or twice a year, just to hedge my bets.”

“Pascal’s wager,” I said.

“You should try a different church,” said B. Which was weird, as I never imagined B. as the church-going type, let alone the church-going-encouraging type. But then I saw the bullshitter's gleam in his eyes.

Anna must've seen it too. “How about the church of go-for-a-hike-in-the-hills instead?” she quipped.

“How’s the painting coming?” I asked B.

“It’s okay. I was looking at that painting of Maria de Guadalupe, thinking how I don’t know how to paint anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“You see, I never really knew how to paint. I knew tricks and ways of faking it. But since the m.s., my hand shakes and I can’t pull off those one-stroke slight-of-hands anymore.”

“Learn new ones.”

“It’s not so easy.”

“How are your eyes?”

“The left is okay. The right is good for seeing ghosts.”

“You can’t see out of it at all?”

“Just a blur of light.”

Then his eyes widened, and narrowed shrewdly as something occurred to him. “Hey, that’s going to be my next series. You saved my career. Half-finished paintings. That’s my new trick, that keeps anybody from seeing I can’t really paint.”

The steps and sidewalk were crowded with churchgoers now. We recognized some other friends and they came over to say hello. There was an element of surprise at seeing each other here. Here with kids and family on an Easter morning at church. I could sense us asking each other in our minds if any of us actually believed in this stuff. But it didn’t matter. Each of us was there for our different reasons, which most likely had less to do with the teachings of Christ than the sentiment and ritual of the day. If nothing else, we were there for each other, for the steely sunlight and chill air tossing the clouds and the reminder that all of us have to learn a few new tricks, of faith or art or cunning, now that life was catching up to us.

Ada began to cry from sleepiness and the cold.

“So you’re here now,” said B. as we made hurried goodbyes. “I’ll see you around?”

“Of course. Great to see you, B.”

He stopped me and waggled his fingers before Ada’s eyes. She quit her crying and for a moment, as though a spell had been cast on her, smiled at him.

Sleet, Snow, or Shine

1 April 10, Boise

Yesterday got away for a morning ski up at Bogus Basin. Ten inches of powder, much untouched in the trees. Snowy Ponderosa pines and flanges of granite leaning against a pale blue sky. Towering cumulous above the loping mountains to the north, and to the south, the Owyhees white and chiseled above the tawny plain. Except for my legs going watery after a dozen dips, requiring me to rest and take in the view before starting off again, the tele turns felt good and the body knew just what to do. All that powder didn’t hurt, either.

It’s been ten days now since Obama signed the Health Care Reform Bill into law, and while I’m glad the thing went through, am feeling some regrets about it. Why couldn’t we get a public option in the mix? When Democrats knew they were going to use budget reconciliation to push the bill through on a straight majority vote, they could have thrown in the House’s public option and still rallied the fifty-one votes necessary for Senate passage. That’s what the GOP would’ve done. Those fuckers aren’t afraid to ramp up their legislation to ideological heights when they see an opening. But democrats? They won’t play hardball if they’re afraid of losing a few seats in the coming fall election. But when will another opportunity like this come again? Another two or three or ten decades before both houses and the executive branch are under dem control? This was our chance, and we played it center and safe. Well, how safe is the future of our health care now? Not much safer than it was before, as the same gatekeepers are at the gate, albeit tempered by a few more restrictions on their behavior. We need not only new keepers, but new gates: public option gates. All this talk about consumer freedom is ridiculous. Real freedom would be an option to get out of the capitalistic, pro-profit route and have a healthy, fair, decent way of getting not health coverage, but health care for all of our people. You know the right is shaping the argument when a basic ideal such as that has you sounding like a radical.

- - - - -

Sleet and snow all morning, coming down in white clumps that gloss the streets. The bare trees etch a somber thicket against the grey sky. Shades of brown and grey and winter greens, against which the first colors of spring stand out delicately: budding leaves lacing the elm trees along the center of the street; forsythia in yellow bursts from the sodden yards; thumb-thick pale green buds opening in the lilacs; daffodils as brightly ridiculous as plastic flowers stuck in the ground.

So we’ve found a house to rent, and we’re not sure the April Fool’s joke isn’t on us. After all the slap-together rentals we’ve seen, this one is a jewel, perhaps a stolen jewel for the mere 900 per month in rent. The catch is that the place is still on the market as a short sale, and we’ll have to move out on thirty days notice should the house sell or go into foreclosure. But that’s a roll of the dice we’re willing to take at this point, a gamble that compliments our need to be free of a lease in case we find a house to buy. Our fear, though, is that after growing accustomed to the fine surroundings here we’ll get booted out and have to settle for one of the lesser rentals we’ve seen about the neighborhood.

From what I can guess, the house was built around 1910, as it lacks the gables and angles and frills of a Queen Ann, yet isn’t as fine-lined as a craftsman. All the rooms get great light, and the living and dining room windows look out onto the stately, tree-lined street of Harrison Blvd. You look down the wide street through a canopy of huge oaks and maples that lean out from spacious yards and islands where lamp posts stand like sentinels from the Victorian age. At night, the lampposts glow among the long interwoven limbs of the bare trees, and you can imagine the shadows of horse carriages slipping past, clippity-clopping their way down the long boulevard, carrying riders homeward or into town for opera shows and dinners in gilded restaurants or perhaps a covert rendezvous in the secret tunnels below the capital building.

Our Spirits Catching Up to Us

19-23 March 2010, Boise

Early morning on the back porch of the house of my good buddy R.H. Cold clear sunlight warming the porch boards, a cup of coffee in my hand, the house quiet with everyone off to work or school, the cat twining figure-eights between my legs as I stand looking out at the frosty blue sky. And above the thicket of leafless trees and pitched rooftops that is the North End of town: snow-white mountains, blue with pines along their ridges, buff-colored lower down where the snow-melt-soaked hills are beginning to bloom with ground flowers.

After the verdant coast, everything looks brown here, from the sage hills to the dirt alleyways to the skeletal canopies poking at the sky. But a dormant energy is rising in things. You can feel it on a morning like this, a spark in the sunlight, a sliver of warmth in the chill air, the green spears of iris pushing out of the ground at the edge of the yard. Three days ago, in Jordan Valley, I saw a wedge of geese flying north. The birds know what’s going on. And we’re not unlike them in migrating northward with the season. But it’s taking my spirit some time to cross that high desert and catch up with my body. I don’t feel here yet; I don’t feel anywhere yet. Maybe that’s because Anna and Ada aren’t here, staying as they are in Denver with Anna’s mother as I scout ahead. San Francisco feels long behind me. And Boise is a land of doubts and roaming for me, jobless and on the hunt for a house for us, waking in the middle of the night with that gut-empty insecurity that you feel sometimes when on the road, that you felt as a kid the first time you slept away from home; the anxious daring fearful dreaming feeling that is the constant companion of gypsies and children and mountaineers and migrants and I dare guess birds flying north at the front edge of spring. But I’m certain that along with those birds, and the warming days and the first blossoms softening the trees, and Anna and Ada arriving by plane this afternoon, my spirit will soon catch up to me.

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We are house-hunting and tired for it. Seems most of the cute bungalos around the North End are only genuinely cute if they're for sale or already under ownership. Should you want to rent one, and dare step inside with all the anticipation inspired by the rental's outward appearance (or photos on Craigslist), the setting you encounter will surely dismay you; will more likely please a ground squirrel holing up for winter, or a college student or starving artist doing the same, than it would a young family looking for a clean, decent place to let their kid roam about in. Everywhere we go we see the craftiest Craftsmans and the coziest Forties bungalows, all of which are already owned, with families outside working in the yard or kids swinging from the trees. So we’ve got house-envy pretty bad.

(I can’t believe I just wrote that last line: me, who’s lived how many seasons out the back of my truck or the depths of my backpack? Yes, life works on you, shapes you like a living piece of sculptor, and what the hand of time doesn’t get around to, the baby-fist of your first-born will smash asunder.)

On Sunday we took a break and went to a crafts fair in the Linen District. (The area was for decades where all of downtown’s laundry and linens were produced, washed and pressed.) The single-story brick and cinderblock factory buildings have innate modern lines to them, a minimalist style which has been picked up by the new shops and cafes that now occupy the two-block section of downtown. A mid-century era motel, renamed The Modern, has been sharply renovated with contemporary touches. The upper level of the Linen Building houses an art gallery, the high-ceilinged space with exposed timbers showing through the white walls and long views over town from the windows. After looking over the paintings, we toured the crafts show downstairs. While the old photo booth didn’t work, the rest of the participants in the show had some interesting products that did. We bought a bottle of good riesling from Holesinsky Wineries, located in Buhl, Idaho, out on the Snake River Plain; and a bar of oatmeal/lavender soap and lavender flowers from a nice old impeccably dressed man from a farm in Nampa. Anna nearly bought a pair of ear-rings that looked like they could've been hanging from a tree in San Francisco’s Candy Store. The young jewelry-maker belongs to the Visual Arts Collective, located in Old Boise, which is where we promised to find the artist and her wares once we had a little more money to spend.

After the show we wandered over to the café next door. Big City Coffee, with all it’s black and white photos and vintage signs on the walls, feels more like a roadhouse on the way out of town than a big city café. The place was lively and crowded with a mix of young and old, newspaper readers and onliners, hipsters in pegged jeans and ancient geezers in worn Wranglers. We shared a massive sandwich of thick slices of honey-glazed turkey and peals of green-leaf lettuce and tomato, sipped our coffees, and watched with hands-free delight as Ada, lodged in a highchair, made friends with three young girls who had gathered round from the next table to play with her. The girls were very sweet with her, fawning over her and twirling her hair. Ada loves other kids, is fascinated by older girls, and being a rough-and-tumble girl herself, she was in hog heaven as the girls became more courageous in their play, taking her hands and hugging her and pressing their funny faces into hers. She was so thrilled she about danced and howled herself out of the high-chair. We apologized to those nearby for our daughter’s obnoxiousness, but nobody seemed to mind. It was great to be able to sit back and eat and let the village kids do the baby-sitting. A similar experience happened a few days earlier when we were at the playground and some kids came over to play with Ada, all of them having a ball while their parents took advantage of the time to relax and relearn their English.

So despite our uncertainties and mid-night anxieties over whether we've made the right decision, it feels, most of the time, good to be here. Our apprehensions are mostly of the mind, while our bodies are beginning to feel at home here. Just as spring is meandering it's way north, so our spirits are catching up with us.