I had time to think on our way down to Wolfhaven today. I thought from Seattle to about Federal Way about hipmama, mostly about how to choose articles that reflect “hipmama-ness”, whatever that is. I’ve got a good piece right now, I mean, it seems to be decently written, but somehow it just seems to lack *something* & I can’t quite put my finger on what. I can arbitrarily turn something down, but I want to know for my own purposes why it’s not a fit. Right now I’m leaning towards accepting & publishing in the spring (late spring?) when folks start thinking of heading out into the woods for hiking/camping again, but the fact of the matter is… and I’ll have to reread it before any final decisions… that I think it could appear in any parenting-related place that writers send their writing to for publishing. I don’t feel like there’s anything there that defines it as particularly a hipmama piece. And we’re back to the square one of my thinking here — so what actually qualifies a piece as something that would fit on hipmama? I have not arrived at any conclusions as of this moment.
After thinking about that for a while, we drove into a heavy fog bank that didn’t lift again, really, until about the time we sat down to eat. From here into Wolf Haven, I thought about how this area is very much my home. Every now & again, I run into someone who asks if I’m “local”. In the sense that my people have been in Washington state, whether Yakima, Lynden, Seattle, or places in between, I can say yes, since the mid-late-1800s. I was born an Air Force brat in Colorado, from the age of three months to ten years I lived in Calgary, then we moved back down here, residing a few months at my grandmother’s house in Seattle (they were the second house built on their street in the Laurelhurst neighborhood, my great-grandmother’s house was about two blocks off Lake Washington, not far from Seward Park, and she married, after her sons were grown, Mr. Bonney of Bonney-Watson Funeral Home), thereafter residing in Gig Harbor & spending substantial time around “the peninsula”, in Tacoma, but also regular trips to Seattle. Then I went to school in Olympia… Every now & again, the person asking if I’m a “local” has the audacity to sneer a little when I’m not found to be “pure-bred” Seattle. It’s true. By “local”, I mean I’m local to the I-5 corridor, but mostly just generally to the Puget Sound area at large. I qualify as local to this area in any number of areas from sheer family & personal history. And today I was feeling that as I drove through the chilly fog banks, with massive trees rising out from the land, ever so faintly. For a while there was a misty Mt. Rainier hanging in the background. I’ll never be a “local”, I’ll never entirely fit in with anything, or anyone, perpetually I’ll always be on a fringe, but regionally, this is so very home to me. And anyone who thinks I’m not local enough can suck it.
It was bitterly cold at the sanctuary. The mist took the sun away & there was frost still on the trees & weirdly frozen ground. The slight damp from the fog permeated our layers of clothes, and skin, into our bones. It was good to be reminded that we were alive. The wolves howled just before the tour begin, then we heard nothing more from them, a few little whines hello, then ignoring of the crazy simians in their funny little packs. The sun came out at lunch, but we didn’t dally, and it didn’t warm up all that much. And that’s ok. It’s still January. M1 got a wolf t-shirt that she wore this afternoon & decided to wear to bed & will likely try to wear tomorrow & the next day. She was very cold, poor girl, but I think everything was sinking into her head despite it.
On the way home, I looked up, around 2 in the afternoon, and a waxing moon, soon to be full was just hanging in the mid-day, now blue sky. It’s not every day that you see the moon in the sky in the middle of the afternoon. Though I suppose it’s not every day most of us see 20 or so wolves & three coyotes either.
And now, I’ve put it off way too long, way too late, I’ve got to go do the hair washing thing. Maybe for the first time since around noon, I’ll be warm again…
