waves away

Young Phil dreamed of being a pilot, but neither the requisite monetary nor military sponsorship came through, so he became simply a plane devotee. He basks in their history, crafting, community, music, and above all aims to know their magnificent action by freezing it in photographs. Among the key items on his checklist of revelry are the National Air Races in Reno . He made it there for the first time in 2012 and was sold; the annual pilgrimage became a priority. Cancer interfered the very next year, but his new friends in Section 3 sent the spirit of the races right to our living room with love and artifacts. Once it was clear he'd be able to go back in 2014, I wanted to go, too. Far more than the flying, which I only care about by proxy, I care about getting away with my husband -- as the patchy blog shows, our opportunities to do so are precious few. And escaping to places where gambling and going to the pool are the main activities? Sign me up every time. I had been to R...

June snuck up more stealthily than ever this year, and with it, my rank as step-mother of a seventeen-year-old. To celebrate her birthday, Avery did a whale watch excursion with her dad. Neither of them had ever been out in the Salish Sea looking for orcas, and the Clipper delivered on their first try. They stalked a pod of five rolling, jumping whales through the sunshine into Canadian waters, and had dinner in Friday Harbor . The teenager was in pleasant spirits even 14 hours after an unspeakably early Saturday morning. The dad, though, was spellbound. He spent Sunday online studying "their" whale pod and the jackpot San Juan Island lookout point called Lime Kiln state park. On Tuesday someone filmed almost ten minutes of orcas coasting and frolicking along the park's edge, and posted it to YouTube. On Wednesday Phil came home early, announced that he was taking Friday off, and found a vacancy at a bed and breakfast five minutes down the road from Lime Kiln. On ...

Another visit to our second home on Kauai is now behind us. Yes, it seems like we were just there, when this baby blog began. And yet a great deal of time had passed, making this a very different trip than the last one. Of course, everything is always different than it was before, every day and every year is different, because we are different; before and after cancer are significantly different. In some ways this trip was a bookend -- as distinct as the logistics and even the dispositions were, the soul of Kauai and its dialogue with my own remain the same. Actually, I'm going to call it a book mark instead. While I accept that I can never really live there, I am surer than ever that I will always return and be anchored there, so this is no end.   We were on the island just ten days this time, and we brought my mother. Phil and I had shared lots of alone time in the year before this trip, compared to many prior years, so the company would be okay. Mom had not been to Kauai...