work

kk prepares 484 pages of stories and 27 cover letters for a massive mailing.

weathervane

labyrinthe

snowy branches near kilroy creek

evening and night

"We want our film to be beautiful, not realistic."
--Of Montreal, from the song, "The Past is a Grotesque Animal"

raccoons

game day. wazzu's out, :(. tomorrow, we root for michigan state. go state!

the meadow

much snowfall today. the world was very quiet.

flies on the water

'And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually--their paths were laid that way, as you put it.'
--Sam speaking to Frodo in JRR Tolkein's The Two Towers.

icicles

I wasn't born of a whistle
Or milked from a thistle at twilight.
No, I was all horns and thorns
Sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright.
So enough of this terror we deserve to know light
And grow evermore lighter and lighter.

--Joanna Newsom, from the song "Sawdust and Diamonds" off of the album Ys

lou teaches sam how to make venison bratwursts

kk is the sausage queen of kilroy

black trees

"Each marked buoy passed like a minute hand making its way across the face of a schoolroom clock. The time, the date, all the measures of normal life were stripped of meaning. But just when boredom threatened to overwhelm the senses, the river would offer up some bit of unimpeachable beauty. Bald eagles circled overhead and landed in snags to watch us with wide yellow eyes. Deer startled from the shore, crashed into the understory, white tails flashing. Opalescent sunsets silhouetted herons at dusk. The great birds paced their own glassy reflections before pulling up like brushstrokes to stand in the shallows of the far shore."
--Matthew Power, excerpt from "Mississippi Drift: River Vagrants in the Age of Wal-Mart", Harper's, March 2008.

byebye zags

the boys cried into morning beers at the final buzzer. pictured: a happier moment just after halftime.

atv trail

we watch basketball at lou's -- michigan state and wazzu win. lou grills elk burgers for dinner.

sunlight

"And this is why people's brains are like computers. And it's not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they don't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.
"Also, people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry."
Mark Haddon, from the novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

sam and lou make plans

the boys prepare for tim's arrival, and for the beginning of march madness on thursday. the cabinet mountains glow white in the background. in the late afternoon, sam shaves off his beard.

10 second self-timer

"Nobody I know in the middle west has ever gone out of his way to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition."
--William Maxwell, from "So Long, See You Tomorrow"

skull

sam encounters the remains of a kill in the woods

we love kristin and jp

sam cried into his beer as michigan state lost to wisconsin AGAIN

JP and Kristin visit for the weekend

You will not tame this sea
either by humility or rapture.
But you can laugh
in its face.

Laughter
was invented by those
who live briefly
as a burst of laughter.

The eternal sea
will never learn to laugh.

--Anna Swir, The Sea and the Man
Translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

morning visitor

reorganized bookshelf

"The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul."
— Miranda July

treetops

a tree coils from an apron of moss into the lightbright canopy

sam's homemade pizza

canadian bacon, pineapple chunks, peperocini, tomato sauce, cheese, barbecue sauce, oregano. yum-o-licious.

while the boys repaired the smokestack, the girls played on the beach

"It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. When the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same sharp, watery smell. The wind is watery, and all the pumps and creeks and ditches smell of water unalloyed by any other element. At the foundation is the old lake, which is smothered and nameless and altogether black. Then there is Fingerbone, the lake of charts and photographs, which is permeated by sunlight and sustains green life and innumerable fish, and in which one can look down in the shadow of a dock and see stony, earthy bottom, more or less as one sees dry ground. And above that, the lake that rises in the spring and turns the grass dark and coarse as reeds. And above that the water suspended in sunlight, sharp as the breath of an animal, which brims inside this circle of mountains."

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping. Robinson grew up in Sandpoint, and her intimate knowledge of the lake fuels the language and imagery of this breathtaking book.

the gloaming

I turn around on the gravel and go back to the house for a book, something to read at the doctor's office, and while I am inside, running the finger of inquisition along a shelf, another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book heads out on his own, rolls down the driveway, and swings left toward town, a ghost in his ghost car, another knot in the string of time, a good three minutes ahead of me — a spacing that will now continue for the rest of my life.

--Billy Collins, I Go Back to the House for a Book

kilroy creek

"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."
--W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

the green monarchs

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - - -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM! love KK and Sam

hump day

a late afternoon snowshoe to Pine Cove.

home

Our home, surrounded by western larches, firs and spruce trees.

monday's quiet snowfall

"Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

"It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." -- James Joyce, The Dead.

we're grateful for the help

Doug, John, Uncle Lou and Sam roll up their shirtsleeves to repair our broken smokestack. The repair is delayed by the amount of damage done, so Doug merely covers the hole in the roof with tarp and duct tape. Doug, John and Nancy reluctantly boat back to Garfield this day, having to work on Monday. Unlike us. Snow, as you can see, is up to the eaves of the cabin, so that you can walk onto the roof if you so please.

members of the Kilroy family

What's for dinner? Haggis and homemade-mustard appetizers. Italian sausage (venison/elk), compliments of Uncle Lou's successful hunting season. Lime-enhanced salad, homemade bread and Doug's venison spaghetti. And, headaches aplenty: Carlo Rossi Paisano wine.

from left, moving clockwise: Doug (our ferryman this day and lifelong family friend -- he introduced Kilroy to Sharma's parents years ago and has one of the broadest histories here), Nancy (has a cabin on the hillside, is an incredible sailor), "Uncle" Lou (trustworthy Lou is the only person who lives here year-round -- he's the perennial caretaker of the cabins and is much loved by the Shields), John (Nancy's son -- he is already one of Kilroy's most active residents, having built a sauna from scratch overlooking the creekbed), and, of course, Sam.

by nightfall, all was calm

The mercurial lake at rest.

jitters

a harrowing crossing from Garfield to Kilroy on March 1st.