There’s an old saying about rain in California, that it doesn’t rain but it pours. Last night and this morning are a perfect example of that, here in my vicinity, and a day or two earlier with the evacuations of burned areas north of here for fear of mudslides.

After Election Day — the results of which pleased me extremely on the presidential front — we settled into another hot, dry spell with high temperatures in the 90s for too many days to count. I’m trying to put them out of my mind now, but I think this was the first year I ever used the air conditioner here as late as the third week of November. October is supposed to begin our rainy season.

Now the rain. No, now the RAIN. Last night it was so loud it woke me three different times, and once scared the cat so she wailed something about whether the sky might be falling and needed to be reassured. I gave her a hug. (I needed a little reassurance myself.) It wasn’t windy. The noise was just rain. Lots of it.

This morning it’s still raining, but it’s a less frenzied kind of rain. There seems to be less rush to dump all the moisture in the sky on us at once. My estimate is that we might have gotten two inches last night. But I don’t have a rain gauge, so I’ll have to verify that. It sounded like two inches!

And yes, I meant what I said in that last post. Now Tara is nearly 8 months old (Saturday the 29th), and this is her second rain. It’s her first really big rain, since that Election Day rain turned out to be merely a wimpy drizzle after all. And now our fire season is officially over — until the next long dry spell, which hopefully won’t begin until July. The reservoirs are low, so we could use quite a lot of rain this year in Southern California, as well as a nice thick snow pack in the Sierras. Besides, our amazing, intrepid firefighters need a vacation.

In spite of this being a much bigger rain than I hoped for, I’m grateful. The sun is peeking out between clouds now, and I’m wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving.

Wherever you are and whoever you’re with, have a wonderful day!

• Brigid, the ‘Fire of the Hearth’, was the goddess of fertility, family, childbirth and healing.
• Brigid, the ‘”Fire of the Forge’, was like the Greek goddess Athena, a patroness of the crafts (especially weaving, embroidery, and metalsmithing), and a goddess who was concerned with justice and law and order.
• Brigid, the ‘Fire of Inspiration’, was the muse of poetry, song history and the protector of all cultural learning.

(read more at Brigid: Goddess or Saint?)

According to Wikipedia, Imbolc:

“is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens is perhaps a precursor to the North American Groundhog Day. A Scottish Gaelic proverb about the day is:

Thig an nathair as an toll
La donn Bride,
Ged robh tri traighean dh’ an t-sneachd
Air leachd an lair.

“The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bride,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.”

“Fire and purification are an important aspect of this festival.”
(read Wikipedia article)

The verse quoted above, and in the Wikipedia article, is from Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations, Ortha Nan Gaidheal, Volume I by Alexander Carmichael (1900), and can be found on line at Sacred Texts Archive, where you can read even more about Bride.

Then there’s the perfect non-religious Groundhog Day celebration for our times, which is simply to enjoy the Bill Murray comedy by that title. That’s how I like to celebrate it.

In truth, each person tends to accomplish the things that are most important to that person. I know that sometimes in the past I wasn’t even conscious of what was really important to me. I was more conscious of what I thought was expected of me, or what everyone else seemed to consider important. I wanted everything for the people I loved, forgetting that what everyone really wants is . . . love. I felt guilty about what I didn’t do, or sometimes even resentful about what someone else didn’t do to help. But the important things got done just the same. Why can’t we be content with that and spend the rest of the time enjoying each other’s presence, or our memories of those who can’t be with us?

Sometimes it’s better to focus on what does get done and simply be happy with that, especially around the holidays, which seem to overwhelm all of us with expectations of perfection — whether out of a need to recapture our childhood and a feeling of being taken care of, or to recapture our childrens’ childhoods, or for some to capture a childhood they didn’t get but have always wanted.

I have wished many times that I could get everything right, for even one day of the year, but I don’t. I never have, no matter how hard I worked at it, no matter how frantic I got or how I urged others to take part in my visions of the perfect whatever — and I can be as much of a control freak as the next person. Expectations of perfection tend to leave us unsatisfied and always wishing we could do better. And yet our expectations seem to increase each year, working us into a kind of frenzy.

My new goal is to be happy with imperfection, for this season and all future ones, in fact all year. I want to look at what I accomplish and say, “This is enough. I did my best for now, and I am enough.” If I can achieve a day of joy with myself and those around me, maybe that’s the best I should wish for, regardless of whether the table is perfect, or the turkey perfect — or, in our case this year, the chicken. I can be joyful, whether everyone gets exactly the gift they want, or a card on time, and even regardless of whether I get to be with the people I want. I have lots of memories with my loved ones, and I cherish them this year as much as ever, right here in my heart, as always. They know I love them, and I know they love me. That really is the most important thing, isn’t it?

If this is supposed to be a time that we celebrate peace and love, then why do we get ourselves so wrapped up in these perfectionist delusions? Maybe it has to do with winding down the old year, and some pressure that builds from the notion that we needed to make this year better than any past year, or that we have to make next year even better, on and on until the years run out. This is madness, isn’t it? Where does it come from? It reminds me of working in a place where doing one’s work well and on time means future expectations are even greater, that the quality/production machinery gets cranked up, and pretty soon everyone’s running around like Lucy Ricardo and Ethyl Mertz trying to keep up with that crazy candy conveyor belt. Those are the kinds of jobs that kill people before they have a chance to retire and enjoy all they’ve earned — if there’s anything left.

My wish for everyone I know is that they’ll step off that track filled with holiday madness (or any other flavor of perfectionist madness) and simply enjoy a pleasant time with loved ones, basking in the lack of any need to be perfect. Laugh about the errors made attempting to get everything to the table on time, or the overdone food, or the dust on the mantle. The world only needs one Martha Stewart, really. She’s wonderful, but unique. Heaven help us if anyone ever decides to clone her. Or me, for that matter, with my trail of dustbunnies scattering behind me at the other end of the housekeeping spectrum. You ARE perfect, each of you, just the way you are. That’s why the rest of us seek to be with you all year long, or wish we were when we aren’t. You, just as you are, are the true gift we all cherish, right here in our hearts. My suggestion is to throw out the To Do List, and replace it with one that has only two goals on it:

• Have fun.
• Be happy with whatever you and your loved ones get.

Consider that failure is impossible. The one with the most gifts or the least doesn’t usually notice. If they’re aware of the world around them, they know they’re lucky to get any, and if they don’t know that, we’ll leave them to their innocence this once. Most guests don’t see the table setting, especially what’s missing from it. If the turkey takes too long to cook, you can eat the pie first. The dessert police won’t arrest you. They don’t work on holidays. Keep peanut butter and jelly or canned soup on hand in case the oven breaks (it happens).

I wish you fun, laughter, and contentment this year, creating or reliving memories that are special and uniquely yours, rather than magazine-like, cookie-cutter perfection where people are afraid to touch anything. May you be content in a life and in love well spent. Love to all of you and those close to you — just as you are.

I was sure this one meant business. Sure enough, minutes later we had more rain. Nothing spectacular, but it was a cold night.

This morning when I looked out the back door I saw clouds still piled in windswept drifts above the mountains to the east.

A little later those clouds blew away, and — hey, wait a minute.

What’s that white stuff sticking to the mountain under that big blue sky?

Why it’s a blanket of fresh snow. Mt. Palomar has four inches or so of new snow, transforming our back yard view into something fit for a holiday card. I’m sure some of you in other parts of the country get sick and tired of snow. Here in San Diego County it’s a novelty we get every few years and then only at the higher elevations.

So these pictures are my holiday greeting to all of you. Whatever and however you celebrate this time of year, Happy Holidays to you and yours. We’re celebrating our lovely view of snow — as long as it lasts. It’s melting fast!

When I woke up this morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about this song that I learned as a kid for Thanksgiving:

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.
(read the rest of the lyrics at Wikipedia)

It might seem a silly thing to remember during serious times, and on yet another holiday that seems to offend so many people. But holidays can be a good way to remind us how we’ve changed and progressed, and to find new ways to change and keep moving forward. It might interest you to know that the song quoted above, titled “A Boy’s Thanksgiving Day,” was written by a woman who was well ahead of her time — or perhaps a better way to say that would be that she wasn’t as behind as the rest of her people of her time. According to Wikipedia, “Lydia Maria Child (February 11, 1802 – July 7, 1880) was an American abolitionist, women’s rights activist, opponent of American expansionism, Indian rights activist, novelist, and journalist.” The entry goes on to state this:

She was a women’s rights activist, but did not believe significant progress for women could be made until after the abolition of slavery. Her 1833 book An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans argued in favor of the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and she is sometimes said to have been the first white person to have written a book in support of this policy. (read entire Wikipedia article)

It’s good for any society to be able to review its errors and learn from them, to evolve as a people and keep working to make things better for every member that it carries into the future, so this seems a good song to use to celebrate this day of thanks.

As for memories of grandfather’s house, I don’t have any. My maternal grandfather died before I was born, and the other lived farther away than we could afford to travel. But I knew my maternal grandmother. We took trips to Oregon see her at other times of the year, until she came to live with us when I was a teenager, and we spent Thanksgiving with her at our house most of the years that followed. I also remember trips as a small child, mostly around Easter, to what had once been her father’s little homestead in Potrero, CA, a tiny town pocketed in the hills north of Tecate, Mexico, and made famous recently by wildfires and mercenaries.

My great-grandfather’s house was a favorite place for my mom to visit when she was a girl, and I can imagine her going there for Thanksgiving, though not through “white and drifting snow.” Even at Potrero’s altitude of about 2300 feet, snow rarely falls there. I remember the house where my great-grandfather lived only as a fireplace still standing long after a fire had destroyed it. There was a newer house by then that a great uncle lived in, but it seemed that every family member found a reason to walk past or through that burned-out structure on each visit to the property, imagining the past, until it was sold off sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s.

Even though there’s no snow in Potrero, or here, on Thanksgiving, there is this memory of place special to me and my family, a place I wouldn’t know how to get to today, and a man named Christian Nelson, whom I never met. He was originally from the island of Læsø, in Denmark, where his father was a fisherman. Chris herded geese as a boy, and left home at 14 to spend years at sea, on merchant ships, until he decided to settle here as a young man. His name should probably have been spelled Nielsen, but he spelled it Nelson when he came here in 1881 because he thought it seemed more American. He later joked that it turned out he’d made a Swede of himself.

I haven’t been much for genealogy, not having children of my own, and I don’t think about Chris Nelson very often. But a couple of days ago I sorted through some old books and came across two that mention him. One is a memoir my grandmother wrote about growing up in Potrero, and the other was written by a woman named Ella McCain, who happened to be with my great-grandmother, Josephine Gray, on the day she met her future husband. Ella described the Danish farmhand Chris Nelson as a “big, barefoot boy.” He worked for a local rancher they were visiting who’d just married into Ella’s family, and Ella mentions how she and her sisters teased Josephine about Chris, which leads me to think there must have been an attraction from the start. Ella also wrote that Chris Nelson had landed in San Diego Harbor on the four-masted sailing ship Trafalgar, and that information sent me searching the Web for more. It took a while to get the right search words, but I finally found a listing for the ship, which no doubt looked something like this.

I couldn’t be with the rest of my family this year, only my spouse and my dog who are both very special to me. Still, snow or no snow, in the past two days I’ve been over the hills and through the woods of my memories and family history, to my great-grandfather’s house, where he kept bees, won ribbons at fairs for his peaches, and provided eggs, butter, milk, and honey to my grandmother and her family during the Depression, when such luxuries were hard for them to come by in San Diego. He spoke four languages, that I know of, and he raised eight children, four each with two consecutive wives. (Josephine died 13 years into their marriage, when my grandmother was five.) He set a standard for the whole family, of love, hard work, honesty, generosity, and care for the land, lessons that have stayed with us for generations.

The riches we leave our families have little to do with money, or even genetics. I grew up with two adopted siblings, and we all learned the same love and values. Those were what we carried forward into our lives, a gift partially from Chris Nelson of Læsø, Denmark and Potrero, California, and partly from others before, after, and beside him, including my dad’s family back in Missouri. Both Chris Nelson and my dad have given their children and grandchildren a legacy of values that are worth a fortune, the same kinds of values I’ve done my best to adhere to through my life. Today I’m keeping those memories and ideals that count most in my mind, and I feel very grateful to have the memories and family that I do. But I also remember now, which I didn’t with as much awareness as a child, that there were people here before my grandparents, great-grandparents, or anyone else in my family came here. The Kumeyaay lived in Potrero well before my great-grandfather or any other white person ever heard of it or named it. The Kumeyaay considered the mountains near there sacred, and had their own names for them.

I understand why many people are offended by celebrations of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving that only recall a portion of the past, that glorify the western expansion of white people and the raping of a land that was just fine before we ever landed here. I think it’s important to remember that bitterness and the wrongs that have been done, as well as our growth as a combined people, the lessons learned that are worth salvaging. We learn from our mistakes, if we’re humble and respectful and we bother to look back and see clearly. We can’t change history, but we can remember it, the good and the bad, and do our best to make the future better.

In enjoying that song that I learned as a child, and in learning more about the woman who wrote it, I have to ask myself what voices of healing we may be ignoring today, just as her message of healing was ignored at the time she called for abolition. What voices, even before hers, tried to tell us not to begin slavery, or not to begin to rob Native Americans of their lands and way of life? When we gather around tables and talk about football games, or watch the news, what voices can we hear, behind the media’s hype, behind the conversation at the table? What voices are calling to us to do the right thing? How much weight and importance do we give them in our lives — everyday, not just on holidays?

We enjoy bird friends at greater distance these days. When I came across the linked story today, I decided I had to share. It’s a love story, just in time for that love-related holiday around the corner—if you’re reading this post while it’s fresh. But why wait until a particular time of year to celebrate love?

Here for your enjoyment, straight from Australia, is a tale of love among cockatoos. Note the first time I read it I assumed the first page was all there was to it, and only saw the “next page” link on my second time through, so be aware, there’s more.

Hope you and yours had a peaceful and abundant day, and I wish you many more.

The sky today has been mostly gray, thick clouds parting to reveal a diaphanous, silvery powder blue in places. Finally the clouds shrink to gray puffs against that blue this afternoon. A gust of wind now and then sets everything in motion, tumbling through wind chimes.

I always feel better once the first heat wave of summer passes, with a new higher range of personal comfort, and the assurance that I can make it through to autumn. Autumn here begins late. We always used to spend the first weeks of school with sweaty palms and skin sticking to the varnished chairs and desks. Around Halloween, the air finally cools enough for sweaters at night, at the same time kids dress up to make their ghoulish rounds. Three months to go.

***

To me being privileged means having more than one’s basic needs met, and there are degrees of privilege, and it is relative, and basically meaningless. I’m more privileged than some people I know, and less privileged than some I know. But all I can really say about that is what I see on the surface.

It’s tragic that so few people in the world have adequate food, water, sanitation, shelter, clothing, necessary transportation, education, rest, safety, security, and health care, even some people in the US. Those should be basic, subsistence level expectations, especially considering how far we’ve come technologically in this world. Unfortunately those advances seem to be reserved for the wealthiest people in the wealthiest countries, for those living under certain forms of government and economics. Basic civil and human rights should also be considered subsistence level—everyone should have them. Not everyone does, even in the most economically “privileged” countries. We can’t even agree on what civil and human rights people should have.

But I also think many people in the world have a skewed notion of what it is to live under what they consider privilege (i.e. better apparent economic or social conditions than theirs). It looks easier. In many ways it is. It’s no guarantee one will be happy.

Comfort exists on many levels. People in wealthier conditions still get sick (health care doesn’t guarantee health), suffer, die, lose loved ones, fall in and out of love, get abused, depressed, lonely, fearful, deal with pain (much of it hidden and not obvious to anyone else—some physical, some psychological or emotional). They experience disability, addiction, disasters, worries, or slip through the cracks of their society. Many so-called privileged people live very unhappy lives, or don’t only because they overcome adversity no one else would guess at. Just because some people have their basic subsistence levels met in ways that too many in the world don’t, doesn’t guarantee they won’t still lead difficult or even miserable lives. Conversely, among those who don’t even have what we consider the basics, you’ll find some fairly happy people.

A lot of this may have to do with choice, though much of it doesn’t, but let’s face it, being privileged doesn’t guarantee you’ll make the right choices—or that your family members will. Some of this also has to do with individual thresholds. Some of us handle certain types of stress more easily, some have chronic health issues, and some have an inability to think we have choices, even when we do.

So the idea of “privilege” doesn’t really tell you how much one will suffer or how happy one will be.

No one can know another’s pain. We can try, we can develop our empathy and compassion to a deeper level and care about others, try to walk in another’s shoes. But we don’t live the other’s life. To judge what another considers his or her suffering, abuse, or pain, is simply judgmental and likely unjust. Privilege is relative, and can exist right alongside extreme suffering.

So in many ways privilege as we think of it is pretty much meaningless. It seems to me that instead of nurturing a notion of being privileged or not (as if one should feel guilty for being what others consider privileged), it’s more important to nurture compassion, unconditional love, mutual concern. This isn’t to say there isn’t a grossly unbalanced distribution of wealth and power in this world. Obviously there is. It’s also clear that a wealthy person in a position of power is more likely to help his wealthy peers than those he doesn’t consider his equals. But we have to be careful of what we allow to separate us, of allowing ourselves an “us and them” mindset.

The idea of measuring privilege separates us.

The idea of all people belonging to the same human family with equal rights to the basics, and with equal capacity for suffering and happiness, connects us.

***

What does privilege mean to you?

And while we’re at it, Happy Independence Day!

Later I taught myself to type on an old Smith Corona typewriter my mother or her mother purchased when Mom was in her teens or early twenties. She was born in 1923, if that gives you a clue to its age. It’s one of those typewriters that could be used to trace a murder suspect because of the way it slightly superscripts certain characters. I used it while seated on the floor of my bedroom beside my bed. Sometimes the typewriter rested on the floor, sometimes on a little castoff maple end table.

When I was about eighteen my parents bought me an electric typewriter for Christmas, and when I opened it my mother recalled hearing me pound away on the old one to finish up a term paper a few evenings earlier. She had almost given me the new typewriter then. I used this typewriter on an old sideboard from a great aunt’s house that originally had extra leaves one could add to extend it into a spare dining table. The leaves had, by the time I used it as a desk, been converted into storage shelves under my parents’ breakfast bar.

I later bought my own more modern electric, with a little daisywheel that whirred back into position at each return, instead of the whole carriage moving. I used this typewriter on an old wooden desk my husband bought at a friend’s garage sale. This desk has a center section that lowers to hold a typewriter, which I thought was pretty snazzy. It reminded my father, the first time he saw it, of a desk he used when he was in the Army during WWII. The most frightening detail of this story is, we still own that desk–though not the daisywheel typewriter. We also still own the castoff maple end table. (Oh my God, do we need new furniture.)

I’ve never dreamed of building an office over the garage as a place for me to write (as the man did in Eric Mayer’s post). I’ve been too busy writing. I write where I can, sometimes in bed like Colette, though that doesn’t seem to help me write stories like hers. But then, she never had a laptop computer she could carry anywhere she wanted.

I still do some of my best creative writing on a yellow lined pad with a pencil—and a good eraser.

I also, like Eric, prefer those chunks of uninterrupted time. Even when I think I should have time, I’m interrupted or distracted by pets, by spouse, by my own ineptitude, by the Internet, and by the dryer buzzing, or by guilt and self-loathing over house or yard work left undone. It’s always something.

The writer simply writes through it all. But sometimes it is a real pain.