Month: June 2011

I’ve Got That Oregon Glow

Last weekend, I was in California for my niece’s birthday party, held at my brother’s house on the road to Yosemite. It’s a starkly beautiful landscape of golden hills and oak trees. Hawks glide on the breeze and rattlesnakes rustle in the grass. Often over 100 degrees in the summer, it was pleasantly cool, only in the 80s. The sunset over the hills Saturday night was spectacular, turning the whole sky scarlet.

But I’m not used to the heat. After 15 years, I have become acclimated to the coastal climate. Delicate flower that I’ve become living here on the Oregon Coast, I noticed my arms starting to burn after only a half hour in the sun and slathered on the suntan lotion I bought on the way up.  I already had on a hat and more clothes than anybody else.

I had thought I was doing pretty well with my tan. We have had some great sunny days in South Beach lately. I spend as much time as possible on my deck, reading, writing, playing music, and doing yoga or anything else I can transfer outside. We had sun even when it was raining in California. I thought my face and hands were browning up nicely. The rest of me, well it doesn’t get exposed much, so the latent pigment hasn’t shown up, but I felt pretty tan. Until I went to California.

The rest of the family has been schlepping around in shorts and tank tops for at least a month, and they are brown, brown, brown, cocoa brown, milk chocolate brown, there’s-Hispanic-in-my-heritage brown, brown enough that cuts and scars show up white. When I bared my legs to wade in the pool, people shrieked, “Oh, you’re so white!” Someone said, “She lives in Oregon.” Someone else replied, “Oh, ha, ha, that explains it.”

Fine. The cool water felt great on my hot skin. Let them burn themselves to leather. We on the Oregon Coast are short on Vitamin D but probably have healthier, less wrinkly skin because of the moisture in the air. Around here, in the land where everything on shore is green and the blue ocean sparkles nearby, I’m brown enough, and I’m proud. I’m an Oregonian now.

Monarch Sculpture Park: Turn at the Butterfly Tree

Giant iron and steel sculptures along the road lured me into a fairyland of natural and manmade art where real birds perched in a stainless steel tree made of butterflies. I walked through a giant green portal that boomed as the wind blew through it and came upon the three little pigs’ houses, giant bugs made of metal scraps, a hand two stories high and a croquet set big enough for a giant.
As I wandered through the Monarch Sculpture Park, located 10 miles south of Olympia, Washington, roosters crowing vied with the bongs and clangs of gongs and musical instruments made of sheets of metal and pipes placed along the grassy paths. I wanted to look everywhere at once.
Beyond a fantasy garden filled with sculptured flowers in wild colors, plastic streamers waved from the trees in the Sacred Grove. I opened a mailbox to find pens and streamers to write my own message to hang with the others.
Opened in 1998, Monarch Sculpture Park has grown to more than 100 stone, metal, wood, ceramic and glass sculptures spread over 80 acres of forest, creeks, ponds and grasslands. The site also includes an indoor gallery and offers art workshops, retreats and residencies.
Founder and director Myrna Orsini says the object is to provide an art adventure for everyone, based on the idea that creative expression has no boundaries. Visitors of all ages can see, touch and play with inspiring, quirky and crazy works by famous artists as well as those just starting out.

The outdoor art is open to the public year-round from dawn to dusk. The gallery is open by appointment. This year’s indoor exhibit, “Censored,” features art that might be rejected by other galleries because of its political or sexual nature.

Throughout the year, residents live and work at Monarch, adding their art to the exhibit and sharing their skills with the local community through arts presentations and workshops.

Orsini, who created many of the sculptures in the park, said she was inspired by art centers in Europe where artists could create art and display their work in outdoor exhibits. She relies on donations, residency fees and volunteers to operate the park. These days, she says, she’s struggling to keep the park open and may be closing this fall, so go soon if you want to see it.
Most of the paths are accessible but they do ramble through mud and tall grass. My feet got wet, but it was worth having soggy socks. As Orsini says, the park is a bit out of the way, but when people find it, they fall in love and keep coming back.
Monarch is located at 8431 Waldrick Road SE, Tenino, WA 98589, (360) 264-2408, http://www.monarchartcenter.org.

Help, It’s Not Raining!

We had some freakishly hot days on the Oregon Coast last week. Saturday got up into the 80s. We figure that was summer. Seriously.

Nobody knows how to handle these days. Bugs come out of nowhere, including crane flies and flying carpenter ants as big as hummingbirds. We don’t know what to wear because we finally have to take off our fleece jackets and our fleece vests and our fleecy Ugg boots, and let a little pale skin come out. We don’t even have any suntan lotion; thank God the Dollar Tree reopened yesterday. Our bodies do this weird thing we can’t identify until someone from somewhere else explains that it’s sweat. And my dog, poor Oregon Coast pup, is dragging around wishing she could take off her fur coat.
I remember well getting into my car in California and burning my hands on the steering wheel, walking into buildings just to feel the air conditioning, and getting a new pair of sandals every year. Around here, nobody has air conditioning. What for? All we can do is open a window. I’m used to lolling on my deck as much as possible, soaking up the sun, not hiding from it. I know it was only in the 80s. The temperature got up over 100 on a regular basis from June through September back in San Jose. Eighty was a nice day. It’s all relative. After 15 years, I’ve acclimated.
Anyway, it’s cloudy today. It dripped a couple drops of rain, and I’m hoping it will rain good and hard because it’s muggy, like Massachusetts in August, and I miss my fleece.
***
On a slightly related note, Friday turned out to be a good day to take photos on the beach. We’re working on the cover for the paperback edition of my new book, Shoes Full of Sand (already available on Kindle, hint, hint) and I decided to take some more pictures. Here’s some of what I came up with. I’m sure people thought I was nuts taking pictures of sand and my own bare feet and my shoes. But hey, it’s Shoes—Full—of—Sand. And they were.