Shiloh and the dugongs (2003-01-18)
My 7-year-old daughter and I were working on her first school report, on an aquatic animal of her choice. She chose to write about dugongs, a manatee-type animal that lives in southern waters of Africa and Australia. (I think part of the appeal was that neither of us had heard of it before.) She had to write five sentences about it, and was stuck on coming up with an additional fact. I told her dugongs were mammals. I said we're mammals, what do you think we have in common with the dugong? She looked at me, glanced at my trusty Route 66 mug and said, "They drink coffee?"

Man, I love being a parent.

Lost and found (2002-09-27)
Just over one year ago, I lost everything I owned. Someone stole my truck and the U-Haul trailer attached to it, which was loaded with all my belongings. We were preparing to move from Seattle to Florida. The trailer was taken two hours before we woke up to drive off with it to our new life in the South. We were insured, but the cliche is true--there are some things you can't replace. I sometimes miss my journals, old recipes, the photo albums I made--one for every year of our daughter's life.

I lost my life history, that detritus of letters, cards and scraps of old cloth that most of us keep as postcards from fond memories. It was a revisionist history, to be sure. But it was mine and on dark days, I explored the artifacts and there found solace, whimsy, or at the very least nostalgia.

In the year that has passed, we have filled another home with furniture, dishes, photographs. I've started keeping a journal here, where it can be shared, but not stolen. And I don't spend time poring over old school notes, perusing old love letters. I don't have them. I don't even have any old clothes when it's time to work in the yard or paint a bookshelf. What I do have is a life less cluttered, but rich with the present. And that is a gift.

This morning, I got a call from the Seattle Police Department. Two girls were pulled over during a traffic stop. The police discovered that one had my old Florida driver's license, a Washington driver's license with my information but her face, and, oddly enough, my long-expired library card from New Orleans. Her name is Marcella.

Once upon a park in summer (2002-08-24)
Something about the late afternoon light called to me. The molten rays streaming through the western windows of our nearly empty house beckoned me to the park on the corner. So I stop packing for our eminent move West and called to Shiloh. She grabbed her scooter and we headed for the playground. The smoky-sweet charcoal-meat smells of a barbecue greeted us as we headed through the park gate. The shouts, staccato ball-beats and basket-slam twangs of a pick-up b-ball game thudded in the fenced-in courts. I tried again to teach Shiloh how to pump her small legs to get herself going on the creaky swings. We decided it was more fun to swing together, Shiloh in my lap. We swung until my legs got shaky. Next we played dinosaurs. “Pretend I’m taller and my neck is long,” Shiloh instructed as we clambered over the top of the monkey bars for the fourth time, making our way across the imagined river below. We got dirty--that kind-of-sweaty, swing-set-grease-sticky feeling. It felt good. Like being a kid. Dusk made its way into the park. The crickets and cicadas caught this cue and started their sawing songs. We balanced on the roots of looming oak trees, leaping from one to another without touching ground—a final game before we left for home. A faint breeze blew through the gray moss overhead and cooled my damp forehead. I love summer sundown, before the bustle of shorter days to come. And I love my daughter, who reminds me to play while the days are long.

Road Trip Day 4: The South (2001-09-28)
We crossed the humpbacked Ozarks and sank into the cotton fields of south Arkansas. Brown and white puffballs lined the road like a summer snowdrift. We steamed through tiny burgs, their houses sagging under the heat, the humidity and too much history. Listless dogs and rumpled kids watched the dust of our wake. The air was warm and clear, dappled with cotton fluff fairies like a sunlit dream.

We hit New Orleans at midnight, parked, and strode into the rank blur of neon, beer fumes and cigarette smoke that hangs over Bourbon Street, heralding the debauchery bought and sold there for five-dollar daiquiris and buck-a-piece Jell-O shots. Blue-shirted conventioneers staggered down the sidewalk past doormen in shabby tuxedos shouting drink specials to passers-by.

Road Trip Day 3: Colorado, Kansas (2001-09-27)
A clear, cold morning hits Rocky Mountain high. We woke up steepled among the peeks of Frisco. We descended into Denver’s thin brown haze and rocketed past Buffalo Bill’s grave, non-stop to Kansas’ unrelenting flat farm country, home to a six-legged cow, the world’s largest prairie dog, and, once, Bob Dole--or so I’m told by the road signs that punctuate the featureless landscape. Someone decided to repave Kansas: They are tarring Highway 70 from gray to black clear across the state. Sunflowers bob, heads bowed in homage to their celestial namesake.

Road Trip Day 2: Utah (2001-09-26)
We drove through ochre rock redly looming over our cement river. Further east, the rocks gave way pistachio hills pointing to the great Salt Lake and her dry and flinty city. We left her behind and struck out through Utah back country on Route 6 through stone castles bleached by a relentless summer sun. We came out on a sage valley dotted by sun-shocked shrubs resolute in the clean heat. In the western distance a kingdom of stone rings our bone field mesa.

Road Trip Day 1: Oregon (2001-09-25)
We headed out of Portland on 84 East as it follows the Columbia River. We skirted the wide, flat, dam-tamed water and climbed hills covered in grass burnt to the color of buttered toast. Scraggy rock knuckled the road exposing scars where the river cut through long ago.

A black bird with white-tipped wings startled up from the pavement and flew into hills growing greener with our easterly course. The hills' rocky angles gave way to large round curves -- like giants asleep under a honey-colored quilt. We drive over their thighs and shoulders and watch the moon rise. Trees stand sentry over this God's country as we follow the moonrise.