A bit of a meander: a rainy day coastal road trip, Sunday morning on my paddle board, and a photograph of one-year-old me carrying a dead duck.

A couple of posts back, written for the ongoing challenge I’m doing with a former student, I wrote about Nostalgia, about moving to and leaving Maui. It took me about a million twists and turns to get those words down on paper—and here’s why: I am tired of writing about the BAD. Displaced from career, home, friendships, love. Uhg. Enough already. FFS, universe.

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To get out of the trap of the BAD, just barely a month before covid came into our lives, I set out to drive from Olympia to the coast. I love the Pacific Northwest coast on any day, but especially on a rainy day. I had just joined a book club through the local bookstore so I brought along my copy of bell hooks’s all about love (her best work, IMHO—you should read it). I wanted to walk on the beach, sit in a coffee shop to read and write, and find a funky little shop to explore. Check, check, check.

I had a couple of questions in mind to ponder on the drive: what kind of a person am I, now? Is there a return to self after so much loss and prolonged grief?

I was back at work at a writing instructor at a community college. I was home to Olympia. I had my dog-walk routine and my yoga routine and my spend time in nature routine and my volunteer for tree-planting routine and my family dinner routine. I was in some liminal space between grief and going through the motions to live a full life.

On that beach drive I meditated on what it means to join a book group and read a really important piece of literature in community. And given the topic of the book, I asked myself: how can I love my life again? My life.

The answers started to come and the routines began to feel real again and then covid hit and I was displaced all over again. I keep pondering, during lockdown, as I focused on my writing, on my photography, and on scanning the 1000s of slides my father took while we traveled the world in the 1970s. Yes, I thought, yes, these are the things of my life. This is the kind of person I am in this world in this moment in time.

And the first few months of the pandemic, I still had work as a writing teacher. As enrollments dropped and covid kept on, I found myself working in retail. All else stopped. I was—became—a typical American wage worker, over-worked, taxed to the limits of my stress management, running on low blood sugar and barely having energy to do my laundry on my days off—(and I had split days off for the two years of it).

I asked the questions again: what kind of person am I now? how can I love my life again? what is my life in this new situation?

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I started teaching again this past academic year, 2023-2024. And I just finished my summer term, which coincided with our annual family camp-out. This past Sunday morning I sat on my paddle board on the lake we were camped at. I’m still contemplating, now that I have time again and after this last disruption—what is my life?

I looked at the mountain in front of me and followed the line of it down to the forest and the line of that down to the lakeshore and then across the water into my heart.

The previous evening, I had started reading a book, To Shake the Sleeping Self, by Jedidiah Jenkins, a travelogue of his bike trip from Oregon to Patagonia. Early in the narrative he shares with the reader that he is somewhat following the trajectory of his parents who walked across America in the 1970s (their trek was published in National Geographic).

In that moment on my paddle board I asked myself, what if I just keep following the line from the mountain top down to the trajectory of dad’s work? He was a world-renowned zoologist who, before we traveled, shaped much of the land management of state lands here in Washington. He taught me how to know nature and to see myself as part of it, not apart from it.

Just this last week I started back at scanning my dad’s slides (after my two-year exhausted by work hiatus). I came upon an image of my one-year-old self, running across our lakeshore yard, lovingly holding a dead Mallard duck. These things happen when your dad is a zoologist.

I may have traded the red sneakers of that little girl for the red lipstick of womanhood, but I am that same person, from then, through grief, to now, and for evermore. I am my dad’s daughter, plain and simple: photographer, writer, an environmentalist who is always working to connect humans to nature.

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