“Ten times a day something happens to me like this- some strengthening throb of amazement- some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” – Mary Oliver
Sometimes a person needs to talk to herself for a while, and that’s what I have been doing down in Tenakee for about a month. Blogging to me. Every day, in the Tenakee journal I began in August two years ago, when I first began the cabin project. I am at home here now, part-time anyway.
I love Haines, but it is very nice to be some place, some time, where I don’t have forty years of relationships. I’m meeting new people. I’m an outsider being welcomed. I’m still not sure I can explain, on the big picture level, why I love Tenakee, so I will stick to relating the small things that happen on Tenakee time, in a place without cars, on a dirt trail named Tenakee Avenue, where a hundred souls live close together, and even bathe together (men and women separately, except maybe late at night, or so I have been told…)
Walking down the trail with a friend whose home is full of deer antlers, we meet my neighbor rolling his wheelchair the other way. I told him I heard him yelling this morning from his deck when I hung laundry to dry off mine. There is a leafy tree between us so we can’t see each other this time of year. He cursed so creatively and convincingly. With conviction. I didn’t mind at all. Now, he apologized and said he didn’t realize anyone could hear him. I assured him it was fine. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. He had made me laugh out loud. I figured he was chasing the crows from his beloved bird feeders. “Squirrels” he said, exaggerating and with good humor in spite of their nuisance to him. “Vermin,” he punctuated. “Nothing but rats with tails!”
I said my husband has been trapping them in Haines.
It’s an infestation.
It’s too bad we can’t eat them.
The hunter said a boy in Tenakee has. My neighbor said no way. It’s true, his dad makes him cook anything he shoots, that’s the family rule.
We agreed that he’s probably not killing squirrels anymore and swung back full circle to cursing them. My neighbor rolled west, and we walked east toward the boat harbor with our dogs.
I said I felt guilty about being an accessory to our squirrel murders in Haines. We didn’t eat even one. They are smart and have bright shiny eyes. No good comes from squirrels in and around homes, we agreed on that. Don’t get me started on the mess they make in the woodshed. I told him that I had just read a Native American prayer earlier that morning, noting that all living creatures are sentient beings.
What’s a caring person to do?
The hunter thought a minute, and told me that his father hangs a string in the kitchen sink drain so that any spiders rinsed down it can climb out.
