Orcas Island Home

Black Friday

2009-11-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

It's the day after Thanksgiving and the sun is shining in a clear blue sky. And I am VERY thankful! As the days grow shorter and the fall rains come (which we desperately need after one of the dryest summers ever) glorious sunny days are appreciated in a way that never really happens in lower latitude places. And Orcas Island is just about as far north as you can get in the contiguous United States. My home in Deer Harbor is 48.6 degrees North. By comparison, this is the same as the center of Newfoundland and well north of Toronto or the northern tip of Maine. So when I tell you it gets dark at 4:30 this time of year, I'm not pulling your leg! The other side of that coin is that it doesn't get dark until 10:30 in the middle of the summer. Yet, despite the significant variation in the length of the daylight from winter to summer, and our high latitude, the weather is quite temperate year-round. Today the high was about 50F and the low tonight will be in the mid 40's. Typical winter weather. Every year or two we get an "arctic express" and get some snow and freezing weather, sometimes for weeks on end, but that is the exception, not the norm. Summer weather seldom gets into the 80's for more than a few days. Typical summer temperatures would be 72F during the day and low 50's at night. Because of the mild climate our heating bills are quite modest compared to much of the country. AND because the weather is seldom extreme we spend a great deal of time outdoors. Yes, sometimes it's raining, but (usually) it is damp/drizzling rather than soaking/raining. There are fogs and mists that turn the forested hills to Chinese brush paintings. The foghorns sound and the ferryboats call in return. I like fog actually.

Yes, those are roses blooming in November! Some years they go till the crocus are coming up. We love warm winters!

And when we get a good snow storm we are grateful for that too, because it kills the yellowjackets. We don't have mosquitos or blackflies or large numbers of any biting insects but we do have yellowjackets and they can make late summer picnics a challange. After last winter's extended cold snap we had almost none this summer; it was great!

There is much to be thankful for here.

A Healing Place

2009-11-20T21:35:00.000-08:00

It has been said that a poet writes the poems he must write and only then can he write the poems he wants to write. When Kate and the girls and I moved to Orcas Island we rented a waterfront house looking east at Mt. Baker, next door to Lucille Willis, on the farm her husband's family had homesteaded a hundred years earlier. I began writing early every morning and those poems burned. Looking back I consider them my 'healing poems'; the poems I NEEDED to write. They got me going and more importantly, they helped me to heal. Orcas does that to people; helps them to heal. Now I write (mostly!) poems I want to write. Sometimes the words whispered in my ear by the Muse are about pain and sometimes she insists, but it's not the ONLY topic anymore!

Ancestors

I spend these mornings

Searching for the spirits

Of dead ancestors

An archaelogist, sifting through

Twenty seven years of dust

Looking for pot shards

And bone fragments

To reconstruct a Man

K.A.Wood

1991

We had taken the rental house sight-unseen and as it was a 'winter rental', we had to move out in June so the house could be used as a vacation rental for the summer. That was pretty typical back then. LOTS of people were scrambling for housing every June... We were blissfully ignorant of this critical fact.

We had a contract on a piece of land overlooking West Sound off Exton Rd that we had planned to build on but the sale of Kate's house back east fell through at the last minute and we decided to move anyway. Like most of our better ideas, it was Kate's! Her friend Cecily told her to "fly out through that Window of Opportunity" ...and we did.

When we arrived on Orcas I made a solemn vow to my daughters that, though we would undoubtedly move around some on the island, we would not leave; Orcas Island was their Home. Heather was in first grade that year and her eldest, our grandson Caleb, started first grade this year. He is our first native born islander. And he KNOWS the whole island is his home.

The Beginning

2009-11-20T20:32:00.000-08:00

Seeing Green

November's grey and patient rains came
quietly and slow, intimate and surprising
as always, filling pores and hollows
absolving me of summer sins
opening my eyes wide
in the kindly light
I have begun to see again
the ten thousand colors
we call green.

K.A.Wood

I wrote that poem 5 years ago during an autumn much like this one. Though none has been as wet as the year Kate and I moved here; 11 inches that November, I think it was a record. We were so in love with Orcas that we just put on our rain jackets and went out walking in the rain with our silly grins etched on our faces. I cannot even imagine the number of times we have walked around Mountain Lake in the last 20 years, and yet, I enjoy it every time, regardless of the weather. Orcas is like that. It will do that to you; make you understand that the joy to be found in the world is right in front of you, right at this moment, and all you have to do is be present and pay attention.

Welcome to my blog; I hope to tell you about my home, what it's like to live on Orcas Island, how I spend my "one wild and wonderful life" here in paradise.