Onalaska

I've traveled up to rural Washington to write for a week and wander around with the Bird Photographer. I was invited to this bucolic setting by a new friend, the artist and writer Mimi Feldman, who asked me over wine one night, What's up with your book? I probably sighed and rolled my eyes and made some sort of excuse or another, and she said, Why don't you come up to our house while my husband and I go on a road trip?

So I did.

Mimi and her husband Craig have created this incredible home in the middle of rural Washington. They have three goats, a cat, a barn with a studio that Craig built with his own hands, and views of rolling green and heather-flecked hills and regal pine trees. The home is filled with collections from their travels arranged artfully on beautiful, warm furniture. Their art hangs on the walls. Craig is an extraordinary abstract painter and carpenter. Mimi is an extraordinary painter as well, but I met her through writing and our shared experience of mothering and extreme parenting. She has written a magnificent book about her experience raising a son with schizophrenia. Until it's published, you can read her writing and see some of her art at her blog, The Asylum of the Universe. It will take your breath away. She's a badass.

Last night we talked about books and Bob Dylan and caregiving and men and women and children and life, the whole full catastrophe. This morning, Mimi and Craig drove off on their road trip adventure. Carl and I settled in and then wandered around a bit.

Now I've got to write.

Good-bye D.C., Hello LA

Redbud Trees, Washington, D.C.

I need a vacation after my sons' vacation

Call me greedy.

Holocaust Museum

There are few words that would do justice to the experience of the Holocaust Museum.
I was struck dumb by the display of Operation T-4, where Nazi health officials argued that "state funds were better spent on loans to newlyweds than on medical care for the permanently disabled." The disabled were the first to be murdered, some used in grisly "medical experiments."
I didn't know what to say to my sons, but we walked quietly through together.
I wished for a weeping room.

Waiting in line at the Holocaust Museum

Die-hards

The strange collision of cultures

Thank you to Radish King for educating me about the terrible scourge of homelessness and mental illness that lives even behind the literal center of our government. I apologize for my previous flippant title. It was a scene that frankly shocked me, but that wasn't conveyed in my title.