Marcus and I met at the vet's office this afternoon to ease Fluffer's path over the Rainbow Bridge. He contracted cancer at the turning of the new year and held on bravely for at least two more months than we'd expected, but the poor lambie had grown very weak the last two weeks.

Yesterday I found him at the foot of the stairs leading to the basement. He'd caught a claw in the carpet and was too weak to extricate himself, and it broke my heart to see him. At that point, there was no mistaking the signs: it was time to ease his journey over the Rainbow Bridge and let him go.

While we've had five months, or nearly, to prepare for this day, tears fell on his behalf, and I am not ashamed to say so. Fluffer was affectionate to the end, rustling up a purr when we doubted how much pain he might be in and second-guessing whether we were prolonging his suffering.

Our pets love us so and ask for so little in return. It is hard to feel so selfish in wishing them to stay with us for ever, but in the end, we must give them peace and find peace ourselves.

Farewell, my dear Fluffer, and greet Dandelion for us. Someday, we will cuddle you both again.

Thanks to LibraryThing, a wonderful invention for the bibliophile

Today would have been one of my favourite cousin's 54th birthday. He was almost exactly two years older than I (birthday number 52 was yesterday); he was an accomplished musician and loved boating and good jokes. He always treated me with the same good-humoured disrespect that an older brother would have.

He was found dead in his home on Wednesday and will never again pick up his guitar to cover a Beatles tune, never tinker with a cranky boat motor that's stalled on the St. Joe river, never again raise his voice in song.

Speaking words of wisdom, dear cousin, let it be.

I have admired the varied talents of our citizens in creating beautiful 3-D renderings of fantasy people, but the only drawback, to my way of thinking, is that so many of the images are young and thin, and I'm decidedly neither! I suspect that the desire to have a positive self-image is the reason behind so many people who claim past lives as queens and kings instead of serfs and trash collectors. So imagine my pleasure when Seshat Taharqa sent me a middle aged avatar of my very own! Those who have seen me in the flesh may judge for themselves whether it is like. I love her—grey hairs and wrinkles!

We've been in limbo for the past few weeks waiting for our son to come home from Iraq on military leave. Last night at about 19:45 while watching Slingblade (excellent movie, btw), we got a collect call from the Seattle airport: he'd been bumped off most flights that day, including the critical last leg. So we threw ourselves into the car along with a pillow and blanket and drove the 150 miles to fetch him.

It was quite the adventure: a car driving west on I-90 about 30 miles east of Seattle hit an elk and cartwheeled right in front of us, landing on its roof. We made it to the airport and wandered around for 40 minutes until we found him, looking pretty darned great in clean cammies and new boots. I assumed he'd be dead on his feet in those buff suedes, but we talked all the way home.

This is his second tour, and he'll be going back for another 3½ months on October 6, but he's remarkably serene about the experience: he plays guitar, quotes Yeats, and delivers remarkable insights, a great comfort to us. He's talking about going into the Peace Corps after his tour is up in September '08, also flipping mental coins on where to go to college and what to do there.

Let him be safe and able to make all those choices!

I have discovered LibraryThing, which in 24 hours has insidiously taken over my time (in between sleep and work). If, like me, you'd like to have a catalogue of your sizeable book collection, but are daunted by the task, visit LibraryThing and get started. It's both addictive and incredibly useful. It's a good thing, just now, for I wore a hijjus blister on my heel walking around in my riding boots yesterday. It's indescribably painful, as I discovered on this afternoon's ride, but it's just not advisable to ride a motorcycle in flip-flops. Eheu! Bread! Circuses! Book cataloguing here I come!

July opened its doors to blast-furnace heat and wind, which initially drove us north into the BC Kootenays in search of cooler climes over the 4th and 5th.

We found a delightful hotel called the "Mountain Hound" in downtown Nelson, BC, which offered small, but reasonably-priced rooms right downtown, plus inside parking for our motorcycles in what had been the old nightclub. Never have the bikes had it that good!

Nelson is just 300-odd miles, or 480 km from central Washington, but worlds away in atmosphere. We rode up spectacular Lake Kootenay, then over to New Denver, via the mining ghost town of Selden, and it was still mighty demmed hot, especially for BC.

We returned on Friday, and I found a letter waiting from the Washington Ag-Forestry Foundation, which I initially viewed with all the apprehension of a prospective college student seeking admission to a prestigious university.

I had applied earlier this spring to participate in the foundation's leadership program, a two-year, intensive series of lectures combined with travel, geared mainly for primary producers in, obviously, agriculture and forestry.

To apply, one must complete an application, plus spousal and work permissions, PLUS four recommendations from community members. Last month, a panel of graduates interviewed candidates, and finally the board met to make the final determination.

I assumed that my chances were reasonably good, but since I'm not in either field, I was prepared to be philosophical if rejected, and after a 300 mile ride in 90-plus heat, didn't have the energy for histrionics if I'd been declined. Still, I had to lay down on the bed and pet the cat (outraged by a two-day absence) before slitting the envelope, hearkening to my husband's remarks that the envelope was rather thick for a simple "sorry."

I've been accepted into Class XXX! The work will really begin in October, so I have a few months to savour the initial success and anticipate meeting my classmates.

I'm delighted. Absolutely delighted!

The following article appeared as the *gulp* cover story of a new magazine in Wenatchee, titled, The Good Life. The piece fairly wrote itself; what I didn't expect was to find myself on the cover of the magazine—especially after having three teeth drilled and filled. It's a wonder I wasn't drooling.

Middle Aged Motorcycling

The open road, the kids left behind

My passion for two-wheeled adventures began a few years before our son left home, and the feelings of freedom the sport engendered has become ever sweeter after the nest was emptied. The lure of the open road—the urge to leave all one’s earthly possessions behind—is often associated with the young. Ironically, the ability to fulfill these dreams are often not possible until we’ve wrapped up the business of parenting and are reasonably sure that our offspring will survive without us.

I took up the sport of motorcycling when it was reasonably certain that our son would be able to fend for himself should the worst befall one or the other of us. For a few years while he was at home, it was a sport and a passion that my husband and I shared with him. However, when he abruptly joined the US Marine Corps after finishing high school and nearly two years of college, I was surprised at the intensity of the feelings of freedom I felt. Suddenly, my motorcycle took on an entire new significance. It was a tangible talisman of freedom that I would come to depend on most intensely in the summer of 2004, which was to prove tumultuous.

The signs had been coming on gradually: either my husband or I would observe to our youngest son that the sun was known to rise in the east. He would sullenly and stubbornly assert that the opposite was true. He would take his car (his symbol of freedom) and vanish for unaccountably long periods of time. He began to do poorly in school as his graduation became imminent.

I’m probably not the only person to conclude that the behavior of your average teenager is nature’s way of ensuring that parents won’t regret their departure from the nest. What surprised me is that, increasingly, I had visions of running away from home myself.

My husband and I found our refuge in riding. Whether it was for a day to Chelan or two weeks to the American southwest, striding our motorcycles gave us an outlet and an escape from these troublesome teen-aged years. As I would pack up the bike for any excursion be it 20 miles or 2,000, I was surprised by the intense desire to divest myself of all the detritus collected in nearly 50 years of living and survive on only those items that could be strapped to the back of the bike.

Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics, “I went out for a ride and I never went back” became a recurrent mental theme song during our son’s last summer at home. We prepared for a precious two week tour of the American southwest, just my husband and I, dividing our camping gear between the two motorcycles and leaving our son under the watchful eye of a neighbor to finish the final classes required for graduation.

One of the key benefits of piloting a motorcycle is this: in order to ride safely, one cannot be distracted, and the sport is involving enough: scanning the road ahead for oncoming traffic, checking the pavement for tar snakes (omnipresent in Utah and New Mexico and slippery as all get-out) or gravel, watching out for animals or simply holding the bike steady in a buffeting cross wind, a constant companion on this particular tour.

We passed through some of the most spectacular scenery to be found in the continental United States and, unlike auto touring, the vistas could be enjoyed on all four sides, while the scent of the pinyon pines rose in the heat of the day.

Winds turned from gusty to dusty in the southernmost part of Utah, forcing us to crawl down a highway resembling a Depression-era dustbowl. We took refuge in a motel room in the spectacular Monument Valley, completely obscured by rolling dust.

The next morning, in desperation, I consulted a Navajo medicine man to intercede with whatever wind gods ruled that place. He spun a tale, observing that winds were the spirits of the dead. No charms warding off the winds were available, though I did buy a turquoise necklace as blue as the now dust-free skies as a keepsake.

Other disasters dogged us as the road unwound. South of Canyon de Chelly, a low-flying bird impaled itself on the throttle of my motorcycle. Looking in my rear-view mirrors, I saw nothing but a cloud of feathers. Later on the same trip, yet another bird would swoop down into my path, living to fly another day. I began to feel as though I was in a surreal re-make of Hitchcock’s memorable movie.

Some days were picture-perfect: retracing portions of old US Route 66, noting remnants of urban archaeology and taking turns standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. However, the final days of our tour would bring us much closer to our own mortality.

Highway 95 connects the state of Idaho from the basalt floodplains of the south to the remote and mountainous panhandle. For all its remoteness, after nearly two weeks on the road, the tree-lined road felt like home. We weren’t to travel it without incident.

Between McCall and Riggins, a deer leaped out of the underbrush at just the wrong time. Perhaps I was thinking ahead, perhaps I failed to think as I rounded the curve in the road to find my husband’s bike stopped square in the middle. Suddenly I crashed into the rear of his bike, knocking him to the ground. All of a sudden, the lustre of the open road lost its gleam. With the aid of a good samaritan, I picked the bike off my husband and we limped home.

We’d left our troubles behind for a while—and collected a few new ones. Repairs to the bikes would be made, and eventually, repairs to my husband’s fragile neck bones as well. We would live to see our son leave the house he grew up in, unshaven and scraggly, and return a clean-cut, well-muscled and extremely polite Marine. The road of his life would now go on without us, with its own burdens, obligations and dangers. Our roads would now be filled with freedom and memories of the road ahead and the parenting behind.

The shock of our son’s sudden departure into manhood has worn off, and the joys of the open road are now unmixed (in fine weather). I abandoned my large cruiser for a lighter, faster motorcycle—one with better braking power —and scan my road for obstacles in view. They’re always there, but they make the journey onward that much more exhilarating.

This morning, as I was swilling the third cuppa and thinking about getting ready for work, the phone rang—not an unusual event mornings, for at times people try to reach either my husband or I to ask work-related questions.

Today, however, the voice of my son reached out from the barren wastes east of the Syrian border to greet the both of us. We've not spoken to him since he deployed on 28 December, and even the e-mail communications have been few and far between. While Mark had to leave for a meeting, we talked for nearly an hour, planning a possible motorcycle tour should he come home on leave. It was good to hear his voice, very good, and to know that he is well. We speculated on the upcoming presidential elections, but it's hard for any of us to contemplate politics without wishing to beat our heads against solid objects.

He's all right, that's all we can hold on to for the time being.

My husband and I took a little mini-tour this weekend to eastern Oregon. We saddled up the bikes and left in the early afternoon, riding down from Wenatchee to Quincy, then to Ellensburg and down Highway 97 and Highway 197 to Madras.

Getting off the main thoroughfares is a real treat, especially in central and eastern Oregon, for there's little in the way of industry. I've often thought that if eastern Oregon had had the Columbia River flowing through the middle instead of the northern border, perhaps it'd be as relatively prosperous as eastern Washington; as it is, there are vast areas of juniper forests, jackrabbits, and a few ghost towns. I love it, I absolutely love it.

I didn't love the rain Saturday, though we had the gear for it. We left Madras and rolled southeast to Prineville and stopped at a filling station to top off (one doesn't know when or where the next gas is to be found) and took a fork in the road that followed the Crooked River through a number of ghost towns with names like Post, Paulina and Izee.

We stopped at the Paulina General Store and I availed myself of the facilities in the attached saloon, which had a NO GUNS sign above the door. A glance at the denizens at the bar, and I don't think they were being facetious.

The road snaked into the hills, and it got colder, with snowbanks still visible in the gullies and sand and mud on the road, forcing us to slow way down and mind our Ps and Qs. This far from civilisation, a spill would have been worse than inconvenient.

Finally we rejoined a highway — 395— and headed north to John Day. We stopped at a homey restaurant around 2:30 and warmed up on coffee and really good Navy Bean Soup. Still far from civilisation, we decided to call it a day in John Day.

The weather gods smiled on us: by Sunday morning, the sun was out and 395 north was everything a motorcyclist could hope for: wonderfully engineered, with sweeping curves and fine pavement and very little traffic. We had a wonderful ride all the way up, passing more ghost towns with names like Beech Creek, Long Creek, Dale and Ukiah. The last had another general store that was open, so we stopped and visited with the proprietress, reading the store across the way which was covered with signs rabidly protesting tax waste. Out in the great wide open, some people have far too much time on their hands.

Finally, 395 relinquished us in Pendleton, where we were forced to rejoin civilisation, taking the freeways west and north to the Tri Cities. While the sun remained, the winds made the last 180 miles among the hardest of the trip, and we were glad to see the lights of home at last. As we fell asleep in our own beds, outside fell yet more rain — but not on us, not this time!