Part II of Travel Story--Tribute to Kissy

Alas! No more travel photos have come my way--none of Kissy's birthday bash or of her fabulous home. So I've decided to improvise. One of my birthday gifts to Kissy was a big black tri-fold poster-board collage of her life. I started out on the top left with her baby photos and moved across her life to the bottom right corner of these modern times. Below is one of our annual Easter photos. Good thing we have this documentation because, otherwise, who would have believed how our mother dressed us (and then had the nerve to take us out in public, and to church, no less). Not much else to do in San Angelo, Texas, in the 50's. Dear goodness.




Kissy's husband Paul had heard of a very cute idea and decided to do it for Kissy's birthday party, which was to make about 30 copies of the photo below (Kissy as a junior in high school) and and had them mounted on paint stir-sticks. While I spirited Kissy out of the room, Paul passed them out to everyone and, when she came back, they were all holding her face in front of theirs. It's hard to explain how fun that was--I wish we had the photos of everyone standing there with Kissy's face on their body. You'll have to take my word for it that it was very funny. Try it sometime.




Below is Kissy on some beach around PG or Carmel, with her son Lucas, who will be turning 24 on Dec 14th. What a beautiful pair.




Since mine and Kissy's birthdays are only three days apart we have had many joint birthday parties as adults. Well, I don't know if adults is the right word, but below is a photo of us cutting our cake together at a party in Carmel Valley and that's her son Justin between us. He's now 21 years old.




And here's the sisters with our mom and dad at Maya and Eder's wedding reception in May of 2003. That's Eder in the background all the way on the left.




So that's a little touch of what was on the collage board. I think there were about 70 photos all together. They certainly didn't tell the whole story of Kissy's life (that would have taken several more tri-folds) but there were some fun shots on there and lots of good memories. And the more I look back on it, the happier I am that all of us were able to share in the memory of her 50th birthday and that we made the cross-country journey.

At times, though, I was suffering from a critical mind and my own harsh judgments of how Americans live. It all seemed much more evident on the fast-paced, high-priced, crowded East Coast. (My sis would agree-she's wanting to move to Nebraska, to a slower and saner tempo.)

Luckily I had taken a wonderful book with me, titled The Best of Buddhist Writings 2004. So I was able to maintain some level of Buddhist perspective of impermanence. We're all here for such a brief moment called life. Everything is in a constant state of change and decay and rebirth. You can't really attach to any of it. That helped my critical mind relax and enjoy.

But it did give me time to think about values while out there in "America" and away from the safety of Corvallis, OR. I was danged happy to get back to our little home and go back to the sanity of my simple, sweet job. As Maya and I were entering the Portland Airport (after the trip from hell, trying to get home and being thwarted at every turn), we saw Powell's Books. And in front of the store was an impressive recycling set-up, which included a food composting bin. We looked at each other and said "Ahhhhh! Back on Planet Oregon!"

And, almost as a welcome home gift to me, right after I returned, Courtney and I canceled our garbage service. It turns out that between recycling and composting, we don't make enough trash to warrant a weekly pick-up (or even bi-weekly). Somehow that gave me so much joy. Lightening our footsteps here, bit by bit. Really without planning or intending to do so, when we moved to Oregon, we started to eat what's in season. Shopping at the Co-op and at the Farmers Market supports that and makes it easy. We share our one little gas-efficient Hondita and try to be thrifty with our driving. We've got a ways to go to zero-emission, but we're heading in the right direction.

Thanks as always for reading this, and stay tuned because I have more coming down the pipeline soon,

Valori