Quarantine Diary #72 6/11/2020 When Women Run

I received a warm, easygoing, and professional phone call from Sara Rodriguez this week. She is running for Wisconsin State Assembly in the 13th district. Not my district, but I am ready and grateful to support people who will fight for issues I care about. Especially women. We need them and right now, they need us.

This is Wisconsin’s 13th District. https://maps.legis.wisconsin.gov/?asm=13&single=y  It seems to roughly include Brookfield, Elm Grove, around the Zoo and the Wisconsin State Fair Park. This map was invented by Republicans to elect Republicans. What you are seeing is gerrymandering.

Look at the map if you are not sure if you are in it or not.

Sara is calling people who can work for her, vote for her, and donate to her. Read her bio and agenda and send money!  Like her on FB and invite your neighbors to do so, also.

https://www.saraforwi.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Sara4WI

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It’s getting more complicated to talk about and write about things that are not directly about racial justice. When we live in a society where we have to talk about “racial justice” -- well, that says it all.  If it isn’t justice for everybody, then it isn’t and never was justice.

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Our son dropped off some things to us this week and stayed for supper. Tacos in the garage (it was raining) with one’s kid, in this time of quarantine, is just about the finest dining I can imagine.

We are visiting our daughters in Chicago tomorrow. One has a new kitten and the other has our two grandkids. We will be wearing masks and when we are with the grands, we will be outside. 

It’s been a long time since we spent time with our kids. In some ways, we have communicated more via calls and facetime than we did before.  But we haven’t been with them in months.

So much of our information about each other is absorbed not through what we say, but through what we feel and intuit - that mystery of intermingling molecules that happens when we are in the same place as people we care about. Do you feel closer to your people or more cut off? I’m not sure if I could answer that but I am very aware that connections with family and friends have changed a lot in the last three months.

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Our wedding anniversary is this weekend. We started celebrating wildly yesterday … by taking a hike and later by discovering a startling place we didn’t know existed.

Our hike was almost here. https://wisconsin-explorer.blogspot.com/2017/07/hiking-ice-age-trail-monches-segment.html  You park your car at a parking lot, walk a short distance into some woods, and then you turn left. Except we turned right and that, as Robert Frost promised when explaining about paths in the woods, that made all the difference. 

(We are going back to the Monches segment really soon. Looks lovely)

We hiked two hours on the Ice Age Trail as it wends through old forest. There was a place where the meadow was so green it was chartreuse. We saw a blue-bodiced damsel flies and chippy woodpeckers and all the regular small darty animals. Lots of trillium past their blooms plus some Jack-in-the Pulpits and other leaves of things I know are rare and native, but I can’t tell you their names because names of plants is not my forte’. (Ask Kathryn and Franc.)

I stood quietly on the path a while; Len was far behind taking photos. Wind was blowing way up in the tops of the tall trees. As I watched them sway sixty feet over my head, I both felt and saw how those bigger breezes gently fell and whooshed downwards, moving the air inside the woods, pushing into skinny saplings standing among their parent trees. Those leafy saplings’ thin and pliable branches rose and fell like lungs of the forest. All around me trees breathed and waved and I was more than a little awed to see it. I’ve been hanging out in woods all my life and I never noticed this before. That you can see and feel and hear the forest breathing.

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On our way to find sandwiches, we saw curious signs that promised “Spectacular Sculptures.”. Len had seen this mentioned on a Google Maps list of interesting places. (Spectacular Sculptures)

We found it, dropped our jaws, and parked. Once again, all I’m doing here is telling you about an amazing place. Maybe you already know Paul Bobrowitz’s art.

It’s six acres of sculptures that are big and imaginative; there are LOTS of sculptures. Some are whimsical (a bunch of frogs-like critters riding bikes together). Some are edgy and feel political. Some are threatening. Think wendigo, boogeyman, nightmare creatures standing on slag heaps of broken sidewalks.

No one was there, we had the place to ourselves. (Another couple drove up as we were leaving.) The sculptures are created from recycled metal, wood, rocks, bikes, propane tanks. The artist lives on this property. It’s crazy but it is also under control.

Life is long. People honoring long decades spent together could do worse than wandering among chrome moons, painted suns, teapot bird houses, monsters, rusty lovers, and all the other symbols and prisms of a beautiful and complicated life.