Ten years ago I was looking back on my summer vacations before we had kids. I’d visit my home state Washington and schedule way too much stuff using a Daytimer to keep track. I also posted photos from our 2016 beach vacation and noticed how much more relaxed I was.
You can read that post HERE. I was contemplating whether I should swim in the ocean with several sightings of great white sharks. Yikes.
We’ll be heading to the beach later this week. I’m ready to get out of this terribly hot summer in the desert and enjoy some fresh air!
Looking down the hallway of the Marin County Civic Center in San Raphael, California.
One of the highlights of my recent trip to the Bay Area to see my kids was visiting the Marin County Civic Center. I was surprised that touring a civic center was on the agenda with my son and daughter-in-law. But I soon learned that it was Frank Lloyd Wright’s largest public project and also his last commission.
Intended to centralize thirteen dispersed Marin county departments, the Civic Center project encompassed an entire campus of civic structures and incorporated ideas from Wright’s Broadacre City scheme of the 1930s. The three-story 580-foot long Administration Building, and a four story 880-foot long Hall of Justice together spanned the valleys between three adjacent hills. The flattened dome of the circular library and its connected gold tower (built to encase a smokestack and a radio transmitter) form the focal point of the plan. The concrete Civic Center’s pink stucco walls, blue roof and scalloped balconies are distinctive. The interiors feature glass walls and are arranged around open atriums in order to promote the transparency that Wright felt governments should promote. Though Wright planned the atriums to be open to the sky, practical considerations saw barrel-vaulted skylights put in following Wright’s death. Construction was carried out by William Wesley Peters and Aaron Green. The Hall of Justice was completed in 1969, the Veterans Memorial Auditorium opened in 1971, and the Exhibit Hall opened in 1976. The site also includes a circular post office, Wright’s only commission for a national U.S. government facility. https://franklloydwright.org/site/marin-county-civic-center/
This was a model of the Marin County Civic Center I discovered outside of the library.
A committee interviewed 26 architectural firms in 1956 to select an architect for the civic center. Peter Neutra was the lead candidate. Frank Lloyd Wright was not interviewed and refused to participate in a competitive selection. Wright had an ardent supporter on the Board of Supervisors but it was a battle to get him appointed as the architect. Wright eventually earned the commission and was directed to proceed with detailed design on April 28, 1958. In March 1959 Wright was appointed to design the post office. On April 9, 1959, Wright died at age 91. The Civic Center continued under the direction of two of Wright’s architects, Wesley Peters and Aaron Green.
Here’s a view of a spire through the ceiling glass. We have a Frank Lloyd Wright spire at a shopping center in Scottsdale. That spire was originally planned for a capitol building that Wright designed without anyone asking for it. His project was never approved or brought to life, but the spire was built.
This is the library in the civic center. We walked the entire length of the building and saw the sheriffs department, attorney general’s office, library, a state senator’s office, cafeteria, court house and government agencies including financial, community services and administrative offices.
Next to the large building is the jail. Isn’t that amazing? The jail is underground and a tunnel connects it to the court house.
Here’s s view of the spire from outside.
The design has been controversial with the blue roof. But I thought it was beautiful!
I wrote about Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s compound in Scottsdale HERE.
My mom’s birthday is in a few days and I really miss her. She passed away on New Year’s Day of 2023. This is the post I wrote about her and how it hurt to lose her:
My New Year started off with a phone call from my brother that our mom was found in her bed unresponsive. She lived in assisted living and I wasn’t able to visit her during COVID shutdowns. Thankfully, I visited her at the end of 2022.
Within two hours she passed away after being taken by ambulance to the hospital. This was totally unexpected. She tested positive for COVID five days earlier but was asymptomatic.
I’m going through shock, denial, disbelief and grief all at once.
I wrote this children’s story about her years ago. I sent it to children’s book publishers and actually got an offer from a small publisher. I turned down the offer because I didn’t think it was big enough! I’ve never had another offer in my life to have a book published.
Here’s the story:
A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOTHER
I have a different kind of mother. She’s not like other mothers on our street. She looks like other mothers. But it’s what she does that’s different.
She sings all the time. She sings songs by men named Wagner and Wolf. But she calls them “VAHgner” and “VOUlf.”
When my friends come over they ask “What is that?” We listen. “La la la la la la la la laaaa.”
I shrug my shoulders and say, “That’s my mom.”
My friends laugh. Their mothers never sing unless it’s to the radio.
My mom sings all the time. She sings operas while she drives, cooks, shops, gardens, reads and cleans. I think she sings in her dreams.
My mother never buys a loaf of bread. She bakes it every week and slices it with a big knife. Sometimes she lets me punch down the dough after it rises.
When I take my lunch to school, my sandwich sits crooked and looks like it’s ready to fall. My mother packs me carrot sticks, a hard boiled egg, an orange and an apple. There’s too much food and not one chip or pretzel like the other kids get. I like to order hot lunch.
My mother thinks hunting through the woods for mushrooms is fun. She took classes to learn about mushrooms so she knows which are good to eat and which ones are poisonous. I hate it when she asks my friends to go picking with her. But they love to go tramping through the dense green forest, climbing over fallen logs covered with moss. She points out the faerie rings where the mushrooms grow.
My mother grows vegetables in her garden, she won’t buy them at the store. But does she grow peas and carrots like the other mothers on our street? No. She’s proud of her eggplant, asparagus, spaghetti squash and rhubarb.
When my friends come over to play, my mother asks them to weed the garden.
“Nobody wants to weed. We want to play,” I tell her.
Then I turn around and the kids are lined up on both sides of her, pulling weeds as she tells them about the vitamins in vegetables.
My mother doesn’t read ordinary books by popular authors. She likes to read e.e. cummings with letters scattered over the page. I don’t know what the poems say. But my mother gathers up the letters and makes sense out of them.
Digging for clams up to her elbows in mud is how my mother catches dinner. She knows about razor clams that we dig in the surf and butter clams, littlenecks and cockles we find in the gritty gravel. She calls the ones we break with our shovels “clums.”
She picks oysters off the beach, shucks the top shell off and eats them raw right then and there. She eats the roe out of sea urchins and says, “It tastes like caviar!”
She’s the friendliest person on the street. She bakes wild blackberry pies for elderly neighbors and talks tomatoes with anyone who will listen.
She invites the neighborhood kids in, even if I don’t want her to. She doesn’t care when kids build a fort in our backyard or makes tents in the living room with old sheets. She lets us draw chalk pictures on the driveway and dig for China in the backyard.
At night when she tucks me in, I listen to her sing a lullaby with her beautiful voice.
When she kisses me good night, I love that my mother is a different kind of mother.
I don’t know where January went. Probably because I’ve been laid up for half the month. It went pretty quickly, although some days dragged on and on for me. The Bird Buddies have been keeping me company. There’s always plenty to watch and enjoy with the birds and squirrels in our backyard.
I have a pretty busy week ahead so more time will fly. I can’t believe it’s time to post another reading list. I am getting further and further behind with my Daughter In Law’s syllabus for AP English. I had agreed to read along with her class, but I have a feeling I’ll be reading well into the summer to catch up!
READING LIST:
I’m looking forward to reading Emily Dickinson and Shelley’s “Ode to a Skylark.” Dickinson was one of my mom’s favorite poets. And because it’s a new month, my mom is on my mind. I’ve shared this before, but we called each other at the beginning of each month to say “Happy February First” or whatever month it was. It was a race to be able to say it first. I miss her. She was an avid bird watcher and when she was in high school she created a book of all the birds she’d seen along with sketches and paintings of them, much like “The Backyard Bird Chronicles” by Amy Tan. I can’t help but think she’s smiling down on me pleased with my bird photos.
Happy February to you!
What have you read on this months reading list?
One more photo of Red. He likes the birdseed that I’m buying. It has a photo of a Cardinal on the front of the bag.
Two blog posts I read this week had me reminiscing about our cabin in the woods. I’m referring to Wynne Leon and Brian Hannon who have their own blogs as well as writing for The Heart of the Matter. Here’s Brian’s post about a cabin on Writing From the Heart with Brian. Wynne’s blog is called Surprised By Joy and that is a link to her post about a recent vacation in a cabin.
Both of their cabin stories hit a soft spot in my heart. The photo above is the cabin my mom and dad built before I was born. My dad designed it and mom and dad used their own two hands to bring the idea to life. The large-paned windows came from my grandmother’s shops in Marysville, Wash. The cabin was located in Robe Valley on the Stilliguamish River.
I say “was located,” because years ago my brother and I decided to tear it down. It had been repeatedly broken into, trashed and even lit on fire. It was a hazard. All that remains is the beautiful property and the fireplace.
Our property on the Stilaguamish River. That’s Mount Pilchuck in the background.The road to our cabin through the woods.
I have many memories from my cabin when I was very young. There used to be a sandy beach that I loved on the edge of the river. As you can see the river has changed — it’s all rocky.
We fished, rode the rapids on air mattresses with friends and jumped off the giant rock into the river. We used our cabin in the summer. There was no running water, no electricity, but it did have an outhouse. I remember fishing early in the morning and late in the afternoons. Mom would fry trout on the wood burning stove. Outside the cabin was a pump for water.
We spent my early days with grandma and other relatives. It was a gathering place. Then as we got a little older, my brother and I got to bring friends to the cabin for weekends.
There was a certain smell of evergreens at Robe along with a musty tinge inside the cabin. It had one room with steep stairs to a loft and the balcony overlooking the river.
My grandma was an artist and painted a picture of the cabin as well as one of me playing in the sand.
You can see the giant rock we’d jump off of across the river.
Here’s the sandy beach plus the large glass windows in this painting.
The story I heard from Mom was that her father bought a mile of riverfront property during the Great Depression. He envisioned it as a place where family would gather for generations. He gave parcels of land to his three children, plus to other relatives. When they first started using Robe, the family stayed in “The Lodge” which was formerly a post office for the town of Robe. Robe was once a silver mining town with a railroad. When my grandfather bought property there in the Great Depression nothing of the town was left, except the abandoned post office building.The road into Robe is straight and was the railroad line. I’d like to research history of Robe. I see a project in my future to find out more.
My extended family on my Mom’s side holds an annual family reunion at Robe each summer. I’ve gone a few times, but mostly I don’t go. I honestly don’t know the ever growing family except for my aunt and first cousins.
On my mom’s birthday two years ago, my aunt and I drove up to Robe to spread her ashes in a place my mom loved. I wrote about that HERE.
What special memory do you have from childhood of a family place you’d visit or spend vacation?
It will be a year this week when my Aunt and I traveled to Washington State to spread my mom’s ashes at our family property. It would have been Mom’s birthday. I’ve been feeling a little weepy knowing that her birthday is this week. I miss my mom.
Here’s what I wrote last year:
This is the private road through the woods to our family’s riverfront property. We ran across this obstacle on our journey.
My aunt and I made the trek to Robe Valley where our family has owned property along the Stillaguamish River since the crash of ’29. Our mission was to spread my mother’s ashes in a place of beauty that she loved.
At dinner the night before at my brother’s home, we celebrated mom’s life. I was surrounded with love from my brother, sister-in-law, niece and nephew, spouses, their children and of course my mom’s little sister.
I worried about the condition of our road to the river. Would it be too muddy? Would it be flooded? We were told we’d need a chainsaw this time of year to make it to the river.
“We don’t do chainsaws,” I said.
My aunt who turns 80 this year, nodded her head in agreement.
A new gate to our property.
Our first obstacle was a new gate. Prior to this gate, we had a chain across our road. Fortunately, I packed the key that was mailed to me by a distant relative a few months ago. Whew! It worked!
When we stopped at the fallen branches blocking the road, I was able to push and hold them back while my aunt gunned the accelerator and drove through.
Then something surprising happened. A Great Blue Heron rose from a low branch and flew up in front of us. The Great Blue Heron was my mom’s favorite bird. In the 80-plus years this property has been in the family, no one has seen one there before.
My aunt said “Mary is that you?” (Mary is my mother’s name.)
The heron kept flight directly in front of our car as we made our way down the road. Literally we were looking up and forward.
I’m reminded of a post of Vicki’s at Victoria Ponders with these words from her dear friend:
Look Up. Look Forward.
HTTPS://VICTORIAPONDERS.COM/
It was a sight or a sign. It was other worldly. I didn’t get a photo or video, but the four-foot tall bird guiding us down the road is etched in my mind.
We reached the river without further obstacles, prayed and spread my mom’s ashes along with blue hydrangea blossoms (blue was my mother’s favorite color and she loved hydrangeas.)
We left in peace knowing Mom was put to rest in one of the most beautiful places that she loved. Her dear cousin’s ashes were spread there the previous year.
Where we spread ashes with snow on the riverbanks and snow capped mountains in the distance.View across the river from our property.
Who do you miss most in your life? How do you celebrate their memory?
On Monday, I was celebrating fun memories of my daughter on her birthday. Then I saw a post by a mother whose daughter shared the same birthday with my daughter. Our daughters knew each other as student-athletes at the University of Utah. I didn’t know they had the same birthday until Monday. I texted my daughter if she knew. She said she did. I remember how devastated my daughter was on the day she learned of Lauren’s death.
As I was rejoicing the life of my daughter, this mother was grieving her loss. I burst into tears realizing how fortunate I am.
The other mom heard her daughter’s death happen, on the phone, while she was talking to her daughter when she was shot to death by a stalker.
“‘There but for the grace of God, go I.”
Lauren’s story is a harrowing event that made national news. The mother has worked to keep Lauren’s memory alive, plus began a foundation with the following mission:
Our Mission
Dating violence and stalking are some of the most pressing issues facing universities and colleges today. One third of all women report dating violence by a current or previous partner. University and college campuses are not trained to respond effectively to these problems. The Lauren McCluskey Foundation was founded to honor the life and spirit of Lauren Jennifer McCluskey by bringing awareness to, funding research for, and providing resources to change the culture that responds poorly to dating violence and stalking on campuses.
Our mission is to let Lauren’s light shine by supporting her passions, including animal welfare, amateur athletics, and by making campuses across the country a place where students are safe, supported, and have the ability to thrive.
