[Un]Cannery Row: August 2025

It’s the end of August here in Little Town, and all the kiddies are back in school. The college kids are swarming Walmart, stockpiling ramen, energy drinks, and Little Debbie cakes. They might be packing heat this year, too, thanks to our suck-up-to-the-tyrant legislature, so flak jackets are this year’s trending holiday gift for any college faculty and staff on your list. K-12 kids are back in their classroom petri dishes, passing around their viral/bacterial loads. Hummingbirds are slowly buzzing back through, early birds (see what I did there?) on their way back to Mexico.

Here on the Row, it’s been a weird summer. The weather has been strange—smoke from Canadian and Western fires, weeks of extreme heat, weeks of rain, storms that bring down trees. Our garden, slow to get going, suddenly took off quite late and is now a semi-tropical, impassable rainforest, but somehow unproductive (except for cukes…you want some cukes?!?). I’ll roast and freeze only my second load of tomatoes today; I’d normally be eyeball-deep in canning season right now.

I turned 69 this summer. That’s darned-near 70. I remember telling my friend once that his mother shouldn’t be driving alone from South Dakota to Texas. She was 50 at the time. I also remember thinking once that my mom had one foot in the grave and I could lose her at any moment. I was 14. She was 34. My, how our perspective changes…

Pedro and Fiona watch for fish.

We did very little traveling this summer, but we did make it to Kansas to scatter my mom's and dad's (and my mom's dog Oprah's) ashes at the lake cabin Mom loved so much. It was a quick trip with all three dogs, but a sweet mission of love.

Another weirdity (okay, I"m making these words up) this summer is the continuing, escalating Great Disturbance: democracy’s depressing decline and the greed, narcissism, and cruelty of the current badministration and MAGA sycophants; I’m generally a pretty insightful person, but honestly, I don’t get it. I don’t get how this happened, why it’s still going on, and how so many people could be so duped and so selfish.

This darker energy is also complicated by the standard “facing mortality” thing that crops up as we get older—a growing list of family, friends, and Little Town villagers have moved through the veil into the Beyond, are heading there (as are we all, Iowa senator Joni Ernst reminds us), or are living (suffering sometimes) with an assortment of serious injuries or ailments. I realize that mathematically, I’m also nearing the end of my tenure in this body. I know these things are natural and inevitable. I’m not afraid of death; I DO believe it’s a passage (to what, I don’t know) and not an ending. But I don’t like saying goodbye to the people in my little bubble.

Pretzel waves at passing boats.

In another bout of weirdness, our roof started leaking, and our fridge and dishwasher died on the same day. My very wise daughter, whose fridge also died, claims our collective frantic energy and anxiety over the state of our country is breaking stuff. I’m sure she’s right.

Meanwhile, retirement life goes on at the Row. Ray practices drums, guitar, and trombone, he archives his audiophile collections, and he’s still playing drums with the Boyz every Friday night at our Little Town Watering Hole—a weekly well-attended ritual we affectionately call church. I’m writing, working jigsaw puzzles (very meditative), knitting whenever I can manage a dog-free lap, and tending to a ridiculously large collection of houseplants. Our 3 dogs are constantly at work training us, and don’t get me started about the 30-year-old self-plucking parrot or the 10 molting canaries.

The Boyz in the Band

On we go. Happy Labor Day weekend to you all, and many thanks to the women and men who gave us unions. And as the mornings get chillier, I’m wishing for us all a golden, peaceful, SANE autumn, for compassion to stir in the hearts of Republicans, for sensible gun legislation, and for full larders, even if they’re only full of pickles.