Wakawaka Chronicles | Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews

The Soul on Mothers Day

May 12, ’13 2:17 PM

A Strange Reflection on Mother’s Day

Jr and I on her second birthday. We had just started living life on our own.

Poet Wislawa Szymborska writes “A Few Words on the Soul” as a reflection of our richest moments, when the soul visits us in pure feeling. She comments too, our soul is not always with us, though we need it and it needs us too. Life distracts us from our full connection, then comes rushing back in with force. In one line that carries strong resonance for me she remarks on the interconnection of joy and sorrow:

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

Greeting cards often treat joy and sorrow as separate events, striking us at different times defined only by one or the other. Szymborska reminds us the richest moments, the fullest times of heart are when the two are necessary to each other.

In 2005 my dear friend Gita died jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. The grief it caused in me was unbearable for over a year, and then merely painful for long after. A year and a half later I still struggled to feel “up” emotions. Knowing she’d suffered to the point of complete sacrifice, and that I had lost with her over a decade of sharing could not be reconciled for me. It still lives unreconciled. Suicide finds no home in the heart.

In summer 2007 I lived in Toronto for 6-weeks sweating through the heat wave with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I was at the end of my second year of a PhD program. At night after hours on end reading, transcribing, and annotating a paragraph at a time from the text, I would stumble across the street for street meat. I joked recovery from Hegel was like a hang over. You needed salt, water, and a long walk. At night I would visit the annual Jazz festival’s small venues dotted around town.

One Monday about half way through July a pack of us descended on a beer spilled pub that housed a weekly Jazz Standards band. The repetition of songs week after week had become comforting. That night, pitchers of beer in, my friends erupted suddenly into dance. I don’t know what triggered it since the song played was the same they’d heard weekly all summer. But that night I watched through the dark bar as my friends smiled bigger than their faces, and shook their limbs about. The song was fast and they went with it.

The moment was so beautiful, everyone ecstatic in jazz, and in the midst of my grief I almost couldn’t bear the happiness. This was an experience Gita had given up. She had left our world because the weight of it was too great, and she’d sacrificed joy along with her. With my friends all dancing, I found myself weeping with laughter. The two feelings coming simultaneously. I couldn’t bear that we can suffer such pain, and yet couldn’t sacrifice that we can revel in so much joy. The two inform each other, and make the other both more bitter and more sweet. Both too are feelings bigger than any one of us alone. We can only live them by letting them wash through as they will.

On Mother’s Day, I write this to say two things.

Raising a daughter on my own all these years has brought me the heart that can almost bear its soul. To be her mother makes my life both more bitter and more sweet. I cannot explain how to persist in the challenge of being an only parent. Many times the struggle has been unbearable–facing fears with her, or making ends meet. I can only answer it to say, I love her, and that makes me more able to love me too.

But, more than this, I thank my mom. Being a mother myself has given me the gift of loving my mom more clearly. It is thanks to her I have this heart at all. Her love, and my father’s, was given to me first.

Blessings to every mother on Mother’s Day. May you have a day that brings you tender joy. Amen.

***
To read Symborska’s poem: http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-szymborska.html

Comments (2)

UC Davis Talk, Part 2: Freedom, Expression, and Love: A Consideration of Choice in Winemaking

Apr 17, ’13 8:30 AM

The following is part 2 of a talk I gave to UC Davis Viticulture & Enology students on Monday.

To read part 1: on Freedom, Paul Draper, and Camus: UCDavis Talk, Part 1: Freedom, Expression, and Love: A Consideration of Choice in Winemaking

Here is part 2

***

Freedom, Expression, and Love: A Consideration of Choice in Winemaking
by Elaine Chukan Brown, aka. Lily-Elaine Hawk Wakawaka

Part 2: Expression: Pneumonia and Technique

For the second part of my talk, I want to consider the idea of this expression, but I want to reflect on it by telling you a story from my own life that few people know. For all the personal confessions that exist in my writing about wine, this is a story I haven’t written. It’s how or why I left my academic career.

In 2010, I was awarded a research fellowship with Dartmouth College. I had already been teaching philosophy full-time in Northern Arizona for several years at that point. The fellowship I won is given to one person a year for someone whose research is seen as a positive resource for the Dartmouth community, and academia at large. The winner is funded to live on campus and simply do the work they were already doing. I arrived, then, in summer 2010 as a philosopher in residence working on questions of Indigenous Identity.

While there, I was also asked to give the response to a keynote address at a conference occurring in Montreal, Quebec, where I had also done graduate coursework at McGill. To prepare for the response, I’d of course thoroughly considered the article itself, but also read each of the books and articles written by the keynote speaker. The day I was to respond I woke up severely ill. I was used to toughing out sickness, however, and made plans to clear my schedule until the keynote that evening so I could rest until I needed to get up for my response. Two hours prior, I discovered I was still too sick to get out of bed. In the end, though, I had to be convinced by the conference organizer that it was acceptable for me to stay in bed and let someone else read my pre-written response.

The person who wrote the keynote was one of the leaders in my field, and the occasion had been designed partially to give us the chance to meet, so as to facilitate the possibility of her acting as an ongoing mentor—it is common for younger faculty to be guided by more experienced professors. It turned out I was sick the entire week and I never met her. Finally, by the weekend, a friend took me to the emergency room, as I was having trouble breathing. I was diagnosed with pneumonia that ultimately sent me to the emergency room three times over the course of almost two months, and demanded three rounds of antibiotics.

I actually suffered a poor reaction to the first set of antibiotics that included severe headaches lasting for several hours after taking the pills. The pain was intense enough I could not do anything for the hours they peaked besides meditate through them. It was unbearable but I had no choice but simply get through it. Fighting the headaches made them worse. Stopping the antibiotics would only make the pneumonia worse. The headaches were also severe enough I couldn’t do any other work. There was no way out. You might say the illness was my boulder during this period.

In the midst of this time I made a surprise discovery. At the best of it, I would clear my thoughts entirely. But often uncontrolled thoughts would come through mind. After a little while, I recognized that when I thought about something that lined up with my preferences, the pain would subside slightly, and I would feel better. If I thought about something that did not agree with me, I would feel worse.

When I recognized this pattern I decided to test it. I would intentionally think about things I already knew my preferences on: over extracted Australian Shiraz—immediately bad; over-oaked Chardonnay—even worse; champagne—ah, better; coffee—better still. I continued testing it until I was confident the pattern was consistent. Then, I began testing things I wasn’t so clear on to see if they made me feel better or worse. During my meditations through the headaches I would treat my body as a kind of i ching making small insights into aspects of my life I hadn’t been sure about before. Over time, what I came to recognize was that when I thought about anything relating to my career in academia, I felt immediately worse. The sensation was utterly consistent, and in fact became stronger through my headaches. By the time I finished that round of antibiotics, the idea of continuing in academia in the way I had been before immediately triggered migraines.

As I recovered my health, I decided I had to change my life. I had committed so completely to philosophy, and pursuing it through an academic career I had no idea what else I could do for work. Even so, the message of my health was too clear. So, I made a different commitment. I would give myself one year to extract myself from my career in academia. By the time I finished that year, I still had no idea what I would do instead. I only had images of what I wanted—I wanted to write. I wanted my life to be full of sunlight. I needed alone time. I liked listening to people that really meant what they were doing. I had no idea what it would look like to make all those elements come together. I only knew I’d made myself a promise, and I had to act on faith that my promise was worth something.

Around the time I had planned to give my resignation I worried that my decision was crazy. By this point I had returned to Arizona to complete my last year of teaching with an ongoing contract from the university. The same moment I questioned whether I should stick to my plan of leaving, or stay another year, I got asked to a meeting with my department chair and was told that due to severe budget cuts across the state I should expect my teaching load to increase one class per term without any raise in pay. It was the only confirmation I needed, and I submitted my formal resignation that same week. I understood that I was still a philosopher. But the success I’d cultivated in academia I left behind. Though I recognized myself as a philosopher still, there was no guarantee it would ever be recognized by anyone else outside a formal philosophy program. I walked away from any guarantee of being recognized for my work by others.

Here is what I want you to know about that story: everything in me knows that I made the right decision pursuing a career in philosophy. The personal clarity I gained from suffering through the rigorous demands of advanced training in careful thinking is irreplaceable. It has shaped who I am. I am endlessly grateful. Everything in me also knows I did the right thing in leaving my career in academia. This is not to deny the benefits of academic life. It is an excellent career to consider. It was simply not the right career for me to stay within. So while I am grateful I chose philosophy, I am also grateful I left academia.

My point, however, is this: advanced training in philosophy gave me decisive access to a wealth of tools. What it did not tell me was precisely how I must use those tools. It gave me a range of possible models I could follow, but it also did not expose me to others that were also possible. An academic career in the discipline is one framework through which I could exercise my training. But through faith, and a lot of luck, and now continued hard work, I bumbled my way into an entirely different form of expressing those same tools.

When I meet with people in wine, what I am doing is listening to what they say, as well as what they don’t, listening for their values, their beliefs, and their principles not only through how they overtly express them, but also through the implications of what they do and do not say. While listening, I track the form of their expression, to ask myself who it is in front of me. I ask questions to make sure I understand where someone is coming from. In a strange way, I do something parallel to this when tasting and drinking wine.

What I have learned from this approach is that the more willing, and more often I am willing to take people, and wine this seriously, the better at hearing what each has to offer I get. Then, once I am comfortable that I do recognize the actual person, or beverage in front of me, I write about them. What I am practicing, then, is another expression of my philosophical training. I chose to leave one form of philosophical practice to instead pursue another.

What I want to suggest is that each of you have a similar choice. Most likely, and hopefully, it won’t be as dramatic as headaches and pneumonia that helps you make your decision. But you are still in a similar situation as I just described for myself. This is true in two senses. First, it is up to you to decide how open, and how systematic you want to be in approaching your practice with wine, and with people. This point connects to the second.

Here at UC Davis what you have been given, or what you are gathering, is a collection of tools. If you do choose to continue in vineyard management, or in winemaking, eventually that choice will become the rock you are committed to, but you will still have the question of how you will apply the tools you have gained here. In what way do you want to express yourself as a vineyard manager, or winemaker? To put it more simply, you have an incredible opportunity to ask yourself, what kind of wine do you want to make.

In the world of wine, it can be easy to assume sometimes that we have been handed a preset model of what is good—that Burgundy is the model for terroir, as an example. It is one of the oldest. Sometimes we assume that most established is equal to the best. Or, we might think that over oaked Chardonnay is always bad. Today, common models of wine include the idea that natural wine is best, or that it is crap; or, that only low alcohol wines are balanced. But each of these approaches to wine are actually methods developed over time by a series of tasters, and winemakers, and, just like Sisyphus’s rock, these ideas are in a sense arbitrary.

We still have to choose our views. They are what give shape to our life. But if you recognize your own ideas here about what counts as the right kind of wine, I want to ask you to consider, what is the source of that opinion? Is it what you want to commit yourself to?

From the peak of Mt Olympus these distinctions in wine do not mean much. It is us, with our face right beside the boulder, that decide they are meaningful. We get to ask ourselves which approaches we want to invest our time in.

***

Tomorrow: Part 3: Love: Paul Draper and Principles

Part 3: UC Davis Talk, Part 3: Freedom, Expression, and Love: A Consideration of Choice in Winemaking

Thank you to Dr. Boulton. Thank you to Nick Antignano. Thank you to all of the students that attended.

Thank you to Kate MacKay.

Comments (4)

Going Home: Walk Around Flagstaff

Mar 21, ’13 3:58 PM

Visiting Flagstaff in March: Mixed Signs of the Season

Jr and I are back in Flagstaff, Arizona visiting friends for her Spring Break. Though I’m born and raised in Alaska, I grew up in Flagstaff. Our lives here included more than seven years with me going from being simply a graduate student of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, to becoming a professional philosopher teaching at Northern Arizona University here. It’s been over a year now since I resigned from my position in academia, about nine months since we moved from the Southwest. The thing about Flagstaff? It stays much the same. Nice most of all to be back here with friends.

Per request from some friends and a few readers, tomorrow we’ll be driving South to Cottonwood to taste with AZ Stronghold, and Pillsbury Wines.

Here’s a few photos from walking around town that give you a feel for the place.

Classic Arizona: All Signs Point to the Inessential Drive-Thru Liquor Store

March offers conflicted signs of the season: buds not yet open

Leaves of the bush in colors still turned from Winter frost

What kept me in Flagstaff so long: sky sky blue blue sky. The clarity and high contrast colors of life at elevation

Winter Birch cut against the blue blue sky

Stopping by my friend’s place for an afternoon chat: Caleb Schiff’s Pizzicletta

Walking with Caleb to deliver Pizzicletta’s bread to the local CSA

A town with no snow still ready for winter: it’ll come again soon. It always does.

Visiting another friend’s, Lisa Born, bakery, Sugar Mamas

Their first day open two years ago I bought out all the cupcakes and brought them to campus for the Existentialism class. Sisyphus’s rock is easier with frosting

Flagstaff defined: old shops on Route 66 in view of the Sacred San Francisco Peaks, with a 4×4 truck crossing the trans-continental Railroad line

***

Cheers!

Comments (4)

Being Truly Grateful: The Challenge of Thanksgiving

Nov 21, ’12 1:50 PM

The Complexity of Gratefulness: Remembering Thanksgiving

In first grade, as Thanksgiving approached, we learned the story of its origins–how the pilgrims were on the verge of dying, and the neighboring Indians came to offer corn, as well as how to cook it. The Pilgrims were so grateful, they asked the Indians to stay a while, and in the celebration of their getting along they made a feast. At the time I was fascinated. Touched too by the power of generosity and sharing. The story developed into a Thanksgiving celebration of our own, which included a project.

Each of us were given a paper pattern for making a simple three part vest. We were to lay the pattern onto burlap, cut out the scratching brown weave, and then stitch the pieces together with yarn. I loved this. The care demanded of marking the pattern, followed by the hands-on process of cutting and sewing… perfect. Hands on work was always my favorite. Once we finished the vest a new aspect arose.

The class was going to reenact that original Thanksgiving. We were to choose–did we want to be a Pilgrim, or an Indian, and then embroider icons onto our vest accordingly. Part of the pattern, it turned out, included things like feathers and corn for the Indian vests, or outlines of houses and something else for the Pilgrims. I sat for a long time confused.

My family is Alaska Native. On my father’s side we are Inupiat, which is an Inuit group that happens to be on what is now the Alaska side of the border with Canada. On my mother’s side we are Aleut. Most people haven’t heard of Aleut, it’s okay. But Aleuts are a group of people that come from along the Aleutian Chain of Islands of Alaska, up into the Alaska Peninsula, where the Islands join the mainland. The Aleut are more closely related to the Yupik and Inupiat of Alaska, than they are to the Athabascan, or Tlingit–the two major “American Indian” groups in the state–but really they are their own group of people. In Anthropological, in Linguistic, and in Census terms, neither the Aleut nor the Inupiat are “Indian.” Though “Indian” itself is a problematic usage, I’ll overlook that for now. The point is that, Aleuts and Inupiat simply are not what is called an “Indian” group, though they are Indigenous.

The challenge of the vest for me lay in having to choose my identity–Pilgrim, or Indian.

My family celebrated Thanksgiving every year. We would put together a huge meal, and I would revel in the extra days off from school to play with my stuffed animals, watch the science shows on PBS, and rearrange the furniture of my room. (I rearranged my furniture a lot.) My mom would make several pies, and homemade rolls, which were everyone’s favorite. But, honestly, she made the entire meal every year. We would start the meal in prayer, and then we would eat, without a lot of talking, but with a lot of appreciation for the food. We didn’t eat muktuk or seal oil that day, but we might have had it earlier that same week.

I remember saying aloud in the classroom as I sat deciding, “I can’t be a Pilgrim.” Well then, be an Indian, the teacher and other kids responded. “But I’m not Indian.” It took me more than a day to decide. Eventually I ended up with an Indian vest, and a construction paper feather at the back of my head. My people don’t put feathers on their head or wear burlap vests.

As small as this moment seems, Thanksgiving has made me tense ever since. It’s not that I want to talk about the decimation of Native people. I actually don’t. Nor, (please, god, no) do I want a moment of silence “for the genocide” to start the meal. It’s more that I don’t want to not talk about it as though gratefulness is a monotone focus. It is not only a focus on the positive. Gratefulness, I believe, is a complicated state that flows fullest with recognition of the blessings that come even within the challenge. As well as appreciation for what we might think is simply good.

I am deeply grateful. It’s a kind of miracle that as a Native person I am even alive, our history has been so challenged. I am grateful for the vitality of my family. I am grateful for the wealth of incredible teachers my life has included–both literal in the classroom teachers, and each one of you I meet and learn from. (My first grade teacher was honestly one of the coolest people I ever knew. She used to threaten that if we acted out she was going to pick us up “by the seat of [our] britches and carry [us] to the principal’s office.” I longed to see that happen, even as I desperately didn’t want anyone to act out.) I am grateful for my daughter, that through everything, we have persisted in joy. I am grateful for this little house I have just moved into in Sonoma, and am still unpacking. I am grateful for my sisters’ wonderful families–it does my heart good to know they have such lives. I am grateful for my mother. She is the most dedicated to me, and I learn on a regular basis what devotion means from her commitment to her family and to god. I am grateful for my father. His life is a testament to how much is possible when a person chooses well, determined to succeed.

I give thanks for my friends. I thank god for getting me here. It is my friends god has most clearly acted through. Their willingness to love me through the struggle of making change, as well as the celebration and excitement of my goals coming to fruition–that has made everything I’ve ever done in my life feel possible. A year ago at this time I was getting ready to close my last semester teaching at the university. I had given my resignation and had no good idea what I was going to do. I only knew I wanted to spend my time writing, and I wanted to decide where Rachel and I were going to move, then move us there. That’s exactly what I did this last year–another sort of miracle. Now, I want to focus on us getting settled, on celebrating the connections we’ve started with people, on continuing to grow a healthy liveable income, and on appreciating each other. She is just 13.

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow. What a beautiful idea to have an entire holiday devoted to gratefulness. May each of you feel the blessing of this day. Amen.

Comments (6)

Happy Halloween! Or, And Now for Something Completely Different (and a little random): The Heritage Madrone, a Bonus in the Wine Writer’s Life, for Shiloh

Oct 31, ’12 10:59 PM

The Oldest Madrone in Sonoma County, Likely in California

On the Western ridge overlooking Lake Sonoma stands the oldest known Madrone in Sonoma County, believed to be the oldest in all of California. The tree is over 300-years old and measures approximately 11 1/2 feet in diameter about the base. In such remarkable state, it’s registered a Heritage Tree, which means it stands as a protected growth, treated and maintained only by those certified by the county to handle treasured plants.

Madrone do not typically spread so wide at their base, instead usually growing up for a distance before then branching into an open canopy. But the heritage Madrone grows at a curve where the crest turns into the slope of a hill. It is believed that because of its position at the arc of a slope the structure of its trunk started differently than others might.

In 1995 I happened into a seminar on past life regressions being led by a woman skilled in what she called “Vibrational Healing.” Generally curious I decided to participate, and then found out she also needed someone to demonstrate her techniques on for the group. I volunteered. Though deeply skeptical that I even had past lives to explore, I was also quite willing to experience the process directly and share in the intimacies of what was discovered.

Since I’d practiced meditation before, the Vibrational Healer was able to bring me into a conscious trance state easy enough. After guiding me through the initial steps, the Healer began asking me questions to move me through the reality of my previous incarnation and discover together who I was.

During the question process I simply remember feeling a deep, grounded, incredible calm. The kind of consistent steadiness in the feeling persisted through the duration of the regression experience for me. The Healer would ask me questions about the life I was experiencing and within that steady calm I would answer. Every step of the way I felt an incredible ease. As we moved through the stages of the life I could also feel nuances of other lives around me–other beings alive near me–but the entire experience was marked by a lack of visual stimulation and little focus too on sound. At times I could see the color of things moving, but it was like I felt the movement more than saw it.

I found out later that this steady calm I was feeling was actually coupled with a long period of low level anxiety for the Healer, and a sense of uncertainty for those observing. It turned out the way I was responding to the session, both in terms of the slowness of my responses, and the kinds of answers I was giving, were unlike anything the Healer had experienced before, or read about, after more than 30-years “in the business.” While I was pleasantly relaxed in my steady state, others in the room were perplexed. I could feel a sense of their confusion from within the trance I was in but more than that was a clarity that it wasn’t something to worry about. The confusion would work itself out, and in the meantime all of us were quite okay. We could just continue as we were, okay. The overall feeling was carved by that combined sense of knowing my own state, while understanding at the same time we were all together. Whatever we happened to be doing both were true–I was simply me, and we were in it all together.

Finally, the Healer decided she had to ask me a direct question. None of the tricks she had to sorting out when in history, or what sort of person I was had worked. So, at last she simply asked if I was human. In my happy calm, I laughed and said, no. Still perplexed, she asked me if I was an animal (she told me later people often regress to animal past lives), again, I said no. Finally after some series of questions I told her that of course, yes, I knew who and what I was. I was a tree. It hadn’t occurred to me to worry or say such a thing until this point in the session. I also knew I wasn’t an oak, but I had a shape kind of like one, with bark like oak in places. There were berries instead of little nuts, and I’d helped grow many small ones [younger trees]. I told the Healer that because my human self didn’t know the name my kind of tree, I wouldn’t be able to name it for them then.

The Healer told me later she’d never had someone regress to a tree, nor even heard of anyone having a past life as a tree. By the end of the session, we also discovered that my life as a tree was actually still existing. Though my tree had started its life long before my human had, the two of us were coexisting. We were in our lives together, even if we hadn’t met. In that sense, my tree life wasn’t a past life at all, but a concurrent one. Whatever may happen through the rest of my life, there was always a tree-me out there somewhere.

The steady calm I felt during that session was a gift that stayed with me. Whatever else I may think of the idea of past lives, or past life regressions, that feeling is something I’ve always been grateful for. I have to admit too in some weird way I draw strength from imagining I could be living two lives simultaneously, and endless humor in thinking that while Shirley McClaine is lucky enough to have been Cleopatra, I get to be a Madrone near the California coast.

The Heritage Madrone resides on the Gustafson Estate about 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean, looking over the intersection point of the Dry Creek Valley and Rockpile AVAs. It’s one of the loveliest trees I’ve had the fortune to meet, a bonus in the midst of visiting vineyard sites and interviewing people in wine.

Folk viticultural knowledge tells us that Madrone are markers for a good place to grow grapes. In the right place Madrone grow deep and steady roots, but require good drainage in the midst of an available water table. That is, they grow where water is provided but doesn’t pool, much like what grape vines need.

A few weeks into November I’ll be doing a series on the Dry Creek Valley AVA. I’ve been lucky enough to visit a range of interesting sites, and to interview people important to the history of the AVA as well over these last few weeks. In the meantime, for Halloween, I thought I’d share a bit of silliness and good fortune–the haunt of a spirit older than any of us, the Heritage Madrone.

Cheers! Happy All Hallow’s Eve!

Comments (1)

Wakawaka Turns 100! (Or, actually, 1!) For Paul, Susan, Katherine, Fred, and Hillary

Oct 10, ’12 3:35 PM

Wakawaka Hits an Anniversary

Somewhere in the midst of spending time with friends, planning our move from Northern Arizona to Sonoma, and reflecting on the philosophical implications of a life in wine, I hit my one-year anniversary in wine comics.

Hawk Wakawaka’s First Posted Wine Comic

I knew the anniversary was coming up, but the truth is I was so immersed in the project I’d set out for myself–tasting wine, listening to people reflect on wine, writing about wine, drawing about wine, hanging out with friends in wine–that I missed the day itself when it happened.

Though the particular day has passed, I want to send my love and thanks to a few friends that pushed me into starting all this.

Thank you and Love to Paul

Paul and I in Memphis for New Year’s Eve

My dear friend Paul forced me into drawing the little zine that started it all. He’d come to visit us in Flagstaff, and during his visit I became cranky at some ridiculous national level political realities happening at the time. To express my irritation, I’d written him a sardonic, self-effacing-for-the-sake-of-making-a-political-point paragraph signed under a pen-name meant to capture the mouthy while loving, cranky though charming mood of the piece. Paul took a liking to the write-up and told me he thought I should turn it into a comic in the form of a handmade zine. I laughed and blew him off.

Over the course of his visit, Paul brought the idea up repeatedly. Each time, I nodded and ignored it. Finally, one afternoon Paul appeared in front of me with a bundle in his hand and said we were going to The Wine Loft for a glass of wine to hang out. Immediately accepting that idea, off we went. Then, when we sat down at the bar, Paul put paper, pen and my little paragraph transcribed in front of me, and told me I was going to sit there until I turned it into a comic. I stared at him, but seeing he was in earnest, drew stick-figures to illustrate the story, one waving on each page. Then, I handed it over.

Paul read the little zine, responded that he liked it and told me we were then going to go photocopy the thing. By the time the night had finished he’d pushed me step-by-step through first drawing, then copying, and finally packaging and mailing to everyone I knew, and some I didn’t, a little stick figure comic I’d made under the name Lily-Elaine Hawk Wakawaka. The good Wakawaka name was born.

Love and Thank you to Susan

Susan and I together in Seattle for my birthday

A week or so later, a number of friends wrote, having received the little comic Paul and I had sent out. Among them was Susan, in Seattle, writing to tell me she’d neared collapse at her mailbox laughing and crying while reading the Wakawaka zine until her neighbor came over to check on her, then read the comic and did the same. She asked if I would please do more. Nodding, I thanked and then ignored her, not thinking of it again. That non-response on my part began a series of messages sent to me every few days from Susan, each time with more information and ideas from her on how I could keep doing comics, post webcomics, start a comics’ blog, read other comics to see how other people do them, and generally asking how my Starting-a-New-Project-of-Drawing-Comics lifestyle was going for me.

Susan persisted at me for well over a month until in exasperation I finally drew another comic, that time about the disasters of dating, and mailed it to her, and a few other friends, thinking that would make Susan stop. To that comic she responded again the same–pushing me to draw more. For weeks she kept at it, and I now, with thanks, call Susan the hand of God, she is so convincing and devoted.

Thank you and Love to Katherine

Katherine in Le Cigare Volant, Santa Cruz, on our California tour this June (I have pics of Katherine and I together, but I just love this pic of her so I post it)

Somewhere in here Katherine stepped in, and started asking me to make photocopies of the comics I was drawing so she could hand them out during the monthly Flagstaff Art Walk. A few people then asked where online they could find more and finally to keep them quiet, and get Susan to stop bugging me I started a comics’ blog.

It didn’t work. Dear Susan started sending me notes cheering for me drawing, while Katherine made sure I carried around a notebook to write down ideas, and Paul kept sending links to different people to get them to read what I was doing. In the midst of this, somehow I got obsessed and decided I was going to draw comics on everything.

The thing was, I was deep in the world of philosophy by that point, living a life as a philosophy professor, and as some of us know, philosophy is highly demanding. To succeed you have to give it everything. The best philosophers I know have their career and one hobby, not two. So, by the time I started drawing these silly little comics, I’d almost forgotten I knew how to do anything besides read, think, write and teach all mixed together. Once my friends pushed me hard enough, discovering I could do something besides the read-think-write-teach quadrumvirate was such a relief I really did feel like I wanted to go ahead and comic continuously.

Love and Thank you to Fred and Hillary

Hillary, Fred, and I in Flagstaff

In the midst of drawing comics of everything I came up with the idea of drawing comics of my experience with wine. The idea occurred to me simply as funny–I loved the contrast between people thinking of comics as low brow and cheeky, while wine culture is often taken as snooty and pretentious. Neither is exactly accurate, but the contrast of stereotypes amused me. So, I drew up the three wines I’d had for my birthday then took the comics to The Wine Loft to show my dear friend Fred, just to see what he thought. (We were each others first friends in Flagstaff.) His only response was to ask if I’d like to draw a comic a week for The Wine Loft to be posted on the Facebook fan page. I couldn’t believe it. So, once a week I started sending Fred a comic to showcase a new featured wine for his shop/winebar.

Immediately, Hillary further encouraged the idea, saying she hoped to color the images, and offering to taste wines with me for the project. She encouraged the comics, shared them with friends, brainstormed new ideas, and helped pick bottles I wanted to draw up for my own comic site. I started adding a different wine comic a week to my comics’ blog, then one a day, and the next thing I knew, the wine comics had been mentioned by Vitabella Wines in France, Peter Handzus in Slovakia, Kermit Lynch Wine in the states, and Brain Pickings in London.

To take advantage of my research and writing experience, I integrated writing paired with drawing into the site, and then started receiving emails about sample bottles, potential commissions, and going on wine trips. I’ve since also added photography. This journey from comics to now has brought me all the way to moving my life to Napa-Sonoma, California where I am now building a life writing and drawing about wine, developing an income in an entirely new career. The whole experience has led to so many wonderful connections and friendships, and I continue to travel for this life in wine. I am so grateful.

With Love

In her series on love and relationships, bell hooks shows us that love is a practice of freedom–that is by giving ourselves to each other, and to what we do we find ourselves anew, released from the ways we might have thought we were restricted, or defined before. By fully investing in our love for another, we can express ourselves in ways we hadn’t expected, and discover we are capable of more (and sometimes less), or different things than we had believed possible. We can discover, then, too we have the capacity to change.

In addition, we come to see how anything we do becomes something more than ourselves alone. This happens in at least two ways. First of all, in encouraging another person, our love makes something new possible for that person. My friends saw in me something I hadn’t imagined, and by pushing me to do it gave bloom to a whole new life for me and my daughter. Secondly, this shows us too that what we do becomes something with a life of its own. That is, the decision we make to reach our own goals–whether it is something as simple as convincing a friend to draw a comic, or comics in general; or, something more complex like me deciding to give up my life in Flagstaff and throw myself completely into writing and drawing about wine now here in Napa-Sonoma–is an act of love as well. By following through on what we care about, we act in and for our own freedom–creating a life for ourselves that could not exist otherwise.

Paul, Susan, Katherine, Fred, and Hillary are the roots of Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews. Through them I got to see myself in ways I never expected, and discover this path that I am now living–listening, tasting, writing, and drawing about wine. Thanks to them, I find myself now so invested in this good life that I missed my own one-year anniversary.

Dear friends,
Thank you for your love. All of this I do because of you.
-Yours, Elaine

Comments (9)

Feet Made of Leather: The Wakawaka Chronicles, for Denise

Aug 13, ’12 6:25 AM

Your feet look like they’re made of leather.
Let’s go walk around the farm. –Clare Carver

In Spring of 2001 I ran away from my ex-husband. My daughter was 18 months old, and he believed we were simply taking a trip North to visit family for the summer. I’d convinced him by planning to commercial fish for salmon that year, as I’d grown up doing, which meant I’d be paid, and he, therefore, would have more money. In the end, I never went back, and I haven’t seen him since the moment he dropped his daughter and I off curbside at the airport.

Our marriage began having trouble almost as soon as it started, and when Rachel was born problems escalated. Determined to do what I could to make things work, I tried various tactics for well over a year until first he told me he didn’t want me to leave the house (ever) for my own safety, and then added that he’d be filing all our money in an account with only his name on it. I’d been waiting for a sign of confirmation on whether I should leave or keep trying. The combination of isolation and lack of money seemed an obvious answer by that point. In the end, I spent the last month with him afraid he would kill me. Not by planning, but because the tension coming off his body was so high it seemed he could snap at any moment, and at various points he did snap, just not with me right next to him. Before our getting to me planning to leave in secret, I’d done the responsible thing and talked to him about us splitting up. At first he’d responded in a way far too reasonable. The next day he threatened me.

The departure from that relationship is a moment that has shaped my entire life. I pushed my way into graduate education with funding because I was determined that running from an abusive marriage wouldn’t be the marker that defined my life. Working as hard as I did to succeed in school, while living below the poverty line, and raising a young child, in my mind was no hard work compared to what I’d gotten myself out of with him. Strangely, how hard I’ve worked to transcend the limits of that marriage has simply affirmed what a gift my abusive relationship was. Not that I would ever wish it on anyone. (I pray daily we will all work together, to love openly enough that we may never witness another relationship or person so unhealthy again.) Still, I cannot deny my having been there rests in my past now as a gift.

I have spent the summer talking with people. Listening, mostly. It has been an incredible blessing. Earlier this week I had dinner with a woman I think and feel very highly of, Remy, of Remy Wine. She was asking me to describe to her how I understood my own work–this traveling around writing about wine. I outlined the bullet points of what I believe I do but finally said to her that again and again I find myself in moments of incredible intimacy with others. Moments where people open to share with me sometimes the best of who they are, sometimes their most precious values, sometimes the awkwardness of what they do, sometimes the uncertainty of why I want to talk with them at all. But where ever these pitches of conversation may point, in each case, I experience an openness asking me to listen. So, there I sit, apparently to write about a person’s wine, but what I witness there is a person present in front of me. What I listen for is their story.

My life has taken me through so many moments. It took almost two years after that curbside drop off, but finally I got through my escape from my husband with full custody of our daughter, and nothing else. I’d left our belongings behind. At the close of it I felt certain nothing else would ever be so hard and so I decided to try everything. I’d already trained camels for four years; worked as a 1-900 psychic for a time. So, I decided to go to graduate school. It turned out the daily exertion of thinking so hard towards unclear ends that a PhD in philosophy demands, while raising a daughter on my own, felt, after three years at McGill, far harder on me than my divorce had been.

Why do I write these things?

In listening to people there is regularly a point that appears in which the story depends on describing what, for the person, is a pivotal moment. What’s become clear is that at this point of a person’s story there is usually one of two differing, both incredible threads. On the one hand, there has been story after incredible story of a person there in front of me taking a seemingly insurmountable risk in order to follow their dream, or their heart. I can’t count here how many people in wine have a story like this, but many many of them do. A story of walking away from a well established job in order to choose what the person almost can’t help but do–make wine–even at the risk of no money and total failure. Or, of inexplicable, almost out of no where, a realization that they must make wine, even without a family history of doing so, and often without any real knowledge of how one even makes wine. Or, even the story of someone that fell into a wine making job after college and now has had their entire life passion shaped by it. In each case, there is a kind of unison present between what the person knows they want to do, and what they actually do–live a life of wine.

Then, too, there are stories of people’s fear, fear they will fail, fear they’re doing the wrong thing, fear people won’t like them or their wine. (Let’s be honest, I have heard a few rather boring stories of how people think about wine. But those really are few, and the truth is those lives look rather different from the others–less expressive, less focused, less interested.) All of us have fear. I’ve come to believe it’s important for how it guides us, for how it keeps us alert, but also too for how it drives us to seek connection–to god, to others, to love, to our deeper selves. The stories about people radically changing their lives for wine seem to make contact with the stories about how scared someone is at the place where risk and fear intersect. How the story I’m hearing goes–either into a total leap of faith pursuing what the person wants, on the one hand, or, into vacillation back and forth between desire and uncertainty, not taking the clear leap, on the other–seems to rest in which phenomenon, risk or fear, takes the bigger hold on the person.

For some of us, a moment arises when the need to step forward into what we must do is so great, the risk associated almost holds no relevance. Let me restate. It’s not that the awareness of risk falls away ignored. It’s that inasmuch as the person is still reflecting on the risk there, it simply helps to focus their choice all the more. In this way, the awareness of risk in the face of what we believe we must do makes us more determined to commit it all, believing that is the best way to secure a chance to succeed. Weirdly, in these cases, the person’s ability to pursue success seems to coincide with their ability to risk even more.

But for many of us fear stands as a guidepost against which we cannot choose–fear acts as the thing that tells us when we must not risk failure even in the face of wanting all our dreams. For many of us, fear acts as the thing that makes us stop and not move forward towards what we want. From listening to these stories, what I’ve learned is that those of us that convince ourselves not to follow these heart dreams do it by believing and telling others that our fears are justified, because, the story goes, we’ve suffered through something insurmountable and unique. That unique thing proving we are right to shut down and not choose for the sake of what we want. We’ve suffered before and now believe we will suffer again.

I was raised to understand the best way to communicate lessons and truth was by telling (and, more importantly, living) stories. So, let me again say part of mine.

At the start of Summer 2012, I made a decision. Some of my friends believe I’m crazy. What I knew was that I felt compelled to write about wine, but not just wine, about the people and their stories connected to it. I also knew I wanted to travel, and I wanted to talk to people face to face, to enrich my wine knowledge by being present on the ground (which I always hope to do–I’m someone that needs projects and believes any of us can always be learning, even if we’re already experts in a field), on site with the places themselves that make wine in the United States. And so I set out to have a summer in which that’s precisely what I did. I’ve been lucky. IPNC invited me as a media person this year, which got me to Oregon. Others extended guest housing, and an interest (or willingness) to have appointments with me to talk to them. And I’ve had now almost two months of 10+ hour average days doing precisely what I set out to do–listen to people. Ten weeks on the road, minus 10 days of that visiting family, the whole time spent meeting people, or driving to meet someone. So, I’ve put a lot of work into this choice I’ve made. But I chose it just the same because it’s what I wanted.

The crazy part is that I have no idea what I’ll do really after the summer is up. I’m not being paid for any of this, and currently I have no actual job. I left a career teaching philosophy at the end of the Fall 2011 term. Teaching, and philosophy, both, were things I am good at, but I’d reached the moment when I had to choose to risk what might still be an insurmountable leap. The first step was away from a reliable job. The leap through the air I’m still in the middle of making. I have enough money to get through my summer. But none of this has been funded on a millionaire’s money. I have very little actually. And in a sense all of it has been scary. But more than that, it’s been what I’ve wanted to do. I’m talking about it now because so many people have asked me either what I’m doing, or why, or how I’m funding it. And even more have asked me how I got here from there, that is, wanting some sense of who I am, and why I live the way I do, ten weeks on the road.

Getting out of my marriage in the way that I did affirmed for me the importance of fear–believing he could either kill me or stalk me after–and that it does not actually rule what we may do. Leaving my marriage in the way that I did showed me that in the grip of the most consuming terror we still can choose for the sake of what’s bigger, for the sake of what we care more about. Going to graduate school made me realize the all encompassing, grind your soul out pressure of hard work can be important, can get you closer towards what you want in life because of how it shapes and trains you. And, again, that the fear of working so hard is no reason to avoid what we wish for. In the midst of both I’ve been in circumstances surely too severe to raise a child well on my own, and yet my daughter is a remarkable person. Her heart, it turns out, simply needs mine to be dedicated to hers. And so I am lucky. Having come through these things, I find myself now choosing something rather simple. To listen.

Living these moments with others, and a glass of wine, where all I can do is listen, and often listen as hard as I possibly can, while people tell me about the risks they’ve taken to get to where they are, or their view of the wine region in which they live, or how they came to use whole cluster or not in their Pinot production… living these moments is exactly what I have wished to do. It’s a life I believe brings together so much of who I am and what I’m good at. It’s what I intend to keep doing. Honestly, I am so grateful. I learn so much grace from these moments with other people. And sometime soon too I’ll step into whatever way I’m going to get back to making a living, both for me and for my daughter that I’ve raised on my own since the moment I left the curb at the airport, more than ten years ago now. I don’t know yet where that living will come from, but I can’t wait to find out.

There are so many things to be scared of. Many of them are legitimate fears, fears we can be grateful for because of how they focus us. In the midst of them, I ask, what would we do, each of us, if we could recognize that our dreams, our own determination, and our ability to do hard work are all so much bigger, and so much stronger, than what we’re scared to do.

Amen, with so much thanks.

***

Thank you to William Allen, to Don Beith, and to Dan Fredman.

With love to Meg, Stephanie, Neile and Katherine.

Comments (14)

Reflections on a Tasting with Abe Schoener: Dancing through Family, Nietzsche, and Tragedy

Jul 14, ’12 7:28 PM

Abe Schoener and I had a conversation about tragedy.

My senior year of high school, my uncle Jay died of pneumonia. It was September. I had a cross country running race and we had to dress up for such days. I was up earlier than usual to put on an outfit I was uncomfortable wearing when my mom knocked on the door. She said my uncle was in the hospital. His friends had rushed him to the emergency room, then knocked on her window in the middle of the night. As a result, she was with him when he died. It took a while, but weeks later she told me the receptionist had brought her directly back to my uncle’s curtained room in the E.R. He couldn’t speak with his lungs too full of fluid but when she entered the room he turned towards her and cried. Within a few minutes he entered cardiac arrest, and in twenty minutes he had died.

In his book, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche builds on his ideas already explored in his earlier text, The Birth of Tragedy. There Nietzsche considers the painful revelry he sees as peculiar to the phenomenon. In Nietzsche’s view, the pain of tragedy reveals to us our own limits. It is in losing someone we feel attachment to we come to recognize the finite nature of our power and our lives. We cannot save them. In the same moment, we are forced too to see we cannot save ourselves. We will die. For other philosophers, the reality of our mortality brings with it a burdensome pessimism. Schoepenhauer treated the negative as defining human life. Earlier in the history of philosophy, Aristotle took tragedy in art to be a kind of therapeutic for our countenance. In experiencing second hand feelings of grief, fear, and terror by watching the tragic hero (like, Oedipus or Agamemnon, as in the case of Ancient Greek tragedy), we are cleansed of some tumult associated with such feelings, and thus find ourselves more stable, and stronger after. For Nietzsche, such a view is naive, perhaps even damaging. Instead, the all consuming pain of loss, and fear of our own mortality found in tragedy reveals to us a strange duality. It is in facing the stirred up feelings experienced in the death of another that we discover reason cannot provide all answers. Some things are simply unexplainable. The sensuous pain of loss dominates us and we must face an inexplicable edge that defines the limits of human existence. At the point of death we have no knowledge. What is interesting in all of this, is that, for Nietzsche, it is precisely when we allow ourselves to go into these feelings that we come to recognize our own brilliance. Tragedy, for Nietzsche, carries in it a two-fold experience. We are thrust into a horrible pain, and find through it a defiant pleasure. Tragedy forces us to recognize the limits of our own powers, and yet in entering that feeling we come to see our own power of persistence. We will die. Surely. Yet, here we live our human lives, demanding they be more than our own mortality simply by persisting. This two-fold experience is the source of Dionysian revelry, for Nietzsche. It is only in our facing the realities of decay, and decomposition that are the death cycle, that we see then too how life is a perpetual process of defiant transformation.

The family I was born into was four generations strong into my early 20′s. My great grandparents raised us through their simple constancy. We were lucky enough too to have grandparents, my parents, my sisters and I. My senior year in high school, when my uncle died, began a five year period of dismantling what my family had been. He died, unexpectedly, followed by my grandmother, my great grandparents, my other uncle, and finally my grandfather–more than half those deaths sudden. Two generations gone from us, and half of a third also lost. In that same time period, my father’s brother, other more distant extended family, and two of my own friends all also died. Those five years marked what my mother calls a stripping to the bone. Any pretense, or room for drama was lost. In the midst of so much grief there is room for little else. In the same time period, my oldest sister was diagnosed with what was supposed to be a lethal brain tumor, given eighteen months to live. By god’s grace she is still alive, so beautiful. It’s been eighteen years. In the same time period my oldest niece, Melissa, was also born, my great grandparents, then, witness to the wonder of five generations–a family they put into bloom. One of the gifts of simply persisting.

Abe Schoener and I had a conversation about tragedy. It started over a barrel of botrytis infected petite sirah. The year had been suddenly wet, in the end, and the clusters were covered in mildew when harvest time came. It was a situation many faced by throwing out fruit, but the berries revealed there was still juice in their meat. So, Schoener and his team foot stomped them. The vats after were slicked by a film of off-white growth on top–the mildew pushed off the skin. The wine now carries the smoothly tannic balance possible with a petite sirah, alongside concentrated fruit and spice notes associated with a late harvest wine, both without sweetness. It was a wine I’d heard Schoener was working on and I couldn’t wait to taste it. Then, there we were meeting in person for the first time (both of us careful in selecting our outfits for the occasion hoping to impress the other), tasting from barrel a wine that was strange in its brilliance. It’s been two weeks since and from a set of around twenty wines, the petite sirah is the one I crave. It drinks like its been touched by the edge of spoilage and come back to tell its story. Like its structure is more than the damage it could have endured. The acidity knows what its capable of being, so it just goes ahead turning in the barrel. The fruit dances through stages of vibrant and concentrated, dusty and fresh somehow all there together. The wine is not sweet like sometimes associated with late harvest grapes, but it is deepened, darker, and more raisined than it would be otherwise.

Schoener’s wines are seen as strange for the American palate. Even if his wine making techniques have their analogues abroad–with the oxidative elements purposefully done in Jura, or traditional Rioja, as examples–still, Schoener’s wines work against what’s more common for the mainstream–fresh fruit, or fruit jam presentation–of a still young U.S. wine industry. I ask him to talk to me about his wine making choices, so he explains. He wants his wines to be a pleasure to drink, he says, but he also wants them to make you think. He’s unclear how to accomplish this purposefully, yet, sometimes by intention alone the motivation succeeds. He wants his wines to go ahead and get right to the edge of what it is to be wine–a way to prove they are no longer fruit–then, to find their way back from it. What he’s learned from wine making, he says, is that if you start with a healthy vineyard, and then give the wine its own time in the barrel, it will self regulate. It will have moments when you think it is undrinkable, and, from the perspective of a more traditional wine making style, when you think it may be flawed. But if you let it persist, on the other side you’ll find a wine ready to bottle that is still marked by that edge, yet full of pleasure. I ask him about that idea of the edge again. That edge, he tells me, that’s the analogue to tragedy–where the wines have come right up to the border of something, and shown they are more than it. In this way, he wants his wines to cause pleasure, to be fun to drink, and at the same time, he wants them to make you think, to make you think of tragedy.

***

Thank you to Burt Coffin, Paul Sutton, and Aaron Pinnix.

Comments (2)

Last day in Alaska

Jul 13, ’12 6:21 PM

The drift fisherman were busy on the water through my time in Bristol Bay. So, no visits, and no pictures with them. Fishing works that way.

My uncle Smile and I hadn’t seen in other in at least eight years so on my last morning he docked the boat, raced to the airport and visited for five minutes before I had to board the plane. He brought with him a bag of Native style smoke fish, right from the smoke house. It takes about a month to make, and is so rich I fall asleep from just a few pieces. The bag I carried it in still smells of it.

Driving through California now trying to adjust to so much plant life after ten days in Arctic desert. Tonight I arrive in Sonoma for ten days in the extended area meeting with people in wine. Next Friday I also have a special media event to attend–hee hee. Can’t wait.

Love you, Smiley.

Comments (0)

Turning Home 6: Walking Around Outside my Great Grandparents House

Jul 4, ’12 2:31 PM

People say the ground in Alaska swallows what’s on it. Traveling around the state it’s hard to find any genuinely old buildings, or visible archaeological sites. Moving to Boston after graduating from high school was a thought revolution for me–facing all the historical locations mixed right in with everyday life.

My great grandparents’ house is no longer lived in, and their property no longer used. The alder and willow, and wild grass has grown up around their buildings, and the driveway from one direction is barely visible. The last time I was in Naknek it was still possible to stay in their house. Growing up, I slept in the back room with my great grandmother. Several years after both my great grandparents had died, and after I’d already stopped fishing, I visited in the middle of summer and slept in the back room where I had growing up. It’s the only place I’ve ever rested so deeply.

I walked around their property for a long time tonight with clear images and moments from childhood flashing through me–I lived there in the summers with my great grandmother till I was ten, and spent much of my time there after. At my youngest, their house was one of the furthest out of town and it was a common occurrence for bears to wander across the property at night. It wouldn’t have been much of a concern except for my great grandfather’s love for his dogs that lived outside. There is a clear image in mind for me of the figure of my wiry, small Grandpappy walking outside at dusk with a shotgun in one hand as he went outside to yell off the bear, and talk to his dogs. I was so scared standing at the little window of his bedroom praying for him to make it inside.

In the middle of the property, Grandpappy had built a Quonset hut for his garage. He spent much of his time outside working on projects there. During the salmon season he’d cut fish into strips and hang them from the rafters, tied together on one end by twine to hook them over for hanging. The fish strips would dry there in the ceiling. Then, some would be brined and slow-smoked for several weeks in the small building at the back of the property. There my great grandfather burned fresh cuttings of wood to flavor the fish until the meat was hard and rich with salmon smoke. There is one type of tree in the area he didn’t like for flavor, and another he did. I wish I could remember which was which.The rest of the dried fish would be left as was to be eaten in winter after having either been boiled, or soaked in seal oil for softening.

To the side of the house my great grandmother hung clothes for drying after washing them in an open top, old-style slosh bucket inside. She did all her house work by hand, having grown at a time long before electricity ever reached the area. She was still scared of things like the vacuum cleaner by the time I was growing up, favoring lifting dirt from the carpet bent over like she was low bush berry picking. Her time was spent almost entirely inside, house work and cooking taking most of the day because of her hand done approach. Each day she kept the same schedule for meals and tea time–5:30 a.m. breakfast, 9 a.m. tea; Noon lunch, 2:30 p.m. tea; 5:30 dinner, 9 p.m. tea. The schedule helped her partition her work, but it also meant anyone knew when it was okay to visit without interrupting her work.

My deepest felt memories reach back to my great grandparents property. My daughter Rachel walked around outside there with me, and gratefully knew to quietly wait till I was ready to tell her about it, rather than ask me. The idea that their property is now silent gives a challenging first view. Finally, I decided I’d look for close-up photos around the property that caught spaces close to how they had been when they were still being used. The images give a feeling of the texture, and shape of the place.