My Week In Pictures

Okay, so it is actually eight days if we are being exact, but this week has included some odd goings-on, very surreal Hobie-specific things, and, well, things that just make more sense in pictures.

Saturday, June 17
In a reprise of where we spent last June 17, Katie, Tim, Amy, and I, along with Elliott, My Favorite Wife and her dreamy husband, and Brandon (Gorilla) and Jenine, went to the Pleasant Grove Strawberry Days Rodeo. This is a place where one is encouraged, nay, expected to eat strawberries and cream until nausea sets in. A beautiful thing. This night a year ago marks, in a way, the end of our innocence-- we had no idea what the next day would mean to all of us, so it was a little melancholy. But a good display of Wild Cow Milking will clear that away quickly...
Heather and Samy-- Together Forever
Heather, Amy, Katie, Tim

Sunday, June 18
This was not only Father's Day, but the one year anniversary of my Mother's death. In true Sydney and Riggs Family style, we "celebrated" by having a sunset picnic at my mom's grave. Now if you are not an appreciater of the Orem City Cemetery, you need to become one. It is a beautiful spot, and one of the great sunset watching places in the Valley. It had been a very popular spot all day, apparently, and there were treasures galore left there by students, friends, and family. It was a lovely evening.

June 18, 2006

Monday, June 19
I spent this day working in my yard at my cute little house. I pruned trees, and picked cherries. This is my backyard, the view from my kitchen window, my cherry tree, my sweet dog Max, my cute blue jeep, and my beautiful Mount Timpanogos.
Kitchen Window
View from the Cherry Tree
The Driveway

Thursday, June 22
I am not a morning person. This is due to my status as a semi-insomniac and lover of the night. This means that I don't really wake up earlier than absolutely necessary in order to get to work. I finally got smart and started taking something with me to eat for breakfast, since we sometimes hit a little moment of quiet. On Thursday, I indulged in one of my favorites: Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Maya, our blue and gold macaw, was helping me, and decided that she wanted some of my cereal. This led me to the conclusion that she is left-footed, since birds don't have hands. But she stuck her little black bird hand into my cereal bowl and stood there flaunting the fact that she was eating my cereal, one piece at a time in her stinky bird foot.

Look! Breakfast!
Scoping out the bowl
Maya, naughty bird, running away with cereal...
Look, my cereal is in her hand!
She is flaunting it now
Enjoying the cinnamon-y goodness

Friday, June 23
We get some strange animals that come into the vet for treatment. We also get some wild animals... I once went in on a sunday morning to do treatments and there was a yearling mule deer in a kennel... crazy. But on Friday, we had one of the more impressive patients come in-- a golden eagle. We have a client that does wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and her latest charge was a young, and unfortunately very sick golden eagle. Take a look at those talons- longer than my fingers. Keep your fingers crossed for this beautiful boy-- he is really sick.
Golden Eagle

Hobie's REAL House

So, I have to brag for just a second. My yard looks GREAT. This is a comparative great, as compared to the Years Of Lazy Renters Before Me Who Never Did A Damn Thing And The Lawn Not Getting Watered Enough While I Was Gallivanting In Europe... I have planted, weeded, fertilized, swept, watered, staked, pruned, mowed, etc., and the result is a cute, little, mostly-green, and semi-blooming work-in-progress environment. So, if you know where I live now, drive by and admire the change. If you don't know where I live and are not a scary stalker (I warn you, the dogs will EAT you if you are not an invited guest and have tracked me via the internet, you scary stalker!), let me know... I would love to have admirers. And help yourself to some fresh cherries off the tree out back... there is a bounteous harvest. Also, If you have a hankering to weed, come on over. Preferably late at night. Jake suggested that I host a TV show called "Eleven O'Clock Gardening," based on my propensity toward late-night weeding and planting. I just happen to have a few traits that make this a good option: 1- I am an insomniac, 2- I love summer nights more than anything on earth, 3- I am fair-skinned and avoid the sun like a vampire, and 4- I usually have 2 hours of daylight when I am not at work, and 2 hours just doesn't cut it, so by default, I must garden after dark. I plan a bumper crop of basil, and I make a really great pesto, so help the Little Red Hen now so that you can share in the harvest!

In the Mourning

Traditionally, a period of mourning lasts one year. It is for that length of time that the family would wear black, mirrors would be covered, a widow or widower would be “off limits.” At the end of the year, life would go on, the deceased would no longer be mentioned, and that was that. The Chapter of Mourning would be closed and a new one could begin.
As the one-year mark since my mother’s death arrives tomorrow, I find that I am not ready to be finished mourning. I actually don’t know if I ever began mourning. I feel a great pressure suddenly, magically on the morning of June 19th, to wake up ready to move on, take off the black, and uncover the mirrors. But I am anything but ready. I haven’t had that yet! Not that I am completely incapacitated by grief. On the contrary, I think I am doing very well. I consider myself to be Highly-Functioning But Pretty Sad Sometimes If I Allow Myself To Think About It, So I Don’t. There is too much LIFE going on to dwell on things that can’t be changed. I have written before about how death becomes like an amputation… there are sometimes phantom pains, and in that shadowed area between reality and sleep, you forget that a part of you is gone. My mother is always there in my dreams. She stands guard, watching, silently, with that glint in her eye, as if to remind me that she is still there… in the dreams I usually refer to her as being gone when talking to people, yet then have to somehow explain to everyone else that she is still standing right there, as much a part of the scene as anyone. It makes perfect sense in my sleep-freed mind that, dead or alive, she is standing next to me.

In my attempts to understand and process things, I usually make mental “short films”—I create a scenario, (full of nuance and meaning, of course), then direct it, shoot it, and edit it in my mind. These movies don’t necessarily translate—they may be too figurative for actual film. Who knows. One day I may actually try making a movie. But in my secretly grief-bruised head, these are the two movies I have recently made:
I am wearing a white linen dress, and I have been given the task of going into a large, greenish-gold field and gathering a harvest of my emotions. But I haven’t been given any way to carry the harvest with me, and the field is so much bigger than I am. The shot shows me in this infinite field, with nothing but darkening sky behind. Waist deep in this barley-field of emotions, I can slowly pick them, one by one, and try to fill my pockets, then my clothes, anywhere that can hold them. I gather the feelings by the armful, trying to keep them from falling to the ground. The daylight is fading, and I have to gather all the emotions or they will be gone…I get more and more desperate to hold them all, that I run frantically, randomly grasping at anything I can hold onto, spilling what I had already gathered in, so that in the end, I am alone, silhouetted in the dusk, arms, hands, and heart empty, with nothing left to feel.

The next film is set in Ireland. Don’t ask why. I’ve never been there. But it is… with rolling green hills, a steel grey sky, and a small, whitewashed stone house. My task is to gather water to drink, to quench a never-ending thirst, but all I have been given is a basket, and my source is an angry, cold ocean. Each time water fills the basket, I feel it escaping the reservoir, so I rush faster and faster, spilling more than I keep in my hurrying. I have to double, triple, quadruple my work. I leave a trail of water-freckled dust as I pass down the empty road. In the end, finally home in the empty stone house, I sip to quench my thirst, and find that the meager liquid I have saved is bitter, saline, and tastes of infinite tears.

Those short films are the overly-dramatized version of what I am NOT feeling right now. What I am feeling is a sense of the surreal, an inability to process the fact that it has been a whole year since my mom died so suddenly. I am still not really able to comprehend life without the single most important person, from the moment of my birth to the phone call 20 minutes before she left this earth asking if she could bring me dinner at work… I miss her terribly, but I still can’t convince myself that she is gone. So my head and my heart have decided that I simply won’t feel anything, because it becomes too much.

Cheating On Utah

I feel, in a way, like I have been cheating on Utah. I love Utah. We have had a relationship for a long time. I always know that wherever I go, she will be waiting for me at home. She is a constant. She is strong, beautiful. I tend to get a little wanderlust occasionally and go away. But I always come back. Recently, I was having a bit of an affair with Germany. With Austria. With Czech Republic. I was enamored of their beauty, the newness of it, the things that made them NOT Utah. Not that I loved Utah any less. I just loved having a breath of something different.

Somehow, Utah must have known that my heart had been wandering. She has been working very hard to make sure I don't fall out of love with her. She has been wearing her finest green mountain-cloak, her crown of afternoon clouds, her bluest skies. She has been wearing the perfume of thundershowers and mountain air that don't smell the same anywhere else. She has been giving me all the gifts I love the most: full moons, warm rain, snowcapped mountain sunrises, fiery purple sunsets. It is her way, I think, of reminding me why she will always be my truest love. Why she will always be home.

Home, and Prague Pix

I have returned. I am trying to adjust to the time difference, and trying to adjust to the lack of German breakfast... My sweet doggies are helping me unpack and try to finish moving into my little house so that I can at least be relatively settled. I am back at work tomorrow, and couldn't have LESS desire to be there. Such is the danger of time away, I suppose.

I have had a request from my dad for pictures of Prague, so here are some highlights. There are more photos to follow. Some day.

Homeward Bound

While sitting in a back-alley laundromat in Baden Baden, Germany last night I composed a Final Installment posting, banking on wireless internet which I never found. Too bad for ya´ll cuz it was great. Not really, but you can believe that.

Tim and I did go to Bodensee, which was absolutely lovely. We spent most of the day on the German side, before driving to Switzerland by way of Austria. It was another lovely evening. We stayed in a roadside inn, ate more schnitzel, and enjoyed a brisk walk in the forest for an hour or so, during which time we constructed elaborate Hänsel and Gretel scenarios and discussed wood nymphs. No, really. Yesterday brought us back, along the southern shore of Bodensee, to Germany by way of Strasbourg, France. Beautiful little place, with a breathtaking Gothic cathedral and equally breathtaking pastry shops. We are now at our hotel in Frankfurt (thank you, expedia for the nicest, and cheapest, place we´ve stayed yet. Man, I love the internet. Anyway. I am off to eat all the Döner Kebaps and Schnitzel I can, shop for more Überaschungs Eier (Kinder Eggs) since I have bought out most of the country, and I may even get a few Gummibären. I have delightful photos to share. Soon, my children. Soon.