The Costco Orchid


A spindly stem rises from a nest of fleshy flat green leaves, springing free upwards, unable to stand alone, tied to a bare dead stick.  Four brave white blossoms at the top, each a delicate origami, snuggling a riot of delicate purple petals and at the very center, beyond belief, a tiny tiger-spotted heart.  And buds too, sinister and pod-like, lined up and awaiting their time on center stage.


It smells of nothing.  Not the heavy fetid stink of a tropical forest, seeping moss, pungent peeling tree bark.  Not the thick sticky mud of the jungle floor, sucking at a wandering pig’s feet.


I stand here, my shopping cart full.  Toilet paper, orange juice, eighteen eggs, chapstick.  I stop and stare at you, you shrouded in clear cellophane, perched on the slatted plastic shelf.  You, born from a steamy greenhouse and now offered up in a Costco warehouse.


Do you dream of jungle, of iridescent bugs whirring onto your white petals, raindrops plopping out random messages, turning into tiny dancing bubbles on your leaves?  Of elusive chameleons and birds of a hundred colors, twittering, while the palm trees above fight to hold back the relentless sun?


You are a sacrifice, an offering.  Please, I say, make the gray slop of winter melt into the promised spring.  Help me remember the light.  But hothouse beauty, your days are numbered.  I know I will kill you, in the end.  And I’m sorry.

I was so pleased to share a story from my past on My Unsung Hero on NPR:
https://hiddenbrain.org/unsunghero/stephanie-coles-story/
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It’s spring here in the Pacific Northwest, or at least the calendar says it’s so.  In reality, winter seems to be dragging on, with overcast, drippy days.  But the days are longer, which is most welcome, and the boldest of trees and plants are pushing out into the world.  Every day I look out at the birches in our back yard.  They are still in tight bud, as they’ve been in weeks.  No green yet.  But soon, I’m sure, soon…


It will be a special spring, with us all coming out of covid restrictions—and fervently hoping they won’t be back.  Some of us have negotiated these past two years better than others.  Some, I know, have been remarkably productive.  Unfortunately for me, my creativity seems to have taken a hiatus, but I’m feeling good energy start to return.  Bring on the people!  I am so tired of Zoom meetings and classes, but they were a life line in the last two years.  


In the middle of Covid, when no one was going anywhere, I ordered a pair of sparkly shoes online.  They are unrelentingly cheerful.  I have no place to wear them—yet—but they remind me that there WILL be dinners and parties and celebrations of friends in the future.  There WILL be times we can all come together in relaxed company again.  Please, soon!


Now, with the tentative arrival of spring, I am trying to write.  Raven, the main character of my novel-in-progress, is a masseuse at a remote wilderness spa in Alaska.  For months, she’s been two-dimensional to me.  I haven’t been able to see her clearly.  Now, suddenly, I realize that she has a special gift:  Her massages awaken hidden emotions and memories in her clients, sometimes welcome, sometimes not.  There could be some magical realism just around the corner.  That might be fun.


And I’m finding some inspiration from a new exhibition at the Bainbridge Art Museum:  “Unbound”  It’s an extensive display of artists’ books, an art form I’ve just discovered.  I’ve read a number of definitions of “artists’ books,” and I like the Smithsonian Libraries definition:  “An artist’s book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the structure or function of “book” as inspiration—a work of art in book form. Although artists have illustrated the words of others for centuries, the book as art object is relatively recent…”  The books in the exhibit are wonderful.  Some clearly manipulate the traditional book form; others are a bit more obscure—but they are all thought-provoking and quite lovely.  I was part of the team of volunteer writers who assembled the catalog for the exhibit.  It was a delightful exercise, and now I’m experimenting with the creation of my own artist book, based on tiny tidbits of nature and the simple words of Sylvia Boorstein, a Buddhist teacher:  “Life is difficult, so why not be kind?”


But now, excuse me, I have to go outside and stare at the buds on the birch trees.

When the CDC notice flashed up on my news feed a couple of days ago, I didn’t immediately believe it.  I read it three times, so carefully, to make sure that I was understanding it correctly, before I told Chuck, “I think, maybe, they’re saying we don’t have to wear masks anyone, if we’re vaccinated.”


We just looked at each other for a long moment.  Wow.  After more a year of fighting the pandemic, maybe, just maybe, this is the beginning of the end.  


We’ve been fully vaccinated since late February.  We were extraordinarily lucky:  We happened to be in the right place at the right time to get jabbed quickly, while others were queuing and searching desperately for available vaccination slots at locations far and wide.  It was a tremendous relief to get our shots, but Chuck and I still wore our masks and socially distanced.  (For the most part, we’re rule-followers.  We believe in complying with reasonable public health mandates for the good of all, and we glared and muttered under our breaths at those who were out and about and ignoring the rules.  And often they glared and muttered at us.  On one occasion an unmasked shopper purposefully coughed in our direction.  What a divisive time this has been for all of us—)


But, perhaps, this horrible time of fear, of masking, distancing and quarantining is coming to a close.  Perhaps in the not-too-distant future we’ll look back at this interlude with the perspective that the passage of time will no doubt provide.  


I’ve been surprised at how little writing (as in, virtually none) I’ve done during this time.  I can see online that some have put this period of enforced isolation to good use—but not me.  The well has been dry.  I’ve been treading water.  (What a weird combination of metaphors!)  I’m hoping that will change now, as we move into the new (and hopefully improved) world.


But Chuck and I haven’t been placid these last few months, as we awaited the end of the plague.  Instead, we stirred up our lives:  In a period of three and one-half months, we’ll have moved four times.  


First, we sold our home in Seattle.  It was the right time for us to go.  We’d tired of the city and we sensed our neighborhood had changed.  The traffic, the congestion, the political and social strife, the implosion of downtown Seattle—all of it led us to the conclusion that we wanted to leave.  


We found another home, close to Seattle but a ferry ride away.  We discovered we weren’t the only Seattle residents with this idea.  House sales were shockingly competitive.  After several months of looking we’d found our house—nearly perfect for us—but in order to make the sale, we were required to rent back to the sellers for 60 days.  We put our Seattle household goods into storage and moved temporarily to our small summer cottage in northeastern Washington.  (So…move #1, leave Seattle house and put possessions into storage; move #2, move into cottage)


Living at the cottage in the spring is not putting in hard time.  In the Okanogan, the cherry and apple trees were in blossom, the birds were twittering (and mating madly), and most days were sunny.  Almost by accident, we discovered another cottage for sale in the community, smaller but with a most fabulous view of lake and mountains, and we fell in love.  We bought it and moved (Move #3, cottage-to-cottage) and put our original cottage on the market.  


Now, as we approach June, we are readying for move #4, onto the island.  Our belongings will be delivered from storage and we will again have a home.  We are both yearning for a sense of being planted in a place, a spot that we will again call home.  We know it will take a while, but we can’t wait to get started.


And maybe, hopefully, we’ll land in our new community with bright smiling faces open and unmasked, with the chance to shake hands with our new neighbors instead of backing away to a safe distance.


As we approach move #4 (hopefully the last for a while), I will leave you with my number one epiphany gleaned from moving, and moving, and moving…


We all have too much stuff.  Well, Chuck and I do anyway—perhaps you are more accomplished than we are when it comes to deleting unnecessary material goods from your life.  When you move, you pretty much have to touch everything you own.  We have a mountain of possessions, and the physical stuff is entangled with emotional memories, the tugs of imagined obligations (“It’s part of our family history and no one else will understand or want it”), even sometimes guilt (“Aunt M gave this to me.  It’s disloyal to her memory to give it away.”) These obstacles are not rational.  I know that.  (And yes, I know about Marie Kondo, thank you.)


Take the ice bucket.  It’s not even a very functional ice bucket.  It was wedding present for my first wedding in the 70’s.  The marriage didn’t last too long but I still have the ice bucket.  I’ve maybe used it five times in all these years.  It’s not very valuable but it has some value.  Sell it (not worth the effort), give it away or what?  I’ll tell you what—I packed it.  It’s going to show up on the island, and I’m not sure why.

​Even the shoes we choose—for the past few months it's been running shoes and slippers, with an occasional foray into rain boots.  All the fancy shoes (and all the fancy clothes, for that matter) rest comfortably in the closet.  There’s no reason to dress up, no place to go.  And though there really isn’t a great need to order anything other than food, online ordering is both an outlet and an addiction.  It’s pretty exciting when those boxes get dropped on our doorstep…
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Zoom has become an essential part of our lives.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  It works well for yoga class, when everyone is moving slowly, but not so well for my attempt at line dancing class—too easy to lose the pattern as you sway away from the computer screen.  The Zoom classes offered by the University of Washington have helped to save our sanity.  We just finished a six hour course on immunology.  (Viruses are wily and fascinating, it turns out.) On-screen visits with friends and family have helped too, but of course they’re a poor substitute for the presence of living, breathing humans offering up hugs. 



Even my relationship with my dog is affected.  Rusty has always been attached to me, but I’ve been around the house so much lately that I’m pretty sure he’s going to have some separation anxiety once we’re all released from house arrest, and I go out into the world without him.
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And then there’s sleep. I sleep a little bit longer every day.  Of course the days are getting darker, and we all slow down naturally during the dark months, but it’s more than that.  There is no reason to spring out of bed.  This day will likely be very much like the last.  

So, this would be a perfect time to write, wouldn’t you think?  Wouldn’t you think that these long unstructured periods of time at home would spawn vast quantities of new material?  It doesn’t seem to work that way for me, and I think for many other writers.  The creative process hasn’t been nourished by this interlude, this time of waiting, hoping for the vaccine to come and save us.  I spend too much time cradling a coffee cup and staring into space. 

​ I’ll keep trying.  

“When he sees her turn toward the window, reaching for her coat, he scrambles behind the dead broken stump barely in time, slamming his shin hard as he stumbles into an icy hole.  He growls a curse under his breath.  He doesn’t think she’s seen him, but he’s got to be careful.  Better to watch when it’s totally dark, when the light from her cabin rolls into the meadow and he can see her so clearly, bent over her potter’s wheel, weaving her spells into lumps of clay…

He wants to stay all through the night, to be near her when she sleeps.  It’s so cold that he can’t stay long.  His arms and legs are cramped in place and his nose stings from the biting cold air.  The skin on his face is crusty and stiff, coated with ice crystals.  He raises his head over the stump, inch by inch…”

And so begins A LATE HARD FROST, the sequel to COMPASS NORTH.  

A LATE HARD FROST will take you back to Homer, Alaska, and into the intertwined lives of Merry, Cassandra and Nick.  

Lately I’ve been asked if there’s a third book brewing in this series.  I am in the preliminary stages of work on two new books, but they are not in the COMPASS NORTH world.  We’ll just see.  It’s hard for me to say goodbye forever to Merry, Cassandra and Nick.  We leave them in such an interesting time in their lives…perhaps there is another story for them to tell.  

But most recently Raven Applegate won’t leave me alone.  She keeps popping into my mind, though she hasn’t revealed her story yet.  Raven is fair-skinned and blue-eyed, and named Raven because her mother once saw an albino raven and was enchanted by its uniqueness.  But like her namesake, Raven doesn’t really have a place in the world, or at least not one she’s found yet.  And as we all know, the world isn’t always kind to those who are different…  I’m letting Raven float around in my head for now, wondering where she plans to go and what she plans to do.  And that’s the way it works with most writers:  You don’t really know where your characters and ideas come from.  They lurk in shadows in your brain and haunt you until, one day, they start to spill onto the paper (or, more accurately, into your word processing program.)​

Maybe Raven will decide to head to Alaska…

A LATE HARD FROST, the sequel to COMPASS NORTH, is now available on Amazon.

The link for the ebook is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07897V7LJ
 
The link for the paperback is https://www.amazon.com/Late-Hard-Frost-Stephanie-Joyce/dp/1942623771

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A LATE HARD FROST returns to the world of COMPASS NORTH, and the entangled lives of Merry, Cassandra and Nick in the quirky small town of Homer, Alaska.

Cassandra's life as a talented but isolated artist hides the emotional wounds that haunt her.  Now, unexpectedly, she finally has the love of the one man she's adored for so many years.  But that love has come at a terrible price:  the destruction of the only true friendship that matters to her.  As Cassandra struggles with the massive changes ricocheting through her life, a sinister figure lurks in hiking, watching her, waiting for his chance to claim her as his own.

I'm planning to be back on the blog very soon, but in the meantime, take a look at the book trailer for Compass North just released by Duncurra (my publisher).  Very nice I think!  What do you think?