Blackberries!

One of my favorite things about my childhood home was the blackberries. We had bushes and bushes of 'em, lining one side of the road up to our house. Blackberries so deep there was no way you could reach them all.

But you could reach a lot, and I did. Every day walking to and from camp or school or the library. My dad would go out a few times a year in protective gear from head to toe, pick tons, then we would eat them with vanilla ice cream. Yum.

There was the one year Paul B., our paper boy, ate enough that we noticed they were missing. He confessed. And there was the year Joanna and I tried to color t-shirts with blackberry juice. This involved a lot of stomping around plastic buckets filled with blackberries, getting them all good and mushy. The t-shirts looked great but by the next wash they had turned an ugly brown.

Fast forward to Berkeley. Every year that we've lived in the house, 9 years now, I have cut back a small, thick, dark green vine that appears in front of our house near our boxwood hedge. This year, I never got around to it. It grew, and grew. Then I started noticing flowers that appeared suspiciously like berry flowers, and then....green berries that turned red and now black!

Norrie tried to convince me it was going to be a raspberry bush -- but the minute she saw the first sign of dark blue, she said "no, mom, you thought it was going to be raspberries but I knew it was blackberries."

I ate my first sufficiently ripe berry today. Bliss!

Sometimes I wonder

if I would have ended up in the Bay Area if I were 5 years younger. It was the place to go for progressive Brown graduates -- er, that means pretty much all Brown graduates -- in the late 80s and early 90s. The Bay Area, plus Seattle. Or Boston for those who didn't want to go far. Now that I've hooked up on Facebook with neighborhood kids from the old hometown, I see that the younger folk ended up in places like Austin and Boulder. Equally progressive but, I'm guessing, a good bit more affordable. I talked with a local friend tonight who feels like she's paying an awful lot to have crazy people wander down her street and to subject her kids to bad air quality.

And then there's the state budget. Oy!

I was going to write that the Bay Area has one saving grace, which is that it's a pretty good place to be a lesbian family. But oops...we're behind Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and Mass on that front.

Maybe we're still here because of folks like our next door neighbors, parents to Norrie's best friend in the whole wide world. That's worth a lot.

I just hope we can all afford to stay here. Or all go somewhere else together.

Feeling all "in the mix" today

Great day for getting my opinion out there, and using my skills to help others do the same -- all in the service of social change:

- Posted to my HuffPost blog about being one of the 18,000 same-sex couples who actually are married in CA.
- Successfully pitched a reporter to write front page article in the SF Chron about the launch of online loans to U.S. microbusinesses.
- Had a hand in editing this op-ed in the LA Times about how California can't afford the death penalty.

This is what I love most about my work!

My Family Values Love

Isobel
Originally uploaded by cerambycidae.

Taken by awesome straight supporter Carol at the Prop. 8 Day of Decision rally.

Infinite deniability

Took Norrie to see the movie "earth" today.

I'm yet again amazed by the capacity of the mind to only take in what it can handle.

Her film commentary follows.

*** Spoiler alert***

When the wolf catches the caribou: "the caribou went into a hole where its home is. It's in its home now." When the cheetah catches some gazelle-like animal: "I think they're becoming friends. See, the cheetah is hugging the gazelle." And when starving lions are stalking and then attack an elephant: "Their claws don't hurt the elephant because it's so tough. It hurts humans but not elephants."

I think I ruined it all for her when I told her that the polar bear was dying. She would have very happily thought it was lying down to rest.

(In fact, after the movie she told me she didn't like it because the polar bear died. I think I thought I was teaching her some lesson about life, but it's actually much nicer to live in a fantasy world. At least while you can.)

Our Cheeky Baby!

Happened to pop over to my friend Whitney's blog and find her here. Boy she was a cutie.

And maybe all that signing helped her become a four year old fairy-tale-weaver who wants nothing more than to pretend Grandpa is a hedgehog and Mama is her friend opossum and Baba is her Daddy seal.

And now, in a complete reversal of history...

Overheard yesterday in a cafe:

A white guy talking about his four year old son.

"He told me I wasn't a man. He said only people with dark skin are men."

"'What?' I said."

"He said, 'You know, like Barack Obama. He's the man.'"