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Sirithiri || ‘God’s Hospital’

BY SIRI BARDARSON
August 24, 2016

My summer began with tears.

I cried when I accidentally drove over my favorite snake with the ride-around mower and hacked her into three bloody pieces. I have the best garter snakes at my house and she was the biggest of them all! The one with bright blue stripes and a girth the diameter of a napkin wring. Did you know that garter snakes live to be ten years old? I wept for the rest of the afternoon and woke up crying the next morning.

When my tears stopped and I reflected a bit, I saw my many reasons to cry. Garter snakes are the same age as fifth graders and it had been a tough teaching year and my colleague had died. That sounds silly. Surely the snake was many things: an emotional metaphor for vulnerability, the slaughter of innocents and rage against the machine.

I needed to visit God’s Hospital.

I can hear the sharp intake of breath at that language. We live in such a spiritually neutered time, but “God’s Hospital” is just a name from the language of my favorite adults. My mom coined the phrase. A visit to “God’s Hospital” meant a swim in Puget Sound.

Two of my sisters and I did this the other evening. There is no big blue letter “H” on a signpost to guide you to the beach but maybe there should be. We chose the north end of Homes Harbor. The tide was up, the sun shone at a late August slant and the prevailing northerly wind feathered the waves of the flooding tide. Both forces pushed the warm surface water in to shore.

I picked my way over the rocks on the shore. The voice of my 14-year-old self appeared out of nowhere and warned that if I ever wore shoes in the summer, I was old. Maybe that was why I was crying.

The northerly wind chilled my car ride sweat to goose bumps and, for a moment, I second-guessed my swim. But there is no pausing at the door to “God’s Hospital.” Not if you want relief from everything that ails you. I was first in and my sisters followed quickly.

My twin and I are the oldest siblings and we are Pisces, through and through. We began our saltwater swims, as children, at our grandma and grandpa’s cabin at old Brighton Beach in Clinton. Our grandma set the standard for the afternoon swim; if the sun was out, we went in.

There was a bit of ritual around it. A quick run up the wooden steps to the attic bedroom loft where you yanked open an old sliding mullioned window and leaned out to grab your dry swimsuit from off the shed roof. A swimsuit that has been swum in all summer, in the saltwater and sundried, is as stiff as a board and full of sand. You pull it on with a sort of painful yank, the crotch and the leg holes stiff and chafing, pieces of dried eelgrass and lettuce kelp fluttering to the floor. The only relief is to get the suit wet again.

Our grandma would be ready downstairs in her rubber slippers and her swim cap with the snapping chinstrap and the divot of rubber ripped off and missing at her forehead from too much tugging. She held a rolled-up rice mat edged in black grosgrain ribbon, and my Grandpa’s transistor radio swung on her wrist from a thin leather strap.

My twin and I would run ahead, across the yard and the blazing hot macadam road to the beach. We picked our way past the beach grass and its fragrant green, hay smell and over the big driftwood. We ran barefoot over the rocks to the water because we were young.

We would glance over our shoulders toward Grandma and wait for her. She would carefully roll open the rice mat and place her towel and the little radio on it. Her skin was the color of milk, her shoulders a little hunched, but she had beautiful legs. She would walk down to the water and stride in knee-deep, pause, and splash the cold water on her chest and shoulders and dive in. We would do the same. She would whoop and swim briefly and get out but we would stay. Once your ankles stop aching you can stay in the water forever.

We always swam underwater. On a sunny day, the shallow water in Puget Sound is a yellow-jade color. Below the surface, the sunlight beams down in wavering streams in a silence as thick and viscous as the feel of the water. You can hear buzzing engines from far away, muted and unimportant, and the sensory deprivation is calming.

We would pop out of the water after awhile and our Grandma would go up to start dinner. She would leave us the rice mat and the little radio and we’d lay on our stomachs with our hands straight at our sides, our heads to one side, the salty snot running from our noses, and the hot sun drying the saltwater on our skin into little salty circles that itched and pulled.

The radio hummed and all was well at the edge of “God’s Hospital.”

A Northwest native, Siri Bardarson is a writer with an emotional hotline to the vibrant natural beauty of Puget Sound. When not writing about the importance of the wild blackberry, daisies and natural time, she practices her cello a lot and sings at the same time. She loves her Whidbey Island home.

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CLICK HERE to read more WLM stories and blogs. Have a great story idea? Let us know at info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

August 24, 2016
Sirithiri || ‘Note-to-Self’

BY SIRI BARDARSON
February 17, 2016

Spring is near. All the harbingers are visible: daphne odora, pussywillows, quince. Racks of colorful primrose are at the grocery store. Next it will be the forsythia, then tulips and the lilac bushes.

And ants.

I made my coffee the other morning and, at first, I thought they were the black feathery floaters in my vision. But no, they were the ants, determined in their scurry, coming out from the seam between the backsplash and the kitchen counter. Of course, they were in the general vicinity of the sugar bowl and the cupboard with the honey.

The ants seemed smaller than usual, not robust and shiny black, but tiny. This will make them easier to swallow when I find them in my tea.

Illustration by Siri Bardarsan

I am not going to kill them because of a book I read with my dear friend who died just the other week. “Ants and Buddhists,” it’s called—how to teach non-violence to children.

The tiny black ants remind me of my friend, always scurrying, always moving toward the sweetness of life. Love bug, love cookie, ray of sunshine, do-gooder, force of nature, positive energy, Mother Teresa, eco-warrior, radical activist. And now she is gone.

Death has such bad timing. It wouldn’t be right for her to die at any time, but now—when the earth is coming alive, activating, rising up to every conceivable opportunity to participate in Mother Nature’s mission: more and improved. That was her vision, too. More love, larger membership in a love’s vision connecting the dots between people, places, imagination and FUN, the 100% sweetness of life’s sugar bowl.

Now she is part of the good soil from which comes all possible bounty—if care is taken. Hmmm, care, careful, loving, nurturing. There is no room for the rabble of knee-high weeds and stubborn invasives if we take loving care. Work, like my visiting ants: good work, hard work, grindy work, many-hands-making-light-work. The opportunity for the work of love is always there, but it’s most obvious right now—now, when it seems like a good idea to get outside and dig.

I don’t have to do anything about the ants. They will be gone is a couple weeks. It’s very short—the window of time for scurrying and the occasional bonus reward of the sugar bowl.

Very short.

A Northwest native, Siri Bardarson is a writer with an emotional hotline to the vibrant natural beauty of Puget Sound. When not writing about the importance of the wild blackberry, daisies and natural time, she practices her cello a lot and sings at the same time. She loves her Whidbey Island home.

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CLICK HERE to read more WLM stories and blogs. Have a great story idea? Let us know at info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

February 17, 2016
Sirithiri || “Monstro”

BY SIRI BARDARSON
August 5, 2015

On one of our recent sunny days, I sped down the highway around the end of Penn Cove and saw many cars parked at the beach. I had seen a notice online for a “Digging for Dinner” class, a how-to on clam habitat, limits and licensing. I guessed that this was it, people learning about the rich shellfish bounty of our wonderful Puget Sound.

This made me think of Monstro.

Monstro was an ancient boat, 14-feet long, wooden, and a double-ended dory. It appeared one afternoon, towed behind our father’s car, down the dirt driveway of our summer cabin at the end of Holmes Harbor. I never knew where he got it.

What a surprise! It was enough that our father was here for a visit; usually he stayed in town to work. But here he was with a boat that you might see in a picture of a whaling village, and loaded on an equally odd trailer—also wooden, with tall tires that had spokes painted hunter green.

We girls were thrilled; my mother was silent. We named the boat Monstro and my dad announced we were going to use it to go clam digging.

Clamshells (illustration by Siri Bardarson)

My parents purchased their waterfront lot on Whidbey Island when I was nine and everywhere along the beach was evidence of a dying logging industry. Holmes Harbor was virtually unpopulated. The green clapboard machine shop that became Nichols boatyard was vacant, and across the street from it was a ramshackle wharf with a dilapidated storefront. Beyond the wharf, log skids extended out over the mud, like giant ribs of a dead animal picked clean by time. Underneath the skids, eight inches of sawdust covered the mudflats and, when the tide came in, the dark sawdust filled the waves.

Just off our beach, there was a behemoth of a raft, built on the scale of Paul Bunyan—huge-dimensioned lumber nailed with giant spikes. The loggers also built a tree swing in the huge maple tree by our cabin. The tree was so tall that there were no branches within 30 feet of the ground. A brave soul had scaled way up the tree and attached big wooden braces, stringing wire cable down the distance to the plank swing seat. The ground under the swing was sloped and if someone tall would give you a push, you would sail out over the whole world.

The loggers also left behind a giant picnic table in our yard. One evening during our first summer there, we sat at the table eating dinner and someone blew up the wharf and store and pieces of it landed in our dinner.

Our cabin was previously a tool shed and it was outfitted from St. Vincent de Paul’s. It had four sets of army bunk beds, two large, sturdy, leather-benched wooden chairs, (turned out they were original Stickley pieces!), three kerosene lamps, an orange-enameled après ski stove that Austin Powers would die for, a small picnic table and a chest of drawers. The cabin had no electricity but a huge Majestic wood cook stove with heating coils and a tall riveted hot water heater on an ornate steel stand. It provided hot water for scrubbing dishes but there was no shower. We didn’t care. We lived in our swimsuits and slept in sleeping bags that were full of sand.

Our cousins from Spokane were visiting us the day we went clam digging in Monstro. There must’ve been four to six kids along with my dad. I don’t remember any life jackets. The really little kids stayed at home with our moms. Our destination was a beach down around the corner, below what is now the Holmes Harbor Golf Club.

Monstro was moored to the big raft and to get out to it was tricky. Logistically, the tide had to be out to dig the clams, but “in” enough to load the boat. The long draw of the tide flat meant that, first, we walked knee-deep through the quicksand-like mud and next, forded thigh-high water with the clamming gear: a galvanized pail, shovel and coffee cans for bailing buckets. Our father carried the Seagull three-horse outboard above his head, someone had the gas can. It was raining.

We loaded in. My dad set the outboard in the engine well in the center of the boat and gave a yank; the engine sputtered to a start. I remember that it was a small noise, and secretly wondered if it was up to the task. My dad re-arranged us to get the boat balanced as Monstro moved slowly forward through riffled waves pitted with rain.

We kids dragged our hands overboard and stared down, looking for the drop-off. It’s 200 yards out from the end of Holmes Harbor, an eerie watery marker even for a Pisces like myself. Just before the drop off, the eelgrass waved dark and menacing and then there was the black void.

About then, my dad barked to start bailing. We looked into the bilge to see the water up to our ankles.

We bailed continuously until we reached our destination and nudged into the beach. My dad stepped out, shovel in hand and we scampered after him with the bucket. He dug, we sifted—nothing. We moved on and he dug again and this time we smelled the metallic smell of the gray oily sand that clams love. We sorted through the huge piles of wet muck and quickly filled the pail and loaded back into Monstro.

The wind came up as we headed back, a northerly coming from behind. It was colder now and we hunkered into the task of bailing, which kept us warm. My dad would sing. He knew just when to sing, to distract us from complaining or worry.

“One night as I was a trimming of the glim,
a singing a verse from the evening hymn.
A voice from starboard shouted ahoy,
and there was me mother a sittin’ on a buoy.
Yo-ho-ho, the wind blows free,
all for the life on the rolling sea.”

We reached the big logging raft and moored, leaving the bailing cans in the boat. The tide had come in and the water was deeper, but we managed to get back to the cabin. We were all cold and, inside the cabin, we wrapped ourselves in Army surplus blankets and our moms fed us lunch. They started frying bacon and cooking onions for the clam chowder and the top of the cook stove clanked as my mom loaded more wood. She and my aunt had baked a wild blackberry pie and there was a piecrust cinnamon roll for each of us after lunch.

I finished first, grabbed my warm piecrust cookie and beat it outside to the big swing. The sun was tentatively out, the grass still wet. I gave myself a push and floated over the big picnic table. I had a good view of Monstro tied up at the raft and, in the distance, the brown sawdust waves washed over the skids.

Soon the tide would be all the way in and it would be time to go swimming. I would find the biggest, whitest clamshell and play my favorite game. Throw the clamshell, swim as fast as I could under water with my eyes open and catch the clamshell before it hit the sand. Back and forth in front of the cabin; toss, dive, toss, dive.

And later, there would be a delicious dinner and some singing.

A Northwest native, Siri Bardarson is a writer with an emotional hotline to the vibrant natural beauty of Puget Sound. When not writing about the importance of the wild blackberry, daisies and natural time, she practices her cello a lot and sings at the same time. She loves her Whidbey Island home. Find out more about Siri at www.siribardarson.com.

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CLICK HERE to read more WLM stories and blogs. Have a great story idea? Let us know at info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

August 5, 2015
Sirithiri || Rose is a rose, is a rose, is a rose

BY SIRI BARDARSON
May 20, 2015

Downsizing is big these days and I have done it. A year ago I moved from 1700 sq. ft. to 665 sq. ft. and from 18 rosebushes to one.

According to the Census, the average American will move 11.7 times in a lifetime. Mobility and a shortage of usable space have inspired cozy Manhattan studios measuring less than 300 sq. ft. and a popular “tiny house” movement.

What is livable? What is living?

I bought this tiny condo the first time I saw it. I had searched for anything under 100K and ended up in Oak Harbor. I was scouring a neighborhood near the water and nearly missed the For Sale sign propped up in a window of a building that looked like an old Herfy’s hamburger joint. The place was so 1970s—just like me. The front door was nothing more than a slider and I couldn’t see much through the reflective coating. I jotted down the agent’s number and then I noticed the rosebush at the edge of the concrete patio.

Condo Rose (illustration by Siri Bardarsan)

The rose was lanky and blotched with black spot, like rosebushes get around here with proximity to the saltwater. It had the biggest bright orange rose hips that I’d ever seen, and I broke one off and twiddled the stem in my fingers while I stared 25 yards down the driveway to the saltwater of Oak Harbor. I hurried to my car and called the phone number from the sign and stuck the rose hip in my visor.

The next day, my real estate agent yammered at me as I stood in the living room. The condo was crummy with inexpensive faux oak laminate on the floor that was cupped on the seams. It had been freshly painted in dull sage in high gloss, the ancient uneven taping of the overhead drywall illuminated by the shine like zits on a greasy 16-year-old nose. It had a four-by-four foot kitchen that had a smell, but there was a view of the saltwater and the rose bush.

“I’ll buy it,” I said.

The offer was a short sale and I immediately had buyer’s remorse and suffered for the six months to closing. One evening after teaching, I grabbed some fast food and sat in my car in the February darkness at the end of the condo driveway on the street by the water.

What the heck had I done? My house in Freeland was a mile from the beach on an acre of land with 18 roses in my overgrown veggie garden and more Great Horned owls than one long night could stand. We had lived there for 20 years.

I took a bite of my sandwich and rolled down my window to breathe in the cold salty air of Oak Harbor. On the water in a puddle of streetlight floated the largest raft of Hooded Mergansers I had every seen. I calmed down.

Do you know Edgar Albert Guest’s poem, “Home”? The one that starts—“It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home?”

Here is the last verse:

Ye’ve got t’ sing an’ dance fer years, ye’ve got t’ romp an’ play,
An’ learn t’ love the things ye have by usin’ ’em each day;
Even the roses ’round the porch must blossom year by year
Afore they ’come a part o’ ye, suggestin’ someone dear
Who used t’ love ’em long ago, an’ trained ’em jes’ t’ run
The way they do, so’s they would get the early mornin’ sun;
Ye’ve got t’ love each brick an’ stone from cellar up t’ dome:
It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home.

Maybe with the new paradigm, our experience with what we love, like roses, will be fleeting. Maybe we will pick up where that last stanza left off.

Best Rose Rosette (illustration by Siri Bardarsan)

Many years ago, I won “Best Rose” at the Island County Fair. I know it’s near impossible to kill a rose bush. Does it have to be “new,” does it have to be “mine” to love it just as much and take care of it just as well?

I have a piece of a rose thorn embedded on the inside of my forearm from some rose wrangling in my old garden. It is like a tiny black tattoo on my white skin. I tried to get it out and I dug at it with a needle. It got infected and I figured it would disappear after time. Ten years later, it is still in my arm.

It’s the only bit of rose I’m ever really taking with me. I think about this deep in the night while I listen to the Great Horned owl outside the condo.

A Pacific Northwest native, Siri Bardarson is a writer with an emotional hotline to the vibrant magic of the Puget Sound area. She writes about the importance of the wild blackberry, daisies and natural time and how we are all in this together, and she plays her cello a lot. Siri loves her Whidbey Island home but she feels prepared to live just about anywhere.

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CLICK HERE to read more WLM stories and blogs. Have a great story idea? Let us know at info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

May 20, 2015
Sirithiri || Writing My Book

BY SIRI BARDARSON
Whidbey Life Magazine Contributor
March 4, 2014

Both “Read Across America” (otherwise known as “Dr. Seuss Day”) and “World Book Day” are being celebrated this week. Long live the book!

Reading is the socially acceptable way to withdraw. I was a confirmed reader by the age of ten and for a never-enough girl like myself, there were always more books. Over-indulging on bazillions of words like chocolate chips… Into paragraphs like cookies… Four dozen thousand words later, I’d ingested them all.

Sweet.

When I was eight or ten, I tried to write my first book. The story began with the smell of bacon and the sound of a screen door slamming. These were comforting images that I typed very carefully onto erasable onionskin stationary with a Smith Corona typewriter on the dining room table.

The onionskin paper was thin and could barely hold the idea of bacon, like carrying a large rock in tissue paper and expecting it not to rip. The screen door seemed like a harmless thing and I struggled to get it right but I couldn’t know that beneath the simple words roiled my intense desire to escape my giant family. It was a mob scene and we had the bacon rule.

My mom only cooked bacon on Sundays and then it was just one piece for her and the five of us girls and two pieces for our dad.

I erased the onionskin until there were dark blurs and rips in the fine paper that held my six sentences and then I gave up. It was a terrible discovery—the fact that reading and writing are so different.

Reading felt great and writing felt horrible.

At the beginning of the summer, my sisters and I walked down our steep hill to the library and slowly dawdled back up after enrolling in the summer reading program. I remember carrying fourteen novels back up the huge hill and zipping through them in that first week of summer. I diligently filled in the list with the titles and authors on the special paper the library gave us that smelled like a Weekly Reader.

Then the Pacific Northwest summer turned on and the great escape wasn’t reading but being outside.

The infamous Wigwam Store (from the author’s private photo collection)

The switch from reading indoors to playing outside seemed to coincide with getting our new summer tennis shoes. My mom would take us to the Wigwam store in the big station wagon to buy our shoes and on the drive home she would issue a warning.

“Do not ride the wagon down the hill! If you drag your feet when you ride the wagon down the hill and ruin your tennis shoes, it will be too bad. These are the only tennis shoes you get this summer!”

We heard the contradiction in the first two sentences and avoided making eye contact with her as she glanced at us in the rear view mirror.

Riding the wagon down the hill was not allowed. It was a very dangerous hill down a neighborhood road, about a 100-yard-long freefall before it took a harrowing ninety-degree left turn at a yellow painted concrete barricade. To the right was an empty dirt lot and relative safety.

We had broken the rule the previous summer and we knew that the only way to slow down enough and careen right into the dirt lot was for all three kids in the wagon to simultaneously brake with their feet down on the road and lean to the right when the wagon driver yelled.

Riding the wagon down the hill was a break for freedom. And the price of freedom was ruining your tennis shoes.

When it was your turn to ride the wagon down the hill, you would drag your feet and grind the rubber soul into a jagged slant that made you walk on the outside of your feet from that moment on. This would hurry up the process of poking your big toe through a hole on the top of the shoe because you were walking funny, and then the rubber sole would pull away from the material at the sides of the shoe. And then your shoelaces would break.

It is impossible to lace up your laces with the fuzzy ends no matter how many times you lick them. And so the tennis shoes are laced up through only the first two holes because the lace is VERY short. And then, you just start sliding your foot into the shoe instead of lacing it up, because you can. And then you slide it on halfway and crush the heel part down because you are in a hurry. So now the new tennis shoes are just slip-ons or flip-flops, which are worthless if you play outside a lot. So you just go barefoot for the rest of the summer, which is the truest sign of personal freedom.

And your mother yells at you and grounds you. And you have nothing else to do but curl up with your book in your bare feet.

Summer is really happening now and the screen door slams. And if it is Sunday, there is the smell of bacon.

Siri Bardarson is a cellist and vocalist who performs with the best duo in the universe, Siri and Steve. She writes a lot and is ecstatically happy when she makes stuff! You can visit Siri at www.siribardarson.com or https://www.facebook.com/siri.bardarson/

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CLICK HERE to read more WLM stories and blogs. Have a great story idea? Let us know at info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

March 4, 2015
Sirithiri | Love in the Time of Plethora

BY SIRI BARDARSON
December 17, 2014

This 2014 holiday season, my country is full of civil unrest. There are many real life dramas that are wrenching and violent and fueled by legitimate passions.

Citizens in the streets storm for the dearth of human rights, and consumers at the mall buy a plethora of stuff.

I have an itchy, unsettled feeling about life, in general—and our collective future, specifically. I’m casting about for my power and place as I wonder if we can be something more than backseat passengers in this head-on collision of human ideals with the voracious machine of power and money. Are we doomed to ride with forces so grim and loveless?

_______________

Change is in the air
as the New Year approaches
and I am ready for my part
in this large drama.
_______________

The other evening, I was invited to a “table read” of an original play. The event was held on the day after the big windstorm and I drove down from Oak Harbor to Clinton. The north end of the island was unscathed compared to what I saw when I reached the phone booth at Classic Road. Debris from the storm littered the highway and fallen logs, piled brush and newly cut stumps were everywhere.

It was dusk when I rolled up to the late afternoon affair and the air felt especially chilly when I stepped out of the car. The air felt raw and scrubbed clean as I called out to my fellow playgoers in the dark. We greeted each other’s black shadows and together we went inside.

The heat had been off and the building was cold as the guests, a dozen of us, milled around in our jackets, some sitting down on the few pieces of furniture. The room was inviting, although austere and poorly lit. The playwright welcomed me and made introductions. He is a man, both affable and intense, earnest and fun. We mingled for a bit. There were a lot of guys there—that was cool, and they were young, which was also cool. There was one young woman also, a girl with big glasses and a sideways smile.

It was great to be with all ages as I am old and work with the very young. I was impressed by everyone’s willingness to just show up for something different; maybe cabin fever had set in but mostly we all seemed happily curious about the play. We sat around; wine was poured and there were yummy cheeses and crackers and a plate of cookies.

Our host, the playwright, called us to the table and we shifted over, still in our coats and jackets. More wine was poured and pens passed around to mark our parts.

The playwright explained his plot premise. He had fallen head over heals in love with a woman, and one morning—so he said—when they parted (she, off to work, and he, staying behind) he said he didn’t know what to do without her.

“Write a play,” she said.

Sometimes I think the spark is that simple.

When she returned that evening, he sat in the same spot with a finished play. In it he wanted to explore one idea as a truism: true love would never judge a book by its cover and would always identify its beloved even if disguised.

Ah, love, where is it, and what does it look like and do I recognize it as mine?

We started in; the players voices ricocheted off the edge of the wedge of light that hung over the table and then bounced off the concrete floor. We all leaned in, eyeing our upcoming parts, listening to the strength and tone of the previous players’ lines. The scripts rustled on the plain wood table and we finished the first act. There was more water and wine in plastic cups and a little philosophizing about contemporary love. Youth and age both have lots to say on that matter of looks and beauty, knowing that sex sells and that we are all drawn to it.

The play turned out well. The soulmates were tested but remained faithful in their devotion to the other’s best attributes and nature. We congratulated the playwright; he deserved it and I drove back up the island.

* * *

Once I get as far up the island as the Au Sable Prairie, I love the drive. You burst out of the dark canyon of trees and the sky expands. You can sense, even in the dark, the powerful tides of Puget Sound to your west. Across the water, a rime of frosty blue sits on the Olympics, a pale blue outline that follows the sun into the next time zone. This time of year the Big Dipper is low on the horizon, tilted on its ear, but otherwise reliable when so much in this crazy life is not.

So what I want to tell everybody is that in your personal drama, on stage with you in your life, there are many reliable fellow actors. Life’s setting and scenery are excruciatingly beautiful, even where you don’t expect it and—like the Big Dipper on its ear—there is always the undeniable power of love.

We have so much and too much of everything else but not enough of this gorgeous force; love free and plentiful with the potential to heal the downside of human drama. Its expression might be most accessible when it is inspired, like a man in love at the breakfast table, but we all can find the willingness to state it profoundly with an understanding of the larger forces at play and the threats to love.

Happy New Year. Write a play for someone you love; say it plainly and attempt to say it perfectly and that will be plenty.

Illustrations by Siri Baradarson from her iPad

Siri Bardarson is a musician devoted to creative projects that synthesize her classical and popular music background via her cello. She is ecstatically happy when she is making stuff! Special thanks to Ian Bage, multi-genre artist, for his play, “Lissema and Ani.”

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CLICK HERE to read more entertaining and informative WLM stories and blogs.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

December 17, 2014
Sirithiri | Attending a Writers Conference, or, ‘I love you more than…’

BY SIRI BARDARSON
October 29, 2014

Whidbey Life Magazine was a sponsor of this weekend’s 2014 Whidbey Island Writers Conference and, as a blogger for WLM, I was allowed to go as a member of the “press.” What a blast! I felt I knew the secret handshake or the special wink as I breezed into lovely Chat House settings and convenient classrooms in the uber-charming waterfront town of Coupeville on beautiful Whidbey Island.

Kudos to Kim Cottrell, Executive Director, and Terry Persun, Conference Director and their hard working staff and volunteers who handled the many details of this successful event!

Illustration by Siri Bardarson

At morning registration at the Rec Hall, the energy was palpable, similar to when I stand next to the huge lavender bush in my backyard on a sunny, summer day and hear the honeybees rattle the air with their industry. There was real bustling and conversation while the attendees registered but what I also felt was the interior whirring of wordsmiths and word artists. The sound of a bazillion ideas, hopes and dreams and the words that help manifest them.

I found a seat at a table where other attendees were poring over their conference program and finishing up their Continental breakfasts. I considered my responsibility as a member of the “press” and I asked each person the reason they were here. The answers were as varied as the ages, genders and looks of my six tablemates: learn to pitch, continue as a lifetime writer, this is my birthday present to myself, get motivated to finish my project. The youngest writer was staying at her family’s beach cabin; this was her first conference and she was working on a middle-grade fantasy novel set on Whidbey Island.

And then it was time to go find the answers to our questions or the information to help us reach our goals and we hurried off to our Chat House sessions.

Bardarson with conference presenter and fellow WLM contributor Deb Lund (photo by the author)

My Chat House session was nearby and I was grateful for the walk. I was already too excited and I was only two hours into a full weekend! As everyone clambered into car pools, I saw the swarm of ideas released into the morning sky like a swarm of honeybees or those cool murmurations of starlings that have been filmed and posted to YouTube.

But all these ideas and words that my fellow writers have aren’t coordinated like the drones of honey making. No—each writer was tasked with finding out how to make the perfect container for his or her words and to create a writing project. That is the beauty of the Writers Conference: come and figure out what you need to know because it takes more than a butterfly net or a video camera to capture the huge cloud of words that surround a good idea.

This year’s conference had a wonderful menu of presenters and classes. I was interested in working on conflict in my current project and I heard professional advice on this tricky craft skill presented two very different ways. On one hand, the published writer spoke in a linear way about plot points and strategies, while in a similar class the next day, a different published writer dished out the same excellent advice with the tone of your best friend who loves ya! People don’t learn the same way and writing is certainly not a one-size-fits-all exercise, and it was great to hear two different approaches to an identical craft issue.

The conference attendees have travelled home now and some of us are already at the computer or chewing on a pencil stub. I can hear across the universe—the soft whirring and grating sounds that we writers make as we sort and sift and work our way through one more word choice or craft experiment. Writers, like all artists, make decisions constantly, tiny and big. It is a lot of work.

My boy and I used to play a game. One or the other of us would start it.

“Have I told you today how much I love you?”

“No,” the other would answer.

“Well, see those fir trees over there?” The other would look into the distance and smile. “I love you more than all the pine needles on all the fir trees in all the forests of the universe.”

“Mmmm, that’s a lot,” the other would contemplate and smile more broadly.

In this silly game, the thing to be counted can be anything. After this weekend, having met so many wonderful people and communed with the huge number of ideas and words that exist in the vast collective consciousness of writers, I have an idea for the next time I play the game, for the moment when it is my turn to express a huge, incalculable, infinite number.

“I love you more than all the beautiful words and wonderful ideas of all the writers in the universe!”

Good luck, my fellow word artists and thank you, Whidbey Island Writing Conference 2014!

Siri Bardarson is a musician who writes a lot. She is ecstatically happy when she makes stuff!

Read more about the conference from blogger Dianna MacLeod and view photos from David Welton’s photo essay here.

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WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

October 29, 2014
Sirithiri | The Garry Oak and DjangoFest’s Tcha Limberger

BY SIRI BARDARSON
September 26, 2014

There is a floor-to-ceiling window that runs the length of the pool up here in Oak Harbor and, just outside, there is a huge oak tree. Out of the foggy left eye of my swim goggles, I glance up at it and then away with each breath and stroke I take down the lap lane. A few days ago, the giant tree was backlit by a summer dawn. Now, it is a dark profile in the early morning.

Garry Oak leaves. (illustration by Siri Bardarson)

Fall is here.

Natural time is the big, round, chrome gauge on my instrument panel of life. Time and life on this earth—the spinning of the planet with its huge system of environment and ecology of species—drives the transition of seasons with remarkable power and character.

I love the reliability, the unstoppable march and the confident nature of the seasons. It is a comfort and, at the same time, in some corner of my consciousness, it is oddly daunting—like being pregnant with the realization that you are just along for the ride. My anxiety about what I am doing, my creative life, creates a rub and chatters like the brittle leaves in the wind.

I don’t know what I am, but the big oak tree outside the window knows what it is.

The Garry Oak trees in Oak Harbor are magnificent. Did you know they are indigenous to our area and thrive on drought and simple soil? They are host and habitat to many species of flora and fauna and they thrive on natural disturbances such as fire. A 300-year-old oak tree is impervious to the welcome fire that clears away the understory and the competing rabble that devours the oak’s meager resources.

One block over from my new place in Oak Harbor, there is a park with an oak forest. When I visited Bulgaria last year, we took a walk every day in an oak forest. Those woods are so different from the ones I know here in the Northwest. Oak trees have strong, straight-up and-down, black trunks and are the perfect setting for archetypal fairy tales and all kinds of imagination.

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Djangofest is a local harbinger of fall. There is a ton of virtuosic ability at Djangofest—the stuff that one achieves by tenacious application—a lot of hot dog players, playing fast. These versions of the manouche genre are very disconnected from the music. Technical virtuosity is not the same as talent, although both can have the same level of ability.

I made the ticket splurge to see Tcha Limberger after a chance listen to him at the final concert of last year’s fest. Hearing him play might be as close as I ever get to the manouche or gypsy jazz genre.

Limberger’s artistry defies definition. The word “talent” is insufficient. It’s like calling the 300-year-old Garry Oak a tree. Whether Tcha sings, plays the guitar, the violin or the clarinet, you can’t separate this person from the music that he plays. The performance was absolutely mesmerizing—the gypsy feel, swaying and swerving and bulging rhythmically outside of time. It was campfire opera on LSD filled with deep passions that were both religious and vernacular. His music was infused with the whole world, attached to the deep history of a people but alive with the current season of now and creative freedom. It had soul. Yes, it had soul.

And is there anything more inspiring than art with soul?

When I was in Bulgaria last year, I heard these sounds, although I didn’t intentionally hear any music. But the landscape had a sound—the religion, the hardship, the nature and the culture. I didn’t understand any of it specifically, but I experienced a kind of cosmic fellowship.

The magnificent Garry Oak tree will always be exactly what it is—welded to the cycle, the only subtle changes made haphazardly by evolution. But we, as creative individuals, inhabitants of the same world as the oak, we have different opportunities and challenges: to put the old and the new together in a new way and find the soul.

What a place to be—the soulful place, the beautiful world and its soulful song. The place where the very old and the very new merge.

The leaves are going to fall from the Garry Oak and my tan feet and hands and sunny hair will disappear under layers of wool. I will listen, play and sing more music and write more words and love life even more strongly.

Grab a sweater and come with me.

Siri Bardarson is a musician who writes a lot. She is ecstatically happy when she makes stuff!

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WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

September 26, 2014
Sirithiri | Daisies sweeping up the hillsides

BY SIRI BARDARSON
July 11, 2014

Have you noticed the ox-eye daisy? Its blank stare skyward, zoned out like a cat in a sunbeam; it is the harbinger of summer.

Only a few days ago, the fields were blanketed in a patchwork of green grasses: citron, neon green, blue-green with a touch of rust red on the grass heads, mossy and silvery green—each shade polarized by gray skies and soft rain.

It happened like this. Mother Nature glanced at her calendar, not at all surprised that the Solstice had arrived. It was the middle of the night and she was star-gazing, (maybe that’s where she got the idea, that smattering of diamonds on blue velvet). She laughed a hearty laugh with her mouth wide open and her teeth showing and then she announced, “Summer.” In an instant, the fields turned yellow and the daises followed as though the Boss Lady had emptied the cosmic hole-punch out over the scene.

Voila! Daisies in the ditches!

Daisies in the Field (sketch by Siri Bardarson)

There is a pullout off the highway across from Greenbank Farm. Recently, I stopped there to sketch the daisies and someone pulled in behind me. A woman announced she was going to pick some daisies; I said I was going to draw them. We chatted, we had both just driven down the highway from Oak Harbor and I remarked that the daisies didn’t grow everywhere. In fact, from where we stood on the little blacktop driveway, to one side a field of daisies grew as far as the eye could see and in the other direction, it was only a sea of yellow grass and not a daisy to be seen.

Some things are some places and not others, like creative ideas.

For a dozen years, I have commuted between the south end of Whidbey and Oak Harbor and I can tell you exactly where my ideas are. After 30 minutes of driving, my brain moves into its right side and I begin to think imagistically. Driving north, it happens at Au Sable prairie at the OLF field and driving south, it happens at Greenbank Farm. At these points in my drive, I enter my dream space as predictably as Solstice showing up for duty. Without having to work at it, everyday things take on new meaning: the plowed field is a rich brown the color of coffee grounds, the daisies are small children with blonde hair or twinkling stars. If I am smart I have brought something to write with because the ideas are coming non-stop—a sketch, a lyric or a sentence. I swerve as I reach into my book bag!

Betty Edwards, author of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain,” identified the phenomenon for me when I re-read her seminal book a few years ago. There are certain kinds of tasks that she calls global tasks. If you engage in these for a period of time, the brain activity shifts from the linear left side to its non-verbal right side.

My favorite global activities are driving and sweeping. It was heartening to discover that I am not plain weird!

I never knew why I loved my commute or sweeping and here is how it all synched up. At the end of the school day, I started sweeping. This took a good thirty minutes and, as there were major janitorial budget cuts, I wasn’t squandering taxpayer dollars. I would end up feeling great about the school day and anxious to get home. I would load up and start driving, the outside world—the day’s trouble spots—infringing a little on my right-sided forays, but by the time I reached Greenbank Farm, I had the lyrics to a new song or a sentence that was so perfect I was in love with everything.

Then I would walk into my house and sweep some more.

Ah, to be in love with everything!

I will point out that there are other variables in this equation, like being alone. Yes, solitude is a big part of the endeavor and so I want to qualify the idea of being in love with everything when I am alone. This is easy love: idea love, soul love, flying love, grounded love, my head attached to my heart love and simple love enthusiasm. Like the daisies in the ditches it is part of a good season, fertile ground and the fuel to keep on keepin’ on.

Mother Nature just winked at me and handed me a push broom.

Siri Bardarson is a musician who writes and sketches a lot. She is ecstatically happy when she makes stuff!

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July 11, 2014
Sirithiri | Thank Blog it’s Friday: In Print!

BY SIRI BARDARSON
April 23,2014

Whidbey Life Magazine is delivering its first print edition this week!

In tandem with its highly successful online magazine billed as “Your #1 Resource for Arts and Culture,” WLM founders Sue Taves and Jan Shannon have made the move to provide a 40-page, high-gloss magazine that captures the flavor of creative life on Whidbey, plus a roster of seasonal arts events. WLM is celebrating the release of the 2014 Spring/Summer edition at a release party this Friday night at Freeland Hall in Freeland. Be there or be square!

Do I love things in print? Let me count the ways. The paper, the pictures, the tangibility, the font variety, the keepsake, the reference, the shared experience—those are just the graphic and physical qualities. Then there is content! Anyone who has been following WLM online knows that the content has been a wild and wonderful bunch of prose, pitches, pictures and visual poetry delivered weekly by a fraction of the amazingly talented creatives here on Whidbey Island.

Isn’t that what WLM is all about? Come one, come all to this lush island to experience a creative destination, and let the print version of Whidbey Life Magazine be your perfect guide.

Let’s talk magazines and guides! I just gave 15 years of Gourmet magazines to a local thrift store. That gesture of “letting go” was tougher than my son’s first day of kindergarten. I can see the beautiful covers in my mind’s eye, the colored eggs in the clear glass basket of the March 1995 issue. Well, what can I say, these magazines meant a lot to me and they filled up three shelves in my pantry.

How about those beautiful paintings of food items on the back of Cook’s magazine? I saved those for years to wallpaper the summer cabin that has yet to enter my life.

Then there’s the Helix magazine my twin and I bought off the streets of San Francisco in 1968. Two sixteen year olds from Renton, Washington—about to have their minds blown by cartoons of the Kama Sutra and advertisements for music at the Filmore. Our mother was not amused.

And not just news, events and information but my favorite writers! At the back of House Beautiful, Phyllis Theroux would write her 600-word essay about some aspect of home that was really a philosophical treatise on place and beauty and human longing. And there was the photo journalism of Life—so political, so American, so comforting in its red, white and blue way. New Yorker cartoons cut out and stuck on the refrigerator. The gorgeous typeset movie schedule from our local Clyde movie theater, (I collected those for years). And all the advice that didn’t help me with any of my relationships from the Ladies Home Journal’s columns, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” And Twiggy in Vogue, and Seventeen, the fashion diva of thin, freckles and eyeliner.

And guides? I have the exhibit guides from every art exhibit I have ever gone to. In the text is the tiny detail, the extra explanation, perhaps a chronology and a diagram stating “YOU ARE HERE.” So wasn’t it a wonderful idea to consolidate the huge number of noteworthy art events, galleries, working studios and work to define this special place, Whidbey Island?

And when I am done with my magazines? Ah, a magazine’s second life: cut up, collaged, ripped pages for wrapping paper, the beautiful pictures on the refrigerator or bathroom wall, the fire starter on Labor Day weekend for roasting marshmallows at your Fort Ebey campsite, a memento of an inspired visit, a lovers’ picnic or the beginning of a long love affair with this unique place that holds so much creative juice.

This print magazine idea is a little retro in its feel—but a magazine by and for artists and all those who appreciate and support art—I know a print magazine aimed at this niche demographic will succeed and I dig the heck out of the substance, form and function.

And if someone spills coffee on the console between the passenger seats, they can rip off a back page and wipe up the mess; they can tear off half a page to create a space for the ketchup for their fish and chips. Or they might clutch it to their heart as they doze on the ferry ride back to town and dream about Whidbey Island and its creative possibilities. When they get home, they’ll stow it in the storage spot behind the passenger seat for next time.

Try doing that with a bookmarked page in your virtual world. Cheers to Whidbey Life Magazine—“Your #1 Resource for Arts and Culture!”

For more information on the launch party, go to https://www.whidbeylifemagazine.org/wlm-print-magazine-announces-launch-party/.

Siri Bardarson is a musician devoted to creative projects that synthesize her classical and popular music background via her cello. She is ecstatically happy!

CLICK HERE to read more entertaining and informative WLM stories and blogs.

WLM stories and blogs are copyrighted and all rights are reserved. Linking is permitted. To request permission to use or reprint content from this site, email info@whidbeylifemagazine.org.

April 23, 2014