It’s super weird to see myself on video like this, but I decided to stop being so vain and just … share it. This is completely off the cuff, about three days after I found the leak.

Also, there’s a postscript to this story. I talked with an Audubon guy and one of the PNW’s preeminent crow experts; in June the full story will appear in the Seattle Times.

I’ve done three of these live, one at Fresh Ground Stories (The Hat, that’s here) and two at Bar Stories. I’m still working up to doing The Moth but I’m getting there.

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So I had a tree guy out to look at it. “Oh, yeah, I can fix this,” he said. He was not expensive and he so clearly cares about trees. “Your yard is fanastic,” he added. “Just gorgeous. How long have you been at it?”

I was delighted. And I was reminded of this story I published last fall on How I Learned. There’s a rough version of this in my archives, but I love this published piece. The edits Blaise suggested make it sparkle.

Here’s a reprint for spring.

There are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

The ladybugs like the lupines because the lupines are covered in aphids. I don’t like the aphids; I think they’re gross. The lupine stems and seedpods are crawling with these tiny green bugs, but the ladybugs think the aphids are some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet, so there are a lot of ladybugs now.

I like the ladybugs very much, and I like that they are fucking in my lupines.

When I first moved into this 1946 home, it was surrounded by too much manicured lawn and immaculately shaped juniper hedges. “Topiary of the Eisenhower era,” an old friend called it. I was amused by the hedges at first, and by the blue jay that would tuck peanuts in them and come back later to retrieve their secret snacks.

The front lawn was confusing to me, but I liked sprawling on a blanket on the back lawn, staring into the blue of a summer sky. Then the water bill came. It was four hundred dollars. I stopped watering out front and gradually, the lawn went to dust and dandelions.

I never expected to live in a home with a yard. I had a series of tiny apartments, the last had a common garden for which I was not responsible. For a few years, I had a small plot in a community garden a few blocks from my walk-up condo. I successfully grew tomatoes and unsuccessfully grew a few other things. Zucchini. Lettuce. Some flowers. Those community garden people were hard core and humorless. You received a sharply worded email if you didn’t empty the water from the hose when you were done. It did not make me excited about gardening.

At that condo with the common garden I had a noisy downstairs neighbor, and no room for guests, and, eventually, a husband. All that precipitated a move to this 1946 house with more space, an office where I could work, and too much lawn.

It wasn’t long before we argued, the husband and I, about what to do with the yard. He didn’t mind the mowing and was apathetic about the dust in late summer, but I hated looking at the bare dirt, the increasing weeds. I had started randomly planting bulbs in the grass. Daffodils and tulips alongside the walk out front, crocuses at random in the back lawn. Little white and purple flowers that I would forget about and then be delighted by come spring.

One year, after returning from a work trip, the husband walked in the back gate. Upon seeing the lawn dotted with crocuses, he became quite angry.

“How am I supposed to mow?” he said.

“What if you just… didn’t until the flowers are done?”

“They’re in the way.”

I was confused by his bitterness. It didn’t make any sense. The flowers would fade; it could wait. It would only be a few weeks. Why was he reacting like this? There were daffodils along the low wall at the back of the garden; he said those were also in the way.

The yard was not the only thing we argued about, but the arguments about the garden became increasingly metaphoric over time — ridiculously so.

“I did it to inconvenience you,” I snarked. I couldn’t help myself.

“You probably did,” he said.

We’re divorced now. You already guessed that.

The rules are clearly stated.

When you sign up for Chip Drop, you must take the whole load, and you get notice right before they arrive. It’s a chaotic way to get free mulch. You have to be up for the adventure and ready to spring into action. I had been alone for a year by then, maybe it was two, I don’t remember. I thought I could handle it. How much mulch could it be?

I was coming back from walking the dog when the truck pulled into the alley. I stared at the container on the back. Oh no, I thought, what have I done? I asked the driver if I had to take the whole load. Could I not just have half?

“Nope. It’s all or nothing.” He tipped the container into the alley, covering most of the space between my fence and the fence opposite mine with a fragrant mountain of shredded tree clippings. The scent was intoxicating. All my neighbors came out.

“Well, that’s a lot of mulch, isn’t it? What’s your plan?”

It was Thursday. On Tuesdays, the city ran garbage trucks through the alley that was now blocked with 25, 30 yards of chip mulch. It had to be gone by Tuesday morning. Early.

The neighbors looked at me like I had an answer, like I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. I was terrified.

I had read about gardening: library books, websites, an online forum about permaculture, and I had been learning about the lasagna method. To lasagna your garden, you lay down cardboard, cover it with mulch, and wait. The cardboard smothers everything underneath, depriving it of light. The stuff above it holds the cardboard down and eventually feeds the soil as the cardboard decomposes.

Reading is a good place to start, but you don’t learn how to grow stuff in your yard until you get your hands dirty.

I had done this lasagna thing once before on a much smaller scale with only a few yards of mulch. In early winter, I had lined the front walk with cardboard and compost and waited until spring. My shovel cut the formerly hard ground like it was warm butter. I planted several varieties of lavender that now spill over onto the walk and hum with bumblebees much of the spring and summer. Easy enough, successful enough. So go big, I told myself — do the whole front yard.

There I was, confronted with this mountain of mulch; it had to be out of the way in four days — no question. I imagined the city calling to complain that I’d blocked their access; I imagined there would be fines.

I spent half a day panicking before coming to my senses. You’re the boss, I told myself. You’re alone now; you get to decide how things get done. When the lawn needs mowing. Where to plant flowers. When to hire some help. I made a call and the next day, two polite men from the day labor service showed up at my house. They made short work of the mulch, and by mid-afternoon, the entire front yard was buried a foot or so deep in fragrant shredded forest. When it rained, I could smell the pine and cedar. When the windows were open that woody aroma filled the house.

Time passed. I read. I planted. Things thrived or they didn’t.

The following summer, the California poppies arrived. They covered the front yard with neon orange flowers. The bees loved them. Standing out front I could hear them singing to themselves as they traveled from bloom to bloom, collecting great yellow blobs of pollen in their saddlebags.

I read up on native plants and ordered way too many from the conservation district plant sale. Every time I turned over the soil to plant the mock oranges, red dogwoods, daffodils, and tulips, I found earthworms. I randomly scattered Northwest wildflower mix, thinking it would take. The calendula did. And the lupines, where the aphids thrive and the ladybugs fuck.

Sometimes I watered. Mostly I didn’t. Friends gave me plants they’d divided from their own yards; seeds they’d collected from their crops. I put them in the ground and remembered them when I waded through the knee-deep poppies, my nails dirty from pulling stray grass.

I found myself puttering in the garden, meticulously weeding one clump of lilies, clearing around that coastal strawberry runner for ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and then calling it a day. My dying lawn of dandelions and dust had transformed into a riot of color—orange and purple and neon green—and butterflies and ladybugs. Hummingbirds. Crows feasting on the earthworms that surfaced after the rain.

One day I was stopped by my neighbor, a quiet, keep-to-himself guy in an orderly house with regular garden service. “I just wanted you to know how much I love your wildflowers,” he said.

Another neighbor said, “Oh, I can see you’re a gardener.”

Spring came and I let the back lawn grow tall and the flowers bloom. I left the lawn mower in the garage until the last crocus wilted. No one was inconvenienced by my flowers. I wandered around in the increasingly abundant mess out front; letting things grow where they wanted to grow and not worrying much when they didn’t. It’s a certified wildlife habitat now, registered with the National Wildlife Federation.

And there are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

Sometimes I hose off the lupines; that works to get rid of the aphids in the short term, but it doesn’t make them go away. I planted fennel and sage because they are supposed to deter the aphids long term, but the stalks are covered with those sticky green bugs all the same. There’s a much neater garden around the corner from me, their yard is also full of lupines, but they don’t have the aphid problem that I have. They also don’t have all those ladybugs, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. I’ve looked. You can’t miss them, the ladybugs, with their bright red-orange shells, their polka dots. The ladybugs are at my house, the house with the untidy garden.

I have counted four or five kinds of bees. Honeybees and fat fuzzy bumbles and a shiny greenish bee. I have hummingbirds zooming in and out of the currants in the early spring. They will be back to feed on the crocosmia and the lilies when those bloom in summer. The wild brown bunnies nap in the shadows, the earthworms turn the soil below ground. The lawn isn’t completely vanquished. It sends up tall spires and goes to seed, but no one would call that unruly meadow in front of my house a lawn.

It’s a mess, a tangle of color and life, and there is no containing it.

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I had got it in my head that I was going to learn how to tell a story, you know, like they do for The Moth. And for the past few months, I’ve been going to live storytelling events around Seattle. They’re all different, but they’re grounded in the action of getting up in front of a the room with no notes and telling the room about that one time.

I have the recording from my latest attempt. Also, you need to know that when I told this story, I was wearing the hat I’m wearing in this photo.

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Accepting my age has come with an internal discussion about my own mortality. Over the past few years I have had the difficult honor of shepherding a few obituaries into the world. Obituaries are other people’s version of your best self; they’re how other people think you’d want to be remembered. But unless you tell them, how do they know? They will say your wild child years are less important than your business acumen, they will mention family by name but not friends… they absolutely mean well. But what do you want?

I decided I would answer this question myself, and upon hitting this significant age, it seems time.

I hope to write 30 more of these, that my health and vitality permit to revisit this every year for years to come. This is not a goodbye note, let me be perfectly clear. It’s a “just in case” note because life includes so many things out of our control.

And if you’re of a certain age, I encourage you to do this too. Don’t leave it to other people to define what your existence looked like, what you think made you, well, you. At a difficult junction in recent years someone accused me of trying to control the narrative. Fuck yeah, I am.

Happy birthday to me.

Pam Mandel: 1964 – Still Very Much Alive

Pam Mandel was born in Santa Monica, California. She thought of herself as a textbook West Coast Gen Xer, complete with inherant distrust of The Man and a lifelong uncertainty about the future.

She studied art at San Jose State University; a modest skillset and a lot of determination allowed her to achieve minor success at every creative endeavor she chose to prioritize, be it visual arts, music, writing, or film. She had a boundless appetite for the expressive. She made big paintings, played in a ukuele rock and roll cover band, wrote a memoir and an award winning short film, and seemed to always be trying something new.

Pam moved to Seattle from the California Bay Area when her first brief marriage ended in 1993. Her move coincided with a tech boom that allowed her to earn a living in a series of jobs she repeatedly walked away from to go on adventures, be it driving the Al-Can highway or crossing the Australian Outback where she met her second husband. The two were married for nearly two decades, dividing their time between his home in rural Austria and her home in Seattle, until they divorced in 2020.

That same tech boom meant that Pam’s work as a writer corresponded with the rise of blogging and during the 2000s and 2010s, Pam was small scale internet famous for her blog, Nerd’s Eye View. Her blog provided her with some remarkable experiences — a camping safari in Kenya and Tanzania, a solo road trip through the Mississipi Delta, and crossing the Drake Passage to Antarctica — to name a few.

Her appetite for international travel waned during the pandemic; she traded long haul flights for road trips with her dog, Harley, and spent the darker months in climates sunnier than her Seattle home — Joshua Tree, Moab, and the central California coast. And she found adventures in her home kitchen with her gay boyfriend Larry, who she met her first year in Seattle; the pair had been cooking their way around the globe for several years.

While not particularly athletic, Pam preferred to ride a bike when the weather and the destination allowed. She also liked to swim laps because, she said, it “quieted the hive of bees in her brain.” You could count on her to join you at a protest march, to give time to causes she supported, and to apply her wit as a weapon when circumstances required it. Pam was impatient with bigots, lazy thinkers, and people she considered sell-outs. Pam was often accused of being elitist or stubborn, to which she would respond, “Oh, absolutely. I want the smartest people in charge, why don’t you?” Her romantic partners in particular were confounded by how she would not compromise. Later in life, she considered her solitary state the price she paid for refusing to have children, to live in places she did not want to live, or to shrink herself to fit a role she had no interest in fulfilling.

The descendent of what she called “Fiddler on the Roof” Jews, Pam had an increasingly complex relationship with her religious heritage. She declared herself an atheist, yet had Hebrew tattoos and gave time to progressive Jewish causes. She strongly identified with Jewish culture — Passover was her favorite holiday — but refused to equate Judaism with Israeli politics. Her world view was relentlessly inclusive and she thought that a life surrounded by people of all stripes was the only way to live. A great lover of carbs, she insisted that in addition to other benefits, diversity provided amazing desserts.

In lieu of flowers, she requests that you buy yourself a piece of original art for your home or, if your circumstances align, have Indian takeout delivered to your mid-range roadside hotel. And that you have dessert.

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What’s bothering me, indeed! What’s not bothering me would be a better question given the State of Things.

On this morning’s walk I thought, well, it is Thanksgiving, and it is not raining right now, and it is not particularly cold, and that maple is still looking so splendid with the full range of colors available to it, so. So.

Last night I baked a cake, a key accessory to my role as Single Lady of a Certain Age at the annual performance of Thanksgiving Dinner. I am grateful to be invited by friends who have cast me before to play this role. It will be cozy and bright and nourishing in all the best ways. It will feel so good to be welcomed at their table.

There have been long shadows over the year. I have not had proper income since May, which, in a terrible coincidence, was when Harley the Dog got so sick he had to be hospitalized multiple times. Harley is insured, and I pulled some money from my retirement accounts, but I also got help from friends and family and I am still overwhelmed with gratitude for the space that gave me to make the right choices. Harley had a lengthy but nearly complete recovery, though I think both of us were traumatized by the whole unfortunate event.

In August I hammered out a pitch for a book based on Canned, the podcast I launched with my producer/friend/creative enabler Amy. I sent 50 customized pitch letters to literary agents; I have received nine rejections and two expressions of interest that have netted exactly zero offers to represent me. Ask any working author, they will tell you the process requires the resilience and endurance of an Olympic athlete. You must wait months for a terse “Not for me, best of luck,” reply. I shut the process down last week, 50 seemed a good number and the beating my ego was taking wasn’t made easier by the ever-diminishing daylight hours.

Still, I have been so grateful to everyone who supported this project from the get-go, total strangers who were willing to tell me vulnerable stories, folks who pitched in to help cover the production costs, and to everyone who said, “OMG, that’s brilliant,” when I told them  about Canned. It has absolutely been a bright spot, which is ironically funny when you consider where these stories come from and how they play out in the bleakness of today’s job market.

In September, when I started pitching my book projects, I also started going to live story telling events. I have been trying to learn what makes a story interesting when it’s told off the cuff. What makes a person a natural storyteller and what makes a story feel labored? What’s the difference between a story that’s performed versus one that’s just told? In October I got up in front of a room of mostly strangers (there’s a friend who’s along for the ride on this adventure) and told a story about that one time I went to Indiana, and it was…  thrilling, actually. The rooms these events take place in are unfailingly kind, the stakes are low, and I’m grateful for the space to do some creative experimentation.

(I’m gonna stop you right there, I’m not, in fact, a natural in front of the room. I’m good on the keyboard, but to stand in front of a room, just you and a mic, nothing in your hands, is not a skill I have, thank you. I can put some words on a page, sure, but to move them from my brain to my voice with no keyboard In between is another story.)

I was pondering all this while walking Harley this morning. I was engaging in that seasonal practice at some dinner tables of saying what you are grateful for. It helped me shift to things I am looking forward to, as well – friends coming to visit, a much-needed sunbreak on the horizon, Thanksgiving leftovers, taking advantage of the time I have allotted to write this winter…

It is dark, I find it difficult, and as a person who has struggled with depression, feeling this particular weight has me scanning the perimeter for the black dog. I think he’s at a safe distance and the fences are secure enough. It is good to walk the dog when there is a break in the weather, and it is good to play the part of Single Lady of a Certain Age at Thankgiving Dinner, and there is much to be grateful for.

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