We will see a fox.

Boaz can spot animals in the wild so easily that walking with him anywhere sometimes feels like walking through a very laid-back zoo. We’ve seen owls, bats, deer, lizards, hummingbirds, so many rabbits and chipmunks, a blue heron, muskrats, a dozen raccoons, ibex, river otters, a wild baby pig, and a few other things I can’t remember right now. 

In rural France his specialty is hawks and falcons, and we’ve seen more than I can count. I can count about three before I lose interest.  

We’d really like to see a fox. The man who owns the 17th-century farmhouse we’re staying in says the forests around here are full of foxes, but he says we won’t see one. “You won’t see a fox.” he said just last night. Then he went on to describe foxes as reddish-brown, medium sized, short legs, angry. Pretty good description. We can pictures it in our mind's eye now I guess.

There are also supposed to be lots of buzzards, and those buzzards are in luck because there are so many dead things. 

On a trail by a cornfield we saw two shrews, both dead, very small and soft-looking. We didn’t touch them. (Did you know shrew skin is tastes sour to cats? A cat owner told us that the other day.) Shrews have snouts that make them look like adorable little fur-covered elephants, or adorable little woolly mammoths.

Outside a pastry shop we saw two tiny tiny black mice, both dead and bloated, lying in the middle of the street. We looked at them as we ate macarons that tasted like lemon-cheesecake. 

On the highway on the way to one of the many castles we saw a dead animal the size of a small duffel bag, with a white face. We’re still trying to identify what that one was.

I’ve decided the difference between being able to speak a language and being able to speak it fluently is knowing the little ways to express yourself when something unexpected comes up. I can ask for lemon-cheesecake macarons at the pastry shop, but if the cashier makes a joke about not giving us our change, all I can do is stare at him nervously, without blinking. I know there is something funny and normal to say back, but I don’t have a clue anymore what it is. When France gives us surprises I have nothing to give back except long, silent pauses. 

The part of France we're in is mostly countryside so most of France’s surprises for us are small, dead animals. It presents them without comment and we stare back without comment, positive that there is something good and normal to say, that we used to know but we’ve forgotten. 

I hope we see a fox soon, a live one. You know, reddish-brown, angry, with short legs.

I don't know anything about your dog.

In high school my family had an exchange student. She had the perfect level of English fluency - the level of French fluency I hope I have - where everything she said was technically right, but sometimes just a little tiny bit wrong.

The best example is one morning she looked down at our dog and asked: “Is your dog a man?”

“He’d like to think so,” I said.

Our dog’s name is McGee, and he is a man. But if people think he’s a girl, or a woman, I don’t correct them. 

If someone says “She's so cute” I don't correct them, they're right. My dog is pretty cute, I think. The "she" part doesn't matter so much to me. Dogs aren't boys. Dogs aren't girls. Dogs are dogs, to me.

If someone says “Why does she smell that way?” I don’t say it's because he’s a man and that’s what men smell like. I usually just say that we don’t wash him very often. The groomer said he has sensitive skin so we’re not supposed to. Try standing further away if it bothers you. Or stand upwind maybe. 

It’s ok that our dog is sensitive. Our dog doesn’t care if you call him a him or a her. I'm almost positive our dog doesn't subscribe to any traditional or even non-traditional gender norms. All I really know is he’ll lick up his own pee if we don’t move him along fast enough. Licking pee is something our dog avidly subscribes to.

Wikipedia says that being soft, dependent, and emotional are feminine characteristics and my dog is all these things. If you count leg-humping as being sexually aggressive, that’s a masculine trait. But if you count leg-humping as flirtatious, then it's feminine. Our dog has a few different styles of leg-humping for different occasions.

The point is if you have a great dog, and I bet you do, I’ll want to ask “Can I pet him” or “Can I pet her” and honestly I can’t tell if your dog is a boy or a girl, so I’m going to have to guess.

And I’ll probably be wrong and you’ll probably correct me, and that’s fine, but I won’t really get it.

I don't think your dog cares. And I think your dog smells great.

I will never make a cross-stitch.

For most of my life if I had guessed which was more likely: talking to a rabbit or talking to a rabbi, I probably would have guessed rabbit. 

Rabbits can’t even talk, I know this because in first grade we did a craft project where we made a puppet of our favorite animal and a sign with the sound they made, and my teacher said I couldn’t make a rabbit because they don’t make sound. 

“Rabbits don’t talk.” she said. 

“But they can scream.” I said. They can, they scream when threatened with death.

Hana Akiyama made this

First grade was a while ago and I’ve still never talked to a rabbit but a few weeks ago I was talking to a rabbi.

Rabbis love talking about life. The rabbi said life, is like a cross-stitch. On our side it may look messy, and we may not understand why things are the way they are. But the reason is that there is another side of the cross-stitch we can’t see, and on that side everything has a purpose and creates a beautiful picture.

I wasn’t that interested in the metaphor. Mostly because, to be honest, crafting metaphors have never done much for me. I appreciate a good hill metaphor any day, and I’m even pretty into laundry metaphors and airport security metaphors, but anything that compares my life to hot glue, sequins, beading, or needlework, just doesn’t really resonate. So I forgot about it completely until last week, when I was at the police department.

Chloe Giordano crafted this

At the beginning of summer I dropped my wallet somewhere in the forest, and considered it more gone than anything else I have ever lost. I lose socks and notebooks just like everyone else but this wallet was gone forever. To put it in crafting terms it was like… a very small piece of felt dropped in a shag rug? I really don’t love crafting metaphors. The wallet was gone. That’s the best way I can explain it.

So I replaced all of it and none of it was even that annoying. I got to learn more about how my bank works and got to visit the DMV, and got to talk with the woman who works at the DMV who told me that someone had broken in that morning and turned the thermostat to 85 degrees and turned all the faucets on. She wasn’t sure who did it. I had a few theories but she didn't think any of them were likely.

I told people that story for weeks, and if I hadn’t lost my wallet I never would have heard it. 

Then, months later, after I’d forgotten about the lost wallet and the new license and the DMV and the DMV sauna, I got a letter that the Portland Police Department had my wallet and I could come to a creepy warehouse and get it.

I didn’t think I would care too much about having my wallet back, since I’d essentially cloned it. But reaching through a weird metal security drawer and holding my wallet again changed everything. 

And suddenly I was incredibly into crafting metaphors, that cross-stitch one especially. Because this wallet had disappeared into thin air, and then months later, popped up in a different place good as new - there was even a $5 bill, a free drink coupon, and two forever stamps still in it. And there was only one explanation for it all:

I am living on the right side of the cross-stitch.

And now I can’t wait to talk to that rabbi because I know we will talk about life again, and cross-stitching will come up, and I can say I know exactly what you mean. I have tasted the other side of the cross-stitch and it tastes like a free drink from Sisters Coffee Shop, that the manager gave me because I was polite to other patrons, and I put that card in my wallet, which I dropped in the forest, and picked up in an evidence holding facility two months later. 

Life is one of my favorite things in the world and if life is what rabbis like talking about than I am into it. 

I would talk with a rabbit about it too if the opportunity presented itself.

Killer whales will break your heart

I like whales, but that’s not news. 

Everyone on earth should like whales. Because they’re amazing and beautiful and smooth, because they sing, because a whale tongue weighs as much as a bus, and because whales aren’t just sitting around waiting for you. Whales aren’t like that.

Whales are the celebrities of the sea. Whales are running errands, falling in love, making mistakes and chasing their dreams, just like you and me, but when we see whales we all scream and take thousands of photos and talk about it for the rest of our lives. We see a whale for one minute and it changes us forever. Whales ARE whales, all of the time. 

Anyone can see Beyoncé or take a photo with her but what’s it like to wake up at 2am and BE Beyoncé and have to go to the bathroom? What's it like to know that every time you've met someone that day has been the most memorable day of their life?

These are questions I would know the answers to as soon as I looked a whale in the eye. So I really wanted to see a whale. A killer whale specifically. 

Last weekend we went up to the San Juan Islands to the Olympic Peninsula or to Washington or these might all be the same place. Our boat captain was Captain Matt and his life’s two-part mission to be charismatic and to find killer whales and look at them. Killer whales! He sat in the front of the boat staring through binoculars like a captain from a Wes Anderson film. I’m happy with any whales but I’d love to see killer whales from a Wes Anderson film.

The day went by really fast. And the further we went into the ocean and the smoother the water got and the more free ginger candies I ate, the more I started to realize that the ocean is gigantic. You guys, it’s huge. The ocean is just this enormous immeasurable thing deeper than ever, and in it are about eighty killer whales.

That's seventy-nine more whales than I even need to see, but still not very many.

So we didn’t see any whales but we did see how big the ocean is and isn’t that something?

As Captain Matt wrapped up our tour he did his best to convince us that we’d had an amazing time. He spent several minutes on the loudspeaker assuring us how much fun we’d had. 

“Remember we saw that eagle? We all loved that. We didn't see any killer whales but remember those seals? Remember when we saw a harbor porpoise in the distance? That sure was something to see. We really did have fun today, we really did have a great, great day.”

The good news is I've had a dormant fear my entire life that some day I'll see a killer whale and it will be so great I'll have nothing else to look forward to and no reasons left to exist. A fear that seeing a killer whale is the nature-sighting equivalent of doing meth, and I'll keep looking for that high again and never find it until one day I'm just lying in a ditch whispering about orcas to myself. That fear seems legitimate.

And the other good news is it seems like there's a small chance that some killer whales might have seen us, and I hope it changed their life forever.

Have you ever seen a killer whale? Please tell me everything.

Have you ever seen the movie Blackfish? I haven't but I want to.

Summer is the worst

It's the time of year where I start freaking out about summer being almost over. There are probably only nine weeks left of it if I'm being incredibly generous, eighteen weekend days and you'll definitely waste four of them so really just two weeks of summer left.

It makes me sad and then I think "If I'm sad, that will be a waste of summer" and that makes me even sadder.

The only thing that makes me happier is taking out the garbage. Because to take out the garbage I have to go down this little locked alleyway behind my building, where two baby birds fell out of a nest a few weeks ago and have just been slowly decomposing. Maybe I was supposed to bury them when I first noticed their bodies, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, and now it's so hot and they're just slowly baking on the sidewalk like the grossest barbecue I've ever seen. 

I have to take wide steps around the birds and then I have to carefully maneuver the garbage can area because ever since summer started half a dozen huge spiders have started building this complicated six-part web, and they're using half the garbage cans as anchor points. You have to pull some Ocean's 12-type moves to navigate through them without any of the spiders freaking out at you, and Ocean's 12 was the worst Ocean's movie and I only like spiders from a safe distance, and after I throw away my trash and walk back through the birds I can't wait for summer to be over and thank goodness there are only pretty much two weeks of it left.

Go to the beach while you can, you guys.