Monthly Archives: May 2026
The Voyage of the Beagle
by Betsy Mitchell Martinez
Stand next to me and retch over the rail
until our microbiomes sink and merge,
develop shells and pulses, dragging scaled
anemic wonder to the shore. Purge
everything you thought you understood,
the ant, the barnacle, and shout your weakness
to the wind (o stupid dog! o no-good
plodding flesh begetting bile and pique
and paradox). Somewhere, a pointed beak
has learned to relish suffering, to feed
itself on cactus pads and air. A hound
has traveled to the waning moon and back
inside a howl, has nosed the evening’s grief.
It tracks that scent to you, and calls it friend.
https://onlypoems.com/poem-of-the-month/may-2026-form-sonnet
Listening to Joni Mitchell, part two
Not in Order
I’m starting with the first record I heard by Joni, which was Ladies of the Canyon. When I was thirteen, Brother Steve brought it home from Minneapolis, where he attended art school. Home for me was a log cabin at a ranger station near the mouth of Gallatin Canyon, in Montana. Steve was my musical mentor, bringing me song after song because he hoped I’d love them. And I did, though Joni sang a little high for me.
These songs are so personal, a sung diary from a young woman in a magical world I longed for: music, artists, sunshine, longhaired men who were really still boys. A world to walk around in as opposed to getting into a car and driving somewhere, which is what we had to do to reach Bozeman. I was fascinated with boys but fearful of them. No “Morning Morgantown” for me, no rising from a man’s bed and venturing out in the city with my love. She might as well have been singing about the surface of the moon.
Besides, I was notoriously awful in the morning (still am).
The Sad Songs
I loved most the songs I could sing. “For Free” was keyed perfectly for me and it also told that haunting story. I’m sure my family got tired of listening to me crooooon alooooong to this song, as well as “Willie,” which I loved because I could break out the vibrato. Just imagine a thirteen year old girl warbling, “Willie is my chiiiiild, he is my faaaaather,” and then trying to hit the notes for “our love cannot be real.” Really. My parents could be very patient.
As a girl, I didn’t really understand “Conversation,” but an adult, I will tell you that “Conversation” has me shaking my head. It’s like “Poetry Man.” They capture a specific kind of heartbreak, the naive belief that you’d be better for a man than the woman he prefers. He banks the fires of his ego with your adoration, then returns to the woman he loves. Oh, my young heart bought right in, but my adult heart quietly ushers those men right on back to their homes.
I didn’t understand “The Arrangement” either, a song indicting capitalism, which is fine, and she does some interesting things with her voice, some truly haunting pyrotechnic runs that gave her nodes. But it meant nothing to me as a kid and I probably lifted the needle right over this one (remember how skilled we were at that?).
I loved “Rainy Night House” because it told me another non-relatable story, again with lovely vocal agility. It was also keyed low, so I could sing it without straining or offending the ears of my family. “Blue Boy” was another mystery I enjoyed, despite how troubling “roll her in his arms and give his seed to her” was to my virginal ears. As a girl, I thought it was about a statue that came to life, an idea I liked. As an adult I know it was one more song about Joni throwing her love away on a manchild.
The Happy Songs
Everyone knows and loves “Big Yellow Taxi,” and they should because it’s fun and playful and a pleasing antidote the heaviness that precedes it. But that goes right into “Woodstock.” And I’ll tell you, at age thirteen, as I sat there with headphones on and album cover in hand, listening to the lyrics of this song, I understood poetry for the first time. This song’s complex, layered lyrics sent my young mind spinning, enlarging, opening to the linguistic possibilities of metaphor.
“The Circle Game” is a singalong, and so sweet, and ends the record on a hopeful note after all the wooooo, and choral doom, and sad love stories on this record. But I saved the most important song for last.
The Ladies, the Canyon
“Ladies of the Canyon” enchanted and perplexed me at age thirteen. I listened to it over and over, because exactly which archetypal lady of the canyon would I be? Trina, Anna, Estrella, so deftly sketched and yet, so mysterious (as was this canyon of which she sang, I lived in a canyon myself but had never heard of Laurel Canyon or I’d probably have steeled my heart and taken off hitchhiking to reach it).
But back to the ladies. I thought these were the three choices available to me and I wasn’t sure where I fit. Trina was clearly a clothing artist (she wears her wampum beads? Seriously?). But hey, I had a really cool secondhand coat from my Grandma Lucille, so maybe, even though I was thirteen and too tall and curvy and pale and awkward. I started thrifting that year and wore outrageously strange clothing for an eighth grader, but it wasn’t exactly lace and filigree. I understood the look, I just couldn’t quite imagine myself pulling it off.
And then, in the next verse, bless her, Anna sat you down to eat while a horde of extremely fat cats and children twisted around her ankles. I could see this kitchen in my mind, and I liked it, but I didn’t enjoy making or eating most baked goods. I loved cats, but babies? Nope. Not a fan. Also, Anna was clearly the earth mother of the outfit. I was still planning to evade motherhood and I absolutely did not want to be Anna, nourishing, giving, fecund Anna, with her open door and all those goddamned baked goods. Anyone but Anna.
Estrella (Circus Girl) was definitely the most mysterious and arresting, so artistically described with “songs like tiny hammers hurled / at beveled mirrors in empty halls.” But then she was out there sailing seas and climbing banyans. Obviously I didn’t write songs or go on overseas adventures. Somehow I knew, at age thirteen, that I didn’t have the soul of an adventurer and feared I never would. Case in point, I never once ran away from home. But oh, how I wanted to be that woman, fearless and traveled, with her shattering songs and gypsy shawls.
You see how it all came out.
I really hate to break it to my thirteen year-old self, but of the three, I am most definitely the woman with the open door and the plump babies and the flowers on her table. It’s been small dogs over here, not cats. And I am no baker. But I’ll sit you down and feed you whenever you need it.
Retirement and Blooming
Retirement Discussions
So we had our family gathering for Memorial Day on Sunday, and “family” includes a LOT of people in my world. In addition to an incredible menu of traditional cookout delights, the hijinks of seven delighted children, and my beautiful daughters, I was privy to a fervent discussion between in-law and ex about the possibility and necessity of retirement.
My son-in-law’s father (Marty) is pro-retirement (as am I). My ex-husband (K), father of my children, is still working hard at age 67. Marty was trying to encourage K to finally retire. After listening for a while, I joined Marty in reassuring K that he would be fine financially (much more than fine). I mean, if I can manage, he certainly can.
K listened and argued and listed his reasons for putting off retirement again. Marty turned to me in bafflement. I said something like, “You’re right, but K’s refusal to retire has nothing to do with finances. It has to do with emotions. It’s all fear. He’s afraid of losing his identity and security, and no amount of logic can cut through that fear.”
What Not Working Means
I am so incredibly glad to be retired, but I’ve had my moments of free-fall. I was reading this essay by Hugo Dos Santos in LitHub this morning, and realized what he said about being laid off was the same for retiring:
Someone who has just been laid off is someone in the process of disappearing, and they know it, even if they can’t say so. The routines that informed the self are gone. Gone are the title, the inbox, the calendar invites lining up the days. What remains is the stubborn question underneath all of it, the one the routines were so efficient at keeping quiet: Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?
I probably had less trouble with this “Who am I?” question than many, because I might have spent ten hours a day getting to work, being at work, and coming home from work, but I never felt defined by work. I had a career, but it was also just a job. What I did for a living was never my identity. In fact I often chafed at working because I am a person who simply cannot stand to be told what to do. Ever. By anyone. This is the core of my identity, this stubborn opposition to the direction of others.
If you think I’m joking you’re wrong.
So the answer to “Who am I now?” after retirement is “Myself, finally.” But this means I’m my own manager. I’ve had a few good managers in my life, and the best of them (Kathy) understood that I could and would do ANYTHING if allowed to do it without excessive oversight and questioning and nitpicking and bothering. I would power through projects like a draft horse if left to my own devices. I don’t think I ever missed a deadline.
However, as my own manager, I find that I’m a recalcitrant and stubborn employee. I can be a total pain in the ass. I think this could be helped if I gave myself more deadlines. I love a deadline, I love meeting or beating them, I’m like a dog on a track to cross that line. I miss having deadlines. So maybe I’ll work on that. Or not.
Finding that Door
Here’s another passage of wonder and beauty from the essay.
What I told myself, during those years of not writing, was that the conditions weren’t right. That I needed more time. More quiet. More distance from the ordinary demands of a life. That the writing would happen once things settled. Things never settle. What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door. And somewhere within that structure, I had stopped thinking of myself as a writer and started thinking of myself as someone who had, at one point, desperately wanted to be one.Â
Oh that gorgeous line: What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door.
I didn’t do that. I was always writing something. Poems or essays or blogs, even when the urge to write novels dried up. I’d write for work and feel an almost desperate pressure to write my own things instead, but I had those deadlines, you see. So I’d send myself an email with an idea or passage or just a phrase. Then I’d go back to whatever I was doing for pay. When I got home, I’d tap away at my own work. My real work.
This writer discovered that too.
The art happens in the margins between obligations, between the work day and the start of dinner, in the twenty minutes before the house wakes up. Or it doesn’t happen. The desk in the basement is not a retreat from life. It is inside the life.Â
That’s why retirement works for me. Writing was always inside my life, my true identity. Retirement has taken away nothing. Instead, it has opened up space for the parts of my life I’d fit in around the edges of making a living. I understand that it’s different for other people, but it’s beautiful for me, a blooming place where words are allowed to take up the space they’ve always needed.
If you’d like to read this fine and lovely, click below.
How can such a thing exist?
I just read this.
Apparently there is a sizable group of people who collect security envelopes because they love the internal patterns. Read about it here: https://dirt.fyi/article/2026/05/inside-and-outside
The whole idea is absurd and yet, somehow, some way, it makes complete sense to me. Human beings are strange, I tell you. So strange. Please don’t worry, I will not be collecting a new thing. Or if I do, it will not be security envelopes.
Listening to Joni Mitchell in the car – Part One
I’m aware that there are women in this world who don’t care for Joni Mitchell. They’re wrong, to be clear, but today–or perhaps eventually–I’ll address those of us who love Joni. The key word here is “eventually.” First, let’s go on a few road trips.
Port Townsend, Washington
I just wrapped up six weeks of various travels. First, I went to Port Townsend with two friends, Shannon and Katrina, for a writing retreat. In case you’re wondering, they are both writers, and in need of retreat. I drove up the Kitsap Peninsula with Katrina in my old car that still has a CD player. I’d grabbed a stack of options for listening, and asked Katrina to choose what we’d listen to. In there was one of my favorite car-trip CDs, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. I assumed that at some point, my friend would choose Hejira, but she passed it by in favor of Bluegrass, and then of course the best car trip CD of them all, which is Paul Simon’s Graceland.
I allowed a small doubt to percolate in my psyche. Was it possible that Katrina didn’t like Joni Mitchell? I knew such women existed, but had never thought I’d harbor such an individual in my cadre of friends. To be on the safe side, I cautiously sidestepped the entire topic of Joni. I didn’t want to stir the smooth waters of the writing retreat, which was a peaceful, restorative experience that produced progress on the short story to which I have devoted my entire retired life so far.
And there were deer.
Florence, Oregon
My next trip was to Florence, Oregon, where April and I revisited a VRBO in historic Florence on the Siuslaw River, where we’d stayed at a few years ago. I took a really stressful route to Florence because my phone told me to get off I5 at Halsey. As I hair-pinned and white-knuckled my way through the hinterlands of Oregon, music was not an option. I focused all my attention on the road and my white-hot anger at my iPhone for leading me into this mountainous, rural, stunningly beautiful hellscape. I was going to the COAST, I didn’t need all this NATURAL BEAUTY, I just needed to get to the COAST to enjoy the natural beauty THERE.
At some point, my bladder near to bursting, I stopped at a Chevron and said, “I’ll gladly buy something but can I have your restroom key first?” The young clerk handed me a literal Hula Hoop with a key attached. I bought a Poppi. It was far too sweet but I drank it anyway. Poodle Creek Road finally delivered me to the highway I should have been taking in the first place, which I followed just long enough to be stopped for hours by a terrible (fatality) accident. I was four miles from the VRBO and hopelessly stalled. I turned off the car and listened to The Fine Young Cannibals, an old CD I bought right before the trip. It was still the banger I remembered from the years I’d put it on and my then-husband would groan because “Not again, Karen.” I don’t think The Raw and the Cooked, is responsible for him leaving, but “She Drives Me Crazy” might have been a factor.
The time in Florence was fantastic once I finally got there. April and I had fun of the type we’ve honed over fifty years of friendship. Great meals, some shopping and gallery-going, a ridiculously short hike to the Cape Perpetua Lookout, the Yachats rock shop (if you’ve been you know what a wild place that is). April prods me into moving, which is a good thing, and also a little humbling. At the Port Townsend writing retreat, my more fit companions took daily walks and came home flushed and happy. I just sat there, admiring the deer and writing. In Florence, April made me walk. It’s like she wants to keep me around for a few more years or something. I ate my weight in delicious seafood to circumvent her ambitions for my longevity.
Federal Way, Washington
My next trip was up to Federal Way to see Sue at her charming lakeside cottage for some relaxing days of conversation, aggressive thrifting, and crafts. Sue is an accomplished art quilter who crackles with creative energy and bursts with talent. When I visit her, her artistry feels contagious. So even though I have zero crafting talent, I brought a tiny case with some small craft-type materials in it that I’ve been carrying around for twelve years. I swear one of these days I will finish something.
The weather granted us only one sunny day down by the lake, where I read Sue the one short story to which I have apparently devoted my entire retirement so far, and I found all the places where it needed work.
The other days were cold, almost blustery. We kept ourselves busy with days of thrifting, good food, cocktails, and a Ricky Gervais series to binge watch in the evenings while we crafted (if you’re wondering, I embroidered a small part of a praying mantis on a piece of muslin. Go me!).
One day, Sue laid out material groups for a dozen quilts with my input, which (from me) sounded mostly like, “Do you have a stripe you could put with it?” or “Do you have a check you could put with it?” because I love adding stripes and checks to florals. My suggestions were sometimes greeted with “All wrong!” or “Yuck” or “Hmmmm” or “That might work!” or even “Perfect!” I’d send her into her quilting room to look for a specific color, and at one point she said, “I don’t have a fabric store in here.” Then she came out with a bunch of choices and said, “Okay, I do have a fabric store in here.”
Quilters, get set to drool.
It was glorious fun.
This trip was I5 all the way north and south, so I brought a stack of CDs, and many were Joni. For the Roses, Blue, Hejira, Ladies of the Canyon, Clouds, and Court and Spark. I decided to listen in chronological order, which brings me to the actual point of all this meandering introduction. I’m going to talk about Joni. A lot. Prepare yourselves, because I get personal. But because this got so long, and I intend to talk about these CDs in depth, I’m going to stop here and return to Joni another day.
That’s all.
“Karen, you Have a hint about your mother!” No kidding, Ancestry.
Why does Ancestry send me hints about my mother?
No, seriously. Ancestry is clueless as far as I’m concerned. It shows me as married to my dead high school sweetheart, and I have zero idea how to change any of that. My super-intelligent cousins on my birth father’s side are whizzes at genealogy websites and could straighten me out in five minutes, but how stupid would I feel, asking them? They are all STEM geniuses and I only have a shaky grasp on multiplication at this point (and I still say “times tables” and “take away” and “carry”, which causes my daughter to shake her head in consternation when I try to help my grandson with his math homework, and do they even still call it math?).
Anyway.
Clearly I helped myself liberally to the other side of the gene pool, where calculators were a fact of life, and not those expensive programmable calculators used by my more intelligent classmates in my rare college physics classes. The free calculators you used to get at the bank.
But back to my mother.
I thought of Mom this morning for the funniest reason: a taste in my mouth. My memory is often jogged by tastes and smells, and today when I gulped down the handful of prescriptions (three) and supplements (seven) that I take to keep my heart beating and the like, the flavor of one brought back a spill of sense memory. I accidentally bought the chewable B12. When I add water to swallow down this mass of pills, most of which probably just give me expensive urine, I taste that chewable vitamin taste.
This brought me right back to being five or six years old and finding a brown bottle of chewable vitamins in my mother’s bathroom. I was into everything as a child. In her notes, Mom called me snoopy and I guess that’s fair, though I prefer to think of myself as curious. Anyway, I opened this bottle and started eating these vitamins, which had a flavor close enough to candy to keep me going.
I don’t know what type of vitamins these were, or how many I ate. I also told on myself. I took the bottle to Mom. She didn’t take me to get my stomach pumped or anything of the sort. She had me drink a few glasses of Kool-Aid made her way: one packet of Kool-Aid and half the recommended sugar. We drank this to mask the sulfur flavor of artesian well water. I drank some Kool-Aid and nothing happened and life went on.
That was how it was in South Dakota. We were Midwestern children in the sixties, a hardier breed with great teeth from all the naturally occurring fluoride. We survived.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I also wouldn’t want any other mother. Ancestry might have hints, but I doubt Ancestry quite appreciates the balance of my mother as I do. She could be impossible, but she was my favorite person in the universe until I had children of my own. She was mercurial, curious, fascinating, frustrating. I am baffled by how she let me down in my adolescence, but she always loved me, a big old furnace of love.
So here’s a hint about my mother, Ancestry. Mom had her first child at age seventeen. An emotional, intelligent young woman left college, which she started early because she graduated high school at age fifteen, to become a mother. I understand why she felt ripped off. Her adolescence ended with motherhood. I don’t think she was well-equipped to help me navigate mine. She put me on the pill and put me out at age fifteen to make it on my own, a weird remedy or echo or repetition of what happened to her.
I also understand why she grieved when I had my first child at 22. She saw my young motherhood as a curtain going down on my life. As she watched me, I know she felt sorrow, anger, helplessness. But she was resigned to it. She brushed her hands together, considered me done for, and moved any ambitions she had for me over to my childless siblings. There, hope for a meaningful life remained.
A slight sea change.
Over time, Mom realized that I hadn’t exactly shriveled up and died. I’d just reproduced. She also felt a little defensive. Why was I making motherhood look so easy? Why did I do it without complaint or anguish over what I’d given up? I didn’t explain to her that much of this was a facade. Motherhood is a monumental struggle, and my marriage was a lonely, lonely place. I survived with the help of fierce friends like Jennifer and Karen and Sue and Bob and Debi. These people provided the companionship and emotional support missing from my marriage.
But here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s a part of this of which I am not proud. I wanted Mom to think it was easy for me. As children, Mom let us know that motherhood had ruined her life. This was a steady drumbeat throughout my earliest years. “Never have children. They ruin your life.” “Parenthood is pouring from an empty pitcher. It uses you up.” “I could have had a life, if not for you kids. You took everything from me.” I heard this stuff all the time, and felt tremendous guilt until about age eleven.
That’s when it hit me that I hadn’t had any say in the matter. I began to smirk, roll my eyes, and yes, talk back. I actually said, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Which was terrifically snotty, and my brother and sister would look at me like, oh god shuttup Karen, you’re enraging her. But I figured out early that Mom’s truth should not have been spoken to us kids.
My petty revenge.
So when I was a mom, I wanted to shame my mother for how much she railed against motherhood when she was angry. I wanted to show her up. I wanted to glide and adjust and care for and laugh at the hard parts and make it look like a breeze. And I did, until my marriage fell apart. And I fell apart. And I needed help, and let me stress this, as a young woman with a high school diploma and three kids to raise, one of whom needed massive orthopedic surgery during the year a nasty divorce was unspooling, I needed so much help.
My then-husband had taken control of all our bank accounts. When I asked my parents for the funds to retain a divorce lawyer, I apologized. Mom said, “Honey, you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting to write this check.” She happily dashed it off and sent it. This is one of the many times my mother helped me. Mom showed UP. Two decades of financial help and encouragement and emails and phone calls and laughter. All my visits up to Bainbridge with my girls, and her delight at seeing them. Each daughter has specific memories of a grandmother they loved, and who loved them with no reservation.
Was she perfect? Is anyone perfect? Of course not.
Perfection is not part of the human condition.
I’ve done a great deal of thinking and writing about my teen years. When we moved to Montana, I was twelve years old. My life went off track when I was sent out into the wide world at age thirteen to navigate a dangerous environment. My sister and I ran with a rough crowd. I’ve examined all that, not to understand Mom, but to understand myself. I asked hard questions to ascertain the damage done, and heal it enough to live a better life. It would have been so easy to find myself trapped in sadness and anger. My mother was supposed to guide me, help me. She didn’t.
But I had this amazing experience while taking a memoir class with my dear friend Katrina. I wrote a piece that still hasn’t found a home called “The Corner of Skidmore and Haight.” It is an unsparing look at beginning of my second marriage and birth of my first child. Because I took this class from the esteemed and brilliant Martha Gies, it’s full of journalist-level reporting on Portland of 1981-82. Martha made me research the details of North Portland, the arrival of gangs, police misbehavior. But that’s a backdrop for the real struggle, which was two young people, aged 22 and 24, trying to figure out how to be married parents.
In this piece of writing, I played much of it for laughs, because that’s how I handle pain. But the pain is there. Whenever things at the corner of Skidmore and Haight felt hopeless, we survived. How? It wasn’t clear to me until Katrina critiqued the piece. Ever-so-gently, she said, “What impresses me is how over and over again, your mom and dad showed up and helped.”
The proof is right there on the page. My parents might have foundered in my teens, but from my twenties on, they were right there, helping. Over and over again. And they continued to do that until they both finally died.
I don’t think I thanked them nearly enough.
I was in my early sixties when I took this class. I’d been doing quite a bit of examination of my history, trying to understand exactly who I am before I leave this world. Katrina’s words showed me that I had a choice to make. I could focus my attention on the chaotic decade of my young life when Mom had no idea what to do with me, and whatever I needed was lost in the turmoil of her own unhappy life. Or I could shift my focus and appreciate what she did for me after I left adolescence.
You know, it’s like I finally grew the hell up.
So here’s another hint about my mother, Ancestry. There’s no good, no bad, no right, no wrong. There’s just Mom. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I miss you every single day. And thank you for all the days and ways you were there. There are no words for how much I love you.
