LET'S HEAR IT FOR THE GIRLS!

Bear with me, gentlemen readers. Or, as they say in Washington these days: get over it!  I’m using this blog to salute my sisters.

Hail astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir. Last week they participated in the first all-female walk when they exited the International Space Station and leapt into outer space. Wearing space suits that actually fit (thank you, finally, NASA), the ladies floated in the netherland, changed a battery charge/discharge unit and made history.

Both women boast credentials that are sky-high. Christina, 40, has a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and electrical engineering, a Masters in electrical engineering, and she’s a graduate of the NASA Academy program at Goddard Space Flight. When the Texan returns to Earth in February 2020, she will have completed the longest single continuous stay in space for a woman — 335 days! After debriefing, she will undoubtedly head right off to rock climb and backpack in the Texas hinterlands with her husband.

Jessica Meir, born and raised in northern Maine, is no slouch either. She’s been a professor at Harvard Med, studied penguin behavior in Antarctica, wrote about bar-headed geese who migrate over the Himalayas, and was an aquanaut on the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations. The 42-year-old admits watching space shuttle missions on television amped her ambitions, but her interest in space undoubtedly had “something to do with the fact that the stars shone so brightly in rural Maine.” She speaks Russian, plays the piccolo, enjoys hiking and running, and holds a private pilot’s license.

AWESOME!

Last week the Librarian of Congress announced our new poet laureate. Native American Jo Harjo, 68 and a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, is now the official poet of the United States and will be until next May. She is one of only 15 women named poet laureate in a list that originated in 1937 and includes Robert Frost, Stephen Spender and Robert Penn Warren. 

Harjo, a resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma, said, “It’s such an honoring for Native people in the country, when we’ve been so disappeared and disregarded. And yet we’re the root cultures, over 500-something tribes. I bear that honor on behalf of the people and my ancestors.”

Jo writes beautiful verse (see one of her poems at the end of the the blog). What’s equally cool is that she plays the sax and flute with her band, the Arrow Dynamics, and has toured with them around the world.

DOUBLE AWESOME!

Closer to home, I salute Molly Graham, an energetic and attractive 30-something-whizbang who lives here in Maine and bears an uncanny resemblance to young Cher. At Bates, she ran the college radio station and produced her own show. After graduation, Molly headed to the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and produced an award-winning radio documentary, “Besides Life Here,” that was licensed by several NPR affiliates. She received her Masters in Library & Information Science from Simmons, and used that expertise in running the Wisconsin Veterans Museum oral history project, and later as assistant director of the Rutgers (NJ) oral history archives.  

Currently, Molly is project manager for NOAA’S oral history collection where she collects, preserves and curates oral histories, documenting historical environmental change and its impacts on fisheries, oceans and coasts. The day we met she was on her way to Gloucester to interview a 94-year-old woman (wife and mother of fishermen) on the changes she’s witnessed over her lifetime in coastal Massachusetts.

But the most important parts of Molly’s days focus on raising her two-year-old daughter Charley and juggling schedules with partner John. She “thrives” on every minute of “being a mom and using my education.”

TRIPLE AWESOME!

One hundred years ago women got the right to vote with the passage of the 19th amendment. As the saying goes, we’ve come a long way, baby.

These women not only vote, THEY ROAR. Let’s hear it for the girls!

——-

A poem by Jo Harjo:

THE EAGLE

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.