A Nana's Journey

New Light

2011-12-12T20:36:00.000-08:00

Introducing our newest family member, granddaughter, gorgeous Calla Ruth, born December 12th, 2011, weighing 7 lbs, 6 ozs.

Calla, meaning beautiful, is a type of lily, which is also a symbol of rebirth and resurrection. The Romans associated the Calla Lily with winter solstice. The lilies bloomed indoors during the darkest time of year and celebrated the bringing of light. Indeed she is a bringer of light, and much joy, to her delighted and thankful parents and grandparents.

It's difficult to see because her hair is still damp and unwashed after her birth, but Calla has beautiful bright red hair just like her father's. I feel awash with a passion of tenderness.

It's a subtle change like the scent of new snow, but I know the world has changed since the birth of this new little girl. I wonder what textures Calla will make of the mosaic around her. Right now she is the heart of life, around whose centre everything else is peripheral. The source of that love is divine, and gathers each of us into its blessedness.

(Calla Lily by Sarah Grangier.)

Jordan's Gift

2011-11-27T15:37:00.001-08:00

Friday I received my first Christmas card of the season, one that has a very interesting and poignant history. The only time I connect with its givers is at Christmas and they always include a little letter telling of their latest family doings. This sounds very ordinary, but it has a far from ordinary beginning.

About ten years ago I was working in the emergency department one summer when late in the afternoon an eleven year old boy was brought in lifeless, the victim of a drowning. Heroic measures were attempted for well over an hour, but despite this, the boy died. As his heartbroken parents gathered his body into their arms, they told me their story in broken sobs. Jordan was their only child. After a number of childless years they had adopted him as a newborn infant. He was the joy and light of their existence. They were very cautious parents and had only just started allowing him a little more freedom. Jordan and his friend were rowing a rubber dingy in the lake when it capsized. For some inexplicable reason he had taken off his life jacket. His friend made it to shore. Jordan did not.

I spent several hours with Jordan and his parents after his death. When his mother cried and asked for blankets to warm his cold body, I brought them to her. When his father asked "why?" over and over again, I gave whatever poor comfort I could. When they asked that I wait until friends brought Jordan's favourite stuffed dog to accompany him to the morgue, I told them I'd wait as long his parents needed. Mostly, I just listened, helpless in the whyfors of such undeserved suffering.

I didn't cry until I was at home, the images of the past evening flowing through my mind endlessly. I thought of that beautiful child, so unmarred and peaceful looking. I thought of how his dark tendrils of damp hair had gradually dried. I thought of his parents' anguish and grief, of his mother's begging, keening wail, "Please tell me this hasn't happened!" I thought of all they must now go through.

Two summers later, I went into work one gorgeous blue and golden morning. I was working in the O.R. and as I looked at my slate list, one name seemed vaguely familiar; a woman to be prepped for a Caesarian section. As I pulled the curtains aside, her eyes met mine. The smile froze on my face. The last time I had seen those eyes was that sorrowing day in the E.R. wracked in anguish over the body of her little boy. She recognized me immediately. Instinctively, she held out her arms to me, and we hugged.

As she was prepped, with her husband now gowned by her side, she told me about their miracle. After twenty-one years of marriage, at the age of forty-four, she was about to give birth to her first biological child. She told me about how difficult it been after Jordan's death, how there had been times when they had felt they couldn't go on, that life had seemed hopeless and over for them. They saw this new baby not only as a promise of a new beginning but also as a precious cosmic gift from Jordan. Their excitement stretched like a tent over a framework of hope.

"Do you know what day it is today?", she asked with tears in her eyes. "It's exactly two years ago to the day since Jordan died." Then she added, softly, "It is only fitting that you are here today. It was meant to be."

I was immeasurably moved, and I stood with a very full heart as the surgery commenced. By now all the staff working the room that day had heard the story, and the hope and good wishes of everyone was palpable. A healthy, beautiful baby boy was born to collective sighs of relief and joy.

At the end of my shift I made a quick visit to the maternity ward. Baby Matthew's mother cradled him in her arms, her eyes shining with happiness. One of his tiny hands was clasped around his father's finger. Both parents faces were alight with love and the amazement of discovery. On the bedside table next to them rested a framed photograph of a dark haired, smiling boy; the big brother that Matthew will only ever know through stories and pictures.

Since that time, once a year, at Christmas, I receive a card from Jordan's family. Matthew is now nine years old, a wonderful, loving child, full of life and normal boyhood joys.

Life can indeed be mysterious. I had only worked in the Emergency Department for a short time choosing to return to my previous position in the Operating Room after only a month. The day of Matthew's birth, I had originally been assigned to another room but a colleague had asked if I would switch with her.

Through the loss of one child and the birth of another, I am enfolded in the love of a family who have been both scarred and graced. Jordan's gift is one of hope.

(Giovani Battista Salvi Sassoferrato, 1685. Madonna and Child.)

Tante Adrie

2011-11-26T09:05:00.000-08:00

(Ariana is delighted to find that Tante Adrie has the exact same initials and last name as her own.)

Gem's Tante Adrie is the only surviving member of his father's birth family, his father's 'baby' sister. At nearly 90, she lives on her own in a little apartment in Haarlem, a beautiful old city about forty minutes by train from Amsterdam. We arranged a Monday afternoon visit for coffee. The logistics involved several calls to iron out the details, as her English is limited and Gem's Dutch only somewhat better.

The day before our visit, our cell phone rang. It was Tante Adrie. Our conversation went something like this:

"Yah, you come coffee (Dutch words). Appel coek. More Dutch words."

"Danku (thank you; one of the few Dutch words I am sure of), Tante Adrie. I'll get Gem for you."

Gem reassures her several times that, yes, we will be there at about 2 P.M.

The next morning the phone rings again. 'Are we coming? I am worried you will get lost." More soothing words from Gem.

We arrive, Gem, Ariana and I, about ten minutes late. Tante Adrie is standing on her tiny flower laden balcony eagerly watching for us. She is tall, big boned, smiling, her brown eyes sparkle with humour. Each of us in turn is engulfed in an enormous hug accompanied by the usual Dutch greeting of a kiss on each cheek. Her words flow in a kindly torrent. Gem picks out about one in four, but is able to make out the gist of what she says, and interprets for me. "We are to leave our shoes outside. We are to sit down. Gem looks so much like his late father, it makes her cry. How old is our beautiful granddaughter? Don't mind the dog."

The apartment sparkles with cleanliness. Elaborate doilies edged with scalloped lace, curtains and tablecloth, all snowy white, contrast with the dark, gleaming wood. Numerous thriving house plants in blue and red china pots vie for space with even more numerous knicks-knacks. Ariana is particularly enamoured of a china figurine of a lady in a pink china evening gown with roses in her china golden hair.

Tante Adrie won't allow any help, and we sit a little awkwardly as she ushers in cups of coffee, plates and forks. A plump apple cake sits in the middle of the coffee table next to a bowl of whipped cream. Orange juice is brought for Ariana. We are just about to tuck in when Tante Adrie folds her hands, closes her eyes and begins to pray. Our names are mentioned in the prayer.

The cake, served with lashings of cream, is delicious. The coffee is dark and luscious. A second helping of each doesn't take much urging. The dog, a fat puggish little creature, named Bepo, waddles over to Tante Adrie, who feeds him bits of cake. Ariana is soon giggling delightedly as he licks crumbs from her fingers, too.

Later Tante Adrie brings out old photos of Gem's father, and of other now deceased siblings, of her late husband, her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, most now residing in Australia. Snippets of stories are told, some understood, some not, but the love and warmth of them, their soul and essence, nourish without precise meaning. The tears and laughter of old forgotten joys and sorrows fill the room. Ariana reads her book for a time, and then wanders around the room delicately caressing various objects with the tips of her fingers.

Before we leave we give her our gift of a box of maple-cream cookies from Canada, and we take pictures. My husband, a big man and 6 ft, 5 ins, lovingly referred to by friends as 'the gentle giant', dwarfs most people but Tante Adrie holds her own next to him.

Last hugs, last kisses ... and last good-byes, for Gem and I both know that this is the last time we will see Tante Adrie. It is a final earthly farewell. I reach over and squeeze Gem's hand for I know his heart is very full. Having lost both his parents, he is once again dancing with the part of himself that holds all the love and sweetnesses of his childhood.

(Tante Adrie and my Gem. I love this photo!)

The Carols of the Birds

2011-11-25T06:37:00.000-08:00

(From Google Images)

Often we walk with the madness of the daily news pounding in our heads. Sometimes it seems like all we hear is the hard news of our human condition, the bleak alarm of journalism. The bloodshed and brokenness breaks the heart. Peace stumbles on crutches. Fields of hope lie fallow. Griefs and forebodings seem to find an easy voice in us.

After listening to the noon news the other day, I went outside with glum forebodings of the world economy screaming in my head. I filled the bird feeders with seeds and nuts and then just stood still for a while in thought. Suddenly I became aware of a sound penetrating the tumult of my inner chatter. It was the loud, exultant wek, wek, wek of jay calling jay. Iridescent flights of deep blue flashed swiftly from tree to tree. Over the unabashed commentary of the jays, high above, something very small warbled and babbled cheerfully. One bird rested on a branch near me and scolded joyfully, proudly.

Once my ears were opened, I became aware of the sounds of birds all around me. It's hard to believe that birds speak only to each other. I think they must also speak to us. They call us out of our brooding numbness. They invite us to join in their ironic affirmations. They must know something we don't know.

Winter denies the ecstatic arias of the songbirds of summer, preferring the diminished recitatives of a chastened goodwill. Yet, these cryptic carols of the winter solstice are song enough to confront the gloom. At that moment, standing in a winter garden, it was enough to join the irrational delight of toughened blue jays screaming of a hope beyond reason. In their persistent carols, I found a moment of transcendence.

Of Books and Being

2011-11-23T23:59:00.000-08:00

(The Painting, 'Reading Young Man' by Ignat Bednarik.)

My very first love was books. As a little girl I hauled books home from our small local library by the wagon load. The primary pleasure of my childhood was reading. I spent hours and hours laying on my bed reading, surrounded by a muddle of books. This is still the kind of muddle I like best.

I believe that books help to develop a sense of individual self. The introverted nature of reading ... you and the book, is part of its power. No one knows what you are thinking as you read. No one can see what changes might be taking place under the surface of your silent repose, and there lies the essence of its transforming power.

A month ago I was delighted to be hired part time at a lovely book store. My primary duty is to help people find the books they are seeking. Sometimes they know exactly what it is they want. Other times they have somewhat, or even a vague whisper of an idea. Besides the physical help in locating the book, many want advice or suggestions, and sometimes they want someone to listen to not only what they are looking for, but why.

This morning I had a young man of about twenty-five come up to me. He was tall, good looking, dressed casually in jeans and a ski jacket. I was a little startled by his first words. "I need to find a book that will teach me how not to be an asshole", he said bluntly. I must have looked a bit quizzical because he immediatly continued, "You see my girlfriend tells me I'm an asshole. She is threatening to leave me. My boss has told me something similar before and even friends. I know its true and I don't want to be that way, so I need a book. Can you suggest something? I don't know where to start."

After this candid confession, he followed me to the self-help section, and we continued to talk. After discovering a little more about him, I made two suggestions: 'Help Yourself' by Dave Pelzer, a book which encourages readers to find hope, courage and happiness by showing ways to eliminate the destructive baggage of their past, and 'Excuses Begone! How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits', by Wayne Dyer.

"I'll take both of them", the young man said, after reading the dust jackets. "Thanks for your help". He then added, "Tell me, what do YOU think is the best way to start being a nicer person?"

Wow.

After a few seconds I replied somewhat hesitantly, "Kindness. Maybe you could just start with being kind. Speaking kindly. Giving small kind gestures."

"Yeah", he nodded.

"Good luck to you", I said. "And you know what, right here, right now, you've made your start."

"Maybe I'm not such an asshole", he said, and smiled for the first time.

The Spirit of Christmas

2011-11-21T10:28:00.000-08:00

Every Christmas season my preparations begin with a reading of Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol'. There is something about Dickens which makes me yearn to curl up by a fire. I want the scent of game pies and thick meaty stews, mulled wine and tangerine oranges. I want to sip egg nog and break off bits of rich, buttery fruit cake with my fingers and pop them into my mouth as I read.

A Christmas Carol is a moral lesson in miracles. It teems and seethes with life. Sadness, fear, danger, loneliness, sacrifice, perhaps none of these are impossible to cope with, but bleak hopelessness, and the cynicism that comes with believing in nothing, are soul destroying.

Dickens hated sham and humbug. False feelings and false friends are endlessly exposed in myriad ways in his work. It's difficult sometimes, with all the rampant consumerism raging around us, to push the trivial aside, and connect with something deeper. The truth of my own intrinsic vitality and vulnerabilty cry out for hope, for communion, for miracles. 'A Christmas Carol' enfolds me in a mystery and compassion which stretches far beyond my own heart.

Christmas, of all celebrations, is a time for real feelings, real friends, real food, and real memories. Scrooge discovered it through the agency of a benevolent spirit. For me, its joy and good will are heralded by the company of a good book.

Inspired by Vincent

2011-11-20T14:13:00.001-08:00

(Vincent Van Gogh, 1853 - 1890)

(Outside the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.)

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised to see the glorious Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam hawking a variety of unlikely products, all bearing the famous name, in its gift shop. Van Gogh butter cookies in tins depicting his likeness, vied for space with Van Gogh umbrellas and Sunflowers pencil cases, aprons and even tea cosies. Vincent's tortured eyes loomed out from all manner of T-shirts in a countless variety of colours. There was something vaguely unsettling or 'wrong' to me about featuring such artistic genius in this way, but I couldn't quite define why I felt that way.

(One of the displays in the museum gift shop.)

Most artists harbour hope that their work will live on after their deaths. However, I was possessed with the uneasy feeling that this kind of commercialism reduced beauty to banality.

Another aspect of me, though, wondered if ingesting Van Gogh cookies is simply revering his genius in a modern, innovative way? Maybe, I thought, if Van Gogh were alive today, he'd be posting images of his paintings on facebook and gathering comments declaring ' 100 people plus, like this'.

My eight year old granddaughter certainly had no qualms about purchasing one of the umbrellas for herself. When I asked her why she wanted one, she said, "Well, I need an umbrella, and when it's raining I may as well have one that reminds me of when I was here and saw all those beautiful paintings he did."

I found her statement full of the purest kind of optimism. I guess in my misplaced elitist way, I had been trying to protect Van Gogh's paintings from a kind of cheap sentimentality. Ariana's words, devoid of my adult cynicism, offered them a homage which had escaped me; that they can be represented in the most mundane objects and ordinary moments of life, and in doing so, continue to enhance the beauty and truth of what that life reflects to us.

(Ariana, a study in beauty.)

Playing Dress-up

2011-11-16T11:56:00.000-08:00

In this day of digital games and virtual reality, it is a joy to see my niece, Hannah, (named after her auntie) engaged in hours long games of dress-up and imaginative play. In turns she is attired as a highlander in a Scotch kilt and cap with a large red tin as a drum; a lady trailing a green velvet skirt, long black gloves and a paper fan; a little red riding hood clad in a red shawl clutching a basket filled with apples and little treasures.

Today she is a Queen clothed in a froth of pink tulle, dripping jewels and a sparkly tiara, the royal mistress of a unicorn tethered to the couch with a silken purple ribbon. We've spent the past hour making little paper crowns for the unicorn and its retinue of ponies. Hannah provides the voice for all. "You may kiss my hoof, Oh Queen," she says, bowing the unicorn to her own majestic presence.

She is a swoop of movement in the way only a child can be. Twirling around me in a lovely curve, chattering pell-mell.

"You are the nicest lady I've ever known in my whole life", she tells me, with the wisdom of five whole years of living. "Except for my Mummy", she adds, matter-of-factly.
"Of course." I say.
"Don't go home. I want you to stay here forever", she begs, her hands entwined in mine.
"My house would miss me," I tell her. "It would be so lonely. "
"Just think if your house started to cry and you went home and everything was soaking wet", says Hannah, this image taking flight in her big blue eyes.

We wave at each other until my last craning glimpse of a little girl perched on the back of the couch, lips kissed to the window, is pressed into memory.

Secret Colours

2011-11-16T09:34:00.001-08:00

Magpie 91
Secret Colours

In lavender mist where shadows creep
A young girl's dreams green and weep.
Her yearning glances can't fill the chairs
with flesh and purple and curtain prayers.
But hope cannot be contained, so
ashen grey sings a rose red glow.
Immortality, a summer blue
enrobes her heart with silver dew.
And faintly golden chairs now gleam
for passion in rainbow buds unseen.

All Aboard ... for 'Toyland Express'....

2011-11-14T06:39:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was asked by Scholastic to write a review of Walter Wick's new book, 'Can You See What I See? Toyland Express.'

This delightful book provides the kind of interaction between child and reading that is an integral leap of physical and emotional joy. Having no grandchildren living close enough to share it with, the four year old son of a neighbour filled the spot admirably. Connor's shouts of glee at finding the hidden treasures of each page were spontaneous and catching. He needed my guidance for some of the items but was able to find many on his own, an act which thrilled him from the top of his red curly head to the tip of his cowboy boot slippers.

Connor's least favourite page was the Toy Maker's Workshop which shows the train in its wooden skin before its painted glory. He rapidly wanted to skip to the next page. His favourite page was the Store Window with its bounty of colourful toys. Personally, I loved "At The Circus' the best. I could almost hear the whirligig music and smell the buttery scent of popcorn.

It seems to me that when it comes to books, children often want a very similar involvement to people of all ages and generations; participation in a wider experience that is not yourself, while at the same time, seeking and sharing the security of the known. Walter Wick's Toyland Express does this wonderfully. Its unique interaction brings a degree of autonomy for the child, as well triggering imagination and creativity.

To learn more about this delightful book, please go to the Scholastic website, here.

(The author, Walter Wick, poses with the circus scene from his newest book.)

The Month of Remembrance

2011-11-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

November smells different. There is more than a hint of winter in the air. It is the scent of wind blowing over the heights of freezing mountains. The faint scent of snow. It is also the touch of decay in the garden and woods. November brings down the leaves and sends the salmon to spawn. We are called to remember. We remember the victims of both war and peace.

This photograph above is of my paternal grandfather, Laurence Maxwell Stewart, taken in 1907 when he was three years old. He was killed in May 1940, one of the thousands of British troops stranded in Northern France after being overwhelmed by Nazi advances. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had asked anyone with a boat to travel to Dunkirk with the Royal Navy to help with the evacuation of these men. Dozens of naval and civilian craft, including paddle steamers, lifeboats and fishing boats, subsequently crossed the channel amid German shelling. Churchill had originally expected around 45,000 allied troops to be rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, but in what he would later describe as a "miracle of deliverance", almost 200,00 British and 140,000 French troops were evacuated between May 26th and June 4th. Sadly, my grandfather was not among them. His body was never identified.

(British war memorial at Dunkirk.)

(My grandfather left behind his wife (Constance) and four children. My father, John, is shown here in 1939 at age 8 with his sister Madge and brother Richard. His youngest sister Vera, was born in March, 1940.)

After the loss of his father, my Dad was never again quite the same exuberant carefree boy. The death affected him profoundly, and something in his spirit was quelled. He has suffered periodic bouts of severe depression his entire life. Even now at age 80, my father's eyes mist over and his voice trembles when he speaks of his father, which is rarely.

We remember the victims of this world, for the fallen in battle are everywhere. There is such a prodigious spending of lives. There is much senseless and unnecessary suffering, so many wasted lives. Uncaring, brutal violence and terrible torment takes the lives of unnumbered victims. Pain stares from too many faces and too many are so very young. There is a sense in which all humanity stands now at the eleventh hour.

Gem and I belong to our church choir here in Kamloops, and we have been practising a poignant, solemn a cappella choral anthem by Pepper Choplin for our Remembrance Day service. It is called, 'How Long', and the verses begin, "How long 'til this world is free from suffering?" "Press on, let faith and hope sustain you." This is one of the most asked questions of faith, and the piece conveys so beautifully our yearning for peace.

Click to hear the choir singing 'How Long'? (It takes about 5 seconds to upload.)

The salmon complete the cycle of their lives by a homecoming that brings birth. In this, there is splendour in the triumph of the new birth which comes from dying. For those who make the ultimate sacrifice in our upstream human struggle, let it be for love and rebirth. May our lives honour them, and the ideals for which they gave their lives.

I dedicate these words to the grandfather I never met.

(I'd also like to thank Alan and Kat for their part in creating a place to tell the stories so that they, too, will not be forgotten. Congratulations on 100 Saturdays of Sepia!)

The Chimes of Westerkirk

2011-11-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

(Ariana and I by Bloemgracht Canal.)

This past August Gem and I had a wonderful holiday in the Netherlands. Gem immigrated to Canada with his parents and two older sisters when he was nine years old. He had never been back to Holland since, so for him it was a pilgrimage of sorts, to his roots. We brought our lovely eight year old granddaughter, Ariana, with us, and her presence added a beauty, a light, and a perspective we wouldn't otherwise have had. I plan over the next months to write the little stories about our time there. This is the first one.

Instead of staying in a hotel, for the first week we rented an apartment in a 17th century row house along the Bloemgracht (Flower canal) in Amsterdam. The house boasted twenty foot ceilings, wide windows overlooking the canal, gleaming black shutters, crisp white scalloped curtains and a wood floor worn beautifully smooth and uneven with the years. The street breathed romance, like old songs and old books.

Our apartment was located so close to Anne Frank house that we could hear the chiming of the nearby Westerkirk every fifteen minutes, just as she had. In the diary she kept while in hiding, Anne wrote about finding the sound so very comforting and reassuring, and how it made her want to both cry and sing.

(Westerkirk, Amsterdam, built in 1620.)

The evening before we visited Anne Frank house, I told Ariana, Anne's story. She was very interested and asked many questions. The next day, as we waited for our turn to view the house, a woman near us reached over and gently touched Ariana's hair, "You know, I think you look a little like Anne", she said.

Once, this canal house on 263 Prinsengracht was the office of Otto Frank, Anne's father, for his spice business. Entering, I’m immediatly struck by the subdued atmosphere. Voices are low. It is very quiet, very solemn. I begin to imagine what it must have been like, living in this eternal dusk ... day in, day out; in constant fear of discovery. Poignant excerpts from Anne’s diary are written on the walls:

(Anne's actual diary, which she received for her 13th birthday.)

11 June 1942

"We will have to whisper and tread lightly during the day; otherwise the people in the warehouse might hear us."

19 November 1942

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."

21 August 1943

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death."

In Anne's room we gaze silently at pictures and newspaper cuttings she had pasted on the wall almost seventy years ago: the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, Ginger Rogers, Sonia Henie, Greta Garbo in Ninotchka. Nearby are the pencil marks on the wall, drawn by her father, noting her growth during her years in hiding. Ariana stands very still. I see tears start to trace her cheeks. I place my arms around her, draw her close to me. "It just wasn't fair, Nana. It just wasn't fair", she whispers.

Later that evening after tucking Ariana into bed with her prayers, I lay down beside her for a while. The silvery melodic bells of Westerkirk start to ring in the summer darkness. As the tones die out, Ariana says in a tender voice, "When I hear those bells, it's like Anne is speaking to me because she could hear them, too." I will never forget the hush and holiness of that moment.

(Ariana 8, beside the statue of Anne Frank outside the house where she wrote her diary, while hidden with her family for two and half years, 1942 - 1944.)

Moore's Symphony

2011-11-07T08:45:00.000-08:00

Hear the wind blowing through the trees.
It dances scarlet graves of leaves.
Spectral orchestra, communes under direction
Of the equal conductor, section by section.

The slabs and headstones all in place
Perched, high and low, named, face to face.
Each one solos its finite story
Long, short or middling inventory.

The symphony plays its stony dirge,
And bone sounds carry and converge,
As blades of grass in supplication
listen to Moore's ghostly ovation.

(Magpie Tales #90)

My Love

2011-11-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

Gem cleared the patio of its bounty of leaves today. Before he did so, I took photographs; A carpet of winged red maple. My angels peeping from gold and scarlet dreams.

He wore his old tweedy, leathery jacket, the one he basically now only wears for gardening and puttering around outside on frosty, nippy days. Occasionally I like to press my face against its scratchy folds as it hangs in the closet. There is something immensely comforting to me about the feel and scent of that jacket. It contains the essence of Gem's strength and manliness, his gentleness and his love. It is chock full of love. Love bursts through its seams in an accumulation; his silly little sayings, his uncomplaining toil, his long arms stretched out for the rake or mugs of coffee. Love, that I have sometimes in my conceit, taken lightly, as my due.

As a leaf raker may pray by raking, a lover may pray by intimate conversation with an old worn jacket.

Fred Dances

2011-11-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

(Dancing sculpture, titled 'Joy' by Bruce Garner, in Ottawa.)

A few evenings ago I attended a local Kamloops Blazers hockey game with Gem and three of our friends. To be honest, I did not really closely follow the action on the ice, preferring to enjoy myself in my own absurd way. I was more interested in observing the other attendees around me. Near me was a mentally challenged man. He was about my age, stooped, very thin, bald, with an oddly elongated head. His jacket bore the name 'Fred' in white scripted letters. Fred clutched a large cup of coffee in one hand and in the other held a noise-maker. The young man seated beside him, obviously his caregiver, frequently reached over and dabbed dribbles of coffee from his chin.

Fred plied his noise-maker enthusiastically and appropriately throughout the game. Occasionally he'd look over and smile at me, nodding and smacking his lips. During the first intermission, Fred opened a small backpack that has been lying near his feet. One by one he removed the contents, lifting each up and showing me the item; a large bar of chocolate, a pen, a pair of gloves, a knitted hat, and a small battered stuffed mouse. I smiled and made a thumbs-up sign, and then rummaged in my purse and showed him the apple I had secreted there. Fred grinned and then pretended to feed the bar of chocolate to the mouse, as his caregiver smiled indulgently.

During the second intermission, the presenter announced a giveaway called 'Dance for your dinner', during which people could stand up in the aisle, dance to the music, and the winner would be given a $50 gift certificate to a local restaurant. As several young people began to dance, Fred observing them, stood up, removed his jacket and shuffled to the aisle a few seats away. As the music blared, this small, elfin figure lifted his arms and began to dance, unabashedly and unashamedly. Then he looked over at me and gestured for me to join him. I smiled and shook my head, but this didn't deter him. He waved at me again, using a broader, more expansive movement. Twenty seconds later, there we were, Fred and I dancing in the aisle together. Beaming at me, he echoed the sign I had made at him earlier, raising his hand in a prolonged thumbs up. My small embarrassment disappeared completely and I just gave myself in to the moment.

Neither of us won the prize, but I am humbled to have been a tiny part of the heart, instinct and courage I witnessed that night. Joy, indeed.

Sisters

2011-11-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

(From left to right, me, Suzanne, Alice and Hannah with Amanda standing behind. The occasion was Suzanne's wedding day on September 10th of this year. Sadly, my sister Connie was unable to attend.)

I have five sisters. There are fifteen years of age between me, the eldest, and Hannah, the youngest. We have very different temperaments, interests, loves, house decor, choices of friends and ways of being. We live, three in different cities in British Columbia, two in Ontario, and one in Quebec. We share the deepest bond of love and devotion and acceptance. In the hum of our busy lives, we are never far from each other's thoughts. We tell each other our happenings, big and small. We gossip. We dream. We tease. We cry together. And, oh how we laugh. They are my greatest friends.

My sisters form the root of my sense of belonging. The picture below was taken one sunny morning in early June, 1965. A set of sisters with their dolls; from left to right, me (Jo) at 8 years old, Amanda 4, Connie 7 and Suzanne 2. New baby, Alice, born in May of that year was in the house at the time the picture was taken. (Youngest sister Hannah was to follow after a seven year gap.) What strikes me now, is how strangely indicative of aspects of our future parenting personalities this photograph portrays.

(Jo 8, Amanda 4, Connie 7 and Suzanne 2.)

As a little girl, I adored babies. (I still do.) I sit with my arms and legs folded securely around my baby doll, whose name was Caroline. When I was a young mother, I was the protective type, at times overly 'hovering'. I worried continually about every aspect of their well-being. Too much so, I realize now. As I grew middle-aged, I became known somewhat as the neighbourhood 'baby whisperer'. There are few babies I cannot calm. Now, with my own grandchildren, that kind of intense protectiveness has mellowed. I have greater serenity and faith. As for my children, my careful cocooning has produced a son who sky dives as a hobby, a daughter who loves her Harley motorcycle, and a son who has the reputation of being the roughest, toughest defenceman on his provincial hockey team!

My sister, Amanda, seated next to me, was the family academic. Her doll sits in the little suitcase beside her. She eschewed dolls and girly toys, much preferring the meccano set she finally received for Christmas one year. Amanda loved mathematics, puzzles, and building forts and hideouts. She is very clever academically, very blunt, and very meticulous. When she became a mother, she and her husband (an equally brilliant academic) developed a plan to create what they hoped would be exceptionally gifted geniuses. Her babies sat in their little chairs listening to Baby Einstein. Everything they came into contact with had a serious educational purpose and meaning. Naturally, they have grown up to become wonderful artsy young people who, thus far, have renounced all formal further education.

Connie, my next in age sister, is sixteen months younger than me, She sits with her doll hoisted in the air, on the move. Connie was the Tom boy of the family, with a love of climbing trees, racing her bike and playing loud, active games . Her fists and tongue were equally fierce. She is a very active, energetic woman. She is also vivacious and witty. Everything she takes on, she does with intense passion. After building her law career and travelling, in her mid forties, she adopted two little girls from birth, eighteen months apart. Her daughters, like their mother, live in a whirlwind of activities ... ballet, gymnastics, piano, french horn, and swimming lessons. She packs the girls up for bike rides and long hikes. They take trips all over the place. I don't think Connie has ever spent a day at home merely relaxing in her life.

At the end of the row, sits Suzanne. It's difficult to see but her little doll is in her hand. On her lap and next to her rests a bunch of dolls' clothes . Suzanne changed her own and her doll's outfits as often as possible throughout the day. Our mother laughs that every time she turned her back, Suzanne had put on something different. Her dolls sported makeup and lavish hairstyles. As a teenager, she filled our fridge with weird home-concocted skin potions resulting in family guessing as to their ingredients. At 48, she has an amazing body and looks many years younger. Her home is as beautiful and fashionable as she is. Despite having four children in five years, she was back into her size 4 jeans within weeks of each birth. Her four children, even as babies, were always dressed in the latest designer fashions, their hair and accessories, impeccable. Of course, her only daughter has grown up to become fashion averse.

Next sister, lovely Alice, was a little girl who loved to draw flowers and hearts on herself and her dolls. She adorned her dolls with paint and poised them, naked, like sculptures in her room. Her children were allowed much freedom of expression. I once accompanied Alice and her son, who was then about three, out for an ice cream. He was dressed in a ballet tutu and gum boots, and had felt pen doodles all over his body. Alice is a gifted artist who runs a successful home decorating business with her partner, a painter. She is also one of the funniest people I have ever known.

My gorgeous baby sister, Hannah, recently celebrated her 40th birthday. A child possessed of a huge imagination, her dolls were elaborate props as she acted out characters from books. When she was eight, Hannah became Cinderella for an entire summer! She insisted on wearing rags and set herself all kinds of weird and wonderful chores to do. I was visiting home one day (I was married by this time), and was astonished to find her on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor with a small brush! She was a very determined little girl and once she had set a goal, she accomplished it. Hannah now owns her own very unique dance studio in Ottawa, and is also the author of a wonderful series of books which are used in many schools as a resource guide for part of the physical education program. Hannah parents her three year old son with loving imagination and intelligence. She is the most consistent parent I know.

I sometimes think that the hearts and voices of my sisters are like the sea. They break the surface on a calm day, leaving gentle ripples like those of a diving duck or the wake of a distant passing ship. And when heavy wind brings the sea to shore with the steady throb of crashing breakers, they gladly shoulder the salt-sting and offer their own shelter and peace from the storm. Each brings her own special brand of solace and joy.

Hearth and Belonging

2011-11-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

Since my visit to the Secwepemc pit house the other day, I find myself thinking about the meaning of hearth. As I sat by the fire, something ancient seemed to be speaking within me. I felt myself strangely at home. It was a feeling of being inscribed upon the earth, of being grounded and centered.

There is something deeply elemental about being seated before a fire. Perhaps it is the connection to a primal way of staking a claim for habitation, of being warmed in body and spirit, of being open at the heart to the beyond. I think we have a continual need for rites of renewal. For intrinsic to our story is the presence of incarnate life, of down-to-earth embodiment of the sacred.

Charlotte, the elder I met that day, poured tea into small cedar ceremonial bowls. As she sipped hers, she made a deep, satisfying sound in her throat ... a kind of cross between an 'ahhhhh' and a gurgle. As she did this, she nodded and gestured at Gem and I to drink. As I did so, a smile briefly crossed her wrinkled, lined face.

The poet, David Wagoner, says:

'If your heart stutters with pain and hope
bend forward over it like a man at a small campfire.'

Life is best when centered around a hearth of communion. From this kindred warmth we feed one another.

Verismo

2011-10-30T16:28:00.001-07:00

A living tree is taken so I may give birth
to words on paper, and yet today
I see only Rorschach splattering ink on the wall.

"I see a sleepless angel"...
"I see a clumsy lover"...
"I see a girl crying in a Rowan tree"...
"I see Mary calling out for grace".

but my fingers are still.

Holy Smoke

2011-10-29T20:10:00.000-07:00

This afternoon Gem and I made a wonderful visit to a local Native Museum and Heritage Park. Located on the banks of the South Thompson River, there are more than a kilometre of trails leading through the archaeological remains of a two thousand year old Secwepemc village. This major archaeological site includes a cache of over fifty unique lodges. It also features four authentically reconstructed winter pit-houses.

I spoke with a remarkable eighty year old aboriginal woman, an elder, whose stories both enthralled and captivated me. She told how in the old days, as a little girl in her village, there was always a welcoming fire. Everyone shared what they had in a circle around the flames; smoky morsels of fish and wild meat, bannock, tea. She said, too, how when you saw smoke rising from the huts, you knew you were welcome, that it was not too early to make a call on your neighbour. The whole village was blessed with a mingling of the smoke from the many fires of the community. Nowadays, she said, sighing deeply to express her sorrow, nowadays, you hardly see any smoke, and people are too busy to visit their neighbours.

There was a time when smoke communicated the presence of the holy. Where there is smoke there is fire, the fire of the scared energy at the heart of life, the hearth of creation. The first peoples of this continent experienced the communion of the sacred sweat lodge and the vision sleep ... ecstasies induced by the smoke from ritual fires. Even now, when I see smoke rising from a bonfire of fallen maple leaves or I get a resinous whiff of alder smoke from a fireplace, I sense the benediction of a spiritual, fleeting presence.

"For my days", says the psalmist, "pass away like smoke." Sometimes it's a holy thing to allow ourselves to be transformed, to be absorbed into the very air we breathe, the apparent nothing which is everything.

Clothed Body and Soul

2011-10-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

I gather the velour infant sleeper , the little red fleece hoodie, the small Canucks hockey jersey, and the brown Carhart overalls that my oldest grandson, Darian, loved so much and insisted on wearing until the straps literally dug into his shoulders. All are outgrown now. They contain memories as palpable as the fabric between my fingers as I fold them neatly. Each recalls a time-woven tapestry of the three years when two of our grandsons lived with us.

I remember buying Mattias that orange sleeper with the man-in-the-moon decal over his heart during that first harried week as we frantically readied a room for the boys. It speaks to me of those early days after they had arrived beautiful, beguiling and a little bewildered, at three and half years and six months old. I took this picture of him wearing them, sweetly sleeping in the borrowed crib Gem had scrubbed, in the bedroom where the sky-blue paint still smelled new and looked unfamiliar. How full my heart was that first night five years ago.

I remember the joy on Darian's face when he chose the little hockey jersey, how he clutched it to his chest, his face beaming. My fingers linger over the small red hoodie, and I joyously recall Mattias, at age 14 months, lying on the grass at our summer cottage kicking his legs in beatific delight.

Parting with my children's outgrown clothing is a ritual which has always given me bittersweet pangs. Over the years, some I have given away, some I have donated to a women’s transition house where sometimes mothers and little ones show up in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Yet others, I can’t let go; the first tiny pink dress purchased by her Daddy for our daughter Sarah-Beth when she was born, The cub scout shirt with its rows of badges so proudly earned by my eldest son, Nicholas. The penguin sweatshirt belonging to my younger son, Joshua, which he loved into faded shabiness. He wore it until the opening would no longer stretch over his head and the sleeves were only a little past his elbows. I remember his words when he solemnly accepted the fact that he just couldn't wear it again, "He was a good penguin, wasn't he, Mummy?"

All these items are imbued with the souls of my children. I place them back into my memory box, adding to them the few items now outgrown by my grandsons. The freshness, sweetness and fragility of their history reach down to the very marrow of my bones. They are strewn with the songs of yesterday; tunes of dawning faith and promise and unblemished hope. They still possess the power to both nourish and elate.

Emily and Me

2011-10-23T18:16:00.000-07:00

Through an aisle of waving grasses and woodland wildflowers, I approach the high bench where I plan to sit quietly for an hour or so, gathering scattered pieces of myself. Resting at the crest of a hill I sit overlooking Mt. Peter and Mt. Paul, twin mountains guarding the Thompson River which floats like a curled blue ribbon on the earth.

The boards feel warm against my thighs. I carry with me only a pen, a journal, a bottle of water, and the buzz in my head. I sit with my back against the bench and my face to the east, where the yellowing grasses are hazy in the afternoon sun. I draw in a deep breath. Not for the first time, I think of how fortunate I am to live only a short five minute hike from this stunning vista.

Although I can’t let go of language entirely, I do manage to sit for a long spell in a wakeful hush. I keep my eyes open because I wish to see the stillness, not escape from it. The panorama I see is hardly wilderness, and yet every blade of grass, every bird and twig courses with a wild energy. The same energy pours through me. Although my body grows calm from sitting still, I rock slightly with the slow pulse of my heart. My breath and the clouds ride the same wind.

I think of the the way humpback whales breach the sea with a snort from their blowholes and a wave of their flukes, and I remember how the water erased all signs of their passage moments after they dove again. Is that how it is for us? Do we slip crying breath into this world only to disappear, all traces lost when our time is done?

Physically gone, yes. But what about the soul? The heart? The essence of the beloved. Memories float in and out of consciousness; now gentle, now raging, now yearning. Images of an old wooden boat which has slipped away from its moorings and come to rest against a green and purple shore ... of a water lily climbing serenely toward the surface of a pond ... of a fallen leaf turning round and round on the river ... of a rippling wave dancing its way into existence and spreading out in slow circles until it kisses the shore.

Sometimes I, a woman in her fifties, sends indulgent love to the girl in her twenties I once was ... unblemished, dewy, radiant love. Am I no less that girl because my body has grown older? She lives within me still; just as vigorous, just as throbbingly awake. Her blood is mine. Her bones. Perhaps in some strange way, I express her more purely now because I am kinder, gentler, more loving with myself than I was then. I understand the things I did then better than when I did them.

There is no absolute stillness in death. Even the dead yield their substance in the stories of who they were, in the love bestowed, in the bone-memories of those they touch.

My thoughts drift to my recent visit to Ross Bay Cemetery in Victoria where I knelt in the grass next to Emily Carr's grave. A much loved Canadian artist and one of my favourites, my visit was a pilgrimage of sorts. The impact of her work is still plain to see today as her gravesite is scattered with sketch pencils and paintbrushes left by adoring lovers of both her paintings and her prose. Nearby rises a stone marked with these words of Emily's, written almost a century ago:

“Dear Mother Earth, I have always specifically belonged to you. I have loved from babyhood to roll upon you, to lie with my face pressed right down onto you in my sorrows. I love the look of you and the smell of you and the feel of you. When I die, I should like to be in you, uncoffined, unshrouded, the petals of flowers against my flesh and you covering me up.”

Me too, Emily. Me too.

October Gratitude

2011-10-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Here, in this deeply wooded land, I have a ringside seat to all this season holds. Each day the colours intensify. Less green, more gold and lemon, rust, orange and deep red.

Sometimes I stand rapturously with my mouth open in wonder. I wander around in a dream-like state, thinking of superlative adjective after adjective, a successive seasonal litany. The children I encounter on my daily little walks romp in a glorious shuffling of boots and fleece jackets. They gather pine cones and clutch reddening leaves in their hands.

I took my five year old grandson, Mattias, for a walk in the park on a crisp October afternoon. Following an old ritual I recently read about, I told him to gather the five most perfect autumn leaves he could find, and that each would represent the giving of a perfect day to someone he loves. The collecting done, we stood holding our bounty on the pier overlooking the river. One by one he tossed them into the rippling water, calling out the names ... "Daddy, I wish for you a perfect day! Nana, I wish for you a perfect day!" The delight of the afternoon is as sweet, as spicy, as fragrant as a Macintosh apple.

October is a time of the fullness of ripening. Seed pods hang swollen from the memory of their petals. The orchards and fields lie bloated in their excess. Pumpkins and squash rise among their slow leaves and show their thick skins to the paling sun. Cool mornings ride on the hot air balloon of Indian summer afternoons. My arms take turns in wool and skin.

This, too, is the season of fragility. I think maybe wholeness is possible only when we embrace our fragility. It is a paradox, perhaps, that the only way to really be fully alive is to open your heart to all your life contains ... the sad and poignant and hurting, too. My heart often feels wrung, as if all the grief and joys of my life are stirring together in one large lump in my throat.

I always take pleasure in finding an apple on which birds have fed. We all make our mark on the things we touch, and the curves and arabesques of the birds’ beak is a signature to its hunger. Writing is like that for me. It is the food I carve my name upon. I feel much gratitude this October day to once again possess the strength to write.

Postcards from Jill

2011-05-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

It was not my intention to allow almost three months of time to pass by since last writing here, but sometimes circumstances conspire against us, and thus it has been so for me. If you think of a blog as being a kind of lens, then each post can serve as a facet, reflecting a shard or sliver of time. The time accrues like bog moss, each layer pressing the preceding into a nutrient-rich mass of fertility and decay. The ghost of my blog has been haunting me, urging me to till the neglected soil and sow more seeds of time.

Have you ever noticed that some people are rather like the litterbugs who throw a little piece of garbage out of their car window as they drive by? They toss their words like empty, crumpled up wrappers. Sometimes we’re clumsy, insensitive beings, we humans.

Last evening I was at a meeting held at my church to discuss the recent publication in our weekly bulletin of a number of very negative comments about the music provided by our church choir, of which Gem and I are members. Almost the entire twenty member choir, along with our director and pianist were present as we sat around a table together and struggled to come to terms with not just the hurtful remarks, but also the fact that they were published in such a public manner.

Apparently the negativity really only came from a half dozen people who think that the choir is too traditional and should provide a more contemporary selection of music. However, the manner in which their views were aired falsely implied that they reflected the views of the congregation as a whole. I believe that constructive criticism is an important part of dynamic growth, but our wonderful music director had never even been approached to discuss this issue. The first he or any of the choir members heard about this dissonance was just before the service on Sunday when we read the bulletin which is distributed to everyone as they enter the church.

We were urged at the meeting not to take the comments personally, but truthfully they did feel very personal to us, we the members of the choir who devote two and a half hours every week to practice. The function of our choir is to be a part of what the congregation offers to God in its liturgy. Each week we give of our hearts with joy as we sing, striving to do just that.

As the meeting dwindled to a close, I was feeling a little down. One of the choir members, who along with her husband, is blessing Gem and I with the lovely gift of their new friendship, reached over and handed me six beautiful old postcards. “I found these today and thought they might inspire you in your writing”, she said. As I looked through them, two scenes each by Monet, Gauguin and van Gogh, I immediately felt warmth and succour course through my being. Her little act of kindness was such an affirmation of true beauty and holiness.

The paintings in the postcards shine with imagery that pays homage to the whole person ... soul, mind and body. They make me feel as though I want to take off my shoes and lie down in them. Perhaps my favourite amongst the postcards is the beautiful bridge scene titled ‘White Nenuphars’ by Claude Monet. I have always loved bridges. To me they embody possibility and hope, and so, too, a sense of mystery.

During the meeting my new friend shared how profoundly the words of an old hymn had suddenly filled her when she awakened to see the sunrise from her hospital window after surviving critical heart surgery last year. “Awake my soul with the sun ...” Her words served to help remove the sting of the other careless words.

Sometimes life is beautiful. Sometimes achingly so. To keep seeing and hearing and breathing in gorgeousness wherever it graces us, despite our personal pain, is to be open to the full breadth of life.

Northern Reflections

2011-03-06T11:30:00.000-08:00

The Northern Lights, interpreted by the Tlingit of Alaska as the dancing of human spirits, came alive for me in a glorious concert Gem and I attended last evening. We accompanied lovely new friends to a concert given by the Thompson Valley Community Orchestra. Themed 'Northern Reflections', it featured gorgeous music from Norway, Finland and Russia; Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg, Gustav Holst, Nicholas Rimsky-Korsakov, Peter Tchaikovsky, Alexander Scriabin. The guest pianist was a brilliant, passionate twenty-one year old young man named Clinton Denoni, who last year won the Canadian composer's class at the B.C. Festival of the Performing Arts.

The music, under the direction of the wonderfully talented Norris Berg, came alive in banners of unfurling green light, each note possessing its own geometry of grace. I felt nourished as I listened, my soul fed. I could feel the distinctly Northern reflections of each piece; music seeking the kaleidoscopic transformation of the ever-shifting beauty of mountains, of snow, of liquidity and ice, of dark and light.

It occurred to me as we drove home, that the whole evening was a form of prayer; an intimate dialogue, gathered and given. For just as a dancers pray by dancing, and musicians pray by playing music, we human beings have a continuous, ongoing need for prayer through the rituals of communing.

(Clinton Denoni, wonderful young pianist.)

Towards a Boundless Home

2011-02-25T12:40:00.001-08:00

(Caribou, by Dietrich Maune.)

After a faint glimmer of spring last week, we are once more in the full throes of winter. Everything is covered in a fresh dusting of snow. It is also very cold ... the wind chill factor makes us a bone chilling -17 degrees this morning!

I received an Art card today from my oldest grandson, Darian, who is seven and a half years old. It depicts the beautiful 'Caribou' by Dietrich Maune. In it, my grandson writes: 'Hi Nana and Papa. I am learning to cross country ski and I did good. It was fun. I think I saw a caribou. He was hiding in the trees. I saw his tracks. I love you. When you come on spring break I will give you a BIG BIG HUG!!!!! Love from Darian M. XXXOOO

Thus, two first time hand-written communications this week! Each sent from two different cities in two different provinces from my two oldest grandchildren, who are a month apart in age.

Darian is the kind of little boy, who, when something interests him, will learn reams of information about it and then relay it to you in detail. Presently, he is very interested in caribou (reindeer). When I spoke to him last week, he was filled with all sorts of fascinating facts: "Nana, did you know that caribou have special valves inside their noses which close off so they can't breathe in bugs?" "No, sweetheart, I didn't know that," I tell him. He relates more impressive facts, and I find myself hoping that he'll always retain that inquisitive sense of wonder and thirst for knowledge. I picture him searching for the exact, perfect caribou card to send, and I smile.

I have never seen a caribou in the wild. To share a cross-country ski path in the woods with these remarkable animals is obviously a magical, exciting thought for Darian. I find myself thinking about how the Aboriginal peoples must have felt about the presence of caribou on their land. When a hunter grasped a handle made of polished antler, when a child was given a pair of moccasins stitched from the hide, they must have felt a direct gratitude passed towards the caribou in a bond of place, animal and culture. That bond would have been felt deeply, as a form of love that can only be imagined today.

For caribou, roaming is an act of survival. For our human culture, survival seems to be connected to keeping within safe bounds. My life overflows with examples of how I limit myself, how I define my concept of place tightly. I feel a frisson of regret flow within me.

Thankfully, our minds don't need to be as limited as our bodies. Perhaps Darian only imagined seeing the caribou as he skied because he wanted to so badly. But real or not, how wonderful that the meanderings of our minds are not anchored in the logical brain. We have the ability to create the whole concepts, complex visions and stories which ignite our souls. I pray nothing ever stops my grandson from following the tracks of his heart towards a boundless home.

(Darian, in wide-eyed wonder at the Children's Science Museum a few years ago.)

Magpie 54: Greening

2011-02-22T14:30:00.000-08:00

Greening

The empty spaces

Wear a green

Mist as thin as a

Hummingbird’s wings.

I stoop in verdant garb

Shaped for bones

Far more elegant

Than mine,

Placing pieces

Of greening shapes

Imperfectly.

Still, poetry doesn’t

Make substance

Of devotion

Without a flaw

In the dance.

(Please go here for more Magpie Tales.)

'Starry Night'

2011-02-21T09:55:00.000-08:00

('Starry Night' by Vincent Van Gogh.)

In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo: "I need a starry night. Often it seems to me night is even more richly coloured than day."

There was a vast, starry sky here last night. Somehow, when I look up into such a sky, I feel I can forgive humanity anything. It’s the cosmos as far as can been seen inside my head. It’s as though everything that I haven’t read and everything that I haven’t written and all the poetry I haven’t composed catches fire like a comet. My soul stretches out to infinity.

This morning I am pouring over the very first handwritten letter I have ever received from my my seven and a half year old granddaughter, Ariana. It arrived this morning in an eggshell coloured envelope pressed with heart-shaped stickers. “Dear Nana and Papa,” it begins, “I miss you. I looked at the stars with Daddy and he said you can see the same stars to. I sent you my love and a kiss. Did you feel it?”

I am awed by the synchronicity. I suddenly remember the night many years ago, when Gem scooped our three year old son, Nicholas, from his bed and carried him wrapped in a blanket, outside. There we stood in an inky darkness punctuated by countless twinkling stars. Nicholas, awakened to a new sense of dreaming, stretched an arm out towards the sky. That was only the first of many star-watching sprees shared between father and son. Now, holding in my hands tangible proof that this unalterable language is being bequeathed from my son to his daughter, I am filled with immeasurable tenderness.

I trace my fingers along the silver frame of my most recent photograph of my granddaughter. Ariana, woman-of-the-future, her face molded in lines of shining beauty. With my breath, I place verbs of love into her eyes.

'Hear Ye! Hear Ye!'

2011-02-18T10:19:00.000-08:00

We often walk burdened with the daily news. In the eighteenth century, the town crier rang a hand-bell and called out, “Oyez, Oyez!” before making the proclamations which let people know of new happenings. Oyez is an Anglo-Norman word , and means “Hear Ye! Hear Ye!“. Its more literal meaning is ‘listen’, and is a call for silence and attention.

Present day journalism often seems reduced to a kind of pabulum. We are spoon-fed like babies, tasteless, uninspired gruel. At times hard news is reduced to cheerful babble. This chastens and diminishes all of us.

Esteemed and delightful bloggers, Martin and Clare, have launched a wonderful new venture; Poetry24, a place where we might express in poetry our various thoughts, forebodings and emotions regarding current, topical news. To have a place to cry out in poet’s voice our bleak alarms, our ecstatic arias, our philosophical musings regarding the news stories happening both in our individual communities and our collective world, is a gift.

Thus, please go to Poetry24. Join in the ironic affirmations, the cryptic carols, the bell-ringing cries. Read, listen, and when you feel moved to do so, write, comment, proclaim!

(Pictures taken from Google Images.)

Magpie 53: My Salt of the Earth

2011-02-15T15:29:00.000-08:00

My Salt of the Earth

They flavour my days

with morsels of reflected reverie.

I scan their feasts,

see myself enter a vast

repast. Tip of tongue

touching salt from pebbles

tossed into the sea.

When images loom,

I cherish their eccentricities.

Faces of ghosts, flaming leaves,

flaunting facets, shaking

sense and symmetry.

I honour these grimacing,

grinning grains.

I consume of their hearts,

swallow of their breath,

eat of their tales.

drink of their joys.

lick the salt of their tears.

And my fingers call their

dreams to my table.

(Go here for more Magpie Tales.)

Dance of February

2011-02-15T11:10:00.000-08:00

Today is all glitter and sunlight and blue shadows. Swells of the sheerest intimation of winter transition quivers in my bones; a tune that teases memory but can’t quite find the words.

After waving goodbye to my parents, who have been visiting for the past week, I hasten to go for a walk. There are melting pools of snow everywhere as the temperature soars to 8 degrees above zero. For the first time in months my body feels an inkling of spring. It registers in my legs, my brain, my heart.

The snow has separated into bone-shaped islands. Blonde grasses peek out everywhere. I stop and eat my apple on a small bridge while looking out at the thawing skin of the river. I knew I was weary of the winter crust on my world, but I hadn't realized quite how much until I feel the glad leap in my heart.

On my way home, I run into my neighbour out walking with her two little ones. Ben, aged three, scampers ahead, stamping his little boots, mittened hands pawing the thinning snow for treasure. Not having seen her close-up since the autumn, I am astonished at how big baby Ashley has grown. Fat, dimpled, pink-cheeked, she grins at me, revealing two perfect pearly teeth. I issue an impromptu invitation for lunch, and am accepted.

We unwind scarves, remove snowsuits, undo boots. I pass the baby to her mother, a soft, plump burden of love, and then seek out the box full of little toy cars for her brother. I bring out, too, the big Noah's Ark with all the animals. Ben finds this fascinating. Soon giraffes and lions, sheep and elephants, jostle for position in the ark alongside myriad little cars. Baby Ashley gums and drools on a sculpted plastic camel.

I chat with Anna as I add a mixture of sauteed scallions, dried apricots, roughly chopped almonds, and a diced Granny Smith apple to rice cooked in chicken broth. Ben would prefer a grilled cheese sandwich, and this I prepare as I sear scallops in garlic butter to serve with the rice.

Anna comments on a garden plaque resting on the Welsh dresser. It reads 'My Secret Garden'. This I bought the other day because it called to me, partly because The Secret Garden was one of my favourite books as a child, and partly, because I think each of us possesses a secret garden of self which just needs the right conditions to unfurl. We all need light and warmth and watering tears and tender hands. Once the snow disappears completely, I will place the plaque outside.

As we eat and laugh and sip tea and savour the antics of the children, a wave of feeling rushes over me. The dance of February; slowly releasing the soil, stretching the spiralling buds ... thwarting the breath of winter, not just in nature, but in we human beings, too.

Magpie Tales: The Piano Teacher's House

2011-02-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

The Piano Teacher’s House

Floors of hardwood, high ceilings,
white curtains, candlesticks on the
brick hearth, clock ticking in dark
wood. Glass bowl of seashells.
No shouting here. No stale beer smell.

She waits for her turn making
up stories for the pictures
lining the room. Babies in white
dresses, men in uniforms,
women in plumes and velvet.

The green house with the piano
converts black insects into
music. She plays them into
gilt-edged pages of incense
breathing secret beauty.

Too soon, in the car, sitting
next to her father, not talking,
eyes closed, trying to keep
the piano teacher’s house
humming inside her.

(Go here for more Magpie Tales.)

Musings on a Monday

2011-02-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

Today is a day for hand-knit woolly socks. Willow, lover of all things wool, if you’d like a pair, email me.

Yesterday, I day-dreamed of daffodils and tulips while snow fell in fat feathery flakes all day. There are times when yeast and champagne are lifeless, and you feel as fermented as a rotten apple. Crisp, juicy flesh gone. A dry ache and a hungry want left. The want I have is for spring.

Usually, the first thing I do every morning is make my bed. Call me weird, but I actually enjoy this daily ritual, as well as the weekly changing of the sheets. I prefer my bed linen in shades of white, ivory and cream. There is nothing quite like the luxury of sleeping in good Egyptian cotton sheets (bought at a greatly reduced price at an outlet store in Vancouver).

This train of thought brings me to words by Rupert Brooke, a handsome young English poet who died during the First World War, at the age of only twenty-eight. His wonderful poem, "The Great Lover", details the many splendid ways that life seduces us with the simple beauty of the ordinary, and contains these words:

"Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon,
Smooth away trouble ..."

That Rupert knew what he was about. Handsome young lad, too.

Gem and I have been on the lookout for a smaller, older heritage type house to buy. We want one that doesn’t have to be completely gutted, but needs some love and restoration. Ideally we'd like one with a small back yard, a few mature fruit trees, on a nice tree-lined street, and within walking distance of the lovely downtown core, our church, and beautiful Riverside Park with its wonderful beach and outdoor summer concerts. We'd also like a few Arts and Crafts period details; wood wainscoting and moldings, hardwood floors, arched walls, stained glass. Plus, I've always wanted a front porch! This may prove hard to find, but dreaming is always permissible and we're not in a hurry.

Sunday afternoon, despite the snow, we went thrifting. I scored big: a 1953 Burleigh Ware commemoration Toby jug of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. It was reduced to $9.99 from $14.99 and is in immaculate condition. Once home, I did a little research on the internet and found it listed on a New York site for $600, and one in London for 289 pounds! Truthfully, it’s rather odd looking ... but in an ugly-lovable kind of way.

Afterwards we went for coffee and cheese scones at a nearby coffee house. There, I overheard a woman say to her friend, "Do you know what I want more than anything? I want my old tits back!". This made me smile. Gem wondered if she meant she was unhappy with breast implants. I thought it more likely she was referring to pre-pregnancy perkiness!

From my window I am looking at a pearly grey sky. The colour grey appeals to me, or perhaps I should say the full spectrum of grays, from pearly pigeon-breast grey to ashy or granite grey to weathered cedar-plank grey. I love a leaden pewter sky. I delight in a cloudy, foggy, or mist-ridden morning. I am reminded that after all, winter’s monochrome has its own beauty.

Even when the heart is yearning for spring, magic is everywhere we look, if we have the eyes to see it, and the wits to comprehend it.

I hope this week brings such to you.

The Pink Cape

2011-02-05T01:33:00.001-08:00

(Jo, aged ten years old, 1967.)

Spring in my family meant new spring clothes; a dress or two, new shoes, and a spring coat. Usually the clothing was sewn by my mother, and although I’d see the pattern, and glory in tracing my fingers along the fabric, my sisters and I would only have glimpses of the garments until they were almost finished. Sometimes I’d gaze in wonder and growing anticipation at the little heap of shapes on my mother’s sewing table.

She had a small sewing room right off the kitchen at our house. My bedroom was directly above it, and often I could hear the whirring of the sewing machine at night when I drifted off to sleep. It was a lullaby that always made me feel loved.

My mother was happy when she sewed. "You’re going to love it", she would say, smiling, "As soon as I saw that material, I knew it was exactly the right shade to bring out the green in your eyes." Or, "Princess Anne has a dress just like the one I‘m making you. I saw it in my magazine." In a trifling, I’d imagine myself in my new dress, feeling beautiful as the material floated around me.

The year I was ten years old, my mother sewed me a cape for my new spring coat. It was of pink Melton cloth with a darker pink silk lining and magenta buttons. I hated it! I had expected a coat. The picture on the front of the pattern had showed three figures. My eyes had fixated on the two in coats, barely noting the one girl wearing a cape. No one in my class wore a cape. Nor did anyone else I knew.

My mother, as she measured the hem line on me, knew immediately that I didn’t like it. I also knew I would have to wear it anyway. That didn’t stop me protesting, though. My disappointment came flooding out in a litany of grievances:

"Nobody wears a cape. Nobody!"

"Everyone is going to laugh at me."

"Couldn’t I just wear my old coat?"

My face burned with dislike, and also with shame at having offended my mother.

I wore my cape to school for the first time, filled with mute despair. I tried to carry my satchel strategically front of me, and place my arms in such a way that it hid the fact that it was a cape. To no avail, of course, and my fears of being teased were realized. Being called, "Stinky Pinky Bat Girl!" really doesn’t sound all that dreadful now, but I was a very sensitive little girl, and at the time it stung to the quick.

A few weeks after the cape made its debut, my father had business in London and he took me with him for the day. This was a rare treat, and I was thrilled, despite having to wear my pink nemesis.

As I waited in a rather grand reception room as my father attended his meeting, my eyes were increasingly drawn to a beautiful young woman sitting at the big polished desk. I don’t remember what she was wearing, just that I was very impressed with her beauty and poise.

As my father and I went to leave, I was startled when this elegant being spoke to me, "Your cape is just lovely. It’s the very height of fashion. You look so chic in it!" I left the building feeling almost like I had just had a bath; clean, transformed.

My father and I went out for lunch, and then to feed the pigeons at Trafalgar Square. He snapped my picture as I stood there in my pink cape. The delight of that spring day glows in my face.

In time I grew to love that cape. In fact, I wish I still had it.

(This is a Saturday Sepia post.)

Groundhog Dreams

2011-02-02T09:41:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, Groundhog Day is recognized in Canada and the United States on February 2nd. If the ground-hog comes out of his den and sees his shadow, he retreats back into it for six more weeks of fasting and dreaming. Apparently, Canada’s most famous groundhogs, Wiarton Willie (Ontario) and Shubenacadie Sam (Nova Scotia), both failed to see their shadows this morning. Thus, an early spring is predicted! I’d put away my long underwear and dance, but I have a bad cold and my bones don’t feel the least inkling of spring.

My daughter, as a child, wished that she could visit the groundhog’s den. She wanted to know what it looked like from within. She once drew a picture of what she imagined it to be, that secluded place of mystery in the dark earth. Her nine year old vision beheld a tiny bed complete with pillow and patchwork quilt, and a small candle flickering nearby.

I think most of us covet a snug retreat of sure repose. In the houses of my childhood there were many places for private retreat. Unlike most modern houses, which often have an open floor plan, with few walls and doors, old houses can be secretive and surprising. There are shadowy corners, friendly creaks, stairs leading to dark attics. The mind, like a house, should not be all kitchen or living room. The biologist, Lewis Thomas, said we need an attic in the brain where thoughts are not disclosed and made public or social but where we accumulate our most “functionless, untidy, inexplicable notions.”

We need a groundhog’s den in our consciousness. We need to remember to descend there once in a while and relish the freedom of the deep and secretive within us. It helps to have a space set aside where the mind more easily affirms creative uselessness, holy irrelevance and impractical dreaming.

Right now I am sitting, wrapped in a knitted shawl, in my own especial place, my own refuge; my little study/library. I have in front of me, besides a large box of industrial strength tissues, a mug of deep, dark roasted coffee, accompanied by a toasted bagel covered in cream cheese and raspberry jam, and in deference to my cold, a glass of orange juice. Mmmm, a slurp of coffee, followed by a bite of bagel and a sip of juice; comfort and succor creep into my bones. Von Gluck’s ‘Minuet and Dance of the Blessed’, a lovely flute piece, plays in the background.

As every groundhog knows, it’s good to come out to cast your shadow in the sun, but it’s also good to mediate upon your dreams.

To each of you:

(Photograph and drawing from Google Images.)

Magpie Tales: Icons of Dust

2011-02-01T11:44:00.000-08:00

Icons of Dust

When I am alone

The world shoves poetry

Into my brain.

It germinates in earth

And sky and trees

And snow glistening

In morning light.

Brick walls and birds

Cello music and

Gnarled hands.

I name it

Give it story

Fill my language with gold.

And the presence inside

All things muses on beauty

As brick becomes an

Icon of red dust

Coating my eyelids

And choking my voice

With song.

(Go here for more Magpie Tales. It's worth the flight!)

Remembering a Young Daredevil

2011-01-29T15:43:00.000-08:00

(Gerrit, aged 10 years, in 1928.)

The photo above was taken in 1928 in Bloemendaal, Holland, the ancestral home of the Hellewaard family, and the place where my mother-in-law, Eva, was born in 1923. It is of her older brother, Gerrit Adrianus Hellewaard, when he was ten years old. We found it among her possessions after she passed away in 1997. Gerrit died in 1942, during WW II, of pneumonia at the age of only twenty-four. He was actively involved in the underground resistance movement in occupied Holland at the time of his death. The second picture is of him as a young man in 1941, less than a year before he died.

(Gerrit, aged 23, in 1941.)

Gerrit was my mother-in-law's only brother and fifty years after his death, she still found it difficult to talk about him. All we know of him comes from the few photographs which remain, and the sparse precious stories my mother-in-law was able to share.

She and her brother, who was five years her senior, used to skate to school together along the canal in the winter. As a little girl, her shorter legs and lesser skill at skating, left her struggling to catch-up with him each day. One summer, as they walked along the edge of the canal, Gerrit fell into the water. A man fished him out, and her brother begged her not to tell their parents. She never told, and even distracted her mother while Gerrit slipped upstairs to change. "If I'd told, he would have got a whipping.", she said.

Every time my mother-in-law made her traditional Dutch pea soup with ham, which she always referred to as 'snert', she'd say, "This was my brother's favourite." I asked her once why she hadn't named her only son after him, and she told me that it would have been too painful to have to keep saying his name. She did, however, give the middle name 'Gerritdina' to her eldest daughter, born ten years before Gem.

The glimpses of Gerrit's life, as scant as they are, do give significant clues as to his vibrant personality. He was a 'waaghal', a daredevil, my mother-in-law would say, and he was fearless! My younger son, Joshua, has inherited something of these traits from his unknown Uncle Gerrit. Once when Josh, at the age of three, wanting to get a closer look at some puppies, climbed over our neighbour's wire-fenced kennel and cut his hand badly enough to require stitches, my mother-in-law, who was visiting, remarked, "He's a lot like my brother, Gerrit. He's going to give you some trouble as he grows up!"

This admonition proved to be true. However, along with that trouble came an intelligent, lively, charming young man with a huge zest for life, and a strong sense of social justice. I like to think that such was the case with young Gerrit Hellewaard, too.

(Next to a photograph taken last summer of my son, Joshua.)

I think they look rather alike!

(This is a Sepia Saturday post.)

Late Roses

2011-01-27T11:56:00.000-08:00

Gem comes from a Dutch immigrant family. His mother, whom our children called Oma, was a tall, robust woman with a big heart. Loud voiced and opinionated, her actions sometimes surprised me with a gentleness that belied her more usual stance.

Once, many years ago, she took me with her to visit an elderly Dutch lady from her church. This venerable woman, in her mid-nineties, was wonderfully spry. In addition to keeping a small vegetable garden and attending her flower beds, her little house was meticulously clean. That day, as I got out of the car, I saw a tiny, white-haired creature busy painting her fence.

My mother-in-law admonished her a little, "Minnie, you shouldn’t be doing that. Can’t your daughters do it for you?"

The little, stooped figure straightened up, made a dismissive gesture, and said something in Dutch, which was translated to me as, "He who has butter on his head, should stay out of the sun."

I must have looked baffled, because she attempted an explanation, "Da girls of mine be only 70 and 72, but dey be tired all da time. Och!"

As she motioned us into the house, we passed the rose bushes which had been the especial love of her husband, Henk, who had passed away several years ago. Minnie took a pair of scissors from her apron pocket and snipped two blooms.

Perched on an aged wing chair in the living room, I watched as she placed the richly red roses in a vase on a polished dark table spread with a white lace doily. They stood next to a picture of a smiling old man holding a small dog. For a moment, her hand trembled against the velvet labyrinth.

"Yah. Old fool love da roses.", she said.

My eyes met those of my mother-in-law, who was unloading the almond cookies she had brought with her, and putting the kettle on in the adjoining kitchen. She was smiling, and her eyes were full of an unaccustomed softness.

Later, as we drove home, she told me that Minnie had once told her that several months before he died, Henk, fearing a heavy rain storm would destroy his last roses of the season, had gone outside to cut them. "Minnie told me she followed him out into the rain and held an umbrella over his head while he did this."

I was nineteen and passionately, newly married. I couldn't imagine anyone old being romantic. That is, until that moment, listening to my mother-in-law's words.

That benediction of late roses lives in me, still.

(Pictures from Google Images.)

Daydreamer

2011-01-26T19:38:00.001-08:00

On my walk today, I saw a beach bucket marooned in a snow bank. I was reminded that nothing is so slight or trivial that it may not speak to the sensual spirit.

At times I feel like there are two of me. One me is attentive, friendly, capable of unleashing heart stories from strangers. The other part of me feels like a dandelion gone to seed, a collection of fragile parts. Sometimes I have almost too much energy, and am fuelled with a potent mixture of excitement and desire that makes me dart and hover, extracting nourishment from beauty like a hummingbird. The other part of me wants only to curl up somewhere quietly, and dream.

I know myself to be akin to the ambivalent balance of opposites which create our world. My heart walks between flowing water and layers of ice, between dark and light, vulnerable, ephemeral.

I am a daydreamer. I muse and dream and wonder. Sometimes I think that when we daydream, our minds catch glimpses of our unknown selves. Fully awake, it seems to me that the net breaks and much of the catch slips away. We are fortunate to be left with a small fish from our dreams. When I land a little piece of my most secret self, I feel blessed. A dreamer must dream as a fisherman must fish.

Magpie Tales: Snow Dreams in Red

2011-01-25T14:38:00.000-08:00

Snow Dreams in Red

A dreaming ashen stillness falls upon
The frozen breathless path, the sapless woods,
The winter of my brother’s death. An etude
Full of young men’s voices calling, his wan,
A hush above the rest. Fleshy heart gone.
The snow so bright, I weep. Weary to rest
My own scarlet vesture beneath my breast.
Strewn with arrows memory hastens on
To pierce far beyond the hard icy rim.
His bright Robin hair shines into the grey
Of sombre wind-rent flakes, that gather grim
Around the dying portals of the day.
The snow so red, I bleed. His tawny lore
Dressed in white, his voice sings evermore.

(This sonnet is dedicated to the memory of my beloved red-headed brother, Jason, 1975 - 2003.)

A-Thrifting-We-Will-Go

2011-01-24T13:30:00.000-08:00

I hope that Willow will consider it the 'sincerest form of flattery', that I borrowed the idea for this post from her wonderful entry about her recently acquired “loot”.

Many Sunday afternoons will find Gem and I engaged in one our favourite activities ... something we refer to as, 'thrifting'. We love to peruse second-hand stores, auction houses, antique shops, and in summer, garage sales. Some weeks we return home empty-handed, and others, exalted with the thrill of the find. This past Sunday we had a particularly delicious haul.

Three glorious books! Ones which caused my heart to beat little skips, and likewise, my soul, when I held them in my hands.

The first, a 1905 copy of ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, one of my all-time favourite books of poetry. As a child, I could recite several of its poems from memory. Among the pieces I loved the best: 'My Shadow'.

The illustrations, by Jessie Wilcox Smith, are particularly endearing. The impression they make on me are the same as when I first saw them in childhood, pure delight and a sense of the embodiment of something wholly pure and beautiful. The book is missing its dust jacket, but is in almost pristine condition.

The second is a 1958 first edition copy of ‘A Bear Called Paddington’ by Michael Bond, illustrated with the original delightful pen and ink drawings by Peggy Fortnum. It, too, is missing its dust jacket, but is otherwise, in wonderful condition.

These two books, I discovered among a jumbled assortment of children's books on a shelf at the back of my favourite second-hand store. I am fairly certain that they must have been donated by the same person.

It is Gem who found this lovely little leather-bound book, entitled, ‘Painting and Decorating Craftsman's Manual and Text Book’. It was printed in 1949. One of the things I love about it is that you can see the crease along the front of the leather cover where the owner must have worn it in his pocket.

It is filled with quirky little tidbits of information, including the importance of avoidance of 'fingering' or 'fishtailing' your paint brush.

There are also numerous carefully drawn black and white illustrations of the trade.

I plan to gift this to my sister, Alice. She and her partner, Dale, have a very successful home-based decorating/painting business, and a particular love and reverence for old and vintage things.

Finally, along with the books which I am still hugging with delight, we brought home this gorgeous set of Royal Minton tiered plates. Grimy, unloved, in three separate pieces, with the connecting hardware rolled up in a wad of saran wrap and taped to the top, I found it among a mishmash of china. Once hand-washed in hot, soapy water, its lovely sheen and lustre was revealed in all its luminous beauty.

I plan to leave 'The Child’s Garden of Verses' to my granddaughter, Ariana, pictured in the framed photograph at the top of this post, alongside the three books. Thinking of this, reminds me of the occasion in September when she was visiting with her parents. She loves my beautiful service of 1928 Alfred Meakin china, and carefully helped me to set the table with it for a special dinner. As my daughter, Sarah-Beth, doesn’t care for old china, I told Ariana that one day I would leave it to her when, in a very long time, I died. She seemed happy about this, and then added, thoughtfully, "Will you leave me the china cabinet you keep it in, too, Nana?"

The total cost of all four items together came to an extraordinary $11.50, plus tax. Thrifting, indeed!

What is it that stirs such a thrilling dialogue between us and the old objects we covet, and love to own? I only know that I feel an affinity to them. Somehow, they still retain something of the freshness and sweetness of their history. Then, there's that sense of mystery, too ... that little bit of unknown story which holds the power to both nourish and elate.

Miss Shoemaker and the Holy Cards

2011-01-22T12:41:00.000-08:00

Inspired by paintings of Jesus and the saints, the first Holy Cards appeared early in the 15th century. During my Roman Catholic childhood, I was well acquainted with them and at one time, had quite a collection. The roots of that collection are bound in a story, one that is inextricably entwined with Miss Shoemaker.

When I was ten years old, my teacher, Miss Shoemaker, read ‘The Lives of Saints and Martyrs’ out loud to us, a chapter a day. Often lurid, sometimes intense, always fascinating, I was enthralled. I listened in an admixture of goose-pimpled delight and fear, to the tales of suffering and redemption. I fondly daydreamed myself as a martyr dressed in rags. Glossing over the fire-burning and lion-eating parts, I imagined ministering to all in saintly benevolence. I cringe to admit this, but I even practiced a mystical expression and lifting my eyes to the heavens in prayer, in front of the mirror.

I didn’t know it then, but the shape of the rhythm of those tales, would help to ignite further, an already deep love for the magic and fire of language when just the right words are wedded.

My sense and love of Miss Shoemaker is strangely mingled with that of my sense and love of Holy Cards. Miss Shoemaker seemed omniscient to me. She made so much of the year I spent with her, that little of it has gone from my memory. She had a Scottish accent and you could almost hear the bagpipes in her voice. She wore tweed skirts and knitted wool sweaters, crisp white blouses, and polished black leather Oxfords. Her short hair, iron grey, was worn in a series of little crimps. We were to be her last class before retirement and she was a legend in the school.

Miss Shoemaker was an old-fashioned teacher who considered herself responsible not just for our academic progress, but for our health and morals as well. Daily inspections of hands and fingernails for cleanliness occurred. Her shrewd eyes took in a missing button or a tear in our uniforms. She’d dash off little notes, "Give this to your mother. Your tunic needs mending." Occasionally, she’d complete the repair herself, whipping out navy cotton thread or white, fishing buttons from a small box she kept in her desk.

In winter, she’d extol the virtues of eating a bowl of porridge before school. She’d also ensure that our footwear was appropriate to the weather. "Where are your boots?", she’d ask, sternly. When one boy admitted that his family couldn’t afford any, she bought him a pair, herself. "Now, you look after them.", she said. During cold season, Monday mornings we’d each find on our desks, a cod liver oil capsule and a lemon throat lozenge. I still remember the rows of children grimacing as they struggled to force down that pungent pill, and the fishy, oily after-taste, followed by the cleansing lemon.

If you had been particularly well-behaved, or completed some assignment exceptionally well, or passed your desk inspection with flying colours, you would likely receive a Holy Card as you left the classroom that day. These were much coveted and prized. For years I kept mine; pictures of 'St. Francis of Assisi', and 'St. Anthony of Padua', and 'St. Agnes of Rome' depicted on the front, and their legends in all their graphic glory printed on the back. By the end of the year, I had about a dozen Holy Cards, and all the children in my class possessed at least one.

That is, except the class bad-boy, a tall, brown haired boy, named Gary. He hadn’t earned a single one, and I felt pity for him. He claimed not to care, but sometimes I caught a little glimmer of something in his eyes that made me wonder.

Gary really wasn’t all that bad. Only naughty. Miss Shoemaker didn’t like dirty hands, and his were always grubby. She didn’t like messy desks, and his always looked like it had been stirred up with a muddy stick. He forgot his homework, chewed gum in class, and stuck out his tongue at her behind her back. The worst thing I ever remember him doing is asking various girls what coloured panties they were wearing. At least, to me, at ten years old, that was quite shockingly bad.

The last day of school came. Prizes were handed out, and I received a biography of Joan of Arc, which I have to this day. As we lined up at the door to leave the classroom for the last time, Miss Shoemaker had a few words and a Holy Card for each of us. Gary was standing behind me. As I left, I looked back to see Miss Shoemaker hand him a Holy Card of St. John Bosco. "This is the patron saint of boys who have lost their way.", she told him. "Pray, and he will help you." Then she patted his back. He mumbled his thanks, and sped past me and out the door.

In the playground, I saw Gary stop, look at his Holy Card briefly, and then place it in his shirt pocket. He was smiling.

St. John Bosco

(This post is part of Sepia Saturday.)

Permitting Play Time

2011-01-21T11:25:00.000-08:00

My youngest sister, Hannah, and her little son, Evan, last summer.

This recent post of Susan’s evoked a train of thought in me about the huge competitiveness that often exists between parents, and indeed, sometimes grandparents. During the three years I parented my two little grandsons, I gradually came to the conclusion that young parents are under enormous pressure. It seems greater than I remember from the time when my own children were small.

There is an intense push to have your child enrolled in multiple activities, to provide a constant barrage of educational experiences and classes of every description. I also think there is a bigger pressure now to be seen as the perfect nurturer, and to produce a child who is viewed somehow as "more special" than the rest.

In my months standing outside the school waiting for kindergarten dismissal each day, I listened to a litany of parents discussing their child-rearing methods and children’s achievements. There appeared to be an almost desperate need to display superior philosophies.

"We have a stronger bond because she hasn’t had her spirit broken by saying "no"/ because he co-slept/wore cloth diapers/was never left to cry/was born underwater/doesn’t eats candy/self-weaned."

"We have her in dance three times a week now. The teacher says she’s very gifted."

"We already often eat dinner in the car. I don’t know what I’ll do once the baby is old enough to start activities!"

"He has developed a strong sense of personal space. He is a spirited boy.", said one mother, smiling as her son shoved several children out of his way as he pushed to the head of the line.

"We only allow Dakota a half hour of TV per day. More than that is just taking the easy way out.", said another Mum one day. This, after I had just admitted to having sat the boys down in front of a Bob the Builder marathon one day when I badly needed some down-time.

I don't like it. This guilt-mongering and pressure. We parents and grandparents need to be kinder and more gentle with each other. Not that I don't have my own righteous assumptions. I do. But when they bubble up, I try to keep them capped where they should be ... behind a face of genuine support. No matter what my preferences and prejudices, the goal should be happy, healthy children ... all children ... not just mine because they're somehow more deserving or "special" than yours. As though all other children are lacking, cheated, less worthy.

An excellent surgeon I once worked with, a very nice, empathic man, shared something with a group of us one day. He was taken aback when his eight year old daughter, after being informed that one of her extra-curricular classes had been cancelled, exclaimed joyfully, "Daddy, do I really have a whole afternoon off?!" If I remember correctly, this little girl was involved in a dizzying array of activities which included piano lessons, dance, gymnastics and Japanese Kumon.

During the holidays, I watched my youngest grandson, aged four, completely absorbed in arranging a series of small sticks in the snow, rocks dotted here and there alongside small cars in an elaborate design of his own making. His mind was cradled in its own rocking.

I passionately believe that children need, as we all do, spaces where passions and visions dance without specific shape. Being over-programmed with scheduled activity takes a toll not just on the child’s soul and body, but on those of its parents as well.

Maybe the only remedy is to permit ourselves and our children to play. To become absorbed in the apparent nothing which is everything.

My grandson, Darian (in the orange shirt), playing with some of his kindergarten friends.

Magpie Tales: The Lost Skaters' Sonnet

2011-01-20T12:11:00.000-08:00

The Lost Skater's Sonnet

There is none more elusive than pale hued
January. Lost skaters' kin. None more
Beautiful. The wool and fur do sustain
Their silver wings over ice-blue domain.
These winter flights are such rare surprises
Of maiden joy, we feel them speak again.
They do not know they are graced to fashion
Voices from sepia and blood, to sing
That thin place in air, muted lyric’s length.
Half ghost, ephemeral spell we recall
Past music of such ethereal strength.
Our later time on earth does lend enthrall
To magic echoes, poised reliquary
Trio of recollected January.

(Visit more Magpie Tales.)

A Good Woman

2011-01-18T15:54:00.000-08:00

As this January morning whitened, I took a taxi. The news was on and a story about a violent act committed by a youth was broadcast. The driver, hands clenched tightly on the wheel, expressed to me that, "The problem with the world today is that women think about their careers instead of thinking about their duty as wives and mothers."

His words are expressed politely, but there is an edge to them. "Life can be complex," I murmur. "No," he says. "My daughter will be a good woman."

From his mirror dangles a laminated photo of two children. The little girl looks out with huge, limpid brown eyes. I wonder about her. She’s wearing an orange butterfly clip in her thick, dark hair. I stare at it. A butterfly meant to be probing the heart of tiger lilies, meant to be ascending the sky in papery bursts, improbably strong. Will she find herself stretching, constrained, bound by glass walls she can’t escape?

The silence between me and the driver grows. I want to tell him that our children bear all our hopes, and fears, and expectations. That, these we wrap around us in the guise of love and care. I say nothing more, except, "Thank you" and "Have a good day", as I leave the taxi.

As I trudge through the snow, something in me yearns towards the little girl in the picture. A nice man, and one I’m sure cares deeply for his family, the taxi driver perhaps cannot see the butterfly he pleasantly hopes to confine within a jar. Should I have tried to say more, I ponder? I felt incapable of articulating any words which might have bridged the chasm between us. Am I being too judgmental, too righteous, too fanciful?

Later, I think of the paradoxes inherent in the form and physics of snow. It can be soft and hard. Light and heavy. Thick and delicate. It freezes and insulates. It compacts and fluffs. It is both secretive in what it hides and open-faced in what it presents. It can be so implacably glaring, and yet so softly, amorphously beautiful.

Like a good woman.

Magpie Tales: Primordial Symphony

2011-01-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

Today I turned 54. What better way to celebrate, than to do something I have never done before ... share one of my poems in a public forum! Thus, I have joined the orchestra in this week's Magpie Tales.

Primordial Symphony

A scuff of deer tracks,

crows feet

against my eyes

a symphony of wind song

Breathy sighs

And whispers,

Eternal murmuring;

Shadows,

roots and boughs,

lime filigree of light

my feet release the

ancient

song of cedar;

A plethora of

twisted wood

against tide

and mountains

frozen

to flight;

If these pieces

of music

predict any arrangement

it is that

all resting places

shall be

movable;

And for now

I am simply here

breathing air

needing no

rigid reason

for life but my

bones.

Three Days in Hebden Bridge

2011-01-15T02:30:00.000-08:00

Ever since discovering that Tony lives in beautiful Hebden Bridge, I have wanted to write about my own time there in September, 2004. Gem and I spent three days there visiting my sister, Connie, and her two beautiful adopted daughters, Kira and Freya.

Connie is my next in age sister, sixteen months younger than me. For all the years of our childhood, we shared a bedroom. We registered the slightest fluctuation of each others’ moods. We fought intensely sometimes, but loved each other fully, unquestionably. When I remained in Canada and Connie decided to go to England to attend university, that pattern was interrupted. Her absence from my life was like a question that I had to answer every day, until it became a part of me, like all the other barbs that are snagged on the walls of my soul.

I’m not aware of it before I arrive in Hebden Bridge, but my sister’s 12 year relationship has recently ended. Her eyes are no longer receptive, lively, but are bitter with concealment, haunted with pain. She carries her fear like a shielded flame. She and her little girls entwine their arms around each other constantly. Her eyes follow them hungrily everywhere they go.

We’ve lost our easy words with each other, but we walk all over Hebden Bridge together. Gem takes pictures, and I absorb myself in my nieces, holding their hands, peering into shop windows, stopping to buy them each a soft toy. We go out for lunch, and five year old Kira climbs onto my lap. “My Mummy is sad,” she whispers audibly into my ear.

On the way home, Connie pushes three year old Freya on a swing in the small playground near her house. The expression on my sister’s face is frozen, drained of essence. My husband wonders privately to me if we are intruding, and should leave before the planned three days are up.

My sister cooks dinner, and I paint the girls’ faces. Freya peers delightedly at the result in the mirror, and Gem captures the magic of that moment. Later, he goes out by himself in search of a pub. I stay and help my sister put the little ones to bed, and then we talk. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this alone”, she tells me. She starts to weep and I hold her. Gem comes back having found what he sought. He finds us stuck into the wine, laughing hysterically.

Two days later, as Gem and I walk to the railway station, I am aware of an abiding peace and beauty all around me. It seems in direct contrast to my sister’s fragility. The loveliness is almost painful. I’m not mourning the loss of my sister, but rather the passing of a time when were in the same flux and our stories were concurrent.

When we leave, Connie hugs me fiercely, kisses my cheek. “I love you, Jo,” she says. Her words sound almost surprised, as if she has suddenly just realized that it’s true.

Six years later, and so much has happened since our brief visit to Hebden Bridge. Connie has moved with her daughters to Canada. They live in Ottawa close by another sister, and are building a good life for themselves. Connie teaches at a highschool there. She is vibrant, alive, happy. Kira, now eleven, plays the French horn in the city youth orchestra. Freya, aged nine, takes ballet and gymnastics.

Another change: my hair has turned snow white, and I’ve chosen to leave it that way!

Although I hadn't looked at these pictures in several years, seeing them now, I am instantly transported back to the mellow sunshine of those three poignant days in Hebden Bridge.

The Culture of Play

2011-01-13T10:58:00.000-08:00

(My son, Nicholas, aged 9, playing Ninja Turtles with a group of neighbourhood friends one summer afternoon in 1988. He is the boy in the middle wearing the aqua-green shirt. They had made their own masks, shields and swords.)

This past Christmas holiday, I found myself immersed and fascinated by my grandchildren’s play. One afternoon, after a vigorous few hours tobogganing, the two oldest, wriggly-toothed seven years olds, sat side by side with hand held video games. "They’re interactive", my son said.

In what language do they construct their inner worlds, their utopian places and sites of belonging, I wondered?

My mother, Margo, had a rag doll. Literally. It was made of pieces of material from her mother’s rag bag. It had button eyes, woolen hair and a sewn on smile. She rocked it, sang lullabies to it, loved it with all the fervour of her burgeoning mother-heart. My sister, Amanda, eschewed all girly toys and played with meccano and lego, constructing the elaborate houses and castles of her dreams. My daughter, Sarah-Beth, composed with the magnetic coloured letters of a plastic alphabet. I can still her now, on her knees before the fridge, creating a litany of words. My sons lived in an alternate universe of Transformers and leaping Ninja Turtles.

Something stirs in me from the well of my own childhood play. I remember the magic of marbles; crystals, peewees, King cobs, steelies. A many coloured collection of treasures kept in a drawstring bag, it might have been unearthed from some pirate’s cache. Mostly we girls just watched the boys play, but I had my own little stash, thrilling to the feel and look of the round weights in my palm.

I knew the rhythmic geometry of the yoyo, spinning globes with string inviting me to "walk the dog, rock the cradle, go around the world".

The virtual world of today’s games seems to make the earth miniscule and children giants. Yet, they are able to draw new boundaries, make reality oscillate in a new dimension.

Toys and children’s joy; inimitable, personal.

As a little girl, I knew the poetry of the jump rope. The rope coming round would invite me to risk a jump into the split second of – NOW. Here is the truth of playing. Enter the narrow gate of now, for there is no other time.

Need we ever go far beyond the poetry of children playing?

Flying Dreams

2011-01-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

(My grandfather, Nicholas Steigerwald, three months before he died.)

Childhood can be a strange paradise. To the little girl I was, there were stars in the night that bloomed like flowers. I can still feel the season-scented air which blew into my room through the open window and touched my face as my elbows rested on the sill.

While living things slept, I would slip out of bed to fly in mind and heart in the faint light of the moon. Only the surrounding houses were still. Flying dreams stayed with me for years. I loved entering the sky on dream-wings.

Going back in time ... remembering ... is another kind of flight.

Today is my maternal grandfather’s birthday. He was born one hundred and five years ago today, and died in 1992 at the age of eighty-six. An immigrant from Austria as a babe in the arms of his mother, he came to Canada in 1906. I named my eldest son, Nicholas, after him.

His blood flows beneath my skin in a transmission from the past, pumping the bone memories of stories, known and unknown, all remarkably, a part of who I am.

My grandfather’s family was kept behind a heavy, creaky-hinged door inside his heart. I know very little about his childhood. He rarely spoke of it ... just snippets of stories which I absorbed into memory.

Forced to practice long hours on the violin from the age of four, he was apparently a masterful player. I wouldn’t know. When he left home at the age of twenty-one, he quietly put his violin away and rarely played again. My mother remembers hearing him play once as a child and thinking the music was as heavenly as angels singing.

My grandfather was never less than beautifully dressed; knife-crease trousers, immaculate shirts and ties, leather shoes polished until they shone. A meticulously clean man, like Mr. Rogers, he always exchanged his shoes for slippers the moment he entered the house. (My mother recalls that her father’s mother kept separate slippers for each member of the family outside the parlour. They were required to exchange their ordinary house slippers for ones to be worn just in that room alone!)

A quiet, gentle, humble man, who was the perfect foil to his out-going, vivacious wife, he loved his family deeply. He enjoyed having me dress-up in my Sunday best and taking me out for lunch. As a teenager, I once showed up for an outing with him wearing bell-bottomed jeans and a T-shirt. "Don’t you have a nice dress?" he asked me wistfully ... and then added with that slow smile of his, "That’s alright. I’ll buy you one."

My grandfather was a devout Roman Catholic. He had the disconcerting habit of asking any woman he found attractive if they were Catholic; waitresses, saleswomen, a harpist at a concert I took him to see. Once, when I was about seventeen, he took me to buy some shoes. Not liking the wedge-type sandals I was trying on, he asked the sales lady, "Do you have anything in a nice Virgin Mary blue?", referring to the shade of her gown often rendered by artists. I remember my face flushing beet red as the poor woman stood perplexed as my grandfather tried to explain to her the merits of the Virgin Mary. As a little girl of eight, I won a statue of St. Joseph for an essay I wrote. I gave this to my grandfather for his birthday. He kept it on his dresser until the day he died.

Sometimes we’d go for grilled cheese sandwiches at the beautiful waterfront Sylvia Hotel in Vancouver, a short walk from my grandparents’ apartment. Somehow the hotel seemed to epitomize all my grandfather stood for; classy, old-fashioned, charming, mannerly. Built in 1912, its elegant exterior covered in Virginia Creeper, the very walls were soaked in graciousness and courtesy, just like him.

This past Christmas holiday, Gem and I made a little pilgrimage to the Sylvia Hotel. We had lunch there at a table overlooking English Bay. For a few minutes, flying dreams soared. I was a young girl once again, watching my grandfather spread a starched, snowy white napkin on his lap, the tilt of his head, his impeccable cuffs, his gentle smile, all measured by me in an unconscious reflection of love.

Candy is Dandy

2011-01-10T11:35:00.000-08:00

Intrinsic to our sojourn on earth is the kinship of those we love. By that warmth we feed one another. So, too, humour ... laughter, sharing silliness and mirth.

What better way to mute and transform sadness than the guileless, visceral observation of a little boy.

It’s a few days before Christmas. Mattias, a full-fledged four and a half year old pre-schooler, mostly manages on his own in the bathroom. However, his little voice calls out to me urgently as I sit in the living room.

"Nana, come here, quick!"

I hasten to the bathroom, his older brother on my heels. There is my grandson standing in front of the toilet, pants still around his ankles, looking down into the bowl.

"Look, Nana! I did a great big poop and it looks just like a candy cane!"

I peer into the toilet and sure enough, he has indeed done a great big poop that is hook-shaped at one end just like a candy cane.

"Wow! Amazing!", I say.

He laughs. I laugh. His brother laughs.

Such is life created in moments. And the moments just keep coming.

Winter Dreaming

2011-01-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

A year is a precious thing. It is a chunk of life... a whole cycle of possibilities, of things said and done, of things left unsaid and undone ... of dreaming dreams, of giving in to fears, of loss ... and, of hope.

These past few months have been ones of a bittersweet mingling of sorrow and joy. Sorrow at two heartbreaking personal losses, and joy in the delight of sharing my beloved grandchildren’s Christmas. I’ve been writing, but only in my hand-written journal; thoughts which perhaps are too dark, too close to the bone to share publicly. A thoughtful little note from another blogger has rekindled my desire to start blogging again, and I am thankful for his kindness.

January's moon often seems poignant to me, and rather lonely, floating up there in the velvety darkness by herself. Those of us who live in the snowier climes of Canada huddle indoors near our hearths, heaving wood into our fireplaces at regular intervals. We watch the dancing flames, and drink our hot chocolate with a little added something like a shot glass of brandy.

Sometimes I feel as if my whole world were inside an owl's wing... muffled, soft, white, and slightly blurred. The fine snow sifts down from white skies onto an ever-whiter earth, traced and divided by the charcoal strokes of trunks, branches, twigs. There is a restfulness, stillness, and peacefulness in winter that doesn't exist in quite the same way during any other season. It is as though my whole world is breathing quietly ...and dreaming. Snow is without prejudice ... it wraps itself lovingly around everything it encounters, and enfolded in its pristine billows and swirls, we are all equal.

This afternoon I am savouring my homebody predilections, and enjoying the winter dreaming from my windows, the melody of the silver wind, and the piling of the snowy inches.

My Grandsons, Darian 7 and Mattias 4, shoveling their driveway.

Fire and Ice

2010-11-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

It’s been a tough week. In the wake of losing my friend, I’ve been gathering scattered pieces of myself. I’ve been speculating endlessly on the turns in my storyline. I sit awake at night rehearsing a litany of choices made. Sickness of spirit and squandered opportunities and living uneventfully and not being brave enough and mediocrity and aching with wanting to be more. My thumbs push the tears from my cheeks. I think about my friend. I ache at her loss.

I go for a walk carrying with me a pen, my journal, my camera, a bottle of water, and the buzz in my head. I walk in hopes of calming that buzz. I hear the purl of birdsong, the drumming of footsteps, and the trickle of words said and unsaid run through my mind. I wish to shrug off time for a spell, to dwell in the present. I don't want to drift off into past and future, jerked around by memory and expectation. Although I can’t let go of language entirely, I do manage to walk in a wakeful hush.

My feet turn onto the boardwalk of the pier jutting into the river. All the surfaces here are wood, a reminder that this place is a gift of the trees. I devote myself to recording the dance of light over the boards, the green and purple shore, a fallen leaf whirling round and round on the river. Although my body grows calm from standing still, I rock slightly with the pulse of my heart and the rippling water. Clouds drift across the sky, coiling and merging like foam at the confluence of rivers. Every so often, birds wheel across, there a moment and then gone, like thoughts. My breath and the clouds ride the same wind.

The boardwalk creaks as I walk. Tonight, after the sun goes down, the joints of cedar and pine will sing again as they cool. Even in the depths of winter, beneath soil frozen as hard as iron, hearts will beat in burrows, and the river will run beneath a skin of ice. There are tragic, consuming fires that burn inside all of us at times. I take a measure of comfort from knowing that what my friend and I shared is not lost. It is within me. Like life, both fire and ice.

Becoming Real

2010-10-31T12:45:00.000-07:00

I've been off on a sad little journey. A dear friend of mine, only fifty-six, lost her battle with cancer. I have spent the past week snatching moments with her at the hospice where she died. We talked when she was strong enough, or wanted to, but there was more silence than voice. At the end of her life it seemed she mostly just wanted comfort. Her two sons, her daughter-in-law, and I tried to give her that ... rubbing her frail body with scented lotion, holding her hands at times, reading to her, surrounding her with flowers and beloved photographs and favourite music. The presence of her only grandchild, a lively wee man of twenty-two months, was in truth sometimes more pain than pleasure. Her eyes yearned towards him, but the actual attempts to hold his wriggly, bouncing little body hurt and exhausted her.

One afternoon a few days before she died, I found myself alone with her. Many years ago, we had once discussed how much we loved the book, 'The Velveteen Rabbit', by Margery Williams. Nominally a children's book, I think it actually speaks more to adults. A book I have loved since I was a little girl, its real meaning only became clear for me when I was a woman. For her birthday sixteen years ago, I had given my friend a beautiful copy of that book. It nestled now on her bedside, and she asked me if I would read it to her.

Excerpt from 'THE VELVETEEN RABBIT' ~ By Margery Williams

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse.
"It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

My friend smiled as I read this part, her favourite, and shortly afterwards drifted into sleep. That evening I tucked a newly purchased soft cuddly toy rabbit next to her. The following day she lapsed into a coma.

At the funeral yesterday, there was sadness, yes, but there was also a celebration of my friend’s life. There was tears. There was laughter. There was reflective silence. There was silliness. There was tenderness. There was love. I gave the eulogy, and at the end, again read from her own book, her favourite passage from 'The Velveteen Rabbit'. As I had prepared my friend’s eulogy, I found written at the end of the book, in her hand-writing, the following words:

"This is what I want for them, my boys. To be loved and to love all their lives - as young men - as middle-aged men - as old men, when they're grey and their fur has all rubbed off - and all the times in-between."

I read those words at the very last, a benediction not just to her boys, but to each of us there.

My friend’s sons kindly gave me her book and the little rabbit before I left yesterday. As I clutched them together in my arms, her small grandson chortled in glee at the crunch of the leaves beneath his tiny boots.

Death happens and life continues becoming real. Struggling, rising, spilling, wiggling, joyous, ever hopeful life.

'All Manner of People and Conditions'

2010-10-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

This morning I popped into 'Hello Toast', a funky little downtown urban café, for breakfast. It has a wonderful, vibrant atmosphere; local art work on the walls, a quirky collection of old toasters scattered around, fantastic food. The tables are arranged very close to each other which abetted one of my favourites pastimes; people-watching and eavesdropping.

The woman next to me asked the server, a pretty, young college student, a lot of questions, "Is the cream cheese low fat? Is the cinnamon swirl muffin really cinnamony? I don’t see it on the menu, but can I order steamed almond milk?" While reading his paper, the young man near me had an interesting and amusing conversation on his cell phone regarding the difficulties he had encountered when sneaking a cat into his apartment.

I ordered the oatmeal, which incorporates oats, barley, cracked wheat, and sunflower seeds, and comes with maple sugar and cream. Accompanied by multi-grain toast, it was to die for ... and the coffee was superb, too!

I then had to go to the medical clinic, and while awaiting my turn I saw something which upset me. There was a young girl there with a sick baby. She was accompanied by a young guy who was about as much support to her as a felled tree. The baby was crying, and his mother looked tired and anxious. The guy kept giving her these scowling, exasperated looks. After about ten minutes, he stood up and said he was "tired of this shit", and then left. The young mother hunched closer to her baby, but I could see a tear rolling down her cheek. She looked so resigned and hopeless. I moved over next to her and told her she was doing a very good job of comforting her son, and how hard it is when little ones get sick. I just felt so badly for her. The struggle to love and be loved, to make a living, and to keep sufficient sanity to get along in the world, can be overwhelming.

On my way home, I was walking next to an old, tired, dilapidated apartment building when I was stopped in my tracks by the startling loveliness of the scarlet autumn foliage growing over the crumbling brick. Joy in these ordinary things can symbolize the transcendence of beauty, and of the human soul, over those events in life that threaten to overwhelm and demean us.

Icons of Nesting

2010-10-17T15:59:00.000-07:00

(Summer's bounty to be savoured throughout winter.)

We spent much of today and yesterday, Gem and I, doing what I call nesting, provisioning for winter. We made a batch of blueberry jam. We cleared the patio and walkway of leaves. Gem pressure-washed the big grey paving stones and cleaned the fireplace. I rubbed the windows until they sparkled. Gem put up our shiny new mail box, and together we transplanted a few plants into pots and brought them indoors, safe from the impending frost. Gem worked outside bundling small pieces of wood for kindling. What a lovely word, ‘kindling’, hinting at all that sparks the kindred for gathering by the hearth.

I arranged and lightly ironed the choicest, reddest maple leaves between sheets of waxed paper. I added these to the little hoard of items ready for our grandchildren’s Halloween parcels to be posted this week.

(Halloween treats, new sweatshirts and T-shirts, all ready to be parceled up for my granchildren.)

Tired after our day’s labours, we had a very simple supper of newly baked bread and red ripe tomatoes. All that was needed was butter, a dash of sea salt, and plenty of black pepper, freshly ground. We supplemented this with chunks of Balderson’s aged white cheddar cheese and a few pickles. It was a feast for the gods.

(Knitted hoody for my granddaughter, Ariana.)

Later, I sat in the living room and knit; peaceful, warm, the steady click of my needles like a heartbeat. I put the final touches on a hooded sweater for my granddaughter. It joins the growing pile of Christmas gifts, alongside a sweater I finished some weeks ago for my daughter. I lay out the completed items and took pictures, my hands smoothing over the wool gloatingly.

(Knitted sweater for my daughter, Sarah-Beth.)

This small white knitted dress will soon be winging its way across the ocean to the beautiful town of Horton in Surrey, England where my new niece, Lily, recently made her debut. It’s a pattern I’ve made several times before, and one I know almost by heart.

(Introducing gorgeous Lily Grace, born on September 22nd, 2010, weighing a whopping 9 lbs, 12 ozs!)

These times of nesting create icons of the immeasurable, the down-to-earth embodiment of incarnate life.

Margo

2010-10-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

(There is so much to enchant in the wonderful Saturday Sepia Blog, of which this post is a part; the old photographs which contain the bone-memories that are a part of us. Their mystery is inexhaustible. Their stories both nourish and elate. To study the photographs and read their histories is to breathe new life into times long past.)

(My mother, Margo, at 18)

Recently my lovely mother celebrated her 75th birthday. This photograph, which I have always loved, was taken on her 18th birthday in September, 1953. Her gown was a rich olive green silk. She exudes loveliness from every pore of her body.

My mother, who was named Margaret, but has always been called Margo, still carries herself with the same effortless elegance, and her skin is just as luminous. Her eyes, still beautiful, are more sentient now. They contain the joy of her seventy-five years of living, but her pain and grief also. She has at times dwelled in Gethsemane, a place of passion, where the agony of love and death come together.

Even her most ordinary actions reflect the fastidious beauty of her soul; the whiteness of her linen, the garland of parsley with which she wreathes the pink slices of ham, her perfectly scripted lists of tasks to be completed, the single rose placed at each person’s place-setting, her hands tenderly cleaning the collection of crystal snowflakes hanging from the mantelpiece. She exudes a living daintiness; a purity and sweetness about her things, her person, her life. She is one of those who can hear the singing of the seas in a shell.

So too, my mother has an aspect of her soul she keeps hidden, apart, as though the wounds it bears cannot be shared even with those she loves best. Sometimes I can’t quite reach her song or understand its words. She holds a piece of herself remote, unattainable. There is a facet of her which is unable to connect with the earthy, messy, visceral reality of her daughters. A few months after the above photograph was taken, my mother spent a year in a convent with the intention of becoming a nun. She changed her mind, but I think a part of her still dwells in that other-worldly aesthetic, and always has.

But, if she were any other way, she would not be my mother.

I know that each moment I have left with her is infinitely precious. My fear of losing her rises up and chokes me. I ache with unbearable sorrow at just the thought of it.

(Margo, at 75)

Theme Thursday - Knots

2010-10-15T09:19:00.000-07:00

I am a day late, but found both the concept and the photograph so beautiful, I wanted to participate anyway.

When I was eleven years old, I lived on the island of Malta for several months when my father was the architect for a new hotel. I became fascinated by the sight of fishermen mending their nets and would spend hours sitting by the sea watching them. The fishermen's work is primary and ancient. They inherit the skills of ancestors. I envy the primeval integrity and beauty of their labour. So many precise knots to be secured if the catch is not to be lost through a hole in the net.

The need to tie things together, to join, to hook, to loop, to weave must be instinctive. I wonder if the first net for catching food was learned from the spider in its web? Fishermen continue the ingenuity of the spider, whose intricate geometry secures dinner.

When fishing nets are hung up in the sun there is a translucent loveliness. I feel a mingling of emotions which must reach back into a common, archetypal memory. I dimly sense that all of life is one vast web of woven singularity.

There is a time to be tying knots and a time to be untying knots. The whole cosmic and social mystery is a continuous tightening and loosening of myriad knots. To be caught in life’s binding and loosening is both terrible and beautiful. We spend much of our lives trying to discern where we should tighten knots and where we should loosen knots of complicity or belonging. Just like the fishermen, a careless or unskilled knot can lose for us what we would keep.

I end with a poem written several years ago by my dear friend, Patrick, who was just twenty-one at the time.

KNOTS

Things grow more tangled
the more that I watch.

I have no patience with knots.
I have no patience with nots.

I have
no
patience.

I resist the urge
To Simplify

with knives,

Their Cleanness

Slicing.

Instead I begin
Quietly
To unravel.

(Theme Thursday - Knots)

Genial October

2010-10-14T10:24:00.000-07:00

I was down on my knees sorting damp leaves from the flower beds which surround my patio, pruning plants, feeling the earth tumble between my fingers. Deep in reverie, I heard a small voice say, "Whad ya doin’?" It was Ben, my neighbour’s three year old son, his little feet perched between the rungs of my wrought-iron gate. His mother, sitting with the baby on the gentle hill which overlooks our condo, waved down at us.

"What ya doin’?", Ben asked again. After each answer, he repeated his question. Little by little, I shared my passion for the garden. I told him about savouring the last flowers and cleaning-up for winter. He has such knowing eyes ... wise and penetrating. We are becoming friends, he and I.

He showed me his child-sized wheelbarrow which was filled with rocks and pinecones, small trucks, and an assortment of leaves and twigs. "Do you have any wooms in there?" he asked, pronouncing "worm" to rhyme with "room" after the manner of Inspector Clouseau.

Soon, Ben had joined me on the patio, his little hands patting the earth next to mine, the occasional small treasure joining the rest in the wheelbarrow. He sang as he worked, lyrics of his own creation which seemed to circle the words, "no" and "nah". However, the melody was the clearest kind of "yes".

"I hope he’s not bothering you?", said his mother, standing by the gate. "No, not at all", I said. "He’s lovely".

We smiled at each other, as Ben looked at me with candid eyes. "Have you gots any juice?", he asked, hopefully, unceremoniously. "Oh Ben!", said his Mum. "It’s okay", I said, laughing. "Would you like some juice ... or coffee?"

And juice it was. And two cups of steaming coffee. We drank it side by side at the patio table, leaves twirling about us. One fifty-three year old Nana, one thirty-something woman with gorgeous russet hair wearing a darling, fat, dimpled baby on her chest, and one small boy with dirt on his face and a song in his soul.

Collective Rescue

2010-10-13T10:56:00.000-07:00

(Daniel Herrera, the 16th miner to be rescued, hugs his wife.)

Like millions of other people, I have spent a good part of last evening and this morning watching the rescue of the Chilean miners. As I write this, eighteen men have miraculously been brought to the surface. Sixteen more patiently await their turn an incredible eight hundred metres deep in the bowels of the earth. The joy and elation on each man’s face as his feet touch the ground, and his eyes and arms enfold his wife, his sweetheart, his mother, his father, his son, his daughter, his brother, his sister in turn, has moved me to tears. In addition, on seeing multiple scenes of viewers from many countries around the world similarly moved, I have felt an immense connection to the human family.

In this vastly diverse world of ours, this rescue has allowed us a rare moment of recognition. We see and feel in the images before us, a collective intimacy and communion. So often, our lives become a miniature and closed world. We are more comfortable to keep our distance. An occasion such as this, brings us a time of reciprocal trust and a sense of covenant. Each of us watching, regardless of what country we are from and what tongue we speak, can know and empathize with the joyous reunions before us. It is our husband, our wife, our mother, our father, our son, our daughter, our brother, our sister that is pressed against our hearts as we see each man embrace his loved one.

There is a continued need for rites of renewal, for celebrations which re-astonish us with the miraculous veracity of each other’s most personal stories.

Thanksgiving Weekend

2010-10-07T13:16:00.000-07:00

Gem and I are heading south tomorrow for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. We will be spending it in Abbotsford (about an hour from Vancouver) with my sister Suzanne and her partner, Jeff. Altogether, there will be twenty-two people at their house celebrating this time of gratitude.

I have been designated desserts. Thus, my morning has been one of epic domesticana. The whole condo is filled with nutmeggy warmth and pumpkinny goodness. I have baked three pumpkin pies and two apple pies, all from scratch. A Pumpkin Ginger cake sits on the counter cooling. This cake, spiced with ginger and cinnamon and cloves, and studded with crystallized ginger and plump sultanas, is a family favourite. I will be icing it with cream-cheese frosting when I am at my sister's house. As I stirred and measured and tasted, I thought of the ritual and hospitality of welcoming, of daylong roasting and feasting. Indulgence, contentment. Full bellies and unbuttoned pants and tucking in for winter.

I have so much to be thankful for:

Thankful for my husband, Gem, who loves me unfailingly and unconditionally.

Thankful for my family, for the belonging we give to each other.

Thankful for my wonderful friends, who love and forgive me much.

Thankful for the ebb and flow of so many spiritual traditions which cover this country like a blessed wave from the ocean to the mountains, to the rainforests, to the tiny prairie towns, to the arctic, to the rainy urban cappuccinos being sipped in dozens of cities.

Thankful that I understand that grief comes to human hearts of all colours and creeds and ways of being.

Thankful for my good health, and the ability to work and play and think.

Thankful for the stories and poems and photographs which anoint my heart and soul.

Thankful for YOU.

Because and Because ...."

2010-10-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

(Mattias, at age 2)

Maggie, who is raising her two year old grandson, is dealing with temper tantrums. Now, when I was a young idealistic Mum, I tried to reason with my little darlings. I soon came to realise that there was absolutely no point in reasoning with a two-to-three year old, especially one with a mindset like this:

Me: "Joshua, it’s your turn to choose first. Which balloon do you want?"
Joshua (aged two and a half), surveying one red and one blue balloon: "I want the one Nick (his older brother) wants!"

I assure you this incident really happened. The tantrum that followed when I refused to ask Nicholas which balloon he wanted and then hand it over to Joshua, is legendary. I think it was at that moment I realised that there is no logic involved to a two year olds’ tantrums.

If you ask two-to-three year olds why they are screaming, kicking, crying or what-have-you, they don’t know. "Because and because", my Josh once answered.

During the three years when Gem and I had taken on the role of parenting two of our grandsons, it gradually became clear to me that I was somewhat wiser than in days gone by. I didn’t try and reason. I just made sure they couldn’t hurt themselves and went about my business. But one day I accidentally found something that worked, at least with my grandsons. I put on Mika’s Lollypop song and danced. Within a minute, my little tantrum trumpeter was dancing, too, his tear-flushed, angry face wreathed in smiles. Resistance was futile. It was magic.

Thank you, Mika.

Unsolicited Gifts

2010-10-04T01:02:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I have nocturnal fits of awakening. On these occasions I sometimes get up and make myself a cup of tea. It is inexpressible what darkness and moonlight may do to a table, a favourite chair, a cherished book; familiar things changed by night. The china cups and the red-and-white checkered tablecloth, the flowers rescued from yesterday’s wind ... all shaped with elusive newness.

As I sit on the couch and sip my tea, my eyes dwell on four new spots of colour on the wall. I spent yesterday afternoon framing and hanging paintings gifted to me by my oldest grandson, Darian, who celebrated his seventh birthday at the beginning of September. My thoughts drift to the phone conversation I had with him after dinner. "Did you have fun at school today?" "Did you learn any new words in French?" "Yes" and "I don’t remember", he answers to these silly Nana questions. He asks me to describe exactly where I have hung his pictures. "Can you see them when you open the front door?", he wants to know. I reply in the affirmative and I can tell my answer pleases him. "Having paint on my fingers makes me happiest of all", he tells me.

Darian lives the largest part of his life away from me now, in another rhythm, but I am reassured our bond is unbreakable, our closeness something I need never question, like the rising sun.

Like the muted shapes of objects in the darkness, the force of my grandson’s growing sweeps me up in its subtle changes. The light is broadened and diffused. The years of childhood are so unbelievably brief. I want to gather them like a harvest, and savour their fruits as the juices stain my lips and run down my chin. Unsolicited gifts.

Angel Voices

2010-10-02T17:39:00.000-07:00

Today while catching up on some blog reading, I discovered that Barry who wrote An Explorer’s View of Life had lost his battle with cancer in late July. His last post was on July 16th, just four days before he died. I feel sorrow at the loss of this gentle, kind man who battled with such courage and dignity, whose thoughtful words and comments had added a dimension of joy to my own blogging experience. Although I only knew him briefly through this medium, I was nourished by his presence.

I have an unsettling feeling of regret that I didn’t write to Barry as I had planned. I had thought that after the summer there would be more time ... always, more time. I was wrong. In our human voyage, sometimes there are unchosen conditions which close in on us and inhibit the breadth of our lives. There is infinite precariousness. There is no finite, ideal time.

This has made me ponder the powerful impact we bloggers can have on each other. Written words, photographs that communicate through the mingling of our spirits, we are bonded by expectation, by dreams, by hope. I sometimes think that the voices of our blogger friends are like the sea. They break the surface on a calm day, leaving gentle ripples like those of a diving duck or the wake of a distant passing ship. And when heavy wind brings the sea to shore with the steady throb of crashing breakers, they gladly shoulder the salt-sting and offer their own shelter and peace from the storm.

Martin wrote recently of angels, of sometimes hearing the comforting voices of departed loved ones: "It's not what they say but, how they say it. The tone of kindness. Would some regard this as angelic influence?", he asked.

Yes.

Robert Frost wrote:

"Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in a position to look too close."

Birth and death ride the arbitrary circle of an immense hunger. The link to Barry’s blog is still on the left side of this page with all the other 'Salt of the Earth', and I plan to leave it there; an angel’s voice.

A Matched Set

2010-10-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

The above photograph taken in May, 1958 outside our Wandsworth, London house, is of my mother, me, and my new baby sister, Connie. I was sixteen months old and wearing a new red and white organza dress sent to me by my Canadian grandmother. Note the tiny white gloves. Apparently by that age I was already quite capable of putting them on myself, although it took me a long time to accomplish the task. As we only lived in London for the first two years of my life, I have no memory of that house or its environment. My mother tells stories of how I loved to feed the ducks at Wandsworth Common, and would try and make sure each received its fair share, admonishing certain bolder ones "not to be greedy." The dress in that picture was to be the last I had individually for a very long time.

The second picture was taken about a year later, of Connie and I at the ages of two and half and one. The dresses were red with white lace trim and we wore red leather shoes to match. This was the beginning of a trend that would see us dressed identically all through childhood until we were about eleven and ten, when a rebellion of sorts took place.

I am the oldest of six girls and my mother generally dressed us in matched sets; Connie and I, and then the next three sisters (Amanda, Suzanne and Alice) born five, six and eight years after me. My youngest sister, Hannah, arrived much later, when the rest of us ranged between fourteen and six, and thus she was spared the years of identikit clothing. On special celebrations, such as Christmas and Easter, we girls were often dressed five-of-a-kind. I especially loathed these occasions. Reminiscing once with my sister Alice about this, she told me, "You think you had it bad! What about me? I had all the other dresses to grow into! I wore that green velvet Christmas dress for about ten years!" I hadn’t considered it from that point of view before, and she certainly deserves sympathy.

The matched sets of clothing didn’t stop at just the dresses. It applied to coats, shoes, cardigans, and even nightgowns. We were allowed more freedom with our play clothes, but for every other activity, we left the house starched and ironed and clad alike. One year we all had identical pink Easter coats with matching bonnets. I was nine years old and I still remember the embarrassment of filing into church with all my sisters in what I thought of as a very babyish outfit.

The sixties were in full swing and I yearned for the psychedelic patterns and bright colours that my friends wore.

Perhaps what I yearned for the most, though, was a pair of shiny, white Gogo boots. I envied my friend Linda, proud possessor of a pair. However, my mother thought Gogo boots were ’unseemly’ or ’crude’. In fact, she once referred to them as “prostitute boots’, a term my sister Connie and I didn’t understand, even after we had looked it up in the dictionary.

My mother was decidedly old-fashioned. We girls wore smocked dresses with sashes, or pleated skirts with frilly blouses. Our footwear was leather or patent-leather buckle shoes. I didn’t own a single pair of trousers until I was thirteen. For my twelfth birthday I asked for something I had never had before … an outfit of my own choosing, modern, and exclusive to myself. My father granted that wish. He took me to London for a shopping trip, and I have never forgotten the joy of that special day. I can close my eyes and still see the dress I chose … navy, yellow and white swirled in a psychedelic pattern with trumpet sleeves and a belt around the middle. It came with a little triangular matching head-scarf of the same fabric.

I wish I had a photo of me wearing that dress. It was styled something like this, but not as short and with a higher neckline.
Alas, I was never able to convince my mother about those Gogo boots!

Oh, the thrill I felt when wearing that dress; the first awakening consciousness of the power of my femininity. Many years later when watching my own daughter make her first foray into a style of clothing not chosen by me, I became fully aware of the bittersweet act of letting a child go. I knew then what my mother felt that day as I preened before her in the kitchen. It is a peculiar ache, the mingled emotions of love and regret. Yet, together they create a whole and balanced beauty. A matched set, as it were.

(This is a Sepia Saturday post.)

The Willow Manor Ball

2010-09-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

('Waltzers' - by Jack Vettriano.)

Voltaire said, "Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." Willow’s splendid ball is an invitation to both. I will read, and as I do so, I will dance.

(David Sedaris)

My chosen fantasy date for the ball is David Sedaris, the American humorist, writer, and bestselling author whose personal stories are a combination of joy and pathos, of mundane and bizarre, of ordinary and extraordinary, of love and hate, and always, shining through the gut-wrenching humour, of hope. A master of satire, David slices through cultural euphemisms and is a keen observer of the human condition.

On the surface of it, he and I perhaps don’t appear to have much in common, but apart from the fact that his December 26th, 1956 birth was exactly three weeks before my own, we both have over thirty years of hand-written journals, and we both believe as David replied when asked how he keeps finding fresh material to write about, "All you have to do is live."

"You must have some chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star", David Sedaris also said during an interview. I wrote his words down, instantly aware of their truth and beauty. They came back to me when I read Willow’s invitation and decided he’d be my perfect date to the ball.

I am wearing a burgundy taffeta ball gown, the flounces edged in lavender silk ribbon. On my feet are my flat deep red velvet dancing slippers trimmed in the same colour. I have a single red rose in my hair.

My hands are encased in these frivolous black lace gloves.

So, here we all are at Willow’s fabulous ball, our minds cast into the net of our own imaginations. We fishers of the inner deep descending to catch the mysteries of each other. Dancing together, our secret and larger selves are united. Glimpses of moonlight spilling onto gorgeous gowns and elegant suits, laughter, perfumed richness, scented hair and hands, the glorious music and motion.

As we dance, our words spill out into the night ... so many stories.

"A good short story should take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and slightly uneasy with the fit", David Sedaris once said. That’s how I will feel by the evening’s end; mind and soul expanded, quenched yet thirsty, dancing on the edge of dream.

Apples of Time

2010-09-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

This weekend I swept the leaves on my patio for the first time; a light autumnal carpet of reddening maple. As I swept in the apple-cheeked golden afternoon, I was joining a deciduous truth, descending into the earth. It occurred to me that what I was doing was perhaps a form of prayer. For a leaf raker prays by raking, just as a dancer prays by dancing. It was an intimate dialogue. Gathered and given, preparing for the transformation of winter.

I thought about apples; the remembered apples of my childhood. I remember the small orchard at the bottom of our garden in its rosy dream of redolent ripeness where we gathered our first unbruised windfalls. We enjoyed apple pie many Sundays when I was growing up. I can still see my mother garlanded with spiralling curls of apple-peel falling to her aproned lap. I remember the spicy mingling scents of apples and cinnamon, the joy of being allowed to carefully crimp the edges of the pies between thumb and forefingers. Boxes of apples, jars of golden apple sauce glowing like vigil lights in the pantry, their bounty an autumn promise to winter.

All sap and surge and hope, there was an apple tree I liked to watch into winter. After all the leaves had long turned yellow and fallen, and the ground was white with snow, it held on to its bright apples, like red balls on a Christmas tree. This refusal to be harvested, this longing, perhaps gathers in all of us as the autumn season ends. But for now, I savour the amber juices of September, content in knowing that the brooding plenitude of October still beckons.

Autumn Lullaby

2010-09-23T16:20:00.000-07:00

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

It's September, and there are slow turnings all around us,
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,

and leave you inexpressibly to unravel
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable
it is alternately tree in you and star.

These beautiful words seem to define me this month. After the rush of summer, I now find myself in a kind of lull. I am gripped by lethargy, by inertia, by the seeming inability to do anything other than freefall from a parachute jump of my own dreams.

Autumn aches with ending, with change, with dying. Not death itself, but the slow and inevitable process of dying into winter. There is a lullaby crooning in my heart. It is a simultaneous wash of both sweetness and sorrow. It's a kind of full-body, full-heart aching. I want ... but I don’t know exactly what? It is the same song sung in the woodland in autumn. Sung by the herons, geese and loons on their flight south. Sung by the wolves on the northern hills at sunset. And sung by a woman daydreaming in the chilly purple dusk.

Rites of September

2010-09-08T09:54:00.000-07:00

To me, September is the most beautiful month of the year. Crisp mornings ride on the hot balloon of summer air. My arms take turns in wool and skin. Hydrangea dry their heads, their petals turning from melted blue and pink to thin gold. The leaves on our Maple tree are beginning to turn colour. Their edges are brittle and carry the first edge of deepening red. Soon, I will be able to walk through fallen leaves. There is an infinite childlike enjoyment in the crunch of feet wading through crackling foliage.

Perhaps, too, because of so many years of being synonymous with the start of a new school year, September also brings a sense of newness, of beginnings. There are new shoes, new clothes, new school supplies. My grandchildren are full of stories of their new teachers and classrooms. My granddaughter, beautiful Ariana, seven years old and entering grade two, has a new seriousness about her. "I’m not one of the little kids any more, Nana", she tells me. Grace and poise are etched on her every limb. She devours books in the same avid way I did as a child, her reading skills far beyond her years.

My grandson, Darian, also newly seven and beginning second grade, is full of the joy of being allowed to walk to his nearby school by himself for the first time. He is once again by far the tallest in his class (a legacy of height bequeathed by his father, our second son, who is six feet, seven inches tall). Next I speak with Darian's little brother, Mattias, who at four is just entering the formal education system, and will be attending pre-school three mornings a week. He tells me about his new Toy Story backpack and his snack box. "I chose a red square to sit on", he says. "One girl threw-up on her shoes", he adds with a mixture of fascination and disgust.

The last call I make is to Jesse, my daughter’s five year old son, who has just begun kindergarten. A very shy little boy, my daughter and son-in-law have been quite concerned about how he would handle his new routine. "I listened very good", he tells me with pride, "so I got a happy stamp on my hand."

Very early this morning we said goodbye to our eldest son, his wife, and their daughter. After a gorgeous five day visit, they are on their way back to their home in Edmonton. Last evening we ate in candlelight; chicken breasts slathered in rich mushroom gravy, and mashed potatoes, golden corn-on-the-cob, a medley of red and green peppers and orange squash. This was followed by maple ice cream and ginger scones. Not planned consciously, but a dinner to mirror autumn.

Now, as I sit here writing, I am filled with the rites of September; the ripening, the sense of newness. I think of each of my grandchildren and hope that their wonder, their joy, their spontaneity, will always be a part of their learning, of their growth. Someone once ridiculed Groucho Marx, saying, "A child of five could understand that!" And Groucho replied, "Someone please send for a child of five." Several years ago I read a bit of graffiti on a university wall ... "I am Marxist. Groucho, not Karl."

Me too.

(Darian, aged five, in his classroom in 2008.)

Waning Summer

2010-08-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

Thinkers all; Susan, Martin, Alan, Willow, Shelley, Tony, Maggie, Chris, John, Nigel, superb writers who resonate passion for living, kindness, and integrity. I have missed reading you (and others) immensely! I have missed Sepia Saturdays. I have missed the validation, the humour, the beauty, the mimsy ... all of it. You are such wonderfully giving bloggers, and you gild my days.

Since July 1st we have had a non-stop parade of company; our adult children, grandchildren, sisters, brother-in-laws, friends. As delightful as this has been, it has also placed a huge barrier on my ability to blog. Essentially this is because apart from not wanting to appear rude and disappear to write, my computer is set up in our spare room which, of course, houses our guests. I think I am going to have to buy myself a lap top!

We have just finished waving goodbye to our lovely daughter, Sarah-Beth, her partner, Doug, and their beautiful son, Jesse. This afternoon a darling cousin from Toronto will be here for a week. The last expected company (our eldest son, his wife and our seven year old granddaughter) will be arriving September 3rd for four days. I can’t wait to see them, and anticipate their visit with much joy. To be honest, though, I am also looking forward to a break afterwards, although I feel a little guilty saying so.

I have read that the song cycle of the nightingale lasts three minutes whilst that of the whale lasts twenty-four hours. Once slowed down and sped up respectively, they are apparently very similar. Maybe as human beings we are simply on varying frequencies of song. Perhaps the way we use language ... to speak, to write, to dream, to think ... is like a sonic map of our personalities. I am a woman who needs solitude at times.

As summer wanes and the drowsy, full-blown ripeness of August comes to an end, I look forward to sharing crisp September days catching-up with each of you.

(Jesse, aged 5, contemplates a butterfly.)

Who, Being Loved, is Poor? (Oscar Wilde)

2010-08-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

I have missed you, my shadow friends. My month’s hiatus from blogging wasn’t intentional but circumstances have conspired to create a cycle of unwritten words. It has been a chunk of life clothed in weeks nursing my ill mother (happily doing well now), and welcoming with open arms and heart and feet and soul, my grandsons for a glorious extended visit. This all interwoven with blessings in the shape and form of assorted other family and friends.

This baptism of welcome has created within our new place, connections which are imprinting a real sense of home and belonging.

So many wonderful moments we have shared:

An amazing day trip with our grandsons on a completely restored 1912 Steam Locomotive. Crossing the South Thompson River, meandering through the beautiful Okanagan and Kettle Valley completely surrounded by mountains at every turn; each hiss and rumble of the journey a joy.

Countless golden afternoons at the beach, the air shimmering with heat. Swimming, building sandcastles, wet sand between toes and fingers. Towels spread, the coconut scent of sun tan lotion, iced tea and fresh apricots.

My four year old grandson improvising one of his instinctive songs as he digs and pats the sand. His song reflecting the throb of the rippled waves, his own heartbeat, the whole sky.

Eating outside on warm, languid evenings. Blueberry stained faces and sunkissed skin.

Walks after dinner. The blues of the water and the greens of the lawns, the pinks and purples and oranges of the manicured city gardens popping in the light.

Bedtime rituals of baths and stories and tucking-in. Muffled giggles and thumps. Finally, the boys sweetly sleeping.

Playing cards and drinking wine with friends, sharing stories which scratch the surface of rich language and metaphor.

Laughter and tears; the ordinary preciousness and fragility of human life. Life burned into minds and hearts. Like thunder, cracking open, pouring rain down to drench the world, and then standing still, hushed, soaked, alert.

This is love.

Canada Day Celebrations

2010-07-01T19:33:00.000-07:00

Full bellies and daylong feasting, sipping iced lemonade, a study in red and white, the boundless, permanent summer of Canadian multiculturalism. Today we celebrated our first Canada Day here in our new home. Gem and I meandered through Riverside Park ... thronged with hundreds of people absorbing the food and colour and music which erupted in a kaleidoscope of scents and sights and sounds.

I indulged in a henna hand tattoo.

Gem bought an original watercolour from the Art Fair.

Living here in Canada, I am thankful for so much ....

Thankful for the ebb and flow of so many cultural traditions which cover this country like a blessed wave.

For the elegant women wearing jewelled saris.

I am thankful for the giggling, exuberant First nations children dancing to the plangent sound of the drums.

For the Asian men and women I saw gracefully engaged in Tai Chi by the river’s edge.

Thankful for the voices and laughter I heard today in English and French and Cantonese and Ukrainian and Italian and Afrikaans and Greek and Hindu.

Thankful for the connections that let me know the kindred in human beings who are different from me.

Later, candlelight anointed the table as Gem and I ate our barbecued salmon dinner and the homemade pavlova I made for dessert.

I am thankful, too, for the sense of belonging given in the ritual of celebration.

Treasures

2010-06-28T17:11:00.000-07:00

(I was inspired to write this post by one written by the beautiful, eloquent Willow.)

Gem and I love to while away hours poking around thrift stores and garage sales. This weekend we went on one of our treasure hunts. Some objects reach down to the marrow of my bones. I trace my fingers along them and something in me responds. They are endearing, inexplicably comforting. There is a meaning, an indwelling of connection which enhances my sense of belonging.

This week’s finds:

A Crown Clarence Staffordshire sauce boat - $1.50.
I love its summery, shimmery blue, just the colour of a Robin's egg.

A retro, hinged tin - 50 cents.
I’m going to keep my collection of teaspoons in it.

A Japanese calligraphy set - $3.00.

This was Gem’s find. He has long dabbled in the art of pen and ink drawing and sketching, and plans to use it.

And perhaps my favourite find, this 1970’s knitting book in immaculate condition - $1.
Although I did a fair bit of knitting when my children were small, I haven’t had much time in recent years. Now, though, I have a few knitting projects planned and hope to make good use of this book. My granddaughter, Ariana, who will be seven in August, will be the first beneficiary. She is very excited and has requested a purple poncho and a pink sparkly sweater. After speaking with her, I was reminded of the year my mother-in-law knit my three children sweaters for Christmas. They were all beautifully made, but I still remember the look on my eldest son’s face when he opened his gift. His expression momentarily reflected his thoughts: No eleven year old boy would be caught dead wearing a sweater with a huge yellow image of Sesame Street’s Big Bird on the front of it! His eyes flew to mine, startled, unsure of what to say. Thankfully, he swallowed his chagrin and thanked his Oma nicely.

Objects can be saturated with spirit, imbued with the layers of life from the places where they rest, the people they touch. They are remnants, the bearers of our fragile being, our mortality.

Rainy Interlude

2010-06-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve been away on a little Father's Day weekend camping trip with Gem and my grandsons. After an absence of over a month the boys are static cling, full of secrets and kisses, hands and fingers entangled in my hair and gripping my neck, folding into me, owning me. Mattias brings his face an inch from mine and places an open palm on each of my cheeks. "I love you, Nana", he declares earnestly. We stare at each other, eyes clownishly wide, lash-to-lash. Almost unbearable sweetness. Something deep and visceral, animal, takes root.

When the rain starts, Gem rigs up a large tarp and the boys move their elaborate game of monster trucks under it. Their clothes become soaked and caked with mud. They are in some private, blissed-out world of invention and play that absorbs them wholly. When bedtime is announced, they look at me puzzled. "But Nana, how did the time happen so quick?", asks Darian.

Yes, sweet grandson of mine, how does time happen so quickly?

On me they are etched, but more as a phantom limb as they grow up and away. Every day each is more himself, full of his own opinions and priorities, leaving me with an intense mix of joy, protectiveness, fear and pride.

Exhausted, yet sated. Three hours of sleep ... a sodden, rain-soaked travel trailer ... drying hiking boots by the campfire ... sticky s'mores and charred hotdogs ... 4 am smothered giggles. Awakening to more relentless rain. A mad dash to the truck, Gem and I each holding a sleep-warm little boy ... The scent of wet dog and damp earth and strong, black coffee. We sit in the warmth of the truck watching the greys patterning the wet morning. Mattias entertains us with song. Darian covers his head and burrows deeply into his blanket, eyes closed.

Of course now that we are home, the weather is glorious!

Miss Kennedy

2010-06-18T22:42:00.000-07:00

This photo is of the shelter in Hubbard’s Hills Park in Louth, Lincolnshire, the small town where I spent most of my childhood years. It is supposedly haunted by a local soldier named Robert Stephenson who died during The Great War. Apparently on certain days of the year, you can see his ghostly figure hovering, awaiting his lover. Many years ago I sat in that shelter one September evening with a handsome boy named Simon. I didn’t see any apparitions, but the excitement of first love was thrill enough at the time.

It was Miss Kennedy who first told me that story in the marvellously dramatic voice that was uniquely hers. How I loved that woman.

Miss Kennedy was a spinster of our small village community. She wore kilts and hand knit sweaters and stout walking shoes. She was long and thin, as were her patrician nose and mouth. She often wore a brooch with a purple stone in the shape of a thistle, the flower of Scotland. All inward beauty and prickle, the thistle was surely Miss Kennedy’s flower. Her face so animated when something interested her, and so unaffected and closed looking in repose. She had a booming voice and was the only person in my daily existence who actually sounded like one of the royal family when she spoke. She was my elocution teacher from the ages of six to ten, but I knew her until I was fifteen.

A painfully shy little girl, my mother thought it would help me to be more forthcoming if I learned to speak in public. Thus, Miss Kennedy, whose classes began with breathing exercises and learning to annunciate ‘properly’, and culminated in reciting learned by heart poetry. Once every three months or so a small recital would be held for the parents featuring well scrubbed children in their Sunday best holding forth their newly elocuted skills on the stage of our local church hall. I remember my first recital with startling clarity; standing there with trembling knees, clad in my green velvet Christmas dress reciting Robert Louis Stevenson’s 'The Swing' ... "How do you like to go up in a swing?/ Up in the air so blue/ Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do!" My voice faltered and the breath seemed to be squeezing out of me. I looked over and saw Miss Kennedy flashing me a radiant smile, willing me silently to continue, and I did.

Long after my tutorials had ended I continued to visit Miss Kennedy’s antique filled little bungalow. An unlikely friendship had sprung up between us. I would pore over the cut out pictures of Princess Elizabeth pasted in a scrapbook during Miss Kennedy’s girlhood, drink my tea and listen to her enthralling stories. Stories of the objects and photographs which surrounded her, of buildings and history, of poets and plays, of her bird watching expeditions.

I have never forgotten the time one afternoon when Miss Kennedy, an avid member of a bird watching society, called out, beckoning, "Jo, do come! There’s an enormous great Tit in the garden!" I was a young teenager. It was the early 70’s. I had to suppress my laughter until I got home where I replayed the entire episode, complete with accent and actions, for my mother and sisters.

When I went to say goodbye to her before moving to Canada, I was fifteen, fragile at the break-up of my family, fearful of leaving all that was familiar in my life. "Chin up, Jo", she said. "You have all the strength you need, and I will always be rooting for you in the wings." Physical affection had not been a part of our friendship but when I left she gave me a small, bony hug. As I turned back once more for a final look, Miss Kennedy was still at the door watching, and there again was that beaming, transforming smile. I never saw her again.

I did a little research and to my amazement found this photograph of a Private Robert Stephenson Gould from Lincolnshire who did indeed die during The Great War. I don’t have a photo of Miss Kennedy. I wish I did. How strangely convoluted the mind is at times. Three tenuous connections; a simple little shelter, a boyish soldier in Sepia, an old-fashioned woman holding onto the dregs of a changing era, all merging together to create a story from my own history.

(Private Robert Stephenson Gould, died 1917).

(This is part of the wonderful Sepia Saturday posts leaving a trail of digital bread crumbs as we delve into the photographs and write the stories which in part have fashioned us to who we are.)

A Song I Know by Heart

2010-06-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

(My beautiful mother, aged nearly 75.)

My mother has a dainty, special way of doing things. She sprinkles lavender on the sheets as she makes the beds, smoothing them over and over until not a wrinkle mars the pristine snowy whiteness. She always sets the table with her own gracious knack for beauty whether it be for a splendid Christmas dinner or a simple snack. She takes scissors and a basket and goes outside to gather flowers; snipping each gently in a glorious mix of domestic and wild. She squeezes lemon oil onto an a piece of old cloth and rubs down the furniture until it gleams. She pegs as much of her laundry as she can to the clothesline. She is small, dwarfed by the mountains and the summer sky, her hands lovely and meditative as she expertly applies each garment to the line. Her fingers move fluidly, like music.

One of my favourite places in my mother’s house is her laundry room. There covering the walls is her collection of pictures and items depicting a variety of the earth’s garments gathered and hung to dance in the sun. These are many and come from every member of the family, from the four corners of the globe. Some date back fifty years or more. I think my five sisters and I are always unconsciously on the lookout for them. The walls seem to have expanded to hold their number, and there always seems room for one more. I make a pilgrimage there each time I visit to look and admire new and old alike, but perhaps even more, to bask in the passionate tenderness of my mother’s presence. It soaks the walls of the entire house, but none so strongly felt as in that small shrine of laundry. It's like a song I know by heart.

This morning I found another little offering for my mother’s laundry room; a postcard, small, whimsical, perfect. On the back are the words, "Proof of Global Warming!" I will frame it and soon it will be adding its own bit of humour and sweetness to the others.

'We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only picking grapes or hanging up the laundry.' ... E.B. White

'A Little Sugar in My Bowl'

2010-06-16T08:03:00.000-07:00

David has been my best friend for many years. Most of the years of our friendship have been via written correspondence and phone calls as we haven’t lived in the same city since our late teenage years. As Gem had a conference to attend these past four days which happened to be in the city where David and his delightful husband Tom live, I decided to accompany him and invite myself for a visit. From beginning to end, it was an unmitigated pleasure.

David and Tom, aged fifty-three and fifty-seven, have been together for twenty-two years, and married for the last three of these. They have a daughter from Tom’s first marriage, a son-in-law and an infant grandson. They also have two dogs, a cat and one of the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen. Their lovely lakefront house is soaked with energy and humour and happiness. So powerful, it weakened my knees. I couldn't stop myself from touching things ... the big orange and purple rooster on the kitchen table, the cushions, one embroidered with the word 'Chit' and the other 'Chat' on the comfortable window seat, the paintings and photographs. The hearts of these two beautiful men shine out of their home in a mosaic of devotion. David and Tom's natural generosity spills out like spring water.

We ate the most delicious, succulent barbecued pork, and corn on the cob, and red potato salad, and an amazing salad of early dandelion greens and arugula and fresh herbs tossed with a little vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil and garlic. There were sublime lemon biscuits served with their first sweet wild strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. We ate outside in the gazebo surrounded by the beauty of that garden, the lake water gleaming before us. Later, numerous tiny lanterns peered into the darkness creating small magic pools of allure.

David and I indulge in a feast of do-you-remembers? Much laughter. The humour is deep and quiet and full of irony and puns. There are a few tears, too. It hasn't been all sweetness and sunshine. I remember the anxiety, as well as the burgeoning joys of their beginnings. I felt their anguish at losing beloved friends to Aids. We speak of how healing brings the past from obscurity into light, of the peace of the life they have built for themselves. It is rare to find conversation such as this ... igniting of spirit and mind and heart.

Later Gem joins us. "Hi Sugar", he says to David, as he is embraced in a hug. There is history in that greeting. The first time my mother-in-law saw David after learning that he was gay a few years after our marriage, she said to him, "Yah, I always thought there was a little sugar in your blood, liefje". Since that day Gem and I have often called David by the pet name, 'Sugar'.

When we leave the flowers smell richly in the dark. Tom carries an armful of fat ginger cat. Cleopatra, of the mysterious green eyes gleaming in the night. Hugs and kisses are given and exchanged. The murmur of our mingled voices pulse in the night as we make arrangements to meet for Sunday brunch. I feel surrounded, encompassed by something that I can only describe as abiding love ... the kind that is honest and absolute.

'I want a little sugar
in my bowl
I want a little sweetness
down in my soul ....'

(Nina Simone) ... have a listen!

Kinship

2010-06-11T18:56:00.000-07:00

During the packing and unpacking process, I have been spending a lot of time looking at old photo albums and boxes filled with pictures. Some contain the ghost faces of people whose name I will never know. The known and unknown alike, speak to me. Their blood flows beneath my skin in a transmission from the past. Not just my blood, but in the bone memories of stories which have remarkably somehow led up to this very moment.

When I find an unknown among the treasures of the past, I always wonder about the life its image holds and the connection to the person who kept it. I want to know their story, to speak their name, to seek out their place in history.

Amongst my twin great-aunts’ old pictures, sent to me after they died three weeks apart last summer at the age of ninety-five, is the above photo of an infant dressed in a lovely white scalloped-edged gown. The back of it contains only the words, “Our darling Freddie”. No date. No location. No last name. Just little Freddie in his baby beauty, obviously much loved and cared for. If you look carefully at the top of his little head, it even appears that an attempt was made to part his sparse hair straight down the middle in the male fashion of the time. I’m guessing it was taken somewhere around the end of the nineteenth or the very beginning of the twentieth century. There is no Frederick, Fred or Freddie in my maternal family ancestry that anyone can recall.

I can see a wee spark of future mischief in little Freddie’s eyes, a glimmer of humour in his expression. Where did he play, I wonder? Who did he grow up to become? I hope he did grow up and is not one of the countless little ones slumbering in an old graveyard somewhere.

We all have favourite photographs of our children. I would like to share a couple of mine here now in memory of the unknown Freddie who may or may not be related to me, and as a tribute to childhood everywhere.

My oldest son Nicholas, who will be thirty-one in August, was the kind of little boy whose pockets contained fragments of his love for the outdoors ... small rocks, shells, little pieces of wood, a bird's feather ... collected by his own hands, scoured for uniqueness, pocketed for remembrance. Many times during dinner, he'd eat with his small treasures laid out in a ring around the edge of his placemat. Their possession gave him a wonderful sense of satisfaction. Always a keen observer of natural life, there came a day at aged seven when he showed his eighteen month old brother, Joshua, how to blow a dandelion clock. I was fortunate to capture that shining moment on camera.

My other favourite photo is of my daughter Sarah, now aged twenty-seven. She was nine years old and we were on holiday on Vancouver Island at the time. I saw her standing facing the ocean as the waves surged and kissed the shore below. She had both arms raised and a feather clasped in one hand and was using it like a baton conducting an orchestra. I captured her in that blissful moment; a little girl poised in beauty composing her own symphony of the sea.

All these photographs speak of those things which form our roots and sense of belonging. I want to nurture the connections, find the stories, and weave them into that place in my soul which honours kinship.

(This is a Sepia Saturday post.)

Morning Witness

2010-06-09T08:56:00.000-07:00

I am given a moment every morning that lights me from head to foot, charges my batteries, and makes my senses dance. What did I ever do to deserve this?

Most days I awaken around 5:30 and amble to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. The world outside my windows is still in darkness, the features nebulous, bosky and undifferentiated to the early morning eye. A gentle silence reigns. The stillness which is draped over everything is the perfect companion to begin the day.

I usually sip my first coffee standing by the window. As the sun rises over the horizon, the day's first light peers through the trees, pokes its way through the iron railings on the patio and paints the walls with rosy fingers and a wide brush. A delicious warmth creeps over my body. It is a mixture of the fragrant, the visual, and the embraced.

I find often the most beautiful stories are written in darkness, exposed by the sun, augmented by shadows, then gone. Each sunrise is different, and every single one is a gift. Ready or not, here comes another day. Here I come too, perhaps not as filled with light as the morning sky, but working on it in my own peculiar fashion.

I wonder how our ancient kin would have described such luminosity? There may have been a paucity of descriptive terms and expressions for such experiences in the long ago, but we are united across time and space in the unspoken language of wonder. In my mind, I can see them standing somewhere quietly on a summer morning long ago, as entranced and comforted by the deep glow, as I am here today.

'It's All Your State of Mind' ....

2010-06-08T09:34:00.000-07:00

When they learned that I was moving away, family, friends and co-workers told me that I was fortunate, that I’d now have time to do all the things I hadn’t had time for previously. I’m starting to realise that I was, in fact, already doing all the things I wanted to do.

I’m missing my grandchildren terribly. I’m missing my daughter, my sons, and my friends. I’m missing my working life; the interaction with patients and co-workers. I’m missing the pulse of my old life as I struggle to re-define myself in the light of the new one. I miss the energy of my old house; the small shoes piled up at the door, the scattered toy cars, the laughter and tears of children, their sheer noisiness.

I’m having trouble sleeping at night. I can’t find the sweet center, the angle of repose. I remember as a child I had a bedtime ritual which consisted of setting stuffed animal beside stuffed animal, shoe beside shoe, doll beside doll, book beside book. I could never abandon one single thing to loneliness. I wish it were that simple right now. The aroma of change, the altered light is inescapable.

“Are you okay?”, asks Gem as he heads out to the university.
“Sure”, I nod.
“Come over and have lunch with me today?”, he says.
“I will”, I tell him.

One of my favourite bands is Great Big Sea, a Canadian group from NewFoundland. Their song ‘Ordinary Day’ never fails to brighten and comfort me. So, I’ve put that on ... and I’m going to get dressed and finish the hanging basket I started yesterday. Later, I’ll walk to the beautiful campus where Gem works and we’ll find somewhere lovely on the grounds to eat our picnic lunch.

Here for your enjoyment, Great Big Sea performing 'It’s an Ordinary Day'.

“And I say way-hey-hey, it's just an ordinary day
and it's all your state of mind.
At the end of the day, you've still got to say,
it's all right.”

Anerca

2010-06-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

The art of being silent is rare and precious. Communicating together in silence, in stillness, hears and speaks a truth beyond both. After almost thirty-five years together, Gem and I have become shareholders in the gift of silent eloquence.

The Inuit have the beautiful word "anerca" for the mystery of "the within of things", which discloses itself to the one who waits. The Inuit sculptor does not force the stone to fabricate a shape which is not in the stone; he does not go against the grain and grace of the stone’s inner secret. The "anerca" reveals itself to the one who respects the silence within. So it is for those who can let themselves be revealed through shared silence.

Yesterday we went for a walk on a breezy, overcast Sunday afternoon. We followed a path by the river‘s edge that leads along disused railway tracks and into an old tunnel. We stood there within that silent sanctuary for several minutes. Lichens and mosses clung to the walls. I felt as though I was in the centre of an ancient creature. There was a pulsing flow of primal energy. Neither Gem or I spoke a word. We both felt the "anerca" of this tunnel reclaimed by the elements, recreating itself in silence. We emerged into the light feeling humility and shared wonder.

Perhaps we learn the healing embrace of silence and stillness from the daily gifts of quiet things; the wordless communication of rocks and roses, bread and sunlight, shadows in moonlight, and old lovers’ wordless peace.

A Life in Dolls

2010-06-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

This week's Sepia Saturday photograph, taken in 1965, is of four little sisters and their dolls on a sunny June morning. From left to right is Jo 8, Amanda 4, Connie 7 and Suzanne 2. Our newest sister, Alice, was only a few weeks old and babies would have been on our minds. This picture still has the power to elate with the sweetness and strength of its history.

I was very much a little girl who loved her dolls. I admit that I was probably around twelve before I reluctantly stopped requesting them for gifts. The doll in front of me in the picture is a cloth and vinyl combination ‘Baby Dear’ doll. My next-in-line sister, Connie, and I had received them for Christmas. I named mine Noelle and often dressed her in discarded real baby clothes.

This photo awakens a sleeping self in me; stirs something from the well of my childhood. I am reminded of all the dolls I had over the years. I am the oldest of six sisters, so consequently none of my dolls survived the successive and varied mothering they received over the years. I was, in turn, the proud owner of:

A 'Posie' doll:

A 'Tiny Tears',

A Skipper,

A Betsy Wetsy,

And perhaps the strangest of all:

A Nun doll.
My earliest years at Primary school were spent at a convent school and I held an admixture of fascination, fear and awe of the nuns who educated me. I had requested my nun doll repeatedly and my mother had no easy task finding her. I named her Sister Mary Rosary ... odd, I know ... but I was only six years old at the time.

Perhaps, though, the dolls I loved the most were my huge family of paper cut-out dolls.

I literally spent hours engaged in play with them. There was something intensely satisfying to me about carefully cutting out their clothes and staging endless games as I whisked them in and out of their extensive wardrobes. They all had names and I created a rich series of relationships between them. I kept them in a box under my bed ... safe from the prying eyes and fingers of my little sisters.

My sister Connie, who is sixteen months younger than me, remembers with delight the stories I used to make-up for her each night when we went to bed. Most of these involved our dolls coming alive and the adventures they had. I don’t recall the specific details, but I do remember the two of us cuddled in our beds as the stories I created took shape in the shadowed darkness.

Humanity’s childhood shares with all created things the primal dreams and desires of embodiment. The little girl who loved her dolls so tenderly grew-up to become something of a ‘baby whisperer’. I have the reputation of being able to calm any baby down. Last year, late one evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a neighbour, the new mother of twin boys (and also of two other little boys under the age of five). She was carrying a frantically crying baby. “I hope you don’t mind”, she said anxiously. “I saw your lights were still on and I’m at the end of my tether.” Her words dissolved into tears. I took the tiny, squalling wee man from her and she followed me into the house. As Gem made tea, I rocked and soothed little Beckham (yes, that’s his real given name) until he fell asleep against my chest.

Perhaps that healing embrace of comfort has its roots in a story of long ago; a little girl playing with her dolls.

(A proud, tired Nana Jo with her real life 'dolls' ... my first grandchildren, Ariana and Darian, born almost exactly one month apart on August 4th & September 3rd, 2003.)

Pretty Pretty Princess

2010-06-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

(Mattias, a study in wonder, taken last summer at the age of 3 years, 4 months.)

Reading this yesterday in Susan's wonderful blog reminded me of a sweet little incident of last year. My grandson Mattias, who was three years old at the time, had been invited to a little neighbour’s birthday party. He was the only male guest among five girls. When I picked him up after the party, Julia’s mother met me at the door and explained apologetically that she hoped I didn’t mind, but the party theme had been Princess, and she hadn’t thought to buy any boy items for the lone Prince in attendance. Moments later my grandson appeared on the front porch wearing a sparkly pink princess tiara on his head, and carrying a shiny pink princess sceptre in one hand and a pink princess goodie bag in the other. He was beaming. “Mind?”, I asked. “What’s to mind? Pink is his favourite colour.”

Mattias, a year older now, is presently in a ‘painting the roses red’ phase. He races through the world in his red shoes and red spring jacket. At bath time after splashing through a sudsy pool of wind-up boats, stick-on fish, butterflies and mermaids, he asks for the one red towel I own. "I left my heart in the Sea of No Cares", he sings as I towel him off. The boy has been singing since infancy. When asked by Darian’s hockey coach if he wanted to join his big brother in playing hockey next season, Mattias (whose name my son chose from the NHL roster after hockey-great Mattias Ohlund) replied matter-of-factly, "No, I’m going to learn to sing!"

(One of my favourite photos of Ariana, a Pretty Princess, at the age of two.)

My granddaughter, Ariana, has lived, breathed and danced pink practically since birth. At nearly seven she wants to be a fashion designer when she grows up ... of princessy dresses. No one has suggested this to her. It is who she is ... right now, anyway. All four grandchildren adore her game ‘Pretty Pretty Princess’. The boys compete for the bling just as ardently as she does.

Neither child has been steered towards their choices. I don’t believe it’s a matter of guiding children towards the gender ’appropriate’. It’s a matter of respecting and accepting individuality in both genders. Let’s be doggedly open to the mystery and beauty and diversity of our children and grandchildren. To each of my sweet fledglings, in the infinite abyss of human hunger, may you always feel the shelter of love.

Mountain People

2010-06-02T11:54:00.000-07:00

Here, we are completely encircled by mountains. There is nowhere I can stand without being graced by their majesty. I have always wondered how much the geography of a place shapes the spirit of its people. Do prairie dwellers know a boundlessness that mountain people cannot understand? When a former co-worker and friend who had grown up on the prairies heard that I was moving to Kamloops, she told me that she had lived there for several months once as a young nurse. "I left because I felt claustrophobic all the time", she said.

I don’t feel that way. In fact, I feel an excitement, an added dimension of intimacy with the cosmic. My heart and mind soar. I went for a walk yesterday, my head engaged in the mountains. I was brought back to earth by these words from the conversation of two young men walking unseen behind me.

"Dude, I mean why be too cool? It only makes the world colder."

Immediately lyrics from the immortal Beatles came leaping into my mind,
'Hey Jude ... it’s a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder ....'

Did the young men know the song, I wondered? I turned for a quick glimpse. Clad in shorts and t-shirts, tousled hair, and open faces, they were carrying a large framed painting between them. I recognised it immediately as ’The Lady of Shalott’, a print my oldest son also owns.

"John Waterhouse. Very cool", I said, smiling.

They grinned at me. "Got it at a garage sale for $3."

"Enjoy!", I said, turning.

For me, the spirit of the people of a place depends upon the real presence of person to person intimacy taking joy in ordinary revelations. My brief encounter on a breezy blue afternoon was a continued covenant with the mountains.

('The Lady of Shalott' - by John Waterhouse, 1888.)

The Remains of May

2010-05-31T19:21:00.000-07:00

I believe that our ancient and innermost will desires metamorphoses, kaleidoscopic transformations of ever-shifting beauty. Such, I found today.

The end of May is celebrated here with a yearly ritual; an old-fashioned fete which involves simple delights such as games from childhood, picnic fare, music and a May Pole Dance. Gem and I decided that this would be our first participation of an event together as part of our new community.

As we leave our car and walk, emerging into the sunny riverside park, our sense of pleasure leaps. We are lifted into the light of laughter, music and play. The ribbon bedecked pole stands ready. Friends greet each other, children frisk and run.

The high point was the May Pole Dance. The dancers and their ribbons intricately weave and braid an image of the way our lives are woven together. On our behalf, they offer a mobile icon of life; the turning of time, the cycles of creation, from birth to death, around the still centre of an eternal mystery.

It was a shining moment of ease and freedom as children danced, and then slowly, tentatively, adults joined them. The ritual dance became the social dance of the whole community as the pulse of music and motion melted old hurts and fears and angers into shared joy.

There is a continued need for rites of renewal, ceremonies of innocence and awareness, celebrations of the spirit. I am glad we are in a place that recognises this truth.

The Scent of Memory

2010-05-29T07:21:00.001-07:00

It’s amazing how certain scents instantly bring back memories so precise and evocative, you are suddenly back in that place of long ago. The yeasty welcome of freshly baked bread, the smell almost painfully igniting my desire to consume, is one of those scents for me. It is synonymous with my maternal grandmother, Aline, the woman in the photograph. Yesterday, as I stood in a line at the bakery, I was kneed in the gut with memory; her rose-lotioned hands cupping my face, setting my place, slicing her newly baked bread, as she asked me what I’d seen or heard.

With each passing year, my grandmother feels more distant, trapped down the smudgy viewfinder of a pinhole camera, fading, the memory of her breaking up and drifting in all directions. Sometimes I squint, trying to see double, willing myself to re-live things said and done and felt.

Aline was a sister to the twins I wrote about several weeks back on another Sepia Saturday. In fact she was the only singleton sister in between two sets of twin girls. My mother came to believe and understand that my grandmother’s unique family birth order (she had an older brother as well) left her at times feeling lonely, displaced, the only sister who wasn’t twinned with a special friend. She was the middle child, often the attention seeker, and the family ‘wild child’ in her youth, and retained something of these aspects all her life.

I have so often wished that my grandmother could have lived long enough to have known and loved my children. She died of ovarian cancer when I was five months pregnant with my first child in 1979. Seated on her lap is my Uncle Philip, the much loved youngest of her four children and her only son. My mother was twelve when he was born and in many ways was like a second mother to him. He was only eight years older than me and more like a big brother than an uncle. He died tragically in a car accident when he was only forty-two. Philip deserves a post of his own and I won’t write about him now.

Aline was a fun-loving woman, larger than life, beautiful, opinionated, intelligent, a fabulous cook and baker. She could tell a story with perfect timing, always leaving you spell-bound and wanting more. She was vivacious and the heart and center of whatever room she was in. She was generous and gregarious, but had a sharp tongue at times. Both adventurous and impetuous, she would often gather her kids and their friends together for impromptu outings. "If I was a man, I'd have become an explorer", she would say sometimes.

Aline was not your typical fifties housewife. Even during her child-rearing years, she worked as an executive secretary for a large company, which was very unusual in those days. She was the only working mother that my mother and her siblings knew. My grandfather, a gentle business man, allowed her, her way in all things, let her ‘rule the roost’, so to speak. Yet, it was more complicated than that ... they loved each other very much. I think Aline brought colour and zest into his life, and he steadfastness and unconditional love into hers. After her death for a long time the stars faded out for my grandfather. In fact, although he lived for another thirteen years, he was never quite the same man again.

When I was a child she would visit us in England every three years or so, in between our holidays in Canada. I do not recall my grandmother, in all her life, saying that she loved me. That was not her way. In many ways her life was not a part of the child I was or the woman I was becoming. I was a very shy, introspective little girl, and I think my grandmother struggled at times to understand my particular brand of girlhood, just as she had my mother’s before me.

Aline loved wolves. She had pictures of them in her house, and sculptures, too. Perhaps she saw something of herself in their wildness, their haunting songs. So, too, she loved the woods ... something I have in common with her. I wish we could have shared that love together. Much of everything I am, I became after she died.

I see my grandmother’s memory as a tree with roots so deep they touch the molten core of the earth ... my earth. And, as ever ... I smell her memory in the fragrance of newly baked bread.

Whatever the Wind

2010-05-28T08:56:00.000-07:00

(Kamloops view.)

I've been here in Kamloops for six days now, and after a bit of a rocky start, life is starting to unfurl beautifully. I must admit that when I first got here, I sat down and cried. I had left a spotless house; a home containing a multi-layered patina of love which reflected off the polished surface of every nook and cranny of it.

I walked into a place that was filthy. A cleaning crew was supposed to have gone through the entire condo which had sat empty for several months. However, apart from steam-cleaning the carpets, no other cleaning had been done at all. Furniture and boxes were piled high everywhere, and for a short time, I couldn't see beyond what was immediately before me. Four litres of bleach and many, many buckets of soap and water later, my aching knees can attest to the fact that our condo now shines with cleanliness.

The first thing I did that garbled day, after rousing myself from my watery indulgence, was to make the bed. As I smoothed the linen and looked out the window at the mountains, my ragged edges started to find some solace. I was reminded of one of my favourite poems by the wonderful Rupert Brooke, “The Great Lover”, which details the many splendid ways that life seduces us with the simple beauty of the ordinary.

“Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon,
Smooth away trouble;”

I have spent these past six days cleaning and sorting and arranging. The rooms of the condo are starting to bear the mark of our presence. The views from every window are a gift; the mountains, the river, the green lawns and mature trees. It is slowly becoming a place to contain my dreams, my peace and passions, my stillness and laughter. Sometimes, though, I feel my heart holding back, fighting the tiny rootlets of belonging. My ego is reluctant to let go of the familiar, as if doing so would somehow negate past loves. Absurd, I know. I realise that I need to embrace both together, to affirm a whole and balanced beauty.

There always seems to be a wind blowing here. Today it is warm and gentle. Yesterday, it contained the sting of rain. Whatever the wind, the love will come.

(The ground floor patio.)

Artie's Game

2010-05-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

My Sepia Saturday offering this week is a photograph of our very first local hockey team in 1913. Outside my department in the hospital is a wall featuring several old black and white pictures of regional interest, including this one. The handsome gentleman sitting on the ice on the right was the uncle of one of my patients, a remarkable ninety-two year old man who still brews his own beer. His name was Arthur Morgan and he was a keen athlete and apparently quite a colourful character. Having returned home from the Great War safely, Artie, as he was known to family and friends, died in 1919 during the Spanish influenza outbreak which swept the world with such devastating consequences.

His nephew, Bob, who was the son of Artie’s sister and born a few years after his death, remembers being told tales about Uncle Artie throughout his childhood. One afternoon recently, Bob, frail and stooped, clutching his walker, stood beside me and pointed out Artie’s picture. His clouded eyes were filled with the glow of memory as he began to speak.

Artie apparently loved wild blueberries and spent hours picking them. He had a great sense of humour. He loved to fish and skate, but ice-hockey was his passion, 'his game'. His grandmother could rarely speak of her only son without tears in her eyes. She had lost another son as an infant years earlier. Apparently Uncle Artie, a school boy at the time, had charged local kids a penny each to come and see the wee babe lying in his coffin on the kitchen table! "I can still see my grandmother giving a little laugh when she’d tell of this and then wiping her eyes on her apron", Bob said.

At the time of his death, Artie had started a small lumber mill and was still playing ice-hockey on a local team. In those days they played exclusively outdoors on the uneven surface of frozen lakes. You may be interested to learn that despite ice-hockey being Canada’s national religion and we like to believe we invented the game, it has British beginnings.

In the 1860’s British soldiers stationed in Kingston, Ontario began playing ice-hockey on the small frozen lakes in the area. Within a few years, students from McGill University had heard about the game and were playing it themselves. By the 1870’s the students had written up a basic set of rules and had also exchanged the ball used by the soldiers for a wooden puck.

Ice-hockey is the growing rite of passage for many Canadian boys, and my eldest grandson Darian, who will be seven in September, has been playing Mite hockey for almost two years. I once found him sleeping with his hockey stick, and another time his hockey jersey had somehow replaced his pyjamas as sleepwear.

Gem and I have accompanied our son Joshua (Darian’s Daddy and a superb hockey player in his own right) many times to watch his games. There is something especially enjoyable about watching little NHL dreamers tumble and slip and play their five and six year old hearts out on the ice. Each one wants only one thing ... to score a goal. Positions are anathema to them. They all want the puck and to get it into that net. At that age, assisting your team mate is also a foreign concept, despite the coach calling out numerous times, “Assist, Jackson ... Assist! Darian, Pass! Pass! Pass! Assisting is very important, guys!”

During the last ten minutes of each practice, a dozen pucks are thrown onto the ice and the kids are allowed “free” play. Within seconds every single boy is engrossed in a frenzy of shooting from near and far. Each little player scans the sea of parents and grandparents in the stands. Shouts of "I got a goal!! Did you see?" fill the arena. The happiness Darian emanates, is to me, the heart of the game.

There is something very poignant about seeing the picture of the young, vital Artie Morgan in his ‘jailbird’ hockey uniform. I can imagine him as a boy, blueberry stains on his chin. I can see him blowing on his hands to keep them warm as he skates with his friends. A century later, his legacy lives on in the hundreds of local boys, cradled by wonder, still playing ‘Artie’s game’.

(Darian, age six, Mite Hockey, 2010).

A Communion of Endings

2010-05-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Helen, my very last patient (with her permission).

This past twenty-seven years working at my hospital culminated in a single day ... yesterday. It was a day full of last goodbyes, with each moment defined sharply, as if with silver edges.

Although I was a surgical (O.R.) nurse for many years, for the past six years I have worked in the Burn and Wound Care Unit. They have been the most rewarding of my career. Throughout the day, patients, both past and present, dropped by to wish me well. By mid-afternoon the desk was piled high with flowers and gift bags.

At the end of the day, Lois, a colleague who is also a beloved friend, presented me with a wonderful photo album she had compiled of my hospital years. It is a work of art.

The day crowned last evening when fourteen colleagues took me out for a fabulous Thai dinner. The small banquet room hummed in an outpouring of celebration. They had got together and gifted me with a wonderful series of framed photographs of this city; a precious reminder of my thirty years living here. Yesterday, I felt that my dreams and hopes were a part of all those around me. I am overwhelmed, and beyond grateful. I am also deeply humbled by the generosity and kindness.

Life is best when it is centred around a hearth of communion. I am thankful that I am a part of this vast belonging. I feel so blessed and loved, my whole body and heart dances today.

How amazing it is to be permitted to gather the given.

Monday Musings

2010-05-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Nothing specific to write about this morning ... just a few early musings before I head out to work. I’m in a quiet place, a lull of very little brain, as Winnie-the-Pooh might have said.

We all have our little comfort rituals. One of mine is that first cup of coffee in the morning. I sip the rich scented brew and life flows forth glowing and warm. Ahhh, coffee. Sometimes I feel like I am lurching from one cup of coffee to the next, rewarding myself with a handful of beans, grinding them by hand if I'm feeling energetic, scooping it from the can, if I'm not. It's like fuel to me. And then there are all the things that go with coffee, special little almond biscuits wrapped in tissue paper, or small chunks of chocolate praline wrapped in foil ... nothing too large because it mustn't distract from the main event.

My grandsons picked bouquets of dandelions for me yesterday, carrying them carefully between closed hands like a chalice. I placed them in a jar on my desk and this morning their brief royalty has been spent.

It is raining right now, raining as though the sun may never shine again. It's hard to believe that only yesterday I stood in bare limbs and squinted at a peerless sky. It seems to me that rain makes space more intimate. I huddle closer to my keyboard, wrap my hand more tightly around my mug of hot, fragrant coffee, and dream at the stream of rainwater glazing the flowers outside. Soon these mid-May days will again ripen into golden splendour and plenitude. But for now, there is the sweet steady downpour of rain.

All over the house, boxes, all stacked and taped, wait patiently. Only three more days left of work.

Full Circle

2010-05-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

These pictures, found tucked into an old journal, were both taken in 1976; the first one on September 3rd, the day Gem and I were married. It is of us in our “going away’ outfits following our wedding. In those days you changed out of your bridal gown and tux after the reception, and into a 'going away' outfit. I don't think people do this anymore. We were both only nineteen, four months shy of our 20th birthdays (we are nine days apart in age). We look so impossibly young! Gem’s polyester leisure suit with its pointy-collar shirt was the height of fashion, as was my silky peasant-style dress. I wore platform wedge shoes in the same rust colour as the hat.

The second picture is of me, taken a few days later. I’m wearing the wide-legged, bell-bottomed white jeans which I loved. In the background you can see part of the old truck with the camper-back where we spent the majority of our two week honeymoon. Apart from the first night when we stayed at a fancy hotel in Vancouver, we toured around parts of British Columbia, driving wherever we fancied, spending all our nights in that little camper.

On the back of this photo are written the words, "Jo, Kamloops 1976, honeymoon". This is an especially interesting bit of serendipity because Kamloops is the city where we are moving to next week. I had forgotten that Gem and I had spent a day there during our honeymoon. In all the intervening years we had never had a chance to go back, and now we’ll actually be residing in a place that saw a part of our beginnings. Full circle. It reminds me of an old door I saw recently. Its layers of paint had faded unevenly, blue patched over fading green ... one era glimpsed through another.

I called Gem last night and peppered our conversation with honeymoon do-you-remembers.

I remember driving along highways edged with simmering fringes of daisies as we listened to Abba and Queen, sometimes singing along. I remember the impromptu picnics and little hikes, the swims in glacier lakes which stole our breath and retrieved it in little screeches. I remember the somewhat frightening, but exhilarating kayak paddle through the rapids at Hell’s Gate. I remember the little argument we had about me wanting to look for a place to do laundry and Gem not thinking it important. I remember the day we came across a Fiddle Festival in Merritt and joined in with the stomping, swaying, cowboy-boot-wearing sea of humanity.

It was during my honeymoon that I began my love of old, abandoned log cabins and barns, left to rot, hollow and exposed. It was also where we first saw the Northern Lights, interpreted by the First Nations peoples as the dancing of human spirits. I remember my awe as we watched the night come alive with banners of unfurling green light.

When I look at these pictures and see the hope and promise shining in our youthful faces, we thankfully didn’t know just how tough it was going to be. We’ve been through a lot, Gem and I. We both have our wounds, our dark places, our fears of being broken. We have endured cancer (I am approaching my seven year survival anniversary), our younger son becoming a teenaged father, providing a home for two of our little grandsons for three years, the loss of my beloved brother at age twenty-eight, the death of Gem’s parents, one right after the other.

But we’ve also had immense joys along the way, and like I wrote in another post, life just keeps on becoming. People ask me how we’ve done it ... survived intact despite the odds. I believe that when you can respect each other's personal spaces ... when you can find common joy in countless ordinary days ... when you can reach out of your wounds to each other, in brokenness ... you are open to your deepest sense of belonging and love.

"I always thought that your butt looked pretty good in those jeans", said Gem last night when we talked.

Oh, and a sense of humour is vital, too.

(This is part of Sepia Saturday. For more wonderful offerings, please visit!)

Heartwood

2010-05-13T08:52:00.000-07:00

Lately, I can’t seem to focus on anything for too long without becoming choked-up by the emotion of these last fleeting, astoundingly precious days. They are to be savoured, not chewed hastily while looking ahead to the anticipated next course. These are the small muscles of time.

I went for a little hike in the woods with my grandsons yesterday. As we made our way to a small pond to feed the ducks, I am thrilled that Darian, who will be seven in September, is able to correctly identify several different trees.

“That’s a Pine!”, he says, confidently.

“How do you know?”, I ask.

“It has long, sharp fingers,” he answers.

“Needles,” I smile.

“And that’s a Fir because it has short, soft fingers ... needles,” he continues, cupping his hand over one.

“That’s right,” I tell him.

“And there is a Birch tree, and that one is a Poplar.”

“And, how can you tell the difference between the two?”, I say.

“Birch has white bark and you can peel it easy,” and he demonstrates, holding a small curl of wood in his palm. “Poplar looks almost the same, but its bark is green.”

“You are starting to know the language of the trees!”, I say, proudly.

Throughout the conversation, Mattias, aged four, echoes the names like a little tree seeking its own light and place.

Darian looks at me and grins. I grin back. It’s the kind of smile which possesses the soul ... both his and mine. I take out my camera. But it’s impossible, because you can't take pictures of something that hangs in the air, like breath that is suddenly, momentarily visible, of this heart stretching, ephemeral beauty.

Maybe the whole cosmic and social mystery of life is a continuous tightening and loosening of myriad knots. To be caught in its binding and loosening can be both terrible and beautiful. This is the texture of life. I wonder what transfiguration I will make of my new mosaic? Like the inner heartwood of old trees, I hope I continue to grow.

'Play Misty for Me'

2010-05-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

It is ten days now until the big move, and a frenzy of packing and cleaning has ensued. I have only four days left of work. These are days full of the significance of 'last' moments; little flecks of bitter-sweetness piling up, one after the other.

Good friends invited me over for dinner yesterday. Just a laid back kind of thing; chili and cornbread and a bottle (or two) of fine red wine. We shared companionable laughter and conversation in a way that only the closest friends can. The kind of put your feet up on the couch, sneak chocolates from the box on the table, scratch your belly, completely comfortable in your skin and heart kind of friendship.

Their youngest son, Kyle, aged twenty, is home from university for the summer. I’ve known this young man since birth; well, prior to birth, actually. He is funny and creative and handsome and intelligent, and just the weeist bit lost right now. He’s not sure what path his studies/life should take. Kyle had a new girlfriend over and the two of them joined us for a bit. This girl, let’s call her Misty, is a ravishingly beautiful blonde, and this will sound cliché, but dumb. Seriously, gloriously dumb. At one point we were looking at a gorgeous painting my friend Judy, Kyle’s mother and a local artist, has done of the huge, ten kilometre long ice jam that occurred on the Nechako River last winter. Misty said, "I don’t see why the government didn’t just thaw it!" Mike, Judy’s husband, explained that it wasn’t that simple, and then went into a few technical details. She then replied, "Well, I don't believe in anything that’s depressing because I‘m just not like that." ... ?? Ummm, okay.

Also, her ambition one day is to have twins ... because then 'you only have to go through all that once and everything'. Yes, she actually used the word ambition. She hopes they'll be boys, but she wants to name them Rider and Harley, regardless!

I was wearing my favourite jeans. The ones that fit perfectly. The now-faded denim soft against my skin. They have magical properties, those jeans. I put them on and I’m happy in a carefree, let’s dance and garden and bake bread and giggle to the antics of squirrels kind of way. I said as much to my friends, who because they love me, indulge my various bits of eccentricity. This seques into a reminder of a curious sight I came across the the other day. A pair of neatly folded jeans hanging on a branch in the middle of a trail in the park. Mike, Judy and I then start making-up little stories as to the possible whys and hows and wherefores of the 'pants lost in the park'.

Misty declares that she has had a very trying week because she can’t find sandals the exact shade of pink she needs to match the dress she will be wearing to her sister’s wedding. "I just don't know why things like that always have to happen to me!", she says, dramatically. Kyle’s eyes’ catch mine, and his grin is a telling admixture of deep mirth and embarrassment. Still, Misty really is beautiful, and good natured, and obviously smitten.

I feel renewed as I hug and kiss my friends goodbye. This short interlude has been a touchstone for the soul. It did much to restore my sense of balance and equilibrium. I seek, I feel, I express, I absorb, I love, I weep a little bit ... and oh, how I laugh. Happiness comes in capricious and unexpected moments.

(Judy's artistic perspective of 'The Great Ice Jam' of 2009).