Our Home and Native Land

 

November 16th, 2025 is the date I put up on here last week. It is now the 20th, and I still have not managed to get my head in gear and write. One reason is that I am rereading some of the Barbara Hambly books in the Benjamin January series. A new one came in last week and was a real page turner, causing me to dig half a dozen out of the basement bookcases to reread. Hambly can really write, and although the January series is now almost a classic formula run, the books are still good. In fact, a classic formula can be better than most other stuff you read – Dorothy Sayers, for example, even if she did allow that she would like to kill off Lord Peter. 

I read to escape. I reread because I often don’t remember much about my first run through a work of fiction with a good plot. I will have been speed reading to find out what happened and when you do that, you miss the detail and, often, the best things in the book. When I reread, I take my time and try to pick up on all the detail I may have missed. In a ‘murder mystery’ this can be really interesting. How did the author keep the mystery going until the dénouement? Find the tiny clues.

We do not need tiny clues to figure out how the Liberals passed their budget, Green Party fulminations to the contrary. I am pretty sure the Conservatives are not going to want to go to the polls until they get a new and more acceptable leader. And the poor old NDP is struggling for survival. The Liberals may pick up a few of them if they implode. I am quite, quite sure that the Whips of the non-governing parties were counting heads just as avidly as was the Liberal in charge of getting the vote through. Deficit notwithstanding, as they say. 

I do hope that Mr. Banker is correct in his belief that we can rejig our manufacturing to be less dependant on the USA. And I also hope that Mr. Trump has too much on his mind to get back to driving Canada into the arms of America the Unbeautiful. (Let him keep playing around in South America and forget about us, please. Or work on his holiday hotel in Gaza.) Unfortunately, I do not really see how this diversification is going to do much for our dependence on the States. It is just to logical and too easy to trade next door across the longest undefended border in the world. (Yeah, I read all about the increase in border surveillance. Hah.)

I grew up in Windsor, Ontario. It is a manufacturing town (auto industry) south of Detroit. (Yep. Check the map.) The city depends on the auto industry; when the economy is good and people are buying expensive cars, Windsor thrives. Otherwise, not. When I was living there, there was a big Heinz plant in a small town, Leamington, close to Windsor, preparing food grown on the amazingly good crop land that surrounds the city. My grandfather made a good living on less than 100 acres, growing foods that Heinz bought, cucumbers for example. That plant has now, I read, been relocated to the US of A. I suspect a lot of that land is lying fallow. I really don’t want to look it up, lest it is even sadder than I imagine. And all of Canada is vulnerable to whatever the Americans decide. 

When a mouse is sleeping next to an elephant, it is useful for it to watch for twitching, dreaming and stretching. And be prepared to dodge. But we can’t really close down the border, or move away. Bottom line is that we are stuck with whatever they do. And the class bully  is in charge these days. The daily news makes dismal reading. (Stock market went down sharply today, who knows why.) 

Cat tale.

It is the butt end of a grey, cold, damp November day. The kind of day that really calls for you to have a book that you have read before, a soft reclining chair and no demanding tasks on hand. The undemanding tasks, the ones that are always hanging about, can be ignored, the book is amusing but you know the denouement, and the qualities of the chair are self-evident. 

 I have had a lovely nap, yes, thank you and I am now giving some thought to clearing the mess off my desk. I was aiming to find the bills that needed paying (see under ‘demanding’) but goodness knows what else is hiding under the sheaves and piles and notebooks. 

 I wrote that piece some days ago. Now it is the butt end of another November day, a very white one.

While I had my mind on money, I ordered three books from Amazon.. And I may donate the books to our local library once they have been to book club. You see, our book club has come up with what I consider to be a really good idea. We are working our way through John Ralston Saul’s Extraordinary Canadian series, choosing an eminent Canadian’s book from the list and reporting on it to the club. We figure we will use most of this year’s meetings on this as there are quite a few in the series and the library has a lot of them. 

 I chose to do Emily Carr next month and decided to buy the book as it is one of the few the library does not have. I also bought a book that is an overview of her painting, from adolescence on. Both books came today. The delivery was supposed to be yesterday, but we had a dump of snow, about 8 inches (and no, I am not going to do that in centimetres}, and the road was impassable. At noon today, which is the second day of the snowfall, the Township plow came growling along about noon and we were connected to the world once more. Well, by road. Both the internet and the phone were dead this morning and did not come to life until almost supper time. 

 I scanned through the book of paintings and quickly remembered why I do not enjoy Carr’s work. Although it is evocative and a wonderful record and commentary on West Coast tribal totems, her palette and her style do not resonate with me. It is amusing that the book of biography starts out with the author stating that he disliked Carr’s work. I will read on to see why he changed his mind. Maybe there is hope for me yet. I recall telling my mother, who admired and quoted T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is his most cited poem, I think), that I disliked his poetry. “You will enjoy it when you grow up,” she told me, cheerfully. Well, some of it speaks to me now. Since I am now 83, I am not hopeful about the rest. 

 I have to give the man his due, however. This is marvellous. 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, 

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, 

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, 

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, 

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, 

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, 

And seeing that it was a soft October night, 

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

The Raveled Sleave of Care,

 In my second year of university, I lived in a boarding house with four other female students. We became friends and one of the friendships survived graduation and Moving On and has been a life-long joy to me. I was paging through my yearbook from that year a few days ago, preparing to throw it away (downsizing it are us, in a small way) and I came across this photo.

I wish it were colour as my friend was an accomplished knitter and was in the process of making herself a plaid school scarf in the school’s colours of bright red, bright yellow and deep blue. We were going to go to a football game at another university, and scarves in school colours were ’de rigeur’. She finished it, as I recall, on the train on the way to the game, with my help in weaving in the ends where she had changed colours.

I was not (knot?) an accomplished knitter. I had, up until the time we became friends, only ever knitted one sad uneven square for a Brownie badge. But I decided, and at this remove of time I cannot remember why, to knit a vest for my boyfriend for Christmas. I bought boring brown yarn and a pattern of the simplest possible garment, and worked diligently away at this epic. I vaguely recall finishing it and blocking at home in the days before Christmas and mailing it to the bf. Who did not, to my recollection, acknowledge receipt of it.

I had a scarf. My mother had made it for me and she, while a long-time knitter, did not knit at tension well. The scarf was lovely, of good quality wool, but she had made it in bands in garter stitch and my goodness did it stretch. At a home football game in my third year, I recall my boyfriend (another one) and I both wearing it. At the same time. At some point my mother took two rectangles off the end, lined and sewed them into an envelope into which the rest of the scarf folded, making a pillow.

This scarf lived with us until our YD entered at our alma mater and was given the scarf. It survived four years with her and was passed on, again, to one of my husband’s nieces when she became a student there. I have no idea where it is now; it did not come back from that adventure. And I cannot imagine to what lengths it has gone.

I have become a not-bad knitter since those days. But since I made a scarf and, I think, a hat for the grandkid when she was a small girl, I have not done much. There are partly finished mittens in a knitting basket and a drawer full of patterns, needles and ends of wool. These, I think, can all go to the ‘Reuse Centre’ that runs at one of our waste disposal sites. Along with a lot of other craft items. But, first, green garbage bag time; there is a lot of junk in my sewing and laundry room drawers. A lot of junk.

I wonder what happened to my friend’s amazing technicolour scarf.

A Paddle in My Stream (of Consciousness)

 It has been a long time since I posted anything, I realize. Several reasons. One is that I have become addicted to an online game called ‘Magic Sort’. This is only the second time I have been so, I guess, silly as to play a game for many hours and multiple levels (about 2600 so far). The first time I became hooked was by a game called ‘Lemmings’ and I climbed every level to the very last one. At the time, I had bunged up a knee and was pretty well housebound; playing the game meant that I could forget about the knee throbbing for a while when I played. But really, it was stubbornness. I would solve a level and just have to see what was in the next one. This new addiction is probably even sillier (More silly? Hmm) because the levels are either really easy (solve in under a minute sometimes) or not easy at all and take multiple tries. I refuse to buy extras and so I have to sit through ads, over and over, to be allowed to get back to the start if I take more than one try. I practically have a couple of the ads memorized.

Anyway, it has been very quiet around here. We had a fine Thanksgiving dinner totally sourced and cooked by my wonderful daughters and the ED’s partner, who obsessed about the turkey but did a fine job. All I had to do was one pie ahead of time and it did not run over or burn or come out underdone, so I guess I scored. Oh, and I set the table. While all the chopping and mixing and timing was going on, I was relaxed in my fine new reclining chair, playing my game and having a couple of nice naps. I do love my family.

We were one short, however, as the grandkid is now in England, a few weeks into her Master’s program. She is getting out and about on hikes and runs, and tells her aunt, who was overseas and treated her to a weekend in London, that it is a bit puzzling that she is not having to work harder. My mother was the kind of student who had to have everything down perfectly in case she missed something. She did a second Master’s degree while I was a teenager and I vividly recall her obsessive (to me) revision and the worry that went with it. I think my daughter inherited the gene and she certainly passed it on to grandkid, who adds diligent work to a fine brain. It missed me, for sure.

In a strange sort of reversal, how well you did at formal schooling does not seem to matter, once you have graduated and are out of there. Your proud mother may remember that you won a medal, but the world does not care much, if at all, unlike competitive sports, where placement is everything. Second place should not be a loss of first place, but it frequently is. And if it is the Olympics or World Championships or the like, just getting to go ought to be a point of pride forever.

In the intervals of producing this deathless prose, I am checking the score of the Jays’ and Mariners’ seventh game. At present it is top of the ninth, Jays one run up. My parents would have been glued to the screen, or to the radio before we had a television set. They were both fanatic baseball fans – in their case, the Detroit Tigers since we lived in Windsor. They used to rent a television for a month in the fall and watch the playoffs, whether or not the Tigers made it. The first set we owned was only acquired in 1954 or 1955. I do not know why we didn’t have a set much earlier; we were affluent enough to afford one. But they listened to the games on the radio. I still remember my mother ironing with the radio babbling away. I also remember watching the last game of the Canada/Soviet hockey series on TV while trying to get the laundry done and ironing my hand at one crucial point. I kept the little girls home from school to watch that game, but they say they do not remember that.  It was 1972 (just checked that) and so they would have been six and five respectively.

By golly, the Jays did it. One of my daughter’s stepsons works for the Mariners and he is going to be some sad. By one run in the last game. Talk about squeaking by!

I used to write letters to my mother and father, once a week, regularly. Long, newsy screeds with reports of what their grandkids were doing, what I was doing, the weather, the political scene, the latest scandal, whatever. No spellcheck, a ballpoint pen and, mostly, plain white paper. Sometimes I typed, but I ‘thought’ better with the pen, as it was slower. Now I type everything and this post is not as carefully done as my letters were, but the content is somewhat the same. I do have a ‘review’ function, and so the spelling, at least will be American standard, zeds and all. And I do keep the text for a while and review it. For what that is worth.

And so, the other reason. Finally. This reason is that not much has been happening to write about. However, as you can tell if you have got this far, I do not need much to be happening. I can babble on, regardless. And I should stop this and do the review, already. Goodness. No mistakes.

Silver Spoons and Hot Bathwater

 I have been thinking about money lately. It comes to me that I am and have been extremely lucky. I have never missed as much as a single meal because I did not have the price of food, nor missed a roof over my head, a soft, warm bed, cleanliness and hot water (well, except for the ice storm hiatus), transportation as needed. Child of Canada that I am, my education was freely provided until secondary school graduation. A bequest from my grandfather funded my university, along with help from my parents and savings from summer jobs I held because of training my parents paid for me to get.

Since our marriage, my husband and I have incurred no debt beyond mortgages and have paid off those regularly. We have never bought a car or appliance on time; we never had to do so as we could accumulate the necessary cash without much difficulty. In the one low-income portion of our lives, when my husband invested four years in earning a PhD, his and my parents stepped in with goods and cash whenever they saw a need. As an example, when our babies outgrew their cribs, my in-laws provided suitable beds. The first car I even had of my own was a gift from my mother; she got a new one and I got hers.

I know that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Not that I am prodigal with money. Both my husband and I grew up in households run by people who had weathered the Great Depression of the 1930s. We learned care and economy from them. In fact, if I were to run the kitchen the way I saw my grandmother run hers, modern ecologists would praise me. (But I am addicted to my clingwrap and plastic bags. Sic transit gloria and all that.) The bottom line is that I and mine have never had to worry about money; there has always been enough. More than enough in latter years. We saved money to fund higher education for our daughters who funded their education themselves through scholarships and work. And so those investments continued to accrue funds, augmented by inheritances from several sources. The present total is not a small sum.

It is not all that useful, sadly. We are not Bill Gates, and for those of us safe and far away in the peace and plenty of Canada, reaching out to save a starving child in Gaza or the Sudan is not clearcut. Any money you donate takes a tortuous route to the need. (If the Red Cross sends me one more ‘gift’ of a cheap totebag, I think I may have to cut them off.) It is much more ‘transparent’ to help with a funding effort close to home, where there is some clear need, and you can see where the money goes. A thing that really delighted me some years ago was helping to fund books at our local school that went home with children for their preschool siblings. We are very rural and a library was a hard reach for some families. Now there are preschool programs at that local school, and much needed.

I think of the camel and the needle’s eye from time to time. Not just for myself but for all of us in this favoured land. I read today about the USA funding cuts that will eliminate prenatal clinics in Afghanistan and think about our network of hospitals and ambulances and paramedics. The horror stories of misses are written up in detail, but the steady provision of medical care for all of us is less reported. Not that the USA has such provision; the cuts are coming at home too, as I understand what is happening. But, in fact, since WWII, it has been the United States that is the rich man and they have been funding a lot. Perhaps that funding has been coming from too deep into the purses of people without silver spoons – maybe without any spoon – and so such people have put in an administration that is cutting out a lot of that support. I hope they are not, as the saying goes, tossing the baby with the bathwater. We will see. And hope not to hear the baby screaming in the mud while the bathwater cools in the basin.

Phone icks

 I have just read that President Trump cancelled Kamela Harris’s protection. What a small-minded, nasty person he is. I choose the adjective carefully; I note that it is one he uses about Canadian trade regulations he dislikes – supply management, I believe.  If anything happens to that lovely woman because she is vulnerable to crazy people, it will be the first of the crazy people who caused it, most likely. Nasty does not begin to cover it. Sorry. I do not usually get into political comment here, but this one gets me. It is one thing to pull Bolton’s protection; at least he has some training in defence.  It annoys me more than the British government pulling Prince Harry’s guards when he had very young children. We all know and read about crazy attacks, regularly, and I can only surmise that Trump is so small-minded and vindictive that he actually wants something to happen to those people on his ‘bad’ list.

Anyway. Rant of the day. On to other matters. That also matter. 

I am crouched in my birthday present office chair, more than a little shaky, having just dealt with – well, sort of dealt with – a repair company for our refrigerator’s problem icemaker. It will not turn on. The operation required me to call their call centre, where I reached someone who was not only not IN Canada, she had, pretty obviously, never heard of Canada. Highly accented English in a very high voice. I did get it through to her that we have a refrigerator under warranty. She started looking for a repair facility by postal code and offered me one in Toronto. Um, we live a five hour drive from Toronto. She put me on hold and never came back. After some coffee and headbanging, I started over. This time I got a young man, also accented, who issued me a ‘ticket’. Nothing further ensued.

Ten days went by.

So, today I started over. At least I had the ‘ticket’ number and a phone number that produced a North American voice that I could hear. After a long, long time on hold – with music – I was told I would get an email. Amazingly, it came almost immediately. On receipt of the email, I was instructed to call and get a time for the repair appointment. I was also to email the purchase proof. I did that.

After I did that, I called as instructed and got another call centre. The repair company is Ontario-wide and has hired an incompetent moron for its call desk. We went back and forth a lot and I got more music while she researched the second ticket. She wanted to know where the email came from that asked me for the purchase proof.  Really? I told her. More music. Then she wanted my cell phone number. I use a land line, miss. We sorted that and I promised to stay close to my land line all day tomorrow. I put the phone down, carefully, into its rest. And, finally I got a third email saying that I would get a telephone call tomorrow to schedule the appointment.  

As I write this all out, I am beginning to see the funny side, but only to the gentle smile level. 

You know that trope about ‘what do you do all day, dear’? 

Yeah, for some reason my dear husband tasks me to make these calls. I really considered the adjective in the previous sentence before choosing to use it. 

About Miss G ...

 I have always been somewhat embarrassed over the years to write about my marvellous offspring. It seems like hubris or something, and I am quite sure their level of success and accomplishment is theirs, not mine. But. The next generation is just as marvellous as the previous, and I am going to rejoice here in this space. I just have to. You are now warned and can skip the post and come back later.

My granddaughter  - the one I used to post about as 'Little Stuff' - is a big girl now. She graduated from McGill Thursday evening. My tall, athletic, beautiful granddaughter. Her mother did tell me her Grade Point Average sometime, but I don’t recall the detail. There might have been an A- in there somewhere, but she was pretty well straight A, in a course that looked to me like a mountain to climb. It was a mixed Arts and Science program called Sustainability, Science and Society. She graduated with the highest grade point average in the Arts and Science faculty. Her mother did the same in her undergraduate degree and received a Governor General’s Medal for the highest marks in Arts and Science from McMaster. It will be interesting to see if that is still done and if Audrey gets one.

We just talked to her mother, who seemed to me to be a bit peeved that Audrey’ achievement was not better recognised. Katie said that there was a huge group graduating and that in essence they were all just marched across the stage, tapped on the shoulder and ushered off. However, Audrey looked beautiful, her father bought her flowers (held in place by a McGill teddy bear, I am told) and we will have time to make much of her before she leaves for England and the high-octane Master’s program for which she has been accepted. I don’t know much about it yet except that it seems to feature psychology and that the girl will ace it. (Again, as her mother before her. Katie got a UK Commonwealth scholarship and did a PhD in biology at Cambridge). Audrey has applied for funding, but has not heard as yet.

When she is not being a top student, Audrey runs. She was on the McGill track team as a sprinter and trained in Ottawa for some years with the Lion’s Track and Field club. Her latest is a venture into longer distances and she entered in the 5 Kilometre race in Ottawa last weekend – ran on her 22^nd birthday in fact – and placed not badly. She got a program on line to learn from and I think she expects to do better with more experience. This is a girl who does things Well.

Whenever I think about it, I marvel at our good fortune in our daughters. Both reached the top of their professions; Katie is a professor at University of Ottawa (and if you want to know what kind of professor she is, google ‘Rate My Prof’ and read the praise from her students). Wendy left the Foreign Service from the position of High Commissioner – that is what an Ambassador is called in Commonwealth countries. She was one of six Assistant Secretary positions at NATO, a really amazing post. She has had postings and positions all over Europe and in Africa. In her spare time, she has done things like canoe down the Grand Canyon. Although it is highly unlikely I will be around to see the heights Audrey may reach, I am sure she will climb with skill and determination.

All my girls have brains and good taste and wide-ranging interests. And cats. No one could ask for more. 

The Pageantry of It All

 

I have just spent an hour listening to King Charles III read the Speech from the Throne. It was the first time ever for me to see the pageantry and customs surrounding what has been a standard of parliamentary democracy as we practice it. The reminder that the present form goes back hundreds of years is something I did not need because it is something I value. I learned the ins and outs of the form as a university undergraduate by participating in ‘Model Parliaments’, and in formal debates. It is a good method, although at times it can seem cumbersome. It is a method that, I believe, would preclude the present mockery of democracy in the United States. A Prime Minister is not able to govern by proclamation; a government that tried that would fail and an election would be triggered.

The speech was interesting in several ways. It sounded to me as if the king had inserted little bits of it by himself, most especially the conclusion where he quoted the national anthem’s wording of “the true north strong and free.” Total kitsch. But right, in context. Can't fault it but I cannot see the government’s writers putting that in. And too many figures quoted. In addition, I have a few minor complaints about the format. One is that it seems stupid to have issued the man a floppy booklet to read from where he struggled at times to turn the pages. The other is that it is annoying to have an English language voice-over for the French. Most of us have enough second language to follow clear, slowly read statements, especially if they are repeats of the same material. I wanted to judge the king’s French accent and was unable to hear him.

Anyway, that was my morning. Trade barriers, energy conservation and management, housing starts, some lowering/increasing of fees and rates, increased military spending (we’ve heard that before), all stuff that came up in the campaign. Annoying that the Liberals are taking credit for the dental program; the NDP shoved that one down their throats. Mostly, though, the speech was about sovereignty. With the king making the running. It would be more amusing if it were less important.

I like our country, a lot, and never more so than when we do something as stodgy but as pertinent as this morning’s entertainment.

On Mother's Day

 

My father was newly home from the Navy - 1947

Today is the day set aside, as they say, for children to honour their mothers. As a concept, I must say it annoys me. The ‘day’ becomes an occasion to spend money on things like cards, flowers, small gifts. You might arrange to take mother out of the house for a meal she does not have to cook; good luck at getting into any restaurant where you have not made a reservation well in advance. You might, given the situation, fete your mother at home and cook a meal for her. This is supposing that you are part of a ‘nuclear’ family and your mother lives separately from you. The whole thing is a contrived event that does, for me, very little.

 Honouring a mother? What does that even mean? To ‘honour’ someone is to, (The Oxford Dictionary says),.”regard with great respect. Example: "They honoured their parents in all they did."

Similar: hold in great respect, hold in high esteem, have a high regard for, esteem, respect, admire, defer to, look up to, think highly of, appreciate, value, prize, cherish, reverence, revere, venerate’ worship, put on a pedestal.

Some of the similar terms I can buy into. I like “think highly of”, “hold in great respect”. My mother was a woman of blazing intelligence, driven to do everything she did as perfectly as possible, a curious, warm, observing, thinking person. She was funny, thoughtful, graceful, driven. Obviously, someone to “hold in high esteem”. But to “put on a pedestal’ is a step way too far. She could be opinionated, dismissive, wrong about something. She was a master at ignoring things. She could worry at an impressive level about things that were just fine.

 My mother did her best, and it was a very good best, to bring me up to be a model child and adolescent. And I did my best, mostly, to measure up. Good grades, good manners, participation in the things my mother thought were worth while like Brownies, Sunday school and swimming lessons. (I liked the swimming.) I was, until about age fifteen, a good girl. In fairness, I have to say that what I chose to read was never censored, my friends were always welcomed, my interests were fostered even if they were not hers. And as I grew up and grew out of the circled wagons of her expectations of me, I never stopped loving her and trying to make her happy. After I left home, for instance, I wrote a weekly letter detailing a great deal of what I was doing and thinking. When she arrived at my wedding with a white dress and hat for me to wear, I wore them. When she sewed bright yellow trousers for me to wear, I wore those too.

 Many of my housekeeping habits, my choices in reading, my expectations in interactions with people, are still in keeping with my mother’s tastes and ways. I fold my towels in threes the way she did. I keep a lot of books she would approve. (Well, probably not the science fiction and fantasy – she was not enchanted even with Tolkien.) I think of her often with love. I miss her, often. I tried my best not to bring up my daughters to be good girls, to be model children. But honesty compels me to say that I am not sure I did any better for them than she did for me.

As a new grandmother - Christmas, 1966

 It is Mother’s Day. But I know that my mother is with me for 365 days a year and I am good with that. Maybe the word I should use is “cherish’. I cherish all we had together. I remember things she did and said, often. I miss her. I loved her.

Sweet Violets

 The yard of the house I lived in as a girl was long and narrow, with a paved walkway down the centre that led to the trash bins, the back fence and the back gate into the alley. The alley itself was dirt and worked well for hopscotch. On the right side of the yard, just behind the back of the house, stood a single car garage. Behind that, again, was a huge old willow tree. My mother’s wash lines ran from the garage to the willow and from the willow to a post at the back of the yard. Behind the garage not much grew as it was shady, but there were, in season, clumps of small, hardy violets. A beautiful deep purple, they were very scented. My mother loved to hang clothes on the line above them as she said things came in from the line ‘smelling wonderful’.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

My mother was a determined gardener. On a trellis beside the house there was a clematis, one she had transplanted every time she and my father moved, and, as well, there was a bed of peonies and several rose vines of various lengths of thorns, the one with really vicious thorns beside the garage door. At the back of the property, to screen the alley, there was a line of flowering bushes – bridal wreath is the one I recall. I envied the children of the house across the alley as there were several of them to split what seemed to me to be endless amounts of yard work, including but not limited to policing the willow’s dead branches, cutting back the evil roses, sweeping, raking and, when I was older, cutting the grass. I don’t recall paying much heed to those violets.

Sometime in there the willow had to be cut down. It may have been damaged in a storm; I am not sure. My mother commissioned a post for her clothes lines and the new lines ran from the garage to the post. I don’t think my mother planted anything more except a new baby tree. But, when my parents decided to sell the big house in Windsor and move to our city, there was a firm directive to me to get out a trowel and some trugs and dig up enough violets that my mother could be sure some would survive to reach their new home. She also considered the clematis, but since their grandparents were moving two climate zones colder, my daughters persuaded their grandma to let them give her a new, hardy clematis that would thrive in Ottawa.

My parents’ new home was a bungalow on a huge lot, the original suburb having been on septic systems. It was painted white with a black front door and my mother immediately realized that it needed, indeed cried for, red geraniums and white in a border across the front. When she discovered a rhubarb patch, she was delighted, and she relished a back patio with the clothes line in easy reach. When she received a picnic table for a Mother’s Day gift, her pleasure was complete. The clematis was duly installed and lawn maintenance people hired. (Although if they did not arrive to my mother’s taste in grass length, I cut. And raked. And cut.) The violets were also duly transplanted, some at my parents’ place and some in a corner of my aunt’s backyard, the bit not taken up by the swimming pool.

Forward a number of years, and my aunt was being overrun by violets, she said. She dug the majority of them and firmly gave them to me. I brought them out here and planted a row of them in the low bush beside the cut lawn at the side of the house. And sort of forgot about them, except in the week or two that they flower and the scent is wafted across the grass.

 

The photos accompanying this essay illustrate that these violets are stubborn, take-charge flowers. Plant one and ignore it and you have a multitude. This week, as spring peeps up, they are front and centre in our lawn. And the scent is still wonderful.

A Pledge

Younger Daughter (YD) on the left, Elder Daugher (ED) on the right. Clothes by Grandma

 I gave my daughter a piece of advice in the form of a truism a few days ago. “If you do not put yourself first,” I pontificated, “no one else will.”  A trite piece of advice but a sound one and I meant it. It is a working adage that I have tried to follow, off and on for sure, during my life, and a thing that I was sorry I did not do, if I had not been doing it Got that? Right.

JG and I are both in our eighties and, logically, moving toward the end of our ability to live by ourselves and look after ourselves. Much as I want to deny this, my creaking bones, lack of balance, frozen shoulder, reduced blood oxygen level (and lack of patience about all of these) are facts. It is hard work to make the bed, cook a meal, get showered and dressed in the morning, sweep the porch, stay awake while trying to read. JG has ongoing issues as well. Our daughters are doing some eldercare now and will see it increase as time and infirmity go on. Thus the advice in para #1 above.

The cabin 'at the farm'

It will not be the first time that our offspring have had to come second to what we, the parents, chose. When they were just school age, we chose to buy recreational land, a 100-acre parcel, over an hour’s drive from where we lived in the city. Not a cottage on a beach, not a chalet in ski country, but an old abandoned farm at the very end of an unimproved road. (So unimproved was the road, in fact, that for the first few years we accessed the property in winter by snowmobile.) The cabin we built on this land was heated by a woodstove, lighted by propane, serviced by an outhouse, provided with water drawn by the pailful from a surface well and provisioned with food toted in from the city, mostly, as in summer we could not leave food requiring refrigeration and in winter canned goods froze. We chose to spend all of our weekends and holidays ‘at the farm’ and the daughters were part of it by necessity.

I worried from time to time that the girls were missing out on vital parts of growing up, on bonding with groups of friends on weekends, movie dates, sports teams, even television (no hydro, remember). On the other hand, they learned to navigate by themselves in scrub bush, cross-country ski, build a fire in the snow, take their rowboat out onto the creek. They became, faute de mieux, readers and players of board games. They packed their own weekend clothes, packed their city activities into five days a week, and also learned to rely on each other. That they fit their lives into what we, their parents wanted to do, was not entirely a bad thing.

The year that the ED was in Grade 13 my father decided to move himself and my mother from their large Windsor home to an Ottawa bungalow, a short drive from where we then lived. I don’t know if I have mentioned that I am an only child, but that I am is pertinent. My mother was fragile both physically and, increasingly, mentally, and my father needed help in looking after her. I found them the house, facilitated the move and, in self defence, enrolled in a two-year certificate program at our local community college. My father did what he could to cushion me by hiring help summer and winter for their large yard. (They considered apartments when planning but my mother needed flowers and grassy space.) My mother did enjoy my reports of what I was learning and it gave me hours in the day that she perceived to be my own.

I passed that course and actually (and at my age, too) got a job in the industry, but my mother was really struggling and dad could not cope. I got calls at work; I lost weekends. I quit the job and took on eldercare. At the end, at one point I was sleeping on a rug beside my mother’s bed with a light shining on me so that she could see I was there. Luckily for her and all of us, her physical health broke down and she died before the mental stress became unendurable. My father took about a year to regroup, then moved himself into a seniors’ residence and installed his childless sister in the next apartment over. I became a chauffeur when necessary, but dad managed himself and his sister mostly solo. I started a home-based business in the intervals.

The house JG built 'at the farm'

Dad died in September of ’97 and my aunt lasted until February of ’98. Meanwhile my mother’ s unmarried sister’s health deteriorated and I was the caregiver there, first long distance to Windsor and then, after a move for her, in our city. By this time JG had retired and we were building our forever home here ‘at the farm’.  And, up until the big Ice Storm of ’98 crunched our bush, we were making maple syrup. I was a busy person facilitating other people’s lives for a few years in there. But once we got settled, I found several fun things to do for myself in the place where I found myself, mostly by joining boards of interesting activities. I became a busy person in my own right once again.

I miss, profoundly, being that busy person. Bad health, partly fueled by a lifetime of bad habits, has pretty well parked me in an electrically controlled recliner chair in the living room or here, at my computer, where I feel still in charge. We are very lucky to have the financial resources to hire help for what we cannot do ourselves. (Or we can hire help once we admit we can’t do it; some problems in this regard.) Our daughters take the time to check on us by phone and in person at a level I really hope is not too onerous, and their father has the odd job for them to do (on the roof, for instance) when they visit. Not too demanding yet.

If I am going to be honest here, I would have to say that I resented getting pulled into a lot of care for my elders. I knew it had to be done, I knew I had to do it, I even wanted to do it, but I still got angry about being ‘on call’. Or, I think that was at least part of the anger. The rest was, I believe, anger at fate. Anger at illness that turned my vital, intelligent, funny mother into a whiny child. Anger at age that robbed my equally funny and independent aunt of her self-reliance.  I can identify a mixture of annoyance and amusement at my male-dominant dad’s assumption that whenever he made an appointment, I would be available to take him to it. Maybe the problem was being taken for granted, for coming second in the calculation of what should happen.

Unless and until age and infirmity rob me of my personality, I swear I will do my best not to take my daughters for granted. And to manage so that they can put themselves first.