Flotsam and Jetsam

I just looked up that heading in my Oxford Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It is cited as follows: flotsam. The wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating in or washed up by the sea (as distinguished from - JETSAM goods or material thrown overboard and washed ashore). Flotsam and jetsam is used generally for useless or discarded objects. The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is a very useful little book, or it used to be before Google.

Here is what Google gave me for the same phrase.” Flotsam and jetsam. In maritime lingo, flotsam is wreckage or cargo that remains afloat after a ship has sunk, and jetsam is cargo or equipment thrown overboard from a ship in distress. The precise meanings are lost in the common phrase flotsam and jetsam, which describes useless or discarded objects.”  There is also a Wikipedia definition on the same search result that says, in part, “In maritime law, flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and derelict are specific kinds of shipwreck. The words have specific nautical meanings, with legal consequences in the law of admiralty and marine salvage.” If I had not looked it up, I would have misspelled ‘jetsam’.

All this is simply in aid of illustrating that my mind is full of useless facts and bits and pieces. Flotsam and jetsam, in fact. When I was a child and teen, I had close to an eidetic memory, and in consequence I remember, if the recollection is jogged by something, verses to hymns and pop songs from those years. Once started off, words with the melody play over and over in my head. I believe this is often called an ‘earworm’ or ‘Mondegreen’. (See comment below for info on these terms. ) At present there is a verse of a hymn cycling over and over between my too large ears. I hear:

Stand up, stand up for Jesus ye bearers of the cross,

Bring forth his royal banner, we will not suffer loss.

From victory onto victory, his banner it will wave,

Till every foe is vanquished and Christ is lord indeed.

So, now to see how close this is to the actual verse. I do love Google. Here is the verse as written. 

Stand up, stand up for Jesus,

Ye soldiers of the cross;

Lift high his royal banner,

It must not suffer loss.

From victory unto victory

His army shall he lead,

Till every foe is vanquished,

And Christ is Lord indeed.

Since it is unlikely that I have heard this sung since about 1959, I don’t think that is too bad for recall. 

(I will only add that militant Christianity annoys me greatly, contradicting, as it does, the doctrine of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that I believe is much to be preferred. And, yes, I do recall the story of the money changers in the temple.)

As is not uncommon, I have now strayed far from my original aim in this post. Given all the stuff floating around in my head, it should not be surprising that there is no currant current. Or current currant. What I wanted to comment about was triggered by a post that a blogger I follow with delight put up this morning. He makes a good point, that there is increasing disuse of the simple future in speaking.

Last winter I was coaching a young man, a newly arrived refugee from Syria, in English. I quickly found that introducing him to grammatical English was not as helpful as it would seem it should be. He needed to be able to understand what he heard, as well as to make himself understood, and what he was hearing could be extremely mangled. I could teach simple future tense – I will ride my bicycle to work tomorrow – but what he was likely to hear would be -I’m going to bike to work tomorrow. He said to me plaintively that he could understand what people said directly to him but not what they were saying to one another. It seems that people were taking some care to speak simply to him but were not using the same rules in general among themselves.

Language mutates. Accents shift. Vowels float and twist. New words and expressions are generated by new experience. As in, I googled it. As in our spelling of ‘sweet’ next to Chaucer’s spelling as ‘suete’. To stop this is to emulate the king who tried to command the tide.

Here is another bit of floating nonsense that thinking about this topic just brought to shore.

The grizzly bear whose mighty hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

The sword of Charlemagne the just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf

And I don’t feel so well myself.

I must now go and tackle the laundry, to see what use and wearing has inflicted on the garments in the hamper. I hope that writing this has excorcised that damn hymn. But something else will take its place.

Nostalgia Day

When I was a young woman, I wrote letters. My parents lived a day’s drive away and we kept in touch through letters and, usually, a weekly and expensive long-distance phone call. I worked part time but even with small children underfoot I made time to write. I needed the contact and knew that my parents needed the descriptions that kept them abreast of the development of the grandchildren that they deeply loved but all too seldom saw in person.

I wrote. With a pen, usually on notepaper although sometimes on whatever (usually three ring lined binder paper) that came to hand. I took care in the writing, both to keep it neat enough to read (mostly) and to keep the narrative interesting. And positive. In fact, the letters were not unlike the family blogs that many young mothers write now, but without, of course, the photographs. Photos were expensive, especially coloured ones, and were usually taken on ‘occasions’, labelled and sent infrequently.

My mother kept a lot of these letters. Here is a sample, a fairly short and innocuous one. (As I sorted through some of them to choose one to scan, I found far too many with content that should never hit a screen. Of which more later.)

I was sitting at the kitchen table writing this, with the breakfast dishes either pushed aside or stacked in the sink. As of this date the ED, Katie, is 8 going for 9, and the YD, Wendy, is 7 ½. Katie’s hair was copper coloured but her sister was a brunette. Wendy was missing a front tooth.

 

The year prior to this letter we had purchased an 100-acre piece of land, a combination of scrub (logged) bush and overgrown farm fields and built a cabin on it. We spent every weekend there, had snowmobiles and many trails and had equipped the daughters with very good quality winter snow gear. The music lessons were on the piano, a group lesson that was all I felt we could afford (see pricy snow gear above.)

Bugle was our beagle. And the high school teachers were on strike.  

This letter is rather shorter than my usual report to the parents – I guess because I was using note paper. And it is simply a report. In every letter there was a report, but I often wandered off into introspection or comments on the political scene or just plain rambling. Very much like a blog but with a very limited audience.

Just for fun, here is one more page, this one from 1979, the year Canada switched from imperial to metric measurement.

I wrote with a lined sheet underneath the plain one and that is why the writing does not straggle all over the place. Much. And the news is about the ED, who is now on a gymnastics team, having bunged herself up at practice, causing her mother to drive at illegal speeds to the gym, even more illegal speeds to the ER at our local hospital and …wait, with the poor kid writhing in pain, for an interminable time to see a bored intern. This activity was followed by a visit to our family doctor, Dr. Batley, who took the whole thing seriously. It is an indelible memory.

It was amusing to sort through some of these letters … all sorts of things I did not remember, among them one of JG’s relatives being arrested and one of my relatives having a total blow-up with the spouse. Sigh. I know that ‘the’ should have been ‘their’ spouse, but I cannot make myself do it.

These letters all live in file folders in the bottom of my filing cabinet and will, I am sure, annoy my daughters no end when they have to deal with them after I am dead and gone. There is also a fat file with their report cards, articles about them, and all that sort of stuff. Cannot bear not to have it. I take it out and look at it from time to time.

As I am sure my mother did with these.

Somehow this turned into an essay about wood.

January 21st, 2020

So, that was Christmas and I made it through, traditions intact, these including aspic (forgot one ingredient), socks under the tree (one grumbly recipient who got plain ones and wanted silly ones) and aforesaid tree spitting needles as it was dragged across the living room floor and out the door. JG only forgot two gifts that he bought a while back and I did not, as far as I know, forget any. That I have found, that is.  Not bad. Not at all bad. And today I actually went to town and exchanged a Christmas present.

From the website

I think this is the first time I have ever taken back a present. The gift was a sweater chosen by the YD for her father to give me and it was on her advice that I exchanged it. When I tried it on, it was obvious that the style was not for me. I live in hip length cardigans and pullovers and this garment was an asymmetrical open front that hung all wrong at about knee length in front and pulled up at the back. Oh, dear. Anyway, I changed it for a dressing gown, probably the most opulent garment I have ever had … pale pink silky fabric on the outside and white plush on the inside. (The one advertised turned out to be grey – use your imagination). The ratty one that I have been wearing is going into the wash and then into the discard pile. It is not even fit for the rag bag and certainly not to the recycle. Unless someone wants to use it as padding in a quilt.

As for quilts, as the cold weather crept up on us, my husband, for the first time in my memory, complained of not being warm enough at night. I tried various configurations of duvet and blanket on the bed, but nothing seemed to be working. As a last resort we purchased an electric blanket on line. Twenty-four hours later it was delivered to the door. This on-line shopping is not bad, eh, considering that we live at the dead end of three kilometres of bad road. And now we have on the bed a sheet, a quilt, the electric blanket and another light quilt on top. Who needs one of those new, trendy weighted blankets! And JG is warm. Neither of us is tossing or even turning, but we are nice and warm.

Our bedroom is usually cold. We heat, unregenerate Neanderthals that we are, with wood. In really cold weather we run a wood fired, forced air furnace and can heat the whole house (in fact, we can overheat the whole house, depending on what kind of wood we feed into the maw of the furnace). When it is not as cold, or when the electricity might be iffy, we do not gamble on the forced air and turn to wood stoves, of which we have one on each floor. JG’s computer, TV and other toys are downstairs in the same room as the bigger of the two woodstoves. If he stokes it up too much, his room can get very hot. If he doesn’t, the rest of the house doesn’t. Especially our bedroom, at the far end. Four layers of insulation are not too many.

This heating with wood thing consumes a lot of JG’s time and energy. Over time he has taught himself to be able to judge what trees should be encouraged and what trees should be harvested. Since the major ice storm we had in 1998, there are plenty in the later category, and we have 300 acres of land, mostly wooded, from which to chose. The ideal tree, of course, lies close to a trail, will not hit anything good as it is felled, and does not have rot in the wrong spots. It is also nice if it splits well, stacks well and dries well.

After thinking about this last statement for a while, I decided to add a short photo essay on the subject of harvesting wood. Labour-intensive. These photos are all of stove and furnace wood harvesting. We also do improvement cuts in the bush, and that is a story for another day.

 After a windstorm, this tree will become firewood.

Here is another candidate. This was one big maple. Splitting it was hard work, but worth it, because it split nicely.

Below is the harvester, chainsaw roaring, clearing small stuff.

He is well equipped. This is an articulated claw used, as you see, to pick up whole logs.

The red item on the back of the tractor is a winch, used to haul logs out of the bush.

Logs cut up and split, ready to stack in an open area to dry.

Drying.

When the split wood is thoroughly dry, it is moved in stages from the long pile to the ready pile by the "wood door" near the furnace inside. Here is the chain gang moving and stacking.

Just for scale, and because she was so cute. And so sure-footed.