It's Beginning to ...

 I am looking out at a grey afternoon with low cloud and fine, fine snow showering down. More of a November feel to it than pre–Christmas December. Both my daughters have their trees, and the YD is supposed to be putting hers up this afternoon. We will see what happens with the cats in both households. The granddaughter has her terrible brat of a cat home for the holiday and the YD’s younger cat has never been exposed to a Christmas tree, having started life in Pakistan.

Edited to add the first encounter of Gilgit and the tree. So far, so good.

I have my present wrapping stuff out of storage, but only one set of gifts so far. I would be shopping except. Except. Covid. We went to a dinner party a week Wednesday and I came home with a case of it that developed over the weekend. And JG has caught it from me. Both of us are still showing two lines on the tests and so no shopping is being done. The YD stocked us up with food on the weekend and both daughters are on standby if we have needs, but you cannot send someone to buy their own Christmas present. Unless you are my father, that is. He did that.

I remember with some glee the year he handed my teenaged self a large sum of money and told me to go to a lingerie shop and buy my mother a beautiful nightdress. And I did that. And wrapped it. The look on my mother’s face when she opened it and stared at my dad was, um, priceless. I think his only foray, ever, into Ladies’ Intimate Garments was a trip with me just before I was married when he insisted I buy a pair of lovely silk pajamas and went with me to get them. For my wedding night. He also tried his formal and inhibited best to tell me not to expect too much from my groom on this occasion. And was much relieved, although red-faced, when I told him it would not be a problem since I ‘had my period’. (What my mother had trained me to say. SHE called it ‘the Curse”.)

I started writing this in a very dark mood, but telling that story has cheered me up no end. I did love my father a lot, even when I wanted to dot him one with a heavy object. After my mother died, he moved himself into an apartment in a seniors’ building, divested himself of my mother’s ‘stuff’ (the grandkids got it) and enjoyed a new lifestyle, even setting up a lovely girlfriend. But his lifestyle did encompass my participation. 

The most egregious trick he played on me was what happened when the building supervisor asked him to join the management board of the building. He declined but told her that I would be delighted to take part. I was elected in a flash, and ended up secretary, of course. I also had to be on call to drive him to appointments and events. And was not, ever, allowed to make him the slightest bit late. When he was planning an excursion, he would line up everything he would need on the hall floor in his apartment, including hat, library books, cushion for the car seat in cold weather, etc. I learned to open the door just a bit, cautiously when I called for him. The grandkids were adult by this time, and they thought the whole thing was very funny. I am sure my grandkid is chuckling over her mother and aunt complaining about me, indeed, perhaps at this very moment. 

On the other hand, they are probably too busy disentangling cats from Christmas trees. 

Mindless Chat and Other Stuff

 I just switched my writing font from Aptos to Arial. I am not sure why, as Word is pretty determined to have me use the former. It may be a classic ‘old fogey’ thing. I also like Times New Roman for some things. But when I write, I revert to Arial 12. Stuff it, Word.

All of this ‘Word’ labelling can be annoying as well. I used to play on-line Scrabble. Sadly, it got improved and dressed to the nines and saddled with all sorts of add ons and it is now Words with Friends, version 2. There was just a fill in posted that asked how we liked the latest addition to the gizmos and gimmicks. I told them.

Our finish carpenter has, um, finished for now, packed up and departed for another job. He is due back in a few weeks to do more finishing in our downstairs. But, for now, I have doors on rooms and closets, tile on the landing of the staircase, baseboard and quarter round throughout and really nice finish panelling in the kitchen where we eat. He did his cutting in the garage and so I also have a layer of sawdust on the floor there, even though he did sweep it out once. Otherwise, he cleaned after himself amazingly well, in spite of his sad report that he had left an open tube of epoxy in his toolbox and the stuff was now floating his tools. Not only a fine carpenter but a fun and gentle man. Referrals on request.

Now Grammarly wants me to substitute ‘despite’ for ‘in spite of’. Weird. I do have to ignore some of its strictures if I want to sound like myself. And I do.

I have to quit playing here and go and vacuum a ton of dirt off the front hall floor. We have had no snow, but we do have dead leaves, sawdust and dirt from the laneway. All of these things seem to want to migrate into the house. JG is off to the city to see about a repair to our big canister central vac, but I have a small hand pushed one that is about to get a workout. After I post this, of course.

Sunday will be the first day of December when one can think about Christmas. Just because the stores have been decked out for three weeks is no excuse. I read about people who have already decorated the house and surrounds, and I pass several houses where the house and yard are full of shine and half deflated Christmas ‘stuff’. Our prompt for this month’s photo club is 1.) a Santa Claus parade and 2.) red and green. Muttering to myself. But it is an interesting club. Members from phone photographers to highly outfitted mavens. We put photos from the prompts up on a screen and discuss. Politely but with determination. I got one kudo last month from the ‘orange’ prompt but there is one purist who does not approve of cropping, and so I did not get overall applause.

I did get applause on Wednesday evening. We held our annual dinner for the hall staff (Watson’s Corners Community Hall of which I have often written). I have worked there in various capacities for about thirty years now and our hall manager recognised this in a speech and I was loaded with flowers and thanks. It was sweet of them and I admit to tearing up a bit. You have to notice that this is one really big bouquet.

A Phishing Story

At a bit after 9:00 am this morning I received a call from someone representing himself as an employee of our bank. His voice was accented but his English was clear. He said that there were two questionable items shown on our Access card and proceeded to read off the sixteen numbers on the card at top speed. I bit. Luckily, I do not keep the numbers of this bank’s access card in my head; I do recall most if not all of the numbers of the card I use to make online payments but this card is one that my husband mostly uses.

And so I asked the man to wait while I got my wallet and found the card. When I got back on the line, the voice requested that I give him the card numbers. At this point, I became cautious. He had, after all, given them to me. And so, I asked him to repeat the numbers while I tracked them on the card. No, he responded. I should give them to him. I was pretty sure that I was smelling a rat by this time and so I told him that since he had given them to me once, it should not be a problem to do it again. The bank rules prevented it, he said. Not credible. I hung up and, to be sure, I decided to call the bank and check.

 I looked up what purported to be a number for our local bank and called it. What I got was the main phone complex for the whole bank, with mindboggling option choices. I chose credit cards and had to sit on hold for almost half an hour. By this time I was annoyed enough to put the call on speakerphone and do my jobs with one hand while I waited. When I got a rep, I told my story and was assured that the call I was reporting was a scam and that I had done the right thing to report it.

Two takeaways from this. One is that this scam is pretty catchy; the bank rep was glad to be told the details. The second is that the bank’s phone policy is extremely annoying, even though the music piped during the hold is broken by recorded assurances about call importance and requests to stay on the line. It should be possible to call the local branch without being redirected to the main number and put on hold. If the redirection is, in fact, necessary, the bank should have enough people on the main complex to prevent long waits. Not to mention using better music.

A Door Able(s)

  

We are almost at the end of the decent weather for the months to come. While it is still mild most of the time, we have had one snowfall. It lasted less than the full morning that it fell, but there have been what my family always called ‘hard frosts’ the last few days. And, a major marker in the year, deer hunting started here today. I have heard a few rifle shots, but when I passed the hunt camp next door to us this afternoon, there was no deer carcass hanging, so either that camp has not been successful or it was another hunter that I heard. I can still go out into the screen room with some comfort and so I do hear the guns.

Most of the leaves are down, as well. The oaks are hanging on, but even the tamaracks are pretty denuded. The palette in the bush has gone to greys and browns with a few notes of rust and, of course, the deep greens of the evergreens. JG has been sweeping and raking to get the worst of the leaves off the ‘lawn’ (there is so much twitch grass that it is a bit presumptuous to call it that). And yesterday was a grey day with drizzles of rain that did not amount to much. What it did do is wet down the leaves and now JG is raking by hand. I used to be able to help, horrible job as it is, but now all I can do is watch.

But inside things are improving. JG has hired a finish carpenter to … finish … the bits of the house that he never got around to doing. Window surrounds and baseboards, mostly, upstairs. And doors, glorious doors on my office and to close off the storage cupboard in the wall opposite the brick chimney wall. I will add photos! There was some question as to whether I would get the office door since there is a bookcase just inside, but the door swings and clears. And the door to the bedroom is framed in as are the closet doors in our bedroom. They are going to get a lick of paint, too, in time.

 

Our presently fully occupied carpenter is a character. As he measures and installs, he talks to himself, muttering about measurements and fit. And there are sighs heaved. And deep breathing. I am trying to stay out of his way but I am on the same floor of the house, and the ongoing chat, at full volume, is hilarious. Once he gets this floor done, he is going to be sent down to the television room, an area which is really, really unfinished at present, needing mudding on the walls, a ceiling and a partition and door into the furnace and workroom part of the basement. I think we will have his company for some time to come.

It is past time to have these things done. It will make a great difference in the ability to sell this house at a reasonable price and in reasonable time. I don’t want to think about this ending. The house is the home we built ourselves. Our forever home. Planned just for our needs. Our sweat and a few tears and smears of blood from punctures have gone into it. But it is a long way from anything else. And we are getting old and older. I am not capable of cleaning the inside myself any more, so it is done for me, but JG is still doing everything outside but the tree cutting himself and finding it more difficult and exhausting each year that passes. I must believe and act in the belief that our days here are numbered and few remain.

Change of topic after a pause while I wrote cheques. While looking for something else, I just fished four pens and three snap lighters out of my purse’s pockets. I swear the things migrate. Next week I will find them all on the dining room table or in the pockets of my fall coat. This spring I got out my raincoat and found half of a dog biscuit in the pocket. I think the last time I walked the YD’s dog and fed her biscuits was 2018, or thereabouts.

Okay, time to stop maundering on and post this.

Second Summer and Second Thoughts

 We have been favoured, these last few days, with perfect “second summer” weather. (I called it ‘Indian Summer’ for most of my life, but am aiming for political correctness in old age. And, indeed, the concept of lazy Indians waiting until a dose of cold weather set them to gathering winter stores is a horrid one. Once could almost buy into ‘Colonialism’, if that is what the pejorative is, when you think of how we all carelessly dismissed First Nation skills when we said that.) Hmm. More than usually in the bracket mode today. Apologies. Well, no, darn it. I like my asides. Shakespeare, after all, used them.

Anyway. Second summer weather was where we started. Sheaves of rustling leaves underfoot, but still a grace of gold on a lot of the trees, and the odd leaf drifting down, silhouetted against that incredibly blue sky. Warm wind and warmer sun. (Yeah, lots of nice bugs warmed up on the screens, too. We will not go there.) A huge harvest moon, now on the wane but still lovely. Stars, in quantity, before moon rise. I missed, sadly, the dance of the Northern Lights in our vicinity, but one of my neighbours caught it across her fields and has generously posted the photos. 

I got her mother’s permission to put this one up.

Courtesy Jessica 

I went to our first Snaps and Chats meeting last week. The dynamo of a chairman that runs our Hall applied for and got money to buy a projector and screen and has set up this twice-a-month meeting to take and discuss photos. One meeting on location and one in the hall with the photos projected. Unforseen, the projection was less than perfect when the photos we submitted were enlarged. Definition and contrast were lowered and some of the best features of several of the landscapes did not come through well. However red leaves did. As well as the location day, we get a monthly assignment; this month’s was ‘red’ and ‘old’. Next month ‘orange’ and ‘buildings’. If I stop posting it is because I have driven off the road while casing good barn shots.

Since writing the comments on ‘Indian Summer’ above, the term came up in a discussion with the YD, who was curious as to the provenance. She says she had never heard my take on it and so we googled it, to find that she was correct. Where I got that definition I do not know, but I suspect from somewhere in my extended family when I was a little girl. My mother’s family was ‘lace curtain Irish’ self described and a pejorative description to an extent, not unusual in my grandmother’s kitchen.

O'Neil Homestead

My maternal great grandfather left Ireland in the early 1800s, as a Catholic escapee (I rather think), but arrived in Canada ‘Church of England’ and thus qualified for a grant from the Talbot settlement. I believe he got 800 acres of virgin land and he ran cattle on it and gradually cleared it, building as a family project a home and barn for each of seven of his eight sons as they came of an age to be established. (The youngest got the homestead and the care of ‘Grandma’ after he died). ‘Lace curtain’ Irish were seen to be dead set on bettering themselves and were thus not ‘bog’ Irish labourers with no education or land. Hmm. I seem to be rewriting a family study I did for a course in Social Anthropology, way back when.

JG got out the equipment and sucked up a vast quantity of the leaves this afternoon. But there are still a lot on the trees and Wolf Grove Road, in particular, was a fine place to drive along today. What was not fine was the Queensway from the west end in on a sunny Tuesday morning. Not quite a parking lot, but close. I am so glad we no longer live there.

Whipped

 Just to take the taste of that last pity party out of my mouth, I am reporting a new source of reasons for you to pity me. And that is that my kitchen hates me. 

The backstory. We have, of course, pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dessert. And with the pie JG requires whipped cream. Whipped with a touch of vanilla and just a sprinkle of sugar. Whipped stiff, almost to the butter stage. Our grandkid does this very well, using a Cuisinart handheld ice cold (from the freezer) whip and with the cream in a precooled container. So, we had dinner, the girl, um, young woman whooshed, JG loaded his pie with glorious white curls. There was enough left that he had the last piece of pie yesterday also loaded. And the carton that contained the cream was still in the frig. With a bit of cream left in it.

Now, JG complained that it was a very small container and I reminded him that the YD had produced two cartons for the festive day, only taking one home with her when it was clearly not needed. But, there were blueberries in the frig just demanding that the rest of the cream be whipped for a topping for them. Blueberries are like that, right?

And so. I got out the Cuisinart handheld, put the whisk end onto it and, inserting it into the container with the last of the cream (with a touch of vanilla poured in first), turned it on. Whirring and whipping followed until, suddenly, there was sort of a clunk and the partially whipped cream whirled out of the container and onto my sweater and face and the counter and the wall and the floor. I turned off the machine and demanded assistance. After some considerable cleanup, it was determined that one strand of the whisk had broken.

I had ice cream and chocolate sauce for dessert. JG at the partially whipped cream with his blueberries.

Goodness only knows what is going to break next. 

Voices

 This is an essay in futility perhaps. My conscience says “No, I can never post this. I can never even show it to anyone. I should probably delete.” That sort of honest person who I am sometimes does deserve a voice. But that person who I am a lot of the time does not listen. She is a stubborn old bitch. Not going to delete today.  Maybe tomorrow. Oh, shut it. Post and be done.

 Here is what I want to say. Here is what I have to say. Every morning it is a fight to make myself face another painful, boring day. Every day I have to make myself have patience with small but so frustrating things. Many days I worry about what the future is going to bring and how bad it is going to get and how I am going to be able to cope. I can’t cope, sometimes, now. Some days it all seems entirely useless. Futile. And exercise in rolling the rock uphill.

 I have been reading and rereading this, correcting minor errors and trying to make things clearer without losing my unique voice. Whatever that is. There are many voices, I guess, many babbling streams of rhetoric and less than deathless prose. I am, at times, the cheerful and eloquent reporter about birds and leaves and lovely weather. I am the proud repeater of the daughters’ and granddaughter’s achievements and amazing journeys. I am a somewhat biased and occasionally informed commenter on political events. Sometimes I read and analyse what I have read. Sometimes I do not even proofread.

 Frequently I am writing to be another person.

 This is not always who I was. I used to be a busy, almost too busy, person with contributions to make, I thought, to my community and my family and my friends. I made things, useful and just pretty. I cleaned things. I edited and weeded, both literally and figuratively my possessions and my home. A load to the dump. A wheelbarrow full of broadleaf to the back of the rocks. A fun or funny post created. A speech written or article collaboratively planned. I guess that woman would still like to be around, but the honest woman knows she cannot be.

 One of me has been working on this for over a month now. It was three pages and growing. Editing woman pared it to this. And will leave it for one more round before deciding whether to make it public or not.

 Later. It is a lovely sunny day in early October. A month since I posted. We have had JG’s 85^th birthday and I fed the remains of his cake to my discussion group. JG seems to be pleased with the cookie cookbooks I gave him as his present. I also fed his cookies to the discussion group women, and two of them took extras home, which flattered the baker. We also had Thanksgiving dinner here, my wonderful daughters presiding. After starting the turkey, I got to sit and listen, as there was no way I would have lasted in the kitchen maelstrom.

JG has a fine thermometer that can be tracked on his phone. He inserted this into the bird. In spite of much discussion about whether the bird was cooked or not, it ended up being just right. Given that I have presided over close to one hundred turkeys as they roasted, most without any aid other than my estimation of cookedness, this should not be surprising, eh? And, yes, there is a substory here that I am not going to tell, cautious person presently presiding.

 Okay. I am posting. Cautious person loses. Editing person is shutting down. Stubborn person is probably who I really am.

One Month Later

 Well, so much for the not-very-well-laid plans. As of today, which is, almost I was corrected to note, the middle of August, I have not got much farther with the closet purge, the exercise program or anything much else. I am, however, managing to be off the added oxygen for most of the day and that is the rent in the clouds. If I can get off it overnight, I will be able to sleep in a position other than flat on my back with the oxygen tube tucked under my arm and being able to move around will mean, I hope, that I do not get up in small and painstaking (and painful) increments in the morning. Or earlier. Life in the slowest, do not pass go lane.

Part of this hiatus has been my obsessive (according to JG) watching he feed from some of my favourite Olympic sports over two weeks. Gymnastics, swimming, track and field, and, I confess, beach volleyball. I also got hooked on the Canadian women’s rugby team’s amazing showing. Like the beach volleyball, I find I can see the plays and the logic of what is happening. And it is nice to see the women do well. Did you know that these Olympics are the very first where the women and men are equally represented in number? If you did not, you do now. I watched some of it over and over again, especially the swimming, once my sport. But if I never see another ‘Break’ contest, I think I can live. Having painfully learned the parameters of the marks for style in artistic gymnastics, I guess I could, over time, figure out the meritorious moves in break dancing, but only with ear plugs.

I have also been rereading Rosamunde Pilcher’s epic novels, The Shell Seekers, September, Coming Home and Winter Solstice. The first two contain a carryover of characters and are in chronological order. The others stand alone. And stand up very well to criticism.  While her earlier novels are unabashedly romances, the ones I have listed are much more. They record what life is. They are funny and poignant and alive. I reread for pleasure, slowly, savouring the language, the descriptions, noting the tiny details, rather like plunking down in front of a painting and watching the light fall on it. Rewarding. But it does not get the laundry done.

Some laundry is ready. Tomorrow I have to put the YD’s bed back together. She was here off and on for a couple of weeks but, since her house renovation was not proceeding quite to plan, she left her worldly goods in storage and went on a two-week hike in Baffin Island. From which she returns tomorrow, or maybe the day after that, or whenever. I washed up her bedding and a few garments with my wash. She has a good bit of ‘stuff’ in her room here, mostly clothes unsuited to schlepping across the barrens of Baffin Island, and I therefore assume we will see her anon. It is a source of much joy to me that she is now based in Canada.

Auyuittuq Traverse (Black Feather Outfitters)

We are going out for dinner tomorrow night with the ED. Her family is off having fun in Barbados, being, severally, retired and on August break before returning to university.  I will report. The ED, being neither of these things, is working full out but is giving us her Saturday night. We are actually going to a nice restaurant, a new one for all of us. She is also a source of much joy, as well as illicit butter tarts.

The unusual amount of rain that we have had this last while has really brought out the wildflowers. The ditches are solid with either goldenrod or purple loosestrife, depending on the moisture level, the cattails are going to be immense and everything is green and lush. Our lawn, also green if not lush, seems to have goodies that the deer like to chomp. They are actually staying on the lawn and off my rock garden, mirabile dictu. We will see how long that lasts. JG is complaining that he does nothing but cut back grass and chop back the trees that are trying to take over the trails. Unfortunately, though, it is a great year also for grackles and we must have a whole extended village of the wretched birds. Noisy and blocking the little birds from the feeders, they have no redeeming qualities to my mind.

Such as it is. I had planned to write a post about Canadian English, but I am just too lazy tonight. Next time. Maybe. Or do I mean’ perhaps?

Happiness Was Made of This

 I think the term is MIA. That is what I have been for the last week or two, more or less. Medical stuff. I will spare you.

My essay for today. My YD is home from Europe for good. Her household effects there have been packaged and are in transit, her house here in Canada is being renovated and repaired and we have her here with us until the effects and the newly refurbished housing for the same are reunited. I have not looked into her bedroom but she arrived here with quite a bit of luggage and I am glad it is a big room with a table and extra storage. The cats are being boarded by a friend and so we do not have to deal with feline moving trauma.  I am a happy mother. Plus, she brought me a huge box of Belgian chocolates.

And it gets even better. On Sunday we are packing up (minimally except for food) and absconding to a cottage for five days. YD, me and the Scrabble board, although I hope to see both family and friends while we are there. If it is sunny, we have a beach. If it rains, we have the Scrabble board and the chocolate. Who could, as the saying goes, ‘ask for anything more?’.

Unfortunately, I will have to take my oxygen stuff along. And my Rollator. I am quite pleased about the latter, in truth. I hate the idea of being the little old lady who needed a walker. But … I AM a cranky old lady who needs support to walk any distance. Any distance, where we live, is on gravel. The laneway to the mailbox, for instance. And so I decided I needed something to support me that I could use outside. Something bigger than the normal wheels on a walker for a start; very light and foldable of necessity. An internet search found me this thing called a Rollator. As shown.

It is called a Carbon Overland and my bank account hurts. But it does the job. I can trundle along (down and then up) the laneway and I will be able to navigate around the cottage the YD has chosen. I have a portable oxy pump that fits into a bag that attaches to the front and the seat is wide enough for my butt. (It comes in various widths in the lighter versions but only wide in the outdoor one I have.) If I have to be a crock, at least I am a fashionable one.

Eh. That is until we get to what I am wearing. I am (very slowly) purging my closet of garments that either do not (and never will) fit or that I do not need. Do I need four dressing gowns? A whole drawer of heavy socks that I don’t use or even like? Sweatshirts bought online that don’t fit the way I wanted them to? A dress-up outfit in size 12? Our reuse centre is called the Highlands Food Pantry and they run a recycling store where they sell good donated items to raise money for a food bank, the Food Pantry, in our local village. I now I have the YD to lug the bags of stuff into their sorting and staging area that, since it is up a steep flight of stairs, I do not go.

Goodness, this post is first person on steroids. Tsk. In a last comment in this vein, I am typing this in at supper time as a super supper is being prepared by the YD without my having to have planned it, bought it or cooked it. Luxury. Bliss.

Artistic Merit

 

I read an interesting essay this week about the effect of art on the human condition. The argument was that, from our very earliest beginnings, our precursor ancestors practiced and were affected by art. You can reference the cave paintings, of course, some of which are now believed to have been done by Neandertal man (or woman?), decorations identified as being on the bodies of very early protohumans buried with ceremony, decorated bone and stone found in the caves inhabited by the earliest of humans. Obviously, we have continued to do all three of those things, as well as make music and dance. The article posits that art has a measurable influence on our hormone flow and thus on our physical and mental well-being. ‘Art therapy’ is a universally employed remedy for many distressing illnesses. We are soothed or stirred by a song or instrumental music. (Bagpipes, anyone? A trumpet call? A lullaby?)

Those musical influences are obvious, for sure. I had to think more about what was put forward for the effect of visual art. The argument is that the various forms of it influence us to see things and think of things differently. Photography is easy. We can be moved by a strong image (think of the photo of the little boy drowned and cast up on shore) . Interpretive art is more obscure. But, once you have seen even a reproduction of a Group of Seven Canadian landscape, can you ever think of the Shield Country the same way? Thompson’s The Jack Pine, just as an example, has generated not only learned investigation but also driving and rail tours.  We endeavour to describe our world through visual art and, by doing so, influence and even change how we think of it and use it. Or, so goes the persuasive argument I read.

It is an interesting concept to play with. I was responsible for looking after a childless aunt. For her stipulated appearance in her open coffin, I arranged that she would be dressed in her favourite red suit and that her makeup was suitably bold. And, beyond decorating our bodies both in life and after death, if we have the time and money (and sometimes even when we don’t), we decorate, colour and curate where we live so that it looks and feels like a refuge or nesting place. I have watched family members struggle over decorating decisions and plead guilty to a few obsessions myself. And we are not alone. Have you noticed that Christmas decoration on many houses reaches far, far beyond a simple festive wreath? As for decorating what we use, anything can be a candidate. It is possible to see automobiles with antlers attached in December, and I would not be surprised to see them wearing bunny ears at Easter. Personal decoration? I have pierced ears, as do my daughters, in multiples. There is also, to my bemusement, the current rage to have a tattoo or two. Cro Magnon man would have approved.

Do we do these things because we are cognate, or are we cognate because we do them? It is certainly an amusing and fertile topic. Do you find yourself soothed and enriched by some form of art? And, if you do, which one? (AC, besides your amazing photography, of course.) I do not know enough about music to discuss it usefully, but I have loved and worked in the visual arts since I was a child.  I am amused to find that the practice has been so meritorious.

Foresight may be Vain

 We were supposed to have had a flying visit from the YD this week. She was to get her vacant house back and get started on the repairs and renovations needed and wanted before her return for good in July. The plan was that she (and two cats) would arrive on the weekend, she would commute into the city to get things underway and the week would end with the grandkid’s twenty-first birthday celebration.

Well, mice and men, of course. She got on the plane feeling a bit off and got off it feeling a lot worse. When sister picked her up from the airport, where she was to get the grandkid’s car and roll on out here, sister produced a Covid test and, of course, it proved positive. And so, YD is now ensconced in a hotel, sister (The efficient and caring ED) has run some of her errands, including depositing one cat here, and the house transfer has been a masked endeavour. Luckily she is a strong and tough-minded woman and has made the best of it. And we are chatting via electronics at unholy hours of the morning. But, damn!!!

At any rate, the house is vacant. The repair and renovation exercise is underway. She feels better. And sister has a whole box of test strips as she and her partner have had several bouts of Covid after travelling. It seems that with the vaccinations, the illness manifests for them as a nasty sort of cold and does not last all that long. But they are being super careful about not infecting the aged parents, especially the one with a bum lung.

About the cat. The YD’s two cats do not get along. Callie is an elderly female with strong ideas about what is due her. She went to Pakistan with the menage, had the run of a large establishment there and was indignant when the YD added a young and ebullient male to the mix. Gilgit, the newbie, would like to play and interact with Callie. Callie is not playing. And so the two of them in a hotel room, even a large space suited to keeping the Covid victim apart from others, was not a Good Thing. So, sister loaded the matriarch into her car and brought her out here, complaining all the way. (The cat that is; not the daughter).

Callie is very familiar with our place, having stayed here many times. She is presently occupying her favourite inside chair, which is the spare office chair in this room, peacefully sleeping with no active and annoying youngster trying to play. At night she prefers the wing chair in the living room, thoughtfully draped with a towel by Grandma. And she adores the screened porch. When it is not raining, that is. As it is forecast to do.

However, the promised joy is still there. The YD will be home for good in July. In time for her birthday. Rain or shine.

On a High

Many years ago now, when I was young(er) and strong and agile, I took a solo trip to England. It was early summer, and I had spent the fall and early winter nursing my mother through her last illness, the hard winter and spring grieving and regrouping. My ED was doing a doctoral degree in England and I knew I could have a base with her. And so I packed up, left my menfolk and flapped off to southern England. My redoubtable daughter extracted me from Heathrow (probably) and took me back to her college where she had arranged for a guest room for me. I toured her town for a few days and then, to get out of her way, partly, and for interest (mostly), I rented a little tin can of a car and trundled off around England for several weeks.

I had, as you can probably imagine, some adventures, but I can tell those stories some other time. What I want to do today is to feature, as I recall, one of the best days of my trip, perhaps one of the best of all my days. I want to savour that memory and share it. The day and place? A summer day walking a portion of Hadrian’s wall on the England/Scotland border.

I have always been fascinated by Roman history. I recall getting, from our school library, a book titled The Last Days of Pompeii. I was probably ten or even younger. The librarian questioned whether I could read it and made me read a piece aloud to her. But I got the book and I loved it. I still recall bits of it and have reread it as an adult. I am sure I read other books with bits of Roman history in them, but the next book I love to remember is The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe. I think we read it in Grade 9, but after that I found and devoured all of Sutcliffe’s books about Roman Britain and have found them, over time, to be fairly accurate, where there are known facts.

I enjoyed Latin as a high school subject and carried it on into university where I also found a whole course in the Classics department on Roman History. The course was excellent and a fine source of reading material. I ended up writing a thesis fifty pages long for my final term and I had a lot of fun doing it. My grasp of the history and geography of the eastern edge of Rome’s mantle is less than that of Germanica and Britannia, but all of it is fascinating.

And so, when on the loose in England with a car and all the time I needed, I went north to Hadrian’s Wall.  I was not, of course, equipped to hike the whole sixty-something miles of the distance of the wall. I did have a day, a day of glorious sun with a cool breeze, and after exploring and inspecting the Vindolanda reconstruction, I decided that I could hike out the wall for a short half day and turn around and hike back before dark – late in that place and time of year. I am not sure what I had to eat and drink, but it was probably a sandwich and soft drink from a pub. I had a small knapsack and off I went.

I have a whole roll of film of photos I took of the wall, of the countryside around it, of the reconstruction, of the day and the place. Luckily for me, a pair of hikers stopped courteously and took a photo of me standing on top of a stub (which is most of what is left) of the wall. I am not sure where that photo is at present, but I do have some of the photos of the wall itself as it wound its way toward the sea. Other than the kind, photographing fellow hikers I saw few, vanishingly few, people along my walk. Not on the wall paths, not on the farms adjacent. I did see a lot of sheep. A lot. And in parts of the photo where you might believe there are white rocks, in video those rocks would move, slowly. There was also sheep shit. You could skirt it. 

A lot of the wall is just a few blocks high. Two thousand-odd years of farm needs and building needs will reduce the best wall to a stump. But there is enough of it, snaking along the high points, to see what it was. You can identify where the watchtowers were. If you go far enough, the ruins of the forts, with their entry gates to the wild lands, can easily be seen. I did not get that far, but it did not matter. You do not walk on the wall; you walk beside it. And you look at rock shaped two millennia before you were born, painfully, and painstakingly placed with precision, There they still are, resisting all eradication.

I think that looking after my parents, coping with my mother’s dementia and physical ailments and my father’s difficulties, both physical and mental, had exhausted all of my resources. But I was able to navigate around the back roads of southern and then northern England with some ease. I was proud of coping by myself, although glad to see my daughter join me on weekends. I slowly healed, enjoying self-sufficiency and even competence. And the day on the wall, with its evidence of the work and politics of which I had only read, was simple and real and satisfying in a way I struggle to describe.

One thing that I saw that day delighted me more than anything else. The lengths of wall march along, string straight or carefully curved to avoid an anomaly. But in one spot where there is a fair height of wall remaining, two straight stretches are not perfectly aligned. There is an offset of a few inches. Although I tried to photograph it, the photo does not show the jog at the join. My mental picture is of two Centurions, (a sort of lieutenant in charge of, of course, one hundred men), both of whom had been charged with completing a section of the wall base, finding that their calculations were not the same and that their wall sections would not, seamlessly, tie together. There they stand, in their short togas and breastplates, (but probably with their legs wrapped against midges), looking at the mismatch. The stringers have been laid. It is too late to change anything. They look at each other and … what? Shrug, grin and go off for a sup of awful army wine? I hope so.

The display at Vindolanda is very much expanded from when I saw it. The roads and the pubs will have been changed and improved. GPS and aerial photography will be helping archaeologists discover more about the whole effort. But the wall, the line of painfully laid stones, is there and will probably be there for measured time, if not beyond. And that is no small immortality. 

FSL = French as a Second Language

I wrote ths post 14 years ago. The five year old is now an adult university student - in an English Language proram, but with excellent French. (Very excellent - she was the top student in her French Language High School, and top student in French) I think that it is worth saying it again, because it is so important. Since I wrote this I have had the wonderful experience of coaching adult speakers of Arabic, newcomers to Canada, in English language skills. Young men, in two cases, one in his late twenties with very little English at all, the equivalent of the 40 minute program in, say, grade 9 or 10. the second is a man in his early twenties with decent oral fluency and a great accent, who had learned what he knows by watching TV and movies. The first guy needed basic literacy and a lot of vocab and expressions. The second needed written literacy (and a gentle warning about some of the words he had learned watching gangster films!). I am proud to say that both of them are now doing fine, settled, happy and working, and that the younger one just completed his high school diploma. 

Great guys. But it was hard, hard work, especially for student number one who was terrifyingly uptight about everything in the first days and months he was here. I have never seen anyone try so hard to focus and I hope we learned enough from his struggles to make it easier for others. (These were refugees from Syria when Canada opened to doors there. We are now expecting two families from Afghanistan.)

Here is the language post. (And my French is still lousy.)

 My five year old granddaughter corrects my French.  Carefully, patiently, frequently.  'No, Grama, it's *burrrr*' she says, doing that impossible Francophone thing with her tongue that makes the word sound like a cat's purr.  'Br?' 'Burrrr, BuRRRRR!  Say it again, Grama.'  Sometimes she sighs and gives it up as a lost cause.  At other times she gets stubborn and we pat the word back and forth like Ping Pong champions until she is satisfied.  Until the next time, when I have forgotten how again.  And the huge brown eyes roll upward as she says to herself, 'Elle a mis ma patience à bout'.

My generation of Canadians was taught French as a Second Language starting in Grade Nine for 40 minutes a day.  We memorized vocabulary and verb structures, wrote exercises and listened to recorded voices saying simple phrases that we repeated in unison. If we weren't doing well at it, we were allowed to substitute Latin for our second language.  Or drop it altogether.  Or never bother, if we were in a secretarial or industrial arts stream. This program taught me to read French fairly well with the aid of a dictionary, understand some slowly spoken French and get frustrated by anyone speaking it conversationally.  I can say 'Lentement, s'il vous plaît'* and 'Encore une fois'** very well. My husband, another product of this program, got a lot of French training as an adult because he worked as a manager for the Federal Government.  He can understand talking heads on TV, but loses it in movies. His accent is worse than mine.

My daughters' generation got FSL for 20/40 minutes per day starting in Kindergarten.  They learned songs and stories and numbers and had fun.  Some of them even learned a good bit of French that way. Parents who were serious about the kid learning French could opt for Early French Immersion, starting at Kindergarten or Grade One. My elder daughter did 'Late Immersion' with a year taught completely in French in Grade Six, followed by two bilingual years and 'Enriched French' at high school level. She came out of that with decent conversational French, good enough to let her work in the National Park system in French.  If you were a hard working, motivated student, this program worked out well. The YD, having watched elder sister slave away at the syntax and vocabulary, tore up the application form for this option and stayed with the 40 minute program all through high school, graduating with decent pronunciation and no grammar.  When she was hired by the Federal Government and had to be 'Level Three' bilingual, she spent months and years as an adult in French language training and she still needs to do revision.

These FSL choices are available to my granddaughter, but her parents chose a different route.  After bilingual daycare from eight months old, she graduated to a French Language school and an attached French Language daycare. Her French was mostly passive when she started junior Kindergarten (Maternelle) at age four, and she struggled for the first few months. (Big brown eyes awash with tears, she told her mother that she was afraid of getting things wrong because she did not understand.) However, she sopped up the language like the sponge children are designed to be at four and younger and is now level with her Francophone contemporaries and doing fine.  And terrorizing her grandparents and her parents, of course.

I fervently believe in the value of banging language, grammar and vocabulary into the heads of children from birth on up. Fluency in the milk tongue and a second language if possible, good reading and writing skills made accessible by fluency: these things are the recipe for success in whatever the growing child and adult decides to do. I would be happy to argue that Barak Obama is President today because his mother hauled him out of bed very early in the morning to give him extra English training. There are a lot of routes to language competence - I'm not specifically advocating for early rising or second language immersion or cue cards here. And I don't expect everyone to end up as a language lover who plays games with words and lives to write. But language is a tool box.  The better the tools, the better the job the tool user can do.  Even more than the bike helmet and the rubber boots and the mouth guard and the vegetables, skill with language is a survival tool, enrichment and protection all in one.

In my grandaugher's case, success in learning a second language well enough to fit in was a hard job but her success at it has made her a much more confident child. And certainly one who can teach her old grandmother new tricks.

That Ounce of Prevention

 

The daffodil bed around 2009

The hummers are here! The day I put the feeder up, having been prompted by several Facebook memory posts, we saw at least one male and one female. Skittish, as they are when they first arrive. Because there may be two males, I am going to put a second feeder on the other side of the house. An ounce of prevention of hummer wars.

And speaking of prevention. A while back I got a very formal letter from the Ford Motor Company, warning me that there was something that might be amiss with the engine of my 2020 Escape. If I were to hear an unusual noise, the letter advised me, or see smoke coming from under the hood, I should pull over to the side of the road immediately and turn off the engine. The letter also said that a repair for this was in the works and I would be notified when it was available. The letter said nothing about leaping out of the vehicle and running like a rabbit, subsequent to the noise/smoke. I filed the letter under C for ‘car’ and, frankly, forgot about it. I got another letter today saying the fix is available and reminding me to make an appointment with my dealer to have it done. I now have the fix scheduled for next week and I do most earnestly hope there is no strange noise or smoke in the interim.

Daffodil bed after the re-edit. 2010

My phone rang Friday morning and when I answered it, a sad voice said ‘Hi, it’s me’. YD me. Well, more incensed than sad. She had just had the second bike in a very short time stolen from her, this one her pet and favourite. And the robbery was a fast cut-off of her lock while she was in a store right beside the bike rack. She has reported both of these and is now going to have to persuade her insurance company to provide money to replace them. I gather that bike heists are pretty common where she is. Well, pretty well everywhere. Saddening and maddening.

Friday night I clumped out onto the deck and was rewarded with streamers of pale pink in the northern sky. We are surrounded by trees, nowhere more so than on the north side, but the light rays reached up almost to the apex of the sky dome and were a lovely thing to relish.

Saturday was cloudy and not overly warm, but a thing to relish was a late afternoon visit by either six turkeys or three turkeys twice, four deer and a solitary and scruffy raccoon. The deer munched along what used to be a wildflower garden along the grass at the kitchen end of the house, but although one doe did sniff at a daffodil, the clump survived intact. I am not sure about the trilliums.

Opened out and blooming - the daffodil bed

The daffs mostly do survive. I have a daffodil bed on the field side of the house, but it is so overgrown that it produced few flowers this year. And there is no way I can rescue it, other than to hire someone to do it for me. The YD has offered, but gardening is not her thing and reducing this bed will be a last labour of Herculean proportions. JG and I last redug it in 2012 or 2013. The daffs that are doing well are growing from bulbs given me in bloom as, probably, Easter or birthday gifts. I unpotted and planted several under the lilac bushes or in the unmowed verge of the lawn. They are thriving. The carefully curated bed is not. It was also a mistake to try to get iris to coexist with the earlier spring bulbs.

Iris competing with the done daffs

The frustrating thing about old age and chronic medical problems is that the jobs that used to be easy are difficult or, in a lot of cases, impossible. But … they are all still there.

Postscriptum. Just did the review and spellcheck does not like what I think of as reversal verbs – adding ‘un’ to show the negative. Some are classic, such as ‘unmarried’, and ‘unloved’, but as for ‘unmowed’, not allowable.  Mind you, spellcheck does not like ‘spellcheck’ either if it is Uppercased.  Grammarly corrections are many, mostly specious. Hah!!!

My screen porch

This is the side of the screened porch that is part of the house. The door on the left goes out onto a deck, and behind the right hand green chair is a patio door to the living room.

This is the screened porch from the patio door. There are two walls of screen, the one shown and one to the right of the chairs. There is a house wall on the left and behind the camera.

And early snowfall caught me before I stripped and piled the furniture for the winter. The photo appears to have a double exposure but that is acutally a reflection  in the glass of the patio door.

 

Noxy and I

 

At the feeders, 2011

Spring is springing and all of my photographer acquaintances are madly shooting. The only more frenetic activity is that of the birds who are nesting, involving much singing, building, and, of course, fertilizing.  The photo above is from 2011 and shows, from left to right, a rose-breasted grosbeak, purple finches and, on the silo, goldfinches. We have a few each of these this year, but the numbers are down and there have been almost no nuthatches, although we usually see quite a few. Although we do seem to be seeing fewer birds and fewer species, I live in hope and have, today, put out the hummingbird feeder.

What has been the most fun is watching the turkeys that are regulars to our field and the feeding station. Where there has been over the last while a fairly respectable group of hens (the hens go and find a male when they want one), there was, yesterday, only one hen and two toms. The hen and the older, bigger tom were pecking along, as they do, calmly searching for bugs/seeds (whatever they do look for). The smaller tom was displaying and doing a thing we have never seen before, circling around and around the quite oblivious hen that seemed interested only in a nice snack. Tom kept this up for quite some time, dancing and following the hen as she strolled. The other bird was grazing in quite a different direction, paying no attention. It really deserved an action shot, but that doesn’t work through the window.

I have had a day. Medical appointments seem to be raining down like a hailstorm. After a Zoom appointment with the sleep apnea clinic, I now have an overnight assessment at the clinic, followed by more Zoom for analysis and, oh yes, he wants bloodwork. Meanwhile my own doctor wants an ultrasound of my heart, goodness knows why, and I had two separate booking people looking for me, both, of course, on voicemail and voicemail was all I could get when I tried to return one or both. Plus, the voicemail on the second booking call gave a canned recital of about four different extensions on the two phone numbers, all of which I had to hear before I could leave my message. That finally got settled this afternoon. It is,I think, a universal and plaintive whine of old folks like me that there used to be people on the other end of a telephone call.

Got an analysis yesterday for the oxygen levels in my blood and it looks like the rest of May and June will feature MPG still on a leash. Ah well. It is blackfly season and being indoors, as long as I have my screened haven, is not so bad. My portable oxygen generator and I are going to town tomorrow for a haircut. I have decided that this machine needs a name and am considering Noxy, short for noxious oxy machine. Not that I am ungrateful. If you look up things like hypoxemia, it seems that having a stream of extra-oxygenated air blowing into your nose is the lesser of quite evil evils. However.  I am, I have been reliably informed, a stubborn person and I am being quite stubborn about aiming to bid Noxy a fond goodbye as soon as ever I can.

Report on Book Reports

 

My portable oxygen generator and I went to Book Club this morning. It was somewhat difficult, especially since the wretched little machine insisted on beeping at unreliable moments as well as chuffing. I became, quite soon, so annoyed with it that I shut it down and spent the rest of the meeting breathing normally. I did not notice much if any difference. I was, however, talking, and that tends to keep my blood oxygen count up.

It was a small meeting as three members had other pressing commitments, leaving five of us to report on an amusing book by a female author. What was first reported by most of us is that it was difficult to find such a book. One member lugged in three that she had searched out at the library and allowed as how none of them were good enough that she bothered to read the whole book. An interesting, but quite telling, comment came from one of the two who had thought to look through the Stephen Leacock awardees. Almost all of these winners have been men. Only a very small percentage have been women. 

And so we went on to discuss what makes a book, especially by a female author, funny. One of us said that she had noticed that she was not laughing a lot lately. “Not a real belly laugh,” she said. And when I heard that, I felt the same. While there was no firm consensus, the propensity of women to go to personal anecdote, to tell funny stories on their family, was noted. Also noted was that ‘jacket blurb’ is not to be believed and that what we are told is funny often isn’t.

Stephen Leacock was again mentioned and his humour discussed. Interestingly, Wickipedia agrees. They say “Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humourist in the world. He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.”

What was perfect is that one member had found and reported on a book by Canadian journalist, author and ‘Wife Of’, Sondra Gottlieb. Her husband was appointed Ambassador to the United States and Sondra wrote a book about her experiences as a diplomat’s wife in a high-pressure environment. She has written a good number of books, but our member could only find one in audio.Gottlieb’s humour is in the Leacock tradition, the criticism of foibles being those of herself, her husband, his job and anything else that her sometimes wicked mind came up with. I read her newspaper column in the Globe and Mail for years, and enjoyed what I would describe as acerbic wit. Certainly not many belly laughs. 

The same member reported, however, that she had also found a really good read, Normal Women, Nine Hundred Years of making History, a non-fiction book by Philippa Gregory and she recommended it highly. It recounts the ‘extraordinary roles of ordinary women’ in British history, ‘a landmark work of feminist non-fiction’. I am getting this book as soon as ever I can.

I was more than a bit stumped by what I could do with this topic; I don’t read much that I would consider humour. And so I went back in time and found If Life is a Bowl of Cherries What am I Doing in the Pits?, Erma Bombeck’s take on marriage and family life described as “fun from cover to cover”. And yes, it was. It was a lot more topical and funnier when I first read it as I also was raising a young family and coping with husband, house, job and all the minutiae of life at that stage. 

We were also told about Dance, Gladys, Dance by Cassie Stocks, described as an ’okay read’. This book wond the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 2013. Our presenter commented that as humour is not an area she normally seeks; she wondered what the criteria are for the award. The website for the competition says: “The major emphasis of each entry MUST be on humour, but literary merit and insightful comment are also important. Books of cartoons and graphic novels are eligible only if they contain a substantial amount of textual material.”

Dance is ‘an easy read when you follow the lead of the main character and her ‘contact’, Gladys, who is a ghost. The connection with the ghost causes the protagonist to see life in a new way, and is a ‘witty, affectionate tale -= with a supernatural twist – of several women who are coming to grips with the dreams they have sacrificed or given up on and the changes that they make to their lives to follow their dreams once again”.  The summing up? “I guess the humour comes from the basic premise of the book.”

I also have notes on the three books that the reporter was too bored to finish. I will spare you.

Next month we are meeting for a picnic in the park, rain date to be negotiated, and deciding what we will do in book club next year. My personal bias is toward the method we have used this year of picking a genre and having each member report. But since I was responsible for collecting the list of the types of books, the genres, that we were to use through this year, and since I lost the list and we have had to wing it, I think I may be told to be quiet and eat my picnic and let someone more organized, organize.