Nostalgia, part two. Well, sort of.

 

I have just finished reading an article discussing the very different childhoods of those of us born in the 1940’s and 1950’s to those born and raised when internet and cell phones were common. How we communicated then and how children are managed now incorporates a huge change. Google. Wikipedia. My daughter talks to her phone. Navigating in a car or boat. I could make this list much longer.

Childhood, both for me and for my daughters, was very different from how my granddaughter grew up. We lived in a neighbourhood where most houses had children our age. Something like a 'playdate' would have been met with laughter. We got information from books. My daughters’ treat was a visit to a bookstore with money in hand. In my mind, the big world change happened when my adult daughter and her husband set me up with internet access in 1995. This same daughter had taken a graduate degree in England, had met the husband there and we had planned the wedding through a series (a long and detailed series) of letters posted back and forth across the Atlantic. The other daughter was working in Africa and communicating by letter or telephone. Five years later I had daily access to both of them through email. Now I have virtual meeting with visual and voice. And a steady arrival of photos on my phone, keeping me current with the growth of the step great-grandchild. One of my neighbours read bedtime stories nightly to grandkids in Washington State. Different, for sure.

We are not the first generation to be pulled through into a differently managed world. I recall with amusement my grandmother’s fascination with the stretchy suits (with snap fasteners) my babies wore. She described the pinned wool wrappers that she had used to keep her babies warm, and it did sound dire. Her generation went from horse and buggy to automobile and encountered television. My mother was, I think, twenty-five when my grandparents got electricity, a very late adaptation as they lived on a working farm. My granddaughter had disposable diapers and a voice pickup beside her crib. My daughters had flannelette diapers that were pinned on and washed and dried by the me. But, I did have a programmable washer and drier to use.

I grew up playing chess and checkers and card games. I grew up reading as we did not get a television until I was, I think, thirteen. I grew up with the threat of polio, with almost universal child illnesses of measles, mumps and chicken pox. The vaccines for measles and mumps were available for my children, as was polio vaccine. My children grew up with television and games like Scrabble and Monopoly as well as cards. My step-grandsons grew up with video games.

The article that I read was a discussion of a single serious change. I have been hopping around here and I hope you can follow me at least a bit.

The point I am groping for here is, I think, reasonable. It is this: that, for each person, most change, even a large, a quantum change, is simply accepted and used. In my grandmother’s youth, she travelled by horse and buggy. But as an older adult she did not think of a car ride as anything unusual. Yet something that was as routine for me as a stretchy baby suit was a surprise for her.  For my father, the switch from looking things up in a card file to looking them up on line was extremely difficult. He was not a ten-fingered typist and found using a keyboard slow and frustrating, but was quickly informed by card. My daughters’ and granddaughter’s use of phones for information is simply routine but they still read for pleasure. But, perhaps, for each person there is a change that matters, is meaningful or, sadly, brings loss.

I read. I have a lot of books on bookshelves, more on my iPad, more on e-readers. I do love being able to order a book on line and have it the same day or hour. I recall my days of lugging a pile of books in to the library and lugging a new pile home. Life is different, for sure. For the first  half of my life I wrote letters home at least once a week. And even after internet I continued to do that for my mother.  Who phoned me every Sunday night from the city where they lived. This lasted even after they moved to live close to us. My mother was completely uninterested in computers in any form. 

I have never been able to pin down 'changes' for my mother. Except for polio vaccine. After that was available, I was not sent to stay with my grandparents in the summers when it menaced us all, but children most.

Nostalgia

 

July 1967

This photo was my father’s favourite. It is of my mother in their backyard under a willow tree, with my daughter; her age was about one year. My mother would have been 58. They are both about as beautiful as a grandmother and her first grandchild can be, absorbed in love and play. Both gone now, my mother to age and illness, my daughter to maturity.

I need to add here that I love my adult daughter very much indeed. But I miss my baby, my little girl, a great deal from time to time.

It is not a thing I thought about at all, when I had the babies, the toddlers the very young girls. I don’t know how many mothers would, working all hours of the day and night to keep them fed, clean, dressed, taught, safe. Nothing was written on the wall to tell me that the adored ghost of the baby stays in your memory, even as growth, achievements, and attachment to the adult accumulate.

So, the photo. I snapped it with a Kodak, and I suspect that the negative is still somewhere in this house. You got twenty photos on a roll of Kodak film, and I can locate other photos from that day, but I don’t remember the detail of that visit. We had driven from Ancaster, where we lived then, to Windsor, where my parents lived, about a four hour trip. It was the July 1^st Canada Day weekend, 1967, and I was very, very pregnant. I was so close to term, in fact, that my mother scolded me for the visit and, in a phone call after we returned to Ancaster, she said that she had been relieved to see us leave for home. (In fact, our second-born daughter arrived on July 11^th.)

They look as if they are in a little world of their own with shared laughter and love and this makes the photo a treasure for me. My serious, driven mother, who spent most of her life and energy being as perfect as she could be at everything she did, is as they say ‘in the moment’ and perfectly happy. What you do not see are the violets under her feet and the warm breeze that has swayed the willow branches. What you do not hear is their soft laughter.

This grandchild grew to be a lot like her grandmother in many ways – in her slim physical perfection and in her work ethic and intelligence, she was a joy to her grandmother and a point of pride.

I don’t miss the sheer hard work of those young parent days. I missed a lot of sleep and, with two children in fifteen months, I was pretty close to the maximum level of what I could handle. But there were a lot of good moments and a lot of love and fun then that I think only very small children can give. I miss snuggles and wet kisses and the complete trust of a small child asleep in my arms.  I miss watching them run and watching them sleep and listening to them play.  

An occasional little trip to the past is, perhaps, allowable.

ED with her grandma, Christmas 1966

The Gordie Howe Bridge

 Monday, July 27^rd, 2026

 On Friday last, there was a single-country, ceremonial opening of one end of the Gordie Howe Bridge. The Canadian end. The US of A was, it is reported, uninvited. If, under the circumstances, they decline to open their end to traffic, will anyone be surprised? Edited to add, open as of Monday afternoon. 

I have been following, with both amusement and alarm, the saga of this bridge since it was a vague arch on someone’s table napkin at a pub dinner. The reason for this is my personal relationship with the Ambassador Bridge, a major link between Canada and the US of A, and a structure not very far from where I grew up in Windsor, Ontario, the town south of Detroit, Michigan.

We lived only a few blocks from the Ambassador Bridge. When I was five, my father took me to play on the wall on the east side of the bridge’s entrance and exit ramp. When I was in high school, I my route to and from that school involved walking across that ramp. Neither interaction was at all dangerous; there was very little traffic entering or exiting. Sometimes there was none. A few times, causing the adolescents that we were a lot of amusement, an American tourist would wave one of us over and ask if, say, they could make Toronto for lunch. Uh, no sir. Six to nine hours depending on road work.

 You see, you drove off the exit ramp, a widish apron of concrete stretching back to a customs control, and you were on a major Windsor artery, Wyandotte Street, that was two lanes wide with parking, mixed residential and small business. A right turn took you toward downtown Windsor. A left turn decanted you through a residential area, at a stoplight, onto the Huron Church Road, a four lane road with a boulevard in a few spots that meandered through a bit of a tourist section with fast food and a couple of motels, a small plaza and within five minutes became a country road where there were stands for farm produce and fields on either side. Then you wound your way through a bit of a maze of local highways until you got onto Highway 2, two lanes, speed limit 50 mph, headed for Toronto via London. A short distance from that intersection down another very country road was my grandparents’ hundred-acre farm, excellent soil where my grandfather had grown crops for Heinz tomatoes, cucumbers, and, back in the day, tobacco.

So, my best friend and I could be sent out to the Huron Line to buy strawberries when I was sixteen and had just passed my driver’s test. And we went, using my mother’s VW bug. We felt quite grown up. In truth, there was so little traffic that even my worrier of a mother could not get up much angst at our errand.

As you can imagine, few transport trucks entered the US by such a route. A lot of, most of, the commerce crossed the Detroit River on railway cars, the cars being loaded onto barges and towed across. Quite a bit of the shoreline of both Windsor and Detroit was taken up by the infrastructure needed for this. And that the ownership of the Ambassador Bridge came into the hands of a private company, with one man owner, did not seem important.

I grew up for real. Married, moved to the other side of the province, had children. And they grew up. All the while my parents stayed in the house just off Wyandotte Street. And we drove from Ottawa to Windsor to visit them. We rejoiced when the high speed 401 highway was finished mostly, sort of, from our city to theirs, even though we usually broke the trip into two days. I am not sure when the last bit was opened, but I remember driving the whole route in one go, tired but determined, to be with my best friend when her father died. And I remember being astonished at the number of trucks from Toronto that were on the road with me, headed for Windsor. To cross on the Ambassador Bridge.

To cross on a two-lane… well, two and a centre lane.. even at that time elderly bridge. And paying tolls through the nose to the owner. Having survived this, the traffic all flowed into suburban Detroit and there was some confusion before it could exit by highway.

Here is a short article about the bridges and the drama. 

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2026/07/23/new-gordie-howe-bridge-expected-to-save-truck-drivers-time-money-at-detroit-border/

Each time we visited the traffic was worse. Some improvements of Huron Line (Huron Line and Huron Church Road are the same thing. Sorry.) from time to time did not really ease off the frequent gridlocks. I vaguely recall getting stuck in a lineup of trucks waiting to enter the bridge when I was at least a mile and probably more back from the turn to Wyandotte. I suspect the locals had a better idea of when the road was possible, but driving in on the 401 from Toronto/London, the last exit decanted the weary traveller onto the Huron Line at the edge of Windsor’s newer subdivisions, a good ten miles from the bridge, and all of the through traffic had to compress onto four narrow lanes with stoplights and the unfortunate local traffic.

By this time, of course, there was to my knowledge no train ferry still running. Most of the downtown river shore was sculpted into pedestrian walks and flower gardens. And all of the commerce was compressed onto bigger and bigger transport trucks. People could still use the tunnel by car or bus, but the trucks had one route only. Oh, and of course it decanted them into urban Detroit. So the bridge would bottleneck if American Customs was slow.

My parents moved to Ottawa in the early 1980’s and thus I was not making the drive to Windsor. I think we went a few times to visit my aunts, there were my parents’ funerals at a church only a few miles from the 401/Huron Line junction, but I felt more lost each time I drove there. All of the fruit stands and farm stands were gone, cookie-cutter hotels and plazas had taken over the roadsides, and the big tandem trailers were everywhere. When I first heard about the proposal for the Gordie Howe Bridge, I cheered.

That was a lot of time ago and a lot of cost incurred. That part of the story is all over the news this week as the Canadian half of the totally Canadian-funded bridge opened in Windsor. I have seen photos and short videos. Huron Church Road (always the Huron Line in my mind) appears to have vanished, along with my grandparents’ farm, which my daughter tells me is now buried under access ramps or some such. My public school has been bulldozed, and my high school is on the list to follow. My daughter was visiting in the area this spring and was able to report the family graves intact in the church both my parents attended. But she could not find my grandparents’ home or land.

I hope to add a video and some links here about the childish nonsense going on about this bridge. I am waiting till Monday brings information as to whether the American side is going to open to traffic.

It is a beautiful, beautiful bridge. And the hours long lineups to cross the other one should be things of the past, making the part of Windsor where I grew up livable again.

Photo Credits, George Harrold.

Previous post, edited for the local paper.

 I have taken what seems to me to be excellent advice and edited myself out of this. What do you think? (Previous version in the post below this one.)

When was the last time you went to bed thinking “Well, I may not have everything done, but that was a good day, I enjoyed myself?” It is pretty simple: when I felt like that was
when I was engaged with my community. A lot of the fun in my life and a lot of the value and learning came from volunteering. I have worked full time or part time, but I have always made time to volunteer somewhere, somehow. And it has almost always paid me more than it cost me.

When my husband retired and we moved to Lanark Highlands, a wonderful woman called Marion Paul found out I could take meeting minutes and (it seems to me within a minute) I replaced her as the secretary of the Watson’s Corners Hall Committee. That helped me to find my place in the community. Rural living, for those of you newly here, is not like the city. I think you will always find your neighbours there for you if you need them. But the winter days can be long and cold and slow. The Watson’s Corners  Hall Committee is charged with making a warm, safe space with kitchen and toilets available to the local community. While the hall belongs to the township, the community runs it. All done by people from the neighbourhood.

What is a rural community hall? It is a location, with roof, where almost anything can be done; a family reunion, a funeral, a meeting (with food), cards (with food), a walking group, art classes, fitness classes, yoga, a camera club.  At Watson’s, the committee volunteers use the kitchen to put on several community meals every year to raise money to heat, clean and generally keep the hall going. All done by people from the neighbourhood. 

For the hall to be run and used, the community needs to step up and be part of it. If we all pitch in, even if we only have a bit of time to spare, the hall is and remains a hub.  A volunteer job could be a one-off for a few hours, or a small amount of time each month, didn’t matter. I was part of things; I was happy. 

And so would you be. Watson’s will be calling an Annual General Meeting  in February, 2027 but you don’t have to wait until then. Talk to people. Join.the volunteer pool, or even consider being part of the hall committee.

You won’t regret it. Thirty years later, neither do I.

A Recruitment Letter

 What follows is a draft of a letter for our local paper. I am not satisfied with it; it is too long and, frankly, boring. I would very much appreciate comments.

When was the last time you went to bed thinking “Well, I may not have everything done, but that was a good day, I enjoyed myself?” I have been reflecting lately, as octogenarians are supposed to do, on my life and what I have done with it. And what this seems to tell me is a pretty simple thing: when I was happiest was when I was engaged with my community. A lot of the fun in my life and a lot of the value and learning came from volunteering.

I started volunteering when we moved to a new city and my children started school. I could not find a job and so I had time on my hands and some basic skills. I ended up volunteering in our local school, working with children who did not have English language skills. This morphed into full-time work and part-time work which, over time, I still take on.  But I did not keep to my skill set to find interesting things to do. I have had a lot of happiness learning things like managing puppets, sewing gym costumes, learning shuffleboard, running a strawberry social, calculating amounts for ham dinners.  Some of the time over the course of my lifetime I have worked full time or part time, but I have always made time to volunteer somewhere, somehow. And it has almost always paid me more than it cost me.

When we moved to Lanark Highlands, a wonderful woman called Marion Paul found out I could take meeting minutes and (it seems to me within a minute) I replaced her as the secretary of the Watson’s Corners Hall Committee. That helped me to find my place in the community. Rural living, for those of you newly here, is not like the city. I think you will always find your neighbours there for you if you need them. But the winter days can be long and cold and slow. The Watson’s Corners  Hall Committee is charged with making a warm, safe space with kitchen and toilets available to the local community. While the hall belongs to the township, the community runs it. All done by people from the neighbourhood.

What is a rural community hall? It is a location, with roof, where almost anything can be done; a family reunion, a funeral, a meeting (with food), cards (with food), a walking group, art classes, fitness classes, yoga, a camera club.  At Watson’s, the committee volunteers use the kitchen to put on several community meals every year to raise money to heat, clean and generally keep the hall going. All done by people from the neighbourhood.

If you are still reading this, you may be ‘in the neighbourhood’, if not of Watson’s Hall, then of one of the others that the Township in its wisdom holds in trust. The Township owns it. The community runs it. And so, to be run and used, the community needs to step up and be part of it. If we all pitch in, even if we only have a bit of time to spare, the hall is and remains a hub. Join the volunteer pool, or even consider being part of the hall committee.

I have found that I could always choose a volunteer job that suited my availability and ability level (among the Watson’s kitchen staff, this relegated me to washing dishes but, hey, we put them through). A volunteer job could be a one-off for a few hours, or a small amount of time each month, didn’t matter. I was part of things; I was happy.

And so would you be. Watson’s will be calling an Annual General Meeting  in February, 2027 but you don’t have to wait until then. Talk to people. Join. You won’t regret it. Thirty years later, neither do I.

Bucket List

 June 25^th, 2026. I had to remind myself what year this is before I typed that. Just a small window into the mess that my brain has become this last while. And not only my brain.

 I found and brought forward this photo of my, as a much younger and stronger woman, bringing pails of sap in to boil into syrup. There should be a title, something to do with life making you lug things around. Suggestions?

I am surrounded, today as I sit at my computer, by: stacks of paper; minutes to go into the minute book, requests for money from charities we favour; medical reports; financial records for the file; a pile or two for my husband; all the rest.  And goodness knows what ‘all the rest’ will turn out to be. I have to clear this up and sort it before I can sort what I am prepared to lose of all my precious ‘stuff’. You never know, right, when you will need a gold-edged certificate page or quick-finish glue or a mid-sized manila envelope.

I have done a first and less than drastic sort of the basement storage, my clothes and the china cabinet. It is time to hit the bookshelves and drawers and storage in this, my office. Well, at least it now has a door.

It was just a year ago that JG informed me that he had hired a finish carpenter to finish the carpenting in the house. Since we moved in, only my bathroom has had ‘finishing’ and so I have been looking, for over a quarter century now, at structural wood in the doorways, pipes and wires in the downstairs ceiling, subfloor on the stair landing, more but you can envision the level. This slow and patient carpenter framed in and built the hall downstairs and put in the ceiling. He put doors on my office and my storage cupboard (I cheered) and finished the stairway  floor. Then, sadly, he got sick and had to leave and we still have some cleanup to do.

Another extreme cleanup is underway this morning. My neighbour who is doing this is, she tells me, a ‘detail’ person. There is a lot of detail on that porch, pollen and dust carried in by the wind. It settles, sticks and is in crevices and cracks everywhere. She started right after breakfast and as I write this, just short of noon, she is tackling the worst of the accreted dirt on her hands and knees. She is worth her weight in shiny gold coins.

The two things I am doing for a peaceful future are these – divesting myself of things and locating people who can take over the things I no longer am able to do. JG is doing the same. We are considering divesting ourselves of some of the land, but that is a story all on itself.

And writing this is not getting anything sorted.

This Post May Bug You

 

 

Monday, May 18^{th .}Victoria Day in Canada. Note that it is NOT Queen’s actual birthday. I am not sure when that is. It is a holiday that supposedly celebrates our sovereign. And it is the weekend to open the cottage, or buy bedding plants or … stay inside lest you be eaten alive by little black flies.

I did not grow up with blackflies. Mosquitoes, yes, and deer flies and shad flies and deer flies (more later on these not dear devils), all of those. And my parents opened the cottage on what was then often called ‘The Queen’s Birthday’, so I had an intimate holiday meeting with some of those listed above. But I lived too far south to grow up with the little black miseries. And so, when I get bitten by one, I get a big red welt at each bite spot. A mosquito bite’s evidence does not last for more than a few minutes; I am acclimated to them, annoying as they are. My daughters, who did grow up with them, do not react this way. But I am really sensitive to the blackflies and they are, presently, thick.

I am not the only person to hate the pests. If you do a control/click on the link here Blackfly - NFB it should take you to a really wonderful short song about them. (If that doesn’t work, here is the link to the Wikipedia website The Blackfly Song - Wikipedia. Even if you know this short animation of the song, playing it is a pleasant few minutes.

Anyway, my first encounter with the little devils was in Deep River in 1962. We were driving to the west coast, and we decided to camp for the night in the town’s campground. By morning I had a ring of red itchy welts around my neck, my wrists and my waist and I was really, really glad to leave. We left the bugs behind about the Ontario/Manitoba border but the itchies stayed with me until June.

 If you can’t leave them behind, if you are working outside with both hands occupied, it can be pretty miserable. I have seen some of the neighbours, when they were cleaning up from sugaring, with blood dripping behind their ears. The flies are looking for a blood meal and they have, in fact, sharp jaws.

While we are here whining about wildlife, the other fly in the ointment is the deer fly. This is a much bigger insect, delta-winged, and it really bites hard. They are controllable with repellent, but miserable if you are stripped down to swim as they seem to like wet skin. They leave a welt on everyone. When I was a kid at my parents’ cottage we had horseflies, similar but bigger, that attacked us when we swam in the lake. I learned to swim underwater, as if you did that for a distance, you could lose one that was trying to take a chunk out of you.

We have an open field behind our house and at this time of year, if there is a windy day, the deer will come out and lie in the field to chew their cuds. I think the wind reduces the number of flies following them.

We had our first hot day today. Not enough to put the air conditioner on, but pretty warm. That will bring on the leaves and flowering trees, but anyone out and about this weekend should be covered up, in spite of the heat.

 

Friday, May 22^nd

As predicted. A warm week has produced blossom everywhere, starting with ED’s cherished magnolia, and the blossom has enticed the female hummingbirds north. We appear to have a dominant male, at least one other male and at least one female being courted by the male’s swinging U flybys that, with our window feeder, we see close up. Also for sure two and possibly three pairs of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks. And a robin that has decided I should be scolded off the screen porch and who, accordingly, has a chipping fit whenever I go out there. Robins can be very opinionated. Back in the archive somewhere is a description of persuading a robin that nesting on the light fixture outside our bedroom door was not a good option. This may be her great-grandkid that is bugging me. Fair trade, turnabout. Hmm.

Just to mention, blackflies are rampant. We have a neighbour who got his garden in, he says, because the day was windy enough to blow them away. I am not sure I buy that, but we do have a heavier tree cover to cut the wind and allow the evil little things to lurk.

JG is off to do a dump run and pick up prescription meds en route. Up until the start of this year we had a ‘transfer station’ on the next concession over where all of our trash could go and where recyclables were collected. It closed down and now we have about a twenty minute drive to the station outside the village. Annoying. I know the township wants to save money wherever possible, and the transfer station had to have a keeper and the deposits sorted and moved, but it was lovely to be able to drive a bit down the road and unload it all. We have a lot of recyclables, paper being the premium but plastic a close second. I hope people in this area will stiffen their spines and keep doing the clean thing, even if it is more time and trouble. It is a real blow to our community hall, as it generates a lot of trash when we hold a function.

 Rats and all that. It is now the 23^rd and I am ending this babble. Goodness knows why anyone would read it this far. Except I have to to proof it.

-30 -

Bringing May Flowers

 May 11, 2026

I have been quiet for a few days, mostly because I put my back out and was prescribed a hydromorphone. Plays the dickens with my head. This morning I dumped half a cup of hot coffee on my lap. But, I should be doing a post about the spring flowers, and will try to concentrate.

The daughters came out yesterday with all sorts of goodies for lunch, the highlight being a Mother’s Day cake with flowers and butterflies on it. The butterflies were paper, but the rest was icing and a sheer, indulgent, delight. They then went for a walk in the woods, trundling around the trails they have known since they were small children, and came back with some lovely flower shots.

It is amusing, in passing, to note that the daughter who can squat right down beside a flower to get the best angle had her sixtieth birthday last month. I am pretty sure if I had tried to do that at the same age, they would have had to bring in a crane to get me up again.

A few posts ago, I put  up a photo of my two little girls dancing down a trail. That is one of the trails on our land (we have 300 acres and I can get confused). We bought the first hundred when the daughters were quite young, maybe nine and eight and they grew up spending weekends and holidays here, in a four-seasons cabin that we built. For most of that time we had no hydro and so we heated with a wood stove, and lit and cooked with gas that lived in large tanks at the back of the cabin. We carried water from a well and our toilet facility was a township-approved pit privy. (Read, outhouse, urban friends.)

What did we do here in all of our open time? We made and maintained trails. JG taught himself woodmanship and did an inventory of our trees, bushes and plants. We cut quantities of firewood. We were able to buy more land, some of it carrying good sugar maple and so we made a bit of maple syrup and got ourselves hooked into becoming maple people. This involved building a sugar house, cutting even more wood, stringing tubing, clearing more trails and, finally, boiling, bottling and selling. Plus eating a bit along the way. In winter we played in the snow - skis and snowmobiles - and in other seasons we worked. Or built. Evenings, we read. No electricity means no TV. 

Around where the girls became adults we were able to get electrical power and a telephone. JG redid the cabin with electric lights and electric stove and frig. Glorious. Only, in drilling out the inlets for the power, we enabled mice. Somewhere there was a hole big enough to admit them and we could not find it. We never have found it, and the cabin is now a storage place.

Sometime after that, JG retired. Finished work on a Friday and on Saturday we started in seriously to build our dream home on our land, still referred to, with very little reason, as ‘the farm’. I should write a post or more about that building spree. Someday. I have to get the flower photos up.

The Old Tree

 

The View From Forty-Two  -  Sarah Piazza
  written in 2010

Mommy! My son exclaimed Just the other day: You look like A tree! — and He chortled, then, At the offense: This green shirt, Those brown pants. I was delighted.

When I am old I hope the boy, Grown to man, sees Value In weathered skin Like bark, In hair so white It might cap Even rogue waves, In ropy-veined legs Working overtime, Bulging, and blushing, With dedicated effort.

And all that day I felt strong. Rooted. Proud, to provide Shade, and a moment Or two to contemplate For a wanderer Who might weep, grateful, To find me sturdy, To find me Still.

 

Way back when blogs were popular, Sarah wrote and posted this. At the time, I was 68, with a seven-year-old grandkid, and this poem spoke to me in a way that the author and the other young mothers in the blog ambiance could not relate to in the same way. I was backing up my daughter in caring for her daughter, looking after the child when that was needed. My other daughter was working overseas, in a job with a lot of stress, and calling on me to manage something she could not here, although only rarely. And, yes, I was proud to be in their lives, to be a convenience. Sturdy. Yes.

These same words curl into my conscious thought now so differently. If I once provided shade, I am now shaded, generously, often. Both my daughters live in the city near us and they check on us, carefully, thoughtfully, often. They do things for us that need doing. They are a great and continuing help for the parents whose skin has weathered, hair turned fine and white as foam on a breaker, legs ceased to work well anytime.  For whom just living is an effort.

I am so grateful for them. For them to be here for us. For all that I know they will do, willingly, cheerfully, until they no longer find me. 

Words, words, words.

 

On Monday, we went to an event where both a candidate for our federal riding and the incumbent of another nearby riding were on hand for a meet-and-greet event. The incumbent got up to say a few words and by the time these words were finished, I was very unimpressed. What I heard was the same descriptor used at least five times in as many sentences. And the descriptor was one of those useless ones that should never be employed as positives. My memory being what it is, the exact word has now escaped me, but it was one of ‘amazing’ or "awesome' or ‘incredible’. The welcome received, the candidate’s quality, the food and ambiance of the venue, the importance of the time, all were ‘incredible’. It annoys me greatly when such a descriptor is used once, but the repetition was, if you will excuse my saying so, amazingly very annoying.

I really wished that I had had a thesaurus to hand, to use to whack this person.

For those of you who are not ancient English teachers, ‘amazing’ as defined in the Oxford dictionary, means causing great surprise or wonder; astonishing. Similar words include; astonishing, astounding, surprising, bewildering. Stunning, staggering, shocking, startling, stupefying, breathtaking, perplexing, confounding, dismaying, disconcerting, shattering, awesome, awe-inspiring, sensational, remarkable, spectacular, stupendous, phenomenal, prodigious, extraordinary, incredible, unbelievable, wonderful, marvelous, thrilling, exciting, mind-blowing, flabbergasting, dumbfounding. A second and informal usage is startlingly impressive.

Please note that this meeting, while having enough people so that the seats were mostly filled, was not in any way outstanding, let alone spectacular. The candidate, a pleasant and qualified person, was not, for sure, breathtaking. The food was okay. The meeting time was not the best choice, really, as we were called together over the supper hour. As I think about it, the speaker may have called all of these things ‘awesome’, as that is another descriptor that is getting badly overused these days.

People who are elected as our representatives should, clearly, be prepared to speak to a group, both formally and informally. The verb ‘prepare’ is the key here. I came away convinced that the speaker was either careless or out of their depth. Not what you would want in a member of Parliament. I found the speech literally, if you will excuse me, marvelous.

A Perfect Hour

In a lot of things we do, it is easy to think that parts of it could be better. “If only” whatever it was … was sooner or later, longer or shorter, darker or brighter. If there had been less fog, or warmer water or fewer people or less noise or ….! Yikes. The list is endless, once you start to think about it. But, in the midst of this clatter and clamour, sometimes there are small islands of perfection, of what a poet I once read called the ‘still centre, the heart of rest’. I think it is probably a really good exercise, when the snow lingers or the guest does not arrive when expected, to search in your memory and heart for these times, recall them, even if not in tranquility, and cherish the memory.

For me, one of these loved times was a fall afternoon, here on our land, taking a walk through the woods on a sunny day, a cool but clear afternoon, with my two little girls. There were a lot of leaves down, still at their crisp, curled best, and the girls ran through them, shuffling and rustling and giggling. They would run ahead of me, the sun glinting off their shiny blowing hair, or dart off to the side to investigate something intriguing. Or they would run back to me to share a perfect scarlet leaf or a tattered last summer aster. Sometimes they were together, sometimes off on solo explorations, but always the music of their voices and the grace of their movement informed the perfect hour. Slanted sunbeams picked up the fine dust of the autumn’s leavings as it swirled from their flying feet. I knew as I walked that what was happening was precious, was perfect, I took a photo.

A photograph can only capture one tiny slice of such a day. Even a video, the kind of thing my camera chooses to take from time to time, would not give you scent, the surrounding tall, enduring trees, the  golden leaves on the trail edges. But if I try I can remember all of it, scent, sound, the golden sun’s illumination, the serenity. Even so, a photo helps. The one above may not be of the day I am describing; the girls look a bit older, the sun is not breaking through. But I can edit it in memory. A place in my life to treasure, forever.