I get ideas and the urge to write a post while I am driving somewhere, when I am trying to reduce the pile of laundry waiting to be ironed, as I read the paper or a book. But when I open the computer, lately, I find myself checking Facebook, playing Scrabble, doodling mindlessly with Spider Solitaire, fiddling with my photos - anything but write. I suppose this is writer's block in a specially insidious form. And I am behind in reading a lot of your very good stuff, and very bad at commenting, lately. Inertia (my mother would have said 'Lazy!) is not a good thing.
Part of it is, I think, that I am not sleeping well. What with the man in my life ripping the duvet off me in the pre-dawn, an inability to go to sleep in any timely way or sleep in and what seems to be a chronic state of fatigue, my brain is not functioning well. When I was a sleep-deprived young mother, I used to listen to my elderly relatives complain about inability to sleep and mutter to myself that if I just had some time and a flattish surface, this would never happen to me. I thought their complaints about sore knees and itchy skin were sad but would not ever be relevant to my life. Well, guess what. I've got all of that as well as a few that they never mentioned, probably because the symptoms were too gross to be public.
Anyway, enough of all that. I am going to write again, and it is not going to be a catalogue of the joys of being almost seventy. (Picture my jaw clenched with determination, head thrown back, eyes staring sternly ahead - disregard the bags underneath these glowing eyes.)
I have a friend who has just taken up blogging and is having a fine time journalling her life. The other day she put up (at some unseasonably early hour) a list of what she planned to accomplish that day. Knowing the Bee, I suspect she got it all done, too. And when she finds her voice, she will shine as she is one of the most up-beat, mindful and generous people I know. I have to check with her to see if she wants me to put her site up. One more to add to the list of people who inspire me (you know who you are!).
My preoccupations at present - one is the weather. We got a few minutes of rain last night, enough to bring the rain gauge up to 3/4 of an inch. That depth is the total sum of the rain we have had since September 2nd. And we had 1/2 inch between August 2nd and September 2nd. There are a lot of stressed and grumpy trees that have just gone dormant and are shedding dry brown leaves. A few of the more deeply rooted are showing some colour now after three nights of frost, but it is not going to be a colourful fall. Time to put the flower borders to bed and almost time to start raking. These next few weeks are one of the highpoints of my year. The bugs are gone, the sky is often a remarkable blue (to-day with the last of the rain clouds sailing away), the colour, good or bad, something to make me rejoice.
I also rejoice at the wildlife we see. Lately we have had a bear, various numbers of wild turkeys, and this morning six deer trooped out onto the back field in the early morning light. One was a very young buck with single spike horns, and there were two fawns, dancing and chasing one another. I posted this sighting to Facebook, calling it a 'good haul' and got called on the expression. In fact, I was asked (tongue in cheek) if this meant that they were being loaded into my truck. You don't question the expressions you use until someone does question them, in my experience. My mother's family used 'a good haul' to mean a satisfactory collection of something, whether it be strawberries or shopping. My guess is that this set of ancestors must have fished - they came from Ireland during the famine there in the nineteenth century. And they used some lovely phrases. My grandmother called the guy who delivered the baking 'gossamer wings' for his inability to remember much of anything, leaving your work undone to go somewhere was 'roading' and a child who misbehaved got 'a good hiding'. In fact, what I meant was that this sighting had a good number of deer - we usually see only one or two at a time.
I love language. Well-turned expressions, succinct and punchy sentences, a lyrical stream-of-thought poem, all delight me. Someone who can tell a story well, design an understated amusing comment or convey an atmosphere in a few words is an inspiration. I read well-crafted novels again and again, for the turn of phrase, the skilful characterization and the sheer joy of an exciting plot, one that keeps your interest even when you know the ending. Reading the local papers is an exercise in keeping my temper, sometimes, when the writer of an article makes basic mistakes. Sometimes they get an email from me, more in sorrow than in anger, about the repeated ones. If we're reviewing a set of minutes or a policy statement at the board where I volunteer, the meeting members will sigh and resign themselves when my hand goes up and I start correcting lame sentences and awkward grammar. I got myself onto a committee to redesign our Vision, Mission and Values statements because of this nasty little vice. The whole thing is now boiled down to fit on one page but we are still tinkering. As with family expressions, something you don't question takes on a whole new aspect when someone else tags it. The latest is a question about 'just'. If we talk about a 'just' society, just what do we mean.
Stay tuned. I may figure that one out one day. And in the meantime, I have to go and stock up the deer feeding station.
When my daughters were girls, monarchs made a yearly appearance at our eastern Ontario weekend cabin's fields. The girls collected the caterpillars and incarcerated them in a glass fish tank, fed them on milkweed leaves and released them into the garden when the adult butterfly hatched. Some years we might have more or fewer, but always in August they would be around, close to the edge of their northern limit, happy with the goldenrod and other wildflowers, plentifully supplied with their feeding plant. Here is the Elder Daughter, age ten or eleven, releasing one. Once one of the caterpillars escaped the aquarium and we could not figure out what had happened to it until the butterfly wobbled out from under the dishwasher, not too much the worse for wear. Gave me the grues, let me tell you, imagining what stepping on the caterpillar in the dark would have felt like.
This daughter is now the mother of Little Stuff, whose nickname I will have to change, shortly, as she is growing like a weed. For the last several years they have hunted monarch caterpillars with good success. This year they collected twelve, in all, and ten hatched. As each one hatched, it was given a name and admired before it was released. Here is Little Stuff with, I think, Miriam. Two of the newly hatched were hauled off to school, where they were also much admired. The two that did not make it were very small caterpillars when captured and pupated too soon. I am told that they do better if they are cold at night, so that they will eat for more days. Next year!
