Moving In and On

The view from my living room window

Over the years, apart from my precious Daughter and Grandgirl, I find that it is my friends who offer the most support and comfort and downright consoling when things get rough.

I don't like to lay too much on Daughter or Grandgirl, they have their own lives to live and their own troubles which they are more than welcome to lay on me.

A dear friend called me last week. She's quite the traveler and gallops around the world frequently. I must have gone on a bit of a whine about my health and the Cathedral and my worries, catch me on a down day and I'll fill one of your ears with my woes and the next day she calls me again and tells me she's booked a flight and she's staying for 3 days and find her a place to stay. I have a friend with an AirBnb in St. John's, a gorgeous terrace house on an old street, cheap digs that she'll have all to herself, so in we booked her. I am so delighted, she is a tonic, this brave soul, has beaten cancer a few times and has her own share of troubles but has that gift of curiosity and love of life and incredible loyalty to her friends. Once friends, you're friends for life. So she arrives on November 27th. She was the friend who flew in from Spain to catch my play in Ireland in 2012. I find this one act of kindness has lifted me like nothing else. All we need sometimes is a shoulder to lean on, yeah?

A cousin and I connected out of the blue and it is a powerful bond with similar histories of violence and disconnection from current family members. Goosebumps: this common thread of estrangement and distance and shunning, the theme of our dysfunctional clan. Therapy has helped both of us to just deal and protect ourselves from further abuse. This is like a breath of fresh air in my life and so unexpected.

Daughter rented a table for us both at a Craft Fair in early December So I'm busy crafting. I've ordered prints of some of my photos, the ones that have sold out a few times. This should be fun, just being with others who also sell their wares and making some coin. I'm considering taking orders for story shawls. A lot of work but there is an interest.

So here I am on a Saturday night. Remembrance Day. Poppy Day.

All is calm.

Blog Jam

It's a fog of snow out there. Flakes so small they blanket the air, gauzing the meadow and the barn. I can't say as I like it. We had to cancel, again, the Book Club monthly meeting and now we're deferring the works till March. First time ever Book Club was cancelled and twice to boot.

As I was dressing this morning I became aware, as if for the first time, how there is no longer a need to rush. It seems like in my old life I was rushing from one thing to another. Like most working mothers, like most cramming every scrap of life into an overflowing day.

I thought:

Thirty minutes to perform all the rituals of the woken up morning.

I thought:

Why am I paying attention to the timing of that?

I had the house record (in a house of males) when still living in my parents' house. Five minutes from start to finish. Including the slap(Irishese for makeup) and clobber (full dress regalia). No showers then, just the bath at night. Now it's thirty minutes of drift, a meditation in there too, a chat with the dog. A leisurely teeth brushing, a selection of which of the two pairs of jeans to wear, or the sweats if going absolutely nowhere.

My old newfound friend phoned me yesterday. I hadn't heard her voice in well over thirty+ years. It hadn't changed. She has led a life as an emergency room nurse, a teacher, a farmer, a saw mill operator and now an artist. It turns out she is an expert in the art of Chinese fine line painting and conducts classes. And yes, she's in her eighties. Below is some of her work on exhibit at a gallery:

We also shared missing children stories. One of her sons estranged himself for twelve years from the entire family. During that time she missed the birth of her grandchildren and their growing up years. Years never regained of course - lost forever and with no foundational love for those grandchildren like she has with her other son's. She is stoic when she tells me this and has made the best of it, even through the apologies of her prodigal son. She said to me: "Apologies are too small, too inadequate. I tell him I do not want to hear them for they are meaningless. Let's make the best of the remaining years."

Wise words. I'd forgotten how very wise she was.

Shared heartbreaks. Shared creative souls.

A long lost friendship retrieved from the mists of time and misunderstandings. Elder bonus.

Tell Me A Story

My gosh, old friends. Friends that have long vanished down the tunnel of their own lives, breathing and doing and celebrating and grieving - without you.

I can never sing the praises of FaceBook loudly enough. As I've mentioned before.

I had a friend, 12 years older than me – though I had forgotten exactly how much older she was as she had that younger energy around her until she reminded me. We played bridge in those days. A lot. In the absence of a foursome, her 12 year old son and my 9 year old daughter filled the gap. We were lucky they were so brilliant.

We lived around the corner from each other in a small town in Ontario. In enormous century homes of red brick and atmosphere. History breathed from each others' walls. I've never lost my love for old houses, obviously.

We cottaged (a uniquely Ontario term for going off to a wilderness cabin for a while) with our kids and husbands of the time. And drank together. Boy, did we drink together. The name of the cottage was “While You're Up”. Tells you everything you need to know. And then there was an incident, as there sometimes is. And the friendship survives or it doesn't, And ours went into a coma.

But I never forgot. And neither did she apparently. Because through FaceBook we have reconnected and it's been so very easy after, oh my, 35 years perhaps. So we now email. Lengthily. We pursued our individual artistic souls after we 'broke up'. And she ended one of her recent emails with: “Tell me a story”.

And so I did and ended mine today with: “Tell me one.”

This could go on for a very long time.

Connectivity

I've been thinking about connection lately, how all things are. Trite I know, new-agey. Tree huggy. Elder reflections.

The shifting of importances. I really believe small things should be writ large. How well I feel when I know where my food is coming from, who farmed or hunted it, who has the chickens where the eggs are laid, meet the farmer who delivers my meat, when and where the moose was hunted, how far out in the bay were those crab pots laid. That there were scallop beds on the bay in front of my house back in the day, until the huge draggers came in and destroyed the bay forever and the ocean mile limits were set. Far too late. We need to learn from Gaia, our planet. She has much to teach us.

Today, Leo comes in with a load of wood from the barn and is excited. See? he says, see? And he points at a few big logs. Oh, they're maple, I say, impressed. (I do know my trees and wood from refinishing furniture back in the day. I knows me pine from me oak from me maple and walnut and cherry.)

It turns out they're from Mabel the Maple, her branches now dried and still serving me. And her trunk is still standing and I'm going to get someone to take her down and see if we can make one hell of a bench from her so she can live on.

Thank you, Mabel.

Everything's Connected, Right?

I was contemplating yesterday's earthquake here in Canada in Quebec and Ontario and grateful that it wasn't worse.

I remembered the one I felt in 1985. I was working on the 8th floor of an office building in Toronto and it was the weirdest feeling - as if everything was so fragile, as if all could collapse around me, just like that. It was over in a minute probably, but I can still recall the feeling: as if solidity was just an illusion we all carried around.

And recently I had this thought, this curiosity, about the oil and not just the leaks, ALL the oil we're syphoning from the bowels of Mother Earth for the past century, billions and billions of barrels, what then happens to her displaced layers as a result of the removal of all this oil?

I've studied a tiny bit about geology and physics in my time and I marched forth upon the interwebz and found, well, zero, on this topic. Is it gasses or air that fill the vacuum created by the expelled oil? I can see water from the ocean filling the void - but that could be disruptive to the tides, right?

Could this displacement of oil cause the tetonic plates to shift?

Will earthquakes and tsunamis increase?

So apart from the devastation of the used expelled gaseous oil causing cataclysmic climate change, we have the void left by the extracted oil causing upheavals in the earth's crust?

I would love to be more educated on this topic.

UPDATE

My good friend Government Funded Blogger kindly directed me to

this

which confirms my speculation on the topic. My question would be: Why isn't it addressed more by governments?

Truly Sexy Men

I became citified at a very early age. Six. Prior to that, I lived in a small provincial town in East Cork, Ireland, with frequent visits and sleepovers in 'the country' where my grandparents lived on their acre of tenant holding, existing on the flora, fauna and fish of the landscape around them.

One of my first crystal clear memories is of getting up before dawn and being taken by my grandfather to check the snares for rabbits, which would subsequently be cooked as our midday meal. I remember the tramp down the meadow, our little cottage down the way with the smoke puffing up from the chimney to thread its way through the early morning fog. The dog leaping and bounding, catching the scent of the rabbits tied with a cord and slung over Granda's shoulder. The smell of Granda's tobacco, clinging permanently to his heavy tweed jacket.

Then we moved to one of the first suburbs of Cork City. An alien frightening world to a small child like me. A world, it seemed, full of boy-children, scary and catapulting and hurling and forming gangs to throw rocks at each other. (Sub-suburban life, who knew?). I was never a dolly-playing child so to offset incredible boredom, I joined those frightening creatures and climbed trees and played hurling and became a spot-on stone thrower at the many gangs who attempted to dislodge us from our 'fort'. Heady days. The seeds of equality were set right there, at six.

What fun the boys and I had ! I became truly one of their heroes when a gorgeously huge toy pram I'd been given by the 'other' grandmother was immediately stripped of its hood and covers and converted into a two-person trolley for careening down hills and shipping fresh boulders for further fortification of our HQ.

And now I'm living on an island of men who've never seemed to have moved away from the boy-children they were. In the best possible way.. They have cabins in the bush. They have quads (ATVs to the uninitiated) and wooden boats, and rifles and won't walk down a road without a fishing rod. They talk motors and refittings and wells and where the best berries are and the size of the moose in their freezers. And they toss rocks around to make retaining walls. And they drive trucks carting unidentifiable large pieces of equipment from place to place. And they tow big boats. And they all have sheds (clubhouses) where they congregate and build more stuff.

Wonder Boys, Pg 182

“Irv had rediscovered, as surprisingly few men do, that the secret to perfect male happiness is a well-equipped clubhouse.”

And I've built a shed of my own. With electrical tools hanging on the walls. And a huge workbench. And I just might be buying a small old stick-shift truck to move some stuff around. And one of these days, the boys might just come and play with me.

Connecting with our food

I don't know how it is in the rest of the world at the moment, but here in Canada, we are stumbling and lurching and sometimes dying over continuing compromises to our (factory) food sources, recently we had a listeria outbreak linked to Maple Leaf Foods resulting in many deaths - still uncounted as autopsies need finalizations. The latest occurrence is in North Bay, in a well-known hamburger fast food chain: Harveys is now implicated in a fresh outbreak of e-coli.

The lingering horror of an e-coli outbreak due to a contaminated municipal water supply in Walkerton, Ontario is still with us, years later. I read in today's paper that the health effects - raised blood pressure, damaged kidneys - are still present in those who suffered from the bacterium. 7 people died and over 2500 were made ill in this small town, 8 years ago. And continued suffering is inevitable.

As we turn our very lives over to agri-business, the Cargills, Maple Leaf Foods, privateer water suppliers, et al, more and more of these types of outbreaks will be visited upon unsuspecting and trusting citizens.

I have read both of Michael Pollan's books:
The Omnivore's Dilemma

in which he explores the ubiqitous presence of corn in nearly all of our entire food supply and the near elimination of the independent farmer, all in highly readable form.

and

In Defense of Food

Here, he examines how very far removed from real food we have become and recommends how to shop (only buy products that are displayed on the outside walls of the supermarket, for one!). I don't think I'll ever forget the chapter on mushrooms. It has stayed with me.

Michael feels very strongly about what we are doing to our very lives by blindly eating the frankenfood on offer in most of our grocery stores today and has written a wonderful open letter, published in The New York Times, to the president-elect of the U.S. full of suggestions as to how we can reverse the harmful mismanagement of our precious food resources and put measures in place that restore us to healthful and mindful eating.

The key to a healthy outlook of course is in the very fuel we put in our bodies. The old maxim of garbage in and garbage out has never been more manifested than in what we eat. It affects our very souls.

I manage to buy at Farmers' Markets when I can or at the side of the road here. There is nothing more positive than connecting to the grower of your food or the catcher of your fish. Apart from doing it all yourself, of course.

How on earth did we all get to this fast-food, highly processed, Macfood world of ours?

Like Morgan Spurlock, we are all what we eat, unthinking robots, exactly where BigFoodCorp wants us.