Death and Fair Maidens

I'm second from the right. My oldest friend still with us, took the photo.

I have very few remaining friends in my life from way back when. Those I have are precious with a layer of melancholy spread over us all like a protective shield. My layer, I have no idea how they're feeling.

As many of my readers know, I have no belief in a life everlasting somewhere up in the sky or parts unknown so the finality of death breaks my heart more deeply than those who believe in the pubs and singing and birthday parties continuing in the great beyond. (As an aside though, none of those believers embrace death as the escape route from earthly challenges and pain, am I right?)

Suffice to say I have emails from all three of my surviving circle when I hit the Oul Sod in the late autumn.

One has been a dear friend since we were eleven years old. So yeah, close to seventy years of friendship there. We never lost touch. She has beaten cancer twice.

On a trip to Niagara Falls with Daughter and my "Emigration Liner" friend.

Another is a dear friend now living in New York. I met her when she was twenty and I was twenty three. Where? On the emigration liner pulling out of Cork Harbour in 1967 our heads turning to our new life ahead and then turning back to the tender leaving the ship holding everyone we held dear behind forever. She is flying into Dublin so we can sit and yabber to our heart's content.

Another still is a long time friend I made here, from Dublin originally, who turned tail when her mother died and her father needed her and her husband deserted her and her only choice of safety and comfort was returning "home" as she felt there was no home in Canada anymore.

I believe nurturing friendships of such long standing takes effort. I know so very many who can't create the time and let these trickle through their hands. But how can the connections survive if not given the life breath of a card or an email or a phone call? Often just a stamp and five minutes of one's time is all that is needed. Surely they are worth that? And like I've said before a piece of paper or a card in one's hand is more sustaining than a quick email or message or whatsapp.

It's a joy to meet those who knew me back then, who knew my secrets and our youthful exuberance. Our fearless looking ahead, our love affairs, our hopes and dreams, our music, our humour.

My connections with those of such long duration are drowned in laughter and delight and, yes, poignancy. And gratitude for the unexpected pleasure of being alive.

Still.

Taking Down the Scaffolding.

I don't know whether anyone else feels this way. Like any time a friend dies there's another piece of their scaffolding taken down?

Maybe I'm weird that way? But I imagine that if I started out as a building, mine would be a higgledy-piggledy one, bright colours, odd windows with a bit of a tower (for reading) and a grand piano in the foyer with a solitary lamp. I saw a hall like that once when I'd run Forest Hill at night in Toronto near where I lived. I loved that house with its stark meaningful space in an otherwise busy home.

I have lots of doors, French doors, a half-door like an Irish cottage, a garden door with a shelf. a storm door like the real one I have out front, especially built for me by a craftsman recently. For battening down the hatches.

My building is always under construction but never finished. Held together by beautiful scaffolding. Mixed colours, blue, red, purple, bright silly green, laughing yellow.

And when there's a death of a loved one, a chunk of scaffolding detaches and there's a slight upheaval in the building, maybe a tilt to the right or the left or a subsidence. A couple of bricks falling down or a window popping out.

My scaffolding just had a major chunk taken out of it. No, not my Irish friend. This one took me from left field and I'm still processing.

I will write about him when my breath comes back and I can do him justice. He would never have thought he was a hero. But he was to me.

My building's at a weird angle.

I need to take time to shore up the foundations.

Over the Edge and Into Laughter

Seriously. My house is a construction zone. Grit covers my floors, my windows have been semi-replaced (11 of them), wet paint hangs off doors and foundations, thingies are propped open or shut. Bins of debris surround the house, abandoned scaffolding lines the deck. The only living beings who enjoy this mess are the blue jays who patrol the railings and dive bomb the bird feeders. And that's just the front of the house.

At the back of the house Leo is sawing wood for the winter. He treks up the hill into the woodlot with his noisy ATV and trailer and drags down logs and chain-saws them into stove-shapes.

And then: friends I haven't seen in 10+ years show up from Ontario, I'm very easily found on this island. Ask in most shops on the Avalon Peninsula and you'll get excellent directions. Normally I don't mind and this has happened a few times in the past.

But today? It was a chaos of hammering, stamping, banging, sawing, dragging, accompanied by indoor window fixings, dust flying everywhere and debris crunching underfoot.

On top of all this, Ansa watchdogged like a mad thing trying to keep track of all the invaders and barking while protecting me by sitting on my feet and glaring and sniffing and yapping at Those Who Dared Enter the Holy of Holies.

Timing? Sweet Jeebus. Couldn't be better.

And speaking of Jeebus.

My friends had found Him a few years ago.

And wanted to share the Good News.

It was then I broke all the way down and laughed and laughed like a lunatic.

A tonic, I tell ya, a tonic.

Reflection on a Friendship.

......My BFF is on the right.....


I was writing a birthday card to my oldest friend today. How old of a friendship, you might ask?

65 years of friendship.

I reviewed our history in the card. I always use blank cards. Unless they're my own. My own have a poem at the back, but the insides are white and inviting.

Our baby years. Our national school years. Our high school/teenage years. Our performing years. Our ugly first jobs. Our incredible party years. Our travelling years. Our weddings. Our babies. Their weddings and partnerships. Our grandparent years. It's neat this grandparent stuff. Her granddaughter sends me a painting from Australia. My granddaughter stays with her in Dublin for a few days this past month.

I can overlook these joys of long term devotion and loyalty if I'm not careful.

I outlined them all in my card to her.

We love reminding each other of our mothers. They each died when we were far too young to let them go. We adored each other's mothers. First thing she did when she had her first daughter was to go visit my mum. I was emigrated by then. My mother wrote me of it. How it brought me closer to her on a bad day (she was not doing too well with her cancer at the time).

Her mother would spoil me. Bring me breakfast in bed when I stayed there as my own home was far too busy for such indulgences being packed with siblings. My friend was an only child. I nearly had to be pried out of her house with a crowbar when I stayed.

We'd exchange clothes all the time, we even traded boyfriends. We bolstered each other through thick and thin. I don't think we ever had an angry word to say to each other. And we were never jealous of each other. Our talents and personalities are quite, quite different.

I doubt there are any secrets we withhold, I know I don't with her.

And we always write the language of the heart to each other in our daily emails.

And when we sit down with each other in Dublin or Cork, the years melt away and we just pick up the threads of conversation as if we'd met for breakfast that morning.

Everyone should be so lucky.

Sustaining Friendships.

I left quite a few friends behind me in Ontario when I moved here. And yesterday was some sort of record day in my life because three of them called and thanks to my Bluetooth, I can wander around and talk for hours.

These particular friends never demand anything of me so it is simply warmth and love and connection in our conversations.

I am often surprised at the friends I do have who always seem to want something and only call when this agenda is on their minds. I find my barriers go up, I keep waiting for the axe to fall in the conversation. They need a reason to call perhaps and can't seem to make a call of care, concern or compassion without lurking behind a request for me to do something for them.

Apart from business calls, I don't think I've ever requested anything of a friend apart from the pleasure of their company and the art of their conversation. I may be wrong in this but I do hope not.

And the reaching out of these three yesterday? I hadn't realized how very much they mean to me.

It was lovely knitting our stories together yet again, and completing another piece of the tapestry together. And not losing the rhythm of each others' years. As that can happen. And it is so sad.

And making plans of meeting in the realz before too long.

And yes, I do tell them I love them.

Thank you my darlings - Pad, Linda, Dianne (and not forgetting Claire from last weekend).

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.