An Engaging Topic

My husband and I were living it up in Vancouver, celebrating our wedding anniversary. We had spent the night at a guest house after indulging in a grand meal at the sort of restaurant people like us only go to once in a blue moon, and decided, for nostalgic reasons, to go for brunch at Sophie's Cosmic Cafe, a Vancouver institution, before heading home. Sophie's is chock-a-block with vintage chachkies and brightly coloured walls, and serves old-school breakfasts. V ordered an egg and sausage platter, and I ordered the French toast. We drank coffee (my half decaf Americano was actually kind of awful, but I didn't complain because the food was so good) and tucked into our meals. 

Like many restaurants, Sophie's had music playing at a good volume through the speakers. I noticed as we ate, that the playlist was vintage, like the restaurant and its contents (and some of its patrons). I hummed along to the tunes while V and I enjoyed our brunch experience, my mom's voice in my head saying "No singing at the table" silenced. A song came on that I had loved as a kid, "Don't Bring me Down" by ELO (Electric Light Orchestra). I had finished my breakfast and was sipping my bad coffee, alternating with ice water, and started singing along quietly. Suddenly, I heard a voice in the booth behind me, also singing along quietly. We both noticed each other singing at the same time and turned around to see to whom the other voice belonged. The chorus came up and we sang to each other, just a little louder,  

                    Don't bring me down

                    No, no, no, no, no

                    Ooh-ooh-hoo

                    I'll tell you once more before I get off the floor

                    Don't bring me down

People near us started staring. We didn't care. We sang the whole song together. Songs you knew when you were young tend to stay locked in your brain forever. I remembered most of the lyrics, even singing 'Don't bring me down BRUCE' instead of 'groos' as it's supposed to be, because I had never learnt the original version of the line. When the song was over we shook hands and introduced ourselves. Turns out the man I was singing with was celebrating his seventieth birthday, and sharing brunch with some good friends who had flown in for the occasion from Winnipeg. We all chatted for a bit in a jovial manner befitting a birthday celebration, and the man thanked me for singing with him - said I had made his day. He invited us to his birthday party (I'm not sure he really meant it), but we said we had to be going home.  

The experience I had at Sophie's brought to the fore some thoughts I have had lately, about how people these days engage (or don't) with the world. I grew up in a boisterous family in a small town where we knew almost everyone. Most of my siblings will still talk to anyone, anywhere. I am a bit more reserved than some of my family, but in the right moment and mood I can have great interpersonal exchanges with strangers. People often talk about how unfriendly Vancouverites are, but I have found that you often get what you give. My experience at Sophie's is a perfect example. Sure, I don't do impromptu karaoke in restaurants on a regular basis, but I tend to have friendly exchanges with people more often than not if I begin the exchange by being open and friendly towards them. I have to say, this happens more often with people who are my age or older. The pre-cellphone generations are much more used to greeting each other and initiating conversation. I find, even in my own mid-sized home city, that young people rarely make eye contact with me if I am walking down the street. It's like they are trained not to. When I do get a greeting or a smile I am pleasantly surprised. I do not want to harp on the younger generations. It's not their fault. They are a product of the society they grew up in. But, I do want to encourage them to engage more outside of their social bubble. As you get older life can often get decidedly lonelier. We are more isolated than ever before. If you don't believe me, Google the subject. There are a thousand articles proving my claim and warning of the dangers prolonged social isolation can wreak on one's mental health. 

There is a passage in a book I am reading by Ann Cleeves, the great mystery novelist, that reads: 

"When Jen got home, the kids were holed up in their rooms again. They answered when she shouted up at them, but they didn't come down. There was evidence that they'd scavenged for food. She thought that prison wouldn't be any sort of deterrent for this generation, as long as they were allowed cell phones and internet access in their cells." 

Makes you think, doesn't it? God, I hope it does.

I also have to work on reaching out more. After going through burnout a few years ago, I isolated myself to a great degree, just to get some rest. I had been an incredibly social person who tended to attract similar friends. When I think back to my 30's and 40's I was rarely alone. Now I am alone a lot of the time. I don't generally mind because I have learned to like my own company and a quieter life than before, but I know I need companionship so I make the effort to engage when I am out and about. I greet people, especially elderly people, I make small talk with sales people and servers, and I compliment young parents on their cute children if they'll let me. While I hope I am brightening their day, I am the one who benefits most. And, if I can 'make someone's day' like the man in Sophie's Cosmic Cafe, then I get an extra-big boost of serotonin. Engaging is good for me, and I will argue that it is good for you, too. 

https://youtu.be/z9nkzaOPP6g?si=K2URmgx1QohGifRE

                   

'Til next time, 

Rebecca

Oh, Canada!

In college I flew with my French class to Quebec. After exploring beautiful, bright, and historically rich Quebec City, we drove in a rented bus to our destination of Sept Iles on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I distinctly remember a day at a cabin further up the gulf. The cabin belonged to the family of one of our  student exchange partners, and we had been invited there to celebrate all things maple syrup, it being March and the time of the running of the sap. We ate fried ham and eggs smothered in syrup, and curled golden ribbons of maple taffy around sticks in the snow. The day was radiant with early spring sunshine which bounced off the snow on the shore and lit up the blue water, beckoning me outside. I trudged by myself to the shore and put my hand into the Gulf, thrilled to have finally reached the Atlantic.  I stood by the water for a while wishing I could sail across to New Brunswick and tour the Maritimes as well (something I have yet to do). I thought of the four large provinces I had crossed to get to where I was standing. I felt a connection to the vastness and variety of my country right then and there, and I think that is the moment I truly fell in love with Canada. I have been a proud Canadian every since. I care deeply about what happens in this country.

Canada recently lost our 18th Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney. He is an important figure in my memory because I had just started to pay attention to politics when he was running for election in 1984. I was fifteen at the time, and had become friends with a girl whose parents were Progressive Conservatives and fans of Mulroney. To say my parents were not was a bit of an understatement. They had been Pierre Eliot Trudeau fans and fairly staunch Liberals up to that point. I remember coming home from my friend's house and saying I liked this new Mulroney candidate and hoped he would win. This caused a few raised eyebrows. Meech Lake and Free Trade were the buzzwords in Canada at the time. When I started to pay real attention to what was at stake I changed my mind about Mulroney's policies, but that does not mean I decided he was a terrible man. He had won the right to be Prime Minister by our democratic process, and was serving his country in the way he thought right and good. Not only that, but he gained the respect of his colleagues, whatever political side they were on, simply for his intelligence, his passion for his country, his sense of fair play and respectful discourse.

These days, we can be incredibly vicious when it comes to the members of the opposing political 'teams'. It is not enough to disagree with another party's policies. We have to hate them for them. Growing up, this approach seemed to me unique to the US or Britain, not to Canada where we have a reputation for politeness and mutual respect, even in politics. Politicians who would shout opinion from opposite sides of Parliament could often be friends outside of it. That is not so true anymore; I cannot imagine Pierre Pollievre, right wing leader of the Opposition and PM Justin Trudeau having enough in common to be friends. The pandemic exposed the nasty underbelly of political opinion in this country. We have seen some ugly scenes play out here in the last few years, scenes I never thought possible before now. Even though I am in favour of political satire to keep the powers in check, the vitriol aimed at Trudeau these days is shocking to me. Is our Prime Minister my favourite person? No, but he doesn't need to be. Do I think people are justified to slap "Fuck Trudeau" bumper stickers on their vehicles for everyone, including children of reading age, to see? Hell no. What kind of example does that set to the younger generations?  I'm ashamed every time I see one of those stickers or flags. We can do better than that. We can disagree with our current Prime Minister on his policies, even lack respect for him personally, but the office of Prime Minister demands our respect, and for now, Justin Trudeau inhabits that office. He serves his country, just as Brian Mulroney did. Holding office is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it seems one needs an inflated ego to hold that office in this toxic climate we have created, which is a real shame. An election is looming and we all have some soul searching to do regarding what we want our leaders in Canada to be and not to be. That really is the question.

I love my vast mosaic of a country. I love Canadians for our self-deprecating humour, our official bilingualism, our concern for others globally and at home, and our devotion to both education and democracy. We only have to look south of the border - where the two options for leader are an 81 year old who should be living out his retirement in peace and tranquility, and a megalomaniac who, on one hand threatens violence if he loses the election, and on the other, sells Nationalistic Bibles to try to pay off his huge legal fines - to see what not to do. As Robin Williams said, "Canada is like a really nice apartment over a meth lab." We need to do everything in our power not to get sucked into dealing that meth here. 

'Til next time, 

Rebecca

Soup and Soft Landings

Earlier this never ending summer, when out for a walk, I received a text from a lovely friend. She asked me about the current forest fire raging in the provincial park where my husband works, and how he was dealing with the stress. I replied that my husband was pretty stressed and very, very busy. She asked if I have trouble keeping up to him, and I replied "I don't try. I provide soup and a soft landing." She replied, "We're good at that!!"  She was nursing an injured husband at the moment. As I continued with my walk, I smiled at the phrase that had popped into my head, "soup and a soft landing" and thought it would make a good title for a book. I don't have a book in me, so a blog post will have to suffice. 

Sometimes, when I am questioning my post-active-years-of-motherhood purpose here on earth, something happens to remind me of the benefit of simply being here for the people I love. Or even just for people in general. In August I worked at the local sunflower festival. I worked in the farm store, mainly just taking people's money and answering questions. Our visitors were from all over the world. I met folks from the Philippines, India, Ireland, France, Texas, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Ecuador, and beyond. Flower festivals seem to bring out 'the happy' in people, and many lovely little conversations and exchanges were enjoyed. I had a mask on (having had Covid in July, I was not eager to contract it or pass it on again), but I made sure to smile big with my eyes and my greetings. People really do respond when you take an interest in them as individuals and not just customers exchanging money for goods. Their faces tend to light up and they respond with a little joke or a kind word. Sometimes the reverse would happen. I would be focusing on tallying up their purchases and they would say something positive about the festival and tell me to have a great day. I distinctly remember one man about my age, maybe a bit older, who had brought his two kids to the festival from Vancouver. While his teenage daughter said she would take the little brother back out to the fields after they finished their ice cream, the man said he would seek refuge in the shaded seating area outside of the store. He then told me he was two years into cancer treatment and had learned the hard way about the effect of sun on the skin. The skin cancer had gone into his lymph nodes and into his brain, but he was fighting it successfully so far. I told him my brother-in-law had the same cancer over twenty-five years ago, and I had reason to believe the treatments were more effective now. I truly wished him well, and his eyes told the story of the pain and anguish he was enduring. "I have to carry on for the kids," he said. The love expressed between him and his children was beautiful and I wished him well from the bottom of my heart once again. I hope he went home with some beautiful images of flowers in his head and some comfort and hope from our exchange.

I've noticed as I get older that life becomes more and more about essentials: communications between people, intention, a really good meal enjoyed with a loved one, a perfect piece of fruit, trees, flowers, gratitude for what this body can still do despite injuries, a sense of more to life than meets the eye. I've realized that despite my hermit tendencies of the last few years (post burnout recovery to be honest) I really do love people, and I love to be there for people. Not all the time. Sometimes people really frustrate me. I found myself reacting a few times, just last week, to just such persons testing my patience (I'm talking to you, speeding Toyota truck driver). Overall, though, I hope to provide 'soup and a soft landing' to the people in my life and appreciate when they do the same for me. 

Although last night I made chili. Close enough. 

Running on Twenty

When my third child turned twenty-two this past November I realized that my adult relationship with running had reached the twenty year mark.

Emma was thirteen months when we moved from a roomy four bedroom home a few blocks from our city's downtown to an outdoor education center in the mountains of central Vancouver Island. The Lodge was a forty minute drive to the nearest grocery store/school/movie theater/Starbucks/mall/anyone I knew, and while I had always wanted to try living in a cabin by a lake in the woods, I also felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under my comfortable, convenient life and said, 'Here, deal with this!' The fact that I was under thirty and a mother of three only complicated the situation. A community of sorts lived year round at the Lodge. Anyone near my age had no children. The people with children were older than me and much wiser, and I was admittedly, a little intimidated. Fortunately, I made friends fairly easily and soon found companions to walk and hike with. Walking and hiking did not prove quite enough to ease my hemmed-in feeling and so I decided to start running again - something I had done as a child and young teenager in school. In a relatively short period of time - Keep in mind I was under thirty - I was running two and a half kilometers out the highway and turning around to run most of the way back. The way was rolling and the shoulder was decently wide, so I felt safe and challenged enough. I loved that I could cover a lot of ground in a short period of time, and so began my love affair with running. 

We lived at the Lodge for just over five years. In that time, I grew in confidence and fitness. My husband was proud to be able to think of his wife as something of an athlete for the first time ever. He bought me a subscription to Runner's World magazine. He came home for lunch every day, so often I would make lunch, say hello to him and leave immediately to go running. When my runs got longer I made supper, greeted my husband after work and ran while he and the kids ate and did the dishes. I ran every second day with a long run once a week. In my third year of running my friend Bridged who ran with a group of marathoners invited me to a group trail run. We did over sixteen kilometers that day and I knew I was well on my way to a half marathon at least. Part way through the run, however, I became exceedingly hungry. One of the women gave me an energy bar and I finished the run strong. The women in the group invited me to the next run. I was in! 

A couple of weeks later I discovered I was pregnant. 

I ran for the first few weeks of my pregnancy, and then I had to stop due to my usual morning sickness. Katie was born the following October, and within seven weeks I was running again, but not quite the same distances as before. She used to cry when I left to go anywhere, but eventually even she became used to my running and would sit on the stairs while I put on my shoes and say, "Goin' for a wun, mummy?" Running was my stress reliever, my fitness tracker, my way to get out and away from my busy household only to return fresh and energized. We moved to the Lower Mainland and I enjoyed discovering new running routes.

I have entered a few fun runs, run the annual Terry Fox run with my children's elementary school many times, but I have yet to enter one of the big runs - the Sun Run, or the Vancouver Marathon, or any of those. I am waiting until I have the time and brain space to train properly for a half marathon. I plan to celebrate my fiftieth year with a long run, whether it's alone or with other people doesn't matter. I have run by myself for most of my running career. I don't listen to music when I run. The silence and my footfall is enough music for me. My favourite times are when I get into what the running gurus call The Zone - when my run becomes rhythmic and seemingly effortless, and I just go as if carried by wings. A lot of my best thinking happens on my runs. 

These days I run often with my sister. We talk about our kids and our jobs and our aging mother who has dementia now. I enjoy these times very much. Other times, like this morning, I run alone. Once upon a time when I was younger and I didn't happen to feel like running that day it took me about ten minutes to get into a groove. I would tell myself, just get dressed, get out, and if in ten minutes you don't feel good turn around. I never turned around. These days it can take me up to thirty minutes to get into a groove, but that is okay. I recognize that my age is a factor, and if I want to keep running for many more years, which I do, I have to keep adapting and adjusting to what my body tells me. I have always stretched for about twenty minutes after a run. I am not a person who could go for a long run and then immediately go for coffee or a beer. My body would hate me. At the local Terry Fox run a couple of years ago I found a corner of the gym afterwards and stretched. A few people looked strangely at me, but I just had to do it. Stretching prevents injury and helps me work out the tightness in my muscles and in my back. I also credit my chiropractor, massage therapist, and whoever it was that invented yoga for helping keep me mobile and moving forward. 

Getting outside and putting one foot in front of the other is in my DNA. My family are all great walkers. I just happen to find it also enjoyable - sometimes more so - to run, and so I will keep on as long as I can. Several years ago my family bought me a t-shirt with the slogan, "Gotta run". It's true. I gotta. 

A Slow Burn(out)

Everywhere you look there are young people trying to change the world. They are starting their own businesses while raising young children, achieving advanced degrees, inventing new and improved stuff, working to save the environment, running for office, and renovating crumbling houses (at least on TV). While their energetic output is encouraging and inspiring, and their earnestness is heartwarming it also sets off some alarm bells, at least in me. I used to be one of those people. My goal was to make people in my former small community appreciate and value the role of the arts in their everyday lives, and I worked hard volunteering my time to help make that happen. I also worked from home to make some extra income and volunteered at my church.  I did all this while raising four active children, running to stay fit, and cooking like mad. My thirties were a whirlwind of gratifying, caffeine-fueled community involvement and motherly ambition. My early forties were a slow decline into burnout. Let this post serve as a gentle warning to my young friends.

Burnout is real and, in my experience, happens when you begin to be unable to separate your 'self' from your 'work'. We are so busy in this Western Hemisphere trying to become so many things. Much of this ambition is good. We should aspire to grow, to learn, to strive for a better world, but we also need to simply be ourselves sometimes. We need to protect our peace of mind from too much intrusion, which is difficult in this age of social media and subsequent addiction. Social media nags us continually to DO SOMETHING. Yes, the world has needs, but they are endless. We can all do our bit but none of us can do everything - the treadmill was once a form of punishment for a reason. Gone are the days when simply enjoying oneself was a worthwhile goal, and I am sad about that, for enjoying oneself with the simple pleasures of life can reap great rewards, fend off depression, and spread ripples of good feeling around us. I recently read (for probably the fifth time) Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence. My aunt loaned me the DVD of the televised version and I am making my way through the series now. A Year in Provence is a funny, delightful account of Peter and his wife retiring from successful, but high stress careers in London and moving to the South of France where they restore a two-hundred year old stone farmhouse and spend their days eating, drinking, walking their dogs and getting to know the local culture and characters in the Luberon Valley. Not everything is ideal at all times for the couple, but they embrace their new life and Peter continues to write popular books for the great enjoyment of others around the world. His books exude a sense of having time for others without agenda, of experiencing life with all the five senses, of not taking oneself too seriously, and of laughter being, in fact, the best medicine. The point I am trying to make is Peter Mayle is an educated man and a gifted writer but he doesn't produce his beloved stories by beating himself over the head for not 'doing enough' and being miserable. Quite the opposite.

We all have gifts and most of us must work to pay the bills. Fully recognizing how to use those gifts and figuring out what work to do is sometimes a long road. Many of us learn by trial and error. In my own case,  and living in a city with a large homeless population, I recognize my desire to help the less fortunate, especially the homeless. Some days I honestly feel like the homeless are my sole responsibility, but I am wrong and must guard against these feelings because I know they stem from personal guilt that I have a nice place to live and my fellow citizens pushing those laden shopping carts do not. The desire to help others should never come from guilt. It should come from a more positive feeling of wanting to share. Guilt may be the impetus but it should not be the reason. The amazing helpers such as the Union Gospel Mission, Covenant House and others in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver are not able to carry on doing what they do simply out of guilt. They do it out of love, and that is what keeps them going. They have a special kind of grace to do the work they do and I would hope their work makes them happy and fulfilled and energized most days, not drained and left feeling perpetually vulnerable and raw. At this stage in my life, guarded against burnout, and recovering from some heavy personal stuff, I give my homeless neighbours spare change, smiles, greetings and hopefully some dignity. For now, that is all the emotional energy I can spare, and recognizing this is no small thing.

I leave this post with one prevailing thought:

Let Me Tell You Something

Writing, for me, is an astoundingly personal thing. It is not only thoughts put into words, but my thoughts, my words, borrowed from my experiences and filtered through my fractured lens. "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" or something like that. The fact is, I choose to post my thoughts on this blog for two reasons: 1) Writing for a potential audience is a good practice. I like talking to people and this way I can try to organize my thoughts into something cohesive with a beginning, middle and an end. So often, real conversations get interrupted or sidetracked, which is fine and fun most of the time, but can be unsatisfying for someone who likes to finish her stories. 2) I like feedback, even if most of the time it's only from family members and friends who support me as as person. I am not an introvert as so many writers tend to be, only a people person who needs some regular time and space to herself to sort out her thoughts.

As I sit at my desk this Saturday morning, later than I planned due to half an hour waiting for someone to answer my call at the Royal Bank of Canada VISA headquarters, I begin the plunge, yet again, into sharing my thoughts with 'the world'. Yet, I feel shy about sharing those thoughts sometimes, this morning included. Why should anyone care what I think? Really! The world is in constant turmoil and I tend to write about little, everyday matters which feel so inadequate in this current climate of fear and upheaval, not to mention flooding, fires and pestilence. My posts don't solve anything or help anyone in any concrete way - except perhaps, me. The act of typing words strung together as sentences and forming paragraphs is therapeutic and creative. Each time I blog I have built something, a sort of structure which I can add to the others of my building, and that process is, in itself, satisfying. Clicking the 'publish' button is like locking up my building once the windows are in. I know it isn't perfect and there is still much more work to do in my painfully slow progress as a writer, but my structure has at least reached a stage where I can look at it and say, 'There. I made that. I finished that."

I am a person who needs to contribute, but I am struggling to figure out how my contributions will be shaped in the future. For thirteen years I was on the board of the community arts council of my former town. Six of those years I spent as President. Then, I got a paying job. My job is not anything spectacular. It's a humble, three days per week position as kitchen staff at a cafe-bistro, but I enjoy the creative nature of my work making food for people (anyone who knows me should be aware of my passion for food), the tips are good, and it helps pay the bills. We also moved to the mid-sized city where my daughter's busy theater life happens. I had to let the arts council go and now I've stepped away I see what a huge role it played in my life. I maintained a sense of personal value and purpose in my volunteer role with the council, a role which also happened to be a huge amount of work. Stepping away allowed me the time to pick up my blog again after a two year hiatus, and I find some renewed sense of value and purpose in writing my posts. For now, my blog has to be my contribution to my community. I know in comparison to my other roles in life its impact is tiny. I know I am mostly just talking to myself and a few others, (thank you, family and those few friends), but sometimes the things we do for and from ourselves end up creating a positive, albeit diminutive, ripple.

Growing up when women were the product of the 1970's 'You've come a long way, baby' brand of Feminism, I entered motherhood with the sense I may be an anacronism. I had dropped out of university after deciding against becoming a teacher (yes, there is huge regret there) and had no visible career. I wanted to be at home with my beautiful kids and was lucky my husband was ambitious and career minded enough to earn a good living for the both of us. Yet, I craved more. I loved stories and reading, so I tried to write books as a way to glory and meaning within my family and friend circle of strong, capable, well educated women, but my books were failures. My books were failures mainly because they were deeply flawed in structure and I didn't know how to fix them. I survived those failures and learned the truth about myself. Writing is important to me, but it is not my ticket to another portal "outta here". It is the ticket to my inner life, my heart, my often wavering sense of self in this crazy world, and I will keep doing it even if people stop reading it. Honestly, though? I hope they don't stop reading it.

*The photo is a snowshoe hare changing its colours for a new season.

City Mouse, Mountain Mouse

I was so exhausted after work Friday I forgot the onions and garlic for the Shepherd's Pie I was set to make the next day.  We were gathering up clothing, food and supplies to take up to our place at the mountain resort where my husband is employed, and where our daughter and I would also spend our weekend. I had the recipe in front of me and read it over to make sure I gathered all the ingredients. (I also ended up forgetting the rosemary.) For some stupid reason I had awoken that morning at 4:45 and could not, for the life of me, fall back to sleep. Instead, I had given in, got up, made coffee and taken care of some emails. I never sleep to my 6:20 alarm on my work days, but 4:45 is ridiculous. Fourteen and a half hours later I was pushing through my foggy haze to get organized. Fortunately, my husband had come down to pick us up, and I would not have to drive the hour and ten minutes to the resort. He was also trying to be helpful in a 'let's hurry' sort of way.

Once we were on the road I could relax. A beautiful evening drive was in front of us and a mellow and quiet weekend was something to look very much forward to. The weekend before my husband had come down with the stomach flu and a few days later our daughter got it. I had successfully fought off the flu, but I was truly spent after looking after my family, working, and surviving on the interrupted sleep I seem to get nowadays. As we left the freeway behind and began the gradual winding climb to the resort I felt every cell in my body breathe a sigh of relief. I enjoy my job, I like the convenience of living in a mid-sized city and appreciate all it has to offer my daughter and me by way of cultural and educational opportunities, but I was born and raised in a town perched on a mountainside above a long and lovely lake, and the scent of lake water, evergreens and cottonwood are part of my DNA.

The first thing I do when I arrive at our humble little place in the mountains is fill my lungs with the sweet, fresh, fir and pine scented air. Next, I fill a glass with delicious mountain water and drink it down. The city where I live used to boast some of the best drinking water in Canada, but now it has to be chlorinated. After my ritual of inhaling and water drinking I put my stuff away and my husband made some popcorn. We sat down in front of the laptop and watched some comedy on YouTube. My husband has lately discovered a Brit comedian named Michael McIntyre,who is very funny but also incredibly fast talking. After about forty-five minutes of trying to keep up to Michael McIntyre I gave up and went to bed. I slept the deepest, longest sleep I'd had in ages.

My daughter was up before me the next morning, which almost never happens. I got up about 9 and made coffee, which I am confidently sure I would never forget to bring no matter how foggy I am the night before. My husband doesn't drink coffee, he wakes up ready to go which is a completely foreign concept to me, and doesn't keep it on hand. My daughter was still feeling a bit rough so we kept our ambitions of activity low and wore pyjamas until the afternoon. After lunch we ventured out for a walk on one of the many trails in the park and came across a couple of snowshoe hares, their feet still white but their bodies turning brown for their summer camouflage. They seemed to be chasing around in some sort of mating ritual and kept darting across our path. The air was warm, but not nearly as warm as it would be down in the valley. Still, we stuck to the shade where possible and put our hands in the cold rushing stream dissecting our path. We returned early to our place and I began to prepare our Shepherd's Pie. I soon realized I lacked the required onion and garlic. I wondered if the Resort chef would spare me some, and made my way out the door to walk the ten minutes to my husband's office. I had barely gone fifty meters when I saw our neighbour pull up in his BC Parks truck. I called out, "Do you happen to have an onion?" He said he did, at first thinking I was a tourist before recognizing me despite my lack of winter garb, and we proceeded to chat about Shepherd's Pie and cooking in general. I offered him a piece in exchange for the onion and garlic, and he took me up on it. I had met him and his girlfriend only once before in the winter, but familiarity is quick in somewhat isolated resort communities, I find. I think it has to be.

We thoroughly enjoyed our dinner. The simplest meals seem to taste best in a camping-type environment, where the flavours mingle with fresh air, wood smoke and sunscreen. I remember making Sloppy Joes, which is basically meat sauce on a bun, for my family when we were camping on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, and they begged me to make it at home. I made the dish a couple of months later and the kids were disappointed, even though the ingredients were exactly the same as when we were camping. After the dishes were done, my husband made our first campfire of the summer and we sat around it in camp chairs and talked of this, and that, and burned an old insect and mold damaged paperback nearly page by page. My actor daughter and I read selected lines from the pages by way of a eulogy for the book. We let the fire die and went back inside to watch more Michael McIntyre and then we had another long and satisfying sleep.

The next morning I got up before my husband left for work. Our daughter was up early, too, so I suggested we aim to leave the house by 10-ish since we were both feeling a whole lot better than the day before. We packed a simple picnic and drove the four kilometers up to the lakes. The May morning shone on the blue-green of the lake water and the verdant green of the shore. I knew a path circled the lake so we set out upon it. We stopped several times to exclaim at the tree-perfumed scents of the forest in which we hiked, the birds and especially the ground squirrels that so delighted my daughter with their winning/food begging ways, The walk was longer than we anticipated, and very glad we'd brought peanut butter and jam sandwiches and apples we stopped to sit on a log overlooking the water to enjoy our lunch.  Happy people in canoes and kayaks paddled by in front of us and ducks and geese floated and fished. A dog came to visit us and I jumped because I had been bitten just a half hour before by another dog I had been assured would be friendly if I said hello. This particular dog was an adorable puppy and only made a muddy mess of my leg as it raced around us. I was grateful to put my throbbing and bleeding hand in the cold, clean lake water (no motors are allowed on the lakes) before we continued our trek.

We drove back to our place and made tea and ate more food. We decided we had earned a movie and chose Johnny English. Although the hike around the beautiful lake had made me feel blissful and somewhat romantic about life, the dog bite had brought me very much back to reality and I thought a laugh would do me good. It did do me good, as did the antiseptic wipes and the Advil. We made another simple but enjoyable dinner, packed up and drove down the winding descent to the freeway. We arrived home to a very warm apartment and flicked on the air conditioner. Our daughter caught up on the rest of her homework (she had already done plenty on the weekend after missing school for three days), and my husband and I watched an episode of Miss Marple.

I woke up the next morning at 5:30. The traffic had started in earnest on the thoroughfare by our building and the Tim Horton's drive-thru had already been open for an hour and a half. Not quite ready to give into the city's ways I suggested to my husband who was now on days off, that we drive the few minutes to the river and go for a walk before the heat of the day set in. The cottonwoods were shedding their fluff and giving off their heady, honeyed scent. Acres of pink and purple phlox bordered the pathway and the sun shone warmly down. The river swollen from the spring runoff raced along beside us. I was very glad to carry on the nature therapy a little longer so near our city home. I know we are very lucky to live where we live. The cares of the weekdays would come soon enough.

Later that day I went to the second hand book store and bought another copy of the burned novel.

Musings on Municipal Elections

Elections for the municipality and district school board happen this weekend in my part of the world. I already know who will get my votes. I have read the candidate Q and A's in the newspaper, read their leaflets, talked to many of them in person (this is a small town) and silently crossed off my list those whom I know have good intentions but perhaps not the necessary skills and/or related experience for the job I would be entrusting them to do for the community.

I am impressed so many people have put themselves forward as candidates. Eight people are competing for municipal councillor in our district, two for mayor, and six for three school board positions. To have so much choice for leadership is a luxury for voters. Currently serving on two local boards, I am well aware of the commitment and work needed to properly do the job one is voted to do (hint: it is never enough). What is even more true of such positions is how misunderstood they are. Few people really know what goes on behind the scenes and just how much of one's time such positions can involve. I am not paid by taxpayers to do what I do on the boards I serve, but I can imagine the pressure I would feel if I were. I have had a taste of the bitter fruit of dissatisfaction and at times downright anger that comes from the caring public when my board has made an unpopular decision, and that is only within the small arts community here. I cannot imagine how crushed I would be if after years of dedication and public consultation I succeeded, for example, in building a bicycle lane from my town to the resort community down the road - something I would dearly love to see happen for the pleasure and safety of so many - and a large percentage of citizens despised me for it and thought nothing of hurling hate-bombs at me at public meetings and in the 'letters to the editor' section of our weekly paper.

Many of us are far too eager to criticize those who make decisions on our behalf. Of course the internet has only made the situation worse. Newspapers demand names when writing a letter to the editor, but any Jo Schmo can leave a nasty comment on a website using an alias. To counter this current ugly trend I think this might be a good time to be grateful to the many people who care enough about our communities to run for council and school board and open themselves up to scrutiny from the discontented populace. Of course we also must hold them to account due to the fact that they will, in fact, work for us, but I also believe we could all benefit from counting slowly to ten before hurling those hate bombs. If we do our homework before making decisions on the issues at hand we will often realize there are, as my mother-in-law tends to say, three sides to every story. Engaging in a complaint session with the guy across the street for an hour does not make us an expert. Asking questions, listening to answers, paying attention to what happens in other similar communities, reading the newspaper and attending the occasional council meeting or information session does not make us an expert either but it gives us a wee bit more credibility as a voter and community member.

In my opinion, to give them credibility, municipal government must be made up of people who embrace the big-picture mentality. They must look at their role as a humble cog in the wheel of a forward moving vehicle, one they know full well will always move too fast for some and too slowly for others. They must work well with others and cooperate. They must listen more than they talk and be eager to consider new ideas. They must be prepared to back up their arguments against such-and-such a policy with plenty of research (they must enjoy reading or at least be able to study lots of dry documents). They must have the interests of the whole community at heart and not just one part of it. They must not be toadies of land developers. They must be people-persons. They must be open minded and scrupulously honest. They must not build anything extraordinarily ugly (Am I the only one who believes the raspberry sculpture in Abbotsford fits this category?) or environmentally irresponsible. Do I ask a lot of them? Absolutely. But no more than I would ask from myself.

I thank everyone who has served for the past three or more years, especially a certain local farmer who has given three terms and deservedly wishes to spend more time with his family. I congratulate, in advance, all those who are elected for the next term to serve our community and our school children. You have your work cut out for you, but I hope you will perform it willingly and with at least a few of the qualities listed above.

A friend once suggested I run for council. I responded thus: "I just can't get excited about drainage ditches, which seems like a very important issue here, so no. I will stick to the arts." For better or for worse, 'til death do us part it seems.

Being Canadian: A Complicated Kindness

As our lives on this globe intersect at an ever increasing rate, the desire for us to understand each other as nations grows. When we encounter another culture we often have many questions, some of which have clear cut answers and some of which do not. For example, if one of my ex-pat British friends is asked why Brits drink so much she will say decidedly, 'because they know their country's going down the toilet and there ain't nothing they can do about it.' On the other hand, if I ask why Brits make such good television, the answers are as in depth as I choose to go. The question I would like to ask Hollywood is: why is the collective imagination in the US fixated on superhero and post-apocalyptic movies? I imagine the response to be: because America's debt and lifestyle gap between rich and poor is so off the charts they crave something drastic to happen in order to save the situation, but their own answer would probably have more to do with hero worship. However, if asked why Canadians seem so polite, the answers are not quite so clear. What is it that makes us say 'I'm sorry' every time something happens that may or may not inconvenience another person? 'I'm sorry' is the typical knee-jerk response when we Canadians bump into each other, when we set out to give an opposing opinion, even when we go for the coffee shop cream urn at the same time. As children 'I'm sorry!' is what we call out to the parent bearing down on us with a threatening look in their eye, hoping against hope those two words will stem the tide of disciplinary action coming our way - that worked for me a few times, so I included it.

It occurred to me today that the 'I'm sorry' habit may be something more than what many comedians claim is the Canadian's way of getting out of a potentially uncomfortable situation.* I was in church yesterday when an elderly woman in the pew in front of me accidentally knocked the book in my hand as she sat down earlier than I. Her apology was profuse and completely unnecessary due to the fact that she had barely touched me. I automatically responded with, "Oh no, I'm sorry." We smiled at each other with sympathetic looks peppered with good humour and left it at that. Something then occured to me: the 'I'm sorry' habit is at best about having good will toward other people. Let me explain. If a man and I go for the coffee shop's cream urn at the same time, generally both of us will urge the other to use it first. One of us will be more insistent than the other and finally, after a several laboured seconds one of us will pour the cream into our cup. We will then return the urn to the counter and smile at the other person who kindly insisted we go first, and we will go back to our seats, him feeling proud of his gallantry, and I feeling grateful for it. If this reads like some sort of complicated dance, it is, but as Canadians, we learn it early in life so it stays with us always and leads to a fairly comfortable and pleasant way of going about our daily business. If I have my head down in the grocery store as I consult my list and accidentally bump someone else's cart, I will apologize immediately. If an explanation is required to calm the ire of the bumpee, I will give it and I can usually get a smile from them in the end. Like many Canadians I will do almost anything to avoid conflict, especially in public.

Why are we so eager to avoid conflict at all costs when other nations (I'm thinking France, Italy) seem to thrive on it? I have a theory about that, too. As I said above, I have a few British friends who have lived in Canada for many years, but are still a bit baffled by our social niceties. In theory I agree with them wholeheartedly when they say they prefer the Brit way of just calling a spade a spade and being done with it, rather than all this dancing around the issues. "Brits just speak as we find and move on," said one ex-pat friend after she had witnessed two co-workers in her Canadian office have a big ol' cat fight. Apparently, they had hidden their true feelings about each other for so long that eventually, and predictably, they reached the boiling point and the lid blew off.  My Brit friend who is a teacher had a hard time figuring out the parents of her students until she understood about the tendency of Canadians to avoid open conflict. She would think everything was going along fine with a parent and then one day, somehow, would find out the parent had been harbouring resentment against her for months for some action taken with her child. My friend had detected a certain chill in the air when she and the parent came in contact, but had no idea of the feelings simmering away underneath the surface. My theory about why we Canadians may act like that parent at times is essentially based on my observation that Canadians avoid open conflict because we who live in a cold climate eight months of the year place a huge value on personal physical comfort and safety, and this makes us lazy in our dealings with others. We just do not want to 'go there', but eventually we have to and by then the situation is usually beyond nasty, or at least beyond what it was originally. But, this is the 'I'm sorry' habit at its worst, and, being Canadian, I would rather not dwell on the negative.

I suppose we have historically been the Peacekeepers in global conflict because really, we would just like everyone to calm down, sit back and relax with a beer or even a doughnut. Anything pressing can usually be put off until tomorrow, and a difficult decision is generally made better by the act of sleeping on it. A Dutch man I once worked for said when he first moved to Canada in the 90's he was unimpressed by the Canadian way. No one seemed to work with any urgency, we valued our holidays more than anything, and meeting for coffee at Tim Horton's was often the highlight of the day. Mind you, he had immigrated to British Columbia, which is seen as one of the more relaxed provinces in the country. Over time, he said, he began to see the wisdom of our ways. He began spending more time enjoying life with his family and exploring the area near his home.He decided life was not just about work and making money, but that approach took some getting used to. Now, I would not be surprised if he even said to his clients, "I'm sorry, I cannot possibly fill your order today. I am celebrating Canada Day with my family," and let the chips, or rather the doughnut sprinkles, fall where they may.

*Twelve Ways to Say I'm Sorry

My apologies to author Miriam Toews for stealing her book title 'A Complicated Kindness' for this post.

L.M. Montgomery - a First Love in Literature

In my early years as a dedicated reader of novels, when it came to authors, I tended toward serial monogomy. Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, The Painted Garden, White Boots, and several others was my first real love as a reader, but when the time came for me to move on from her delightful books for children I was at a bit of a loss.

Every time I would talk about needing something to read my family would suggest Anne of Green Gables. "You'll love it," my sisters insisted, and because they insisted I resisted. I finally gave in when I was fifteen - my sisters had all moved out by then - and tentatively began the book that would change my life. I was not prepared to enjoy it, but by the first chapter I was hooked and would remain an Anne fan for life. And not just an Anne fan, but a fan of the writing of her creator Lucy Maud Montgomery. I would spend the next several years scouring second hand book stores for copies of her many books, building up my collection which I read over and over until Jane Austen became my new obsession in my mid-twenties. I credit L.M. Montgomery for helping me greatly through my teen years, for giving me another world to inhabit in my imagination, adding much light to the very real world I lived in every day.

I did not identify with the character of Anne as much as with the general tone, humour and background wisdom of the books themselves. Anne, with her red-haired temper, her heedless ways and her enormous scholarly discipline was not a mirror image of myself, but I did admire her goodness, her loyalty and her literary gifts. I was encouraged by her strength of character and desired to emulate at least some of what she represented. The first few times I read the books I read them for the plot alone. L.M. Montgomery is known for her descriptive passages of the land she loved so well, but I will admit I skipped over many of them to find out what happened next to the people in the books. A good book has that quality, even when you read it for the second or third time and know what ultimately happens, you still want to have the satisfaction of finding out, again, exactly how it happens. By the time I was in my early twenties I still read the books once a year, but by then I was revelling in the descriptions which painted such a beautiful picture of the land, sea and sky of Prince Edward Island and other Maritime provinces. The Blue Castle is set in Muskoka, Ontario and I still read it every few years for its pictures painted so masterfully in words by the author who had moved to Ontario after her marriage.

My mother often said that she liked Montgomery's Emily books even better than the sunny Anne ones. She felt the Emily books were deeper and more reflective of the author's own life as a burgeoning writer. I read the three Emily books immediately after I had read the eight Anne novels, and I could see what my mother meant. I imagined that a lot of authors identified with them, especially those who had known they were writers from a young age. The road to authorship is not easy for the character of Emily; the literary colours in the novels are in various shades of light and darkness, intimating the depth of emotion lived in real life by Montgomery. The happy ending is there, but it is hard won.

When I get into something, I really get into it, so when L.M. Montgomery's journals were published I read them. Her selected journals filled five large volumes and I expected them to reflect the light and happy endings of her novels. What I discovered was that Montgomery's life was a complex blend of light and dark, of longing for the freedom of an intuitive and highly spiritual artist while 'keeping up appearances' in Canadian WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) society of the early part of the twentieth century. I read them during a particularly hard time in my own young life, which perhaps was not fair to either myself or to Montgomery whom I admired so much. Her journals sent me spiralling downwards into a blue funk. I was disappointed in her for some of her choices in life and in love (as disappointed as I was in myself at that time for some of my own choices), and I had a hard time reconciling the author of my favourite books with the author of journals which suggested so much personal disappointment and emotional trauma.

I think, after giving it another twenty-odd years, I might read the journals again. I will probably read them with a more open mind and with much more compassion and empathy this time. In 2008 Montgomery's family came out with an admission that Lucy Maud suffered from depression and had, in the end, taken her own life. Her family revealed the truth in hopes that it would help to remove the stigma surrounding mental illness in our society. And while that news about her death made me sad beyond words, I have a bookshelf full of proof that inside Lucy Maud Montgomery's often troubled heart and mind was also a mystical land of humour, insight, love, and joy of the greatest kind which she shared with her readers through her writing, a refuge for her and for all of those who feel deeply and attempt to live sensitively on this earth.

A mature L.M. Montgomery

For those of you who read the end of my previous post I have an update: My dad was able to go home from the hospital yesterday. Such good news for him and for all my family! Many thanks for your kind wishes and prayers.

Handsome is as Handsome Does

Occasionally, as I was growing up, I heard my mother describe a young man of our acquaintance as a ‘wolf’.  A ‘wolf’, my mother explained, was someone with a predatory nature, particularly toward young, innocent girls (Little Red Riding Hood anyone?), and once identified, a ‘wolf’ was to be avoided at all costs by my three sisters and me.  Wolves came in many different styles of sheep’s clothing, but the costume of which I believe my mother was most wary was of the smooth-talking, preppy frat boy type.  Interestingly enough, she distrusted a guy with a squeaky clean appearance, and often for good reason; after all, she was a teenager in the 50’s and knew this type very well.  She knew these boys could be very crafty wolves - the type to flatter a girl’s parents and then take her out, get her drunk and take advantage.  But, as everyone knows, teenagers often rebel against their parents’ ways and wishes, if only to assert a certain amount of independence, and I was no different.  In high school I developed a crush on a boy of the preppy frat boy type which seemed to resurface in the 80’s.  He was the kind of boy featured in teen magazines, the type to make young, otherwise intelligent girls act silly.  He wore name brand polo shirts with the collar turned up in various shades of pastel, leather loafers, and sported spiky, gelled hair. To my mind he had the face of an angel, and I pointed him out to my mom one day.

“He’s very ‘pretty’, isn’t he,” she said with a curl of her lip.
“He’s not pretty, Mom, he’s handsome,” I protested.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” was her short but pointed reply.

A Very Handsome James Spader as the preppy jerk in Pretty in Pink
-definitely a wolf

To my utter bewilderment at the time, the boys my mom generally favoured were the long-haired rocker types, especially if they played an instrument.  I’m not sure why - perhaps she felt they held an honest disregard for convention.  I had five older siblings with many types of friends, maybe all the rocker kids she knew were just really nice people.  At my high school these kinds of boys were called ‘head bangers’. They usually went around with girls who sported similar rocker hairstyles ornamented with feathered roach clips and head bands.  They tended to answer teachers’ questions in monosyllables and didn’t usually top the academic charts.  Some were even classified as ‘stoners’, an even less desirable label in the upper echelon of my school.  Though friendly with some of the head bangers, I was certainly not their type and, admittedly, they were not mine.  I continued to develop crushes on the ‘wrong’ sorts of boys, often preppy jocks who usually weren’t interested in me beyond a nod in the hallway or as someone’s little sister. My preference for that certain type of boy continued until, as often happens when we begin to grow up, something came along to widen my view of the world.

I took piano lessons until I was fifteen, and in my last year I once again participated in the local music festival. My piece was very difficult and I could not get it right, no matter how hard I practiced.  On the day of the festival, thirteen young pianists assembled on the front pew of the Nelson United Church.  The lights were dim, except for on the stage, and at the desk of the adjudicators, making them look like pale distant ghosts owning only heads and pen-holding hands.  I was extremely nervous but glad to be in the middle of the pack, not at the front.  Sitting next to me was a boy I had never seen before.  He had long, blonde hair, an Iron Maiden t-shirt, and jeans on – mom’s type.   “This should be interesting,” I remember thinking to myself as he approached the bench when they called his name.  I fully expected to hear a less than stellar performance, maybe a laboured rendition of that Leila Fletcher classic ‘My Little Birch Canoe’, or at best, a choppy interpretation of Beethoven's 'Fur Elise'.  I do not remember what he played, maybe Chopin, maybe Rachmaninoff, but it was a shock to see and hear this long-haired dude blast his way through his challenging piece with such skill and confidence. I was dumbfounded, and after the thunderous applause died down, I was *gasp!* next. As I rose to go up to the stage I could hear people whispering about the long haired pianist:  “Who is he?”  “Where is he from?” Then I heard someone say, “He’s ___ ___ from The Valley.  His family is so talented”.   I was really nervous now – rattled, actually.  My pre-conceived notions had just been turned upside down.  How could I possibly follow Rocker Valley Boy's performance!  I sat down on the bench.  I started to play.  I stopped after a few bars and started again. I stopped again, and started again.  I screwed up so badly the adjudicators took pity on me and allowed me to get my music, even though we were supposed to have memorized our pieces.  I got through my nasty piece somehow and with a limping heart and downcast eyes I returned to my seat.  Mortified, and afraid to look at my mom and sister in the audience, let alone at the blonde piano star beside me, I kept my gaze downward.

Quietly, from beside me Rocker Valley Boy spoke.  “Hey, that was pretty good,” he said.
“No, it wasn’t, and you know it,” I managed to whisper.
He turned to look at me.  I finally looked up at him, barely meeting his eyes. “Yeah, it was,” he said, smiling encouragingly.  “Don’t worry about it.”
I was immediately cheered by his friendly and generous words. I could breathe again.  He wasn’t lying either, so I couldn’t accuse him of mere flattery: later, the adjudicator even praised the bits between the screw ups.

I developed a sort of admiration for Rocker Valley Boy out of appreciation for what he did for me that festival day.  On rare occasions I would see him in town and feel a little flutter of the heart.  There is no telling when the words of our mothers will come true.

In Defense of The Delicate Child

My youngest daughter, aged eleven, fainted at school recently. She was standing at the teacher's desk, going over some math problems, when she suddenly felt quite hot. She excused herself in order to take off her sweater and get a drink of water from the bottle in her knapsack at the back of the room. As she took a drink, she felt overwhelmingly hot again, and in a jerky motion she fell backwards and hit her shoulder and head, fell forwards and hit her nose on a desk, fell to the floor, unconscious and began to shake. She came to, and apparently was completely coherent, but she was taken to the office, white as a sheet and made to lie on the sofa until I arrived to take her home.

The teacher thought, due to the jerking motion of her faint, and the shaking, that my daughter had suffered a seizure, and she was quite concerned when I talked to her about it. Her dad came home from work and took her to the walk-in clinic that afternoon. The doctor assured us that our daughter had not had a seizure, but had only fainted, and that fainting rarely looks like how it is represented in the movies. She ordered some blood tests and an electrocardiogram to rule out various problems, but assured us our daughter was okay to go to school the next day. Over the next few days, we watched her carefully, but she recovered her strength, and her colour, within a couple of days and was back to her old self before long.

Yesterday, we had a follow up appointment with our own doctor, to go over the results of the tests, and after a good examination and several questions, he said everything was fine, but that our daughter was 'rather skinny'. He said fainting can be caused by any number of things, and only becomes worrisome if it happens repeatedly. She has not had any 'episodes' since. In fact, she has attended her acting classes, performed in a play she helped write at school, worked hard at her schoolwork, and participated in her Physical Education classes at school as well as in basketball practices. She ate well before her fainting episode, but now we have decided to make her eat a little more, especially at breakfast. She is nearly five feet tall, but weighs 73 pounds, so a little extra meat on her bones would not hurt.

When she fainted, my son Galen reminded me of how, at her age, he used to feel faint sometimes, and how I would let him stay home occasionally, for 'mental health' days. I also remembered that when my daughter Emma was eleven she also had fainting spells when she was in a room, like a church, that was too hot or too crowded. I was not a fainter, but I was a skinny child who grew tall rather quickly and was hungry almost all the time. I did have many a pre-pubescent nose bleed and lengthy bouts of lethargy, which may have had something to do with the fact that I hated school and which caused my sympathetic parents to let me stay home a great deal during my twelfth year of life. I told much of this to the doctor (leaving out the part about hating school) and he concurred, in his lovely Scottish accent, that such things may just run in the family.

I am often being told that my daughter is too skinny. When she was ten, another mother who has four strapping, solid boys asked me if there was something wrong with her. "Does she eat anything at all?" I  responded that I had been a skinny child, too, and obviously had turned out alright. (I have been a nice medium sized girl since about the age of eighteen, with healthy child-bearing hips to prove it.) Still, her question bothered me because her opinion was shared by several other local mothers. If she only knew the food consumed in our house, the money spent on good quality groceries and local organic meats, the care that went into cooking and baking healthy and wholesome meals, she might see the situation differently. Our youngest has always had a healthy appetite, too, but she is not one that overeats, especially when it comes to sweets. Perhaps, in this day and age, it is just less common to see a thin child. The doctor agreed with that, too.

One thing my youngest daughter is, that may contribute to her local reputation as a 'delicate child', is incredibly sensitive. She has moments of extreme joy when something good happens, and moments of great despondency when something bad happens. She sees other children act rudely or meanly to each other at school and comes home quite upset if she has not been able to make them stop, or victorious if she has. If someone is mean to her, she takes it in stride, but it sometimes eats away at her anyway, and I am left to put her back together with hugs and kisses, with a warm muffin and a cup of tea or cocoa. When she is at school, it is as if she has her antennae up all the time, absorbing all that goes on around her. She also puts 120 percent into everything she does, and as the school secretary told me recently, "She goes all day long!" reading to the little ones in her lunch monitor group, helping decorate bulletin boards and writing skits for plays, helping other kids with their work, working hard to play the sports which do not come naturally to her. And, if she sometimes doesn't have enough time to eat her lunch, she is going on little fuel until after school when she can come home and spend the next hour making up for it.

My daughter is not only a particular body type, she is also a particular personality type, and perhaps, more often than not, the two go together. My job as her mother, and our job as parents, is to celebrate and support who she is and not dwell on what she is not. She is intelligent, creative, sensitive, talented, thoughtful and kind. She is not overly robust, happy-go-lucky, tough or sporty. She will probably never become an emergency ward nurse or a construction worker, but she just may become a play write, an actress, or a librarian. As the poet e.e. cummings said:

To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.

If that is true, I don't wonder she is exhausted sometimes. Still, I am aware that we can make some little changes at home, and we can look into ways to strengthen our daughter, to help her achieve the balance she needs to grow in health and in happiness.

The photo is from depositphotos.com

Into the Light we Go

When something like the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre happens, I am left reeling with thoughts of sadness for the children robbed of a future, and for all the families affected. As President Obama said in his sensitive speech following the news of so much slaughter of the innocent, "These neighbourhoods are our neighbourhoods, these children are our children." I could not help but put myself in the place of those parents who have lost their little ones, and all those connected to the adults who were also killed on that day in Newtown Connecticut.

I could say so much more about this senseless act, but I will not. Not today. Today I will focus on the good that I experienced in going for a day trip to Vancouver last weekend to see our son at his workplace and do some Christmas shopping. The fact of how blessed I was to have all my family together and intact has not escaped me, and the knowledge that we will all be together for Christmas is cause for even more happiness and gratitude.

We have had a rainy December at this end of the Fraser Valley. The clouds tend to rest against our high and close mountains and some weeks it feels as though I have been weighted down by a large and somewhat heavily brimmed grey felt hat. My husband, being on holiday for the past couple of weeks, had been checking the weather for a good day to go to Vancouver. Originally, we had wanted to avoid the city on a weekend, but Saturday looked like the best day weather-wise, so we planned out our day carefully and left early.

As we headed west, we drove gradually into the light.

As we approached the newly twinned Port Mann Bridge, her 'sails' rose up into the clear blue sky, reflecting the snowy peaks in the distance. Vancouver enjoys three local ski hills in its North Shore mountains: Grouse Mountain, Cypress Mountain, and Mount Seymour. Our family spent two wonderful winters Nordic skiing at Cypress Mountain, before horses, orchestra rehearsals and soccer took over our lives.

It's challenging to take photos from a moving vehicle.
This was taken while crossing the bridge.

We parked in our usual downtown spot, and walked over to the Vancouver Christmas Market. I've been an admirer of the 'new' Vancouver Public Library since it was built, so I had to take a photo of it gleaming on such a beautiful day.

 And then it was on to the market, where our son Ian is working for the month of December. The market is as authentically German in style as possible for the organizers to make it. It is set up in the lobby and the courtyard of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Vendors occupy decorated pine huts, offering everything from hot fresh pretzels and bratwurst, to spiced apple cider with or without a warming dram of alcohol, wooden toys and decorations. For those of us who are attracted by the woodsy charm of a traditional German/Bavarian Christmas, the market is a purely enjoyable experience.

The market was hopping that day, so good photo ops were few. However, we made the rounds with Ian, who met us a couple of hours before his shift at this hut here, serving traditional Swiss raclette and other delicacies made by our local cheese maker, Debra Amrein-Boyes, who operates the famous Farmhouse Cheese. 

I chose hot coffee over hot apple cider, but we did try it last year, and chose to purchase one of these souvenir mugs, which we put in our youngest's stocking to remind her of the happy day she spent with us at the market.

Of course, no German market would be complete without a hot polka band. This is the only shot I managed to get of the band, who were great and so much fun to listen to.

We all had a grand time at the market, Galen and Emma enjoying it for the first time. The day was clear and mainly sunny, but also cold, and after we'd had enough of the market, we moved on to the shopping malls to thaw and split up into pairs for some gift buying for each other. Then we said goodbye to Ian, happy that we would all be together again soon.

This song seems so fitting for my present state of mind.

Wishing you and yours a safe and joyful Holiday Season.

Peace on Earth. Good will towards men.

Rebecca

Water Water Everywhere

Only weeks ago, we in the Fraser Valley were keeping a close watch on the rising level of the river. Experts said those living inside the diking system were not in any real danger of flooding, but with the water table risen to only six feet below the surface, many with full basements had pumps going full time to keep the water out. When we first moved to this community we noticed in June that many homes seemed to be draining water by hosepipe onto the road. Not being familiar with life on a floodplain, we thought it strange that so many people seemed to be draining their hot tubs or backyard pools at the same time. When a neighbour and friend who happens to have an underground basement began talking about needing two pumps and a backup generator during a year of high runoff, we began to understand the reason for all the hoses to the road. We also began to understand why, after 1975 no houses were allowed to be built with any more than four feet below ground in our town, and were grateful for our house built on a concrete slab with a lawn sloping away from the house.

 A few years ago, our area was in very real danger of flooding, according to all the media reports and the provincial authorities. There were even town meetings in the high school gym to discuss strategies for emergency response should the dikes break. I gathered 72 hours worth of food supplies, including several packages of Cadbury mini eggs. No emergency kit, in my opinion, should be without chocolate. We made sure we had plenty of batteries for our short wave radio and flashlights, and kept the car full of gas at all times in case we needed to leave town in a hurry in search of higher ground. My husband always has our camping gear well organized, so I felt confident that we could get it together quickly if needed. I was so stressed about the possibility of flooding, it was difficult to concentrate on my job coordinating the local festival's children's day, and I made changes to our insurance policy to accommodate flooding in our house. A lot of people did. I even called my mother to ask if we could come to them 500 kms away, should disaster strike. I think she thought I was hysterical.To calm my children and myself we walked down to the river and looked at how far the water would have to rise to breach the dikes. It would have to rise an awful lot by the looks of it, and I felt better.In hindsight, I should have listened to the experienced local farm families from the get-go, who calmly smiled and said they'd believe a flood when they saw it. We never did flood that year, but it was a good test for everyone involved. This year, the water was just as high with flooding in some low-lying places outside the dikes, but the level of hysteria in the media and in the community in general was much more subdued. Our dikes had been tested and had proved worthy.

We did not flood this year and in fact, are enjoying a beautiful July so far. The water is still high as it is everywhere in our province, but without the incessant rain of June, it is gradually going down and people with basements have been able to relax a little. However, it seems that if one part of the world is enjoying good weather and calm waters, another part is experiencing the opposite. The Kootenay region near the Alberta border of British Columbia, and the stomping grounds of my youth, continue to have the wettest summer in recent memory. 'Monsoon rains' are a common term to describe their weather in the emails I have received from my parents' home, and again today I hear of recent and fierce storms in the region. Last Thursday afternoon, the rain fell so hard and so fast that the my hillside hometown of Nelson had temporary flooding in the downtown area - the storm drains just could not keep up with the amount of water rushing down the hills and into the level areas of the town. Several photos were posted on Facebook, and someone added the fact that Nelson had seen this kind of water before, back in 1973.

Robert Neufeld of Nelson took these photos
 on the day of the flash flood

Pulling together to push

The water did drain into the lake before long and the town was apparently dry and open for business by the next day. Flooding, yes, but somewhat manageable. West of Nelson, however, and on the same day, a mud slide had flowed onto the road near Castlegar and there was concern about the stability of one of the slopes above the college I attended for two years. The concern was well-founded as just the week before, a large mud slide had occurred in Johnson's Landing, a small, isolated community northeast of Nelson, crushing three houses with a wall of concrete-like compressed mud carrying trees and rocks as it careened down the slope. Four people were confirmed missing and the rescue efforts were hampered by a second slide and thus a frighteningly unstable area in which to search for the missing people - a father with two daughters and a German tourist. Sadly, after a weekend of extensive searching and the best efforts of personnel, the rescue efforts were changed to recovery efforts, and although I did not expect the news to be good by Monday, it still hit me hard when I heard the cold fact that the body of the girls' father had been found. Two days later, another body had been found, and so on.

 Any time something like this mudslide and flooding happens it is cause for concern, but it becomes personal when it occurs in a place you know well and where events such as this are rare. We are used to seeing footage of flash flooding and mudslides in places like Asia, but in the southeast corner of British Columbia? We are more likely to hear of people perishing in avalanches when skiing out of bounds, or from drowning in a boating accident on the many lakes in the region. The news becomes even more personal when the people involved are known and loved by people you know. That is what happened in Johnson's Landing. The slide occurred twenty-five meters from the home of  a young woman I knew when she was a baby, and her parents. I found this out on the radio one morning when the young woman was interviewed - she was friends with the two missing young women who had been her neighbours and was distraught but impressively composed in the interview. I contacted members of her family and shared the story, as did others, on Facebook. Many of my friends shared my concern and we all prayed and hoped for the best outcome before we knew the worst. Then we prayed and hoped the area would be saved from more disaster from excess rain.

I hope the Kootenays have seen the last of this 'biblical weather,' as a friend called it. Next week we are all going to Nelson to attend the wedding of our niece. The guest list is quite a long one, so I hope the weather will be accommodating to all these visitors from near and far as we gather for this most happy occasion. One thing is clear however. From recent events Mother Nature has let us mere mortals know in no uncertain terms that she is in charge, and we will just have to take whatever comes and make the best of it.