Other People's Words

I came across the above quote in my new day planner, just before I sat down to write my last post. I still use a book style day planner as I have neither a Blackberry nor an iphone to keep track of my life for me. I still like to write things down with a pen on paper, make lists, and cross off tasks as I complete them. Call me old fashioned.

I use student planners because they go from August to August, tracking the school year, just as I, the mother of school-aged children do. They are also reasonably priced. My newest planner, created by the fine company Polestar Press has a quote for each week of the year, meant to inspire the student, of course, but I find the quotes work just as well for me. I'm often looking for little ways to keep motivated and organized. Call me human.

Being a words person, I've liked quotes since I was a young teenager. I remember suggesting to my family that we put a small chalk board by the telephone (the center of the house) and take turns writing funny or inspiring quotes to live by. "Wouldn't that be great?" I said with all the conviction of youthful enthusiasm. My dad looked over his glasses at me and cocked an eyebrow. Okay, maybe not. We did share quotes from time to time, and put funny comic strips on the fridge. Close enough.

Some of my favourite quotes are from artists, like the one above. I was given a gift certificate to a book store as a prize in my last year of school. I bought The Book Lover's Birthday Book from the Metropolitain Museum of Art to keep track of the birthdays of my friends and large family (eighteen nieces and nephews at last count). The book, which I still have and use is full of illustrations from a great variety of classic books, birth dates of writers, and a great quote from a writer for each day. I still enjoy all the quotes, many of which are not commonly known.

Facebook seems to be a haven for quote collectors of all stripes. I've read quotes by everyone from the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa to the boy band The Jonas Brothers, thanks to my diverse group of Facebook friends. The quotes range from extremely cheesy to funny or inspiring. Most recently, fifteen Facebook friends posted the last hopeful message from a popular Canadian politician who was dying of cancer.

Why do people love quotes so much? Not long ago The Bible was the most quoted book in the Western Hemisphere. Nowadays I'm not sure if many people realize that many of the things they say are actually quotes from the Bible. "To everything there is a season," for example, is from Ecclesiastes. After I saw a production of the musical Godspell, I heard the people sitting in front of us remark on all the great lines in the play. My mom leaned over to me and said quietly, "Well, it's hard to get better quotes than from Jesus himself." I think people are searching for words of insight and wisdom all the time, words on which to hang their hat and make sense of our common human plight.

One of my favourite lines in the Steve Martin film, Roxanne, is actually a mis-quote spoken by Roxanne's dimwitted love interest, Chris. Chris is being fed whispered lines from Steve Martin's much more brilliant and eloquent Cyrano de Bergerac-type character, from his hiding place in bushes. Chris is repeating those lines and calling them up to Roxanne who is leaning starry eyed over the balcony rail above. At one point, Roxanne asks Chris why he hasn't spoken so eloquently in person before. Steve whispers from the bushes: "I was afraid of words, Roxanne, words!"

Chris gives Steve a baffled look, then calls up to Roxanne: "I was afraid of worms, Roxanne, worms!"


I have many favourite quotes, but here are ten off the top of my head:

"We read to know we are not alone." C.S. Lewis

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." The Beatitudes

"Sometimes you're the Louisville Slugger, baby, sometimes you're the ball." Mark Knopfler

"Don't borrow trouble 'till trouble borrows you." A well known saying that originated from 'The Sermon on the Mount', I believe.

"We learn from history that we don't learn from history." Bishop Desmond Tutu

"You must be the change you want to see in the world."  Ghandi

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need." The Rolling Stones

"If we have a natural disaster and everything is destroyed, it will be the Third World that has to show us how to live." My younger son

"It's a dog-eat-dog world and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear." Norm Peterson

"It's not the mountain ahead that wears you down; it's the sand in your shoe." Robert W. Service

Have a great weekend and please share a favourite quote if you have one!

A Week Away

A few days ago I returned from a week away. 'A week away' has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? It just rolls off the tongue like 'Back in a minute,' or 'Make yourself at home,' and opens up vistas of possiblilty in the imagination. A regular week around here goes by in the wink of an eye, and is usually made up of a list of Monday to Friday chores, weekend activity, and whatever is good on TV. A week away, however, is a completely different thing: another place, a different scene, another schedule entirely. A week away from being in charge of things at home is a real vacation. For seven days I stayed at a house where someone else thought about watering the garden, someone else made the coffee and asked me if I would like tea, and where someone else did the majority of the cooking. Don't get me wrong, I did plenty of dishes, helped with the cooking and with the entertaining of the many cousins who congregated there, but that is not the same as being in charge of it all. For a whole week I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that the end of summer was coming with its back-to-school shopping, its recommence of volunteer and paid work, and fall cleaning, but I could cast those cares aside for later. I was on holiday.

Earlyish on a Monday morning three of my kids and I threw our bags, coolers and pillows in the back of our minivan. My husband was not able to join us and our eldest was in Europe, so we were able to spread out and be comfortable travellers, each with their own bucket seat complete with arm rests and adjustable back rests.  We stocked up with cold water, music, snacks and a packed lunch, and hit the road. We drove up through the twists and turns of Manning Park, our first mountain pass. The air was cool when we reached the summit, fragrant with the scent of alpine trees and flowers. Once in Princeton, we drove alongside the shallow ripples of the beautiful Kettle River, through ranchland and fruit-stand territory. We stopped for lunch in Osoyoos, which is in the northern part of the Sonora desert. With irrigation, Osoyoos has become a fruit and wine-grape growing hub dissected by a long, warm lake for swimming and boating. We sat in the shade on the beach just below the tourist strip and a couple of us went for a swim in the mid-day heat. I thought about what my friend had said a few days before when she had returned from a trip across the province. She said that every two hours of driving brought her to a completely different geoclimatic zone, and how fascinating that was. I agreed.

One of the many Osoyoos wineries





Stopping for lunch in Osoyoos



We continued on through the dry sagebrush country, following for a time a rather uncertain recreational vehicle driver pulling a boat that wove back and forth, and passing him at the first opportunity. We picked up fresh peaches for my parents along the way and refreshing drinks for ourselves, and after a few hours the scenery became green again and we began another climb up into the mountains to the Blueberry Paulson - a destination for backcountry skiers in winter -  and down the other side. Finally, we arrived at my parents' house in my hometown in time for supper. I was offered a stein of my dad's homemade beer, chilled and with a large head of fluffy foam. It was delicious and most welcome after a full day of driving.

Comfortable beds had been set up for the girls and I out on the porch, the place I slept with my sisters and brothers all summer long when I was a child. My son slept in the attic which my parents had converted to a sleeping/storage loft a few years ago. The nights were cool and scented with the herbs of the surrounding gardens. We kept my parents' hours, retiring early and rising early, too, enjoying the effect of a second cup of coffee on the energy of the conversation around the breakfast table. Nelson has a downtown full of interesting shops so the kids were eager to go most mornings, and since my parents' house is only a few blocks up the hill, I could help clean up the breakfast dishes and relax a bit before I walked down to meet them. My son bought several vinyl albums at second hand shops and enjoyed the chocolate mousse cake at one of the fine bakeries.

My kids' favourite bakery cafe

My teenage daughter shopped for clothes and found some unique pieces, and also enjoyed buying treats she couldn't find at home. My youngest shopped for books with her savings, and bought a bizarre foam substance that bounces whatever shape she moulds it into. I didn't shop much. I was there to visit family, to talk, to share stories, go for walks up and down the numerous hills and to see a couple of old friends.

My brother arrived on the Friday with his boys and the next day he took them and my son for a hike to the brand new cabin in Kokanee Provincial Park, where a celebration was being held for the 100th Anniversary of British Columbia Parks. My mom was also at the cabin providing historical information to the visitors. I took all the girl cousins and my sister to a favourite beach for the day.

My teenage daughter would have liked to hike with the boys, but she had forgotten her sturdy shoes. I promised her a hike up the the top of the town the next morning. "Can we come?" said the girl cousins. We ended up taking the boy cousins, too.

The view from our hike to the top of the town

A few more beach days, a few more walks and visits, a morning of shopping for a few presents for my husband, and it was time to pack up for the return trip home. Tears from my youngest - "I want to go home and see Daddy, but I don't want to leave Grandma and Grampa" - and a promise from Grandma to come and visit us, and many hugs later, we began the journey homeward. We stopped in the orchard country again and picked up peaches for home this time. We ate lunch in the car and stopped for ice cream instead. We drove down from Manning Park into the Fraser Valley in the late part of the day, shadows of the forest stretching across the ribbon of highway, and the sun low enough to shine into my eyes.

Happy to reach home at last, we unpacked the van and put the organic peaches, the Nelson Chocofellar chocolate, the Nacho chips we seem to only be able to find in Nelson, and an edition of Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine on the table for Dad to find when he came home from work.

We came home on Tuesday. Today is Friday. With my head still full of the doings and enjoyments of 'a week away' I am reluctant to pick up the threads of all there is to do here at home. Sure, I've done laundry and the cooking, read my emails and even answered a few, but a part of me, a big part, is hanging on to that holiday mind space. Everywhere I walked and ran in Nelson there was a view, of mountains, of the glacier, of the West Arm of Kootenay Lake.

I was so impressed with these gardens in Lakeside Park.
They are like a painting.

Nelson, already full of natural beauties, is also a place which honors its past and celebrates its culture. Old houses and buildings are renovated and restored, and art is everywhere you look - starting with my parents' front hall:

Food and healthy living are major focuses of both my family and the community at large. One day we had Florentine paninis for lunch with homemade foccacia bread and homegrown spinach. Another day I cooked the organic roast I had brought from my own freezer and my mom and I made a potato salad and a green salad with all the ingredients harvested from their wonderful garden. The kids and I know how good it was to be away, but we aren't talking about it much. I think we are all still there for a few more days, in our hearts anyway. Nelson will always be a part of us, and we a part of it. We don't have to live there to know that.

So much of who I am is explained by the way I was brought up and by the place I was fortunate enough to be brought up in. I love to go to my hometown to reconnect with that place and those people I love so much. I enjoy every minute of it. But then, after a while, it is time to come home and dig in generously. I try to take some of what I am and spread it around in the place I live now. I hope I make a difference, even if it is small (which it undoubtedly is), to the people around me.

More Postcards From (nearly) the Edge

I once met a CBC national news reporter in my cousin's Vancouver backyard. His daughters were friends with my cousin's daughter, and he pushed a jogging stroller with a new little boy in it. The mother was not there; perhaps she was at work. We were all assembled, along with a lot of other parents and children, in order to partake in the annual Easter Egg Hunt put on by my cousin and his family. When we were introduced by my cousin, he asked if we recognized the news reporter.

"Yes, of course! I've seen you on TV," I exclaimed.

The news reporter (who shall remain nameless) was quite friendly, in that reserved kind of way that many people of notoriety have, and he asked us where we were from. When we told him he asked, "Do you have horses or something?" as if the only reason to live out in the country was if we had several acres of land at our disposal.

"No, no," we said, and explained about my husband's job as a manager in a large hotel in the nearby resort village.

We could tell he found it all a bit puzzling, people choosing to live in the country without being able to call themselves farmers. We told him our daughter did ride horses at a nearby stable. "Ah," he said, and relaxed a bit.

I changed the subject and admired his baby, the product of his second marriage. The baby smiled at me. Most babies do, I'll admit. That's how I ended up doing daycare, but that's another story.

"How many children do you have?" asked the news reporter.

"Four," I said.

"FOUR?" Wow, you must be really busy!" he exclaimed, eyes widening at the thought.

I smiled wryly. "That's only one more than you have," I said.  He laughed and had to agree. I wondered silently how he thought 2 tween girls plus one baby, one ex-wife and one present wife who was a step-mother to his first two, was so much less than my four.

Probably with the same line of thought that wondered how on earth we could live so far from the city (an hour and a half's drive), and still look content and sound reasonably well informed. The next time we met for the annual Easter Egg Hunt, the news reporter remembered us and we talked at length about the school system, while we kept the now-toddler out of trouble in the garden.

So, Mr. News Reporter, I am thinking of you as I send out some more summer postcards from our part of the world. I suppose, in a way, we really do have several acres at our disposal out here.

To bee in paradise

Taxpayers Gardens (not their real name)

Hats on the Beach

Our favourite local spot in summer...up the mountain road and turn right

Shade in the afternoon, and lovely water for swimming

I will be away next week with my kids (their dad has to stay here and work), but may be able to read and to post if time and distractions of friends, family, and my beautiful home town permit. Have a wonderful week wherever you are!

Capturing a Place

I've never thought much of the lyrics of the song that goes "If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with," until I saw photos of my eldest son on Facebook, touring around Amsterdam. If I could not be with him, enjoying the sites of Europe, I could put more effort into appreciating the area that I was able to explore - my home here in Beautiful British Columbia (as is proclaimed on our vehicle license plates).

Earlier this week my girls and I went off to the nearby village, which is a resort destination and contains, among its many shops on the esplanade, the summer employers of many local young people including my second son. We brought our cameras with us and decided to play tourist. We found it fun to try and see such familiar sites through the imagined eyes of visitors taking everything in for the first time. The result was a collection of photos, I am sure, quite similar to those of the thousands of people who flock here every summer.

A cold, glacier fed, Canadian lake

My eldest daughter treated us to one of these favourite confections.

A tart, crisp apple coated in delicious chocolate, caramel and almonds. Yummy.

Where many, many local teenagers work for the summers. There's also a great coffee shop next door.

A dragon boat regatta was happening, with thousands of participants.

One of the dragon boats coming into shore with the caller/drummer at the bow.

A wonderful and famous Canadian painter named Toni Onley used to come here, too. He would fly in on his float plane to sketch and paint. He would not paint scenes like the ones I posted above, of people, shops and flowers. He painted scenes much more like this one:

Unfortunately, Toni Onley died in a plane crash several years ago. I grew up knowing and admiring his work and only now am I able to put into words the beauty and mystery of his deceptively simple layers of watercolour. People are often heard to exclaim, when viewing a coastal landscape, "That looks just like a Toni Onley painting!" Toni could capture the essence of place and landscape like few others can. He painted abstracts, arctic landscapes, and scenes from Mexico, Hawaii, and the BC Coast. His paintings seem to float somewhere between earth and heaven, and he is loved equally among art critics and 'regular folks'.

Someone once said that great art picks up where nature ends. And so I leave you with one of Toni's works.

I found this painting on the Winchester Galleries website. I'm having trouble providing a link, so if you google 'Winchester Galleries Toni Onley" you will find more of Toni's wonderful work. The site is well worth the visit.

I'm Sending a Book to...

...the winner of my summer giveaway. My daughters put the names of the entries in a hat and pulled out...Brian Miller of Waystationone!

Brian, you will find my email link on my profile page, so you can send me your mailing address. Congratulations! I think you'll really enjoy Antonia Banyard's novel Never Going Back.

Brian Miller is a super-talented, gritty, tender and prolific poet, so please check out his blog! His group, One Stop Poetry, recently won a Shorty Award for art. They travelled to New York City to attend the gala, but I think Brian became somewhat distracted from the accolades after his disarming tour of the ten floors of the NYC Macy's department store. Read his great poem about it here.

I will be writing a post soon. We've been getting ready to send our eldest off to Europe on Monday. Even though I am not going with him, I feel like I may as well be after all the mental/spiritual/physical preparations. I'll be living vicariously through him with him in spirit.

Cheers!

A Summer Giveaway

For the past week my family and I have been taking in as many events at our local Festival of the Arts as we can manage. We all volunteer for the festival, which gains us passes for free entry into every event. Over seventy volunteers make the festival possible and are sometimes the most enthusiastic members of the audience.

This particular festival is in its thirty-third year and runs like a well-oiled machine. The weather has not been ideal, but the sun shone for a few days over the weekend and I found myself, one warm, breezy evening, lying on the grass above the lakeshore listening to live music, and looking up at the umbrella of branches of a sprawling willow tree - a blissful occupation. The band frontman introduced each of the six band members and told us where they were born. Each of them was from a different country: Cuba, Mexico, El Salvador, Phillippines, Canada, and Trinidad. Our festival highlights world music and by the time the ten-day festival is over we will have attended concerts given by artists from Africa, Ireland, Spain, Louisiana, Vienna, Hawaii and Haiti. The festival is always a wonderful time, and I become a bit of a mental sponge, absorbing it all. I find I am overwhelmed by the talent and passion of all these artists and their stories and the event tends to be a time of intense music appreciation for me. I suppose every creative person needs her own well refilled now and again, and the festival is one of those times. Music is not the only art form represented at the festival. We attended a play on Tuesday evening, and spend hours (and dollars) visiting the art market which forms a long, colourful row of tents along the beach walk on the weekends.

One of the colourful vendors at the art market
(The backdrop isn't bad either)





This evening we are all rather tired and will give the evening concert a miss. I, for one, need to get to bed before midnight at least one night this week. My husband has been dividing his time between the festival concerts, work, and Le Tour de France on T.V. On Sunday, he will take our eldest to Vancouver where Ian will perform in the young songwriters circle at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, a much larger event than the one we attend in the nearby resort village. I wish I could go too, but I will be volunteering with our youngest at the local festival and enjoying, hopefully, some more music in the warm sunshine (please?).

The willow tree by the beach stage



So, since I am somewhat preoccupied with the Festival, I thought this would be a good time to have a bit of fun on this blog. Last week I received a parcel in the mail from a blogger friend, Tracey in California. I had won her giveaway of a sampler tin of Jelly Belly jellybeans. What a pleasant surprise! Earlier in the year, I won another giveaway, a beautiful photograph, from Ireland's Ciara of Milkmoon. I began to think perhaps it might be my turn to return the favour...but what would I give away?

One of my daughters helping herself to a Jelly Belly.

I decided I would order a copy of my friend Antonia Banyard's novel Never Going Back, and offer it as a gift to one lucky friend. Antonia Banyard and I have been friends since we were six years old. I have written two blog posts about the impression her family had on me, and about our friendship and her career as a writer/editor. Never Going Back is her first novel. The following is a description of the story,

Four days, five friends, a birth, a death, a suicide.

Evan, Siobhan, Lance, Lea, and Mandy were once inseperable, but in the tenyears since high school, they have barely spoken. When a memorial finds themreunited in their hometown of Nelson, BC, a small town with a big reputation,each friend is forced to confront secrets from the past. If they don't face themselves, each other, and the central trauma of their lives, they'll never be able to move on.



I have read the book a few times and enjoy it more each time. Of course, there is so much in it that is familiar to me, the setting (my hometown of Nelson), the types of characters, the humour of the writer, but the story stands alone very well as an engaging read for anyone who ever negotiated their way through the challenges of the inevitable changes in friendships that endure after high school is over.

So, if you would like to enter for a chance to win the book, just leave a comment on this post telling me you would like the book, and next week I will put all the names in a hat and draw a name. You also have to be willing, if your name is drawn, to email me your full name and mailing address so I can send you the book!

Good luck! (Now back to the festival)

 

Years Through the Lens

The first summer we lived here I sorted through five years worth of photos I had neglected to keep in order. As I spent a few days sorting and filing the photos, I swore I would never leave the task so long again. I would be more like my friend who, when she picked up a new batch of developed photos (three copies of each) would place them in albums and number each photo with  the corresponding negative, keep a set to send to her mother and brother in Poland, and pass out the rest to friends.

Last Sunday, I pulled a large cardboard box of photos out of the laundry room where they had been stored and ignored. Despite the 'never again' promises to myself from eight years ago, each new envelope of photos had been unceremoniously tossed in the box and become jumbled, waiting for the day when I would find the time and will to deal with them properly. That day had come and I was suddenly quite determined to get my act together and put the photos in acid free albums.  I felt the need to move on to developing a good system for organizing and printing my growing collection of digital photos before another eight years passed, but I knew I had to deal with the my pre-digital collection first.

On Sunday afternoon I sat down to try and make sense of the eight years worth of photos. Putting the photos in chronological order was the most difficult part. In the end I tracked the years by the progress of my youngest child's teeth. In Kindergarten, she had a row of tiny little baby teeth, in Grade One she had lost a few, in Grade Two the two front teeth were almost fully in, etc. Additional clues were held in the length of my eldest's hair, which grew longer and longer into his teen years, and in the number of candles on the various birthday cakes. The process was a bit like detective work and by nine o'clock each evening I would become exhausted and need to stop. Last night the job was done, and eight hundred photos were filed in two large albums, their copies (I usually ordered doubles) and any extras I chose not to include in the albums put in order in a shoe box for the kids to use for their own albums later on.

While the job of sorting through eight years of photos may seem like a tedious chore I found I was enjoying myself. I had not looked at many of the photos for years and as I did, I realized the great value of the family photo album. When I look at the albums from the past years of our lives together I am able to see those years both in individual moments and as a whole. The photos of family camping trips, visits with friends and family -several series of photos show a myriad of cousins playing on the beach - celebrations of birthdays, holidays, First Communions and Confirmations, of record snowfalls measured on the outdoor table, and of performances and recitals, as a whole give the impression of a good and happy childhood. In the pictures the kids are smiling or looking thoughtful, being silly together or laughing unconstrainedly. They appear active and interested, enthusiastic and innocent. Their dad is hugging them, talking to them, showing them something interesting or teaching them to chop wood for the campfire. There are not many of me because I was usually behind the camera.

I remember a time several years ago when family life was hard for me. I wanted to rebel against my chosen lot of wifedom and motherhood. We had recently moved away from civilization and I felt like a trickster had pulled my comfortable town life out from under me leaving me emotionally uncertain and reaching out for something to hang onto. At one dark point I took out our album of wedding photos, hoping to find some meaning there. As I pored over the pictures of a happy couple ready to take on the world, I knew I would be okay. I knew I was at this place in my life for a reason that was larger than myself and I trusted that fact to lead me through the difficult phase I was in.

Even now it is easy to become bogged down by the negative day-to-day stresses and mundane details of life. I tend to lose perspective from time to time, and there are weeks when all the demons I've ever known rise up to try and undermine any positive feelings I may have about my life and work. I don't take pictures of those times deliberately, but sometimes I will find a particular photo which will trigger a memory of some period of painful growth and difficulty. In addition to providing proof of our ability to ride the ebb and flow of family life, the photo albums exist to mark the series of experiences that have made our family what we are. They provide a chronicle which my patchy journals alone cannot supply.

The albums also show, repeatedly, the reason why we signed our youngest up for a musical theatre camp this summer, and why she is having the time of her life. From the age of two she was a ham!