A B of a Day

The freezing rain has changed back again to snow, Leonard's tractor battery is dead, the deer are having a terrible time in the snow that has them floundering about in my woods seeking food, and the bird seed is disappearing rapidly now that the blue jays have returned.

I am cooking bananas (that refuse after almost two weeks to ripen) the Kenyan way.  You fry chunks of banana and onion in margarine, add salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes and cover with tomatoes or homemade tomato sauce and cook till the bananas are still firm but easily pierced with a fork tine.  They are good and can replace potato for a meal.

I also have a great big iron pot filled with beans that are baking.  I used Madame Benoit's recipe ... chunks of pork (not salted) ... an onion coated in mustard, a little salt and a lot of maple syrup. A friend told me that my original recipe using salt pork plus salt was VERY salty.  This one may have to have salt added at the end.  In the last hour you put cored unpeeled apples on top and coat them with a butter and brown sugar mixture.  The beans are sweet and fruity and crunchy on top.

I canceled my class yesterday because I was afraid none of us would get back home safely after 7 p.m.  and got started on a little box that is harder than a chair because I am trying to get the same effect in far smaller spaces ... and am discovering my own limitations!  However ... I shall persevere.

I am not looking forward to shoveling the steps ... and I have to since Leonard has left a wall of snow taller than I am at the top of the other route up to the road.

When is this winter that started in March ever going to end?

So ... dead batteries ... unhappy Bambis ... starving blue jays eating all the bird seed  ... unripe bananas ... baked beans ... and a box ... a B of a day.

The Other Side of the Looking Glass

What we appear to be is likely the face we want reflected. What it hides is a backside that is simply all our virtues turned inside out. Adults reveal that other side occasionally, inadvertently when under stress, when totally relaxed by alcohol or drugs, and also when they are in safe environments where they can trust enough to know that they will be forgiven because they are beloved.

Old people, if they are lucky, sometimes lose their inhibitions too. Jenny Joseph wrote a poem called "When I am Old, I Shall Wear Purple". It is about throwing off the constraints created by the expectations of others, including her children.

Kids are free to reveal that hidden side of themselves to trusted parents.

I met Emma last summer. Emma has absolutely no inhibitions. She is 5 now, and is loved without reserve by her father, mother and teen-aged brother. She interacts with everyone as if there are no dangers in life, as if everyone will love her as they all do.

At the party last night she went swimming wearing her skirt ... and then stripped off and went back in nude to swim and play with two little boys, aged eight and eleven, who were much more self consciously covered. When I went to take photos of their play, she splashed me and I had to move away and remonstrate about cameras and water. She didn't avoid me after that. Instead she was right there in my face hamming it up for the camera and telling me jokes. She knew that I wouldn't hold her exuberance against her.

We could all learn a great deal from Emma. I think I will start today.

A Series of Delays and Abortive Missions

I have had a very long day. So has my nearest neighbour who drove us everywhere since I couldn't see properly to drive.

We set out at 9:30 a.m. and got back here at 4:15 p.m.

First we drove to the Wakefield ER.

At 2:30 I was seen by a physician from Cameroun and told I had an infection in the eye for which he prescribed an antibiotic.

By 3:30 I had filled the prescription and we went and had lunch at Chez Eric.

Then we headed off to vote.

Neither of us was permitted to vote ... and we had plenty of company. Our road was not on their maps. Another woman was not on their list. I didn't hear the other complaints, but the second in command who spoke to us said that they had discovered 70,000 names had simply disappeared from this region's electoral lists last summer and had to be reinstated, Despite Tanya's valiant efforts we were not allowed to vote. I say valiant because she dealt with all this during the last provincial election and so prior to this election she spent at least 5 hours on the phone with petty bureaucrats who all give her a different story. And today she stood her ground without screeching about the amount of taxes she poured into the Quebec coffers ... as one woman who completely lost it did.

This sort of thing could certainly be construed as political finagling of the English vote, but honestly, I think it was simply incompetence, laziness, carelessness and a refusal to think beyond the rules. Everyone there agreed that there was screw up, and we had the right to vote, but no one would break the rules to allow us to exercise that right.

We headed home with one quick stop at the Wakefield General Store so I could pick up a copy of the Low Down to Hull. I paid my 75 cents and Linda, the clerk, said, "Your letter's in it."

You have to love living in these hills.

Yikes! I am becoming my father ...

"If you have a positive thought your body actually goes into a positive vibration, you actually attract everything that resonates with that vibration."

(sent to me courtesy of Insight of the Day to which I subscribe)

It reminds me of Dad's little books of homilies for living a happier, more successful life ... you know ... the kind that Amway salesmen promote ... Dale Carnegie stuff.

But the really scary thing is that I believe this! I believe that happiness begets happiness.

I have found since I retired and began wearing glasses that people smile more at me. I figure I probably smile more myself, and I likely look less threatening than I used to. Now I am simply a little old bespectacled smiling lady. I exude no sex appeal, no power, just bemused niceness.

I like pronoia (the antidote to paranoia), Rob Brezny's philosophy, although I do balk when it gets too saccharine.

I like being around positive people and walk away from complainers.

Dad used to get headaches when I would lecture him about socialism and the evils of American imperialism. I get headaches just remembering all those wasted hours and days and weeks, yes, years, of trying to convince people that they should boycott Kraft products, Dare cookies and lettuce harvested by Mexican slaves for their capitalist masters.

We were smarter, I think, but we looked just as foolish handing out pamphlets outside grocery stores as that lone guy I saw on Bank Street the other day. He was haranguing passersby about God.

We were right and time has proven us so, but no one wanted to listen, so it was foolish to try to convince them. All those other old Wafflers are probably just like their parents now too ... complacent ... trying to shut out the doomsayers even though they know they are right.

But it isn't just this longing for peace in my valley. It is also how and where I choose to live. Dad chose a place in the mountains of the Eastern Townships where he could be free to enjoy nature. He lived for a while with a partner, but was happiest when he became a hermit again ... a hermit with one good friend.

I don't think he disliked people any more than I do. He liked to interact on a superficial level with the neighbours and tradespeople he encountered every day, but he liked going home to his hermitage. He called his place Shangri-La.

I like knowing I am part of a community and I value my friends, but I like living alone with Kenya. A hermit enjoys a freedom that is not possible when you live with most people.

I look at happy couples who seem like two halves of a whole while remaining fully themselves as well. There aren't that many, or at least I haven't seen that many. Some days I think it would be nice to find someone to share this life, but I am not sure I could begin that long process of becoming part of a comfortable couple again.

A Sunday's Plans Gone Awry

I intended to drive to town this morning to attend a service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation (UUC) with Tammy and Carlos. I got up at five in the darkness and assumed that the plan would go ahead. As soon as it was light I would clean off the car, exercise Kenya, have breakfast, shower and we would be off.

At 7 we were out the door, but it became immediately apparent that a great deal of snow had fallen last night. I trudged up the hill. Kenya bounded through the drifts like a boat encountering waves. The car was completely covered, and needed to be shoveled out. The hill down to Pike Lake Road was covered in soft snow again. I did the brushing, scraping and shoveling, and dragged the shovel back to the steps above the house.

By the time I had shoveled all 39 steps, wet strands of sweat soaked hair hung down in front of my face, I was tired, and it was twenty past eight. I had ten minutes to shower, have breakfast, dress and head up that hill again, and all I wanted to do was crash. I also questioned whether I would be able to get back up the hill before it was plowed or packed down by 4WD vehicles.

So much for good intentions.

Instead I fixed the little postman. He no longer has a head. I wrote. I vaccuumed the entire house. I discovered another leak in the roof that was destroying the wall board in the closet above the woodstove. I mopped and broke through paint in two places to let water out. I read the papers. I listened to CBC. I tidied a few cupboards.

And then I wrote my secret letter to Arrow.

I write these letters to Arrow because I love her, and I want her to WANT to read. She finds it hard to focus on school tasks in spite of being a very bright little girl. She can learn anything if it relates to nature and the outdoors, or if it involves actually DOING something physical.

I tucked the letter into a package containing a pair of binoculars for bird watching. The last letter was in a package held together with duct tape and so unwieldy that I wrote a note of apology to the postal workers who had to deal with it. I was afraid they might think it was something for the garbage. It contained two wasps' nests we had discovered between the walls when we were demolishing the old cottage.

I took this photo in the fall of 2006 when Arrow helped me look after the chickens, cats, dogs and horses at a hobby farm while the owners were away. She had no trouble learning how to do everything necessary to be a real helpmate.