The Poet and the Prosaic Writer

On cowardice and courage ...

"The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt."
Thomas Merton, 1915-1968, Trappist monk and writer



"A coward dies a thousand deaths; the brave die but once."
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, poet and playwrite



One forces the reader to think; to construct meaning.

The other makes the assumption that his readers are not smart enough to do so.

Update on the Raccoon Corpse

The vile smelling raccoon I moved up the 61 steps from the lake to the road is gone.

I realized that the garbage men would be offended by the pail containing the body. I needed to find someone with an open truck to move the can and bury the body as far as possible from my dogs, so I called Leonard (the neighbour who plows my road) and asked for help. He came right away and said he didn't need to be paid. Now that is neighbourly!

I delivered a chocolate cake and a serving of rhubarb crisp to him at suppertime. Small recompense for solving a big stinker of a problem.

Sunrise at Pike Lake

My day began early ... before 4 a.m. ...

when the birds began their day.

Just before 5, I took these shots, and forgave the birds.

Mailbox Mania

Rude Spam

Is anyone else receiving huge amounts of spam with messages similar to "What a stupid face you have here bjscott"??? I keep wanting to open one to see how they all knew that, but then I resist the temptation because "What if they are not only rude but virus-infected?"

Today's mail contained the following piece of information:

Analysis of several hundred people who had accumulated fortunes well beyond the million dollar mark, disclosed the fact that every one of them had the habit of reaching decisions promptly, and of changing these decisions slowly, if, and when they were changed. People who fail to accumulate money, without exception, have the habit of reaching decisions, if at all, very slowly, and of changing these decisions quickly and often.

I don't know about money ... I have none ... but I do know about love and adventure ... and so I applied the precept to what I know.

I have made decisions quickly in both areas, and as a result I have had a few adventures, love affairs and marriages throughout my life. I took a very long time to make the decision to leave the adventurous life I was leading (about 14 years) and to stay home and settle down with my dog. I have stored up a memory bank rich in adventures. So the theory works there.

With love, I have made both decisions quickly ... to jump into and to abandon the relationships. I have not created a lasting love with any man.

Lately I have not made any decisions about men quickly and as a result there is no man in my life.

I had sort of wanted a dog for a long time but the actual decision to get my puppy was made within a week. Despite a rough beginning, and some major obstacles, I stayed with that decision until she became truly mine. Now I know I will love her as long as she lives.

So it seems to work with love too.

What do you think? Does it work in your life too?

Look at those eyelashes!

Remi's Answer to Dog Days

She left her world a better place.

Veronica Guerin is a really tough film based on the life of a very courageous Irish woman who fought to the death for her beliefs. She was a journalist who saw the damage done to children by drugs in Dublin, and went after the drug dealers. They eventually killed her, but they couldn't stop what she had begun, and Irish laws were changed because of her courage. The new laws made it possible to seize the assets of the drug dealers and actually made the dealers subject to law.

I was saddened by her death and by the fact that she left a husband, a mother, a brother and a young son to grieve, but it was her courage that made the tears flow.

She was born the same year as my second daughter, and she was murdered in 1998 ... ten years ago.

She left Dublin a better place.

A Scorcher

I like bitter cold better than intense heat. When I am cold I can dress more warmly, put another log on the fire, and eat hearty soul and body warming food. And I can stay indoors. When it is hot I can almost not drag my weary bones around to do what must be done. Decency dictates a limit to the number of clothes I can remove, and I don't want to use the oven even to bake bread.

Also once the weather gets hot, my hermitage is no longer as secluded. I have to share my private road. And the dogs do not understand. All winter they have been letting me know if anything untoward has been happening. They don't go off the property unless I am with them but they are aware of any movement in the empty houses.

Because I have Remi this very hot weekend, and because my cottage neighbours are on the lake, I can't even take Kenya and just swim my troubles away. Remi is a sociable dog and he will visit the neighbours, and then I will have to worry about whether he is bothering them.

Kenya gets upset if she thinks their house might be being burgled, but she goes right home if they tell her to, and her visits are more in the nature of duty calls than social visits, so she would rather play with me and a stick than visit anyone else.

And, since they still need exercise, it means I must take more frequent walks ... and endure the heat, humidity and bugs.

I will be glad when the neighbours leave and/or Remi goes home. Then Kenya and I can return to our normal patterns of going out when we want to, swimming when it is hot, and generally doing as we please.

So far today I have taken the dogs for a long walk, made bread, helped Rowboat Flo move some things up the hill for a garage sale, and followed a fail proof recipe for mayonnaise which refused to emulsify, and I am worn out. And I still have to cut up and cook the batch of rhubarb Flo gave me yesterday, and walk the dogs at least once more.

But I may just go for a swim alone and take a nap first. It's that kind of day.

First Swim of the Season

Tammy, Carlos and Little Tammy came out with Teddy and Shea ... and brought dinner.

We couldn't convince Carlos to join us in the water. (We were moving the pump away from the muck.) He had "forgotten" his bathing suit. He was too shy to go in without it. He had to get ready for an exam. The excuses ran on, but of course we all knew that he was a hot blooded Latino who prefers bath tubs to lakes. It ended up that he worked harder than any of us running up and down the hill to run our errands for us. And of course he made the dinner ... chicken cacciatore ... yummy.


So there we were ... three women, a wharf spider that sent Tammy into paroxysms of terror, a leech that made Little Tammy nervous, Shea who wanted to play rescue dog, the pump, the electrical cord and the heat line ... and, of course, the cement blocks.


Little Tammy and I kept floating away for some reason, and neither of us was good at diving and doing stuff underwater, so Tammy ended up doing the lion's share of the work.




We struggled to attach the cement blocks to the heat line, and managed. Then we attached the pump to the last block, and placed it in one of the holes. The plan was to work together to get it out to the correct spot. Tammy was carrying the cinder block and we were to transport the rest of the paraphanalia attached to it.




That was when Little Tammy and I suddenly felt our feet go out from under us (it gets deep quickly and we are both short) and we floated away dropping our bits. Tammy discovered suddenly that she was the only person holding the cinder block plus its accoutrements and the weight took her straight to the bottom. After a bit more juggling, things seemed to be in place.

We also put the ladder I rescued in the spring in place.
Sarah arrived with Remi in the middle of all this.

Carlos took the Cinderblock Ballet photos.
He was errand boy, cook and photographer.

The water was great, by the way.

The Dirty Deed is Almost Done

I am sweating profusely, my hair is drenched and I feel almost as bad as I did the first night I had the flu, but the corpse is up at the top of the hill wrapped in four garbage bags in a metal garbage container. He stinks despite being enclosed in all that plastic, so I will have to move him by car to a place far removed from my dogs.

I have been working up the energy and courage to attack this problem for days, and planning my strategy.

When I finally began the actual removal, I discovered that he was not simply lying on the hard packed earth; he was entrenched in clay and held down by rocks as well as wedged against a pillar of cement blocks cemented together. Impossible to move or even tilt the tower, so I had to pry him out with the shovel.

... First a paw ... raccoons have the most beautiful paws.

I thought of Rocky, the raccoon who used to come when called; the one who took my steak-perfumed hand in his and bit down thinking it was a second piece of steak. I had to have the series of rabies shots.

I thought of the very large raccoon who stole a huge bag of doughnuts that belonged to Gus, and faced him down when Gus tried to retrieve his property.

I also thought of the days when there was a bounty on raccoons and my oldest daughter would go out with my scissors and remove the paws from roadkill in order to get $5. I'd have paid her a good deal more than $5 to get rid of this one.

The main body came loose next. Did you know that raccoon arms and legs look like hardened leather when they are dead?

I placed it on the plastic sheeting in the box and tied it into a bundle. I put the bundle into an old pail and placed a green garbage double bag over the pail and tilted the bundle into the bags and secured them.

Then I returned to the bits and pieces ... tail and hair ... and put them into another garbage bag.

Then came the task of getting it up the 22 steps to the house and the 39 steps to the parking lot where the garbage tins are. He weighed as much as a bag of sand and salt. Heavy. It took me a long time to make the whole two-trip journey with the two bags and the old pail.

By the time I got all of him into the garbage pail, I was exhausted. Being weak from the flu didn't help but neither did exerting myself while attempting not to breathe. That hill from the lake is an aerobic exercise without carrying a forty pound dead weight. And aerobic exercise is based on the concept of breathing while exerting yourself.

I am now going down to pour javex on the spot and on my shovel. I hope it kills the remaining germs and smell down there.

The condition of the shovel reminded me of one of the lines from a childhood ditty.

Does anyone else know the song we used to sing when there was a funeral party passing, or is only me because I lived for a couple of years next door to a funeral home. It went like this:

Did you ever think when the hearse went by
That you might be the next to die?

They lower you down about fifty feet
And all goes well for about a week,

And then your coffin begins to leak.

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out.
The worms play peek-a-boo on your snout.

Your stomach turns a slimy green
And your pus pours out like whipping cream.

Did you ever think when the hearse goes by
That you might be the next to die?

This whole exercise made me think of this, but I am also stalling. I would just as soon not return to the scene where I performed the dirty deed.

After the Party

It is a misty morning here at the lake, and I am recovering from a stomach flu that attacked me the night of my birthday. My birthday itself was wonderful, but the next few days have been fraught with less pleasant things.

My pump is in a mucky part of the lake and needs to be moved because it is constantly bringing sediment into the system. My water pressure becomes a dribble and I have to clean the filter to get it back. This interrupts washing cycles and makes filling kettles and water bowls or cans take longer, but is most annoying when it happens in the middle of a shower. Some days I was cleaning the filter half a dozen times in a day. Moving the pump is a chore I cannot manage without help because there are cinder blocks attached to the hose and the heat line. Once again I will ask friends.

There is a raccoon carcass rotting in the basement area of the old cottage which has to be buried or moved far enough away that dogs will not be tempted to roll in its execrescence. But first I have to calm my rather nervous stomach. I have prepared a waterproof box to shovel it into. This wouldn't be as urgent a matter except that Remi, the puppy, is arriving this evening, and he has already shown considerable interest in the corpse. Not only that, he is suffering from diarrhea, and I am sure that a raccoon snack would not help his medical condition. I will have Remi for the weekend.

And then there was the birthday card from Revenue Canada telling me I owe more money than I have already paid. RRSPs are hazardous to one's financial health. So is house building, especially when you hire the wrong people. The repairs to the roof which was done so badly will cost almost $9,000. It is the surprises that attack from behind when you least expect to be hit that are the killers, I am finding. Had I known how RRSPs work I would have bought bonds. Had I known how Mike worked I'd have hired a Quebec licensed contractor and paid up front.

The days since my birthday have not been all bad. I received a lovely birthday card from one of my oldest friends, and my plumber (a former student) told me how to fix my problem without incurring more costs. When I didn't appear on the road with Kenya, Rowboat Flo phoned or came over every day to ensure that I was alive, and yesterday Sarah ran an errand for me and walked Kenya.

Life may have its setbacks, but I still look out at this lake which is now an oasis of green after last night's rain, and I realize I am glad to be alive and here.

Tammy's photos

Sarah, Marta, the cake, and me on June 3


Carlos (under the mask) barbecuing with onlookers
(Marta on the right, me on the left, Teddy behind)

That's Why

"Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous - not just to some people in some circumstances - but to everyone all the time."
Thomas J. Watson 1874-1956, Founder of IBM

I agree with this statement completely. But I think it goes further. You cannot simply treat people as equals. It is important to believe they really are just as fully human as you yourself are.

That's why I became so angry with a former partner when he inexplicably discarded his veneer of civility and treated a waitress with horrid disdain. When I complained he said, "She's just a servant. What does it matter?" Who convinced him to believe that money and status made you better than anyone else? Was it his uneducated mother, married to the rich man in town who provided her with servants and allowed or encouraged her to go to the butcher shop and demand special treatment? Usually he managed some degree of courtesy, but the real person was the man who appeared to have the brain fart in that restaurant. Its force simply blew away a very thin veneer of good manners.

I also think that by practising being considerate all the time, we become considerate people; by being generous and courteous regularly, the habit becomes so ingrained that we become the people we have been trying to emulate.

That's why I think I didn't do a completely bad job of raising my kids. All my kids are accepting of people. They believe in our Charter of Rights and practise that belief in their daily lives. As youngsters, they joined me on marches to defend the rights of workers and women, and no Newfie jokes were allowed around our dinner table. It was only much later that I realized the substitution of "Stupid Person" for Newfie or Frenchman or woman, revealed a different kind of intolerance.

I really like my friends, at least partly because they are all open hearted and courteous to everyone. And it is never an act, and that's why I was so angry with the most recent man briefly in my life, and ended it before it really began. He looked down on my friends ... and wanted to be treated as someone special because he had published two very mediocre mystery novels. He believed he was better than most people.

That's why I don't get really close to snobs. Oh, some of them are perfectly polite to everyone, but they put up an invisible barrier against those they consider beneath them, a barrier that keeps out the riffraff. I feel uncomfortable around some rich people but not others.

And that's why I like living in the country and in the developing world. There is greater acceptance of people, and a realization that money is not the determining factor in deciding a man's worth. It is also harder to tell from outward appearances just who is a have, who a have not.

Sarah, Marta and the cake

Marta and Tammy June 3

The Pizza Party

We had fun ... I will post the photos separately.

Shrimp appetizers.

Too much pizza.

Enough wine.

A strawberry fountain of a cake.

Just three dogs this time: Kenya, Henry and Remi.

Fetching Sticks in a Stream

A Rainy Rainy Day ... Again

Kenya and I are toasting ourselves by the fire, and I am taking another day's reprieve from dealing with the problem that kept me awake a good bit of the night. I have a somewhat smelly dead raccoon lying in the old basement of the original cottage. He is between a big rock and a some cemented cinder blocks. I have been advised to bury him, but am trying to figure out the logistics of getting him from his almost final resting place to his final one. The dogs surprisingly have left him alone which makes me wonder what killed him. It also makes me a little nervous about dealing with his remains. The dogs have all been vaccinated against rabies but it has been years since I had the series of shots, and the last titre I had done was in 2002, just before I moved to Kenya for six months, when it was determined that I was still protected.


My birthday will go on all week. Marta, Tammy and Sarah are all coming to my pizza party this afternoon/evening. I am having lunch with Christina, a former student, at Chez Eric tomorrow, and on Thursday I am having dinner at my friend Roger's place. Then on the weekend, Remi is coming for a couple of days.

Dad's 100th birthday (and 68th Father's Day) on the 15th has unfortunately fizzled out.

I will go out for the mail and deliver some blackstrap molasses to Rowboat Flo around noon, and will read (an Anne Tyler novel called Morgan is Passing). I like her strange characters and the situations in which she places them.

I may also watch a movie.

The last one I watched was You've Got Mail which I watch a couple of times a year. I really am a romantic at heart I think, and I like that movie because they are humanly flawed people who really like one another. I like that they can open up to one another and discuss their deepest thoughts even before they meet in person. It is what internet dating should be but generally isn't.

So ... a book ... a movie ... a pizza party ... and a postponed burial. Not such a bad way to spend one's birthday!

Random Thoughts

Arrow and I talked yesterday on her 8th birthday ... she was quite definite ... she was still 7 till the magic hour of her escape from the womb. As we talked, she was surrounded by helium filled balloons and had a blue one attached to her toe.

Gabriel picked up Zeke who didn't bother to leave Kenya's food dish to greet him. I think he realized that his fears had been for nought as he stroked Kenya's head while we talked. Zeke was out in the porch rummaging about, quite unconcerned about going home with his person. The dogs were calm.

Both Gabriel and Debra were enthusiastic about Stephen Lewis' speech at the Bishop's convocation on Saturday. Gabriel was one of the graduates, and Debra had gone to be with her daughter. Debra was the guest minister at the UUC yesterday. I hadn't been to a service there for a very long time. I am glad I went. She spoke about unexpected pilgrimages when we travel, literally into the world and figuratively into ourselves, keeping ourselves open to experiences that can open our hearts and encourage us to live our lives more purposely. It made me think about my own "pilgrimage" this summer.

Not sure what today will bring. The lake is very misty this morning, and the sun has not started to burn it away. I'd like to plant the beef steak tomatoes, lavender, mint, thyme, and rosemary ... but likely won't get everything done as planting here requires dog proofing every site. But I can start.

That is one of the changes that has taken place in me. I used to feel the need to get things done RIGHT NOW. Lately I am comfortable with the idea that I can do a little today and a little more tomorrow. It likely has something to do with the enormity of the tasks surrounding me and the realization that I am just one small almost 68 year old woman. It is not patience so much as an understanding of what is possible.

Last Night ...

Last night I shared my bed with Zeke, and Kenya curled up nearby on the floor or her cushion.

He doesn't look as crazed this morning. Now he looks up at me worshipfully.

Too bad men don't grow on me the way dogs do!

And too bad they don't become more adoring with time.