If It Cries…..Love It

Flotsam & Jetsam (Photo credit: Domiriel)

Don’t you just love lists? I love lists. I don’t love “to do” lists, as they are a little demanding, but with my memory on the wane they have become annoying necessities. Recently I came across a list that makes a lot of sense to me. It is a life “to do” list that was included in some things a retired teacher friend gave me as she was going through the flotsam and jetsam of material left over from decades of teaching. She has a preponderance of binders she no longer uses, and since I need somewhere for my vast stores of “stuff”  I have accumulated we have come to a mutual agreement—I will gladly take her binders, and she gets to declutter.

Anyway….that is all a preface to a sheet of paper I found in one of the binders. It is called “Rules for a Happy Home.”  I am going to change the name of it to Rules for a Happy Life, as they can be applied to the world at large, as well as to our smaller worlds at home. For lack of a better term, my friend was what we at one time called  a Home Ec teacher. Her responsibilities though were much wider than the days of old when we learned how to cook and sew (I learned that I hate sewing, and cook only because I have to.)

The list is concise, and if you think about it, and if you follow it, you pretty well have a lot of life covered. So without further ado, here it is:

If you wear it………….hang it up.

If you get it out……….put it away.

If you sleep on it……….make it up.

If you drop it……….pick it up.

If you open it………close it.

If you get it dirty………….wash it.

If you turn it on………….turn it off.

If it rings………….answer it.

If it howls……….feed it.

If it cries…………love it.

Admittedly I don’t follow all these tenets, but I am working on it. I usually hang it up if I wear it. At my house, if I want to confuse people I hang their coats in the closet, rather than leave them draped over chairs and couches and tables. After a search of the house, some colourful language, and a plea to help them find their coats, I tell them I put their coats  in the closet.  They get a confused look on their faces (yes, that is you husband John and eldest son Adam) and then blame me for hiding their coats on them. One would have thought that a coat placed in a coat closet would not be the subject of a mystery, but at my house, it is.

I do not always answer it if it rings, nor do I always make it up after I sleep on it—but we all have to have some goals. I love the last one: If it cries…….love it—we all cry out in some manner at times, and we all want to be loved.

Artistic Licence: Gardening

List of botanical gardens in Australia (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This was originally written in 2011, but as the planting season is almost upon us, I thought it apropos:

“But each spring…a gardening instinct, sore as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground.” ~ Lewis Gannett

As I write this, I am, for the fifth season, a gardener whether I want to be or not. My eldest son, Adam has decided to “tame another little bit of ground” as Gannett so poetically states, and in so doing, I become part and parcel of the package that is our garden.  Do not get me wrong, I love the fact that he takes such an interest in our little piece of land and tills a small chunk to harvest over the summer months and into the Fall.  The process every spring is not easy. Over the winter and early spring the parcel of soil allotted to the gardening plot has become overgrown and in great need of both weeding and the turning of soil. But Adam will attack the task, (with help from anyone he can corral into it) and the plot will once again be revealed and ready for planting.

As usual, we will have a preponderance of peppers– most of them of the hot, hotter, and out of this world variety, but a couple of bell pepper plants will be purchased in a nod to my rather delicate taste buds. We have in the past had great luck with peppers, so we plant what we know. Of course there will be a number of varieties of tomatoes—big ones and little ones for both salad and slicing, and should I get productive, freezing to make into chili and soup over the winter.

We will plant lettuces of purple, bitter, and leaf varieties, and the seeds for carrots and peas. This year we have found a surprise in our garden from last season—onions we knew we had planted but could not find in the fall. Cousins to our chives,  they  have taken the attitude of perennials. We will also plant a fresh crop of onions— thus making our garden ripe for  the creation of a great salsa.

My job when it comes to the garden is to keep it watered. Occasionally I weed, and happily pick whatever is produced and work it into my everyday menu. No great gourmet am I, but fresh vegetables just cry out for a little creativity.  Swiss chard has been a mainstay of our garden, as it grows plush and easily. I have done a little research and found some great recipes to use up this bounty.

According to Louise Beebe Wilder, “In his own garden every man may be his own artist without apology or explanation.” I like her sensibility about gardening, as it gives one a certain amount of freedom. As we have now been tillers of the soil for a few years, we have learned a few things, but according to the poet, Vita Sackville-West, “The more one gardens, the more one learns; and the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.”  A universal truth.

English: Vita Sackville-West 1919 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My parents had a huge garden when I was a kid. We had strawberries, raspberries, both red and black (I loved the black ones—one of my favourite pastimes as a kid was to pick the black raspberries off the bush and pop the juicy treats into my mouth), as well as every vegetable known to (wo)mankind. I believe there is a satisfaction that comes from producing food for yourself—a feeling of independence in a world so dependent on outside factors. Of course we are at the mercy of Mother Nature, but what we produce is not only “grown close to home” (a claim made by a grocery chain to lure us into their produce aisles), it is actually grown at home.

There is a little bit of magic to growing your own vegetables, something the “unknown gardener” reveals in this pithy observation: “More grows in the garden than the gardener has sown.” Now, I know that “unknown” was not referring to weeds, but I find Reverend Thomas Fuller’s words, uttered in the 17^th century comforting:

“A good garden may have some weeds.”

An Acquired Taste

Lake Erie, looking southward from a high rural bluff, near Leamington, Ontario (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What is poetry?

Poetry is pulling images out of the sky, the air, the universe, and bringing them down to earth. ~Marisa De Franceschi

The chairs were fairly comfortable. The room was not crowded, but neither was it bare. It was filled with people who love the written word, and attended to hear it read aloud. A treat. I must admit that my appreciation for poetry has been acquired—like the taste of beer or olives or octopus. And now that I have acquired it, I like to feed it.

Recently an opportunity to feed the poetry beast was offered at my local library. Three poets from Windsor, Ontario were featured, and provided the audience with three very different flavours of the genre. To say that one poet was better than another would be a misnomer, but of the three, one appealed to my sense of the familiar more than the other two. A second poet drew on the raw realities of life beautifully—but her poetry was to my mind uncomfortable.  The third was a true poet, in that if poetry was not his first calling, it is most definitely his primary form of expression. His was an educated palate and his poetry brilliantly executed. I was jealous of his implementation of the English language.

I tend to understand and like the simple written word—if its imagery is too opaque or its metaphors too tangled, I lose patience, and am reminded of all those times at university when I was expected to explicate a poem rather than enjoy it. I love Marisa De Franceschi’s definition of poetry quoted above—“pulling images out of the sky, the air, the universe and bringing them down to earth”. When a poet does not do that, does not bring their poetry down to earth, I am lost in their wordiness.

De Franceschi’s book of poetry, “Random Thoughts”, is rift with images brought down to earth. One of her poems, called “Be Still” spoke to my depths. She said that it was derived from her personal observations of the ships on Lake Erie that she could see from the windows of  her summer cottage:

“Out on the Lake,

When the gale turns ferocious

There is only one thing for the mammoth ships to do.

Stop and stay put.

Be still.

They do not attempt to force themselves along the seaway,

They sit still and wait.

They do not go up against it, try to fight it.

They wait for the winds to calm,

Wait for them to have their say.

The ships will continue their journey

When the tempest dies down

And gives permission

To head out again

To deliver the goods.”

I think this poem is especially useful as we venture out into the fray of everyday life–sometimes we just have to sit still and wait and let the tempest die down in order to head out again.

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Milestone in Mind of Beholder

Birthday Card made with Iris Folding (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most birthdays live the  longest.” ~wry observation by that wit, Anonymous

Just had a birthday. Not a milestone birthday—apparently that is next year when I finally turn forty. Okay forty plus a lot more—but as I told a lady this week who I met in the grocery store and looked absolutely amazing for someone on the cusp of 80—it is only a number. No, it is not the age that I am turning that I find discomforting when I have a birthday; it is where I am as opposed to where I thought I would be.

A bit of a dreamer, lay philosopher (I say this with all humility—we are all philosophers as our beliefs are derived from the successes and failures we have experienced), seeker, and eternal student of life, I find that I am nowhere near to having fulfilled my dreams in some capacities, and far past fulfillment in others.

I share my birthday with Queen Elizabeth, and was once again disappointed this year when I did not receive an invitation to tea to celebrate the occasion together. Did not even get a birthday card from her. Now, of course, I am joking—but when I told a group of friends of my disappointment at a birthday lunch, one of the women said—“Well, did you send her a card?” I just love it when people make these kinds of observations—how can I expect her to know that we share a birthday? So, next year I will send her a card and see what happens. Or maybe I will send her one of  those “Sorry, I’m late” cards that I am so fond of—really, most of them are much more clever than the ‘on time’ birthday cards, probably because they tend to make grovelling humorous.

My second disappointment at reaching the age that I am now is that Margaret Atwood has not yet fulfilled her promise to have tea with me. After all, she is the mother of Canadian literature, and a bit of a heroine to me.  Once, when she signed one of her books for me, I asked her to put an invitation to tea on the inside cover of the book. Slightly puzzled, and looking askance at me, she did as I requested, probably to get the line moving so she could scrawl her lovely signature in the next book, hoping that the next devoted reader would not make a stupid request. Now Peggy, as I like to think of her, lives on Pelee Island part-time, so it would not be that much of a stretch for her to invite me to tea. (And I would be happy to fight a bout of seasickness to join her.) But, just as I was reminded by my friend that I had not sent the Queen a card, I remember that Peggy does not have my address. I think I may just send it to her and see what happens.

Tea Time (Photo credit: Maia C)

My third big disappointment is that I do not have a butler. Seriously. When I was in my early twenties, I was determined to have a butler. I thought that one had “arrived” if one had a butler. Now, of course, with the responsibility and need for a butler, comes a certain way of life. At my particular juncture, it would be very silly for me to have a butler, and admittedly, it does sound like the yearnings of an unbalanced, albeit harmless, being. But, think about—would it not be nice to have an Alfred–Batman’s wise butler who gives good counsel, and sets out your bat outfit just so? Or what about the butler in the “Family Affair”, Mr. French—I think that is where I first became aware of butlers. Servitude was not the essential element, but kindness and words of wisdom were. I would love to have someone who would guide me ever so gently through life, as these two did, and Alfred continues to do.

I have a number of goals I still want to achieve, which are not quite as “out there” as having tea with the Queen or Margaret Atwood and hiring a butler. Being somewhat of a late bloomer, I am sure I will reach many of them. On reflection, (which is part of what birthdays are all about) I have lots to be grateful for, and lots to look forward to. I will leave you with my husband’s standard birthday joke which I find strangely comforting: “If you can’t stay young, at least you can stay immature.”

A Slap on the Chops

MacDonald Tartans [8] (Photo credit: † Jimmy MacDonald †)

Note of Explanation: This was written just after the last federal election in Canada when the parties all declared that they were going to be more civil. Since it was written, the illustrious leader of the NDP, Jack Layton, is now making his parliamentary points (I like to think) in heaven, and the new leader has just recently been elected.

“I have often seen people uncivil by too much civility, and tiresome in their courtesy.” ~ Michel de Montaigne

Civility: a lofty goal– but is it really what we want to achieve in the House of Commons?  Defined as gracious, polite, courteous and considerate, it is certainly, in most arenas, something to strive for. But in our House of Commons?—I am not so sure.  Michel Eyguem de Montaigne scoffed at civility, and as he was a “great French Renaissance thinker” who studied mankind, who are we to argue? He lived from 1533-1592 and was a sceptic who used culture, literature and science “to increase our sense of relativity of all man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives.”

Since I was not really sure what that last sentence meant, I looked up relativity and found that   its philosophical definition is “dependence on a factor that varies according to context.”  While that did not really clarify the subject for me, nonetheless I am feeling much more intelligent now.  I will leave understanding it to another day. Suffice to say that de Montaigne was well-regarded and quite bright—and he does not think that civility is necessarily always the answer.

I do not like brutal incivility, but what is Parliament without a little haggling?  The finding that Jack Layton was deemed the least polite politician on the Hill by researchers at McMaster University, is according to newspaper columnist Elizabeth Renzetti  “shocking”. She says the conclusion is, “almost as if someone had seen the Friendly Giant rampaging down Sparks Street munching a Prius along the way.” She believes that Parliament is “supposed to be about cut and thrust, scoring points off your opponent, presenting yourself as the coldest, most capable wit in the land” and is preparation “for the debates that win elections.”

I hope the promises made to the new Speaker of the House by the leaders to refrain from haggling and dare I say it, verbal sparring which makes the whole thing interesting, are soon forgotten.

Renzetti made the point that if you cannot be witty then at least  be “quotably bad-tempered.” She noted that “many students became interest in Canadian history only when they read that John A. MacDonald had once crossed the House to confront Oliver Mowat over some perceived slight and bellowed, ‘You damn pup! I’ll slap your chops!’”

I understand that sometimes the haggling gets out of hand—I have heard some things come out of the mouths of the Parliamentarians that should have been swallowed rather than spat—but it is when the incivility crosses the line of no longer dealing with an issue, and instead a personality, culture, or gender that my hackles are raised.

Closer to home, as the ever loyal ink-stained reporter who covers our local council, I love it when things get “interesting” in Council Chambers–when those sitting on Council show some passion.  Now, I do not want to lead you astray, no member has ever gotten out of their seat and threatened to slap someone’s chops, but on occasion, members have been known to get their points across in colourful ways—and where they stand on a certain subject is not left to question. As it should be. These are the people who use our tax dollars to improve our community. I don’t know about you—but I like to hear how they feel about issues and not just rubber stamp them after hearing a report from Administration. They question, they debate, they sometimes use language the Mayor reminds them is not council chamber worthy, but they get their messages across.

Now I am not calling for Councillor Ron to bash Councillor Bob upside the head, or Councillor Gail to comment on Councillor Gord’s outfit, nor do I want Councillor Sandy to take Deputy Mayor Tammy to task for her choice of brief case, but I do expect them, over the course of time, to reflect their personal municipal passions in the way they debate and vote. And if sometimes they get into a bit of a scrum, all the better—that is how an issue is illuminated and scrutinized.  And if truth be told, a little excitement in Council Chambers keeps the audience awake, and this reporter furiously taking notes.

So no matter the level of government, from municipal, provincial to federal, civility should not be the overriding issue—it should be tempered with a dose of passion. Not the passion which made a member of the British Parliament declare the Speaker of the House a “stupid, sanctimonious dwarf”, but instead fiery debates worthy of the issues.

The Temperate Zone

Line art representation of the Temperate zone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is from my column of the same name “On The Homefront” which appears weekly in the Kingsville Reporter:

Fair play. Turnabout. All is fair in love and war. Okay, this column has nothing to do with the third phrase, just thought I would throw it in, in case the first two did not catch your attention. I have written ad nauseum about happiness: what it is, how to attain it, and various experiments –“The Happiness Project” conducted by Gretchen Rubin springs immediately to mind, to convince you that happiness should be not our goal, but our place of rest.

On the other hand there are people who believe “this quest for happiness at the expense of sadness, this obsession with joy without tumult, is dangerous, a deeply troubling loss of the real, of that interplay, rich and terrific, between antagonisms.” This view is held by Professor Eric G. Wilson, creator of the book “Against Happiness”.  Author David Gates joins Wilson in defying the worship of happiness, saying that Wilson has written “A lucid, literate defence of feeling like hell—and, in fact, of feeling itself.” I don’t believe that the pursuit of happiness necessarily erases feelings, particularly the melancholy ones, but instead provides a respite.

Though Wilson quotes Ralph Waldo Emersonto prove his point, I think that by taking Emerson’s words as a way to conduct your life, he hit a middle ground, rather than an extension of his argument. Emerson said, “I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods…The middle region of our being is the temperate zone.”

Ralph Walso Emerson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

But who writes about the temperate zone—that in between place, where, let’s face, most of us are to be found? I agree that the eternal focus on happiness makes it even more difficult to attain. But to give in, and believe as James Hillman claims, that “Depression opens the door to beauty of some kind” is not really the way I want to go either.

I suppose to make his argument, Wilson must make some outrageous claims. He theorizes that to foster a society of total happiness is to concoct a culture of fear; that mirth gives away our courage; that we relinquish our hearts for contentment; and our “blissed out culture”  ignores sadness and feelings. I am not sure what world Wilson lives in, but I believe his book is only telling one side of the story. He tells the story intelligently, in hovering ivory tower language understood (maybe) by academes, but he doth protest too much as my favourite bard has said.

Before I was romanced by all this “send only positive statements out to the universe” and “law of attraction stuff” (being romanced does not necessarily mean being convinced), I heartily endorsed and practiced Emerson’s “moderate” stance. Neither a “glass half empty nor glass half full” kind of person, I have always believed in not checking my scepticism at the door, but neither do I invite it in. I agree that as (Samuel Taylor) Coleridge once said and Wilson quoted, “The thirsty man knows water more keenly than the sated one.” But once having known thirst, one has to admit that being sated is a much happier state.

In her attempt at corralling happiness, Gretchen Rubin found that being unhappy limited her. She did not find any great truths in her malaise, in fact she was suffering from a “recurrent sense of discontent”.

Wilson believes that “our recent culture has made it startlingly easy to live only in a world of personal dreams, a realm from which hard reality has largely been vanquished.” Again, I ask, ‘what world is he living in?’ The world of Lewis Black, I guess. Black says that he has never been Mr. Happy, and after reading Wilson’s book, he feels a “lot better about myself. It almost made me happy,” And therein lies the rub. If being unhappy makes you happy, then quite possibly you are not “deep or soulful” enough to be part of Wilson’s hypothesis. Attaining happiness is not just for soulless rubes, as Wilson seems to believe.

At one time I would have embraced Wilson and his theory that serious things are no longer serious if happiness enters the equation. But there is that place, that temperate zone where we are neither grinning idiots nor doleful intellectuals—that place that Emerson described, where we “can expect nothing”, then be “fully thankful” when we receive something.

Home: Nourishment for the Soul

Cover of Belonging

Where is your home? Not necessarily the place you live right now, but the comfortable place you go to in your mind that says “home”. Home is one of my favourite words—it just feels, well, like… home. Home is the place where you are most comfortable, where you are most yourself, where you are not on guard. It is the place where you can put up your feet, and say ahhh! audibly without embarrassment.

According to Isabel Huggan, in her book “Belonging” there is “no word for home” in her newly adopted country, France. She said that “For a long time this disconcerted me, and I kept running up against the lack of it as if it were a rock in my path, worse than a pothole, worse than nothing.” But she found a way around it and used some variations in the French language to express “home” such as “notre foyer” which means “our hearth” or “notre maison”, which most of us who have a passing acquaintance with French know means “our house”.  But most often, she says, she uses the concept of “chez” which she says indicates both the “physical location and the place where family resides, or the notion of a comfortable domestic space.”

There is that word again: comfortable—and is that not the true essence of home? I don’t know about you, but when I am comfortable, it feels like home. One of the places my mind returns to when I think of home is my childhood home—the place where I grew up.  I was particularly “at home” in my bedroom—it was my sanctuary, shared though it was with my sister. It was a place where you could go to, shut the door, and be yourself. And the fact that it was not entirely my room just added to the “hominess”—it was a shared space. That is not to say, that home has to be a “shared space” to be home—but it is one of the derivatives for me at this point in my life.

Another place I return to as “home” in my mind is my room in residence when I was in second year at university. I remember very distinctly arriving back at the dorm early one morning, having driven in from Kingsville with my dad after having spent a Sunday at my other “home”—my parents’ house. My dad worked in Windsor, and had to leave early (5:00 a.m.—an ungodly hour for a university student if you are getting up and not just going to bed).  It was dark, my roommate was still sleeping, so I crawled into my narrow bed and thought about my life. I was caught up on all my assignments, I enjoyed school, I had lots of friends, I had a boyfriend—and life was good. I had just come back from a wonderful Sunday dinner the night before, surrounded by family. I was not only home, but “at home” in my skin.

This brings me to my current “home” and the Easter dinner I enjoyed yesterday with my immediate family. It was a wonderful family meal, though a little stressful for me in the making because the stupid prime rib refused to cook properly so ended up in the microwave {what sacrilege!} to bring it to a temp that would not kill us—but I digress. There was much laughter and kidding and despite my problem with the roast, good food.

An unexpected synonym for home in my thesaurus is the word “family”. Unexpected, but not surprising. Of course some of the other words for home are house, abode, habitat, or domicile. The latter is a lovely sounding word–I suppose partly because it reminds one of the word “domestic”, which my Encarta Dictionary defines as relating to home, or relating to family.

Home is where the heart is—a warm, if overused cliché, it really is an accurate description. Home can be anywhere, as Isabel Huggan has found. As a writer she has been able to do what she does “anywhere” and has found herself making a “house home” many times. Of her last move to Frances she said “And so it follows that I shall learn, as I have learned in other places to make this house home. Over time, I shall find out how to grow in and be nourished…”

That is what home is—it is a place we can grow in and be nourished.

The Ears Have It!

English: A milk chocolate Easter Bunny. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Happy Easter!  May the Easter Bunny’s hop down the bunny trail wind your way with lots of chocolate Easter bunny effigies. And may you eat the ears first as statistics (gathered by someone with nothing better to do) bear out that most people do. Realistically, where else would you start—the ears are the most vulnerable and easiest way to chomp your way through the delectable. It just makes sense.

Easter when I was a little girl meant a new dress, fancy hat, and shiny shoes. There are many a pic of me and my sister (or my sister and I) in our Easter bonnets, with knobby little knees peeking out from under beautiful “designer” dresses (with crinolines no less: for those of you too young to remember and if my memory serves me right, a crinoline was like a slip with a stiff netting that made your dress flare out). We wore cute little white ankle socks tucked oh-so-delicately into our Mary Janes (those black or white patent leather shoes with the strap across the instep to keep them from falling off). Our “designer” dresses were made lovingly by our mother, who was quite the seamstress and milliner of some note, as every year she created a new hat for each of us to wear to church on Easter Sunday. At that time you could buy a wide hat band and add whatever accoutrements you wanted to it—silk-like flowers, lace, ribbon, netting—the choices were endless, and voila—you had your new and original Easter bonnet to wear to church.

I still remember opening my Easter basket and finding the requisite chocolate Easter bunny or chicken, and all those pastel coloured marshmallow-y eggs. I loved those colourful eggs at the time, but today the memory of their utter sweetness makes me shutter. I am not sure why, but our chocolate Easter bunnies always ended up in the freezer. We were allowed to occasionally break off a piece and eat it for a treat—but we never ate a whole bunny in one sitting (which was probably a good thing—throwing up all over our Easter outfits would be none too festive.)

Today, Easter revolves around church for some, eating, and Easter treats. I may be foregoing the traditional ham this year in favour of prime rib as it seems to be on sale everywhere.  I still may acquiesce and get one of those spiral cut honey hams—they have a charm all of their own. I have never made a “ham from scratch” since I left my family home—but I distinctly remember crowning a huge ham with round pineapple slices, and sticking the cloves in the diamond points, carved into the top of the ham ever so expertly by my mother.

Scalloped potatoes always seemed to accompany the ham, and yellow mustard was scooped out of the jar into a crystal bowl for polite presentation, and if I remember correctly we always had asparagus and some kind of green jello salad with cottage cheese embedded in it. Dessert was angel food cake (not out of a box) with a lemony icing to welcome spring. And the bonus about Easter when I was a kid was that we had the week after Easter off too, to nibble on more of our bunnies—perhaps the tummy, arm or foot, as the ears of course were already gone, broken off on Easter and devoured before anyone noticed.

Easter, to those who do not attend church is the harbinger of spring. And though I no longer acquire a new Easter bonnet, my knees are no longer knobby, and I get to wear “big girl” shoes without a strap, I miss the days of crinolines, frozen chocolate bunnies, and a whole week off to do as I please.

Enjoy your Easter, and if you haven’t done so for a while, get yourself a chocolate bunny and eat the ears first. You will feel like a kid again!

Chocolate easter bunny. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)