Pa’s best friend is a legless farmer. Farmbeau reshingled two roofs for him and his wife last week in the glorious Indian Summer, and invited me along when he went to dump the old shingles in one of their fields. The farmer plans to bury this stonepile next year, and told Farmbeau to dump the shingles there.

I stood on the trailer hitch as he bent over to start throwing the shingles off it.

“Do you have an extra pair of gloves in the truck?” I asked, wanting to help.

“Just one,” he said, adding “but it’s better I do this by myself. With two people, one ends up getting hit by a shingle. You can’t help getting in each other’s way.”

With nails sticking out of those heavy shingles, that’s not a good idea.

I stood and watched him for a few more moments, then jumped down off the trailer hitch and walked up to the front of the truck, then out into the stubble, then back and forth several times, then back to watch him again. I’d put on a sweater, but there was enough cool breeze to chill me, and it wasn’t long till I was opening the truck door to see if Farmbeau had brought a jacket along. There were two, and I put on the warmest one, then walked back to the trailer all warm and comfy.

He was still heaving shingles off the truckbox and onto the stones. It was a job that would take another 10 minutes or so, and I was warm but wouldn’t stay that way if I didn’t get moving. It was too gorgeous out to sit in the truck, so I set off toward a small old house that once sheltered a large family and now stands gutless and open to the elements.

When I was about halfway there, I stopped and turned back to look at Farmbeau working away. The photo above is what I saw.

Then I turned to the north and snapped the picture below, which as you can see is a field of stubble.

It feels as if I’ve been away from writing for a very long time. Grandma’s second cataract was removed on Tuesday, so I have been in the city with her for three days — three long days of repeating everything twice; once for Grandma, once for Aunt Ada — at near the top of my lungs. I was getting cranky and impatient by the end, let me tell you. And hoarse.

After a poor sleep on the hide-a-bed in Aunt Ada’s living room on Tuesday, and up at 6 o’clock (a sleep-in compared to rising at 5:30 the previous morning) to have Grandma to the doc’s office for her 6:45 call, I was in no mood to be asked to stop a couple times on the way home to pick up stuff for the farm. I had been driving all over the city for several days, and had unconsciously geared myself to getting through one more drive: straight home. I wasn’t able to hide my displeasure when Farmbeau asked me for this favour, but insisted on doing it anyway. I’d have been a cow, not to.

Grandma and Aunt Ada were listening to my end of the telephone conversation, and Grandma said “I can see why you can’t live with a man! You should live alone!” Thinking about that comment, I gritted my teeth half the way home, with her in the back seat because the air bag in front could be dangerous to her 89-pound body. I mean the van’s air bag, not me.

Was I being selfish, or was I a normally generous person already stressed and not needing more errands to run? Obviously it all depends on how you look at it. None of the things he asked me to pick up were needed immediately or in the very near future, so it’s not as if the shopping was essential. Still, I would be going right by these two places and it shouldn’t take long to stop and go in.

Halfway home, in the town where the shopping needed to be done, I stopped at a service station for gas and a cup of hot black coffee. That seemed to adjust my attitude, as I consequently made three more stops and it didn’t hurt a bit.

As a matter of fact, while the clerk at one crazybusy store rang in my purchase of a 14-pound sledgehammer and a book of farm trivia I thought Farmbeau would like, I filled out a slip and tucked it into a draw box sitting on the counter. Last night I received a call saying I’d won a grocery voucher for $30. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

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At 3:30 in the morning I woke up with painful menstrual cramps and went on the hunt for the Midol I’d bought after the same thing happened last month. I looked in the bathroom drawer where I keep some painkillers. Not there. I looked in the cupboard above the stove where I keep some pills and elixirs. Not there. I looked in my purse, in my fannypack; I looked in the medicine cabinet downstairs. The Midol wasn’t anywhere I expected it to be.

Back to bed I went, fingers crossed, but the cramps returned immediately and so strongly that I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I got up and searched in all the same places, hoping I hadn’t been observant enough the first time. No luck. I dropped two Tylenols and went up into the top bunk (Barney was asleep on the couch) so as not to wake Farmbeau with my tossing and turning. Just as I was about to fall asleep, he came in, lifted me over the bed railing, and began carrying me down the hall.

“Put me down!” I said, clinging to his neck.
We got to the top of the stairs.
“Your back! I’ll walk! Put me down!”
“Quit giving orders,” he replied, and descended to the bedroom, laid me in the bed, crawled in beside me, snuggled up and put his arms around me. I kissed him and fell asleep contented.

The next morning I was late picking up Grandma, but we got to her doctor’s appointment in the city right on time anyway, at 1 o’clock. Her right eye was measured and examined by an assistant, we were given the same instructions as last time, then as we were leaving at 1:30, the receptionist told us to come back at 4:15 to see the doctor.

The guy was there in the office; why didn’t he see her then, when her appointment was? It seems these people assume their clients have nothing better to do than wait for them and run around at their beck and call. And don’t even get me started on the hospital experience the next day, when she had to be there at 6:15 a.m. in order to sit in the admitting room for 45 minutes before even being processed, followed by a three-hour wait before the 15-minute operation was performed.

Grrr ... all in the line of not taking a chance that the operating room might sit empty when a couple patients do not show up, as apparently happens.

Anyway, I called an old beau’s daughter, who was just getting off her shift as night auditor at a local hotel, and she came down and met me in the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. We had a nice visit and got caught up on each other’s lives. She’d like to come to the Jane Siberry concert with us in December.

I also got togther with another old/new friend. We met over 20 years ago when we both lived in a northern native village, and reconnected last fall when I saw her at a big craft sale in Saskatoon and thought she looked familiar. On Tuesday night we went to Whale Rider, at the Broadway Theatre. Nice movie. What a good actress that little girl was.

I had to drop off a book at my herb teacher’s, so after I took Grandma back to Aunt Ada’s late Tuesday morning, I drove over to her house. She wasn’t home (well I found out later that she was, but she didn’t hear me knock), so I left the book in her mailbox and carried on. I’d noticed an occult shop offering tea-leaf readings, and thought I’d go get one done.

The guy who ran the place sat me down with a cup of tea, asked me to put both hands over the top of the cup, think of two wishes, and tell him one. I said I wished for a big healing for Don, and kept to myself a wish about Farmbeau and I.

The guy took the cup from me and looked into it, then stated that I am very worried about my son (I am not worried, but I want a healing for him, some kind of progress) and that Farmbeau and I have to make up our minds whether we want this relationship or not, and do something one way or the other.

“He has to do more than just tell you he loves you,” the guy said, “and start acting like he loves you.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

I mentioned that Farmbeau and our relationship have changed since we moved here, and that I think the house may need a good clearing because of all the hard times Farmbeau has lived through in it, and the bitter resentment left from disappointments in his life.

“I can help you with that,” the guy told me. “I will give you some candles and incense and dead sea salt, and you can do the work there, and I will do it from here. I can help you. If I take you on, I would only charge you $200. That’s peanuts. I usually charge $75 an hour for what I do. But if I take you on —”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I am not looking for someone to do anything for me. I did not ask you to mentor me. But I could use a ritual or two to help focus my intentions and powers so that I can use my own abilities more effectively. Do you know anything about that?”

“Oh sure,” he said, walking over to shelves of herbs and potions. “I’ll give you these two blessed candles, and you take this and here’s what you do with it, and take this, and I’ll give you that. That will be 15 dollars, and 25 for the teacup reading. How’s that?”

I handed over $40 and walked out of the dusty little shop, paper bag in hand, glad to get away from him.

Twice in the past 20 years someone has come to me for a tarot reading, and thought that what the cards showed was not true. When that happens, it is more likely that the client was not willing to hear the truth. It may take a few days of thinking about it for the client to understand the message of the cards. That’s why I paid this fella for what I consider to be a very poor tealeaf reading: he put in the time, in spite of the fact that most of it sounded like pontificating. But maybe, just maybe, there was truth there that I am unwilling to see. And that’s why I didn’t argue. I paid him for the blessed (or so he claimed) candles, and the herbal incense he said he made himself, and the dead sea salt: because I want them, I want to use them, whether they are worth what he charged me when he *gave* them to me, or not.

I’m thinking about the whole exchange, for of course there was more said that I haven’t written down. Not for a moment do I believe most of the stuff he said about Farmbeau, or that the spirits are drawn to me because of my intuitiveness and kindheartedness and I need this dickwad to help me protect myself from them, or any of the other things he offered to provide his unrequested services for. My feeling about it is that if I need protection from anything, it is from this man’s rather nutbar effluence.

The reader didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already considered, myself, upon many an occasion. But in among what seemed of no value at all, I heard the odd thing worth remembering. That’s why I think the $25 was not an entire loss.

It was also a reminder, from the powers that be, to look inward for my answers, not outward. This psychic did not give me any new information or perspective, nor anything particularly useful. I am no further ahead, that’s for sure. But I suppose the reminder that I’m my own best resource was worth $40.