my vehicle served as a deterrent in case the
beasties, herded several miles to their home pasture,
should decide to bolt down the wrong road instead of following the hay wagon

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>><><><><>

Little sister Joan was calling from Kelowna one morning when she mentioned that she hadn’t been feeling very well lately.

“Oh?” I said. “You’re getting a cold?”

“No, it’s something that will last a little longer than that.”

My antennae went up in instant concern, but I tried not to sound worried. “Like what?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re pregnant? Wheeeee!” I squealed and hooted, forgetting the tender ear on the other end of the line. A new baby! Then came a deep twinge in my heart: Mom isn’t here. It would have hurt her to know she wouldn't be.

She would be so happy, so excited. Even when Mom was alive, we’d already stopped thinking Joan was likely to have another child and, like my sister and her husband, were content with our little Jordan.

The phone call was several weeks ago, and Joan asked me to keep the news to myself until she reached the 12-week point. Now she has, so I can make my dancing-auntie announcement. It’s a fair bet that sister Karen and I will be making a trip to Kelowna in late May to hold the little sweetheart in our arms.

I remember Mom telling me, not long before she died, about a dream that had upset her. I don’t have the courage right now to flip through my journals of the year of her illness in case I recorded it, but what I do recall was that in the dream, Mom was talking to a little boy and said, “Don’t you know who I am?” She was shocked when he didn’t, and told him she was his grandmother.

Perhaps the dream only reflected Mom’s pained regret at missing a possible future. But to me, now, it seems prophetic.

Funny how I can believe Mom is around, and be sad that she’s not, at the same time. This was played out in a TV episode of Medium last night, where the psychic Alison discovers via newspaper that her highschool boyfriend has recently been killed in a freak accident. Even though she has this very day seen and talked to him “in spirit,” she still cries when she finds he is no longer in the physical. I thought “that doesn’t make sense,” but if you think of how attached we are to the physical bodies of our loved ones, maybe it does. My friend the Wise One has said we grieve for their bodies, even while we are still in touch with their spirits.

I have been thinking a lot of Aunt Jean, as Tuesday marked one year since she passed.

~Night Table Notebook~

From an architecture interview on The Arts Tonight on CBC radio:

“Too much order, things get dull;
Too much liberty, you get chaos.”