the extent of Christmas junk at our house

A family member of one of our soldiers killed in Afghanistan has made a substantial personal investment to create and market a calendar commemorating Canadians who have died over there. The calendars can be seen and ordered by going to this website. I am not personally acquainted with anyone serving in the Canadian Armed Forces right now, but there is a young lad whose dad comes from Margo and whose mom works at the Co-op hardware store in Wadena. I often ask about him when I go in there, and she tells me she doesn't worry about him, or tries not to; that he was looking forward to going to Afghanistan. If she manages not to lie awake nights, I'm glad. I hold my breath, dread hearing his name when that of another dead soldier is announced over the radio, but I don't say that to her.

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The other day our local CBC radio station aired an interview with a woman who is leaving Saskatoon because she can't afford a place to live there. She has an infant and a teenager and has been having such a rough time for so long that she feels she has no choice but to farm her oldest son out to relatives and take her baby with her to Vernon, where her parents and brother live, so that at least when she is desperate for food or shelter someone may help her, because she's been shit out of luck when it came to accessing services in Saskatoon. She said that just behind the swanky new Husky station north of the city, on the Yellowhead highway, there is a tent city and that families are living there. In this cold! With children? That's terrible, and I wanted to do something. But what? I wrote the radio station and asked them to follow up with actions that concerned listeners could take, and apparently they did, though I missed the show the next day. However I received an email detailing several options, one of which is to make a donation to the SOS Overnight Shelter Group. That's what I'm going to do. Its mailing address is 131 Wall St., Saskatoon, SK S7K 2C2. If you're sitting in a warm, cosy house and have presents under your tree, your bills paid, and money in the bank, please consider sending a cheque to help these people out. Even $10 will make a difference; it adds up.

It was 30 below and never really got toasty in the van, but Emil and Everett didn't care. They were on their way to their dad's, where "the livin' is easy," and it sounds as if, should they have their druthers, they'd never come back. Hm. What am I doing wrong? Oh yeah. Making them do supper dishes, not driving Emil all over the countryside to visit people at his whim, and not letting Everett play videogames to his heart's content. I am the meanest mother of them all!

We passed this scene of bulldozed trees on our way to North Battleford to meet Gord. It is always sad to see another small forest cleared to make room for more fields. I doubt as a society we really need more space for agriculture, but individual farmers are notorious for thinking of their croppable land gain rather than the effects of decimating the tree population, which the planet is already experiencing. In this day and age surely they all know better, but they are thinking of the dollar, and considering the difficulty making a living by farming these days, it's understandable. Still, it's a pity.

In North Battleford we took the boys to a restaurant and fed them a hot meal before Gord loaded them up in his vehicle and they headed west. We retraced the miles back to Saskatoon and found Cathy out shovelling her driveway. Scott hopped out and took the shovel out of her hands to finish the job, as any self-respecting farm boy will, and Cathy went and grabbed a broom to sweep off the steps instead.

Scott and I looked at each other across the supper table last night and agreed that neither of us, even now, can figure out how we avoided being in a serious smash-up in Saskatoon on Sunday. We're still shaking our heads, trying to understand it.