aug20-04 fri eve
9:55 p.m.

We are beat, Scott and I. I’ve laid down for a while after making and eating supper, hoping a rest will give me a second wind. He eats and goes out to do chores, then comes in and sits at the computer. I come upstairs and tidy the kitchen as I wait for the kettle to boil for peppermint tea. He cuts steak (our special guest’s menu request when I enquired) into cubes to marinate for Vincent’s visit tomorrow, and I put two clear glass mugs on the table for us, and pour boiling water into the teapot before covering it with the knitted cozy.

He tells me they got a ridiculously low price for some cattle at auction yesterday; the cattle were “stolen,” he says. He finishes with the meat and puts it in the fridge, and I ask if he’ll have tea. I imagine we might sit together for a while. But he ignores the teapot and goes downstairs, so I come in here, sit in this chair at the desk, glance over a couple emails I haven’t had a chance to answer yet, chat with Everett, who is reading here in the room.

*** 10:52 p.m. ***

This afternoon I walked around Grandma’s house, looking at her monkshood, her asparagus, her roses, hollyhocks and petunias, wondering WHO was that woman who sat in the back of her brother’s car en route from Westbank to Salmon Arm just three months ago and struggled desperately so that he and her sister in the front seat would not know she was crying? What were all those tears about, and why do I not feel the same way now? Was all that weeping really just “making mountains out of molehills” or was there shock that has passed or was it a normal grieving or fear, or what the hell was it and why do I no longer seem to be feeling the same way? Mom still has terminal cancer as far as we know. Am I more hopeful now than I was then? More resigned? Have I processed something through or just pushed it down somewhere less visible? Curious.

*** 10 a.m. Saturday ***

Cloudy and cool, but it’s a big day. We are borrowing a wheelchair ramp and picking Vincent up at the lodge to bring him out for a late-lunch barbecue. We won’t be able to get him into the house if it rains, though, so we have our fingers crossed against that.

It rained a bit during the night. If only it had done the same the night before! Everything wouldn’t have frozen. Our tomatoes froze right through the coverings I’d put on them. Local gardens are largely finished now.

xoxo
etc

A couple just leaving the yard at dusk stopped as I was picking up Macdonald's restaurant litter that some dipstick had thrown on the road outside the driveway.
"A vacuum where the brain should be," the wife remarked with disgust, then "Go cover your garden when you're done."

I went downstairs to the storeroom and dug out the pillow case stuffed with old sheets and blankets, and headed for the garden. There were only enough to cover half the tomatoes and most of the peppers, but that's better than nothing, and nothing is what we would have if I hadn't because Scott announced the temperature had gone down to -3 C during the night.

It's not a huge loss for us, as we'd planted just enough for fresh eating this fall. But the freeze was widespread and severe and that means area farmers have lost their crops. As my sister said when we spoke by phone this morning, "There goes two-thirds of our income for this year." The other third will probably come from crop insurance. Farmers who didn't buy it will be in bad shape.

How disheartening it must be to farm for a living, sometimes. Karen's husband said this year's crop was the best he'd ever had; and now there's virtually nothing left of it.

aug19-04 thurs

~finally put the top coat on the wall
collage the other day ~

Okay, I’ve been sitting here reading email and a few of my favourite online journals for an hour and fifteen minutes. It is time to move my butt and get ready for the day!

But first ...

John’s entry today mentioned butter. Here’s Mom’s friend’s recipe for butter that’s healthy — well, more healthy than margarine, and more healthy than pure butter, because you’re getting good-for-you oils into your old bod. You mix this up in a blender and store it in the fridge, where it retains the flavour of pure butter and remains spreadable like soft margarine.

Mary Jo’s Butter

1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup grapeseed oil

Voila! I tried it after returning from my trip to Salmon Arm in early summer, and now I am worry-free about buttering my toast each day.

Jill also updated today, which has been a rare treat for the past year or so. She writes about her elderly Mom’s third marriage and I, well, I just think what Jill’s mom got in that third husband is what a good marriage — and friendship — is all about:

“We talked about relationships the other day. Stepdad is her third husband, and the man she loved most of all of her boyfriends and husbands. Stepdad was - is - a sweet guy, they shared a sense of humor and a joy in living that she didn't have with either of her first husbands. She said the most amazing thing for her was that he never criticized her. He didn't always agree, and they sometimes argued hotly, but he never sniped, or criticized or pointed out her failings. He always liked her. He always wanted her to feel good and did what he could to help that along.”

And with that, I am outta here (as Nance would say).

xoxo
etc

aug18-04 wed

~ nothing much happening in the barn these days ~

Taking five minutes to rest my back and feet, have been standing in the kitchen or garden or hospital or school or store most of the day. It’s seriously cold outside, so this afternoon I made use of the stove to make double batches of granola and salsa.

This morning was spent pounding between various institutions of commerce, health and education while my van was in the garage for a detailed checkup. Scott insisted, as I am about to drive through the mountains, that it be inspected front to back and everything brought up to snuff.

Some pieces on the front brakes had to be ground down and Scott was quick to say “that’s from someone riding the brakes too hard” and the guy said no, they were rusted out. Then there was something else brake-related and Scott made sure to throw in his usual remark about coming up to corners too fast, and the guy said no, it is normal wear and tear and they see a lot of that.

Mwa ha ha.

***

I might have snagged a place to live, thanks to my ever-lovin sister Karen. It’s in Westbank and perhaps not perfect but it has plenty of good qualities, right down to towels, dishes, and bedding. I had a long conversation with one of the owners a while ago and we will talk again in the morning. It sounds as if they are showing it to others so I am not counting on anything, but I was encouraged when she said she would rather rent it to me than keep showing it. We’ll see.

I could not keep up the lie to Emil that we are only going for a short holiday and then coming home. This afternoon I called him into the kitchen, saying I had to talk to him about something, and came clean about what is going on. I explained about Mom’s illness, prognosis and treatment, what I am planning, and why I want him and Everett to be with me there. He asked a few questions — mostly making sure he could still stay in touch with the angel counsellor from Camp Easter Seal and that he could still visit his dad — and he seems to be okay with it. That is a relief for me, as I am sure he had a sense of the truth anyway.

He will ask more questions over the coming days as he thinks of things, and I am sure he will drive me crazy as he repeats my answers back many times in order to process the facts. But all in all he took the news in stride and doesn’t seem upset.

***

I feel pressured, though I am not driving myself hard. I am consciously not moving too fast or furious, not pushing myself to accomplish anything in a big hurry. But there is this pressure I cannot put a finger on. I need a good massage and twelve cups of chamomile tea.

Scott has been offering me a special relaxation treatment and I must wise up and take advantage of it. Surely it will do me a world of good.

xoxo
etc

~ I rid my closet
and drawers of
two large garbagebags
full of clothes, and
still have too many.
Not that a girl can
really ever have
too many. ~

Waiting on the créme a sucre. It has to boil three minutes and then we keep it in the fridge and use it on pancakes or ice cream. Eat your heart out. Have I given you the recipe? I should, it's so damn easy:

Créme a Sucre

One cup brown sugar, one cup whipping cream, a dash of salt. Boil two or three minutes, then remove from stove. Cool, then add one teaspoon of vanilla and a dash of mapleine (I don't see why any maple flavouring wouldn't do as well.) This is a traditional French-Canadian sauce. I call it liquid fudge.

***

Okay, that's done. The aroma of the chicken roasting in the oven has just started to reach out through the door. Scott and I snagged a few new potatoes and some young carrots from our garden. I took a frozen cherry pie out of the deep freeze. We are feasting tonight, peoples!

***

We spent a hotel night (you know the sort: potato chips and pop in bed in front of the TV) at Manitou Beach after soaking an hour in the mineral waters. Picked Emil up this morning. He wasn't ready to come home of course. But he had a wonderful time.

***

My aunt was going to bus it to Saskatoon on Monday, so I offered to delay my BC departure for several days and drive her instead.

***

Best go wash those spuds.

xoxo
etc
Kate

~ the chicken coop ~

I am not looking forward to BC summer. Winter, sure ... if there is any sunlight to speak of. Those melty springlike days all winter ... what's not to love about those. But right now, I would shrivel without air conditioning.

My sister Karen has taken her daughter Danielle, 13, and gone out there now and is staying with my youngest sister, Joan. Joan's daughter Jordan has chicken pox so Karen is babysitting her (as she can't go to daycare) when Joan works, and staying at Joan's until she moves into her basement suite.

The two of them are looking for a place for me. It's good to have them on the job. They were house-hunting on the weekend. One place would have done but was in a rough-looking area, they didn't feel comfortable with it. One place had too many stairs outside for Emil in the winter, with snow and slush and ice and all. (Not that there's a lot, perhaps, but surely sometimes there is; they get plenty of snow, as I recall.)

The condo so close to Mom and Dad's was not given to me because I only earned about $3000 last year. It didn't matter that I have lots of cash in my savings account and can work virtually as many hours a month as I want to, so can easily make $ for rent if I discipline myself a little — shoot, I'll have to work a 30-hour week — boo hoo, poor me. Hmph. I think I can handle it.

It didn't matter that my dad said he'd be a co-signer on the one-year lease and guarantee the rent, and that he is well-set financially. I think secretly the property manager prefers tenants without children, but doesn't want to come out and say so. Instead he said I'd have a better chance at the main floor of a house 15 minutes away, where the rent had come down from $1100 to $950. Dad went to look at it and said no way: too junky looking, and too many stairs for Emil.

I am trying to be ready to leave early Friday morning so that the boys can have a couple nights in Edmonton with their dad, who has been a real dear through all this. It will complicate his visiting arrangements with the kids, and perhaps I'd have to ask him for some child support (though I don't plan to) because of the expense of living out there, but since he is still treated as part of the family he completely understands how I feel and knows that it has made Mom and Dad very happy that we are going out there to be with them. And of course he was with his mom a lot before she died from cancer, so he can empathize.

Cathy called me last night. She is a massage therapist in Saskatoon, and said "Your mom's cousin was in for a massage yesterday, and her aunt" and proceeded to tell me this cousin was named Blythe. I knew she was talking about Aunt Evelyn, my grandpa's sister (who married and divorced two "womanizers," as she calls them), but for the life of me I couldn't recall anyone named Blythe who had grown up in my home town and would know all this detail about what is happening with the family. After some thought I realized it was Mom’s cousin Beryl.

"Grace was always my favourite cousin when we were growing up," she said. "She was always so bubbly and bouncy!" and "Kathy is having a hard time with all this" and "Doris is very upset that Kathy is moving away; she will miss the regular visits with her and the boys, and Kathy is the only one who does anything for her."

Right. It's not true by a long shot that I'm the only one who does stuff for her, but her saying such things is why others get irritated with her — they mow her lawn and run her here and there and do stuff for her all the time, but she doesn't remember! and then she complains as if she is ungrateful.

I offered to take her with me to see Mom, but no, she can't leave her cat. Aunt Jean plans to fly out in the fall and invite Grandma along but no, she can't leave her cat. "He's all I have," she told me, "he's what keeps me going, especially in the winter."

Your cat on the one hand, your daughter on the other, I think to myself. It's hard for me to understand your priority ... I say well, Mom could be gone very soon ... ah but so could I, she says, I'm 87 you know!

I talked to Aunt Jean about this. "She's not thinking right," Aunt Jean said of her younger sister.

Maybe she isn't facing the facts? Maybe she can't? Or maybe her cat really is more important to her? Or maybe she has accepted the inevitable and is focused on what keeps her own daily life stable and liveable? She is 87, you know ... and surely has figured out what is important to her, by now, and how to view things so that she can live with life as it is.

I hope that if Mom doesn't live long, Grandma won't regret her choice not to go see her at every opportunity. It would be a terrible blow to lose your child and maybe she just can't imagine how she is going to feel after the fact. I already know she doesn't have any empathy for others who are expressing grief — too much, inappropriately, for too long, is her attitude. It was the common attitude when she was growing up in the 1920s — you carried on as usual within a few days of a loved one's death, with a stiff upper lip, as if nothing had happened — that's what was expected and that's what people did. You were not to be upset by anything for long. So Grandma has a tough-as-nails veneer ... "we have to take what comes" ... which I sure as hell do not have. I know we have to take it, accept it, but it is a painful struggle for me.

Last night I called Mom, as I do most every day now — oh yes, things have already changed a lot — used to be I called once every couple of weeks and usually she'd phone me first — and told her about the gathering of the Likeminded Ladies and the gifts and kindness shown me — and she said isn't that nice, boy you don't realize how much people care about you until there is a need, do you, and then they come out of the woodwork, people you haven't heard from in so long they're practically forgotten are phoning and driving hundreds of miles to visit you. She is deeply moved by that; she never knew how loved she is by so many people, until this happened. It is unbelievable, she said.

Well, I'd best get on about the day. Gotta go to the farm just beyond where I usually walk, and buy some fresh cream and butter. Later I'll take some of that to Grandma's when I drive Everett there to spend the night. My Aunt Reta (visiting from Phoenix, staying with Grandma) loves cream just like my Grandpa Emil did, and she just picked a bunch of fresh raspberries, so they'll go good together. Me, I'm going to make fudge with the cream, and caramel sauce for pancakes and ice cream.

Our neighbour grew chickens for us, and butchered them the week before last. I took them to Grandma's deep freeze so that our two would be free for beef and pork that has just been slaughtered. I don't help with any of the killing or processing and can't stand to be near it -- the distress calls of the frightened chickens make me want to run in there and put a stop to it all, and I can pass out at the sight of blood, and can't bear the thought of plucking feathers or handling guts or feet or heads or — yuk; yuk!! — but Emil loves chicken and so I will bring one home to roast up for his supper tomorrow after we get him home from Camp Easter Seal. They are large plump roasters, they'll be absolutely delicious compared to the tasteless cardboard you get at the grocery store.

The photo above was taken at Scott's aunt Leithe's during a 'journeying' workshop the Likeminded Ladies took with a shaman several months ago. Don't we look like we were having a great time?

Scott's mom is the white-haired woman sitting on the couch, and his aunt is the grey-haired gal on the floor. I'm sitting on the couch next to my best pal Cathy, who came from Saskatoon for the workshop.

Last night we had a small gathering. The occasion, as if we needed one, was that I am leaving in a week or so. I raked in booty — a basketful of relaxation aids (bath stuff, music, tea, candles) and a round, yellow-toned wall plaque showing a fairy leaning against a plant. "She reminded me of you," Leithe said, and I took it as a compliment.

Subject: Re: Hi

So you finally got that holiday back home, eh?

Mom's started her experimental drug treatment (she had the second one yesterday) and is feeling okay, just tired some days and with fairly severe pain in her neck and shoulders from the cancerous lump that was in her chest — they spent a week irradiating it every day but I guess it wasn't vanquished as we'd hoped. She takes Tylenol and ices the neck and makes do because she doesn't like taking morphine for pain.

Emil did have a bike with large training wheels on it, which he has outgrown now. You can buy special bikes for kids like him, they are like adult three-wheelers. The kind you are talking about are actually tippy if you turn too sharply, I'm told. But the specially made ones would be good. I'd just have to bite the bullet and buy one. I don't know how interested he'd be right now; he likes to go out and walk around and seems happy doing that.

Enjoy being home,
Kate

*(Trisha, this email came back to me as undeliverable so I'm hoping you'll see it here)

This fleet of bikes left on the lawn next door reminds me that my own number two son still cannot ride one. He is eleven years old, people! and the prospect of riding a bike is hell to him.

Yikes. He doesn't know what he's missing.

I've set him to picking saskatoons along the driveway for $5 a gallon. He got half a pail of big juicy ones in an hour-and-a-half and you can see the cash registers in his eyes.

Emil is away at Camp Easter Seal until next Tuesday. He's normally so quiet, that I hardly even notice that he isn't here.

I am working this afternoon, so this is all the gossip you get.

xoxo
etc
Kate

While the relatives danced at the family reunion, the littlest ones were fast asleep on blankets on the floor.

Here's my aunt Reta and uncle Carl cutting a rug, and my cousin Gerald dancing with Grandma:

 
~My sister Joan is shaking her booty on the far right there~

The next day we went to Aunt Jean's birthday party. After her grand entrance to the hall, some of Mom's cousins pinned the corsage on the birthday girl:

and then we all ate, drank and visited some more until Aunt Jean cut the cake and we ate it for dessert:

Then this past weekend we went up Flin Flon way for my cousin Karla's wedding in Denare Beach. For Emil it's a big thrill to dance with the bride, and last weekend at the reunion he'd asked Karla if he could dance with her. Nice girl that she is, she said yes of course and made good on her promise — twice — at her wedding.  

~look at that grin, he is tttickled~

I told Everett that all the men at a wedding like to dance with the bride and if she asked him, he'd have to, you can't say no to the bride.

"Is it the law?" he asked.

"Yep."

"Oh, no!"

We left before 11 though and he didn't get asked to dance, so he was relieved.

At home, I drag him out for walks. Sometimes he gets in a snit and struts out ahead of me, pissed off. Thus:

The other night at Laurel's one of the Lara Croft movies was starting and Everett commented that "all adult women have big chests." Upon being pressed further, he said that women are bumpy and lumpy, not only that but their chests bounce and are pointy, yuk.