At the Co-op store in my home town, the clerk says to me “You should go over to Mom and Dad’s sometime, they’d like to see you.” Her sister, four months younger than me, died 30 years ago on May 11 at age 10, just before her 11th birthday.

“You’re just a few months older than her, aren’t you?” she said. “Your birthday is in January, right?”

Laurie died of leukemia after a two-year struggle with the illness. We were neighbours and playmates, and I am surprised Judy remembers when my birthday is.

Back at Grandma’s, I decide to phone over to her parents and see if they’re up for a visit. “Oh sure!” Bill says. “Come on over!” Everett wants to stay with Grandma, so I prepare to leave again.

I pull on my ski pants and walk toward their little house, which I have not set foot in for many years. The wind stings my ears as I pass in front of the old school, now presenting with a huge hole in one of its classroom walls. I can look right inside, so I do, but keep moving. My ears, my ears!

Their small house is very warm. They are both in their eighties. I settle in at their kitchen table, snug against a south-facing window. I point to a curtained-off bedroom at the back of their living room and tell them I remember how Laurie and I sat at a little table and chairs in there for what seemed like forever, tying toothpicks into bundles of 10 to take to school for arithmetic classes. This is how we learned about the decimal system apparently.

Merle makes coffee and serves it in teacups, along with three tiny plates filled with cheddar cheese slices, snack crackers, and chocolate-covered cookies. I drink mine black and Lord, it tastes good. We talk about old people around town, death, health, the struggling healthcare system, my mom and dad and where they are, where all my siblings who don’t live around here are, mountainous roads, Bill’s time overseas in Italy during a war, his blindness now and how he misses reading the Regina Leader-Post every day like he did for years.

We talk about Merle’s brother, who is a friend of Manful’s and is also in his eighties. We talk about dirty politicians, long funerals, church. Bill tells me a memory he has of me as a child, walking a stray dog we had taken in and sic’ing it on Merle’s hens. Merle brought their family portrait to the table to show me their grandchildren. A tiny portrait of Laurie in Grade 2 is stuck into the frame in the lower right-hand corner.

Surely when they see me, even now, they can’t help but think of their own little girl and what she might have been like if she had lived. They can’t help but remember we two little girls 30 years ago, one of us lucky, the other not. They, too, remember that January is my birthday month.

“You’re not like your sister!” Bill comments. “Karen. She’s usually pretty quiet.”

“I guess she’s the shy one,” I say. “But then, she gets up onstage and sings all by herself to a roomful of people all the time. I still won’t to do that. It takes more guts than I’ve got.”

We talk as if we are running a race, one sentence after the other in rapid succession. Merle says “You sure look like your dad. You’re a Johnson, that’s plain to see.”

“He must look like his mother, because I’ve been told I resemble her.”

“She had a very serious face,” Merle says, “did Edna.”

“Me too!” I say. “People are always asking me what’s wrong when all I am thinking about is what to make for supper.”

I must make a point of visiting the old folks around my home town who are always asking me to go over to their houses. And it isn’t only old folks; there are many lifetime acquaintances and relatives whose company I would really enjoy for an afternoon. I’ve lived back here for a year and a half already. What am I waiting for?

Emil and Everett are in training to do their own laundry. Emil is 15 — FIFTEEN! — and will need this skill if he ever leaves home. He says he plans to, but I think that is more a repeating of what he’s heard other people say about his inevitable future. One day, of course, he may have to: I’ll be dead and gone, or he’ll need to live close to his job (if he finds something he can do for a living), or he’ll just want to leave his mother. It could happen. It’s hard to imagine right now, but it’s not that far away.

Instead of showing them how to run the washer and dryer and do laundry communally, I gave them each their own basket for dirty clothes. I figure that is the most likely way to get them to think twice before throwing a virtually clean article of clothing into the laundry instead of folding it over a chair to wear the next day.

Everett is very eager and has his laundry basket downstairs well before I think to remind him. Emil can’t carry his alone, so I have him lift one side of it while I hang onto the other, though it would be 10 times faster to move it myself.

***

There were three people in my house this morning while I was still in my fluffy blue housecoat and had hedgehog hair. It’s a good thing I’m not terribly vain.

The first was a neighbour whom Manful had lined up to do some interior painting today. He thought he was to meet Manful here, but he'd already left. Did I know where he went? Well fortunately, I always ask him where he plans to be for the day in case I need to contact him for some reason. I remembered asking him before he walked out the door, right after my goodbye kiss. Unfortunately, when he answers me I either don’t listen or just don’t remember. I tend to have an elephant memory for the things he’d like me to forget, but the mundane details of life? Sorry.

The second two were here to do some housekeeping that we have pretty much been handling on our own but hey, I want to keep on their list of clients. They don’t come out to clean very often but I love to give them my money when they do. They always tackle the two toilets, which are never cleaned often enough and never will be if any of us in this household have to do it.

***

Manful just called, needs some texture-fresh picked up in town and then delivered to the jobsite, which is on the way to my home town.

“Will you do something for me?” he asks.
“Anything for you, my darling.”
Pause.
“I’m just waiting for the day you say the same to me,” I add, teasing.

It means leaving several hours earlier than I planned, so we have to bolt. My, the things I do for that boy.

Doughnuts for breakfast again. We made a quadruple batch the other day, Everett and I, and the four of us have been going through them by the dozen. Whole wheat, eggs, and buttermilk weigh in against brown sugar and deep-frying. Are the doughnuts healthy food? In comparison to white-flour doughnuts they have the edge, but I don’t suppose they are actually nutritious. We indulge anyway.

Sometimes readers write me, asking for recipes for the dishes I prepare. So here, this time you won’t have to:

Whole Wheat Doughnuts

2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 c brown sugar
2/3 c sour cream or buttermilk
1 tsp bkg soda
3 c whole wheat flour

Beat eggs till light; add salt and sugar. Beat till thick and smooth. Mix soda with buttermilk or sour cream and add to first mixture. Add flour until dough is of consistency to handle. Roll on floured board, cut with doughnut cutter and fry in deep fat. Drain on brown paper.

(Eat, Drink and Be Healthy — The Joy of Eating Natural Foods, by Agnes Toms, 1963. This is a great little recipe book.)

***

A loud wind blew up last night just as I was reading about the elementals in a book called Green Witchcraft, by Anne Moura. Even down in our basement bedroom, the sound was frightening. The author was saying that the power of the elemental forces — air, water, earth, fire — is stupendous, as we all know, and that they are neither to be “summoned” nor “dismissed” during rituals or spellcasting. Right. Got it.

To do rituals and spells as a Wiccan, one apparently addresses the Lord and Lady as well as communing with the elementals. It strikes me that practising Wicca would be like practising Christianity, in some ways. As with Christian prayer, I would go through the motions genuinely and hopefully, but without absolute faith that anyone is listening. It is the simple exercise of speaking from the heart to an imagined loving presence that understands and cares; that is what benefits me.

***

Scott told me that one of the cows died. I asked what happened.

“She must have gotten onto her back somehow,” he said.

“What, cows are like turtles and can’t get off their backs?” I was finding this difficult to believe.

“She must have bedded down on a slope and rolled onto her back somehow, so she couldn’t get up.”

“She committed suicide?” I said lightly, but it was taken amiss.

“It’s not funny,” he said. “She was a young, healthy animal.”

“I know it's not funny. It’s just — I didn’t know that could happen to cows. It seems a little absurd to me.”

“The weight of her stomachs would put pressure on her lungs so that she’d suffocate,” he explained.

“Weird. I mean, that they can’t roll off their backs.”

***

Doughnuts, witchcraft, and cattle. My life is a fascinating hodgepodge. Jealous?

When I came up from the porch this morning after seeing Emil off to school, Everett was looking out the window here in the office.

“Look what Scott did!” he exclaimed, watching Emil chop his walker along the driveway to meet the bus. “We can get the van out today. Scott’s a good guy, isn’t he!”

***

While watching Telemiracle on Sunday afternoon, one presenter reminded me so much of Emil that I cried. A teenager, he had come onstage with his walker and was so eager and so thrilled to be there ... his expressions, his posture, everything matched Emil's ... I don't know why I got all tearful. Maybe because it was the first time I've ever seen someone so much like Emil? Haven't figured it out yet; all I know is that I was deeply touched by the sight of him.

A drive around my home town displays three old churches starved down to their bones, their eyes dried out and empty. One church, the Lutheran, remains active. It’s the one Grandma attends every Sunday. The windows of the other three are boarded up or knocked out. I took pictures, but can only find this one. It is near the south end of main street.

I am looking down our driveway at Manful clearing away the snow with a bobcat. The snow was so soft yesterday that I got the van stuck when I tried to back out. After a half-hearted attempt at getting out — a little rocking, a little shovelling — I gave it up in favour of not having the van bang into a little poplar tree it kept sliding toward.

Zander came running over from the house next door, without a jacket. I sent him home to get one, as it will be cooler and dark when he leaves.

I am just off the phone with Diana, whose mom has passed away shockingly sooner than expected after a diagnosis of lung cancer. There is nothing I can say or do to help, really; but I will pass along these “wise words” that were spoken to three others whose mother had recently died:

When Your Mother Dies

“I know how much pain the three of you are in today and I want to tell you what I know about the death of one's mother, from my own experience. It just hurts like hell for months and the tears come at very unpredictable times and over things that you wouldn't guess.

The pain, fear and loneliness you feel today will get better in time. Your mom is close by right now and, if you listen, pay attention and ask her she will come to you in dreams, strange signs and through others still in the body. This will not frighten you; it will give you comfort and make you less afraid of dying yourself.

The rawness of the pain will lessen in a few months and then you will think you see her across the street and realize that it's some other woman about the same age and same style of dress as your mom and you will wonder if that woman's family really knows how precious she is. You'll wish you could go to the family and tell them ‘Hold on tight to your mom, sniff in her essence, saturate yourself with her smell, listen to her recite recipes to you and give you advice. You will hurt like hell when she's gone and you don't have it any more.’

You will find that the three of you become closer and stronger as a unit of siblings and your mom would want that.

You will be the ones that your friends turn to when their parents die and you will have a deep compassion for those who grieve. When you have your own children, you will tell them what your mother's favourite flower was, your favourite dish she cooked, and the crazy times you had with her. She would want that.”

~ Gloria LeMay

The 28th annual Telemiracle is on TV right now. It started at 9 last night and will continue till 5 this afternoon. There is the usual lineup of professional entertainers from across Canada, along with Bob McGrath of Sesame Street fame. And there is a roster of amateur entertainers from across the province of Saskatchewan.

Apparently Saskatchewan is in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest charitable giving in the world, per capita. That’s pretty impressive for a province that is considered one of the have-nots in Canada. Compared to the standards of living in much of the world, though, we obviously can afford to give generously.

Telemiracle is put on by the Kinsmen and Kinette clubs of Canada, and the funds are used to respond to requests from the province’s disabled and ill. You just ask them, and they will buy your son his wheelchair, or pay for you and your husband to fly and stay with your child for her kidney transplant in Edmonton. They will pay for a machine to help you measure your kid’s life-maintaining food each day. They will buy a scooter for someone who needs it.

Throughout the show they’ve aired little vignettes of people who have been helped by this funding. The first one I saw was of a lady semi-twisted in bed, with a computer on a stand nearby. She said “I learn something new every day.” She had been born a healthy baby who developed an incurable disease at the age of 13 months. She added that having the computer had changed her life dramatically. You could see she wasn’t exaggerating.

Everett ran for his bag of ‘giving’ money, and counted it up.
“I’ll match whatever you and Emil donate,” Scott told him.
“So will I,” I said.

Everett’s grand total is $20.35. Emil will need help counting his. And I phoned in our pledges, totalling $140.35. Woo hoo! All the little dribs and drabs filling that bucket faster than you’d imagine.

Some Americans dream of moving to Vermont their whole lives, and some actually do it.

KC and her husband are experiencing life in the country, and while they're at it, she's bought a digital camera so she can show off the beautiful countryside to the rest of us.

When they moved, she started an online journal, which you can read here.

It looks like a pretty nice place, doesn't it?

“Eating oranges is hard work,” I say to Scott, smiling inwardly because he will think I am serious.

“You don’t know what hard work is!” he responds, disgusted that I might be such a princess. “You should try —”

“Oh but my jaws just ache by the time I scrape all the pulp off,” I drawl like a southern belle, “and there is so much effort for such little return!”

~ from Grandma’s dining room window ~

“What are we having for supper, Mom?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know. People have a right to eat you know. You have to let people eat.”

She stands at the sink with her hands in warm soapy water and watches the chickadees, sparrows, and a pine grosbeak flutter from tree to tree. They apear to be doing a conscious dance for the delighted woman framed in the window. Then she thinks about something else she wants to do, and impatience pushes her contentment away.

She brings her wandering mind back to the trees, the birds flitting busily about out there, her favourite music coming from the corner of the kitchen. She washes a few plates and glasses, smiles at the sky, stands some forks in a mug after rinsing them, hums, looks out the window again, carries happily on.

Until she begins to see herself taking a walk while the sun is still high, starting a load of laundry while it’s early in the day, digging something from the deep freeze to thaw in time for supper. Her pleasure in the present moment is dampened, then squelched. Will these dishes never be done? They are a relentless burden, keeping her from equally pressing affairs.

Ah, no. They are her opportunity to practise “being here now,” she thinks, and scrubs some pasta off a pot, and watches the free, feathered ones through the glass.