We are recycling fanatics these days.It drives me nuts. Once you start collecting faithfully it is amazing how much stuff there is that otherwise would be sitting at the landfills.

I have to take a trip to the recycling yard every week, otherwise the special bins I bought (three, meant to be a laundry sorter but used for cardboard, paper, tin, glass, plastic, refundable juice and pop containers) overflow all over the porch.

Now that I see the volume of stuff I've been throwing out all these years when I didn't recycle everything, it is kindof scary to think how the majority of people do not recycle... and I understand why, too -- because it's such a pain in the ass... really, it is. If I never had to wash another plastic bag to reuse, ever again, I would feel so blessed.

But no. I will continue to take on the responsibility, though it is an ongoing irritation.

Only guests sleep in Grandpa’s bedroom now. He’s been dead more than five years, but it’s still “Grandpa’s bedroom.” Above his high double bed hangs a portrait of Grandma’s grandmother, my great-great grandmother. Her name was Mary Jane Walker.

She and her husband and family of five children left Ontario by train in the late 1890s and settled in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.She contracted pneumonia in 1902 and died at the age of 30. The family left Portage two years later and came further west by train. After disembarking, they came the rest of the way on in a covered wagon pulled by oxen. When they got to the White Sand River, it was overflowing its banks after heavy rains. They were forced to camp next to it for three days, along with other settlers, while they built a bridge to cross over.

There, Annie May, my 17-year-old great-grandmother, met my great-grandfather, who I remember as Grandpa Jack. They were married three years later.

6:13 p.m.

Yesterday I did a rain dance out on our driveway after Don and Barney came home from school.They sat on the Adirondack chairs on the deck and watched, Don with a silly grin and Barney with incredulous delight (“God, what’s she doing now?” I can almost hear him thinking). I strung together some vowels and consonants in a singsong chant, raised my arms to the sky invoking water to fall from it, and did the stereotypical Indian-dancing routine.

I didn’t really think it would work, but there was nothing to lose.
And today, we got the rain we so desperately need.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

From the book:

+++
“If on the trees the leaves still hold,
The winter coming will be cold.”

That’s what happened this past winter, when many leaves clung to the branches right through till spring. And indeed, it was a pretty cold winter.

+++

“If rooks are noisy, cawing loudly to each other,
it is a sign of rain, and so is the flying of
swallows near the ground. Bats flying about on a
summer evening are a sign of fine, hot weather
the next day.”

+++

“Sensitive people can distinctly smell frost or rain
upon the wind; though this is less possible in the
polluted air of our cities than it is in the open
country.”

+++

“There was an interesting discussion about weather on the Dimbleboy Talk-In program on BBC televison in April 1963. The participants were a number of orthodox meteorologists, together with farmers and students of weather folklore. One of the latter remarked that he had noticed for some years past, how four days in the year gave an epitome of what the weather was going to be like for the next quarter. These were Lady Day (25th March), Midsummer Day (24th June), Michaelmas Day (29th September), and Christmas Day (25th December). As the weather was on those days, so it would generally be for the next three months.

“It also appeared from the discussion that there were two dates in the year which gave a reverse forecast. That is, the weather from then on would be the opposite of what it had been like on that day, for a while. These two days are Halloween (Oct.31) and Candlemas (Feb. 2) ...

“During the television discussion mentioned above, a remarkable suggestion was made by Mrs Doris Munday, a hypnotherapist who claims to be able to influence the weather. This lady said that she believed the weather was influenced by people’s thoughts. In her opinion, the reason why the BBC’s weather forecasts used to be more reliable than they are now, was that when broadcasting first came out, people tended to believe these forecasts implicitly and therefore they came true!”

Coming soon ... Magic of Dreams:

“In olden days, nightmares were believed to be caused by evil spirits or black magic. A remedy against such terrors was to hang a large stone with a natural hole through it, on the wall over the head of the sufferer’s bed. A large old-fashioned iron or steel key would serve the same purpose.”

Wednesday
6:35 p.m.

Putting off a counterful of dishes. Just ate grilled cheese and onion sandwiches (among slightly other things) for supper, and now need to set a spell before I stand at the sink for an hour.

OOF. Excuse me.
I dug my only Tena Arena CD out of the desk drawer and put it on, and then couldn’t keep from singing at the top of my lungs and getting up to dance around the office.

So much for needing to sit.

Okay, so I’m just putting off the dishes.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Farmbeau came in late this morning as I was about to step into a tub of warm water. He parked his jeans on the toilet and sat there chatting to me and reading the farm classifieds while I washed my hair and soaked. When I was all toweled off and wrapped cosily in my fluffy blue housecoat, parked at the computer to google the angles on homeschooling, he came and dragged me off the chair, onto the floor, and then down to the bedroom.

I didn’t fight too hard. Oh no. That would be foolish.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Barney was dishing up ice cream cones the other day, and squealing in frustration when he wasn’t having the success he desired. So I said Well then, you’ll just have to practise every day till you get good at it. There’s been quite a run on the ice cream since then.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

While in the tub this morning, the neck thing started to come on. I had eaten toast and scrambled eggs for breakfast, so it couldn’t be blamed on low blood sugar or lack of protein. Farmbeau thought a good dose of luvvin should remedy it, but even the double dose he generously administered didn’t help. After he left for work, I toasted a multigrain bagel and ate it with honey, but the neck remained the same.

I headed for the garden, the last of the bag of wildflower seed with me, and sowed two more rows of flowers. It was while I was watering them that I noticed the neck discomfort ebbing away, and by the time I arrived back at the house with the empty watering cans, it was gone.

If I didn’t know better, I’d guess gardening is the remedy.

Hm.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

I swear that is a deer track, smackdab in a stone circle marking wildflower seed. Tips of new corn have been nibbled off.

xoxox
~etc

8:37 a.m.

Yes, it’s Tuesday. I stand laughingly corrected.
I rolled over in bed this morning and thought “God, I love Saturdays. And Sundays. Sigh.”

Barney’s sweet face appeared next to mine.
“Good morning!” I said. “What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“You’re up early.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, on the weekend you could sleep in, you wouldn’t have to be up yet.”
“You think it’s the weekend?” he asked incredulously.
“Oops.”

11:58 a.m.

We kissed and hugged goodbye and Farmbeau went out the door, off to town to spend the day working. I phoned Petra to tell her we are coming in Friday night and invite her to come to a wedding party with us Saturday night.

When my eye caught a movement outside the window, I looked out and there was Farmbeau with a posthole-digger, preparing a place to install the post for the mailbox we are setting into a flowerbed sort of arrangement. I quickly threw on some shorts (mosquitoes have abated somewhat) and went out to see if I could help, but there wasn’t much I could do.

So I thinned out the morning glories newly sprouted around the location of the post, took them out to the garden acre, and set them into the ground near the sunflowers Barney and I transplanted last night. I scattered some wildflower seed around the periphery of the little bed we scraped together, and gave them all a good watering. Then I walked over to the vegetable garden.

There, I enjoy the most satisfied and surreal peace from standing in one spot and surveying the rows of tiny corn, bean, potato, tomato, pepper, strawberry, and pea seedlings that were not there just a week or two ago. I literally throw my head back and thank the sky for bringing me here, making me feel so alive, so part of life. I breathe deeply in, and squeeze out a grateful tear.

When I went to the garden to thin the corn, beans, and sunflowers last night, I made Barney come with me. He complained that he did not want to go, but I put him to work thinning sunflowers (I can’t bear to throw the thinned-out ones away, that seems too wasteful and cruel) while I relocated two-inch cornstalks to a new row. We were on opposite sides of the garden, as sunflowers and corn do not “like” each other, but I could hear him talking to the plants.

“There you go, little fella! You’re going to make new friends now!” and “Here’s a little drink of water to get you through the night.”

I smiled at the way talking to the plants comes naturally to him and, a little later, while he was sowing another row of peas and I was setting transplanted corn into the mix (these two like each other and the peas will climb on the corn), I told him that I believe the plants like it when you talk to them and that they respond by being healthier than they might otherwise be.

His eyes got big and round. “Really? You mean they understand what you are saying?”

“Yeah. Well, they feel it somehow. You don’t even have to speak out loud, you can just think certain thoughts and they pick up on it, they sense it. I don’t know if it’s true, but I read this book about measuring the minute vibrations of plants, and they did experiments proving that plants responded to human thoughts by vibrating faster -- really fast -- if a person even visualized lighting a match and burning their leaves.”

“Wow! Well, if you say it’s true, it must be true,” he said.

“I’m not always right, you know. It might not be true. I happen to believe it is, but I could be wrong.”

“Mom, if you think it’s true, I believe it,” he insisted.

What must it be like to be Farmbeau, to come home to his yard and his house full of people and so different than it was?

First, he walks past the pots of petunias and marigolds blooming outside the door. Inside the porch, there’s a pretty, quilted tablecloth on top of the deep freeze.

Then, hanging on the wall where he mounts the stairs into the hallway, there’s the framed image of Barney proudly holding a miniature unicorn on the palm of his hand. As Farmbeau passes by the bathroom door, he can glimpse a countertop jumbled with bottles and boxes and baskets and baubles.

In the kitchen, things have migrated to a new order and often there is the warmth and aroma of something in the oven or atop the stove. Every shelf in the fridge is full. There’s a tablecloth on the table, and a fancy-cut, stemmed, green glass bowl in the centre of it. Four wooden chairs are tucked in neatly around the table itself.

The living room is now an office. There are several plants. On the wall is a framed picture of flowers, made of square tiles. In a vase there are flowers made of macaroni. There are new curtains. There are bookshelves and neatly stacked books. There is an antique china cabinet displaying colourful dishes behind a delicate door made of wood and glass.

No need to go on about bunkbeds in the boys’ room and brass pieces and beeswax candles on the window ledges and a loaf of homemade bread on the cutting board. I just hope he’s happy about it all, that it still feels like home.

7:50 a.m.

Behind me sits my 10-year-old son, reading a cookie-recipe book aloud, energized and excited about the ingredients lists.

“And the filling in it needs one container — 16 ounces — of Duncan Hines cream cheese; red food colouring (optional); and one-half cup semi-sweet chocolate chips!”

[turns the page, to a photograph]

“Whoa!” he exclaims. “Oh yeah! Cookies for kids!”

****************************************

I hopped in with Millie to go to the potluck, and just a few miles from here we saw a little doe on the other side of a ditch. Beneath her belly stood a tiny, spotted faun, sucking. The doe was startled and bounded away into the bush nearby, and her baby looked like a large rabbit as it made its way through the tall grass, following her. Naturally, I had forgotten to take the digital camera.

Six women sipped on a succession of herb teas. We walked around our host’s yard, looking at her flower garden, her new rooster and his two girlfriends (our host was so pleased when she got two eggs for breakfast yesterday morning), and her “secret place,” a lounge chair tucked back into the trees where she can escape the sun on a hot day, surrounded by some favourite flowers and serenaded gently by a set of oversized bamboo chimes.

We ate a potluck supper consisting mostly of salads, had lemon pie for dessert, and more tea. We threw the I Ching (always very telling, for me), looked at and drew Sacred Circle cards, Medicine Wheel cards, tarot cards. I did a one-card reading for everyone (there were six of us there); we talked about healing and how as practitioners we can take the credit neither for success nor failure to create the hoped-for outcomes.

When we got home later and Millie stopped the car to let me out at the end of our driveway, she said “I hope you weren’t too bored.” Bored? I looked bored?

Later, snuggled up next to Farmeau on the couch, he asked me “What’s the matter?” and repeated the question several times, and again in bed. “You look bothered/ you seem to be looking right through me/ you seem deep in thought.” There was nothing bothering me; once, I’d been pondering the possible meaning of the dream I had the night before. And I was tired.

Maybe it’s all part of the aging-face phenomena, where your appearance no longer matches what you feel like inside.

****************************************

Farmbeau said, after I’d replied to his question about what we had done at the potluck, “That’s a lot of tea-drinking; six hours of drinking tea?” Then he added, “Sure you don’t have any mosquito bites?” Our host’s spouse calls the group “the witches.” He has heard my “dancing naked in the trees” concoction too.

****************************************

I must remember to make sure Farmbeau knows how much I appreciate him letting me sleep in four out of five days a week lately, while he supervises the boys as they get ready for school. Sometimes he makes them breakfast, even. And while this makes perfect sense because he is up early anyway and Don independently answers the call of his alarm clock at 6 and goes on about his business, including waking Barney at 7, I still feel I am being allowed a great luxury if I get that one extra hour in bed.

The boys might prefer me, (Don frequently asks “Are you getting up with us tomorrow, Mom?), but it appears they are getting accustomed to Farmbeau doing it. I like it too, because it’s the only time they actually spend doing something with my sweetie. Farmbeau is never around after school, rarely joins us for supper, and when he is here in the evenings is mostly downstairs while the boys are up here getting ready for bed.

I am always up before they leave, and kiss them goodbye and see them out the door at the very least.

This was Don this morning. You can almost see the purposeful stride, can’t you? The little bugger goes down that step without hanging onto the railing Farmbeau built especially for his safety, and every time I see him do it I cringe, imagining him falling face-first onto the cement. Yeah, he’s wearing protective headgear. But still.

Today I was awakened by Barney crawling into bed with me and saying “I had a bad night, Mom.” Why? “Because I didn’t get to watch the end of Chicken Run.”

Farmbeau had sent him to bed at 9:30, just as I was walking in the door. He’d immediately complained to me in hopes of having Farmbeau’s decision overturned; instead I said we’d tape it and he could watch it another time. He was sorely disappointed and went to bed tearful.

This morning I said “Hurry up and eat and dress and you can watch the last half-hour before the bus comes.” He was thrilled and did exactly that, with plenty of time remaining to come upstairs and recite ingredients lists.

He said this weekend “You are adorable, Mom. You know why? Because you are always kissing and hugging us. And you’re so soft.”

xoxo
~etc

It was another leisurely morning. The kids had trundled off to school and the lover had gone off to work, and she lay languidly in the lukewarm water. Hot when she first toed her way into the tub, the water had left her weak. It was time to get out.

Through the screened window she could hear the chatter of crows and the tiny talk of sparrows. A gentle tinkling cut through the trees from the other house, where several sets of chimes had been hung along the front veranda.

It was almost 10 o’clock, and the first pangs of hunger were pointing her in the necessary direction of the kitchen.

She roughed up her short hair with a heavy towel, then dried off and wrapped it around her body, tucking a corner of the towel into itself above her left breast. The mineral-laden water, laced with lavendar oil, had left a ring in the tub; while the water ran down the drain, she scrubbed the grime off with a used facecloth. Then she squeezed the water out of it, hung the wet terrycloth square over the side of the tub to dry, and walked out of the bathroom.

Before she’d made it to the end of the hall, the towel had come loose and she put up her hands to tighten it. Then she remembered she was alone — totally alone, but for the birds and the curtain of living greenery covering every window that met her eye. This was as good a time as any to go naked; she might as well take advantage of it.

She hung the towel neatly over the back of a kitchen chair and stepped over to the cupboard. There was just enough dry cereal for one bowlful, and she liked the thought of putting the empty cardboard box into the recycling bin, making more space in the overcrowded kitchen cupboard.

Simple things. It was the simple things in life that contented her. She was not a difficult person to please. This morning she’d been out of bed in time to see her boys and her lover out the door. She’d read her mail and surfed the web for an hour. She’d soaked in the tub and now she would sit at her desk and eat breakfast, while through the open windows could be heard the traffic of birdlife and the breezy rustling of the poplar leaves.

By the time the cereal bowl was scraped empty, her body had begun to cool. She took the bowl to the kitchen and headed toward the bedroom to find something to wear. Just as she reached the porch, which she had to pass through to get downstairs to the bedroom, the door swung open and there stood the farmer who lived down the road.

His “Anybody home?” was cut short by a startled glimpse of her naked glory, and followed by an embarrassed “Oh — sorry” as he turned on his heel and made a rapid exit.

She let him go. He'd have a story to tell, at any rate. And she — well, she doubted he'd actually seen more than a fleshy blur before he did his about-face.

She'd probably missed his knock, as she often did when she was in her office. She wondered how many days or weeks it would be before he showed his face at the door again.

Ah well. These were the hazards of living in a house in the country, weren't they? You think you are alone, but when you most wish to be, it turns out you are not.

11:30 a.m.

The first wild rose has bloomed next to the driveway, and another bud is soon to follow its lead. Soon the entire trail will delight with glorious scent. Swoon.

It’s gonna be a gorgeous, hot day. I can’t wear shorts without dousing my legs in toxic insect-repellent, so I have become a real farmer, wearing long sleeves and long pants, even in extreme heat, while I water and dig.

Dreaming of lilacs, another olfactory ecstasy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“H never ceases to amaze me. We took a walk in the woods by the beach today (we had to drive 40 minutes to find woods). As we were walking we were pointing things out to each other, including sounds and smells. As the path turned away from the water, the ocean scent was replaced by the cool, rich smell of forest. And I took a deep breath. H kinda sniffed the air and said “That smells just like happiness.” — KC P...

29 May 03
Thursday

2:41 p.m.

I can’t stay in. I can’t! It looks like it’s going to rain. I am waiting for bread dough to make its second rise. I have tomatoes to cut up and freeze. And god, I should work and make some money. But all I want is to be outside, sponging up the leaves and breeze and sweet pungency.

Today’s realization:
I enjoy being in the kitchen.

I’ve never thought about it -- but put me in a bright, airy kitchen, clean, well-stocked and spacious, and I can spend quite a lot of time there, and happily.

9 p.m.

More dirt hauled in by wheelbarrow, more wildflower seed sprinkled onto it ... and now, a good soak is in order, don't you think?

I made myself come in, I was obsessing. Flower obsession is as stressful as big business, you know.

xoxo
etc
Kate