~The Breakfast Hours~

Black coffee.

Mullein (commonly known as lungwort, flannel flower, velvet leaf, blanket herb), smoked in my little onyx pipe

Werther’s Original toffees
(six by the time I realize how many)

Barney’s leftover scrambled eggs

~Lunch~

Greek salad

Lentil-herb soup

Three kinds of starch: toasted rye bread, whole wheat bread, and a baking powder biscuit. Leftovers queen.

I have abandoned chopping for casseroles, the stirring of sauces, and sauteeing for soups. I rarely bother with gravy. The chicken I cooked yesterday was thrown into a pot with a bit of celery, onion, herbs and peppercorns, and boiled in water.

"Keep It Simple, Silly."

My new kitchen motto.

Barney stayed home from school yesterday with a fever and cough, and slept. And drank juice. And slept. And ate apples. And slept. And drank water.

It was after 10 last night when I finally found my thermometer and took his temperature. It was 39.7, which is almost 104 F, and Loverboy asked me what I wanted to do.

He suggested that putting Barney in a tub of lukewarm water would cool him off. I gave him two Children’s Tylenol, put a cold wet cloth on his wrist, and gave him a drink of water.

Then I ran a bath and got him into it.

His temperature went up to 39.8.

Loverboy phoned his sister, who is a nurse. She said it would take the Tylenol about a half-hour to bring the fever down.

I made a bed for Barney on the couch downstairs so he’d be close to me throughout the night and I could get to him quickly if he called out or I heard any peculiar sounds. Then I settled in on the other couch to watch several episodes of Coronation Street, which I tape during the week.

I wasn’t about to go to bed until that fever was down, and Loverboy tried to stay up with me for support, but couldn’t keep his eyes open.

“Go to bed. I’ll call you if I need you, don’t worry,” I told him.

“You’re a good mommy,” he said, and squeezed my hand.

By the time there was no more Coronation Street to watch, Barney’s fever had gone down and I felt comfortable enough to go to sleep. This morning his temp is closer to normal, and he is in good spirits, sitting in the rocking chair just three feet away and chattering to me about L’s nephew Zander, who turns six today, and Air Farce’s comic sketch showing Osama bin Laden running into a wall, and how he thinks Saddam Hussein is a “b.i.t.c.h.”

I am keeping one eye on him, and one on the cows.

All the farmers who live in this yard are away for the day, and someone has to get help if a cow has trouble expelling her calf. That means every two hours I have to truck out to the corrals and look for a foot sticking out of a cow’s hind end, and if I see one, phone Loverboy’s cousin to come and make sure things are progressing naturally. If not, he will know what to do about it.

Got some water in the storeroom the other day, so now the stairway and porch look like they did when I first moved in here, with boxes stacked along the walls.

Manful (a.k.a. Loverboy) got on the bobcat and pushed the snow away from the house (too late to avoid the tiny flood, unfortunately), and then went after the garden path.

Then we went out to get some wood. We only need a fire in the evenings now, if we want to sit downstairs, so we went into the bush near the house. He cut down two or three dead trees and sawed them up, and I threw them in the wheelbarrow and hauled them to the house.

Winter has come back, but in a spring way.

Yesterday morning was grey and cool, as I discovered when I walked L’s sister and her husband to their vehicle after they stopped in for a quick hello. Shoulda worn a jacket.

Before long, there was a snow flurry that lasted all of 15 minutes, with monstrous wet flakes.

[In front of these trees, right on the corner, is where I’ll probably dig a flower bed and plant deep-pink cosmos.]

By evening, there had been two or three more such “flash” flurries, and snow had settled thickly on the trees and buildings. Yet even in the midst of the snowfalls, water kept running, running, running from the spout above the deck.

From the kitchen window, in between little blizzards, I could see two brown-speckled grouse picking their hesitant way through the bush between our house and South Forks.

This is how things looked an hour ago, as the boys went out to catch the schoolbus.

An Anthropologist on Mars is a book about seven neurological patients. One of them is Temple Grandin, the autistic woman who has invented world-renowned livestock handling systems to decrease the fear and suffering of cattle, sheep and hogs as they go to slaughter. She has an unusual empathy for them, and is known for her uncanny ability to calm terrified animals.

The author, Oliver Sacks, writes ~~

“Some employees in slaughterhouses, she notes, rapidly develop a protective hardness and start killing animals in a purely mechanical way:
‘The person doing the killing approaches his job as if he was stapling boxes moving along a conveyor belt. He has no emotions about his act.’

Others, she reveals, ‘start to enjoy killing and ... torment the animals on purpose.’

Speaking of these attitudes turned Temple’s mind to a parallel:

‘I find a very high correlation,’ she said, ‘between the way animals are treated and the handicapped ... Georgia is a snake pit — they treat [handicapped people] worse than animals ... Capital-punishment states are the worst animal states and the worst for the handicapped.’ ”

An Anthropologist on Mars was published in 1995.

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

9:18 a.m.

This is Don’s third day home with a cold. Intuition and experience tell me to make a doctor’s appointment and get him an antibiotic against a sinus infection.

Barney’s school is in the midst of its bonspiel, and I’ve volunteered to help on the ice today from 11 to 12. Don will come with me and watch, while I do whatever it is they need me to do.

It’s the time of year when the ice has gotten soft and it’s not too cold out there, and kids across Canada are in last rehearsals for the annual spring ice carnivals, where they’ll show off their costumes and strut their figure-skating stuff.

That’s my little sister and me, up there at the top. I was in Grade 1 that year.

In the morning, puddles of water on the driveway are frozen over and even when Barney stamps on them while he waits for the bus, their ice surfaces do not crack immediately.

By 10 o’clock, steam is smoking off the east roof of the little garden shed as melted snow evaporates into the thirsty air.

Looking westward from the deck, the path to the garden is still full of snow, back in the trees. The snow there will be the last to go.

By noon, the steady drip-drip-drip of the waterspout above the deck will be the only rushing current around this yard.

The herb lady said the hillbillies in Oklahoma smoke the herb mullein from the time they are three years old, and it is not unhealthy. I’m not sure I buy that last part, but I smoke it anyway and this is my gear. In the long wooden box I keep matches and sticks of incense.

It is a peaceful weekend morning in early early Saskatchewan spring.
Oh my god, spring.
How lucky can I be -- to live on this planet.

No more (knock on wood) frigid days left, so I’m posting these last of winter’s laughs and moving on to the gentle expansion of spring, while on the other side of the window my sweetheart pushes wet snow out of the driveway with an old bobcat.

After all, March did come in like a lion at almost 40 below, so it’s sure to go out all mild and playful as a lamb. Today was gorgeous. I went and got Beckster, L’s niece, to take her for a walk. She was in the middle of her lunch but her mom said there was no point in making her finish it, she’d just be mad because she wanted to come out with me, so away we went. All Beckster could talk about was coming over “to your place” where we would “sing” and if I had any work to do, “I can help.”

I managed to hold her off long enough to look at the cattle, gather a few eggs, peruse the two pens of piggies, see what “Unker” was doing, pet the dog and some cats, and have a quick push on the swing. When we did stop in here for a few minutes, she had L put on a CD right away so she could dance, and when I got downstairs she grabbed my hands so we could dance together, as we did last time she stayed with me for a couple hours. Dean Martin was croonin’ and we had a fine old time, Beckster and I.

I love this CD and cannot help but sing and dance when it’s on. And don’t show me any film footage of Deano as a young man -- whew! he was one sexy guy! -- had I not been 10 years old when he was 30, I’d’ve been hot for him back then.

Overdrinking aside, I mean. I remember his show, where he always had a martini glass in his hand or some kind of booze. That was the joke at the time. Now it’s not thought so cool as it was then.

If you weren’t the person living with the drunk, that is.

I took this picture in the fall, to show you how much crop had been left in the field when the snow fell. This is a crop of canola just across the road from the farmyard where we live. Not many farmers around here got their crops off in time.

In a week, maybe two, all this white stuff will be gone! Next, it will be pictures of newborn kittens and kelly-green leaves.

“To do is to be. - Plato

To be is to do. - Kant

Do be do be do. - Sinatra”

Deer on road
Bouncing away like bunnies
Sons giggling
Heat gauge sky-high
Side of highway
Refilling antifreeze
No problem
Twenty-minute fix
We’re on our way

Evening with two white-haired ladies
Eighty-six and eighty-eight
Great-aunt pulls out photo albums
Great-great grandparents
Great-great uncles and aunts
Next to a bush
Two tiny sisters having a tea party
Now here in front of me
Practically blind
Shrunken
Bent
Wrinkled
Tiny steps.

Family tree comes out
Great-great-great grandmother Susannah
Same birthdate as mine
Her son married British Hoddinott
Pissed off wealthy family
Then emigrated to Ontario.
Next generation came west to Manitoba,
Then to Saskatchewan
And here we are.

Curled up on great-aunt’s couch that night,
Unable to fall asleep,
So many mothers and grandmothers
Led to this life, me.
These women asleep in the next room
So changed from the little tea-party girls
They were over 80 years ago.

“You have a personality just like your dad’s”
An old acquaintance of Dad’s from 40 years ago
Tells me, hand on my arm.

Aunt A, my great-great aunt, was a nurse during the First World War. She brought home lovely things; this set of heavy copper has been passed down to me. I never met my great-great aunt, but I have seen many of the things she collected. My grandmother had a beautiful gold bracelet that once belonged to this aunt of hers. I used to borrow it all the time. Now it is mine.

Barney and I went out to the barn last night after walking Zander home at eight o’clock. At the door of his house we ran into Loverboy, who accompanied us over to the barn.

He’d bolted out of the house an hour before, when his dad phoned to say there was a cow in labour. He moved so fast I thought there must have been some trouble. Turns out there wasn’t. When we arrived, there was one newborn calf that was still wet and wobbly.

All the chores had been done for the night, and Loverboy had time to chat with us as we watched the calves suck out their warm milk ambrosia or sleep in a rectangular ‘ball’ after filling their bellies. One had resorted to climbing up on his mother’s back to make her stand, but she wasn’t budging from her cud-chewing position on the floor.

Loverboy greeted each beast and scratched their foreheads, laughed at the hairy forelock on one and finger-dressed it in different styles, slapped their slabs of shoulders, displaying affection and familiarity. He told us about their character traits.

“She’s turned into a real good mom already, figured out what to do when it’s time to come in, goes straight into her stall.”

“Oh you, you can finish a bucket of chop faster than anybody.”

“This one here is going to lose a chunk of her ear. She’s the one I spent a couple hours out here drying her off in the middle of the night.” It had been 35 below, not taking the nasty wind chill into account, and she’d been dropped outside in the corral.

His favourite is obviously a little one who was, he said “as tiny as a newborn deer.” She’s still small. She’s feisty, and leaps about and kicks up her heels, and makes him smile.

They are sweet little things. But keeping them in the barn, where it’s warmer and sheltered, also means a farmer spends time with them in close quarters. They grow up unafraid of humans, and then at feeding time in the corral when they’re grown, they’ll bowl you right over in their hurry to get to the food. It won’t do you any good to stand there yelling and waving your arms when you’re directly in their path. They are focused on one thing and you better get out of the way. That’s almost two tons of hungry beastie. Even if they bump you with their heads accidentally when you’re standing beside them, it can knock you down.