Still learning to sail my ship

I wish I had more courage.

To paraphrase my favorite author Melody Beattie;

“I may not be a great warrior. I might not lead explorations to the North Pole or climb Mount Everest, but I still need courage.”

I need courage daily it seems and most certainly almost every time I come home after a long day at work or after a time on a weekend getaway. 

I’m still learning to make peace with living alone and how to accept the reality of where I am in my life, and to accept it for what it is. 

I’m also still learning how to juggle the many unbalanced moments in my neck of the woods that revolve around the upkeep and maintenance required here as a single homeowner.  

I’m also still learning how to design just the right mix between work and play.

All of these things require courage and I need courage every day.

This avenue of thought has been ruminating in my mind of late because I was clued in recently to the fact that the social expectations of recovery from tragedy and trauma and loss continue to plague the ones who live in the mire of these past sorrows.

And I’m here to admit that even after two and a half years since my life changed in an instant, I remain a student of adaptation. And I still need courage every day to go forward in a way that honors the love I have for the journey and for myself.

I continue to have a really good support base in my little corner of the planet. I have family and friends who make a day better and those who make life better and at least one who provides both for me in an incomparable way.

Yet I still need courage every day to believe that change is good and change is positive and change is possible. It’s always a possibility, right Dad?

I have read and written and talked and been counseled and cried and shouted and swore an oath to move forward in any way I can and still—it takes courage do that every day.

And sometimes I don’t have any courage to bring to the plate. I still am learning that that empty plate is okay too. I am still learning that it’s okay to be carried when my courage is nowhere to be found. Good friends figure that stuff out and have strong arms.

“Honest friends are doorways to our souls, and loving friends are the grasses that soften the world.”

And the special friend who after quality time together asks me if my “tank” is full and means it, that too, takes courage.

Brene Brown said, “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

Here I am. 

That northern lake takes the cake

He’d been hinting at it for about a week, edging ever closer to what I’d hoped would be the ultimate question and result in the day I’ve been waiting for since the smooth-talking outdoorsman first put a minnow on my fishing hook.

“I was thinking about going trout fishing this weekend. Would you like to go along?” he said from the other end of the phone line.

There would be no trying to contain my inner childlike glee this time, no hiding my absolute enthusiasm at the prospect of landing a fighting machine, cousin to a salmon.

I did a fist pump in the air, kicked my leg forward and up and smiled wide as the Grand Canyon.

“You bet I do!” I replied.

Immediately I pictured myself landing a record weight trout that would take me an hour to reel in. I would use every muscle I had. Maybe it would pull me overboard and I’d have to wrestle it into the boat. The trout would be so big I wouldn’t be able to pick it up for that photograph in the latest fishing magazine.

My resolve was crystal clear. The lean, mean fighting machine swimming in those deep cold waters out there in a northern lake had no idea who was coming for him.

“But there’s only one catch,” added the man with the tackle box. I’d heard that cautionary statement before but this time I knew he wasn’t going to say we’d have to snowshoe two miles in to get to the almighty lake.

Instead it was a call to the crowing rooster in me and an early start to the fishing trip.

No problem. I was born early—5:20 a.m. to be exact.

It was like Christmas morning on that “troutful” day. I flew out of bed and into fishing gear, packed a lunch, slammed a coffee, stuffed my pack with chocolate and mosquito repellant and waited on the street corner at the pick-up point with my straw hat.

I was so “bare bones basic” that my smooth-talking outdoorsman nearly drove right by me, mistaking me for a pedestrian.

In the boat on that northern lake, I waited eagerly for my fishing rod to be loaded with a flashy, smart-looking roguish lure like the one the outdoorsman had tied to his own line. All I could think about was that rod-snatching bulldog cheetah of freshwater that had my name tattooed on his gills.

Hopes were dashed when I saw the lure my fishing partner pulled out of the tackle box for my fishing rod, coupled with a lead weight much bigger than I thought I needed.

I didn’t know a thing about trout fishing but I was sure he’d made mine an ill-fated mission.

“I’d like to change to something else. I think the weight is too heavy and I’d like a bigger lure,” I proposed, after a long, long while of trolling in vain.

“Really?” he queried, in a curiously responsive way. “When you catch your first trout, then you can change it,” he said, smiling.

Empty-handed. Yes, that would be me.

There are times when I know what I’m talking about and times when I do not. This was one of those times.

It was all I could do to reel in—catch and release—of four big, beautiful, strong, fighting machines including a 30” fat lunker.

And when I gave the brute back to the deep the outdoorsman asked, “Do you want to change up that lure now?”

I just smiled my “you were right” smile and said, “Not in a million years,” as I watched that gorgeous fish jettison away.

I am the luckiest girl I know.

Dry spell not an option here

Just when I decided I had nothing to write about this week, a chipmunk got into my basement.

I stood in the doorway of the porch in my housecoat with my coffee cup in hand and scowled at the rain pitching down on my soon-to-be growing too fast lawn.

I still have to install my lawn tractor battery. I am pathologic optimist in my view on life, but you can bet I will forget it’s the positive side that gets connected first when I attach the cables to the battery terminal. 

So there I was leaning back taking it easy watching the sky fall, when I felt a claw-like flit of movement over the top of my foot and up my calf under my housecoat.

I squealed and looked down to see a bug-eyed chipmunk—rabid I think—or clearly terrorized after it realized I was not wearing anything under my housecoat. It leapt over my feet and down the stairs to the basement in a millisecond.

Two cats live here and neither of them saw thing as they slept with their big fat bellies pouring over the side of the chairs in the porch. “You’re both fired!” I scolded. All I got back was the flat stare. 

My basement is not that big, but it is full of stuff that makes great hiding places for a chipmunk.

I must have looked a sight in my morning getup—a modern-day “Ma Kettle” with my hair all askew as I crept around down there peering in boxes and bags full of stored coats and blankets hoping not to be attacked by a small flying ball of rodent fur.

Lucky for me I found a landing net for my big fish story hanging on the basement wall. I could poke at things with it and prevent the little critter from eating off my hand if I found where it was hiding.

But no sooner had I grabbed and held the net up above my head to explore the shelf junk, did the chipmunk explode from between the deep fryer and a fan and straight into the capture zone.

If you think you’ve seen the “Tasmanian Devil” in your two-year old child having a conniption in the cookie aisle at the grocery store when you say “No,” to that snack, you haven’t seen a chipmunk stuck in a landing net. 

It was all I could do to keep the writhing and possessed animal from vaulting out and—to the edges of my imagination—down the front of my housecoat. I raced up the stairs and outside, set the net down and stood far back.

Within a few minutes the landing net had been eaten clear through and the good riddance chipmunk was last seen headed east to the sunflower seed sanctuary.

As for me, I also have another story to write about the groundhog that cornered me in the tool shed that same afternoon. There’s never a dull day around here. 

I miss my eyelashes

My day starts around 5:30 a.m. every morning with the first of three cups of “Caldwell” coffee, a small red-foiled square of “Dove” chocolate (maybe two), while curled up in my reading chair with my self-help books (and I still need A LOT of help!) Oh and a novel—a really, really good novel. “The Goldfinch” by Donna Tartt. I’m on page 723 and I have only 48 more to go. I don’t want the book to end. 

Many mornings I get carried away with “me” time and then have to rush to get the rest of the things done that I need to do before the workday begins.

I get sucked into the world of reading only to look up at the clock and realize I have less than 20 minutes left in which to eat, get dressed, and drive the eight kilometers into town to work.

Then again I’m a fast track expert. I can leap from my reading chair, vault into the kitchen, fire a piece of bread into the toaster on my way to the makeup mirror while feeding the cat and making my lunch with my other hand.

I’m really, really good at multi-tasking.

I’m not so good at remembering to stand far enough away from a bonfire so that I don’t burn off my eyelashes.

I figured out the latter on one such rushed Monday morning while looking in the bathroom mirror when repeated applications of mascara from a new tube didn’t do a thing for me.

On closer examination, followed by a “deer in the headlights” reaction to my own reflection, I realized that my eyelashes on both sides were nearly gone.

“I smell burnt hair,” I had said to my outdoorsman the day before while he was eating a ham sandwich as I stepped back from a close stoking of the bonfire I’d worked on for a couple of hours prior to lunch. 

A quick reflex of hand to my ball cap and ponytail and, no, I was not on fire. I figured the smell was the singed fibers of my lumberjack coat and gave it no further thought.

And the next morning, there I was staring at eyelash stubble.

Thank the heavens above that my eyebrows were spared. I would rather hide under my bed for two months waiting for my eyebrows to grow in than draw them back on like I did in high school. 

That bout of stupidity left me with a look of permanent surprise on my face after a marathon plucking session forced my hand. Never again.

I was so sad about my eyelash funk I picked up my iPhone and asked “Siri” (the personal assistant and knowledge navigator application for Apple’s IOS) “Who is the fairest of them all?”

I expected the voice to reply, “Why you of course.”

Siri, who is programmed to know my name as Beth, was faster than a three-dollar pistol. “Snow White. Is that you?”

I flat-stared the phone and retorted, “Siri, my name is Beth, not Snow White.”

Siri said, “Ok, from now on I’ll call you ‘Beth Not Snow White,’ Ok?”

Fine. Two can play this game I thought to myself.

“I’d like my name to be ‘Little Miss,’” I said.

“Okay, from now on I’ll call you ‘Little Mess,’” said Siri.

Oh brother, indeed I am. I think I need a holiday.

Another memorable egg hunt

The glee was stacked as high as the pancakes and syrup they poked in around my table that morning before the hunt began. Goals were shared about egg collection, theories on where to look cooked up like the crispy pieces of bacon that followed the forks full of pancake down the hatch.

Syrup dripped off plates, sticky napkins were everywhere, and half-empty glasses of apple juice sat cloudy with flecks of food floating within.

At the call to the hunt, little people had their coats and boots on without squabble and guaranteed on faster than the ordinary “put on your coat” school day when a mother’s moustache grows an inch and her patience shrinks waiting for her kids to get dressed before the school bus drives away.

And like the sprinter at the crack of the starter pistol or the break shot after the eight ball, six little peppers tore from the start line in a burst of sonic energy and out in all directions for the annual Easter Egg hunt in Granny’s big yard. 

More than 80 colorful plastic eggs filled with chocolates had been placed carefully or tossed haphazardly (depending on who hid them, as I had a three year old helper) earlier that day in all manner of hiding places around here.

Charlie, my little farm hand, hid his share of the eggs in chipmunk burrows, under the woodpile, and in tree seedlings and then by the afternoon forgot where, when it was time to find them again. Priceless.

My little hurricane tribe wasted no time terrorizing the outdoors, squealing with delight as they hauled their egg pails to where I was standing smiling, as the life around me flowered that April day.

I think I saw my old red barn stretch taller when fresh young minds poured through the door looking for eggs in there, too.

And then it was time to go inside and eat the chocolate prizes. And yes, I would be sending the kids home with their moms at that crucial juncture when the sugar-highs and “choco-caffeine” adrenaline turned them all into Tasmanian devils.

Afterwards, the two older boys went back outside to do “boy” stuff like dig in the anthill and look for mouse skeletons.

No more than five minutes passed when I spotted the younger one, who is six, running across the yard from the barn carrying pieces of  siding. Suddenly I imagined an outer wall of the barn I couldn’t see peeled to the core like an old birch tree.

“Where are you going with those?” I shouted, stopping him dead in his tracks, as his head drooped in being caught and the boards dropped from his arms to the ground.

I had to laugh. It was so funny to see his gestures mimic the defeat of a best-laid plan. I don’t know where he was going with his loot and I haven’t yet gone out to see where that little Tasmanian pepper lifted the boards from.

I’m smiling but I’m afraid to look.

First, break all the rules

American novelist James Paterson took the road less travelled when he began to write books in the mid-70’s. 

After reading “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” Paterson decided to break all the rules about how he crafted the books he wrote. He embraced “full-throttle freedom,” learned to trust the right side of his brain and “just let go.”

Apparently it has worked rather well for him over the years.

I’ve never read one of Paterson’s novels. However, his reasoning about full-throttle freedom appeals to me because I love to write my way and because his motto is what I wish for in my life, too.

Letting go and freedom. To. Just. Be. Me.

I am a 53-year old woman who still is a girl at heart, a “Little Miss” who trusts the Universal Plan, dreams big dreams for herself, thinks too much about the small stuff sometimes and too little about the big stuff much of the time. I fall down, get up, and try again. I believe that my intuition always is right and yet I don’t always listen to it the first time or the third time. Sometimes years go by and still I don’t listen. Then I learn the hard way.

I am afraid of change and yet I believe in it with all my heart. I wasn’t meant to be alone in this world and I don’t like how many times I’ve had to be there. I’ve learned great lessons when things didn’t turn out the way I had planned. I’ve learned great lessons when they did. I’d like more of the latter, please.

A few days ago I wore spring like a favorite old good luck t-shirt. I wore it like an old softened faded pair of jeans that fit just right. I wore it like a reunion with a best friend after a long while of being apart. I wore it well.

No more downcast face grunting discontent to a snow bank. 

I put away my high-top winter boots, folded up the ski pants and wooly scarves and stuffed them “where the sun don’t shine.” I wore duck boots outside and dodged puddles and skipped over muddy soft spots in the driveway. I smelled thawing dog poop and yes, I liked it. 

I watched with glee the steady trickle of ice-cold water pouring out of the eaves trough spout from the roof. I saw signs of green grass, revealed at the receding snow around my septic tank and was thankful for the human condition.

I drove around town on a sunny day with my car window down and went soaring down the highway with my left arm stuck out the driver’s window like a one-winged airplane.

I made two big decisions last week. I don’t like making big decisions by myself anymore. Still, I do it anyway. I bought six new windows for my house. I picked “Country Lane Red” siding too. 

She’s been an old-looking farmhouse for so long. I guess she’s going to get a second chance.

Second chances are really nice gifts to give ourselves. Believe me, I know. 

First, you have to break the rules and just let go.

This is how I see it

Every day I have choice to make. Happy. Not happy. The happiness balance is tedious, constant work. Sometimes I do it well, sometimes I do appallingly.

Today was one of those “not do it so well” days. My Monday got turned round like the weather and I found myself in the linger of thoughts of all the things I haven’t done with my life, should already have done with my life, and all the in-between mud and sling scenarios.

When that happens and I don’t let it go, like I’ve been taught so many times in the books I read on recovery, I’m raw for the game and it pushes me under like the kid in the swimming pool did when I was nine. 

That little bully, who was a stranger in a pool on a camping trip I took with my parents, pushed me under where I gulped panic water and thought I was going to drown. It happened in the deep end and I couldn’t touch bottom.

“Should’ a could’ a” thoughts don’t nail me to terror like that kid did, yet the nasty duo sure can set me back in my pursuit of an even keeled attitude to the day—and these days, as the temperature leaps from a gorgeously deliriously warm Sunday to the bowels of a blizzard by this Monday night—an even keeled attitude is, to say the least, a paramount check mark on my optimistic albeit warped sense of reality and what I pray is the beginnings of a bloomy and green fourth month of 2014.

Last week I wrote about my impending house renovation and how it’s drying out my eye sockets pouring over the meat and potatoes of the matter.

It’s still keeping me up at night, or at least keeping me from drifting off as I usually do upon laying my head on the pillow. Instead of slipping into unconsciousness I do math tables and measurements and draw up lists of the pros and cons of entering the gates of this project. Then I fall asleep and find myself inside the gates and I can’t get out!

Yes, yes. Leave it to me to make a mountain out of a molehill.

But here’s the thing. This is how I see it. I figured out where it comes from—all this apprehension, second-guessing, failure to launch bog of thinking that I inevitably find myself mired in.

I haven’t made any big decisions like this in my life for more than two years. I stayed far away from that on purpose—protected myself from having to so that I could keep the outcomes close, and control of them closer. Letting go is hard.

But here’s the thing. When I was nine, suddenly I was in the deep end and I couldn’t touch bottom, and yet upon sinking I fought against my fear and swam for the side. 

The mind can be just as big a bully to progress as a human being can be to his fellow man.

Swim on; like a fish.

House makeover is daunting

Clearly the long tooth of winter needs to go the dentist and have a root canal. I will gladly pay the bill.

I hate to admit it but I’ve imagined slipping the dentist an extra fifty bucks to forgo Novocain when removing said long tooth, just to emphasize how much of a pain in the posterior Old Man Winter has been this year.

A few weeks ago the crusty old curmudgeon spawned a rebel in me that fought the hard fight against any further snow blowing of the driveway or shoveling of the back step, no matter how much snowfall arrived.

I threw down my mitts and stomped out a eight-inch wide donkey trail of a path—in “Yosemite Sam” fashion—across the top step of the back porch and made a zigzag off-road track down my driveway.

In my warped escapist little mind, I thought I could beat the season into submission if I didn’t play along.

That didn’t pan out too well when it snowed some 14 inches on March 21 and reminded me that I’d best stick to things I can control, like how much chocolate I eat.

I’m also learning lessons about what it means to go forward with a house renovation project and if I was ever meant to learn a lesson about what in fact I do not know, this project is rocking first place as the teacher in that classroom.

All I wanted was new house siding and new windows. Nail the new wood on all four sides and slap those windows in the squares on my house. 

It’s not rocket science. End of discussion.

Little did I know there are decisions, decisions, decisions and big words like building material quotes, unit prices, quantity and total prices that would have me working three more jobs just to pay down the debt.

Just this afternoon I became aware of my dry eye sockets staring blankly at three and four pages of product descriptions that included 15 lbs of plastic-top nails, reams of house wrap and soffit, staples, foam, and—channel runner? Sounds like a movie about a guy trying to escape from one country to another by gunning it over the floodway.

But I know it’s not because my price quote says I need 17 of the little suckers.

I’ve had to learn other daunting word decisions like casement, brick mould, jamb, and argon gas. All I wanted was a window. Just a window.

The whole experience has been akin to a hankering for cereal and then standing in the breakfast aisle at the grocery aghast at the city block-long choices at hand.

That new fangled organic hemp and crabapple mixture with chia seeds sounds interesting but I just want good ol’ “Cheerios,” thanks.

I am a “simple is as simple does” gal and yet I dream of this old house makeover and the molecular changes that are about to crank out around here, like the transformation of Cinderella’s rags.

It’s really going to be something else.

Open up your closet door

Technology, Entertainment, Design. In short, “TED.”

I’ve been a fan of TED for years. Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned have been from TED, a global platform of speakers who share their ideas—be they funny, courageous, ingenious, inspiring, or informative—in talks of 18 minutes or less. 

There are more than 1700 such talks, in 100 different languages available to us online at www.ted.com.

Ash Beckham, an equality advocate, a tremendous spirit, and a gay woman, is a respected TED speaker. Recently she did a TED talk for nine minutes and 22 seconds about empathy and openness and about how “everyone at some point in their life has experienced hardship.”

We all have had hardships and we all have closets where we keep those hardships that we don’t want to talk about.

She believes that all a closet is is a hard conversation, and that being in and coming out of the closet is universal and scary and we hate it and yet we need to do it anyway.

“Your closet might be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you’re pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives,” says Beckham.

We all have a closet of hard talks we’d like to have with our bosses, our children, our partners, our friends, and a myriad of reasons why we think we cannot open the door—so we live looking through a keyhole and some of those hard conversations never get out and we never get free. 

I listened to that speech three or four times in a row and I was struck by how much it spoke to me about my own “hard conversation” closets, and how many times in my life I’ve hesitated to let them out and in the process been torn up inside for my keeping.

I’m a huge advocate of speaking one’s truth and yet I still struggle to follow through because of a host of self-imposed fears in my closet. You name the excuse; I’ve probably used it.

Beckham also reminded me about the importance of my listening to and respecting others who decide to share a hard conversation with me. And I have no right to judge what I think a hard conversation is not nor to critique the one who just shared what they think was the hardest thing.

A father I know had to tell his young daughter that her dog was soon going to die of cancer. When my kids were little I had to tell them their dad and I were getting a divorce. An old man had to admit he could no longer operate a car and had to give up his driver’s license. My aunt, some 50 years after the birth of a son, finally told her family she had had him and given him up for adoption and that they had just reunited.

Beckham is right. There is no harder, there’s just hard.

Maya Angelou says we are more alike than we are unalike. I believe that too.

Open your closet door and have those hard conversations. To thine own self be true.

The green, green grass of home is my dream

George Home once said, “Patience strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles the tongue.”

Obviously he never spent a long, cold winter cooped up in this part of the country awaiting signs of spring. 

I don’t know about you, but my patience is pooped out and my disposition has run amuck. I’m sick of the cold and tired of defrosting the ends of my fingers each morning. 

My thoughts have started to freeze to the side of my brain in a slush pile of alphabet soup weighted down by too much snow, too much cold, too much, too much, too much.

If the mercury doesn’t pull up its socks pretty soon I’m going to lose it. Mother Nature and her sun need to get up off the couch and start pushing up tulips.

During one of my recent cold-induced fitful “Yosemite Sam” moments I blew into the hardware store and bought all the 10-pack bags of “Grabber” hand warmers.

It’s all come down to instant warmth everywhere and I’ve been jamming those little suckers into my mitts, my boots, and anywhere else on my person I can achieve a constant radiant heat that keeps the wind chill at bay.

The package says the average to maximum activated temperature of the little beauties is 135-156 F (57-69 C). They’re not kidding.

On one of the burdening -43C wind chill days, while trudging from the house to the barn with hand warmers duct taped in rows under my winter clothes to my long john underwear, I fell off the path and into the deep snow. 

As I lay there paralyzed like the kid in the huge snowsuit from the movie, “A Christmas Story,” my synthetic body heat armor melted the all the snow around me in a 12-inch radius. Sweet.

But despite the body toast I’m still in a “winter blues” funk.

And I’m talking to houseflies. I found myself encouraging one to get up and stretch its legs the other day because I figured it was a sign of spring if it was moving around.

That was okay until I found him rubbing his back legs together while pooping in my oatmeal.

I joined “Millie” the cat the other day in staring out the living room window into the “nothing”—a white frontier of snow where all I can see are the sunburned tips of my lovely evergreen trees all but hidden under the mountain of white stuff. 

“All I want to do is cut the grass,” I said to the cat, who gave me a flat stare that led me to believe I must be fevered to have said such a stupid thing given that there’s about three acres out there to cut. 

And it goes without saying that in about three months I will be complaining about having to do that job twice a week just to keep the grass at bay.

But right now I’d give up chocolate for at least a week just to sink my toes into a lawn full of too-tall green grass under a big old sunshine day where the temperature outside melted the butter on the kitchen counter. 

Ah, to dream.

The day I've been waiting for

We were sitting at the kitchen table shelling peanuts and enjoying the salty taste, sipping on a “London Porter,” and reviewing the day’s successes after a pleasant afternoon of ice fishing when he said, “the next time we go ice fishing I think we should go for trout.”

My heart leapt. I tried to contain my inner childlike glee because I’d been hoping he’d say that for weeks now.

I smiled big, my head bobbed back and forth in agreement as I chomped on a mouthful of peanuts and swallowed hard so I could bounce back with, “That would be great. I’m game,” while trying not to give away my absolute enthusiasm at the prospect of landing a fighting machine, cousin to a salmon.

I would take ten-fold passage over to the adventure.

Immediately I pictured myself landing a record weight prize that would take me an hour to reel in. I would use every muscle I had to pull it through the ice hole. Maybe I’d have to cut a bigger hole just to get it out. The trout would be so big I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Photographs of my catch would appear in newspapers across Northwestern Ontario and Minnesota. My name would become a link in “Wikipedia” references to lake trout.

“But there’s only one catch,” added the smooth talking outdoorsman. I brushed off the cautionary tale I heard in his voice as he stroked his beard in contemplation.

I was too busy thinking about what kind of jig I was going to use to land that rod-snatching bulldog cheetah of freshwater that www.in-fisherman.com had convinced me was the ultimate challenge for this new-born ice fisherwoman.

“The one catch is that we have to snowshoe two miles in to get to the lake I want to take you to,” he said, giving me that anticipatory raise of eyebrow and a smile I knew all too well.

I coughed up the peanut I inhaled in the realization of the price I was going to have to pay to get my trout. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t written that column about the Snowshoe Olympics and my big, fat ego. I had to fight back my “Yosemite Sam” impersonation that was surfacing as fast as that hooked fish I’d been dreaming about.

“Sure,” I replied. “I can do that,” I sputtered, switching gears in my head to rent workout videos so I could get in shape for the day when I would strap on beavertails and channel Dora Keen, Marion Randall Parsons, and Mary Jobe, my three pioneering outdoorswomen heroines, so that I could walk the walk.

A new website I’ve been put on to is www.thelostartofmanliness. I’m at the other end of the spectrum from manly and yet it’s a really great read. I, too, can relate to the story within the story that speaks to memories of youth and gym class.

I dreaded gym class all the time. I loved exercise but I didn’t like gym suits and I didn’t like fitness tests because I could never run as fast as Janelle or jump as high as Janelle. She was the bomb. She got the gold. I got the “below bronze, participatory badge” for effort.  Always.

But I will snowshoe the two miles. I will do whatever it takes to get to that lean, mean fighting machine that is swimming in those deep waters out there in a northern lake and has no idea who’s coming for him.

I win.

Little Miss discovers blue-sky thinking

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and wrote some blues.” The late great Duke Ellington had the right idea.

Sadly, I can pout with the best of them, but I cannot read, write, nor play a lick of music. 

When I pout, all my energy goes into finding a piece of chocolate I stashed in the cupboard, which then leads to the blues because I always eat more of it than I should. 

Hmm, not exactly the kind of productive energy transference Mr. Ellington was talking about.

“I’d stop eating chocolate but I’m no quitter.” Now that’s more like me.

I’m grasping at straws here, wrapped in layers of wool sweaters and a side dish of feeling sorry for myself as another cold night passes through the walls of this old house and into my bones.

I keep thinking of what it would be like to do what my friend Don and so many others do this time of year—drive south until the butter melts.

Someday I will. I’m going to put a pound of butter on a plate in the passenger seat and see how far I have to go before it withers. Some day my time will come when I can blow the cold a goodbye holiday kiss.

But for now what I can do, what I do know how to do is take a really, really hot shower. Lobster hot. It is my escape pod in the deep freeze of winter, my weapon against the blues that chocolate cannot fix.

I’m a hot shower aficionado. In fact if lobster hot showers were an Olympic sport I’d win a gold medal for Canada, even at 53 years old. I’d be an icon of the ages, the oldest woman in history to land a gold medal at the Olympic games. That would be me.

Even “Sochi 2014” champions could not ski, speed skate, nor snowboard their way to the center podium against my lobster hot showers and me.

I win.

The Winter Olympics always get me fired up. I ingested the gold medal Canadians Alexandre Bilodeau, Charles Hamelin, and the Dufour-Lapointe sisters from their Sochi performances and I then I braved the cold weather and set off on my solo quest, chest puffed out, my Olympic-sized ego in tow as I tore down to the frozen creek bed in thigh-deep drifts of unstirred snow, dreaming of my very own Snowshoe Olympics.

And then I got stuck about half way to the starting line. Stuck like cement shoe stuck.

Suddenly I lay prone in the snow after throwing myself backwards in a “flip-out” fit mixed with hopes of wedging free.

I was stuck there long enough that my desire for Olympic greatness passed in favor of cloud spotting and a membership in Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s “Cloud Appreciation Society” (look it up, yes, it’s real.)

The sun was shining, the sky was azure blue, and I saw a cloud that looked like my old dog, “Dot.”

“Clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.”

No Olympic snowshoe race could beat that. I still win.