My house is once again a home

Sunday, February 28, 2010

It’s February 28^th, 9 a.m. and my house is very quiet.

The kitchen is chuck-full of empty boxes and suitcases too large for the attic, but my house is very quiet because thankfully it’s too early for my 19-year-old to be awake.

Oh, how things change.

It’s two days since Daughter #3 returned to the fold to rethink her future steps 18 months after moving to the big city.

Her post secondary path met a road block last fall and in the aftermath of withdrawing from classes, indecision, and despite a valiant stab at the working world in the big city, the factors of reality have made “home” a more logical place to regroup.

I sit here and think back upon the first few days in September 2008, when I’d just returned to this house from moving my final shift in children to the big city—in that moment when I found myself alone and pacing a childless cage.

I was among the lyrics in a Bruce Cockburn song and the one for whom the website flownthenest.com was written and like something from a Van Morrison song, l hoped for 'Enlightenment' in an empty nest.

I had proven myself so many times as a mom since 1985. Parenthood was all I had known, who I'd been, and where almost all of my emotional and intellectual skills had resided for 23 years.

18 months ago, I was like an old debit card. A mother whose magnetic strip had worn thin. Time for a replacement card that included free space, time, and all that.

I had to live with myself.

I’d never had really done that—really had the opportunity in my lifetime to do that.

Even before I was done College I had met the first guy I would marry, so I never really had time to get to know myself. By the time I was separated and divorced from that adventure, I had three very young daughters to parent.

Motherhood took notes and Beth was 82nd on the dictation list.

I never got past 81.

Then I met Peter. Thank God for Peter.

Yet, I was still a mother with young kids and now a wife again. Roles rolled on.

18 months ago, I’d predicted it would take my dogs weeks before they ignored the drone of the school bus coming down the country road to drop off Daughter #3 from high school. Instead it took months.

And today, if I see a school bus, I still can stop them in their dog tracks if I say, “Here she comes."

It’s not only elephants that never forget.

18 months ago, I faced a brand new desert, a new dawn, the high road, the road less travelled, woot! woot! woot!

I ran around buck naked if I wanted to, and was freed from picking up a certain someone from work at 10:30 p.m. six out of seven nights a week. I went vegetarian, played my music loud at 5 a.m. and was done with arguments about whose turn it is to do dishes.

And alone with myself I often didn’t do dishes at all until I’d used up all the eating utensils I could find.

There was no more head-banging teenage rap music to roll my eyes at, and no more silent treatment at the supper table by an aforementioned bad mood bear.

My house saw a new dawning and I learned very quickly to dance to sound of my own drum.

18 months ago, I expected the days would drip slowly on the page, Mr. Cockburn and that I would pace the cage.

The days dripped and I paced for about as long as it took Olympic freestyle skier Alexandre Bilodeau to fly down Cypress Mountain and win his gold medal.

Life without kids in the house did not take some getting used to. It fit me snug as my size seven furry slippers do every morning. I looked forward not backwards at all the possibilities and ran with it.

Ah, but little did I know.

And never in 100 light years did I expect to return to sharing life in this five-room farmhouse with Daughter #3—in an open-ended term.

But here’s the beauty in the smooth and the rough and the unknown if you are raised in the belief that you matter.

Good parents support their children.

My parents believed in me, through my success and stumbling and in all my unsure times. There were no failures. Anything was possible.

In the spirit of parenthood, let me reiterate my words from 18 months ago.

Here’s to you, #3.

Let me begin with a big round of applause to a certain 19-year old the possibilities for whom have only just begun.

Proud of you? Nothing this talented writer can come up with could convey how my rewarded heart believes in you.

However, I doubt you will empathize with anything I've written about in the last few paragraphs and most likely, if I know anything, you won't even read this column until 15 years from now, when stuff your mother did back then, seems cool to you now.

That's okay. It's a mom-thing.

Living the Olympic dream my way

Sunday, February 21, 2010

“Citius, Altius, Fortius!”

If there is one thing I know for sure it is that I am an Olympic Games geek.

Every two years—and in more ways than there is room for me to describe in this space—something ancient emerges from this spirited soul of mine and leaps into a lifestyle in which all things have an Olympic slant.

I have lived vicariously during the Olympic Games since 1972 when I was 12 years old. Growing up, I willed myself to be every athlete from the discus thrower to the speed skater with each successive year of the Games. While the real competitors were battling it out in the Olympic world stage—I was practicing at home bent over like a comma and slicing up the ice rink on the creek perfecting crossovers with my skates or spinning about and hurling huge rocks as discus, across the green grass of my parents’ front lawn.

And today, even as my 50^th birthday looms in the distance and my aching muscles receive their daily Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen combination—I still am right as rain in Olympic-mode and believe myself a champion in all things.

My current favorite Canadian bard is Shane Koyczan. Ever since hearing him articulate ‘We Are More’ during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver I’ve been puffed up in patriotism, acting as if before February 12^th I didn’t even know I was Canadian.

And while my husband will always be ‘Hercules’ in the starry-eyed vision and heart of his wife no matter what year it is, he has not one Olympic sports bone in his body.

This is perhaps the only time I will admit his temporary absence in our neck of the woods is an okay thing.

Although if he had been here right now, the man cave he is intent on building would have been buttoned up and beautiful as he poured all of his efforts into it to avoid being sucked into the Olympic vortex currently racing through this tiny house for two weeks in February.

When I was talking by telephone with him on Sunday morning and expounding my anticipation for watching the men’s hockey preliminary round between Canada and the United States that evening, there was a long, silent pause through the telephone from Afghanistan.

“That sounds like fun,” he said, as my E.S.P. scored another goal.

My ‘CSIS’ (Critical Selection Information System) kicked in just then as I decided not to tell him that my Olympic-size attitude may result in the purchase (using his credit card) of one of everything from the Vancouver 2010 Olympics online store, as well as a pair of speed skates, a snowboard, a curling rock, downhill skis, and a luge sled, so that I can begin training for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

Okay, so I’m a big dreamer, and admittedly my speed skating and discus days are but pearls of the past. But believe me, that doesn’t mean I haven’t found alternative modes of expression for my Olympic prowess.

Not to mention that today’s technology grants me the ability to download every song from the 2010 Opening Ceremonies and with that kind of music energizing me in my training workouts, nothing can stop me.

If there were a two-mile frozen creek walk competition in the Winter Games, they’d be handing me a gold medal right now.

If there were a snow-shoveling event, I’d have taken the competition by storm with my right-handed power throw.

And because the closest thing to a curling rink surface around here is my kitchen floor, it sparkles thanks to my “hurry hard!” deck mop.

Gold medal please.

In the days to come if I don’t keep a lid on this Olympic sweep, it could slalom through Pete’s budding man cave as a good will gesture in a bid to remove unnecessary tool and gadget paraphernalia.

(Don’t worry honey. I will never be the iceberg to your titanic).

Geek or no geek, my Olympic dreams are always a blast for me and no matter how old I get (and I’m going to get very, very old) I will never stop pretending to be the Olympian.

And during those two weeks in February 2060, when the Games of the 46^th Olympiad are going strong somewhere in this big world, here I’ll be at 99 years young having just won for the fastest competitor in the rocking chair event.

Gold medal please, sonny.

What you focus on expands

Sunday, February 14, 2010

It was 10 a.m. on Valentine’s Day and my chocolate fit already had been addressed. The unopened box of ‘Queen Anne’ chocolate covered-cherries left over from Christmas was but a shell of its former self, as all 10 of the sweet-nothings were currently on route to my digestive system.

I really was not looking forward to February 14th, because no matter how bullish I am about handling my perpetually independent life, Valentine’s Day dawns rather blue and empty with my husband away.

Granted some will say that Valentine’s is just another day and in all honestly, it is.

But this is my space and I’ll cry about it if I want to.

And yes, the chocolates were an attempt to fill a void and, no, they didn’t do anything for me except give me the usual regrets—made worse after I read the nutrition facts printed on the box post consumption.

Accordingly and repentantly, being that the first two main ingredients are sugar and glucose syrup and NOT CHOCOLATE, I have ingested 130g (30 teaspoons) of sugar in two minutes.

Ironically, Jackson Browne’s song ‘Running on Empty’ was playing on iTunes and as my stomach revolted against the junk-staple overload, I wished that I too was doing what the song said, as I plummeted into a hypoglycemic nightmare.

I boiled a cup of water and squeezed into it the juice of half a fresh lemon—my current holistic remedy for the ‘ickies’ and I got back to the business of being bullish, because I know myself very well.

I am pathologically positive and the doldrums don’t have much of a life around here.

Faced with making a brighter day for myself I decided to write about three objects important to me and that have helped shape my world.

First is a photograph of my grandmother, the late Florence (Caul) Drennan—taken when she was about 13 years old. I found it here in this house in 2006 after she had passed away.

I don’t recall seeing it before then and I doubt it would have meant as much to me at any time in the past, as it does today.

Grandma would have been 95 years old this April if the Universe worked the way the rest of us wished it would, but as I have come to realize, “Fate rarely calls on upon us at the moment of our choosing,” to quote ‘Optimus Prime’ from the ‘Transformers’ movie.

The 1927 photograph shows Grandma holding a bible and surrounded by eight other young gals whose names are written on the back. They include Lucille Heward, Adeline Steele, Eva and Annie Caul (grandma’s sisters), Gladys McLeod, Astrid and Alice Herrem, and Vera Hanes.

Although it is apparent that the girls were posing in mature fashion for the photo, I would bet the bursting smiles on their faces were surely followed by unrestrained laughter once the box camera flashed.

I can hardly believe my grandma was once so young and when I am down and out or sweating the small stuff, the photograph shouts to me “carpe diem” and reminds me how fast time flies and how precious time is.

Seize the day.

Secondly, is a piece of ocean coral that I have had sitting on my bedroom dresser in every place I have lived since 1978—which to my amazement stands at 14 houses.

That year at Christmas my family traveled with my grandparents to South Padre Island, Texas and located on the gulf coast.

On one of the many sunny days of that vacation I was walking on the beach alone with my grandpa, whom I adored. I was 18 years old.

Grandpa Drennan reached down and picked up a piece of coral and between us we decided it looked a lot like a three-legged dog.

He handed it to me and said, “Here’s your Christmas present.”

Granted it may sound corny and perhaps a tad scant in the gift department but no word of a lie—it remains the most precious gift I have ever received from anyone in all my life.

That little piece of coral reminds me that the simplest of kind gestures might just be our greatest gift to someone else.

The third object? Many choices wandered around in my head and not one of them meant more to me than another. Perhaps the indecisiveness was a hint to give the off-the-wall word soup a rest.

I often wonder why some things happen when they do.

I checked my email and there in my Inbox was a Valentine message from my husband quoting Oscar Hammerstein II and it read,

“Do you love me because I am beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?”

Awesome. Thanks honey!

As the saying goes, “What you focus on expands.”

The rest of my day had a smile on it.

The day that begged for another start

Sunday, February 7, 2010

There are the usual foodie smells that have potential to wake me up in the morning, be it the subtle waft of caffeine perking out of the coffeemaker or the warm drift of fresh bread baked by timer in the bread maker.

And the smell of bacon sizzling in the frying pan remains one of the favorite aromas to jostle my nostrils and awaken me from a good night’s sleep.

Of course none of these wonderful mental stimuli avail themselves in my neck of the woods. Nope.

Instead I am yanked before sunrise from my fantasy dream, wherein Brad Pitt is saving me from a hungry pack of wolves.

Into an immediate wide-eyed state I am thrust all ears to the guttural grunting of “uh-ah, uh-ah, uh-ah”—or in layman’s terms—the sound of a dog about to upchuck inside the house.

There is that jujitsu moment pulled from the ‘Matrix’ movie where I leap from the sheets into mid-air, grab my housecoat with one hand while doing a half twist across Pete’s side of the bed and hit the floor with a stuck landing.

I throw open the bedroom door, and in the dark, bolt into the kitchen, dive over the butcher’s stainless steel table—arms outstretched for the door handle in a frantic effort to release said dog into the outdoors to throw up.

Now, if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I can stomach the sight and feel of just about anything as long as it didn’t just come from inside a dog.

And the situation is much worse when I’m not even sure what the wet blob of a thing is that is staring back at me on the rug when I flick on the lights at 6 a.m. after I have stepped in it.

I’m not sure if the temperature of the thing would have felt as gross at that moment if it had been cold, but as the warm, oozing globule squeezed up through the toes of my left foot I was wishing just then, that it had at least had been below body temperature.

I squinted to identify the thing, because my contact lenses were still in their case on my dresser.

Ah yes, the rug. The brand new rug—now embedded with what appeared to be, in my fuzzy vision, a copious mustard-yellow slime splayed outwards in a size seven-foot imprint.

The dogs had backed up under the kitchen table, dreading the inevitable expletives that spilled out of my mouth. Yet as soon as I began hopping on one foot to avoid spreading the thing around the room, the canine stupors took that to mean play time and bounded about.

All things being equal, Murphy’s Law dictated the thing would then be spread around by paw marks. And it was.

Once outside, the dogs disappeared into the cold air, yet again chasing the illusive nothing they are after each and every morning and on this morning giving not a care in the world for the Alpha who fired sparks of fury at them with her eyes.

I stood in the frigid morning air and crabbed my impatience at Mother Nature for her sluggish stroll into spring and the sunrises I longed for at 5 a.m.

And because my foot was still covered in slimy doggy-doo of some sort, I used my common sense and decided to make a quick rush at the snow bank near the back step and—cold or not—clean the muck off.

If this whole affair had happened on the first day of the workweek I could have blamed it all squarely on the Monday.

Of course this is never the case in my neck of the woods. Nope.

And if it was, then I would have to add to the equation the frozen dog poop I stepped on in my bare feet in the dark that morning, that was right there off the back step where I suspect a certain dog left it the night before instead of going off to his or her regular pooping grounds when out on bathroom detail in a deep freeze.

Needless to say I ended up back in bed and started the day over again—on the other foot.

After all, it was February 2nd, Groundhog Day.

Food for thought ends with butter

Monday, February 1, 2010

It was 3:45 on Sunday afternoon, and if there’s one thing I knew for sure at that moment—turning to food as a source of writing inspiration was stupid.

And of course I professed this as I wolfed down two and three more handfuls of chocolate mini-kisses, because by then I needed something sweet to balance out the rest of the fridge I’d just eaten.

Crackers and cream cheese, a slice of bread with tuna and mayo, half a grapefruit, and a small bowl of peanuts, had spawned nothing more than the need to loosen the top button of my jeans due to gas.

And because this writing jag was a good occasion to have two things going on at the same time, I’d gotten up and wet my nose and applied a ‘Biore´’ deep cleansing pore strip.

Not thoroughly reading the instructions on the box meant that 20 minutes into a 10-minute window I needed a crow bar to peel the paper mache´off my nostrils.

I took one look at the underside of the hardened strip and ran for my magnifying glass, and spent 15 minutes in awe of all the stalagmites pulled out of the top of my nose.

The result is still lying on top of my dresser as a potential science project.

My nose pores were spectacularly clean, but I still had no idea what to write about.

90 minutes into the creative process, I peeled my blank slate off this chair and stood at the kitchen window for 20 minutes trying to decide if a walk outdoors in minus 18C would motivate me.

Red plaid lumberjack coat, scarf, dark sunglasses, a big black tundra hat with ear flaps and under-the-chin drawstring, along with my husband’s oversized leather mitts, and his steel-toed, knee-high, safety Kodiaks.

I looked like Elmer Fudd.

It was no fashion show and thank Heaven I wasn’t expecting company.

I opened the door to the brisk outdoors, expecting to find two canine capers bursting at the seams with excitement to see their Alpha.

No such luck, as I heard them off in the distance howling blindly at nothing but the open space of the field behind the barn.

Instead I was greeted by a dead mole lying face up with his arms tucked snuggly under his head like a sun worshipper frozen solid to the bale of straw that Cash uses as a lookout post while I'm away in town.

No sooner had I stepped down off the stairs at the back door in Pete’s 50lb-each winter boots did I feel a sudden kinship with the late (yet-to-be-found) Mr. Jimmy Hoffa, whom I now suspect met his maker wearing the same cement footwear.

My dogs possess only one keen sense and it isn’t brainpower. They heard me squeak across the snow-packed yard, and came bounding around the corner by the outbuilding, stopped solid in their tracks and mistaking me for an unknown intruder, began barking.

I motioned and moved towards them and they ran away, reassuring me the day I really need them to save my life, will not be realized.

However, Dot may remember that she owes me one.

Early last winter before the ice on the creek was thick enough for the annual skating rink, Dot had had a “run-in” with potential for disaster.

I’d come home from work and parked my truck in the garage and coming out noticed a clan of deer standing together unusually close to the edge of the water on the opposite side of creek—and staring in my direction.

I started walking towards the creek and talking to the deer, asking them why were they so curiously intrepid? All the while Cash was barking up a storm running to me and back down the hill to the water and I thought nothing of it until I got closer and saw the frantic pawing of my Dot, who had fallen through the thin ice in the middle of the creek.

She dogpaddled in the icy water hole and couldn't get a grip to pull herself out. It was surreal moment, as she was too far out for me to go after her.

If I learned anything from the ensuing event, it was not to quit my day job to become a rodeo cowgirl.

Despite the race to get some rope with the gallons of adrenaline pumping through me, I couldn't make or throw a lasso around my dog's neck to save her life—literally.

A cell phone call for help brought rescuers, including one with a long pike pole to latch onto the collar that my dog was not wearing.

More than 15 minutes had passed before we broke enough ice with the pole to get her closer to shore. She was cold and wet and the joke of the ruminant mammal community.

After she was safe and sound, I had to laugh as I imagined the deer all standing there snickering at the smarty pants dog paddling in place in the icy hole, as they chastised her with their stares for stepping out to bark incessantly at them.

Back to the task at hand.

I took my cement shoe walk on the snowy creek, forgetting once again to listen to my dad’s advice and delay gratification by heading into the wind as I trekked away to clear my creative block.

It was frozen solid when I got back to the house and required three cups of hot chocolate and buttered toast to thaw it out.