Memories worth their weight in stone

Monday, May 28, 2012



I am experiencing the let down that comes with the end of a really great holiday. I liken my quick descent back to reality to the loud gurgle and sucking swirl of water that I always stare at after finishing a sink load of dirty dishes. 
“Uh huh, there goes my ‘Cloud 9,’ out with the dishwater.” 


All the life tasks I conveniently forgot about while in Wales now loom in the air around me akin to a cat litter box desperate in need of an emptying. 


Thank heaven for my “Sawzall.” 


There’s no better cure for a “down in the dumps” mood than gripping my hands around a reciprocating power tool and finding something to demolish. 
The autonomous act lifts my spirits, propels my confidence to deal with the realities of life and reminds me that I am indeed the “Jackie of All Trades” in my neck of the woods. 


The trouble is that in the throes of all that handheld supremacy I go berserk and can’t stop.


When all is said and done, the poor tree that I was just going to trim back a tad, now looks like my eyebrows did in Grade 8 when I kept plucking one and then the other to equal them out. In the end I was left with pencil thin tufts that got me stares in ways I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. 


I awoke to my writing day Monday morning to the sound of “Millie” the cat sitting outside my open bedroom window and whose 5 a.m. “rooster call” sounded like the life was being drawn out of her through a straw. 


It wasn’t exactly how I want to be yanked out of the dream I was having of being carried off to safety by Idris Elba of “Thor” fame. 
However the caterwaul beat the banshee wail I heard at 3 a.m. in Wales and that I was sure was about to crawl through the second story window of the room I was sleeping in and chew my face off.

I’ve always said I was born in the arms of a great imagination and as it turns out it was a screaming fox and not the infamous banshee. Still, the little hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention when I think about the sound that shattered the Welsh night air. 


That lovely slice of the United Kingdom also sports adder snakes and hairy spiders made legend by the stories of my fine hosts. I was warned a couple of times about the eight-legged creature spotted on the ceiling of a 17-th century pub “loo” but I was in and out so fast that the arachnid never had time to get a spit line out and down to my Canadian carcass. 


When I arrived and was soaked in the world of the Welsh, it was all I could do not to want learn how to speak the language. 
Be still my stupidity. 


With all due respect to the ancient dialect I don’t think I can make my tongue and palate work like that—unless we’re talking food.


One of my favorite experiences in Wales was a day trip to car boot sales where, in parkades and fields, scores of people sold “one man’s junk another man’s treasure” to the masses.


And it was at one particular car boot field where I was introduced to “Effin Effin,” a ruggedly handsome Welsh bloke rightly and famously named in South Wales for his rampant use of the English four-letter social expletive. Jaw-dropping amazing. 


My lovely hosts went over the top with home and food hospitality and if they ever decide to break out into the tourism business I’ll be their booking agent—gladly.

I wanted to try all the ethnic foods I could and although there were a couple of times when I wished I hadn’t said that out loud as I stared at my plate, I learned to work Welsh delicacies into tasty little adventures. 


My very first Welsh meal was faggots and peas and as soon as the meat passed over my lips I knew I probably wasn’t going to ask for the recipe. 


I appreciate that Mr. and Mrs. Hibbard love it. I love a fried egg on peanut buttered toast and they just couldn’t fathom that either.
I tried the gelatinous dark paste “laver bread,” and cockles with bits of bacon and oh, yes! duck eggs. Quacking good. 


My friends kept telling me I would gain two stone before I headed back to Canada. I thought they were talking about all the rocks I would pack in my suitcase from the beaches at Swansea and Rhossili. Nope.


If I gained any weight at all while on holiday it wasn’t from liver and seaweed but from the Welsh cakes, sugar mice, and clotted cream teas I stuffed in my face. I’m a sweetie through and through.


But hey, most of you knew that already.  :)

The Anatomy of My Whole Life

 Monday, May 21, 2012

I wake up at 6 a.m. every morning, pour a cup of coffee, sit in my favorite chair, write in my diary, and read a daily reflection from “The Book of Awakening” by Mark Nepo.

Nepo is a cancer survivor and his book is touted as one “about life, informed by the shadows of death” and full of one-a-day thoughts that are “vitamins for the soul.”

In my view no truer statements could be made.

This is the second year that I’ve re-read it on a daily basis and I’m constantly finding new connections to the wise words and how the book often mirrors my own journey.

Until now I’ve lived a very safe existence—one that’s calculated and organized so that I turn as many of the knobs on the horizontal and vertical as possible.

It’s the control freak in me. I’ve prided myself on being a subtle commander, but in then end a control junkie in my little world all the same.

Thank you for change.

I know how words work. I know how to put them together to get my point across in this space but they fail me now as I scrape my brain dictionary for the right “write” ones that will paint a picture of how my trip to Wales has opened my eyes and planted a seed.

Sure, people travel in big fat planes to far away places every day and I don’t know a thing about what it does to them.

We’re all unique in our life experiences and I try to respect my fellow man and woman in theirs.

However I only own mine.

I will admit that I thought I knew the world by the view out my kitchen window, the one the media paints on television, the Internet, and yes, even the newspaper.

If I had allowed some of those avenues to decide for me I would have never climbed into an aircraft with hundreds of other people and flown. I was an unwitting victim of hype and uncertainty and the unknown.

As I write and read this, perhaps I shouldn’t ditz the view from my kitchen window. It’s pretty darn amazing.

Nonetheless I thought life was just fine and cozy-safe right here at home plunk in the middle of 59 acres of country paradise. No better place in the world did I imagine there to be—until I flew across the ocean purely on faith that it was okay to let go and let live.

Thank you for change.

And too, my friends and family kept telling me that if anyone deserved this trip to Wales it was me—for all I’d been through in the past two years and most specifically the end of my marriage to a man I dearly loved who decided not to come home and then finding love again with a gentleman’s gentleman and abruptly facing the instant end of a lovely future with him when he committed suicide.

I don’t know if there has ever been a time since I first announced the story behind my trip to Wales that I’ve agreed with anyone who replied with, “you deserve this.”

I have had a very difficult time believing that I deserve good things should happen in my life and I think it’s because if I started to believe that then I somehow would diminish the rewards that grow out of me when my soul is wounded.

And yet if I believed that wishing upon a star made wishes come true, then two years ago I would have wished Peter loved me enough to stay married, and I most certainly would have called on all the stars and planets to change Jon’s mind to more promising horizons on that fateful day in January.  And I did do my share of wishing.

But the Universe unfolded anyway.

More important to me than what I “deserve” in life’s peach orchard is that I have faith that I can grow good from the pits.

Mark Nepo writes “Perhaps the secret to growing from our wounds is to live close to the earth, to live without our hearts and minds and bellies always in touch—both inside and out—with that which is larger than we are.

Perhaps, when cut in two, it is a life of humility, of risking to be at one with the soil of our experience, that allows us to heal into something entirely new.”

The morning I left for Wales I wrote in my diary, “I want more than what I can get by wishing. I have so much life to live, so many opportunities ahead of me to experience. I will love again and in the mean time I love my life today just as it is with me in it.”

William Blake was right. “The cut worm forgives the plow.”

I am living proof.

A "Wale" of a story in the making

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I was born with a great imagination, and as I was flying over the North Atlantic Ocean one week ago on my way to Britain I thought my mind’s eye had a pretty good idea what this trip would be like.

Suffice to say I had no clue. This experience has been more than anything I could have possibly dreamed for myself.

I don’t even know where to begin. My editor would say to start with the most important thing and even that advice is difficult just now because there are so many stories trying to jump through my fingertips to the keyboard.

The eight-hour flight to Europe was long and I didn’t sleep a wink. How could I? I was alight with anticipation not to mention that I could not take my eyes off the near full moon that shone in the night sky and through my airplane window for the entire journey. 

We reached the north coast of Ireland and England just before dawn and at 39,000 ft and clear skies it was a sight to behold as the cities below were lit up in the colour of gold.

When I landed in Amsterdam for a 10-hour layover I felt like I could do anything. The world was my oyster.

But even oysters wind up in nets.

The time and space continuum froze for me when six Dutch security guards gathered to ponder an anomaly in my carry-on luggage as it passed through the x-ray machine at the boarding gate for the flight to Wales.

I felt like a foreigner in a foreign country. Wait a minute—I was.

Another guard appeared and took my passport from my trembling fingers and pulled out his mobile phone. All I heard was my birth name and “Cardiff, Wales” tossed about in another language.

I was convinced I was a goner. My identity would be red-flagged at every airport on every continent. They made movies called “Missing” and “Vanished” about these kinds of things.

 I looked up and there were the wide-eyed faces of all my co-passengers who were sitting pretty and in the clear and staring at my folly.

Security was backed up for 15 minutes as I waited for “special ops” to arrive. I was sweating like Arnold Schwarzenegger when his wife found out about the housekeeper, but I also was as clueless as Alicia Silverstone about what could possibly be in my possession to cause such an international incident.

Eventually a guy who looked like Alan Rickman (the actor who played the bad guy in “Die Hard”) arrived wearing a flack jacket and walked over to me after looking at the x-ray image and promptly said “tell me everything that is in your bag—exactly.”

My mind went blank and all that spilled out of my mouth was “Well, I ate all the chocolate.”

It was hopeless. My nerves shot, I couldn’t remember but four of the some 25 things I had packed in that bag.

“Mr. Flack Jacket,” with a stern, heavy accent and with big blue vein throbbing in his forehead, held up his hand and said, “I will get your bag and we will open it together.”

I had nearly everything pulled out of the bag onto the table, naming off each item as I went as eight security guards stood around the contents. Suddenly one of them pointed to the earplugs for my iPhone and a metal belt clip on the “travel approved” silk zip bag that had contained my passport.

Mr. Flack Jacket nodded and left and I was free to go.

If it weren’t for the streak of white hair that had suddenly appeared on my head, there’d have been no evidence of the incident—unless of course we counted the huddle of passengers who had all moved to the other side of the room when I stepped through security to sit down amongst my fellow flyers.

The rest of the trip was “crackin,” but that’s another story—or two.

Flying high on wings of my own

Monday, May 7, 2012

Let me begin by recanting my sad story about my home septic woes from last week. It wasn’t a miserable Monday after all. It turned out that all I had to do was replace a dirty filter. Thanks to “Good Man Joe” I am free to flush!!

So here am on a merry Monday (May 7th) and on my way to the land of the Welsh. I can hardly believe I am in this story! 

I can’t believe I did it! First of all, I wasn’t even sure I’d get through U.S. Customs at the International Falls border without extra scrutiny, My vogue statement for the debut of “Yours Truly” as a world traveler included having my 21-year old daughter straighten my hair, and hence I looked nothing like my passport photo.

Secondly I also managed to fight my way into the compression pantyhose I needed to wear in order to protect my vascular system from the bane of an eight-hour flight although I pulverized the pair of surgical gloves  that I had to use in order to shovel the pair of high density leggings up my torso.

Heaven help me if I have to pee anywhere between here and my layover in Amsterdam.

I had less than 40 minutes to make my flight connection in Minneapolis and I’d never been in that airport before. I had worried about this for weeks, but everyone was right. It was easy to find my way through the maze—although I didn’t get where I needed to be without walking as fast as my legs could carry me.

The airport’s automatic walkways are awesome, except when you forget to step off properly. Me, my 17lb carry-on bag and my 15lb purse went for a tumble when my feet hit the carpet at 5 mph.

I was okay though. I was embarrassed until I realized no one in the entire airport knew who I was and would never see me again.

One hour and 45 minutes have passed in flight time and oh, no, I have to pee and I’m in a window seat. Nine flight attendants are serving liquids from all directions and as much as I would love a glass of water right now, I’m going to pass on that. Having to ask the guy next to me to move so I can get out is only going to happen once on this flight if I can help it and I’ve still got seven hours before we land.

He isn’t much of conversationalist and I really don’t want to bother him. Besides he is fast asleep and his poor head is flopped forward like a rag doll.

I’m gob smacked that there are some 350 people bound for an overseas destination and all together at the same time in a machine with only two wings—one of which I am seated over. I booked this seat not realizing that I would be looking out my window at the rivets and jet engines. But then again, I’m now some 39,000 feet above the ground and beyond the clouds. The temperature outside is -40C and there’s not much to see anyway. Wait! is that ice on the wing! 

It’s 5 p.m. and I can smell supper. My Grandpa and Grandma Drennan would have been pleased to know they serve the meals around here right on time. Besides I’m starving.

Oh no, I just realized I asked for a vegetarian plate when I booked my ticket. What was I thinking? While everyone else is eating steak and baked potato I’ll be picking through my black bean and apple bake looking for signs of life. Thank heaven I packed that Snickers Bar.

It’s 6:00 p.m. and I must admit supper wasn’t so bad. Turns out making a meal preference reservation didn’t make any difference, as noted by the flight attendant who looked at me and said “Chicken, chicken salad, or pasta?”  I still chose pasta. (I watched “Food Inc.” I’m ruined for two legged beakers that didn’t originate from my local organic farm.) 

It’s 6:30 p.m. and I finally got up the nerve to ask my co-flyer to let me up so I could go pee. It felt so good to stand up that I was going to ask the flight attendants if I could volunteer to serve refreshments for the rest of the flight.

The line-up to the bathroom was long and stirring with conversation. I met someone from every continent standing there. It was an eye- opening experience to the fact that even though the world is small sometimes, it remains a gigantic mosaic of cultures. I need to travel more.

We’re four hours in and the flight tracker on the little TV screen in front of me indicates we are beginning our path over the North Atlantic. How awesome is that?!

And not one “anxiety pill” as passed over my lips. There’s not an ounce of nervousness in me as I fly into the future.

Yet as corny as it might sound, I could just burst into tears in this moment because of how grateful and happy I am.

I used to think life was a beautiful thing as long as I held the strings.

I’m learning more and more every day that life is still a beautiful thing even though I don’t always have control over what happens in mine. But I do control the most important and beautiful thing of all—my attitude.

And folks, I wish you could see what I see right now.

That is one big beautiful ocean out there.