A letter is worth its weight in gold

I don’t know what it is lately, but I’m craving an old-fashioned life. 

Maybe it’s the rabbit race and pace of working so much in order to make ends meet that is the red flag for me. 

Perhaps it’s the impending materialistic-driven holiday season and my sense of not wanting involvement in it that is sending me backwards in time. 

Maybe it was a recent mid-November retreat to the bush living in a wall tent, where the only sound was the crackling fire in the wood stove, and the sound of my whittling knife on cottonwood. Simple pleasures.

Whatever the catalyst, I’m craving an old-fashioned way of doing things and it’s got me to thinking about how I could get me some of that.

First off there’s the toe-tapping song, “Old, Old Fashioned” by the Scottish Indie band ‘Frightened Rabbit.’ 

The lyrics ring true. “Turn off the TV, it’s killing us we never speak. There’s a radio in the corner, it’s dying to make us see. Give me soft, soft static with a human voice underneath.”  Uh huh.

While looking for an old diary recently, I came upon some old handwritten letters. I can’t remember the last time I handwrote a letter to anyone. That makes me sad.

In fact I don’t remember the last time I received one either but I do remember what it felt like when I did—the glee in seeing that identifiable backstroke scribble or flowing signature flair on an envelope meant just for me.

The thick pile of handwritten letters I’d found were secured with a stiff rubber band that broke when I flexed it. 

There on top was a letter addressed to me from an old friend, Norrie Godin. I could have picked his handwriting out of a line up. He was a gem of a man. We met in 1979 when I was home from college working for the summer. We were coffee-time pals. He was in his 80s. I was 19 years old. He wrote me faithfully for years.

Under Norrie’s letters were those from Grandma Drennan written to me in the mid-80s when I lived in Thunder Bay. I was a young unknowing new mother with so much to learn and she knew it. Her handwritten paragraphs, thick with advice and family happenings, made me feel like I just might be able to do the parenting thing after all.

My Grampa Caldwell, was a very special man to me. He lived in eastern Ontario and wrote me letters as I was growing up. 

The one I treasure most he wrote in 1960 when I was born. Grampa wrote of the wonderful world I had come into and how much better a place it was because I was here. No matter how many times I read it I feel so loved, with a sense of deep gratitude for the time he took to give me the gift of those words immortalized at his own hand. He died when I was just 14 years old. 

In 2006 I received two very old greeting card boxes filled with letters dating back to the early 1920s that Grampa Caldwell had written to his fiancée Pearl Davis, my grandmother. 

The letters, still in their original stamped envelopes, are filled with the days of their then young lives, future hopes, their love; my history. Many of the letters still contain the pressed flowers Grampa slipped inside.

I’m going to do my best to write more letters by hand and mail them. I have six grandchildren. Who better to share some “old fashioned” richness with than my little peppers.

Lynn Nicholas was on the mark. “Handwritten notes become treasures. Emails get deleted.”

Turn off that computer and pick up the phone. Write a letter.

I think I just found myself a good old-fashioned winter project. Insert smile here. 

Rodents have no shelf life here

My finger tips throbbed as if I’d just plunged them into a bucket of ice, kept them there long enough to start hyperventilating, and then pulled them out and hit each of them with a hammer.

That’s what I get for taking the gloves off on a frigid cold day.

And if it hadn’t been for my heat of the moment temper that ignited my insides when I found my winter boot insoles shredded as ingredients for a squirrel’s nest I think my ice-cold fingers would have broken off and fallen to the garage floor.

I stood frozen and watched as the beady-eyed varmint poked its head out of the wicker basket it was stuffing my boot fur into and gave me a “What the?” stare after I’d thrown a small empty milk carton at the basket because I was too chicken to get any closer. 

I’d come face to face with a rogue squirrel before.

The last time I’d met up with such a rodent in the confines of my garage it had sprung from the shelving unit on to the top of my car and I was suddenly aware that I was blocking the escape route.

His beady and wild eyes met mine and in a move straight out of the “Matrix” movie my upper body leaned back as the squirrel flew by me and out the open door.

I wasn’t going to have a repeat of that epic battle, but the squirrel of the moment had to go.

I started to reason with the little bugger in a language I thought it could understand.

I said in no uncertain terms that if it understood English it would be wise to heed my warning to be gone by the time I got back from work.

“The laws of physics and chemistry are not negotiable,” I said. “Neither is having a dog inside my new car or a squirrel living in my garage.”

And with that, I backed the car out, and as I lowered the garage door I caught a glimpse of grey running across the shelving unit and back into the wicker basket with what looked vaguely familiar as blue flannel from my sleeping bag.

I fumed about the squirrel all day while at work; about ways to sneak up on it, traps I could set for it, and how I could repatriate the fur ball to the other side of the creek with my slingshot. 

My dad made me that slingshot out of wood and rubber when I was 12 years old. It still has Olympic potential.

It took everything I had not to race home at the end of my workday, my obsession to thwart the garage intruder foremost in my mind, but of course I live on a lousily maintained road just outside of town that is not fit for an ambulance patient, let alone a brand new car. It’s always a turtle’s pace drive.

I parked the car in the yard and walked over to the garage and lifted the door, turned on the lights, stopped, watched, and listened. The wicker basket was vibrating with activity. The scratching and ruffling noise was ceaseless. 

I suddenly missed my canine capers very much and especially “Dot, who could clean the clock of any varmint I set her upon.

I had so many better things to do than have a face-off with the squirrel and in that moment I would have traded dealing with it for cleaning up copious amounts of cat barf and big, hairy spiders.

I walked towards the wicker basket and yelled in my big pants voice at the squirrel, expecting it to leap out and land on my face. 

Instead, it bolted down the shelf and darted up the wall to the garage ceiling where it scuttled along upside down above my head, like the spider walk scene from “The Exorcist” movie. 

Before I knew it the squirrel was making a run for it out the open door with me in chase, but by the time I turned the corner outside, all I could see was its grey carcass making a mad dash for it down the driveway with a black cat in hot pursuit.

“Millie” you rock.

My life takes the cake

I just turned 53 years old. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

Turn around and I was 10. Turn around and I was 21. Turn around and I was 40. Turn around and here I am, not yet on the high side of 50 and yet feeling as if haven’t yet begun to know who I am.

I was born the day before Halloween and as a kid; my birthdays always were full of spooky celebrations with my girlfriends. 

We would sit in the dark and pass around bowls of cold spaghetti, peeled grapes, jiggle Jell-O, and all manner of other pseudo body parts that my mom had cooked up and prepared for us giggly sorts to sink our fingers into and tell ghost stories about until we were creeped out.  It was gross. It was so much fun.

Then, my mom would top it all off with a birthday cake that to this day, is bar none my favorite of all time. I saw it on my birthday ever year as a child from as far back as I can remember until I was probably 12 years old.  

Those same birthday cakes each year rate above the super awesome “death by chocolate” birthday cake my mom makes for me today—and not because they tasted better. Believe me, the “death by chocolate” birthday cake is among my version of chocolate principles to live by.

It had a new Barbie doll standing in the middle of an inverted sponge cake that billowed outward and was decorated like Barbie’s party dress. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen and best of all; the Barbie was mine when all the cake was gone.

Inside the cake, my mom had hidden ten-cent pieces wrapped in wax paper. Magically we all managed to find a dime in our piece of cake. It was amazing and I, for one, felt rich.

When I was growing up I heard stories of how when I was one year old, I put my face in my birthday cake. Plunk. Just like that. Oh, the undeniable free spirit of the young at heart.

When I turned 18, while sitting around the dining table with my family and friends celebrating my day . . . Plunk. Just like that. Now that was funny.

Between my 24^th and 30^th birthday (the “having kids” years) my birthdays were usurped by diapers and drool. I had made a plan to have all my children born before my 30^th birthday. I just made it. Daughter #3 was born seven days before I turned 30. Whew.

Then suddenly it was 2000, I was turning 40, and I wanted to stop the world and celebrate what was sure to be my best year yet. I don’t have to look very far to see a bald reminder of that Halloween birthday party. One of my friends shaved his head for his “The Rock” Dwayne Johnson costume and has never since grown it back.

And then suddenly it is 2013 and I’m 53. Where has the time gone? Where have I been all my life? How did I get here?

I still have my Barbie dolls in a box. I still love birthday cake, especially “death by chocolate” cake.

And yet I wonder where am I going and what does my future hold as I wake up each morning to be this woman who is learning new things about herself every day? 

Some of it I like. Some of it I don’t.

But what the heck.

I think I will make my life my cake and jump in. Plunk. Just like that.