Digging Up Bones

I was born at potato digging time.  I'm not a spring baby who celebrates with pretty flowers, or a child of hot summer days at the beach.  Neither did my childhood birthday parties involve snow activities.  My parties were held shortly after school began another year, when the grass was still green, but the trees were changing to their fall colours; the days still warm, but the evenings cool.  I vaguely remember being dissatisfied with these circumstances in the early years, but I got over it.

Autumn is my absolute favourite time of the year.  The sky is a softer, September kind of blue, the garden overflows with good things to eat, the sun kinder to my skin.  While Mother Nature dresses summer in a whole spectrum of greens, her pallet for fall is rich with so many more colours.  Russets and rusts, ochers and oranges, as dark as burgundy in one place, as dazzling as gold somewhere else: all waiting for the wind to send them to their final resting place.  One of my favourite autumn scenes is where yellow poplar leaves lay scattered across a green lawn; it always makes me think of pieces of gold strewn on an expensive carpet.

The days are more welcoming to those of us who don't like to bake in the sun.  I take advantage of breezy days to hang laundry on the line, trying to capture enough of that heavenly outdoors scent to get me through the winter.  We can still sleep with the window open a crack - I do it for the fresh air but as an extra benefit we wake to the sound of Canada Geese discussing their flight plan for the day, great wedges of them flying overhead endlessly as the days get shorter.

There is only a little garden work left to do.  The crunch of everything ripening at once is behind me now.  The cucumbers are still going crazy but I've got past my guilt of what to do with them.  There is still pasta sauce to make as the tomatoes ripen and the root vegetables have to be dug, brought in, and stored, but the timing is my choice now - my only deadline is snow, and that's a way off yet.

So I work at it slowly.  This week - the day before my birthday, actually - I decided I would tackle a row of potatoes.  It was a pleasant afternoon - warm sun and my dog withholding judgement on my language when I would spoil  my harvest by spearing them with my digging fork.  As I dug, another day many many years ago came into my memory.  It was probably my 14th birthday and being past school girl parties I had moved on to inviting a friend for a sleepover.  Although we would become very close friends I think this was the first time she had come to my house and I really wanted her to like me ... and then mom had told me to go dig potatoes for supper!  On my birthday!  How could she!

In my 14 year old mind this was beyond awful.  What would my friend think of this?  Why couldn't I be treated with some kind of respect?  It was my birthday, after all!  For me to remember this after so much time, I must have been traumatised.  All I can say now is "Good grief!  Get over yourself Jocelyn!"  But that was then, and I'm much wiser now.

The complete picture of that day was that mom had given me the day off my usual chores - to do the milking.  We had a small dairy farm and instead of more than an hour of milking I had been given fifteen minutes of digging potatoes.  A 14 year old girl full of friend angst can be a miserable thing to deal with, obviously.

But, because I was digging potatoes, the whole experience came back to me and I spent some time thinking about my mother, and motherhood, in general.  I am still learning lessons all these years later.  Like a touchstone the act of digging potatoes brought mom and me together for a moment; it was like a birthday gift from her.  To the Fates who arranged that: thank you.

And to whoever was responsible for playing a certain piece of music on the oldies channel the night of my birthday - the kind of music that a daddy would use to teach his silly, awkward daughter how to dance - thanks again.  It's funny how a little age and wisdom can help you recognize a real gift when it comes along.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in my quest to become a better writer I came across a tip on how best to put your reader in touch with the scene you were describing.  The advice given was to pretend you had forgotten your camera but you still wanted to save the whole image right down to the finest details. 

It's not enough to say that you walked down a dusty road.  Even though everyone has walked down a dusty road and has an experience they can identify with, if that's all you give them in your description it leaves them with a very limited window to look through, not the panorama you want them to be a part of.  You must awaken their senses and invite them to walk down that road with you.  You need to add sound - like the crickets' scratchy/sizzle sound emanating from the dry grass in the ditches.  There needs to be a physical sensation involved like the heat of the afternoon sun on the back of your neck, and that one fly that just won't leave you alone, repeatedly buzzing in close to your face, trying to land on your nose.

You need to introduce the wider scene - like how only the later season flowers are still blooming - the goldenrod and the tiny purple asters at the road's edge.  And wider still ... the school bus in the distance returning the neighbour's kids home or the cattle, also being tormented by flies, taking to a mini stampede across their pasture, thundering to a halt at the gate, stopping to stare at the human walking past.  Then, to draw the reader's attention back to their place in the story, to describe how puffs of dust lift from the road's surface each time a shoe hits the ground. 

The bottom line is that you're still only talking about walking down a dusty road, but now the reader feels that he or she is there with you.

The example given in this writer's help book was an amazing description of - believe it or not - a ham sandwich.  An item as mundane as a ham sandwich and yet so masterfully described that I could taste it as I read, and I absolutely remember it still - the crusty home made loaf, the butter spread lavishly right to edges of the bread, the thick slices of home cured ham, the swipe of Dijon mustard across the meat before the top slice was put in place, the large glass of cold milk it was served with.  My mouth literally watered for just even one bite of this treat - and I don't even like Dijon mustard! 

I've never forgotten the lesson.  Not that I have the talent to do such an amazing job, but it gives me something to aim for.  Even when I don't have any way of writing it down I will give myself an assignment to do justice to some scene I come across.  These days everyone has a camera with them all the time, but a quick click just isn't capable of the texture and depth of what the human eye can see.

I am reminded of a scene one morning on my drive to work that is still frozen in my memory because I took the time soak it in - it was too exquisite to lose and I really didn't have a camera with me at the time.

It was an early summer morning.  The night had been cool enough to condense the moist evening air into mist.  As happens sometimes this mist had sunk into the hollows of the landscape and formed shallow, filmy layers that hung just above the grass.  This phenomenon only lasts until the sun rises high enough to burn it off; the magic is fleeting.

My route had taken me past several low spots where these magical clouds hung suspended by invisible wires, not connected to the sky, not quite touching the ground.  There was one place where I had actually driven through it - the defining line between visibility and invisibility as flat and straight as if someone had uses a ruler to draw it: my windshield was above it, the hood of my car was obscured.  I felt like I was floating.

As other-worldly as that sensation was, the scene that awaited me at the corner was breath-taking.  With the rising sun as a backdrop, at least twenty colours of pink/orange/yellow flowed like liquid through green branches and spread their light across an expanse of white mist.  This, by itself, would have been a jewel of a scene, but dotted throughout the pool of mist rose the heads and shoulders of several cattle - suspended, ungrounded, magical - beasts with no bodies.  I felt blessed that Mother Nature had given me this special gift for being at the right place at the right time.  Because I committed it to memory, I still do.

This has been a very convoluted lead in to what inspired me to write today, but I do have a direction I'm heading with this.  I've been trying all week to find the words that would describe what our world looks like with the smoke from distant ( like a thousand miles distant) wildfires filling our air. 

It isn't the smell of smoke - although we can smell it.  It isn't so much the irritated throats and sore eyes that the weather advisories warn us of - although we can certainly feel these things too.  It isn't the spectacular sunsets we get as the last of the sun's rays burn through a dense layer of smoke and turn the western sky vibrant shades of ochre and burnt sienna - but man!  are they ever something to behold.

The part that is so different, so strange, so eerie is the colour of the light, and believe it or not, the colour of our shadows.  Did you know that a blood-red sun throws a sepia shadow?  I have been followed all week by a tarnished, yellow/brown shadow.  Trees at the horizon have faded back into a  gunmetal blue haze, the sun has been an angry red disc in the sky, and all our shadows have had jaundice.  The word 'surreal' comes to mind, but not in a pleasant way.

Tonight there is finally rain.  This is nice for us but a godsend for those who have been battling the fires, because of course, while the smoke made our world weird, it made theirs deadly.  I will leave it up to them to describe what that feels like.

Prepared For Anything

I spent this morning making many many trips up and down my basement stairs doing a job that rates right up there with scrubbing down bathrooms on my 'things I hate to do' list.  The time had absolutely come to defrost and wash down the deep freeze - the butcher had just called and asked how I wanted the pork we had ordered cut up.  It is only going to be a matter of days and I will need to put it away ... in a deep freeze ... which until mid morning was more of a self-contained iceberg that a food storage facility.  I may as well confess just how diligent I am at this job - I found packages of freezer burnt rhubarb marked 2013 at the very back.  And some other stuff that I couldn't quite figure out - possibly a solid clump of perogies?  Even the dog took one sniff and decided it was inedible.

It wasn't all garbage though, there was lots of food that I stacked carefully back in once the glacier had been removed.  Besides the meat we buy in bulk, the extra loaves of bread, the packages of homemade pasta sauce and apple pie filler, there were 25 pints of corn and other veggies from this year's garden.  The bottom two shelves have been freed up for the pork, although there will have to be some rearranging of the bigger chest freezer to get it all in.

That's right, we have two freezers.  Sadly for me this other one also harbours an iceberg of its own, but that's another day's project.

And no, we're not over-the-top "preppers" who stockpile for Armagedon or other end-of-days scenarios.  We are pretty much normal, rural, common sense people who like to be self sufficient.  There's a lot of us out here in the country.  In the world we live in it's nothing unusual to have a lot of food at the ready.  In my world I can't just call up for take out at 5:30; I live 100 miles from the closest Pizza Hut.  Being self reliant is just a way of life for us.

I've been watching the news coverage for Hurricane Irma and it's made me wonder about how it would be to live in the path of such potential devastation.  Year after year, hurricane season after hurricane season - but then I wonder about the folks in California waiting for their next big earthquake too.  Somehow blizzards never seem so bad.

What does make me stop and think though, is watching the stores being over run with panicked people looking for supplies at the last minute to be able to survive the coming trauma.  Why do they need last minute lumber to board up their windows?  Why wouldn't they have permanent covers ready to go?  Why are they trying to hunt down the last bottle of water at the eleventh hour - Irma has been making news for a week.  All of a sudden they need bread and peanut butter - whose house doesn't have bread and peanut butter?  And there seems to be a real run on flashlights - again - really?  Who doesn't have these things as a matter of regular household items? 

The mile long line ups for gas just blow my mind.  In the winter here we just go by the standard rule to keep the tank full all the time; it only makes sense to treat their bad weather season with the same precaution.

I guess it just boils down to we live in different worlds.  Theirs is the fast-paced, modern, every-convenience-at-your-fingertips world and we occupy a place in space and time where we know we have to take care of ourselves.  I'm not saying we don't shop at supermarkets because we do.  I buy bread, but I can make it.  I make cakes and pies and cookies from scratch because they just taste better, not because there's no alternative.  We have a generator in case we ever have to deal without power for a while.  It wouldn't be at our usual comfort level, but I am certain we could survive on our own for quite some time without a run to town for peanut butter.

It isn't my intention for these observations to sound like a sermon.  I honestly don't know how I would manage if I were in Florida at the moment because I have no experience of Cat 5 storm or a 12 foot storm surge; watching it on TV is plenty close enough for me. 

I wish all the people dealing with Hurricane Irma ... and Jose ... and who knows what comes next ... all the best.  Let them be safe.  Let them not lose everything.  Let them help each other back on their feet.