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.