SISTERHOOD

As my ideas for this post began to coalesce in my mind the title of a Willie Nelson/Julio Iglesias song kept popping up – you may remember it, To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before?

I Googled it to refresh my memory of the lyrics.  It really is a pretty song, but the love that they sing of is the romantic kind – not where I’m going with this at all.

While this IS dedicated to all the girls I love it has nothing to do with romantic love.  The love I speak of is much more fundamental.  It is the unspoken sisterhood, the shared experience of being feminine, the mother/daughter/sister/friend role we fill for each other ... whether we have met each other, or not.

I may be wrong but the connection that women feel toward one another is something that probably couldn’t be explained to men even if we gave classes on the subject, but we know it merely by instinct. 

Even in the case of total strangers we offer each other support in times of adversity: imagine a scene in a grocery store - an overwhelmed mom, an uncooperative and angry toddler, defiance and howling in aisle 3.  This is the stuff of despair and loneliness until another woman comes along.  No words need to be spoken, all that happens is that their eyes meet in a been-there-done-that kind of way.  Kindness is shared.  A smile comes to both of them – a virtual fist bump of solidarity.  Some days it’s the difference between serenity and insanity.  We women are good at that.

That’s the broad spectrum ‘we’re all in this together’ way to describe this sisterhood we belong to, but there are as many levels as there are women.

Sisterhood, of course, begins with our flesh and blood sisters if we’re lucky enough to have them.  It’s where we learn shared experiences, empathy, and how strong we can be together.  I was blessed with five sisters but in the past decade have had to say goodbye to two of them.  The remaining three are now all the more precious.

Fate has given me an abundance of sisters-in-law, an extended family of girls with so much in common.  We have watched our children grow up together, laughed and cried our way through what life has thrown at us, and shared some darned good recipes over the years.

This special bond also bridges generations.  My grandmother’s strengths and ideals flowed through my mother and travel on through me to my daughters and granddaughters.  It’s done in subtle, quiet conversations over the years, and also in helpless, gasping, snorting laughter when the mood strikes us. 

And then there are the school sisters we grew up with and our work world sisters and our shared hobby sisters.  There are the ones we’ve known, but not known, all our lives whose importance bubbles up in our sixth decade because this seems to be our time.  And the ones who retreat into the background and then re-emerge over the years for the best kind of reunions you can imagine.

In the bigger picture we don’t even need to know our sisters to be able to recognise them. 

I have one ‘sister’ who lives two provinces away.  I’ve never met her personally and if not for a chance encounter with her mother and son during a monsoon in Beijing not even our Face book paths would have ever crossed.  That’s how heavy the odds were against us, but due to our long and heartfelt conversations on Messenger, I recognize her to be one of my special sisters.  Some day we will meet.  It is meant to be.

And then there is the friend who inspired this whole train of thought.  We only met in our mid thirties and although we worked for the same employer our connection grew from our shared experiences, not close contact.  We are both retired now and still only manage to touch base every once in a while, yet I feel her insights are at times vital to my psyche and I know she feels the same way about me.   Our conversations are like hitting the reset button in our lives.

I look at it as another, more advanced, version of a virtual fist bump, but it serves the same purpose: the difference between serenity and insanity some days.

This is dedicated to all the girls I love – we’re all in this together.

 

THE COLOR OF HOPE IS PURPLE

Here I am in the doldrums again.  The winter doldrums.  It happens every year.

The word “doldrums” actually means a section of the south Pacific which can be without wind for extended periods of time.  Back in the days of sailing ships this meant sailors could be caught in this dead air space with no way to escape.  That’s what January and February always feel like to me.  I’m stuck and there’s no way to escape, nothing to power an exit, no hope for change.

The physical manifestations of my condition are things like long periods of time spent standing looking out the windows, wandering the house looking for satisfying work (just to be clear here, housework does not fall into this category), paging through seed catalogues dreaming of what will be if I can just hang in there, and trying to think of something to make for supper. 

There is nothing more taxing than menu planning in the middle of the doldrums.  If my instincts were followed at this time of year we would be much skinnier by the time the grass turned green.  It would be kind of like when the Christmas leftovers were done we just gave up eating until there were enough daylight hours to reactivate my meal-making give-a-darn. 

Exactly like that, actually.

But, I am allowed no such foolishness.  The other person in the house still wants to be fed, and the dog wants his share of the leftovers.  I am given no choice and somehow I keep us all alive with soups and casseroles and such.  Somehow I feel like I’m winning in some small way if the meal I’m offering can be served from a single dish.

I know it’s important for my sanity not to let my whole focus be on the tediousness of food prep or vacuuming up dog hair so I try to diversify my portfolio.  The most soothing distraction is constantly reminding myself that even though it always seems like winter will last forever, it never has, yet.  Not once in my lifetime has spring not shown up.  There is hope.

This week I was gifted with the personification of such hope, and it came in the colour purple.

Actually, the seeds (literally) of this revelation were planted (again, literally) back in December.  Part of my Christmas baking includes making lemon cheese for puff pastry tarts.  The lemons I used were full of seeds and I decided to plant them to see if I could grow a lemon tree of my own.  I reused potting soil from my summer planters and low, and behold, in less than a week I had a morning glory pop up – on the shortest day of the year!  The dead of winter!  With the least amount of sunlight possible!  I was thrilled with its courage and tenacity.  It got to stay!

And I have been richly rewarded.  One month after its first gift of green to me it has now presented me with purple.  It bloomed!  This tiny, little plant – all of a ten inch stem and seven leaves – gave me one deep deep purple blossom yesterday and will have another tomorrow with many more to come by the looks of it.  I think life may yet be worth living.  That’s not a normal thing for me to say in the middle of the doldrums.

I went to town yesterday and bought some fertilizer to make sure my little emotional support plant stays healthy and strong.  And, while I was at it I went and bought groceries.  I think I’ve come up with an idea for supper! 

It’s almost as if the wind has picked up and my sails are filling ...

 

LIVING WITH A MAN COLD

I’m living with a man cold at the moment. 

Let me correct that statement: I am living with a man with a man cold at the moment.  Obviously there’s a difference.

So far I am still healthy.  Not even so much as a woman cold going on for me; I hope it stays that way.

Last weekend we both were called into grandparent duty.  He had volunteered way back to take one grandson to a hockey camp over this past weekend.  We had also made plans to meet the other grandsons’ family in Saskatoon at a waterslide hotel and exchange beef for elk when the respective butchers were done their work.  It came as no surprise to me that this also worked out to be on the same weekend.  Grandma and Grandpa were off on separate vacations.  Even though I drove through really bad road conditions both on the way there and the return trip it appears I still got the better end of the deal, though.  My set of kids was healthy.  Grandpa seems to have come home with the plague.

At least that’s what it sounds like from where I sit.  I have no intention of getting any closer to investigate further.

We both got home Sunday night.  I was tired and stressed from the bad roads, he was all tucked in under a blanket in his big chair.  Neither one of us was very hungry, I reheated some leftovers for me, he had a bowl of soup.  At bedtime he told me he didn’t feel very good.  Sure enough, he was running a fever.  He dosed up on Tylenol, plugged in the humidifier, and piled on the blankets. 

I don’t know if there has ever been actual clinical studies done on how much worse a man cold is than what we women power through, but there isn’t a household on the planet that hasn’t been the site of anecdotal observations to support the theory that men are not as tough as they think they are. 

I’m not saying that fevers aren’t bad, because they are.  And I know that they make your entire body ache, especially your joints, and believe me, this man has not taken such great care of his joints so he went into the fever with joints already looking for attention.  What I’m saying is that of the two of us, I’m more likely to suffer in silence, if you know what I mean.

Monday was no better for him.  I was up way before him and when he did make an appearance he only wanted a slice of toast and his blanket in his big chair again.  The fever burned on.  I made soup – something easy to heat up when we needed sustenance.  It might come in handy if I came down with the same disease.  I had to spend the afternoon getting warranty work done on my car.  He survived without me but I notice that the thermostat has been hiked up a couple notches so he must have moved from his chair at some point.

I treated him with some of the elk sausage for supper but he really is sick, he didn’t eat even half of a normal meal.  The dog approved of this turn of events. 

Whereas feeding the humans has been very light duty for me I find myself doing extra duty feeding the dragon instead.  We heat our shop with a wood burning stove.  Stoking this fire has become known as ‘feeding the dragon’.  The dragon’s dietary needs require a full meal every five or six hours and it’s not my job - except for when the man is away or incapacitated.  These past few days I’m getting so familiar with ‘the dragon’ I’m starting to think she deserves her own name.

Today the man is marginally better.  His fever is down but not quite gone.  We are now into the coughing stage.  He has a broken rib injury from way back that makes coughing extra hard on him so this stage isn’t going to be any fun either.

Meanwhile (knock on wood) I seem to be remaining healthy.  I have certainly been exposed to plenty of germs by now so I’m starting to hold out hope that whatever bug causes this plague was covered in the flu shot I went and got and he only talked about getting.

I don’t even want the woman version of this cold.

AMARYLLIS ANGST

Who knew that a person could stop nature in its tracks?  Who knew that something that happens automatically, every year, for everyone, could be stopped in its tracks in my house?  Who knew I could stop an amaryllis from blooming by just having it in my house?  Well, besides me; I did.  I knew it.

Just in case you don’t know what an amaryllis is, I’m talking about those indestructible bulbs that they sell at Christmas.  You bring them home from the store, take them out of their box and they immediately sprout up, grow at least four inches per day, and produce so many flowers at the top that they usually fall over if you don’t stake them up.  They are gorgeous.  They are strong.  They are self sufficient. 

Except at my house.  This is where they come to go into deep, dark depression.  They don’t die, exactly, but the term “failure to thrive” is putting it mildly.

I’ve had other amaryllis over the years.  People tell me that they are still enjoying the one their mother got for Christmas in 1962, but that’s not what happens when they come to me.  They bloom the first year, struggle the next year, and if I didn’t surrender them to someone better at houseplants before the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to House Plants intervened, they would all be dead by now.  I had pretty much sworn off even trying to grow one by my sixth decade but I won this one.  I took that as a sign that Lady Luck thought I should try again.  In retrospect I think possibly Lady Luck was inebriated (I won it at a Christmas party after all), but for sure Mother Nature wasn’t in on the decision to trust me with another victim.  She hasn’t helped out one bit.

Fresh from the nursery where all its conditions were perfect, and then given to my sister as we were going to be gone for a month, this baby grew and bloomed spectacularly.  I saw the photos on Face book.  It’s the closest I’ve been to it when it was vibrant and healthy.  I was in Australia at the time.  Apparently that’s the safe distance for me to own an amaryllis from.

But, we came home, my sister handed the poor thing back to me, and it’s been all downhill since then.

I do read up on these things.  One is supposed to keep it in the sunlight and water it throughout the summer.  Come fall it will die back which is when you put it in a paper bag, in the dark, in the cool basement, and mark on your calendar to go get it for round two in November.  I did all these things.

It obliged me with leaves; limp noodley things, but they were green and firm to the touch so I was encouraged.  No flower stems, no buds, no flowers, but further reading said that sometimes they take a year off.  I repeated the paper bag/cool/dark business last year and hoped for the best.

Last November when I retrieved this sleeping beauty she showed no signs of life at all.  No signs of death either, mind you – the bulb is firm, there is no mold or disease.  It just seems to be in some sort of stasis – kind of what they want to do with astronauts to keep them alive on long voyages so they awaken when the conditions are safe for life.

Yeah, exactly like that.  At this moment in time the conditions are not safe for amaryllis life.

I can grow things outside where Mother Nature has a fighting chance to step in and tend to her babies, but plants in my indoor custody are doomed.  A friend from long ago who shared my morbid talent with house plants said something that has always stuck with me – what we needed was a plant that thrived on neglect.  I don’t know if she ever found hers but I have a forty year old umbrella tree that is still hanging in there.  I think it may well be up to surviving the apocalypse.

Other than that I have a ‘death row’ of sorts going on in my south-facing window ... an amaryllis in suspended animation, a pot of lemon seeds too smart to germinate, a foolhardy morning glory that stowed away in the soil I used for the lemon seeds (but it’s green and optimistic so it gets to stay!), and last year’s Valentine orchid that has tried to commit suicide twice by leaping to its death off its perch.

Welcome to my den of horrors.  Spring can’t come soon enough.

NEW YEARS ADVERTISING

A person can always tell when the New Year approaches – the “let’s start over” advertisements start.  There are diet commercials, and exercise commercials, the find-a-mate commercials and the quit smoking commercials.  All these companies are ready to help you with your resolutions ... for a price, of course.  For the most part I ignore them. 

My dissatisfaction with my weight is a year round thing, after all.  I don’t need to be told to eat better or less, and I don’t believe that paying for their program or food is going to help me unless I commit to it and if commitment is what is needed, I already own that ... just like I own these 25 extra pounds I lug around.

Likewise the exercise equipment they want to sell me.  I already possess a significant piece of this.  It’s a great place to hang a coat on and the grandkids like to perform death-defying tricks on it, but mostly it just takes up space in my TV room.  It does work when I use it; that’s the trick, for sure.  I do not need another one to double my guilt at money not well spent.

Thanks eHarmony, but one is enough.

Smoking is easy.  If you never begin a bad habit you never have to give it up.

But, there’s another resolution suggestion that’s been popping up on Face book this past week or so.  I don’t know how Mark Zuckerberg can see into my house but it’s obvious he can.  He thinks I should de-clutter the place and promises that I will feel less stressed and be more productive if 75% of the garbage I’m holding onto is gone.  There have been several pop up ads to spur me on.  I say if he feels so strongly about it, he should come help me.  Or, he can mind his own business.

I’ve been hoarding stuff for so long I just lack the oomph to tackle such a daunting job.

So, I have been ignoring the de-cluttering push as well.  The first few days after the company went home I focussed my attention to dealing with the leftovers and putting random toys away.  Next I began the push to rid the house of extra Turtles chocolates and opened bottles of wine.  The guest bedding was washed and the surplus blankets put away.  I think I’ve found a place for all the new Christmas gifts.

Yesterday as I reluctantly took down the tinsel and garland, the wreaths and the ornaments, the lights and my collection of angels I began to see a pattern.  I was clearing space and putting things away.  Occasionally I was actually throwing something out.  Oh sure, it was only the leftover cranberries, a broken decoration and a handful of cards from years ago, but still.  I would never have to deal with them again.  That kind of felt good.

This morning dawned as unremarkably as any other: my to-do list quite unimpressive.  I’m the chairperson of a board and I needed to find the minutes from our last meeting to prepare for the next one.  I was sure I had put them in a file folder in my office while getting ready for Christmas.  It’s now 11:30 and it appears I placed them in my “safe place” vault and will only find them in 2023 when I’m looking for something else.

BUT, and I say this with astonishment at how I have put this fruitless search to good use, in turning up the many other papers I’ve kept that I have no need for I actually reached for a garbage bag instead of putting them back where I found them.  I have .5% less junk spilling all over my desk than I did three hours ago.  Look at it this on the surface it is such a tiny difference, but on the inside I feel like a trajectory has been altered.

We’re not talking doing a 180, or even a 90 degree turn, but I remember a teacher pointing out to us how a one degree angle could be the difference between the Apollo spacecraft hitting the Moon, or missing it and drifting on forever.  This course correction is a subtle thing, but I think that’s exactly the reason it might just work.  The difference isn’t in the change of the angle, it’s in the distance it will carry me.  Who knows where I’ll be a year from now!

I sure hope good old Mark Z can spot the difference in my office clutter by spring so he gets bored and leaves me alone.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few Turtles left to take care of.

LIGHTING THE WAY

We live a fair bit out of the way to be a part of anyone’s twinkle tour.  Houses in rural Saskatchewan are getting further and further apart – there are fewer farmers farming much more land than was the norm a couple of decades ago.  And, it’s not uncommon for them to decide to live in town, as well.  It makes for a feeling of privacy, tranquility, and peace for those of us who choose the country life.

But, when I put up my outdoor Christmas lights, I know very few people are going to see them.

It doesn’t deter me though.  I have grandchildren who think they are pretty and they spend a fair amount of time here over the holidays; I do it for them.

And me.  I also do it for me.

I began, years ago, with a fifteen foot blue spruce just east of the house.  What’s the point of having a Christmas tree and not decorate it, after all?  At first it took two strings of lights, and then three.  I am now up to four strings and that doesn’t take the lights to the top by any means.  But it’s as far as anyone can go without a picker truck.  Sadly, I do not possess a picker truck.

This year I went ahead and bought light string number five before I was forced to accept my lack of picker truck capabilities.  It took me a cup of tea and a half hour of contemplation before I decided that this was an opportunity, not a set back, and went back out to devise an optical illusion Christmas tree down by the well.  Not only did a single string of lights create a tree, this one could be seen without having to leave the house.  I’m pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

But, the yard looked unfinished so off I went to town and bought another string of lights for my little Amur maple tree.  To look at the actual bulbs on this string is misleading.  They are tiny, insignificant things but the light they put out is amazing; the colours dazzling.  And, even better, this tree is almost right out in front of the house.  It lights up the whole front yard.  It also lights up my smile as I do the dishes after supper – out there, twinkling in the dark, the wind giving it movement and extra sparkle.

There is also the indoor Christmas tree.  I still buy a real one every year, refusing to think about the money I throw away every January.  I love the smell of the real ones.  The prelit artificial ones just don’t have the rich, bright colours I like to use.  This time of year has too many hours of darkness; I need all the light and colour I can get!

As much as I love all of my trees, though, it’s the laser lights that have never worked properly since I first brought them home that I love the most.  They were the first generation of the laser option and I paid crazy money for them because my whole family was going to be home that year and I wanted the best of everything.  These things are designed to be installed outside and aimed at the house, projecting a light show of moving lights or shapes across the building’s walls.  Mine refuse to move, or blink, or do anything but shine.

From the outside this is a disappointment.  When the plan was for dancing lights and changing colours and all I got was pin points of red and green in a static grid pattern, I felt gypped.   But, life went on and our house filled to bursting, and over that crazy, dizzy, noisy holiday I grew to love that my interior walls and ceilings were decorated in Christmas coloured dots of light.  They acted as decorations, as night lights, as red and green freckles on anyone standing in their beams.  They have never worked properly but I wouldn’t dream of not putting them up every single year.  They stir the memories of that 2014 Christmas every time I see them.

A few of their beams even make into our bedroom and shimmer across the stippled ceiling.  I don’t know why but the laser beams that are sharp and clear in the air out side but once through the window glass are refracted in a way that make the lights look like lace when they hit the wall.  It’s the last thing I see before I fall asleep and the first thing I see in the morning.

One of my favorite things to do this time of the year is to take a twinkle tour drive to see what people do to decorate, and I welcome everyone to come see mine if they want, but unless you come inside for a cup of cheer you’ll never see the ones I love the best.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

2019 is rolling downhill like a great big snowball.  There’s no stopping it, or even slowing it down.  The best I can hope for is to stay out of its direct path while I scramble through the remaining days trying to get things done.

This being retired business that I’m in is kind of misleading.  Yes, I can and do call my time my own, but also yes, this precious time is sometimes spent puttering around my gardens and playing with grandchildren.  This is not ‘wasting’ time, it is the perfect way to refresh my soul, but even people with refreshed souls need to get a few things accomplished from day to day.

Oh sure the meals get made, the laundry gets done and it’s a very rare bill that doesn’t get paid on time.  The outside summer work gets done because I love to be out there doing it and writing is usually up to date because, again, it’s the kind of thing I enjoy.  Where I fail usually has to do with numbers, books, accounts, and paperwork of any kind.  Let me play with words all day long ... make the numbers go away.

With less than two weeks before Christmas and three before we swap out our calendars for the bright new shiny unscribbled on ones, I have a fair amount on my plate already.  I am hosting the family feast so there is a menu to plan, phone calls to make, baking to do, and extra house cleaning to tackle.  It’s really embarrassing when you know Santa was here because he left his autograph in the dust on your furniture.  And wouldn’t it be nice if the windows were clean enough to let the sun shine through?

But, before I tackle cleaning I should get the decorating out of the way.  The tree is bought but not yet thawed out or set up.  The tubs of garland and tinsel, baubles and lights are awaiting their annual moment to shine.  It’s time to turn on the Christmas music or the ‘too sweet for my teeth’ Hallmark movie channel, and get in the groove.

As of this morning I have several dozen tarts of many kinds all baked – and due to extreme will power, not all eaten – and the gifts have all been wrapped and hidden because there are grandkids coming for a sleepover tomorrow.  The tree is my weekend project.

That’s what I started doing last night - tidying up so that I could begin decorating.  I cleaned up the pile of papers on the desk in my tv room – and found a stack of paperwork to claim 2019 health benefits before the end of the year.  I sorted through the stack of too-important-to-throw-away papers on top of the china cabinet and found a project I was working on for Tourism that I had forgotten all about.  Thank goodness the deadline is still a month off!  Chastising myself for being so unorganized I carefully stacked these two jobs out to my computer desk in the office and placed them with a couple other coupon redemption jobs that have to be completed online.  To top it off I received an email requiring me to put together an application for grant money, I must double check the deadline on that ...

 Even as I sit here, happily tapping away on my keyboard this stack of nuisance papers mock and intimidate me.  I wonder, if I poured gravy on them, would the dog eat my homework?

Merry Christmas everyone – lets all hope for a quiet, relaxing January!