THE GREAT AWAKENING

These past few days I’ve been experiencing the subtle yet irresistible feeling of awakening.  It probably has something to do with going from 50 below zero to watching the snow melt off the deck, but I think it’s more than that.  The news programs are shifting their reporting from the number of cases and deaths caused by Covid to the number of vaccinations accomplished: it feels like we are putting two winters behind us at once.

As is always the case, I am fighting the urge to plant seeds because I know it’s too early and my house will look like a jungle long before I can move those spindly plants out to my greenhouse.  Mother Nature doesn’t germinate anything for weeks to come so I would be wise to hold off a little longer.  The urge to see life and the colour green is strong, though.  I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

Also, the load of laundry with sheets and towels in it almost made it to the clothes line on Monday.  I long for the heavenly scent of fresh air to fall asleep in, but common sense won out – they would have needed finishing up in the dryer anyway.  But soon, very soon!

I swear I saw a gopher run across the road on my way home from town yesterday.

All the dog bones and deer hides are resurfacing in the front yard as the snow recedes ... and I actually look forward to going out and cleaning up that mess because it means something to do outside.

And, the anticipation to sleep with the bedroom window open is powerful.  This privilege is the counter balance of my loving spouse insisting on flannel sheets during the winter months.  In retrospect I can see there are certain things that should be carefully negotiated into a prenuptial agreement.

All of these things are the annual harbingers of the season of spring that everyone in the Northern hemisphere rejoices in by mid February.  The end of Covid winter is so much more magnificent.

Yesterday I received a phone call from Sask Health to set up an appointment for my 100 year old mother-in-law to get her vaccination.  Although I had been waiting for this to happen, even expecting it to happen, when the call finally came it felt a little like being told she had won a lottery.  It was exciting news.  I drove to town specifically to tell her, partly because she doesn’t hear well over the phone, but also because it seemed like a celebration was in order.  The news was bigger than just her appointment, it signalled that we are moving past the front line workers and into the general population – Covid spring was on its way!

On the horizon is the precious treat of just dropping in on a friend for coffee – in their own kitchen, the more the merrier.  Soon we will be able to converse with random folks anywhere and everywhere without spending the first five minutes trying to picture the bottom half of their face so we know who we are talking to.  Just think of how much fun it’s going to be to go to in-person auction sales and ball games and dance recitals and community fund raisers.  Won’t it be nice not to have to limit who can pay their respects at funerals, or who can come to Christmas dinner?

I have a friend who lives in Manitoba.  We normally get together for lunch, laughter and a girl talk therapy session a couple times a year.  Obviously it has been forever since this has happened – never was the need for this kind of therapy been greater, or more ill advised.  Our next lunch is liable to be an extra long one!

It hasn’t been all bad.  I have been educated in the ways of Zoom meetings and all this isolation time has me writing more.  We have saved all kinds of money – our fuel bill is way down because we don’t go anywhere, our vacation fund is untouched, and I haven’t gone shopping in over a year. 

I know that the time line for putting our masks away is not a short one, and with the new variants popping up there may be some adjustments to make, but we are on the right path. 

In some ways we are kinda back to normal – aren’t we all watching curling like good little Canadians?  Maybe by this time next year we can do it the way we like to ... in person.  Or even better – on a tv set in Arizona.

 

JUST US, GOING CRAZY

DAILY JOURNAL: FEBRUARY 12, 2021

ME:  So it’s another day, another dollar again, eh?  Well, I guess it’s probably more than one dollar.  I should really divide my pension check by the number of days in the month and see.  And bonus!  It’s February!  28 days!  Best write that down though, while I look for my calculator.

DOG:  So it’s another day out there.  Come on somebody!  The sun’s coming up and I need to go outside!  Not to pee, I’ll save that for later.  I just want to stand at the edge of the deck and growl at the blinking light on the school bus a mile away. 

CAT:  So, it’s another day, eh?  I’ve been thumping on this door for an hour making it sound like I’m desperate to get out of the laundry room.  Ah, there!  The door is open ... I will now pause, stretch, wash my face, and sashay over toward the deck door to pretend I want out that one too.  The dog beat me to it.  I will wait until he’s back inside and all the humans are sitting down.

ME:  And the pandemic didn’t go away while we slept last night so I guess we should sit down and listen to the latest statistics.  I will just take my mug of coffee and my iPad and go sit in my comfy chair ... darned cat!  That’s my chair!  Move! 

DOG:  How come that stupid cat has furniture privileges?  No fair!  I’ve been here for years and I’m not allowed on any furniture!  Ha!  He just got the boot.  Serves him right being all high and mighty!  Oh no!  He heard that ... stop that!  Leave my ears alone!  I don’t play cat games! I must not wag my tail!  Don’t wag my tail!  Don’t give the jerk a moving target to play with!

ME:  Eenie meenie miny mo – vacuum first?  Or laundry?  Or dishes?  If it wasn’t 50 below zero I would go for a walk.  Oh crap!  Did I say that out loud?  The dog is looking at me funny.  Can he read minds too?  I AM NOT GOING FOR A WALK!

CAT:  Well, this is boring.  I need to liven things up a bit.  What shall it be?  Shall I dig in her house plants?  Get in behind the TV and play with the wires?  Torment the dog?  Insist someone refill my food dish as it is only one quarter full?  Decisions, decisions.

DOG:  The woman is demented.  There she goes again.  Up and down the stairs.  Over and over.  Nobody can forget what they went for that many times in a row!  Hey!  It’s a dog bone!  You went for a frozen soup bone for good old Turbo!  Would I lie to you?  Don’t wag my tail!  Don’t wag my tail!  Stupid cat!

ME:  The eternal question – what to make for supper?  We should all give up food for lent.

CAT:  Hey!  Somebody let me out of here!  I’m in the porch closet!  Why would anyone shut the door while I was in here?

DOG:  Hehehehehe

ME:  I am being stalked by both the dog and the cat.  They smell thawing hamburger and feel entitled.  If it wasn’t 50 below zero I would banish them both until after supper.  I just tripped over the dog and the cat is on his third crazed stampede from one end of the house to the other.  We are all going shack wacky.

DOG:  Look who’s judging the cat for unnecessary trips to nowhere, crazy stairs lady.

CAT:  Man that dog is dumb!  Here I am distracting the human so he can grab the meat and run.  And all he’s doing is standing there, drooling all over the floor!

ME:  Should I make a dessert too?  So many calories, but we really enjoy a sweet treat after supper.  Let me check my Fitbit count.  Not too shabby!  Well over the 6000 steps so far and ten flights of stairs.  You know if I do 15 minutes on the elliptical, or maybe 10 more flights of stairs I’m good for a bowl of rice pudding!

DOG:  Now what!  That woman is nuttier than a fruit cake.  She’s looking at that pretend walker again but that’s where the man always hangs his coats and it’s full.  And so, away she goes with the stairs again!  A bone!  A bone, I say!  Look eager and happy.  She will want to reward me if I am happy!  Pant!  Smile!  Wag my tail!

Oh god!  DON’T wag my tail!  Stupid cat!

CAT:  Hehehehe

ME:  What’s this sticky note all about?  A dollar sign and the word ‘February’. 

 

WORTH EVERY PENNY

My Facebook memories tell me that I have been retired from my town job – you know the one that paid money and had a pension - for eight years as of today.  I must have blinked.  It can’t have been that long.

I’ve been trying to remember what I did the next day to celebrate my freedom from the 8:00 to 5:00 grind.  Chances are Facebook will let me know tomorrow morning but let’s hope it was something wild and crazy like sleeping in.

I do recall my motivation for leaving the employment world behind me, though.  Heaven knows I tried to explain it to my significant other enough times.  It’s not that he didn’t approve of the move, it’s that he didn’t understand it.  I had seven more years before I was retirement age – I could work that much longer and get that much higher pension.  Why on earth wouldn’t I do that?  I looked at my bank account and what my pension would be without the extra seven years and thought “I think I’ll be fine”.

I had kind of the same conversation with our accountant around the same time.  I know it’s her job to be all about the money but my response was that if worst came to worst I could always get another job and make more money, but there is no way to make more time.  When you run out of time you just plain run out of time.

Maybe the seven year difference in the two pension amounts is the monthly instalment I’ve paid for the extra years of freedom I’ve had.  Regardless, I’m happy with my purchase; it was the right thing to do.

Another thing I remember about my decision was that the ‘freedom’ I spoke of wasn’t being free of the actual work I was doing – being the postmaster of my own hometown was a great job.  I liked the people I worked with and the public we served.  I found the work interesting, I liked the contact with my community, and my employer encouraged me to grow my opportunities within the company.  It was everything a person could ask for in a job and I’m glad I had it.  I am also very glad it belongs to someone else now.

The freedom I looked forward to was the kind that would let me choose on a day-to-day basis what I was going to do on any particular day.  I could go for coffee with a friend and not get back until it was time for supper.  I could garden from sunup to sundown.  I could do a day trip; heck I could do as many as I wanted!  I could be the kind of grandma who was open to sleepovers almost any old day of the week.  I could read books.  I could write books!  I could sit on my deck with a glass of wine at the end of a busy day and watch the sun go down. 

And I could repeat it all the next day.

Or pick something completely different.

And now Facebook tells me I’m already eight years into it.  These past eight years are the extra ones I bought for myself.  My flower and vegetable gardens have expanded probably tenfold and I have a small greenhouse to play in.  My yard is my pride and joy.  I serve my community on the Tourism Board.  Depending on the time of day and who the company is there is always coffee/iced tea/wine/water to be enjoyed with conversation on our deck.  I have written a book and am working on another one.  If Covid ever goes away there are some places I want to travel to, but in the meanwhile I’ve got lots of other things to do.

Of course I am hoping for even more years, we all do.  But the only ones we are sure of are the ones we’ve already had and these past eight have been worth every penny.

 

THE KEEPERS

It’s been a thoughtful week.

My uncle passed away.  He was almost 93 years old and had lived a good, long life.  His health, and therefore his quality of life had been in significant decline in this past year.  There are all kinds of ways people rationalize this set of circumstances: “it’s a blessing”, “it was his time”, “he’s not suffering anymore”.  While all of these are strictly true, the sadness of the last goodbye is every bit as sad.  Maybe a more up-lifting approach is to be thankful that we had him for as long as we did.  It’s still sad, but helps us focus on the times we had together rather than the future we now face without him.

I know that my time this week has been spent reminiscing; revisiting the days of my childhood when he was a solid, every day presence in my life.  A few specific memories stand out of him – moments I keep close to my heart – but these memories are just the starting points for the bigger picture of those times and the people who were there, but are no longer here.

I’m in my mid sixties.  Lord only knows how this could be true, but the calendar keeps telling me the same thing.  The math works out.  Nine people call me grandma.  It’s difficult to come to grips with this when I never really aged past 26 inside my head, but times like this week do force me to confront aging on a more comprehensive level.  We – my siblings and cousins – now find ourselves very close to being the seniors of our family.  You can scoff at the idea of being in our sixties and seventies and still taking comfort that there are people we consider ‘older and wiser’ than us still on this earth, but it’s a true thing.  There is solace and consolation in knowing that we still have our elders to look up to.

In my immediate family we lost Mom and Dad the same year; Mom at Easter and Dad just before Christmas in 2004.  We were all grown and gone from home, it’s not like we were their dependants.  In fact, we all had busy lives of our own with families to care for, jobs to work at, bills to pay.

And yet, there was this unmistakable feeling of being orphaned.  Now who was I going to call to ask how long to cook the Christmas turkey?  Whose memory was I going to call on when I couldn’t quite remember which year Aunt Helen came to visit, or which neighbour it was that married so-and-so and moved out to B.C.?  Who was going to inspire me with new flowers to try in my gardens?  Over and over again during the next few years I would find myself, upon hearing of some neighbourhood news, thinking “I’ll have to call Dad.  He’d like to know that!”  Only to remember in the next instant that he wasn’t there anymore.  They were still the anchors they had always been in our lives, but the physical tie had been broken.  It leaves a person feeling adrift in the world.

It also elevated our feelings toward our aunts and uncles; we held them more dear.  They were our link to the past and each of them represented a portion of the foundation we were built on.  It’s not that they lived close and we saw them all the time, but it was comforting to know they were there.

Mom and Dad were the first of each of their families to go, but over the intervening years we have lost everyone on Mom’s side – each one leaving us a little the poorer for it.  With my Dad’s brother’s passing earlier this month my thoughts of a dwindling connection to family history have re-ignited.  That, and how dangerously close we are to being “The Elders” made even more urgent by the passing of his sister ten days later.  We are down to one uncle and two in-law aunties.  We are precariously close to elderhood.

Maybe it’s time to embrace this inevitable step, though.  What this family position really means is that we are the connecting link between a past we experienced and anyone in the present who might want to hear those stories.  As we gathered in the cemetery – thirty strong and Covid masked – to say our farewells it was reassuring to see traces of faces long gone, to see the kind eyes above the masks and the tall thin bodies, to hear Grandpa’s low voice and slow, measured speech.  Maybe we aren’t so much the elders as we are the keepers.

I kind of like the sounds of that.

 

HARNESSING FITBIT POWER

I got a Fitbit for Christmas, and as Martha Stewart used to say, that’s a good thing.

When these things first hit the market I thought they were nothing but an expensive accessory, a status symbol of sorts.  If I’m anything it’s deadly practical.  There is no way that wearing an overpriced, over glorified piece of technology on your wrist is going to make a person lose weight.  It was just one more battery to go dead.  One more slice of software to need upgrading.  One more charger to forget when you go somewhere.  One more thing that would be obsolete before you got home from the store.

All of these things are still true.  If a person is going to make a commitment to exercise more, that decision comes from their head, not their wrist.  You can’t buy your desired weight no matter how good your credit card is.

I struggle with my weight.  Well, actually, I struggle with my self image ... you know the “self” image projected on to me by movie stars, magazine covers, and fashion models.  I don’t look like them.  I might have briefly in my late teens, but since then I’ve looked like a regular human female; it’s a tough row to hoe.

I would estimate that over the past five decades I have swung from “I have to lose weight!” to “If I’m fit, what does it matter if my waist isn’t ten inches smaller than my chest and hips?” to “What I really need is to be ten inches taller!” to “I can live on 1000 calories a day.” To “This is me, just accept it!”

This past while though, as I still feel the need to be unsatisfied with my body, my focus has been more about keeping active – the old “use it or you’ll lose it” advice.  When you’re in your sixties this adage hits a lot closer to home.  Believe me, when your grand daughter wants you to make snow angels with her and your first thought is ‘if I get down there, will I be able to get back up?’ you know that the old body might need a little work.

My feelings toward Fitbits didn’t change overnight.  I guess you could say that I went from thinking them frivolous, to not having much of an opinion at all.  I’m just not the person who is going to notice if someone is wearing one, let alone be able to tell a new one from an old one – the desire for the latest fashion is lost on me.  It was a luncheon conversation with three women whose judgement I value highly that started me rethinking my stance on electronic fitness monitors.  Two of my friends already owned Fitbits and the third was preparing to buy one.  As we awaited our lunch she asked advice on what she was looking for. 

Instead of the high pressure sales pitch and the ‘can’t live without it’ propaganda, here were people whose opinions I respected talking about what they liked about their watch/fitness monitor.  Practical things like getting a buzz for texts or calls even when their phone was on mute (I didn’t even know they did that), having an accurate count of activity, being able to see charts and graphs of activity over time, and even monitoring sleep patterns.  I have to admit, I was intrigued.

Not so intrigued that I went out and bought one, though.  My cheapness still won out over my fading scepticism, but when my husband was stuck on what to get me for Christmas it was on my list.

I have to confess I really do like my new toy.  I spent Christmas morning feeding it my information so that it knew my stride length, and general unfitness level.  I even shared with it my goal weight and to its credit, it didn’t laugh.  I solemnly presided over the wi-fi marriage ceremony between my phone and watch and we have all marched forward toward 10,000 steps per day.

I say these things with self deprecation, after all it does seem like I’ve bought into this ‘owning a Fitbit will solve all your problems’ business, but it’s not working like that. 

It is working, though.  One of the goals is to do at least 250 steps per hour for nine hours of the day.  This is totally doable; easy peasy even.  And if I haven’t accomplished this at ten minutes to the hour it buzzes my wrist and tells me I have like 87 steps left.  A tiny but effective challenge to move.  It counts how many flights of stairs I do a day – again, I am challenged to see how many I can do.  And 10,000 steps amounts to only my regular day plus a two mile walk – provided the weather stays nice that isn’t even a hardship.

I stand by my mockery of an accessory being able to fix anyone’s life, that’s not what is happening here.  The decision comes from me, of course.  That’s the only way any self improvement plan can succeed.  The role of my Fitbit is making what I’m doing measurable.  I can actually see the kms I’ve walked, the stairs I’ve climbed, the minutes of cardio I’ve put in.  And, I can compare them to last week’s performance.  I am the most uncompetitive person on the planet when it comes to putting myself up against others, but me doing one better than the day before is my rendition of a win.  My progress, should I make any, will be just be between me and my Fitbit.

Maybe, by next winter I won’t have such serious reservations about snow angel activity.  I did make it up again without help – even have a picture to prove it

 

WHAT DAY IS IT?

Every day is the same.

Being the one who wakes up first, I usually roll out of bed, kick the coffee pot into gear, let the cat and dog out, and then throw a coat and boots on over my pyjamas and head over to the shop to stoke the wood burning stove.  We have our vegetables over there in an insulated room and it’s vitally important that the temperature never goes below freezing.

It doesn’t take long, and soon I’m back in the kitchen, sipping my first cup of java, and scrolling through my memories of this date on Facebook.  I’m not a fan of everything Facebook does, but I do love this feature.  It’s like having a glimpse of how the grandchildren are growing as most of my memories involve pictures of them, each photo labeled as to how many years ago it was shared.

This year though, this daily wander down memory lane has been even more important.  Each day there are new memories and comments to differentiate that day from the one before or after it. 

Here in 2020 another side effect of Covid-19 lockdown is this feeling of limbo.  Every day is the same.

Although I’ve never realized it before, I must usually gauge the Christmas season on a scale of ‘getting ready for company’ or ‘getting over company’.  Without these markers I am adrift in a series of days that just mirror each other.  And I’m not the only one who feels like this ... the other day (maybe even yesterday) my spouse asked me what day of the week it was.  My answer was “Be darned if I know!”  We had to consult our phones and a calendar so reset our place in the space/time continuum.  This is important – there are only a few days left in this disagreeable year.  I want to know when we can call out “Home Free!”

I suspect that I’m not the only one who feels this limbo-like trance.  My long winter evenings are spent watching movies, thankfully there a lot to choose from.  I’ve noticed that the conglomerates that do TV programming sort what they offer us by season, hence the war movies close to Remembrance Day and the Christmas movies throughout December. 

Their research must go a little deeper than that though, because as I scrolled through the possibilities last night Groundhog Day came up.  My first thought was not that they were getting ahead of themselves.  What I instantly thought was “You got that one right!”  I’ve been repeating the same day for ages, and I’m not even sure which day that is.

So I cling to my Facebook memories:  Six years ago this house was what in 2020 we would call a super spreader event with the entire family home for the holidays – all clustered inside the same house, even the international travellers from Australia, and contributing to the most profitable year the Redvers Coop Grocery Store ever had. 

Four years ago we had a Christmas Day blizzard and one set of grandkids got three extra days of Grandma and Grandpa before the RM graders came along and freed them.

And, dream of dreams, three years ago today we were sitting in Vancouver Airport awaiting our next flight to Sydney to spend our hottest ever Christmas in the land downunder.  Just imagine: travel, visiting, warm weather holiday in the dead of winter.  Ah!  Those were the days!

As much as I am relying on these memories to keep me grounded though, I do realize the only way to get out of this mess is to move forward.  With all the days being identical this is a tricky thing to measure – kind of like watching paint drying or grass growing – but I have come up with a plan.

The one change I have detected going on around here is that all the baking and goodies are disappearing.  I think we are down to a few mince tarts, a dozen gingersnaps, and a box of turtles chocolates (mainly because I hid them).  The butter tarts are gone, and so is the fruit cake and also the lemon cheese puff pastry.  I am sure that if I had kept strict inventory over time a person could work out a scientific formula to describe the passage of time by means of the depletion of baking.  Conversely, another formula could be developed to describe the reappearance of those calories on a person’s hips – but who really wants to get that technical?

And, if we really wanted to go long term, we could work out how long it takes for those hip and tummy calories to dissipate.  My guess might take about the same time as we will wait to get our vaccination ... June-ish.  Hopefully we are all reset back into our proper place in the space/time continuum by then.

 

COVID CHRISTMAS

And so, this is Christmas ...

Here we are in mid December in the unsettling year of 2020, coming to acceptance that just like everything else this year, Christmas will be different as well.  This may sound weird, but I can’t help but feeling that a regular Christmas – even if we could manage it – would not give what we’ve been through a fitting ending.  Maybe I’m just looking at it from the perspective of a writer, but stories need balance.  After what the world has been through in the past twelve months a ‘normal’ Christmas just doesn’t fit.

In a way it seems much longer than a year since we first began hearing about a virus problem in Wuhan, China.  In truth, we were much more focused on the fires in Australia – remember those?  That was only a year ago.

The story grew, expanding to a problem on cruise ships.  Scientists were sounding alarms but the rest of us were still thinking about taking our usual winter holiday.  That was back when being in our own ‘happy little bubble’ meant we were oblivious to what awaited us.  The word ‘bubble’ has a whole new meaning now.

2020 has enriched our everyday language with many other words seldom used previously.  Words like ‘cohort’ and ‘pandemic’ and ‘nova coronal virus’ are all words we’ve heard thousands of times since February.  We’ve also learned about PPE and respirators and essential workers.  And, lockdowns don’t always apply to a prison’s response to rioting.   And there’s a difference between ‘self isolation’ and ‘quarantine’.

The big one, though, was the implementation of the term ‘social distancing’, quickly revised to ‘physical distancing’ to try to soften the emotional isolation humanity began to feel.  In such a time of fear and sickness and so many deaths, not being able to meet, to be together to mourn, to celebrate times – both happy and sad – to share meals, to enjoy sports or movies or concerts all began to take its own toll. 

By March our world was turned upside down.  Schools – on the whole planet – were closed.  People worked from home ... if they could work at all.  Some had no jobs to go to.  Some had to quit jobs to stay home and home school their kids.  Some tried to do both.  For months we banged pots and pans to thank health care workers for their work and sacrifice.

Travellers were trapped in foreign lands with no flights to get them home.  Some were trapped on luxurious cruise ships, Covid stalking them from cabin to cabin with no port of call willing to let their ship dock.  Hospitals over flowed.  Field hospitals sprang up.  Morgue trucks lined up to store the daily tragedies.  Weirdly we all became avid fans of government announcements – who saw that coming?

Our shopping habits have changed.  Our holiday plans are different.  Visiting family and friends – especially out of province – is totally modified.  The ‘old fashioned’ pastimes of baking and gardening have gone through a huge revival.  Golfing and fishing are in and baseball and hockey are out.  2020 has tipped us out of our comfortable boat and made us learn to swim in these uncertain waters.

And so, this is Christmas 2020.  Our bubbles are smaller than ever.  There will be no big turkey dinners or family get togethers.  Our Christmas Eve church services will have to be online, and carolling only outside and far apart.  Zoom will go from work to play as we ‘meet’ over the holidays to share our stories and offer virtual hugs to our loved ones.  A ‘normal’ Christmas it will not be.

But whatever we do with this season will fit our story.  Personally, I have just finished decorating my house – it doesn’t look like any other year.  My tree is smaller and the decorations I used are much less than usual, partly because we will be the only ones to see them, but also because why not try something new?  Our menu will be different too – who has ever heard of a turkey for two?  The important thing is that we will stay safe until our turn at vaccination and the return to a time when Christmas can indeed be ‘normal’.