COOKING WITH A HANDICAP

Most people wouldn’t figure baking as an athletic activity but the Christmas goody-making season in this house has likely been responsible for wearing off more calories in steps and stair climbing than in creating them in the first place.  Throw in the aggravation of discovering – YET AGAIN! – that the oven had decided to call it a day before its work was done and you have a peek into my December.  It’s been a (half-baked) slice.

I guess I should have seen this coming.  For a couple years now (or more, I have no concept of time) my oven had taken to informing me that it didn’t have certain functions.  Just out of the blue when I went to use it I would be informed on it’s little message screen that it didn’t have the ‘bake’ feature.  Or the ‘broil’ feature.  Or the ‘convection’ or ‘self-clean’ features.  Being as these things are why I have an oven I found this very annoying.  It graciously offered me its clock feature and was happy to let me turn on the oven light, but other than that it would not obey my commands.  This is very frustrating when you have a batch of buns ready to bake.

The first time it happened there was a lot of button punching, a certain amount of off-color language, and a short time trying to decide which friend would be most likely to offer me their oven for half the buns before I remembered a time-honored, never fail computer that fix might work.  There had been a power outage not too long before and maybe this was a computer brain-fart problem.  Sure enough, a trip downstairs to the breaker box, a flip off and then back on, and I was back in business.  The buns were saved and I did a little victory dance because I had thought of this on my own.  A repairman’s milage and wages would have cost in the $200.00 range.  Yay me!

Time went on and many more things were baked and roasted and broiled.  Every-once-in-a-while my oven would try to play this trick again, stubbornly insisting it didn’t have the regular heating features that I bought it for.  It always happened after a power outage so I recognised where the defiant attitude was coming from and I knew how to get it back on track.  We carried on.

In the beginning the trip to the breaker box took longer, but with practise I could do it in half the usual time.  There was no need to look for which breaker it was on the panel, I knew it by heart.  It’s #19 and #21, left side, almost at the bottom; in this past month I’ve visited them so often we’re like best friends.

For the longest time it kept playing the same trick (again, I have no idea of how long this has been going on), but looking back I realize that the frequency of its ‘job actions’ had increased.  Still, I knew how to ‘fix’ it so I let my mis-guided confidence assure me I was in control. 

Meanwhile my oven plotted against me.

In the middle (literally) of baking Christmas tarts my oven came up with a new game.  I would give it my commands-  BAKE-350-START  - and away it would go, preheating just like it was supposed to; its little message center keeping me abreast of its accomplishments.  When it reached the desired temperature I would put my tarts in the oven, set the timer, and go about multitasking like women do.  At some private moment my oven would then say to itself “That’s enough for today.” and decide 250 was its new favorite temperature.  It wouldn’t inform me of this though.  Oh no! I would return when the timer buzzed to find a warm-ish oven and half-baked tarts.  With no time for this nonsense I used my old fix on this fresh problem and took on an unanticipated fitness program in the middle of my Christmas rush. 

It wasn’t all bad – there was very little guilt about extra butter tarts with the amount of flights of stairs I was doing.

2025 dawned clear and bright.  We barbequed steaks for supper (the barbeque isn’t computerized and does what it’s told) and early the next morning I called an appliance store.  I had thought we would fix the old one but when their records showed that this one was 11 years old we had a change of heart and ordered a new one instead.  It’s been ordered and should be here by midmonth.  I see a lot of crockpot meals in our future until then.

 I really should keep up with the exercise though.

 

                                                         MIRACLES

“There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle.” 

So says a man named Albert Einstein.

On the face of it, especially with the use of the word “miracle”, one immediately connects this statement with the debate that pits people who believe in God against people who don’t.  This in turn gels the argument into a science vs. religion battle, and soon Mr. Einstein’s humble observation is lost in the clutter of 21^st Century conventional wisdom sound bites that either tell us there is a God or strives to prove there isn’t.

While everyone is wrangling with this totally irrelevant matter, miracles continue to happen.

Take for instance, snowflakes.  On the one hand there is nothing special about them.  This is Canada; we get snow.  The Weather Network is forecasting another storm coming our way today to refresh our dazzling white landscape for the holidays.  The thing is, even though the snowflakes that fall will number in the billions of trillions, no two of them will be exactly the same.  How can it be that water can crystalize in so many shapes and sizes?  For those with no sense of wonder, snow is just a nuisance to endure.  For those who are open to wonder and awe, the uniqueness of each individual flake transforms the mundane into the miraculous.    

We can use words like “wondrous” to describe the beauty that surrounds us, or we can mutter and curse as we shovel our sidewalks and driveways.

It matters not if you attribute miracles to God, a super being who allegedly put the universe together in seven days just a few thousand years ago, or if you subscribe to the scientific theory that this inconceivably vast universe evolved one tiny increment at a time over billions of years arranging for us to arrive at this time and place we enjoy today by pure happenstance.  Both of these scenarios seem preposterous to me, but make no mistake, they would both require miracles to have happened, either way.

It isn’t just Einstein’s words that are important in this case; it’s the fact that they come from him, a man famous for the scientific work he accomplished to discover, define, and then describe the laws of physics that tie our universe together.  His is one of the most celebrated of all scientific minds in modern times telling us that religion had no exclusivity in the field of miracles for him.  He understood that science merely gave him a language with which to explain how things like the miracle of gravity worked.

More than once in my life I’ve had to ponder the special miracle that is life.  From the first breath we draw when we find ourselves cold and separate from our mother for the first time, to the last wisp of air to leave our used-up body; what drives that whole engine?  Or, more to the point, what turns the engine on?  And what happens to make it shut off? 

Again, there are pat answers given by the Church and argued against by the science community and I don’t disagree with either of them.  What I am talking about is maybe best described by saying that the sense of wonder I have over these two breaths (and everything that happens between them) is separate from both religion and science.  It’s something personal I feel between myself and this Universe/time/place that I inhabit.  There is no where that I don’t see miracles. 

There are only two ways to live your life: 

One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as if everything is.

I choose the latter.

 

TO DO …

If merely starting a list of things that need done got me anywhere, boy would I be ahead of the game.

If recording my intentions on paper accomplished anything, this place would be dazzling in its cleanliness.

If itemizing tasks to be done could inspire the magic Christmas elves to get busy, I could sit back, munch on poppycock, and just enjoy the show. 

Unfortunately, none of these things are happening.  Well, except for the munching on poppycock. 

I have several lists on the go.  I think the first one hit the paper it’s written on a month ago.  It’s still kicking around here somewhere.  It was kind of a long-range, non-specific thing.  More of a vague acknowledgement of long-term goals.  Things like create-extra-bedroom-in-office and de-scale shower stall, because we have guests coming for the holidays.  Mixed in with these big jobs, though, were little doable things like order some things from Amazon, figure out what’s up with the Coop bill, and make poppycock, to name a few.  It always feels good to be able to cross some things off your list so a few of the jobs have to be easy.

This first list was not very productive.  Sure enough, I took care of the easy-peasy ones, got the dopamine high from crossing them off (coupled with the sugar high from poppycock, it was a good day), and then stalled out in the real work department.

A week or so later, on a day warm enough to get my outdoor decorations up, I came in feeling quite accomplished, grabbed a pen to inscribe “get outdoor decorations up!” and briefly basked in the joy of crossing it off. 

This wasn’t added to the old list, though, I started a new one.  It was time to get serious.  This one also had “bake tarts”, “wash walls and clean light fixtures”, and obviously the office/bedroom thing and the shower stall thing had to be moved over to list #2 – those Christmas elves were holding out on me. 

List #3 came into being because I was heading to the city for an eye appointment and I planned to multi-task while I was there.  I don’t know who decided to cut off the world supply of mincemeat, but I’m not amused!  Yes there are tiny jars of quasi mincemeat at exorbitant prices, but it’s not the same! Forgive me my rant, I digress …

By this time the strike was on and my Amazon purchases were being held hostage by CUPW somewhere in the netherworld so #4 was a list of ideas on what to do about that.  Except for a few small things I have declared that Christmas 2024 shall be doled out in random spurts as things show up.  It will add an element of surprise to the season.

Meanwhile, I have managed to bake tarts (2/3rds already eaten), make 3 batches of cookies (3/4^ths eaten or given away), make a huge batch of nuts and bolts (just last night so they are mostly still here), and of course, two batches of poppycock (halfway through the second).  The office/bedroom and shower situation remain unresolved; darn those elves!

The list I penned this morning (on fresh paper with my favorite pen in my best handwriting, just like the first day of school!) has ‘write CtC column’ on it.  Isn’t that exciting?  Something I will be able to cross off right away!  But, as we are now in December and time is getting tight, it also has ‘decorate the tree’, ‘write Christmas letter’, ‘clean porch’ and ‘wash floors’ along with the ever-present office/bedroom and shower cleanse assignments.  Those not-so-magic Christmas elves are really starting to annoy me.

I must have a To Do list in every room by now.  The one I had on my desk must have been thrown out yesterday when I decided that I couldn’t concentrate on writing surrounded with so much clutter.  One of the items on it was ‘pay Sasktel bill’, which I went to do and had to search through the last three screens of emails to find the amount and account # which were also on that paper.  Not only did the task take me way more time than it should have, but I also have nowhere to cross it off.  The effort seems wasted somehow.

This column is done, though – check.  And my desk is 7/8ths clear – check.  And my new list (#6, I believe) starts out with ‘write Christmas email’.  Gotta get that done.

I’m truly disappointed with those elves …

 

STORMS AND THE PRAIRIE PSYCHE

The Weather Channel has been toying with us again.  Getting us all excited about SNOWFALL WARNINGS and STORM WATCHES.  Sending us into a dither of ‘better get that done before the snow flies” activities, like any self-respecting prairie person knows to do.

I think our brains are wired a little differently.  Most humans are quite happy with mundane weather.  They like gentle rains, moderate sunshine, warm, starry nights, mild breezes, soft snowfalls. 

And winters that only last six weeks, or so.

There’s no denying that we prairie people like these things as well, but only 90% of the time.  The other 10% of our weather better have some pizzazz to it.

We like challenge.  We rise to adversity.  We like to prove that we’ve got what it takes to survive.  We want to shake our fists at Mother Nature and yell “Is that all you’ve got?” 

Okay, I retract that last bit.  Mother Nature is not to be messed with.  She’s always got more.  Forget I said that, please.

What we really want is bragging rights.  We want to prove to ourselves that we can survive tornadoes or blizzards or floods because we were prepared for what was to come and met the challenge with ingenuity and resources set aside for just such an occasion, like trees blowing over on power lines or roads being closed for a week.  I’ve often wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Did the wilds of the Canadian Prairies attract the kind of people who embraced this kind of challenge?  Or did the wild nature of this place form us into who we are today?

But enough with the philosophy, and back to what was going through my head yesterday while I waited for the BIG STORM to hit.  The snow was not materializing as predicted and to ward off my disappointment at the wimpy fizzle that seemed to be replacing a true storm, I got to thinking about what it is that I like about blizzards, anyway.

Ironically, I realized the best thing about blizzards is the feeling of being safe and warm inside.  I love to hear the power of a raging wind … from inside my comfy house.  I love the way snow will stick to and build up on the windows making the scene so much prettier … from the inside.  I love to head out into the storm to try to capture the storm’s power in photographs … and then return to my cozy house to thaw out my phone and see if any of the pictures turned out.  Turns out I don’t actually want to experience the storm so much as I want observe it from a safe and warm distance.

There have been a couple significant storms I’ve been storm-stayed here on my own over the past 40 years.  Some people might get pretty uptight about being alone but I don’t mind solitude in reasonable doses.  I even began playing with the idea of if it happened again how I would be free to laze through the stormy days, living on snacks and soup, reading and napping at my leisure – a woman’s idea of the perfect ‘stay-cation’.  I was totally buying into this storm-induced holiday until I remembered that there are pigs to feed these days. 

Chores at 10 below zero and a driving wind; no thank you.

The possibility of the power going out and the water freezing up; no thank you.

The generator over in the shop where it’s not going to do me any good; no thank you.

Prairie people are also known for being practical, and this is me embracing my practical side.  Yes, I still love the majesty of a prairie storm, but from the inside.  I’ll do my part cooking for the guy who does the chores and who keeps my phone charged.

There’s supposed to be another storm coming at us this weekend.  We’ll see if the Weather Network gets it right this time. 

Part of me is saying “Bring it on!” 

The other part is planning on being more of a spectator than a participant.

 

CONFESSIONS OF A GREEN(ISH) THUMB

“Wow!  Those are beautiful flowers!  You have such a green thumb!”

I have heard this compliment a time or two in my life and I tend to smile and say thank you, but if you’re watching you will also see me shaking my head a little too.  Yes, they are pretty flowers, and yes, they are growing in my garden, but believe me, it’s Mother Nature who knows what she’s doing.  I just add water from time to time and hope for the best.

I do come from a long line of certifiable green thumbs.  My grand mother knew not only the Latin names for the domesticated species of flowers in her garden, but for the native plants we would see during a walk across the pasture as well.  Hers was a busy life, a farm wife, a writer, a caretaker of her invalid mother-in-law, and someone who cooked and canned everything on a wood burning cookstove.  I don’t recall her having big flower beds when I was little but she kept up extensive correspondence with friends who developed new varieties of roses and lillies.  During the few short healthy years of her retirement her home was surrounded with color and fragrance.  The most glorious Bleeding Heart (Dicentra spectabilis) I’ve seen was just outside her door.

My mother took her own interest in plants and ran with it.  I think every spring she had Dad prepare a new space for yet another garden, and then he built her a small A-frame greenhouse which soon wasn’t big enough so a larger, commercial building was constructed, and then added on to.  To this day when I walk into the moist, earthy atmosphere of a greenhouse I get a whiff of my childhood.  I can also recognize most of the plants mom grew and sold and know that too much water is more likely to kill them than not enough.  This hardly rates me the title of Greenthumb.

Now I’m the one with the large yard and gardens and a handy husband who provides me with the appropriate machinery needed to till and mow to my heart’s content.  He has even gone the extra mile to haul gigantic rocks into the yard and landscape them into a hillside garden for me.  This loving act of generosity is evenly balanced with his insistence of tucking our well (in the middle of another flower bed) in for the winter with a covering of straw (and a billion weed seeds) every fall.

He's also built me my own little greenhouse to play in, but this does not qualify me as a green thumb either.  Mostly it’s a handy place to keep the mess out of my house.  Someplace to keep the baby plants alive until I can get them outside and Mother Nature can take over.

It’s late October now and I’ve been putting summer things away.  The annuals have been pulled, the tulips and daffodils have been planted, and the deck planters have been emptied and stored.  I feel like I’m a little ahead of the game because I actually thought to draw a map of where I’ve planted things and listed which flowers I want to plant again next year.  I put these maps and notes in the greenhouse so maybe I’ll be able to find them.  Again, this is me ahead of the game.

The final job was to dig up the dahlia tubers and store them so we can enjoy them again next year.  In 50 some years of gardening I’ve only ever successfully overwintered these roots in one place, the crawl space in our basement.  It’s a nuisance of a job so I was quite pleased with myself and feeling very accomplished down there until I spotted a brown paper bag with the words “remember you have an amaryllis, Jocelyn!” printed on it.

 

Of course I had forgotten that I had an amaryllis, and the poor thing had done its best to strive toward the sunlight and bloom.  A ghostly white scrawny stem had emerged from the stapled-shut bag, God knows when, and produced some kind of pathetic flower.  Major fail on my part but Mother Nature is unstoppable – when I opened the bag I found that the bulb was going to give it one more try!  Another ghostly white shoot was already two inches tall.

Who knows if this is for the plant or my guilty conscious, but today’s project is to give it a bigger pot, fresh soil, access to daily sunshine, and adequate water.  If it makes it I will place it with the orchid and four Christmas Cacti that are also blooming despite being in my care.  Mother Nature is amazing!

Me, not so much.  Feel free to remind me that I have plant notes in the greenhouse about February 1^st.

 

 

TWO STORIES, ONE ENDING

Story One:

Many many years ago Glen and the girls went off to Brandon on a daddy/daughter tattoo adventure.  I’ve been told that this is a bit unusual; t’s normally the mom who shares a tattoo experience, but that’s not what happened in our family.

If memory serves me their plans had been in the works for a while.  I think they decided what they wanted and made the appointment during the girls’ Christmas break from University.  Their big adventure was scheduled for when they would be home again on their reading break.  I know it was still winter because the weather and the roads were not good that day but that wasn’t going to stop them.  They were on a mission to permanently alter their bodies.

I remember feeling a little sad and excluded.  It wasn’t the tattoo part I was interested in, but the fact that they went off to the city, ate out at a restaurant, and probably did a little shopping too, and leaving me out of it seemed like a heartless thing to do to dear old mom.  I guess a person only rated an invite if they were signing up for the whole deal and all I wanted was the fun part. 

They returned triumphant, full of stories about how much it did or didn’t hurt, how long it took, what it cost, and showing off their body art.  Mitchell must have been present for this celebratory home-coming too because he immediately piped up that if tattoos could be a daddy/daughter thing, then they most certainly could also be mother/son.  I guess both of us felt a little left out and his invitation was his way of balancing the scales.  I agreed to a tattoo date sometime in the future when we both had come up with something we wanted.

There is a lot to consider where tattoos are concerned.  Are you just going for art?  Are you wanting the name of someone you love this week?  Month?  Year?  Do you want color, or just black or dark blue?  Do you want it to be big, or tiny?  Do you want it where everyone can see it?  Or is it a private thing that you want the option to hide it with clothing or a hairstyle sometimes?  Do you want to be able to see it yourself, or put it on your back where you will never see it?  Do you want it to have special significance to you, or is your choice to just copy something you’ve admired on someone else?  Some people go for a two-halves-of-one-whole design where they each get half of a heart.  Done right a tattoo is a work of art, the possibilities are endless.

Being mindful of all these things I set out to pick the perfect thing for me.  I favored something smaller, a single image of something that held special significance to me.  I’m a writer so maybe a feather quill?  Feathers are also a symbol of a gift, I kind of liked that, but I could never find the right feather image.

I also like blue dragonflies.  Or, how about something patriotic like a maple leaf?

Eventually Mitchell gave up on me and started on his own.  He was going for a sleeve that would be a work-in-progress for a while.  I could join him anytime I wanted.  The thing was I just couldn’t find something I felt strongly enough about to want it permanently etched into my skin. 

Which brings me to …

Story Two:

Many many years ago, maybe even in the same time period as Story One, I decided to rearrange our bedroom furniture.  This never goes over well because Glen dislikes when I alter ‘his nest’ (his words).  The decision is never taken lightly and obviously I have to do it on my own.  Bedroom furniture is heavy and carpet does not make the job easier so to make it more manageable I remove all the drawers to lighten the load.  I have gone hunting a favorite pair of socks down the back of a chest of drawers, I know stuff falls behind there, and this time when I pulled out the last drawer I found a construction paper Mother’s Day card from Mitchell – I’m guessing circa grade 2.  Most of the paper is taken up by an origami paper flower but down in the right-hand corner, diligently printed in little boy letters and poignantly mis-spelled is the verse “Roses are red,  vilits are blue,  I wrote this pome,  just for you.”

I admit I keep silly things, but I had kept it once and I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away this time either.  It got filed away in my silly treasure stash.

This spring, as we adjusted to living with Mitchell gone, the topic of tattoos came up.  Jesse wanted one to keep his memory close and I added to my list of regrets the fact that we had never done our mother/son tattoo date.  I’m sure you can see where this is going.

It’s funny how all of my tattoo insecurities about what and where and when evaporated.  I knew I wanted his poem, in his own writing, on my fore arm where I could see it every day.  I wasn’t doing it to show it off to anyone else, I was doing it totally for me.  I was positive that this was what I wanted.  A very talented artist enhanced it with a colorful stem of johnny jump-up violets and added his signature to the bottom.  It’s a week old now, and I love it.

A person always wonders “What would he think?”  There is no telling, but it’s so easy to picture him standing in the doorway of our kitchen, leaning against the door jamb, his powerful arms crossed over that barrel chest of his, and him shaking his head as if to say “And that’s what you finally picked?”

I also believe that he would be touched by my choice.

 

THEME MUSIC

If anyone ever makes a movie about my life (and I say this in total jest – why on Earth would anyone do such a thing?), but if they did, there should always be music in the background. The first button I push in the morning is the coffee maker, the second is the radio.

I was probably 11 years old when I got my first radio and I remember how carefully the dial had to be turned to bring in the scratchy sound of the AM signal.  It’s no wonder my age group got so many of the lyrics wrong in those days, we could barely make out the melody, let alone the words.  I do remember that my very first favourite song was ‘Cherish’ by The Association.  Out of curiosity I just Googled it, I had some of the words wrong.

My introduction to music started well before 1967 though.  My older sisters had a record collection of The Everly Brothers, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to name a few.  My mom loved Herb Alpert and Frank Sinatra and the big Band sound of the ‘40s.

Truth to be told we could go farther back – Hymns I would have heard throughout my childhood are still some of my favourite pieces of music.  I do know the words to those – it really helps to see them written out in hymnals and practise them on a weekly basis.

In the short span of my lifetime the delivery of music has transitioned through LP vinyl records to 8 Track tapes to cassettes to MP3s to God knows what, I lost track.  Over the airwaves (is that even a word anymore?) we’ve had AM, FM, and satellite.  The crazy array of file sharing services available leaves me overwhelmed and intimidated although my son-in-law did me set up with one because he thought he should help an old lady out.

My personal choice is SiriusXM.  I absolutely love how I can pick a genre of music, or a specific decade, or even a single artist, and their playlists will give me the songs I love in random order so that each of them feels like a happy surprise when I hear the opening notes.  From the day I bought my first car with complimentary months of SiriusXM I have been hooked.  I have since added to my contract so that I get it in the house as well.  It provides me with my life’s soundtrack.  It’s never not playing.

This is not how my significant other feels about music.  Or at least that’s how he started out, it appears I may have improved him slightly over the years. 

In the beginning his opinion was that the radio was ‘just noise’, and that an operator of a machine should always be aware of the sound of his vehicle.  Although it can’t be argued that this is a good thing it made for some pretty long boring drives, so I would turn the radio on, tune the volume down and play ‘70s and ‘80s era country music until I had him converted to a car music listener.

Last year he bought his first brand new truck complete with its own complementary SiriusXM offer, something he really enjoyed until they wanted him to pay for it.  Just like that, he was back to listening to his motor.  I have to drive his big blue Dodge occasionally so I revived the son-in-law’s gift of Spotify and introduced my phone to his truck through Bluetooth (old dogs can learn new tricks if need be) and once again there is music wherever I go.  I’ve noticed I get invited along on quite a few parts runs and I’m suspicious that it’s because the music comes with me.  I wonder: is it my company he wants?  Or my phone’s?

Either way, it was the path Fate took to gift me with a song I hadn’t heard in decades – probably not since the days of my scratchy AM radio. 

You see, the way I have my playlist set up in Spotify is sorted by artist.  I was alone in the truck so I picked someone different – John Denver, one of my favourites.  They played several selections that I knew very well and then came the hauntingly beautiful ‘Today’.  On the one hand it seemed brand new, but on the other hand somehow I knew the words: 

Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine

I’ll taste your strawberries, I’ll drink your sweet wine

A million tomorrows shall all pass away

‘Ere I forget all the joy that is mine today.

It’s my new old favourite.  I’m working on the joy part.  They better play it in my movie.