books
I just finished Elle by Douglas Glover and i thought it was excellent. I was going to start reading The last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe which has been sitting on my night stand (O.K. I don't really have a night stand but didn't want to say on top of the stack of books on the floor near my bed. Yes, I do lie sometimes) but instead i will start Songs of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Beloved was one of my favourite books of all time. I will get to the last crossing. Kids want pizza tonight so i need to shred some cheese, dice some red peppers, etc. The dough is on the rise. greg is off to see "The Lowest of the Low" at a small venue . At a bar but I don't know which one. He is a big fan.
carmel and cream 
on my shed
Monday
I believe I have a Siberian Elm in my front yard. It is the last hardwood tree on this entire street to lose it leaves every Fall. The leaves turn yellow when they decide to turn, in their own good time. It is a lovely tree. It is resistant to dutch Elm (so the tree book tells me). I am glad because after nine years a tree in the front yard can begin to feel like family. The town I grew up in was once covered in Elm trees but they all came down with that awful disease. It even has an Elm park without a single Elm in it anymore.
My youngest daughter is home sick today. I figure we can finish up Harry Potter and start the Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke. Sometimes we read together. Sometimes she read to herself and then I ask where she got to and then I sneak off with the book to catch up to her. My oldest daughter is more like her Dad. She reads a lot of magazines and non-fiction books. I keep hoping that a certain book comes along and captures her. Takes her away and brings her back a book lover.
web
a drive in the country
Yesterday Greg found me sliding into melancholy and suggested a drive in the country. We decided to drive up to Creemore. the kids were not thrilled with the idea but didn’t put up too much of a fuss. We took a few back roads and watched the fields. The trees are beginning to change but not to their full-blown capacity yet. But the fields were absolutely breathtaking. Some were just tracts of brown dirt with sparse yellow with farmers still busy in them. Others were the colour of rich chocolate or Labrador brown and next to these were fields of brilliant yellow that you would swear must cast a light at night. Also, there were fields that looked just like the carpet that my parents once had in their bedroom in the 70s. It was one of those three tone carpets – a mixture of gold, cream and beige. We drove by fields full of black cows, wooly lambs, beautiful horses. Fields of corn with black birds rising up in a cloud reminding me of a Vincent Van Gogh painting. And then I let my vision drop and started watching the ditches full of wildflowers; purple, blue, brown, white, yellow - the speed of the car blurring them into a stain glass window. There were also expanses of thick bulrushes that had exploded their tops into this creamy down and long hardy grass with soft heads turning yellow.
“Want to stop there?” Greg said
“Where?”
“The market we just passed?”
“What market?”
“Where are you? What are you looking at?”
“I’m in the ditches.”
We did stop at a little country store that smelled of Vanilla candles where we bought soft maple fudge and in Creemore we stopped in at their brewery and bought some of their beer. Stood for a while and looked at the shiny steel fermenting containers. They showed us what hops looked like. We then walked up and down Creemore’s quaint little front street and stopped at a bakery and bought an apple pie. Then we drove home. The day was a bit overcast and cool but the drive lifted my spirits and the apple pie was delicious.
Last evening I started the book Elle by Douglas Glover and am in total awe of his use of language. And it’s as funny as hell.
geranium
the little things
My daughter had an assignment to do at school. She had to write about her favourite thing and bring this favourite thing in to show the class.
“So, what is your favourite thing?” I asked.
“The Christmas ornament that Kyle made me last year.” She said.
“Well, maybe you should ask Kyle first. He might not want it to be shown to the whole class.” I questioned as I tried to figure out what a ten year old boy might feel in a situation like that.
“Mom, Kyle moved away.”
“He did?”
“Yes, I told you that.”
“Sorry, I forgot. Do you miss him?”
“Yes, can you get me the ornament?”
I sighed and thought, the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was to pull out Christmas boxes and look for one ornament in a sea of many, so of course I tried a few other tactics. “It's pretty fragile, it might get broken if it is going to get passed around the class.”
“No, it isn’t going to get passed around.”
“Is there anything else that is a favorite thing? You have a pretty special cat. You can bring in a picture of her?
“ I want to show them the ornament.”
So, off I went and retrieved the ornament and as I handed it to her, I said “be careful with it now.”
She turned, walked down our narrow hallway, is about to make a turn into the dining room but tripped over her sister’s sneakers instead. The little snowman ornament flew from her hands and smashed into a million pieces. She was devastated. I have never seen her so hurt. After she recovered a little, I said, “Why don’t you write about it anyway, it ican still be your favourite thing, you can tell what happened and since you got a good look at it again you can describe what it looked like.
So, off she went and a little while later came back and read me her assignment, she got as far as it had little black dots in shape of a half smile, and she started to cry again and I hugged her and thought about this school friend who moved away, who use to call her to talk most evenings last winter, who bought her a teddy bear for Valentines but by May they were no longer buddies and during the summer he had moved and that must have hurt her alot but I didn’t have any idea. She just kept it to herself.
I took her assignment and read it out loud and told her she had done the most wonderful job of describing this gift and at the bottom, she had taped a broken piece of the silver bulb to her page and beneath it she had written. This is all that is left.
leaves
Spiders on my grapes
First autumn morning
bright with summer
contorts between the vines
leaking shadows
from beneath
drones of silver spiders
hover and spin and swing
on shards of borrowed light.
how clever these dainty devils
these agile musketeers
these guardians of grapes
no swords or capes
only juicy bait and sticky
dew laced thread
unraveled
from internal spaces
and fixed to leaf and branch
up and down the oval hills
to gather ferment flies
that came to praise the ripening
and to glory in the sweet
our girl, Annie
Sorry my picture is so dark. Annie is almost fifteen and is blind in one eye, can't hear very well, forgets that she is in the house sometimes, wakes up from her nap, walks in front of the tv, pees a long stream across our hardwood floors and then comes over to us for a pat. Our younger Annie would never have done this. On bad days she walks with a limp and sleeps alot and on good days she still manages to chase squirrels. We know the day is approaching, that it isn't too far off and we are hoping that it will not be our decision to make, that Annie will simply fall to sleep one night and not wake up. I am hoping when she is ready that she just runs off somewhere to chase all the squirrels she wants on younger legs.
Autumn
Cosmic Waitress, so sorry to bother you but I believe I ordered the large life!
The first day of autumn arrives tomorrow. Maybe I will get up early and greet it. I love autumn. I was a bit more productive today than I have been lately and I still have to run off in a minute to run a few more errands but I wanted to jot down a few words. I started a new short story last night and I enjoyed getting lost in it for a few hours. I have it taking place in a semi fictional place just because the place I am thinking of I don't know that well. It takes place somewhere in northern New Brunswick, South of Jacket River, north of the Road to Resources. I have this sixty two year old woman and her older, frailer husband living in this very remote area, hermit like and pretty much detached from the rest of the world. She has a decision to make. It is mainly a character driven story ( I think). She is beginning to take up a lot of room in my head, I have been thinking about her for three days straight now. I keep seeing her in this pulled fisherman sweater and black stirrup pants, with several bobby pins holding back her short grey hair. I like her.
When I worked as a nurse in Campbellton, I always drove by Jacket River but I never stopped in to see what the town was like.
"Hold my coat and give me a rock. I'm from Jacket River." I remember that saying.
And then in August when we were headed back to Toronto we decided to take the road to resouces, a short cut through the province. From Bathurst to St. Quentin there is nothing but trees, hills, rivers and wilderness. It is a wild and beautiful road. This inbetween area just seems like where she might come from. Somewhere on a back road, near a remote fishing camp or hunting camp that must dot that area.
I received another rejection letter yesterday and yes, it did hurt for a moment because it was one of my new ones and I did wonder for a brief second if I should stop sending things out but I 'm over it. Happy Autumn
Who is my God?
Most people have so much conviction in theirs but I always had trouble being faithful to the God I grew up with. The one I had apparently married when I was six during first communion. Six is pretty young to marry anyone, let alone someone you never laid eyes on. My mom was as catholic as they came so my ten siblings and I spent a great deal of our childhood inside of a church, learning prayers, attending catechism classes and going to confession. We were one of only a few families in our parish that had to go to church the first Friday of each month and every morning before school during Lent. It all became quite mechanical for me. The only time I loved participating in one of these rituals was when, one year, my catechism class was held in the convent behind the church. The nuns had this room that they had made into a small classroom where the tables and chairs were set up in a square, facing each other. We had to take off our boots at the door so we attended these classes in our sock feet. I never really paid attention to the lessons but I loved being there. It was such a quiet place and smelled wonderful and was always so warm. You could often hear the other nuns moving about mouse-like in the other rooms and when the forced air heating came up with a gush through the floor grates, it would send these wonderful shivers through me. It was one of my favourite of all hiding places. I would sit there for that hour each week and pretend I was a nun and that this was my home.
When Mom and Dad started going to Saturday evening mass, my sisters and brothers and I would still opt for Sunday morning mass. They were fine with this but since they no longer accompanied us we usually only made it as far as the school playground which was located on the other side of the street from the church. We would swing and talk and fret about getting caught and toss cards against the side of the school. When it was almost time for church to let up, one of us had to race across the road, through the parking lot full of cars and up the steps, and into the church to grab a weekly bulletin. This was our proof we were at mass.
The older I got, the more I questioned and the more I rebelled from a lot of the church’s strict way of thinking. I wanted to believe in God. More so I wanted that feeling of community organized religion can give a person but I could not just give myself, absolutely over to it. So, I started looking elsewhere for that convent in winter kind of feeling. And then for the last several years I stopped looking all together but I feel I am missing that aspect in my life. And I apologize if this offends anyone but regardless what the church may think about us wayward Catholics, Mad Max is not leading me back into the fold. On principle alone I won’t let that happen.
So why am I talking religion? I guess it is because I am almost finished the book Soul Mountain and there is a couplet in it that I believe is an expression of Daoism and it says Man follows earth, earth follows heaven, heaven follows the way, the way follows nature.
And that made me think back at a bit of writing I did when I was home on the river, sitting at my rented cabin’s picnic table in my lone little field that was completely surrounded by trees. And I remember the sun coming up over the tree line to shine on my red covered journal and I wrote.
I want this to be my God. This moment. I don’t want it to be about me, or one all-powerful, nor one thing alone. What I want my God to be is the things on this earth that are beautiful. That existed before me and will hopefully exist long after I fade. I want my God to be that strip of light across still water, swallows swooping low, the quietness that is grass, a young fox showing curiosity, mornings, one flittering white moth. God (the one I want) can be found right here and everywhere that nature is left to be nature. I don’t expect forgiveness and entrance into heaven and I don’t even know what enlightenment means, what I want is this moment and the peace that it brings me. This wonderful calm that this river is always whispering about.
Sunday grass
Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.
Cosmos
Lazy day
My husband's birthday is coming up and I have no idea what to get him? I bought him Oryx and Crate by Margaret Atwood for his last birthday. He liked it. But really I bought it because I wanted to read it and so I needed an excuse to buy a hard cover copy of it. So, this year I should try to consider him a little more in his birthday gift. I'll think of something. I am having a low energy day/week. It is a pattern I have, lots of energy for a week, than a couple of weeks with moderate to a little less than moderate energy and then a week of where's my bed, kind of energy. I know if I just went for a jog this morning I would have felt better but it is very hard to convince myself to do that when I feel this way. I do have work to finish up and I should have started it by now but I think I will just put it off for a while longer. I am not really a doer. My husband is. I figure there are lots of doers anyway; the world doesn't need another one. I just have to look out my window to see all the doers doing stuff. Are there lots of ponderers? Can I have that role? I could just sit her and ponder and if someone has a question about something that doesn't have an answer to it and will never have an answer to it, they can just say go see the ponderer, I believe she wasted many hours pondering about that exact question and I would invite them in for tea and we would ponder and I wouldn't charge a fee because ponderers really shouldn't, it might make them feel like they are now doers.
Like the other day, well it was really about a month ago but anyway, I was driving down this kind of a busy street here and I don't enjoy driving in the city. I only do it when I absolutely need to, so I am a little anxious and I am driving with music on, a little loud, because it helps me with my driving phobia. I see this truck up ahead at a stop sign and am wondering why he isn't pulling out in front of me because he has lots of time and so I am concentrating on him and don't realize that the reason he is stopped is because there is a funeral procession going by and by the time I realize and that I should pull over, I am almost passed it, with my window open and my music blaring. I felt so bad. As I kept driving I saw a church with a white limo out in front and it made me think (ponder) what happens when a funeral procession and a wedding procession pass each other? I figure it is probably a rare occurrence but in cities it must happen?? Should joy pull over for grief or do they balance each other out?
Can't sleep
so I thought I would get up and make some camomile tea and then I thought maybe I should write in my blog while I am up because I had all these thoughts going through my head anyway. But as my water was boiling I figured why not make some peanut butter toast while I am at it which immediately woke my dog. Now she wants to go outside but I can't let her because she will bark. It is warm here tonight and the crickets are loud and the raccoons are squeaking, I can hear them in my grapes. Every morning now the patio is full of squished grape skins. I think the raccoons prefer the seeds and juice and toss the skins? It makes for a lovely mess. Have at it guys. I thought of an idea for a short story while I was trying to sleep, I even have a name for it With stones from her garden. Well, I hope I made that up and didn't glimpse that title from a book shelf somewhere which could very well be the case. but while I was lying there this character came to me and started taking shape a little bit. I hope something comes from it. I don't want to start it right now though because I am close to finishing this other story that I have now rewritten about a hundred times. I'm only making it worst with each rewrite and should really toss the whole thing but I can't because I like it. I doubt it will get to the point where it will see the inside of an envelope but hopefully. I don't send my stories out a lot. This year a total of five, three new ones and two previously rejected ones. Three have been since returned to me and the other two are overdue to come back. I hope they didn't get lost. I'm not trying to fool anyone, especially myself, but nothing ventured nothing gained and it is fun, even the rejection notes. One rejection letter was very helpful. The editor said I was telling the story rather than showing the story and that the ending basically sucked but he did say "lots of potential here". He also used the words lyrical and original, which are words to dream by. So at some point I will return to that and rewrite, send it out again. The second rejection letter that I received said my story had merit but wasn't suitable for them and he underlined in pen with two strokes, not one, to try them again. I think I spent hours staring down those two small strokes trying to determine if that meant a little or a lot of emphasis on try us again or was it just a slip of the pen? They can drive you a bit bonkers, rejections notes. Bottom line, they say what they say and I got to stop trying to read more into them. Anyway, I finished my tea, my dog went back to sleep, and I think the night is beginning to cool off some.
grapes
Tuesday's thistle
twisted shoreline
Leslie Spit
Yesterday we went for a bike ride to the Leslie Spit. It’s one of my favourite places in the city to go to when I need a bit of wilderness. It is a difficult area to explain well. A cross between a Mad Max set and Winged Migration. A conservation area for birds that juts out into Lake Ontario for about 10 kms. The lake was full of white sails yesterday. They dotted the blue just beyond this slim peninsula’s broken concrete and rusted iron shoreline.
On Leslie Spit
Ulysses
I just finished reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I won't tell you when I started this book. It is pretty dog-earred now after carrying it around in my knap sack so long. So my impressions?
Loved the grave yard scene, loved some of the dialogue, loved that he brought me back to a time and place that no longer exists and he did it with such detail and that rambling without punctuation by Mrs. Bloom at the end was pretty hilarious. The rest I didn't have a clue. I'm sorry, for alot of it, I found it tortureous to read while trying to maintain some sort of understanding. At one point i was just reading for the sake of reading, not having a clue what was taking place during huge chunks of the book..However, I can now say I read Ulysses and can cross it off my list of books that I must read before I die.
My sister's dog, Misty.
Cats and Sparrows
So, then that happened. I love the way Alex Baldwin delivered that line in the movie State and Main.
O.K. here’s what happened
I am taking my cat to the vet this morning for her shots. My house is very chaotic right now because the fence is still going up and the window guys are here putting in new windows. Lots of saws and hammering and what not and my dog and cat are like me, a little neurotic, so I am thinking great at least I get to escape with my cat for an hour. Lovely morning out anyway. So, I tell all these guys as I leave the house that I shall be back, just taking my cat for her shots. I even look kind of cool I think with my green, over the shoulder, cat carrier which Zippers at the top. I round the corner as a street cleaner is rounding the opposite corner, coming towards us. Well, street cleaners are loud and my cat immediately came up like a shot through the zippered top of the carrier. Something like a stripper breaking through the top of a cake if that stripper just happened to have super jumping abilities and was able to clear the top of the cake by several feet.
I tried for a moment to hang onto her but she was using ever claw God gave here not to stay in my possession and leaped away from me, darting between two brick houses, which had a nine-foot fence running between them. O.K. she is cornered, I thought. I can get her, I thought. But in one single graceful movement that little cat leaped straight up, balanced for a brief second on the top lattice and then disappeared over the other side. At that moment I had two simultaneous thoughts. First was ..shit, she will never come to me now and I am going to have to cancel her appointment and the second thought was..Man, my cat is so awesome to be able to clear a nine-foot fence like that.
I walked around the neighbourhood for a half an hour shaking my bag of temptations (don’t let the name fool you, they didn’t temp her at all to come to me) and finally I had to sheepishly return to the house with my empty carrier and ask the men if they seen my cat come back here. I doubt if she will return until this evening, when all is settled. So, I made another appointment for her tomorrow and hopefully I will be able to reinforce the top of her carrier . I’ll tell you how it goes.
Oh, and now I am hiding in the basement because the window guy is upset with me because I forgot to tell him there was like twelve years of sparrow nests up under the eve of our front window that my husband and I never had the heart to remove. Like it’s a whole little colony of birds up there, but I think the whole thing came down on him when he began to remove this metal thingymajig that the nests were sitting on. He was not happy. But the main thing is it’s September so there were no eggs or babies up there.
Fishing in silence
near the sandy shore line
a lone grey heron
First day of school
Not only that but it is the first day of Junior High for my oldest. She looked so grown up. They both did. I watched at the door as they went off for the first time in different directions. I'm glad they had their friends to walk to school with.
Sigh! Summer is over. I found another picture of my heron that I want to post. It is from earlier this summer in Bouctouche. I keep thinking of that morning because it was so beautiful and so quiet.
Except of course for the voices of my daughters behind me saying.."O.K. Mom, we seen the sun rise, now can we go to Macdonalds?" and my youngest saying, "can I throw a rock or something at it to make it fly?"
my camera is only 1.5 pixels so my pictures are not the greatest quality. Yah, I don't think they can even give away a 1.5 anymore.
My garden earlier this summer
Van Morrison
September and it was so warm yesterday at the CNE. My daughters and I spent the day there. Up and down the midway and back and forth through the buildings. Five hours of it under a very hot sun and then I get a call from my husband, telling me he has an extra ticket to the Van Morrison concert and that I need to get the kids home and meet up with him and some of his family in an hour. Well i was sweaty and tired at that point and the kids wanted to stay a little longer and I actually for a minute or two tried to get out of going to the concert. But, I went and I am so glad I did. It was a marvelous night for (a moondance) a concert and it was quite something. September is a pretty special month anyway, with its hint of things to come and add that to an outdoor concert, coming on dusk and Van the Man, Jazzing out. and when he started to sing brown eye girl , I couldn't keep to my seat any longer and danced in the aisle.
the fence wars
It is such a beautiful day here and I am finally, with still a little reluctance, making the transition back into city life. It is so great to go home but it makes the city harder to come back too. Our neighbours are up in arms over the fence we are building. The fence I wanted for eight years and finally can afford and now we are hearing comments like the Berlin Wall is going up and that we are smiling Barracudas?? The thing is, they wanted to replace the wire fence, we wanted a wood (privacy) fence- it seemed we couldn’t agree, and so my husband and I are putting up the fence we want on our side. It does box them in and maybe we could have tried harder to come to a compromise, not saying we went about it perfectly but it's going up and it's one of those little things about city life that bothers me. We are all so on top of each other that the actions of one often infringes on another. Such is the joys of city dwelling. Now, my husband argues this happens just as frequently in rural areas and perhaps it does, I just don’t remember needing my privacy there as much as I crave it here.
behind the ax
I thought I should explain why I decided to call my blog Behindtheax.
When asked the wherabouts of a lost item, my husband's grandmother would often say it's probably down in the cellar behind the ax.
I think translated it meant don't bother me with that, go look for it yourself.
I like that saying. I don't actually have an ax in my basement but I love the thought that all the things I'm searching for just might be behind one.
