Thresholds

I have been out walking in the bitter cold darkest hour this morning, greeting the last sun, star and moonrise of my year of losing dangerously.

Don't let the sun go down on me.

Auld acquaintance and new: family trees. Roll out the barrel!

This year, by process most mysterious, as is common in matters of the heart and destiny, I acquired a daughter in the form of a lovely July bride, there on the other coast, outside a library, under a flowering tree.

I didn't think much tangible was in store for me from this union: I mean what more can there be beyond the infinite joy of knowing Lionheart well matched with loveliness.But this week a parcel arrived in the mail, spilling a pile of electric blue snowflake bedecked packages, such strange other world bright shiny objects alighting in my chaotic in-the-middle-of-the-move Mexican carpet coloured interior. Cobalt blue profundity in all the hot reds and oranges.

The advent of the parcels is all very novel and exciting. This is what one gets when new boughs are added to the family tree. Blended traditions. I cannot remember when last I had Christmas presents. A very very long time ago.

Of course I have more than my share of snowflakes of the real sort right now, feeling as though I somehow shifted realities into one of those Christmas cards which never made sense to me as a child. All that snow and sledding, snowmen, icicles and evergreen trees. Ja well now that I inhabit the world where they come from, some of it begins to make sense.

And all along I thought Christmas was about eating watermelons in the cicada loud shade of the wattle trees, down at the big dam, where later we scattered my father, Teggy's, ashes on a late January whitelight day.Childhood Christmas was also about being really, really hot and not doing much in a sort of suspended animation, waiting around for the city visitors, after going with Mother to the 6 am service in the tiny historic St Johns Anglican Church in Baynesfield, musty with swallow and bat droppings, barred light dancing with dust motes. Teggy stayed home for milking. [Mother who took us to church Easter and Christmas. AKA Elizabeth, Liz or Lif]

Those farm Christmasses were also about long empty hours in between milkings where we sometimes all pitched in because some of the staff could be a little under the weather from drinking home brew. It was the one day in the year when Teggy almost forgave them. On any other day it could earn a drunken staff member a dunking in the water trough, if he argued with being sent home without pay. [Teggy was how his Zulu name - Tekweni - became shortened by us kids. Yes, I know what it means. Do You? ]

Oh, then there was also the having to tidy my cupboards because the Durban grandmother, "Little Gram" - aka Bunny (Elizabeth) as opposed to "Big Gram" - Kate, who lived with us everyday, but usually visited Aunt Mary in Rhodesia over Christmas, came to Seafield (as the farm was named - from birth my association with salt water was established) on that one day a year. Little Gram would inspect our quarters in manner most military. [Kate, Mother's mother, who lived with us but often went to Rhodesia for Christmas.]
Christmas was also the only day a year when I was required to wear a dress, besides school uniform of course and that didn't count as it was all part of the parallel universe/nightmare of Boarding School. Little Gram did not approve of women in trousers. It always felt really strange to be in a dress on the farm: vulnerable and inhibited and not knowing how to put legs or sit properly. [Elizabeth aka Bunny - Teggy's mother]
But never was Christmas about presents in my childhood. Fruit mince pies and waiting on the elders, yes. But not presents or decorations.

Here's to hoping for grand beautiful new traditions for Lionheart and his lovely bride. I am already saving up for the Chinese yard ornaments. And PS I love my new spicy resources. Thanks much!Teggy, Aubrey and Aileen in a barrel. Don't ask. Families!

Morning walk with eagle: midwinter solstice dreaming

On solstice morning I went out walking, exploring my new neighbourhood on the edge of farmlands. Following the winding snake river which gives this little mountain town its name, I found my feet on a lovely road curving up into the hills. Echoing belovedness. Into the country. I go.
Entranced totally and newly in a ten thousand snow kisses deep kind of love with this magical minimalism, my solstice gift was an eagle in a tree. Okay it *might* have been a turkey buzzard - this is the wilder West after all.

I am leaning more toward Golden Eagle with the acknowledgement that the message could be: sometimes we don't know our eagles from our vultures. This is my Age of New Pragmatism after all. Oh! how the dreamer has fallen! In the exquisite silence of snow landscape there's the echo of laughter. Reassuring to know that cosmic joker mirth is still resonant in my life.Both eagle and vulture are nature's way of dealing with the dear dead deer sacrificed on the side of the road after encounters most dire with carts, trucks and things that go. Eagles will share table with carrion eaters.

Either way it is seems pretty good counsel to let what has become dead in my life sustain others. My resolve is strengthened to return to the vinyl box and continue clearing unnecessary stuff. Baggage is beginning to weigh far too heavily on me.

I sympathized with the deer myself that morning too. The County was trying to sand and plough the road I chose for my bring-back-the-light solstice meditations. It must have been an irritation for that worker to encounter this lone wandering woman so far out away from houses, in freezing fog at that. He was considerate. He slowed down. He worked around my red velvet jacketed presence in his all white domain. Deal with it dude! There's space for all of us in the world. Sometimes slowing down a teensy bit is a good thing too. Just like encountering the unexpected.
I am sorry if I bore with post after post of monochrome minimalism of my new local landscape, bewitched by ice crystals. Who needs fairy lights, fancy China-made baubles and fake snow when the real thing, the original inspiration, is sparkling all around.

Sunday morning dawning: the new 'hood

I am not completely moved in yet but I did take some time off from hauling household stuff to greet the dawn in the 'hood this morning.Lots of little furry critter footprints in the fresh powdery snow, a hawk flying low and and a flock of LBJs making musical scores on the wires then filling the skies with a whoosh and twitter.
Anyone dreaming of a white Christmas, looks like I have plenty to spare, and then some more.Touches of barn and berry red for seasonal colour. And always my blue mountains surrounding on all sides.

Living here: snapshot memories from the conjectural future

Today would have been grandfather, father, husband, poet, friend, rock climber, philosopher, teacher and oh! so much more Don's eighty first birthday.
Paging through my albums and shoeboxes I find some snapshots, a little yellowed with age (nothing that a little digital editing cannot fix) of Christmas day 1985. Reading Martha Quest with his collar up against the wind. And rowing with his first born 9 year old grandson, Lionheart of my heart, guiding the boatman in.Funeral II

by Don Maclennan, collected in The Poetry Lesson (1995)

My nephew said, “You’re getting old.
Isn’t it time you thought about the Lord?”
How absolute his three-piece suit.
Momentarily I was back at school
having neglected to perform a duty-
Latin homework, or come late for assembly.

I have been thinking all my life
about such things; when I read
Plato or Ecclesiastes
I become an exercise of mind,
resurrected in the rich concision
Of that ancient poetry.

I was offended by his zeal,
his wish that I would not arrive
without a visa at my destination.
We’d just consigned his father-in-law
and were having tea and biscuits
in the hall. It was mid-summer,
everyone was sweating.
After the weak display of grief
refreshments were a great relief.

A cluster of life-scarred widows
welcomed my sister to the sorority
of empty beds and bodily denial.
She looked stern, remote, defiant,
flattered perhaps, or reassured
being the centre of attention.
Her husband’d got short shrift,
a gentle man who never made a stir,
did his duty and obeyed the law,
played six instruments,
but never had much fun at home.
The minister could not find much to say;
it was a great relief to him to ask us all to pray.

It is a strange religion thinks you
happy only when you’re dead -
he with his three piece policy
inviting me to be not me.
I am not worth much anyway,
and like to live inside with
the ironies of impermanence.
Who needs insurance after all
when our future is conjectural?
It may be true that this is where we die,
but more important,
this is where we live.

In the heart of darkness at the edge of town: the place where Romanticism comes to die

My love affair with old houses is over. It's official.

Yesterday I signed some cheques, signed a pile of legal format lease agreement papers, and received the keys to a modular Monopoly Board, 1970's, recently upgraded, vinyl siding and windowed, weatherproofed no smoking pets, ac and lawn mowing included half a duplex unit on the dark south west edge of town.I also received a pile of operator's manuals which will help me navigate the programming of the automatic forced air gas heating and air conditioning system, the stacking automatic washer dryer machine, self cleaning oven, bathroom vanity surface and maybe a few more features I have yet to discover. Instead of rodents in the architecture, I am going to be living in a house that clicks and whirrs with devices various embedded in its body, ticking away the seconds, minutes, hours, days of my life

The relationship with Skunk House has been going downhill for a while now. The beginning of the end, though, was perhaps with the eviction of Pack Rat. Lines were drawn. Oh you know how it goes when a relationship goes bad. The catalogue of discontent mounts. You find you are spending less time together, and when you are together it is pick pick pick in a downward spiral of negativity.

There is the small matter of ice building up on the insides of the windows, the week that no water would flow out of the house because of frozen outlet pipes, the cavernous cold, dark spaces even though the dragon breath gas furnace is spinning the meter ching ching ching in the gas company pocket, the icicle whiskers indicating all the heat loss through the roof....the cold, the dark, the dark, the cold, the truck piled up under mountains of white. The midnight scurrying, scratching, rustling non rent paying tenants in the walls....

Dearest Skunk House, it isn't you, it is me: I never imagined that, come winter, you would turn into a double storey walk in refrigerator. You will always be the first who gave me shelter in this strange sometimes hostile mountain town. And I treasure the aloha shard you gifted me to talk me off the ledge, when I was so desperately, so wretchedly broken hearted from leaving Haleikeokekai and my beloved salt water
Realism 1, Romanticism 0

So on to the Suburban Dream House:Looking east from the front door - I still have a view of Quartzite Mountain where, one day, the sun will rise again.Looking west from the front door I will have sunset views. Score! I get ringside (well front door step) seats on both the bookends of the day/night.Looking south. Hmmmmmmm....yeeees. Well it is a whole lot of white right now but in other seasons it is alfalfa fields full of frolicking elk and deer. Or so I am led to believe.

Yes I did note that frolicking deer and elk in such close proximity are the death of any food garden, but I am not about to begin a relationship with a piece of earth again. Too many times in the past years I have put down roots only to be torn when the camels called. No gardening in the crystal ball for this farmer's daughter for a while. This caravanserai does not have even ONE tree in the yard. Just lawn under all that snow, and even this will be mown for me by some mysterious third party. Assuming it the same who shovelled the entrance and the driveway this week.

Main Street on a Saturday in December: Molokai it ain't.

On my Saturday afternoon walkabout I met the friendliest pair of mules pulling a tinsel bedecked buggy in Main Street. Turns out they were the Ebony Mule Ranch team, giving free buggy rides to all comers, in exchange for a donation of food to the local food bank.

With midday temperatures sitting at a chilly 25 (F) - a whole lot better than the 10 degrees I woke up to - and the weak winter sun sparkling off the ice, it felt really good to rub noses with these beautiful warm furry big eared beasties, even if they did remind me that my bumper sticker says "I'd rather be riding a mule on Molokai". (If you don't know about the Molokai Mule Trail go here.

Snowscapes: luminescence

It seems this little mountain town of mine has had more than 10 inches of snow dumped on it in the past two days and more snow this month than in the whole of last winter. Admittedly, locals have been heard to complain that last winter was too mild.

My birdbath has grown a Russian hat, the mountain has been shrouded for days, Skunk House has icicle whiskers and Ganesha is slowly disappearing under a puffy white mantle.

The city public works department troops were out before 5 am this morning ploughing and removing mountains of snow from major routes around the hospital and fire department. Those mountains, I discovered, end up in the vacant lot across from Skunk House.

Inspired by their civic fervor, I got my aerobic exercise in and did my community service for the day shovelling the sidewalks around the library, at times up to my knees in snowdrifts. The show must go on. We close for nothing here except church on Sundays.
By early afternoon today it warmed to a positive balmy 30 degrees (Fahrenheit). I carped the diem, of course, and went out walking in my snow chain clad boots, crunch crunch crunching up and down very snowy streets, all over town, and into the edgy unploughed territories where vehicle ruts had made crevasses with knee high banks for me to navigate. I learned to avoid avalanches sliding from roofs and sudden surprise snow falls off laden branches.
Way over on the south western edge of town I find two little girls building a snow house. They have a couch and a TV carved out of the snow, some walls and a kitchen. Maybe.

Little girls: "Are you out walking?"
Me: "No I am on an arctic expedition"
Little girls: "You talk funny"
Me: "Yes, all arctic explorers talk funny"
Little girls: "Does it take a long time to be a HarTicIx Pourer"
Me: "Many lifetimes"
Little girls:: *fall about giggling and whispering*
I didn't find answers to any of those frequently asked questions as to how a tropical salt water lovin' girl finds herself in a place like this, (in other words songline of the day went something like "What's a sweetheart like you doin' in a dump like this...") but I did saturate myself for a few hours in the curious luminescence and graphic minimalist beauty of snow landscapes. Couldn't help thinking too, that this is only November, only the beginning. I am shure gonna be be one hella tough tita when I get out the other side of this mutha of a mountain winter.

Here, now

Rockin' my vegan socks off in that maybe 10% of Americans who don't eat turkey today, even as I am 100% grateful for all my turkey massacring friends in the New World who have taken me into hearts and lives with such generosity.

Vegan banana bread anyone? Later. Going out tramp tramp tramping in the lightly falling snow now. Just because I can.

Happy Thanksgiving!

North wind visit

Colder that a well diggers ass is no longer just a line in a Tom Waits song. I am living it. This is possibly the coldest this tropical girl from the hot continent has ever been.

Predictions were for temps to go way down to 22 below zero (Fahrenheit) last night. Two feather eiderdowns and some scattering of Indian blankets covered my dreams.
This snow is dry and powdery and squeaky underfoot - unlike the big wet mushy flakes I was introduced to the other side of the mountains, on the Salish Seas. And life goes on here. The toy town city sands the toy town sized roads at first light then we just bundle up in layers and get on with life, stamping the snow, salt and sand mix from our boots as we enter any building. Tramp tramp, tramp. Billy goats gruff all of us, leaving messy trails and taking care to walk around icy patches. There are no secrets of who has wandered where in a snow landscape unless you are like a small chipmunk and light enough not to break the surface. I feel so exposed by my morning meanders breaking virgin snow behind me, telling tales.
Brrrrrr. Everyone but me has spiked wheels aka winter tyres. I have two more sandbags in the back of my truck, snow chains for my shoes and the coldest fingers and nose in history.

With my heart trailing tendrils in all the places I have been, I watch the news of the other side of the mountains with anxiety. Their lives have come to a halt this week, with cars sprawled out in accidents everywhere because the storm hit smack dab in the middle of the Monday afternoon commute, roads have frozen and the hills make it impossible to navigate with any kind of vehicle. Wind has brought trees down on power lines and many are without electricity probably until Friday. Libraries and schools are closed - a bonus week of holidays for some, a cold and uncomfortable survival strategy exercise for others.

At least here I still have a ghastly gas furnace blasting dragon breath out at me while gas supply company smiles at the racing meter. Though I also have rime building up on the inside of windows because this old Skunk-Rat house does not fit together too well anymore.

Hmmmmm. Am I starting to see signs that it is time to start looking for another bivouac or is this just the nomad gene kicking in again? Now there's that little blue house across town seemed to catch my eye the other day...and blue has been on my mind a lot in recent weeks.

Goose graffitti: going south

Measuring life in goose migrations, it is eight months this week since I crossed the mountains. Creaky, squeaky goose honking calls fill the somber dawn skies. They are going the other way now. Me? Going nowhere, it seems. When in doubt, follow a goose.I stare until my neck gets stiff, face turned up to these migrant's temporary tattoos scrawled across my morning skies.

Ever evolving goose vees raise some little part of me out of this damp dark daily slough of a northern winter's immanence. Seems the palette is stuck on blue with just a hint of rose for orientation. Ah! that way east. If you are not watching you will miss it.

Blue Diwali

It's been so misty in the early mornings recently, and in the soft focussed balnketing it comes to me that I miss the deep and mournful groan of the ferry's foghorn which has been part of my last nine years of foggy mornings. Until the crossing of the mountains.

Ganesha rises from piles of golden leaves on the porch, keeping watch on the abandoned washing machine outside the inner city like, borderline squalid, apartment across the way. Once he had a ringside seat on sunrise over the Salish Sea. Oh Ganesha! Do you miss salt water as much as I do? The sprig of remembering rosemary at your feet is brittle with age now.

Went south to the city 50 miles down the highway, looking for Indian food to cheer the season. Ended up eating Ethiopian after all and glad for it too with the familiarity of spices and Swahili and nobody else in the Queen of Sheba restaurant much. Not at 4:30 in the afternoon.

Leaving, a cigar store Indian beckons me. I end up with a Hemingway for the FTE. Throw tobacco at the blues. Maybe it will light a lamp on that other river running its parallel universe course in other geographies. On the other side. Of those mountains rapidly becoming snow peaked walls.

Young man in the cigar store says "You can't go wrong with Hemingway". I say: "But he shot himself"

Young man in cigar store is politely confused. He doesn't want to be a bad salesman but he doesn't get this woman.

Still he stays on the job of marketing me cigars, taking me into the humidor. Smells beautifully masculine in there.

I say: "Nevermind the librarian thing. He was a man's man. Give me the Hemingway"

Walking down the stairs out of the converted flour mill shopping centre I wonder about the young man in the cigar shop. Is he still perplexed? Maybe he doesn't know much about Ernest Hemingway. He reads mass market paperback thrillers at the shop counter. Turned face down, sacrificing spine to keep his place in the forgettable story line.

Without candles to light on a river tonight, I do at least have a cigar to send. A tobacco offering.

I suspect there's snow in those low clouds which were all sunrise had to offer on this darkening day.