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.