crooked house

Luke Caught His First Fish!

Give a boy a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a boy to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Give your sister a fish and freak her out with the glare of its glassy dead eyes. Somebody better teach your mother how to prepare and cook a fish from scratch if you keep this up, kid. (I am quite impressed -- I do not think I have ever caught a fish.)

Fairy Door

There are a couple of trees in our yard just crying out for this Fairy Door. You can buy the accessories -- the little windows with the flower boxes and the lantern, which LIGHTS UP AT DUSK AND TURNS OFF AT DAWN -- but I'm wondering if they're overkill. I should've ordered this for Easter but I didn't and now May Day is tomorrow. Perhaps for the summer solstice? (Also, don't you think "Fairy Door" would be the perfect name for a gay bar?)

Rite of Spring: Mayflowers

Nicholas Roerich, Kiss to the Earth.

On Sunday we went looking for mayflowers. They're called mayflowers but they come out in April here in Nova Scotia, at the tail end of winter. Their tiny pink and white blossoms, so delicate in comparison to the thick hairy brown stems and broad rusty leaves that protect them, smell heavenly -- sweet, wild and, beyond that, indescribable. Finding them -- and you can only find them in the wild  -- means that it is definitely spring.

Luke, unconvinced that mayflowering would be very exciting, brought his Lego Ninjago sword, which he used to fight off a number of invisible monster skeletons he happened upon. He also explained to me, as I peered into the underbrush looking in vain for tiny pink and white buds, that just the sight of his sword would be sure to terrify any bears we might stumble across, as surely at least a few of their ancestors must have been killed by swords. I nodded and kept looking for mayflowers, wondering how the bears might've communicated this ancestral fear of swords to their children. Sylvie, pushed along in her stroller by her father, bounced over tree roots and babbled about owls.

After some fruitless searching, we came out onto the hiking trail that has been made out of a defunct railway line. Luke and Vivi, who by now had tumbled out of her stroller, started to lag behind and to complain. Grampa's sharp eyes managed to discover three tiny unopened mayflower buds on the side of the trail. "Maybe it's still too early," I said and suggested that we make a quick detour to the nearby town graveyard, to see the children's grandmother's grave, before going on to the playground.

Luke's grandfather's name and birthdate are inscribed to the left of his grandmother's but of course, as Grampa is still with us, there is only a smooth empty space where the date of his death would go. "Who knows? Who knows? Who knows?" said Luke cheerfully, as  he pointed one by one at the blanks where the month, day, and year will be.

Vivi caught sight of a small gravestone carved in the shape of a teddy bear. She ran off toward it. I went after her, to make sure she didn't take any of the flowers away. It was the grave of an 8-month-old baby. "We love you, silly bird" was inscribed along the bottom. Sylvie giggled and stumbled away in her bumble bee boots. I followed her, looking down at my feet, my eyes suddenly filled with sunlight and tears. And there, in the dead brown grass all around the children's grandmother's grave, were dozens of mayflowers.

 

Thank you, Gramma Linda.

Updated Weather Maxims for the Age of Global Warming

Image from here.

Traditional Maxim: If March comes in like a lion, it'll go out like a lamb. If it comes in like a lamb, it'll go out like a lion.

Update: If March comes in like a lion, it'll suddenly turn into a lizard, then briefly into a Labrador retriever, then back again into a lizard before it goes back out again like a lion. If March comes in like a lamb, it'll be served with mint sauce.

 

 

This Life is In Your Hands. And A Spoiler Alert.

 This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone is a memoir by Melissa Coleman that got a lot of attention last year when it first came out. Coleman's parents, Eliot and Sue, were among the first back-to-the-landers of the late 60s and 70s. They moved to a plot of land in rural Maine that adjoined the farm of Helen and Scott Nearing, the couple who wrote Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, which is the book credited with inspiring the movement. Eliot and Sue built their own home, grew their own food, and Sue gave birth to two little girls while they did it. It sounds Edenic, particularly for children, and partly, it was.  (This NYT review of the book does a good job of describing the basic events of This Life is In Your Hands and also the sort of see-sawing the book does between the poetry of the family's life, rooted as it was in nature, and an increasing sense of ominousness.)

It's easy for people who have never attempted to be self-sufficient through farming to romanticize the idea (witness the current resurgence of what Emily Matchar calls the New Domesticity, which admittedly doesn't seem as hard-core a movement) but the fact is that it makes for a very hard life. (I am guilty of romanticizing it myself -- in  high school I gave a speech on my version of "the good life" in which I would retreat with my little family to a cabin in the woods, where I would homeschool my children and we would all survive, I guess, on nuts and berries.) Coleman, who is now a nationally recognized expert on organic gardening, actually had a thyroid disorder, largely untreated, that spurred him on to ceaseless physical labour. And if I were going to try to accomplish what he did, I think I'd want one, too. From Melissa Coleman's descriptions of her mother, Sue, it seems to me that she  suffered terribly from post-partum depression and that this was horribly compounded by the relentless, back-breaking work that homesteading actually entailed, not to mention possible malnutrition.

Now here is where the spoiler comes in. Consider yourself warned. One day, busy preparing a feast for some visitors (as if she doesn't have enough to do), Sue shoos Melissa's little sister Heidi, who is around three at the time I think, out of the cabin, telling her to go float her toy boat on the pond. Heidi actually comes back once or twice, begging for attention, and Sue turns her away. You can guess what happened to Heidi down at the pond. She drowned.

Melissa Coleman doesn't blame her mother for this in the book, but she doesn't exactly absolve her, either. After reading it I was left feeling absolutely bereft for the poor woman, whom I was unable to track down via google, hoping to learn she has found some sort of peace. And I must admit I was also left feeling a bit pissed off about Eliot Coleman's (and the Nearings') subsequent success as  folk heroes.

Now of course children die. They die in car accidents in suburbia and of childhood cancers and all kinds of things. But all it takes is a short stroll through a pioneer-era graveyard to see how many children died when there was no choice for anyone but a  "lifestyle" of relentless physical labour in order to put food on the table. A lot of those deaths were from childhood diseases we can now vaccinate against (if we aren't against vaccinating) but many of them were from accidents that happened when parents didn't have the time and the energy to hover over their kids.

Snow Drawings

It's March 1st and we're expecting 20 cm of snow overnight. Might as well develop an appreciation for the stuff. Check out Sonja Hinrichsen's Snow Drawings, which were made a couple of weeks ago in Colorado, with the help of five volunteers. Via BB-Blog. (The kids are running to the window -- the storm has officially started.)

Illustrator Virginia Lee

This illustration is a perfect description of my relationship to winter. I am thinking of buying a print. I found Virginia Lee's website after happening upon a book she illustrated -- Persephone -- on Amazon.

Further Tales of A Tonsillectomy

Before we brought Luke home from the hospital, we were instructed to make sure he drank enough. "He must pee four to five times a day!" the nurse said. "If he is not, he is dehydrated and must come back to the hospital! Also, there is a risk that the scabs at the back of the throat will rip open and he will start bleeding! Bleeding requiring an emergency trip to the closest hospital!" She also told us not to let him shout or move around too much for two weeks, which could also result in excessive bleeding. The risk is greatest, she told us, during days four to ten.

Have you ever tried to keep a six-year-old boy from shouting or moving around? If not, imagine trying to keep the wind from blowing or the sun from making its way through the sky. You might as well try to keep Kim Kardashion out of the news.

However, we managed, through great effort, also bribery, to keep him mostly quiet and mostly still until yesterday afternoon. Day seven, for those who are counting. (Like me. I am not only counting the days, I am counting the hours and the minutes until I can safely send the child back to school.) Yesterday afternoon, Luke was standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, chatting to me as I was changing Vivi's diaper on the living room floor below -- I am always changing a diaper at these moments -- when suddenly a squirrel leaped toward him from the banister above his head.

We are having a problem with squirrels getting into the attic from some holes we cannot find in our admittedly decrepit roof. Theo, one of our cats, had chased this one down the attic stairs. Luke is afraid of the squirrels because we have made quite a fuss about our distaste for them being in the attic.  And because, let's face it, they are freaky little buck-toothed rats with long bushy tales. And this was a big one. When this squirrel leaped  toward him, the poor boy screamed more loudlyand for a longer period of time than I have ever heard anyone scream. He stopped only to take a breath and then screamed again and again and again and again to similar full-throated effect. While he was screaming he leapt bodily down the full flight of twelve stairs.

So far, luckily, there hasn't been any bleeding, at least not as far as Luke is concerned. I am afraid a blood vessel may have popped in my brain, however, as I am not feeling at all well today. Fee free to send flowers and chocolates.

View From My Kitchen Window

Calligraphy by Ornamelle.

Carrot Lobster

This image arrived in an email called "Lobster for Vegetarians and Poor People." Around here, where lobster fishing is an industry, lobster is for poor people, or at least it used to be. Kids used to be embarrassed to have to take it to school in their lunch boxes.