Another Spring Day

I was cleaning up the front gardening bed so that we could plant strawberries along the south and west side of that space.  From the corner of the brim of my hat, I kept seeing a  robin swooping into my peripheral vision.  I put down my trowel to see what was going on.  She was flying in and out of a  nest with the drainpipe meets the porch.  Since she had been carrying something in her mouth, I was hoping to see chick and stopped to get a step ladder to see what was going on in the nest.  The centre was a beautiful shiny chocolate brown colour, the mud still glistening.  I forgot to get David up there to look until the next day, by which time soft pieces of dry grasses lined the nest.  I left the ladder there so that she can get used to it in the environment, since we are going to be going up and down those steps a lot of time, watching first for eggs and then for chicks.

David and his mom are learning to practise behaviour regulation and they took along their behavioural therapist on one of their trips involved going to get him new clothes.  Buying new clothes is not a problem for David alone.  The claustrophobia of a changing room, the task to find the right waist size, the problem of too many choices and too few definite ideas about what a person wants had him dropping to the floor a number of times.  Shopping is not easy on the child or the mother in perfect situations, which this was not.

David is old enough to use the male changing room at Zellers.  Right outside the door are the men’s hats.  David didn’t care about the clothes being brought into the changes room, but he did care about and a wide brimmed, under-the-chin-chorded, man’s hat with an army camouflage pattern is the product that he spotted on his own.  Since the hat is only in men’s sizes the circumference of the hat is 3 inches too wide for him.  He gets the looks when he walks down the street.  He loves the hat and is oblivious to social cues so everything is copacetic when he wears that hat.

Cutting out recipes.  That is one of my long-time my hobbies.  Recipes from the Calgary Herald, the Glob and Mail, me and Canadian Living Magazine.  The hobby expanded when I could find recipes on the internet, and even better when Bicks or Epicurious.com would send recipes to me with any work on my part at ferreting them out.  I have saved the recipes in designated drawers in my kitchen, in cardboard boxes to be looked at on some later date.  I have collected them in binders, determining to categorize them at a later date.  I don’t have to do anything with all of this paperwork – just keep it as a project should I run out of other things to do. Since I have been here with Bonnie we found another fabulous way to explore this cooking hobby. And the exploration requires no paperwork.  Vegetables like the butternut squash come with small stickers that carry full cooking instructions.  Just pick up the squash, read the instructions, cook it, and throw the sticker away.  To add to that,  I couldn’t find a cheesecake recipe in all of my recipe collections, but while the cream cheese was coming up to room termperature and I was searching through books of recipes, my eyes fell on the Philly box which promised that inside was “our classic cream cheese recipe” was on the inside.  No more clipping recipes or printing them from the internet from me.  From now on, straight from the instructions on the sticker or the recipe on the box for me to the oven for me.

David is making a new fort. The fort is down in the Skunk Cabbage Reach of the Campbell Spring.  David’s helpers are out in full force:  Papa, Mama and grandmother, all down there with their clippers, their wheelbarrows and the spades and shovels.  Bonnie and Arta even leave other work since fixing up that walk is more fun than another other work.  There are sticks, leaves, stones, an old culvert buried so long ago that roots have ground around and through it.  All of that came out in the 14 wheel barrows of slash that came out of the3re.  It is so much fun that we just can’t wait until someone comes in there with a chain saw to take out what we can’t get at.  In fact we could wait and we discovered the way for two women to pull out a fallen tree that was at least 16 feet long.  We wondered if we were crossing the fineline between clean-up and fighting mother nature.  All it took was moving saplings out of the crotch of limbs shaped like a v off of the trunk, angling it between the new first that were growing.  One woman at the top.  On in the middle, coordinating efforts, ... one, two three, heave.

Joaquim asked if we were going to build an auspicious entrance, an arch with a some words above it.  Tremble, all ye who enter here, or as David says, “Enter here if ask people in white house”.