Ten Days in B.C.

I have been in B.C. for a week now and it is time to go home. Trying to pick the 10 highlights of the week in no particular order I wouldn’t know where to start: the joy of the aching muscles; the heat of the hot tub against the sight of the stars at night; the sounds of the birds; the moist air breathed deeply into my lungs; the wonder of being able to fill my lungs with that air and then run a wheel barrow up a steep incline, establishing the downstairs-lake-side bedroom as my own; the sight of the dawn breaking into full day; the yellow of the skunk cabbage blossom; the worms newly exposed on a shovel of earth – just hard to choose what it is that stops me, long enough to find such pleasures in the out-of-doors.

That is not to say I am not enjoying the inside – just reading the two Salmon Arm Weekly newspapers is fun. I found a course I wanted to sign up for: how to organize an interpretive walk, but the course is during the week I will be back in Calgary. As well, I loved reading about the opera and the film festival, both of which are running in town this week. Even the obituaries are interesting – a man died and people are not only crying “millions of tears”, but acknowledging in recognition of his life well-lived, the childhood happiness he had with his dog, Trigger. On another page, the opening of the Centenoka Farmer’s Market was heralded, and as an added bonus, news about your plants – if you want them to really grow, there is goat manure for sale, $2.50 a bag.

On the home front, Bonnie and I cut down the willows that block the view of the lake from the basement bedroom. We suited up so as not to have scratched arms. In a previous adventure on the hills, burdock seeds had penetrated my fleece jacket, moving through the fabric and lining and sitting there up so that the tiny hooks on the end of the seeds had scratched my arms all day. The seeds were lined up both perpendicularly and horizontally, giving my forearm the bleeding image as though a grate having been pressed there.

So, on the next morning in question, I had carefully removed those seeds and we were going after bigger stuff than those burdocks – the willows. Bonnie clipped and I stood by with some weed killer to put on the face of the fresh stump. We could only move downhill. Our footing was too precarious to turn around and try the climb back up.

“What are you two women doing up there?” Laynie called, as she pushed Landon back up the roadway. “I am getting a photo of this.”

A less dangerous but more lengthy task has been getting the raspberry beds ready – cutting down the old canes, saving some back to act as stakes for other plants, weeding around the new shoots and getting out those quack grass roots, , standing up again to use the pitch fork to turn the earth over, amending the soil with rich, black loam, raking off the new rocks that have lifted to the top and rolled onto the grass in all of this work, and imagining the summer day when I will walk along and pick a bowl of new raspberries for breakfast.

The dolly has become my best friend when moving rocks. David came up the hill to take a try. He is always interested in using the exact tool that I have in my hand. Just as he was figuring out how to get the loaded dolly moving downhill, Glen and Connor came by to make a fridge switch at our house – the fridge that has no freezer compartment now coming into the kitchen so that we can top up on the number of vegetables we have at hand in the kitchen.

“Hey, which way are you going with that dolly,” Glen asked David, knowing he would soon need it for the fridge move.

“I am going the way the dolly is going,” said David, pointing downhill to the tracks.

“I will show you how to change that,” called back Glen. He went up to David, showed him how to position himself so that he could put his left foot against one of the wheels and then use his weight to let the other wheel make a 45 degree angle turn, thus allowing the dolly to come down the driveway instead of shoot down the hill, loaded as it was with at least 100 pounds of rocks.

Bonnie and I imitated whirling dervishes when Glen and Connor arrived, saying to us that they were "two men from the church". She was unloading the fridge in the kitchen and I was doing the one in the garage and they were moving boxes and furniture to make a clear path for the move. She wanted some money to change hands for the service, and so set David up with a fresh pineapple to give them at the end of the task.

“No, we can’t take the pineapple,” Connor said. “We already have one at home and I am leaving tomorrow for 3 months of the tree planting in northern B.C.”

“You keep the pineapple,” Glen said, when David offered it to him. “It is healthy food for little boys.”

As they walked back up the driveway to go to their home, David’s little five-year voice called after them in frustration, “Then you won’t get the money in the bag!”

Having a five year old around, reminds me that there is evidence of him everywhere. In the upstairs bathroom there is an extra chair on which I sometimes see a child's book. I knew David had been in there this morning when I saw rocks on the chair, neatly arranged in 3 piles – all of which had come out of his pocket. Now they were placed in groups: small ones, smaller ones and the smallest of all, strategically positioned for battle as he does when playing board games.

Walking Along the Skunk Cabbage Reach of Campbell Spring

 

David  and I are making a tourist trail along the Skunk Cabbage Reach of Campbell Spring. We began yesterday by pulling out some of the deadfall, deadwood so fully rotted that David can handle long logs on his own. He was smelling the fresh ginger that is underfoot, and swinging on an upturned root that is fully embedded in the stream. I tried to make a count of the skunk cabbage plants that are now in bloom there – the number is somewhere between 12 and 20 – each time I get a different count.

The stream is full, the water splashes over rocks and twigs – the noise of it must echo from the side of the small hills that surround it, for when I get back out onto the road, the sound of the quiet there seems deafening.

Joaquim had 4 wisdom teeth out Saturday morning. He was zoned out on his initial medication for all of Saturday. Sunday he wasn’t allowed to bend or reach and was on a bland diet – anything that could be put through an osterizer. Yum.

We, on the other hand, were refining Bonnie’s cooking skills, making fried rice – not just any fried rice, but super deluxe fried rice, adding tiny egg strips, pressing the rice into a cup and mounding it on a dish and topping it off with roasted sesame seeds. Bonnie is inviting David to practise eating mixed textures – a task which seems to be set up for failure just from its initial objective.

At the table with the fried rice, we all turned into Star Wars personalities: Bonnie as Ahsoka; David as Anakin Skywalker -- that Abo Droid who is also a dashing pilot.

I am R2-D2, since that character only has to beep and isn’t required to do any high level thinking. According to Star Wars, the Complete Visual Dictionary: The Ultimate Guide to Characters and Creatures from the Entire Star Wars Saga, my character replaces blown fuses, installs wiring, polishes floors and does whatever else is necessary to the maintain the gleaming visual appearance of the ship in perfect working condition. There was racing going on at our food table – which character could find a green pea first in the fried rice, and get it into their mouth, then a grain of rice first or a piece of a mushroom or a carrot first. R2-D2 was always so slow that David either won or came in with a tie with his mother.

The profile of Grandmother R2-D2, around mixed textures, includes her being a looser if she is to keep the ship in perfect working condition.

Arta