Mary drops in ...

 

Front Row: Betty
Back Row: Michael, Mary, Alice

Usually Mary is with her kids, or visiting her mother-in-law, or taking care of me.  So here is the rare occasion when she visits Michael, Alice and Betty Johnson.  

A rare photo.

I am going to use Mary's height to approximately measure how tall the kids are getting.  I might have missed at least 4 inches of growth in each of them this winter.  

Oh that spring were here and we were out running by the stream or bounding down the lakeward steps.  That will come soon enough.

Tell me, Mary, were  you picking up hides to tan, ort was this just a friendly visit?

Arta

Miranda’s Masks

The inside of Betty's masks is a different
pattern than the outside of her mask.

Miranda made face masks for her children to wear at school. 

The masks are a smaller version of an adult mask. 

She tailored some of them so that interesting designs appear across the jaw -- for example, Betty’s has a fox on the left side of her mask.

The bonus of the style of mask that Miranda makes is that it can hang around a child’s neck when it is not in use. 

This means her children can wear the mask in school, have the mask hang from their neck during recess, and easily return to their face when school resumes. 

This is a technique older people use with their glasses, with a cord that clips on the arms of the glasses.

The chord doesn’t always work. 

 For example, Betty found Alice’s mask over by the money bars. 

Apparently, Alice doesn’t like to wear it when swinging her way back and forth on them during recess.  There is a reason that the school asks for all masks to have a child's name on it.

Miranda gave us a pattern for these masks. Miranda also has bundles of fabric, exquisitely patterned, vividly coloured, cut to size, chosen with care for each of her loved ones. Added to this, she gave Bonnie two morning sewing lessons:

You can barely make out the face of the fox
on the right-hand side of the picture.
But so sweet in real life.

Day 1: choose fabric, cut mask, cut liner, copy pattern making adjustments

Day 2: sew darts, press, sew mask to liner, turn, press, add metal nose piece, top stich in nose piece, add cord

And then Bonnie and I returned to the lake ready to buy our own fabric and make enough masks so that she has multiple products to use at work.

Having finished three masks, I would say we are now about 30 masks behind.

Like all sewing projects, so easy to get started and so hard to take to the finish line.

Arta

The New Yorker Comes Too Fast

...Betty swings from the limb of a tree...

I can’t keep up my reading with the pace that The New Yorker drops through my mailbox. 

So I have a set of them, now clipped together with a wing-clip, and whenever I get a spare ten minutes I sit down to the delicious prose of the articles. 

 Bonnie had some time to read and asked me which of the magazines she should start with. 

 I thought the answer would be the latest one, otherwise she might feel the anxiety I feel about trying to catch up by starting back in May or June. 

... Betty plants her foot on the bole of a tree ...

 Later in the day I asked her if she was going to recommend the article she was reading: “Motherland” by Jiayang Fan. 

 “Nope,” she said. “Too painful.” 

 Later in the day she took back her no recommendation and said that some of the reading pain was lifted by the end of the article. Yes, I should read it. 

Bonnie, knowing I hadn’t read the article, went on to talk about our shared experience for three weeks in China and how her feelings about that experience were weaving in and out of the pages as she read Jiayang Fan’s prose. 

 I love living in a house where someone is reading the same book or magazine that I am reading. I stayed up late into the night, reading both the “Motherland” article and a few more essays – ready for the conversation to begin with her in the morning. 

 I read with a pen in my hand, lately, circling words I don’t know and running a line out to the margin where I put a question mark. 

... a little swinging force for a climbing start ...

 I hope that in the future, I will sit down and look up all of those words in an electrotonic dictionary so that I can feel more of the power of those words, having now only an intimation of what they mean to me, words like sycophantic, wan, precarity, reductive, hagiographies – beautiful words. 

I always have the power to understand words in their context.  Every Grade Oner catches onto that quickly.  But most of the words I find in The New Yorker, the ones that I stop to savour, I have never used when I am typing.  I wonder if the words will ever flow out of my mind and onto the page as they seem to with their authors. 

"I bet you didn't know a could climb a tree, grandmother."

I am looking forward to the article called “Aging Ungracefully”. 

Even at 1 am, I can stay awake to read the review of Sigrid Nunez’s novel, “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead). 

The novel takes on the theme of stripping old age of whatever illusions are left of it. 

Oh, so much in life to read. 

So much in old age to strip away.

Arta

Betty went Sailing

"I don't think I will go sailing again."

Tim Oldham invited any of Michael, Alice or Betty to go sailing with him.

Only Betty wanted to go.

I am pretty sure she didn’t know what sailing meant when she said she would go.But down to the shore she went.

I am trying now to finish off the summer’s adventures as I blog and I am afraid I can no longer capture the story of sailing that Betty told us when she got back.

It is a strange mixture of fiction and fact, though I think it is all fact in her mind.

For example, she said that the hull of the tilted at a deep angle and that it was hard to sit in the boat for it was always tipping and then she showed us the angle.

I think that part was true.

"I jumped off when it got close to shore and I swam in."

She said that Kalina and Theresa were in the boat as well. 

Again, true.

She said that she jumped off of the boat when it got close to shore and swam in.

I think she only wanted to do this – not that she did do it. But by the time she told us the story, she was pretty sure she had done that.

Then she told me that she had to walk up to the house all by herself after sailing was done.  I am sure Lurene would not have let her do that.  Still, in her little mind, she swam to safety and then hurried up to the house.

I just love that little five year old.

Arta

A Bank of Sweet Peas

... Betty leans over the geraniums ...

Moiya has sweet peas from one end of her front deck to the other, the only interruption in their smooth flow being a set of stairs in the middle of the veranda.

The flowers climb more than six feet high and hang onto netting that hangs from the railing.

Moiya keeps the flowers cut so they keep growing.

Sometimes she delivers a bouquet to Wyona and then one to me.

That is a lot of cutting.

Moiya was gone to Calgary for 5 days and she invited me over to pick some of the flowers while she was gone. 

 ... Betty by the porch stairs ...

The pastel colours of the petals began to fill our hands and we worked our way from the east to the west along Moiya’s vines.

I took a pair of scissors, two pair really, and Betty along with me.

I thought she might cut a flower or two.

I have to half keep my eye on her.  The scissors might as easily cut off a lock of her hair as a stem of sweet peas.

I showed her how to cut the flowers, just the way that my mother taught me, tracing my finger to the bottom of the stem where they spring out of the vine and then cutting them in the fork that is there.

Betty is too young to know how to do that, but it only took her one demo from me and then she set out to cut herself a bouquet, working silently beside me, standing on Moiya’s rock planter, reaching into the vine, cutting beautiful long stems.

The air was redolent with the smell of sweet peas.

If ever I want to feel close to my mother, I can do so while cutting sweet peas.

She is the one who showed me how to run my fingers to the bottom of the stem, how to gather a bouquet in one hand while holding scissors in the other, and how to transfer the flowers to the Tupperware sweet pea vase (a cross grate on the top held the flowers apart).

Moiya said the same thing to me – she rarely is out by the sweet peas but she doesn’t think of Wyora.

Arta

Flip Flop

... pegs are numbered one to nine ...
... the die rolled 5...
... I can flip down 5 or 4+1 or 2+3 ...

Bonnie introduced us to Flip Flop, a game she bought at a fair where people were raising money for some good causes.

The game is beautiful, partly because it has the charm of both wood and fabric in its set-up.

“I think this game will help with math,” Bonnie said, so I roped in Michael.

It wasn’t long before Alice was leaning over my shoulder, since there is plenty of laughter in rolling the die and sorting out which pegs will add up to that number.

The game is easy: flop down the peg when the roll of the die can add up to that number or is that number. And then what is left when you can no longer flip down the markers, that number is the score you get against you.

... all the pegs have been flipped down ...
... and I get 10 points subtracted from my score ...
... what a joy! ...

Now what was fun about the game is that it wasn’t long before Betty was by our side, watching how to do that and even roping me into playing a game with her on her own.

I always see so many hands when I play: three pair weaving over and under each other, reaching for the die or to flip down a peg, or one of their hands policing the hands of the other.

I often bend the rules when someone young is beside me. In this game it is not so much the score, but the fun of combinations of numbers.

I am sure there must be other math games like this one, but this is the first time I have learned to love the combinations of numbers up to twelve.

I am a late-to-the-joys-of-math grandmother.

Arta

In the cool of the evening

Red light, green light
as the shades of night creep across the lawn..

This evening, Grandmother Joan Turnbull was over giving the kids supper and having playtime with them.

Richard and Miranda were cleaning up after another flood.

They have had so many floods that they no longer try to ascribe guilt to any party, though this time Richard says it was him who forgot to turn off the water from a slow drip he had on it to the lawn.

At any rate, I slipped over to dinner, which I never would do if I had remembered that it was Joan's night with the kids.

After I had finished eating, I played "Here to Slay" with Michael and Joan went outside to watch the girls ride their bikes up and down the street.

I am  not good with modern board games, but Michael is so young that I can get him to play both his hand and then help me with my hand, so that is satisfying for me.

Simon says, "Turn around."
Fun to watch Betty's hair fly in the wind.
Observe Alice's feet.  Is she headed east or west?

When the shade finally began to cross my yard, we went outside where the girls plays on the swings and the two grandmothers had Michael say everything he wanted to say.

Then all of them wanted to play on the lawn with the grandmothers.

Play is not good for me if I need a cane to stabilize me, so I watched and Joan played What Time is it Mr. Wolf, and Red Light, Green Light.

A grand evening was had by all.

Arta

Games – Buckle Buckle Mr. Bean

We continue to play "Buckle, Buckle Mr. Bean" at our house.  Last night Michael, Alice, Betty and I played it while their mom was engaged in the game, Arboretum, with Aunt Bonnie.  

“The moms are going to play a board game for the next few minutes in the living room.  No children.”  

Those are the words said by Aunt Bonnie and those words left 3 chagrined children looking almost bereft to be left behind in the kitchen.  Even tablet time wasn’t enough to fill the early evening sorrow of being cut out of the lives of those two women for the time it takes to play a board game. 

I left the other 2 children behind  in the kitchen and took Betty to my bedroom to sing, “Come All You Play Mates”, a song based on a popular song of 1894: H.W. Petrie’s “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard”.  (Interested folk can find the song at #169 of Sally Go Round the Sun.) 

My mother taught that song to me; now I teach it to my grandchild.  But just one for she is the only one whom I think I can interest with it.  When I had mined all of the time out of Betty’s interest that I think she can give, I take her back to be with the other kids.

There I turn to read from the Secwepemc Lands and Resources book of Indigenous stories, to the story of “Coyote and Fox”. 

“Dumb story”, said Michael after the first 2 paragraphs.  I agree with him, but only dumb because I haven’t practised reading it – it was a cold call for me, and I agreed with him (poor performance) and kept reading until the end of the story.  “Tomorrow I will try to make sense of this story”, I thought.  But with all of the strangeness of the story, I did keep Betty and Alice by my side, listening to its end.  So I gave myself 100% on engagement, if not performance.

... 1 1/4 inches wide ...
... representing another world of truth ...

Then I remembered how often the children ask to play Buckle, Buckle, Mr. Bean. 

They will play it all day if they have an adult with them.  

Betty still has to have an adult in the room with her when she hides the object of my choice: the bronze Witness Blanket Coin.  

It is just a little bigger than a toonie, though not as shiny.  I choose that object so as to get it into their hands, trying to imprint some ideas about Witness Blanket Theory, I think to myself, though I am pushing the point.

Betty still has to be coached to hide the coin in a place where all can see it.  “Betty, can you see the coin yourself, right now?” 

The answer is no.  She has dropped it inside of a roll of masking tape which is too high on the kitchen counter for her to see herself.

“Then let’s try another place.”

She can hardly stand it when Michael and Alice join her in the room and start their search.  She can’t even give them 30 seconds before she starts coaching, “You’re getting warmer, warmer,” even though they aren’t even close to the coin, nor have they asked for her help.

The best part of the game is that it keeps all of their interest and they have forgotten that their mother and favourite aunt are on the other side of the kitchen door, having their own fun.

Thank you, thank you, "Buckle, Buckle, Mr. Bean" (or as my family of origin used to call the game, "You’re Getting Warmer, Now Colder").

~ Arta

I Know It is Five O’Clock

The doorbell rings and I can see the tops of Nora and Pepper Wood’s heads through the shimmering opaque glass of the front door.  Betty jumps off of her kitchen stool where she has just begun the coveted 2 hours called screen time her mom gives her.  I tell Bettyu to take off her headphones and leave her electronic device behind, since she has grabbed them and is running to the door with them.  I tell her this because the day before, I saw her run off to play with Nora and Pepper, taking her electronic device and I thought, “We are never going to see that again.  She is going to leave it somewhere, not remember where it is, no search of the property will help us see it, and I am too tired to run after her to get it.”  Still it came back last night.  I don’t want to have all of those same negative thoughts about the ipad again today, so I halted Betty, but it was not without a battle of wills – hers against mine.  She was afraid the girls at the door would leave if she didn’t get to the door in a timely fashion, so Betty leaves the electronic device behind.

She opens the door and before they can say a word Betty says, “I know, it is 5 o’clock and you want to play on my device.”  I am both choking back laughter and knowing I should make an intervention.  In the families of those little girls, children don’t have their own electronic devices – just a parental choice to keep them present in the real world, instead of the imaginary electronic gaming world – not a choice because they can’t afford the electronics.  So I back up the parents and say, “Out you go with them, Betty, but no electronic device in your hand.  She heads out with them, but it is only a few minutes before they are around on the back porch asking Aunt Bonnie to come out and supervise them on the zip line.  I intercede there, as well, since Bonnie is busy and I tell the 3 girls, I will meet them at the zip line as their supervisor.  I do that.  Soon they are joined by Alice, Evangeline and Sidney, Nora’s older sister, all from next door, and all 5^th generation little girls on the land.   

I feel a stirring in my heart of gratitude.  Well, not just a stirring – overwhelmed that I have the chance to untangle the rope at the end of every zip line run – at least for the younger girls. So sweet, all 6, ages 5 to 9 running back and forth, their long hair flying in the wind, some of them so skinny that they look like only skin stretched over joints, their little bodies always in motion, never walking, always doing a dash from one place to another – and it has been like that for them all day. The older ones seem to be able to jump off the zip line without having the rope swing back through the air and circle around the two wires of the zip line, locking the handle bars in place at the end of the run.  I look back up the line and there is always one coming down the line, the noise  of the zipline zinging in my ears, one girl on the platform waiting for her next turn, and four lined up at the bottom of the ladder that they will use to climb up to that platform.

I seem to have time to bend down and pull weeds in the 60 seconds between runs and I think to myself, “Why don’t I grab garden gloves each time I come down here to supervise?”  But again, I haven’t though I have the thought each time I am down there. 

I did bring down 3 buckets of compost to drop in the bin the last time I came to supervise.  I thought I could dumpt the buckets unnoticed, but Nora came over to ask, “What are you doing?” 

“Putting my compost in the bin, just as your grandmother Moiya does on her lot.  My bin is just a different shape.”

“Is that why you have flies all over you.”

Now I am laughing again so hard.  I had forgotten the swarm of flies that comes out of the bin when I open it to add more vegetable matter to it.   Dumping the compost just has to be done, so I choke down all the  negative parts of doing it: the swarm of flies that emerge and now hang around my own body, the smell of organic compost at work, my swiftness at trying to dump and get the lid back on so that I am swarmed with fewer rather than more flies. 

“What a sight I must be.  An old grandmother, fruit flies swarming my aura”, I think.  “I hope this child will not need therapy when she is old, about the idea of growing old.”

Later Matthew Wood joins me at the zip line. 

“Coming to supervise?” I ask. 

“No,” he said, “I am coming to see where Evangeline is.  She ran off without telling Autumn where she was going.  Autumn was supposed to be supervising the girls.” 

“Oh,” I said.  “Did you ever get in trouble for running off to play with the other kids when you were young.” 

He laughed and responded, “No.  I can never remember having to tell my parents where I was going.” 

He gathers up all of the girls, Evangeline who is now in trouble, and the other girls who are foot-loose and fancy free shouting, “Yay, we are going home to movie night.”

Thus endeth my supervisory duties both of electronic devices and at the zip line.

Wyona Likes the Chickens

I am doing early morning raspberry picking.
The chickens come out of the coop and
walk along the row of raspberries with me,
taking a bug here and there.
I stop picking to take a picture of them.

Wyona likes Miranda’s chickens.

She really likes them.

Walking back to her own from my home, Wyona stopped in to see how the chickens were roosting, and ask if they go back to the coop on their own every night.

The answer is yes.

Wyona said she is going to come over and take a picture of them.

Ouch.

If they give her a good shot, she will probably paint one of them.

When she wakes up, Betty grabs a pail
and heads outside to pick raspberries.
Here her raspberries are on bananas. 
I shall shortly add cream to them:  
18% BF, not 33% that I really want.
Betty has picked the raspberries for me.

One thing she loves is how they flow – kind of a globular structure flowing down an uneven board. 

As if they have a connection to one another.

When I am out with the chickens, I usually have a broom, chasing them off the deck or trying to herd them out of my flower garden.

... next morning, same chickens, same drill ...

When I am doing this, Betty is usually ahead of me calling out, “Don’t hurt them, Grandmother. I know you hate chickens.”

She has her arms outstretched as if holding me back and protecting them from the evil thoughts I am casting their way.

If I do 999 good things for Betty, all she will remember when I am dead is how I hated her chickens.

Life just isn’t fair.

Arta

"Chicken Run - Larch Haven Style"- Act I (For Blogging)

OThe Setting: Eggs were purchased and hatched in the Spring.  It is now mid-summer and there are 3 chickens and 3 roosters that belong to Miranda, and the three children: Michael (8), Alice (7) and Betty (5).

Alice (running into the front room, frantically calling):  

"The chickens are lost. The chickens are lost.   They are all gone.  I can't find them anywhere."

Grandmother: (calm but remembering that she has seen the Wood's sheep dog, Reno, chasing the chickens around through the trees half an hour previously.  She also remembers seeing Owen Wood chasing Reno, then capturing the dog, and then dragging it back home by its collar to its leash which is on Lot five.  At that point Grandmother is also remembering the 12-year-old boy down low, a toss-up as to whether the boy is dragging the dog, or the dog dragging the boy -- it might be the first is the case, and then it changes back to the other is winning and so forth.)  

"Don't worry.  Chickens know how to hide in the woods."  (She is thinking to herself, maybe the chickens have scrambled over the hill and are down on the road and on their way to the beach.

Alice: (throwing hands in the air and then onto her head and then back into the air.)  

"No.  I have been looking everywhere for them.  They are lost.  Really lost.  Someone has to come and help me find them."

Grandmother: "I think they will be OK."

(Alice goes out to the porch.)

(Suddenly through the front door comes a chicken, being chased by a dog, the dog is chased by Owen Wood.  Owen and the dog are chased by Alice, then Michael and Betty.  All appear to come through the door at the same time.  The chicken flies high toward the ceiling, hitting the light, then falls and perches on top of the round table that is between the two couches.  There are the 3 fake Inuit soapstone carvings, one wire basket and a chicken on the table now.  The dog is in pursuit, climbing with its paws on the couch that butts against the end table.  Again, the chicken takes flight, but it can't get out through the window.  With its wings beating madly against the window pane, it can't gain height and it slips down behind the couch.)

Alice (yelling): 

"Save the chicken, save the chicken!"

Owen (Now behind his dog, all the while pulling on the dog’s collar, trying to back him up, but the dog is not trained to back up.  It is in forward motion, trying to get that chicken that is trapped behind the couch.  He is yelling out to no one in particular, for no one has said anything.):  

"Sorry! Sorry!"

(Owen looks up from his crouched down position with the dog, at Miranda who has now entered the room):  

"Sorry! sorry!"

Miranda says nothing.  She strides up, takes the dog in her arms full on, then switches the dog off to her side, under one arm but it is a big dog.  The boy is willing to take the dog, but she does not hand it over.  She walks calmly out of the house and down toward the creek.  

Grandmother is wondering if Miranda is going to drown it.  

Alice is gathering up the chicken in her arms.

Grandmother: (not saying anything to anyone in particular, but thinking): "I’ll bet there is a trail of feathers and chicken shit to be found there behind the couch."

(She knows Michael has just hand mopped the whole marble floor this morning, for she has been supervising him, so she knows how clean this floor is/was.  Grandmother is also laughing, for she has just been an actor in an event that could not be staged.  She can't stop laughing, even though she can see that no other actor in the scene is finding this humorous.  Alice is still yelling out words about the chicken's close call with death.  Alice takes the chicken out of the front door.)

(Grandmother goes in to report all of this to Aunt Bonnie Wyora who previous to this, needed a quiet rest, long before all of this action takes place, so she has missed it all.)

Bonnie Wyora gets out of bed, goes to the front room and begins to move all of the furniture to see if there is any chicken shit behind the couch.  There is.  

She begins moving both couches away from the window, and tries to move the end table.  It may weigh 100 pounds. 

She can remember Grandmother upon buying it had said, 

“This is either real wood or concrete.” 

Bonnie Wyora really doesn't want any help cleaning. Nor does she want an audience for the way she is going to clean and tells this to Grandmother, who leaves the room, since Bonnie says:  

"I can’t clean while you are watching.   Go away.  Go blog this." 

Grandmother (speaking aloud but quietly and to no one): 

"I can blog this but I don't think I am quite capable of doing it so close to the event."

 (Still, she goes to try.) 

(Betty has needed to get right there in all of this action.  She now wants to see the chicken shit, since she has heard these two words together with a new emphasis.  She gets her nose right in the corner, close to the specimen.  The spot is easy to find, marked, for there is a feather also, seemingly a placeholder – as though to make chicken shit easier to find.  Betty comes up with her nose wrinkled saying): 

"Pee-yew." 

Grandmother (speaking to Betty):  

"Your chicken, your chicken shit.  You clean it up, Betty." 

Betty: 

"No, it is Miranda's chicken. She can clean it up." 

Grandmother (again): 

"No, your chicken. Your chicken shit."

(Betty shakes her head.  She is not going to clean it up. She cleans up other things, but not this. Her nose is still wrinkled up from the smell.)

Miranda comes back and the 3 women gather to try and make sense of what has just happened.  

Michael walks through the door for the first time.  He is ashen and can hardly move. 

Aunt Bonnie Wyora (notices Michael and turns to him): 

"Michael are you all alright?"

Michael is as stiff and still as a statue: 

"I am going to be OK.  Just don't talk about it." 

Aunt Bonnie Wyora: 

"No, you need to talk about what is wrong with your mother."

(Tears well up in Michael's eyes, his lip trembles more.  Aunt Bonnie Wyora and Grandmother start backing up.)

Aunt Bonnie Wyora: 

"We will go into the other room and take Betty with us".

(Betty is the five-year-old who likes to be a spectator in all dramatic scenes.)  

Bonnie (still speaking:) 

"You call us when you are ready to have us near again." 

(They back up, taking Betty with them.  Michael moves toward the arms of his mother.)

(Bonnie Wyora later comes to find Grandmother with a pair of pink shoes in her hands, from which she is going to wash off the chicken shit.) 

Bonnie Wyora (to Grandmother):  

"By the way, the Rogers have just phoned.  They have a chicken down there at the beach and wonder who it belongs to."

(Meaning the question is no longer "why did the chicken cross the road?" but is "why did the chicken cross the railroad tracks"?) 

The End...?

Addendum:  No chickens or dogs were killed in this, Act I.

Have I felt strong wind gusts?

Annis Canada: Severe Thunderstorms Watch

Michael reading Wings of Fire by Tui T. Sutherland
while he waits for the strorm to develop.

I heard a ping, the sound activity on AccuWeather -- one of my phone apps.

I looked at the screen: Warning -- conditions are favorable for the development of severe thunderstorms that may be capable of producing strong wind gusts, large hail and heavy rain.

At the same time there is a knock at my door.

I know it is one of the three little children from the cabin next door. They live in my pandemic bubble.

I try to stay socially isolated from the rest of the world -- in my room here, except for those in my bubble, and three of the six will be wanting entry this morning. Other cousins have left and they are alone. I don’t generally have them in the room.

Alice trying out Grandmother's bed and 
wondering about the idea of reading

Especially in the early morning time when I can do my best thinking. But today is different.

 I let Michael in first, telling him that I am typing but that if he wants to lay quietly on my bed and read, that will be fine.

 It is only a few minutes until Alice comes.

It is harder for her to lay still, so I shared with her the morning forecast, of which she wants to know what “strong wind gusts” might mean.

"Have I felt strong wind gusts?" she asks

If Alice curls up, so does Betty.
... monkey see, monkey do ...
the rhyme we are learning together
from Sally Goes Round the Sun

She doesn’t think so, though I know I have called her to the porch on other great storm days.

She also wants to know what is the difference between heavy rain and large hail.

Sometimes I have to put my hand under the falling water to tell the difference myself. There is that moment between hard rain, soft slush and heavy hail where I am uncertain too.

That is why my door to the deck is open. I have decided I will enjoy the 3 hours of severe wind, rain and hail that Accuweather has alerted me to.

I can hear the heavy rain already, – on the deck, on the boughs of the trees, pinging off of the round table on which I might eat breakfast on a clearer day.

I hear the sound of the crows calling to each other, so it is better that I keep my door open and pay attention to that gift of water from the heavens and all the sounds that it brings.

... the rain drops wash the patio table to a new level of clean ...

The heavy cloud that hung over Bastion Mountain, half-hung, has dissipated into a fine white midst, through which I can still see the mountain, but only barely.

Like through a glass darkly.

I change out of my morning’s summer clothes into a heavy denim jacket and heavy thread-count jeans.

I need to be warm to enjoy the gift of a storm through an open door.

Arta

How to make a Bird Comfortable

... how to make a dead bird comfortable ...

"Was there a funeral for a bird out at the lake?" 

Rebecca Johnson wanted to know more after seeing the photos that will be in this blogpost.

Yes, a dead woodpecker, found in cabin and the bird had made a mess.

Children had different ideas about what to do.

At first the bird was going to be buried in the lawn and then some adult sent the kids into the trees with it.

Previous to this I had extended the wing to let the kids see what it looked like.

Then the kids weren’t allowed to touch it with their hands.

Michael wanted to bury it right away, but we thought we’d wait a day.

The next day Alice put on gloves and asked if she could touch it.

I said that would be fine.

I was gardening and at one point looked over and Betty was pulling up the moss/grass near the tree with her hands.

This looks like it could be a riff on
Ophelia floating down the lake. 

I asked her what she was doing and she said she was digging a hole.

I told her I thought we should do it over by the trees and with a shovel.

Alice said no, she was trying to make the bird comfortable. She was collecting flowers and leaves to put around it.

Then there was a discussion (argument?) between Michael and Alice. Michael wanted to bury the bird and Alice wanted to make it comfortable.

... the bird in the hole ...

We settled on putting the bird into the hole (it turns out Michael had dug a small one the day before) and then letting Alice cover it with leaves and flowers.

It think the bird was very comfortable.

I forgot how small the hole was for the grave.  I think Michael must have dug it with his hands. There were no tools around.

~Mary

First walk in the forest

Naomi, Betty, Michael and I decided to go check out the beautiful path through the forest that David Pilling and Greg Bates have been maintaining.

Here we are setting off from Arta's house.

Along the way, we said hello to Greg, Wyona and Zoe who were all out Gardening.  Piper and Landon were on the bikes, so we got to say hi to them as well. We passed David and Shauna's house and then... into the woods.

This "going up the hill" looks like we are going "down the hill".
We rarely see this stream so full of water!
Don't  you just want to bend over, cup your hand in and take a drink?
So refreshing, and a frozen hand!
An ache right up to the elbow.

Michael decided we should go up the hill at the stream, so when the path ended -- a quick photo shoot.

Then we followed as Betty skipped down the hill.

Betty -- 4 years old -- her socks are matching.
Hard to believe since I know she choose them herself!

In the forest we found some great mushroom and fungus growing.

Can't wait for our next adventure in the woods.

Mary

A Note to Two Grandmothers

Betty's morning make-up

Betty told her mother she wanted to send these pictures to her two grandmothers: Joan and Arta.

Betty added text for her grandmothers:

I love you guys. I really wanted to see you and go there (to your houses) today but it's Valentines today and I wanted to send you a glowing sword.

And I really love you, so goodbye.

Miranda adds, "These are makeup pictures inspired by the magazine we were reading at Arta's appointment on Monday. Betty really wanted to test it out."

And I have something to say.

Yes, we did sit looking at a Glamour magazine while I was waiting to see the dermatologist.

Since one of the models had a lot of freckles on her face,
we did have a long discussion about having freckles,
and about how beautiful they were on the model's face.

That magazine was the only choice we had of a magazine with colourful pictures.

We did look through a Calgary Business Magazine, but every page we turned, there was the pose of another corporate male outfit, which wasn't interesting Betty that much.

You know, a suit, a tie, a man's face, mostly black and white.

But the Glamour magazine?

There we could find glowing colour, sparkles, glitz, hair blowing in the wind, hair that had curls like Betty's, painted nails.

... snip, snip and off come the curls around the forehead ...

Every page was an excuse for more advertising about products that would make a person more beautiful.

Betty lingered for a long time on the eye make up.  And the false eye lashes.

Miranda, in the meantime, was taking the small whisps of curly hair on Betty's head and moving them back from her forehead.

Pointing to Betty's head, Miranda said to me, here you see Betty's first self hair cut.

Yes, indeed, Betty must have taken those long front golden curls and chopped them off with a pair of scissors.

Well, she won't be the only child who has given herself a hair cut. 

Quite a saving as far as money gores, but the result not always that fashionable.

Still, the make-up is good.

Arta