Music Club

David Doral Camps-Johnson belongs to a number of clubs: science club, gymnastic club, and art club.

While I was staying at their house, I thought I should add choir as well.

Music is often  hard sell.

In fact, music club is such a tough sell in today’s world that I take the task on having no expectations of success.

Bonnie and Joaquim are open to me teaching all kinds of music.

They left the curriculum choice to me.

I began to sing any song that was related to anything we have been talking about. David and I learned the following:

1. Onward Christian Soldiers – Joaquim being raised in the Catholic faith does not know that song. (Joaquim taught the concept of the Medieval Crusades and killing for God when David asked his whys about this song.)

2. I am a Child of God - a Mormon favorite, not my Mormon favorite, but the one I hear sung most of the time when I am at church or funerals.

3. Johnny Appleseed’s “The Lords Been Good to me”. (A substitute for saying the blessing.)

4. "I’se the bye that builds the boat" from the Book of Canadian Songs

5. Jack was Every Inch a Sailor and "The Squid Jiggin Ground".  Note to self -- now I have promised to make some squid lines and jiggers for David.

6. "Food Glorious Food", from Oliver, as well as "One Boy for Sale", "Where is Love" and "Who Can Buy this Wonderful Morning". Apparently selling a boy is not frightening to him David can sing that song and watch it on the video. Pretending Mr Bumble is saying the grace? -- “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make you truly thankful”, that is a phrase so fraught with terror that it puts David to the ground, his head in his hands.

7. The Baptist Sunday School Song: “God made Satan / Satan made sin / God made a hot place to put Satan in / etc.  I teach that one to honour Doral Pilling for it was one of the few songs he knew.

8. The Huron Carol - "T'was in the deep of wintertime when all the birds had fled...", etc.

9. Dona Nobis Pacem -- a friend from kindergarten taught him that one. Go figure.  I thought kids were supposed to teach each other their lexicon of swear words, not Gregorian chant.

There were more songs.

I am going to stop my list there, because the point is, although David doesn’t look like he is learning the songs as I sing them over and over, it is only a few hours and I hear him from another room, singing the songs sotto voce, in perfect pitch with all of the words.

No one will guess the song that he sings the most so I will give it up.

It is the refrain that may be heard this summer as he walks the Shuswap paths.

Bring a drum or two.

We will be hearing a lot of “Onward Christian Soldiers”.

I should go work for the Lutherans.

Arta

The Battle

As we left Calgary to come back to the Shuswap Duncan knocked on Richard's back door to say good-bye.

No one was home, but sitting in Miranda's garden boxes were the boiled skulls from Richard's fall hunting trips.

"What is this?"

"Can I touch it?"

"Wanna have a fight dad?"

 And so the battle began.

In too short a time the horns were locked, the opponents brought to their knees and the battle was over.

We were on our way back to B.C. with only the golden memories of a beached skull from the visit to Richard's and Miranda's.

Arta

Risk / Star Wars Style

Steve, Rebecca, Alex and Duncan made a bullet trip to Calgary.

Steve leaves early June and Rebecca and the kids, early July, for London, England.

Their Easter weekend trip was composed of a day travelling from Victoria to Shuswap, then a day from the Shuswap to Calgary, one day moving boxes for Verlaine and then the reverse trip back to Vancouver.

"The worst holiday ever," said Duncan.

To alleviate  his pain 3 women agreed to play the Star War's Risk game. a game he had been begging everyone to play with him to no avail.

I hate board games.

In this case, I sat down and played until 2:30 am.

I couldn't ignore the Duncan's plaintive line "the worst holiday ever".

Bonnie, Rebecca and I were not that alert  -- but Duncan was having a great time, advancing and retreating, rolling those bones and making alliances.

"Hey, grandma, we just made an alliance and now you are taking all my men," he complained.

"Never trust the forces of evil after midnight," I replied.

It was a hard night, as you can tell by how much drinking was done.

Blessed caffeine!

I rarely drink but that kept me going that night.

I like David Doral's board game options for adults better.

He is willing to set up the game by himself, make it a 2 player game instead of 4 player, have the game be time specific (20 minutes) and play his mother's pieces when she runs around the kitchen doing other work.

Now that is the way to play Risk, at least from my point of view.


Arta

Gardening

 Glen had the idea that a person could make a container garden using the barrels Ron Treleaven no longer needs for a dock.

Glen and David cut them in half for me, and made holes in the bottom through which water can drain.

The barrels were filled with 1/3 sand and then Joaquim and I got busy mixing wheel barrows loads full of 1/3 loam, 1/3 clay and 1/3 manure and topped the barrels up.

Though it appears that we are trying to grow a boy in one of the barrels, all ten of them are slated for tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, zucchini, beans and more tomatoes. The giant pumpkin plant seeds are in the front room window, and they will be the first thing to get planted in one of the barrels.

I tested a couple of the geraniums as well, hardening them off during the day and then leaving them out one night.

That was a mistake.

Now I have 3 geraniums with frost-bitten leaves and the added knowledge that people who live in the area say, as we do in Calgary, "Don't plant before the May long week-end".

After the fact, Bonnie, Joaquim and I all say that doing all of this garden exercise feels good. We have no idea if we will get any vegetables.

Come! Visit in the summer and see.

Arta

Skunk Cabbage Reach of the Campbell Spring

4 specimens of Lysichiton americanus

There is a big rock at 5 Corners where Pilling's Road intersects with the Pilling/CPR Road that connects with Bernie.  From that point to where the water runs under the road that leads to the beach, there is the loveliest stretch of moist new growth, a reach that I have been visiting a number of times a day lately.

Doral first pointed out this stretch to me when Rebecca and Trell were small.  We used to take hikes up in there, and at one time had named it the snail trail for there were so many small snail shells that we could pick up.

"Skunk Cabagge" or "Swamp Lantern"

The water is so clear right now, that it is hard to tell the difference between where the stream is running and where the banks of it begin.

Right now, just one shot of the camera can catch three or four of these plants in any part of the wet woods.

The leaves are not a foot high yet, and the distinctive odor of the flower and leaves is still attracting the scavenging flies and beetles.

I began to pick up the deadfall on the ground and carry it out of the woods to the burn pile.

The next trip there was with David and he learned how to step onto on j-shaped log that is firmly planted in the middle of the stream and stream and swing back and forth on it.

I come out of that area with wet knees for I am kneeling down, trying to capture the new moss that is growing, or seeing if I can get the light just right on one of the drops of dew that hangs onto the new False Solomon's Seal that is just beginning to grow there.

I went to brush some moss from a large rock, but it was so perfectly formed there, that I put the moss back and stayed on my feet -- why should I sit for a few seconds when that moss has been growing there for years.

Asarum caudatum or Wild Ginger

I am not so earthy that I want to dig up the roots of the ginger to test if it really does give a peppery taste to food, nor do I want to dry the leaves for a tea substitute.

Still, I pick one or two of the leaves and smell them again, as though I am testing to see if they have the same fragrance that they did the day before.

fiddleheads

The fiddleheads are just right to eat. I am going to gather a few of them and steam them for supper one night.

What a surprise that will be for everyone.

Arta

Annis Yard

A head is just a place to hang your coat.

That is, if your father insists that you take a coat with you when you go outside.

I could just see David thinking, "Looks like Joachim is insisting that I am going to have to wear this coat, but I will be able to get away without putting my arms in it."

With all due respect to David, going outside wasn’t in his mind this morning.

David, being less excited than I, could only be enticed down to the tracks with the thoughts of the bag of jelly beans that Bonnie slipped into my pocket.

When I looked out the window from Glen’s house and saw the heavy CPR magnet lifting the ties and putting them into railroad boxes I raced home without tying my shoes, I was so excited to get him down there to see what was going on.

I wouldn’t have known there was so much metal in the Annis Yard without having watched the flat beds of scrap metal, and now a car load of rails being taken off of the ground and shipped away.

The man in the cab had a small list onto which he made a check-mark every time one of those ties was picked up from the ground and loaded.

We might have watched him pick up, drop, re-position and then carry ties into the box car at least twenty times.

On his way back up to the house, David picked his first flower of the spring and gave it to his mom.


Arta

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