Mary's Calgary Thanksgiving

... cousins skateboarding and bike riding ...

From Mary

Happy Birthday, yesterday, Bonnie.

I hope you got to enjoy a poppy seed cake, and if not, at least enjoy the idea of a poppy seed cake. With sugar in it. Making a gorgeous chiffon cake and then realizing you forgot to add the sugar only happens once in a life, but it is never forgotten.

We spent a few glorious hours in the sun visiting with Pat. 

 Rhiannon and Xavier skateboarded with Betty, Michael and Richard who were on bikes.  All the way to Confederation park and back. 

Delicious food was shared between houses, and Rhiannon and Richard enjoyed some of the new candy stash on top of Arta’s fridge. Naomi, Rhiannon, Pat and I played a card game called Llama. Pat won the first few rounds; then as soon as she started losing we kept catching her cheating. We got some good laughs out of that. (Really, she was just playing cards that were sticking together for her.)

You would have loved the outdoor time, company, laughs, food – and there was a little bit of me singing and Richard laughing at me. 

 A good time all around.

Mary

Uncomfortable Cruise, the Cat

Cruise is on outside mouser cat.

It will be some time before he is comfortable
with all of the attention Evangeline is giving him.

David, Mathew, Evangeline, Ezra Wood and Cruise, the cat came to visit Bonnie and me. They were bringing us gifts, really; they had an over abundance of hamburger buns at their house and were sharing.

All day David Wood and Greg Bates have been burning the two big wood piles, since it is one of the first days that the burning index has said burning is good for the environment.  

Ezra has been carrying a stick as he accompanies his grandfather to the fire -- a magical stick.  When  you put it in the fire it comes out with sparks on the end of it, and then it can be plunged into a pail of water where it sizzles.

For some reason that sounds like good five year old fun.

Bonnie says it is very cute to see Ezra and his grandfather walking down to check on the fire, and then trudging up the road together.

When Evangeline arrived at her grandmother's for the Thanksgiving visit, she ran right past Moiya's open arms to pick up the Cruise, the cat.  

Arta

Covid Haikus - Richard

This must be the covid... 

I am so tired
Is this more tired than Reg?
Must be the covid

She sniffled her nose
It was the start of school...
Must be the covid

Driving to the store
But I do not have a mask
Darn you the covid

This birthday party
Is going to be lonely
Thank you the covid

She makes me feel warm
I want a hug from my mom
W t f covid!!!

customer no mask...
Are we going to do this???
It's a conspiracy?!?!?

Q tips up the nose
Her brain is getting tickled
That doesn't feel good

Richard

Covid Haikus

 

Our department is having a COVID stories contest. Thought I would share my submission with you. 

COVID HAIKUS

by Catherine Jarvis

My panic sets in
Pandemic grocery store line
reveals the chaos

Squirt soap in my palm
rhymically scrubbing my hands
Repeat through the day

Masked line of people
patiently waiting a chance
for toilet paper

A mother's worry
Covid's border walls go up
My child trapped abroad

Spray bottles of bleach
sanitizing my worries
almost, but not quite

Covid time campfire
The family vacation
has gone up in smoke

Eyes leak like faucets
Tiny swab finds the right spot
Hope it's negative

"You're standing too close"
I take a few steps backwards
and find the marked spot

I'm missing your touch
Magically I open
my laptop, you're there!

The mask on my face
hides an all-embracing yawn
from fatigue so deep

I'd love to hear your COVID stories (or Haikus)

From Catherine

Thanksgiving 2020

Thankgiving pictures from Rebecca and Duncan

Thanksgiving at our house:

We exist.

Thanksgiving pictures Catherine and Eric Jarvis:

Catherine and Eric have had large Thanksgiving dinners, relatives and joining them for the week (a tradition for the Books family) plus various other families attending the feast.

Now this is it.

Thanksgiving,  enough for six of them.

Their holiday tradition of various jellos for the very  young continues.  

I have no idea that all of that jello is going to be eating.

Hebe and her mom made cupcakes for the harvest.

Hebe's Pumpkin Harvest

Hebe's pumpkin harvest looks like a lot of work to me.

For some reasons I think of picking one of those up and I look down to see if I have icing on my fingers already, so I am looking for a napkin before I even begin.

Thanks from Bonnie and me, Hebe.

Arta

Bonnie's 54th Birthday

For anyone with an October birthday, I always want to quote Dylan Thomas’s “It was my thirtieth year to heaven". 

I am going to add that poem to the bottom of Bonnie’s birthday post and then read it aloud to myself – when I read, I shall change the poem so that I hear, “It was my fifty-fourth year to heaven,..." for so it was for Bonnie. 

Yesterday, Bonnie made an early morning list: “how to fill my day with choices of blessing in each hour”.

She began by making her own birthday cake – poppy seed. 

 It needed 7 eggs, but only 5 were left in the carton. 

 I had already started breakfast and had another four eggs cracked in a yellow dish. 

She scooped out of that dish, two of the eggs of the four I had already cracked. 

Hey Lady
with Jayne Eastwood and Jackie Richardson

By some miracle, she was able to extract them without breaking the yolks into the whites, leaving me with 2 eggs. 

This seemed like an easier feat than borrowing two eggs from our neighbours. 

I halved the ingredients of my recipe to continue with curried scrambled eggs and she produce a cake that would get a 10/10 rating. 

 I would give her 10/10 instead for being able to separate eggs from whites as well.

Bonnie and I got into an internet conversation with Rebecca Jarvis during the day, all three of us wondering what we thought are the best feminist books to read. 

Both Bonnie and I are going to think deeply about that question -- good material for blogging, I thought.

A Night with Janis Joplin

Then Bonnie and I filled the rest of her birthday hours with entertainment – the best of Broadway right to our home. 

Bonnie’s first pick was Kinky Boots (2019), Then Hey Lady (CBC Gems) 2020, and she closed out the day watching Janis Joplin: the Musical, which was a close-of-the-evening-surprise with how charming the show is.

A perfect birthday.

And now a near-perfect birthday poem

Poem In October

by Dylan Thomas

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook

And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall

Myself to set foot
That second

In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

Taking from the land

... on or walk the stand of ferns have on their rust autumn dress ...

Bonnie and I stopped by Glen’s apple trees, the ones planted on the road to Annis siding.

Two large windfalls were are on the ground, and then a third one was picked up when we really looked at the ground.

Bonnie put them by the side of the road to pick up on the way back from our walk.

We forgot. Now it is the next day and we are going back to see if they are still there or if a bear got them.

I have been thinking about all of the apple trees: Wyona’s, Richard’s, Glen’s “By the Siding” trees, the one at the Healing Circle (that tree must have been planted by Glen as well).

We are down to the last apple in our fridge.

In a telephone conversation with Wyona she said, “Freely pick.

Better you get the apples than the bears.” Glen said the same thing about his green grapes.

Autumn, the time the time for harvest share from the vines and trees of others.

Arta