Here is where I leave you.

It's Christmas Eve, and I think we are ready, as far as such a thing is possible.

I had a nice post planned for today, but I decided to write about something else that's on my mind. After this, I think it's time for me to retire from the internet for the remainder of the year.

Yesterday I went to see some neighbours of mine, from when I was a little kid. They lived next door and were sort of in between my parents' ages and my grandparents' ages. We have very fond memories of Mrs. Mullen, in particular, who used to invite my little sister, a preschooler alone at home, to come in and have a tea party with her while she sewed in her basement. She also gave us a key to her house while she was away on vacation so that we could come in and "feed the cat" -- translation: "watch cartoons" -- while she was away. She knew we didn't have a television and longed to see what all the fuss was about.

I ran into Mr. and Mrs. Mullen in the grocery store in November, right after my Dad's 75th birthday party. I hadn't seen them in decades and it was such a meaningful coincidence...I promised that I would come and visit them before Christmas.

The weeks went by and I was very busy getting ready for Christmas. I had half an eye on the calendar, thinking "I really must phone the Mullens. I really should. I'll do that this coming week." On December 21, I thought to myself, "I must phone them. I'll do it today when I get back from the grocery store." And again, in the same grocery store, wandering the same produce department, there they were.

If that's not writing on the wall, what is? I asked myself.

"I was just going to call you today!" I said as I hugged them. "How's Sunday for you? I'll bring cookies."

It was a lovely visit. It was happy and sad and a little bewildering to reflect on the time that has gone by. I was six weeks old when our family bought the house next door to them, and I was 14 when they moved away from the road. In April 1981, the day I fell and broke my knee cap, it was Mrs. Mullen who, hanging her laundry on the line, ran over with a flannel sheet to wrap the terrible cut that went halfway through my leg at the knee. I lay in the back seat of the car with my head on her lap while my mother drove to the hospital. Mr. Mullen arrived in time to carry me into Emergency.

I am now 39, and Mrs. Mullen is turning 88 this year. They remember that day, laughing about it all, and I laughed too and told them "That knee is better than the other one, now!" but inside I was marvelling at the way people wander into your life and out of it and, whether you ever see them again or not, they share some of your most formative memories.

Go out and see those people. Track them down and send them a Christmas card. Or a New Year's letter. They remember you, and they want to know that you remember them, too. They want to know that you remember the name of their cat, who died when Trudeau was finishing up his first term in office.

His name was Henry. He really liked barbecued salmon.

Someday I will be 88 years old. And I will probably wonder where it all went. I will probably think about the little girl who, right now in 2012, lives next door to me and can be a bit of a pleasant nuisance with her noisy singing. I will wonder whatever happened to her, and whether she had a good life, and is she married now and how old would she be?

I hope someday she looks me up in the phone book, and comes to see me. Maybe she'll tell me that she used to listen to me talking to my sister on the phone, out in the yard. Maybe she'll say "I remember that you used to come outside and hand us pizza, out of the blue." Or "I remember how nice it was in your living room at Christmas that time you invited me in to ice gingerbread cookies."

And I'll be so surprised and touched and I'll say "Fancy you remembering that!"

One day, we'll all look up from our screens and we'll realise that, while we were checking Facebook, the really important things about life have wandered away.

It's Christmas. I'll be spending it with my family and my friends. I wish you the very best, the very sweetest, the very most loving Christmas you've ever had. May it be a rest for you in these darkest days of the year - a time of peace and restoration.

Good Yule to you!

Mr and Mrs Mullen, December 2012

________________

-Names changed.

Stairway to Heaven

Once when I was a child, quite young -- maybe five or six -- we went to Victoria to visit my Uncle Bill, who is my Dad's youngest brother. He lived at the very top -- the servants' quarters, I suppose -- of one of Victoria's prized buildings. It was a single family house at one time, but had long since been converted to apartments, and Uncle Bill had what you'd call the attic flat. There was a discreet, narrow door off a hallway in the upper storey, and when you opened it you were standing on the bottom tread of a narrow staircase, more like a ladder, which took a sharp switchback at a tiny landing about ten steps up. Then you went up another five or six steps to another, narrower door. When you opened it, you stepped directly into Uncle Bill's living room. And you had to watch your head on the lintel.

Victoria was loaded with such places at the time...now, of course, rich people have bought up all these desirable properties in picturesque Fairfield (or Oak Bay, or James Bay, or Esquimalt), converted them back into single family homes, spent millions restoring them, and work all the hours God sends to pay for it. And, the world being what it is, they probably don't like it too much when passersby stop to take a photo of the beautiful architecture they now own.

Whereas my uncle, and many like him, paid pittance for his three low-ceilinged rooms, and loved to sit in the middle of them on worn futons, drinking strong coffee, and enjoying the atmosphere of the place. Soaking up the history.

On this occasion, it was near Christmas, and we had spent the afternoon at Uncle Bill's. He and my parents were talking, and we kids were amusing ourselves looking out the windows, playing a game I don't remember, and generally thrilling in the difference of the place.

I asked if I could go back down the staircase to the floors below. Could I explore the building a little? I wanted to go all the way to the bottom, back to the brass fronted mailboxes, the funny iron buttons for calling up, back to the plush carpets and potted ferns of the lobby. Then, the gleeful finding of my way, all the way back up to the top. There's a joy about this project...I see it in my own children. The fascination of one house that holds many houses - the mystery of the closed doors, each with a different number, and a different life going on behind it.

Having assured my family that I could perfectly remember how to get back, and would not, no never would I get lost, I was allowed to go back down the staircase. As I closed the white-painted, bevelled wooden door behind me, I remember my Uncle Bill's voice, remarking to my parents that I wasn't likely to come to any harm, since I was staying inside the building.

What fun it was to sneak and sidle along the hallways, looking at the way the thick, dark red carpets ran down the middle of the hallway, bound along their edges by dark, shining floorboards of the kind you never see in houses now. Unchaperoned by any parent, who would surely have stopped me, hurried me, I could touch the funny little brass grates leading I didn't know where, and the little handles on things that, nowadays, we don't think need handles. Small paned windows, little doors, deep baseboards thickly painted with the highest of glosses, layer on layer. The walls weren't flat - they were funny nubbly cream-coloured things. In our house there wasn't any textured plaster. And here, if you let your eyes go all the way up to the top of the wall, you'd see there wasn't a hard line where the ceiling came down; there was a lovely rounded cove, with a pretty line lower down on the wall, and another one inwards on the ceiling. There were ceiling lights, but they were nice ones, quite dim, with cut glass.

It was so quiet in the hallways, and the central staircase was so grand, and I was so deliciously alone, that it began to feel like quite a long time had passed. After I had swept up and down a few times, being queen of course, I started to think I had better get back.

Upwards is simple, but remember that little door leading off the upper storey?

It was not the only little door.

Arrived in that hallway, I stopped and looked, a little doubtfully. Is it left? Is it right? It's not straight ahead, is it? Back and forth I stepped, examining all the doors in turn.

I don't know what made me choose that door, but I finally stopped in front of one and, fearful, I knocked. Maybe it was that I could hear people talking behind it: behind all the other white-glossed doors I had passed, on all the other floors in the house, was only a cushioned and clock-ticking velvet silence.

A few footsteps, and the door opened to reveal not a staircase, but a room. I had a confused impression of voices raised in laughter, a strain of sophisticated music, and a woman calling "Who is it?" Standing in front of me, no doubt just as surprised as I, was a man in a blue shirt and black trousers, holding a glass of red wine in his left hand.

It was the wine that really threw me. My family at that time did not partake of alcohol, and I had somehow got the impression that people who did, were loose cannons. It may have had to do with a different uncle, this one a figure of fear, who was widely known in the family as a drunkard, and widely suspected of being violent.

"I think you have the wrong door."
Or maybe it was I who said "I think I have the wrong door."

"Are you looking for someone?"

"I thought this was Uncle Bill's house."

I was rooted to the spot, terrified that he would invite me in. The child I was couldn't have said no, if he had.

I think he gestured down the hall to my left, and he may have said "Bill lives in number 7," or "That's Bill's door there." But in fact I don't remember how I found the right door. I remember the upper flight of narrow stairs, and I remember coming through the second door back into the little, cramped living room, and being weak with relief at finding my family again. And I was amazed and a bit afraid at how, while I was gone, my family, and everything about them, just went on without me behind those little doors, and how everything in all the rest of the houses, just carried on happening behind their little doors.

But I didn't say any of that to my family. I just leaned against my mother and listened to their talk.

Today, a surprise came to me in the mail from my Uncle Bill. He had found some photos from visits of long ago, and decided to send them to me just in case, someday, him being a bachelor, they go astray and are thrown out.

I sat down on the couch with my daughter and, smiling and eager, opened the envelope. I only flipped through a few of them before I was overcome with tears. I couldn't understand, much less explain to her, why it was that I sat and sobbed, my glasses off, my face in my hands, over a few pictures from thirty or so years ago.

It wasn't the losing of the little door, and the finding of it again. It wasn't the glass of wine in a stranger's hand, or the vulnerable fear of a little child.

It's just that all these things have passed. The beautiful houses kept so lovely and quiet for the quiet tenants, their iron door keys and their crystal doorknobs and the layers of glossy white paint. The red carpets and the brass grates, and the way milk used to be delivered through the little doors near the front doors, and the way people used to care enough to put nice-looking, twisty iron knobs on light switches and blind cords.

The way my stocking feet sank into the deep red of the carpets and slipped lightly over the heavy floors, sometimes for a few seconds leaving sweaty small footprints. The way, when alone, I was utterly and terrifyingly alone. Thrillingly, enticingly alone.

The marvellous way that, when I found my family again, they didn't know how lost they had really been.

It has all passed.

It's not my turn anymore. Now, I'm the woman's voice calling "Who is it?" I'm the man who answers the door, his own door, holding a glass of wine. I'm the mother who talks to her brother-in-law while the children explore and, when they get back, I smile vaguely at them, and raise my elbow so they can crawl under my arm, but I don't stop my conversation.

I'm the mother. I can neither lose myself nor find myself. The ability to do it, the freedom to do it and the joy I once found in it, is another thing fallen away with the years.


And when my children come back through my front door damp with rain and shining with the adventure of having walked home in the half light of dusk, I'm the one who, thinking only of what's for dinner and whether I remembered to pay the phone bill, doesn't know how lost I've been.

Uncle Bill's apartment, Victoria - around 1979

Lost Post

Saying that title in my head, I alternate between "Lawst Pawst" and "Loast Poast".

I just found this document in the cobwebbed shelves at the back of my laptop. (Virtual cobwebs, virtual shelves.) I apparently wrote it in March of 2010, which makes it nearly two years old. (I'm so desperate for content these days, I am posting two-year-old opinion pieces.)

***

I’ve always been one of Those mothers: the ones who took Women’s Studies in university, read “The Beauty Myth”, and took back the night, and then have a family of daughters who aren’t allowed to have Barbies.

Those Mothers, in case you haven’t met us personally, have also been known to ban Disney (harmful female role models) and use our bodies to block the magazine racks at the grocery checkouts so our cart-riding children can’t see this month’s Cosmo headline. (10 New Ways to Please a Man in Bed.)

Raising girls this way isn’t easy, but the payoff is that my oldest daughter, 8 years old, still loves her Playmobil and stuffed animals, and plays with her hobby horse every day. Other children her age have moved on to (and, in some cases, past) the eye-rolling, hair-tossing, boy-kissing, lip-gloss sucking world of Hannah Montana......while Charlotte is still a child.

Last week my husband called the kids from the family room to tell them Presto! was on TV – a Pixar short about a stage magician, his magic top hat, and the hungry rabbit inside it. It’s a hilarious film with a lot of visual laughs, and it can be hard to find, so the girls came running to see it. I heard Ian say to them, “They put Presto! on before Snow White.”

“Snow White?!” my daughter exclaimed, “Did you tape it for us?”

Ian said “Uh, yes, I did,” and glanced over to the doorway, where I was standing glaring at him (in an attractive, non-confrontational way, of course).

“Snow White, huh?” I said with my mouth, while my brain was yelling it’s violent! It’s scary! It victimises women, and vilifies them all at the same time! Snow White is a passive and gullible role model who needs to be rescued! All Disney movies encourage women to languish prettily while waiting patiently for a man to save them!

(See? Total abdication of female power.)

I looked over at my children, who were excited and happy, laughing at the Presto! rabbit's antics and settling in to the couch with blankets, getting ready to watch Snow White. My husband was sitting with them, remote in hand, saying “You guys are going to like the seven dwarves, they’re so funny.”

I realised something at that moment, while I was working up the courage to say yet another “No” to a misogynistic, commercialised mega-corporation, and force my family to turn off the TV.

My children have two parents.

Two parents.

I walked down the hall towards the kitchen, thinking. Maybe it’s okay, having laid groundwork – important groundwork, I feel – to let their Dad show them Snow White. Maybe it’ll be all right if he takes this other direction: a direction that I’ve never wanted to go.

As I plugged in the popcorn maker I thought, I can worry about the big issues – the undermining of the female role in our society, the future of my daughters’ self-esteem – tomorrow. Right now, their Dad can show them this classic Disney film, with a story they’ve read in books anyway, and they can all have a laugh at Dopey together.

Because successful parenting, at its most fundamental, is about balance. We’ve all heard “everything in moderation”, and it applies just as much to how we nourish our children’s minds and emotions, as it does to how we nourish their bodies. It’s just as dangerous to keep my children 100% sugar-free, as it would be to only feed them white bread and Nutella:  there’s a ditch on both sides of this road.

My husband and I have different roles in this parenting adventure, just as we do in this marriage. And the best way to equip our daughters for the potholes ahead is to show them that there is a left and right, a feminine and masculine, a yin and a yang to everything. To help them to know how to steer around the obstacles of adolescence and adulthood without hugging one side of the track too closely, they need to see the give and take of different people compromising while loving each other.

I walked back to the family room, popcorn in hand, listening to my family laughing together. It’s been a long time since I watched television at all – even longer since I saw a Disney Princess movie. That evening I didn’t watch Snow White: I watched my children see something fun and funny, that they hadn’t seen before. I watched my daughters laugh at the dwarves and frown at the witch. I watched them have a wonderful time with their Mom and Dad.

And I’m pretty sure they’ll be okay. 

One's sorrow two's mirth

Three odd things have lately happened to me.

1
I was standing by the open slider door to the back yard, when a finch flew directly at me, hovered in the air right in front of my chest for a moment, then darted past me into the house. It perched on the top cuff of my (unoccupied) boot, pooped inside it, and flew back out again.

2
I was washing dishes. A bird flew in through the open window, alighted on the rim of the dining room chandelier, then flew back out again.

3
I was sitting in the living room five minutes ago, drinking cabernet and thinking about life, when two finches flew toward the back window. One bonked against the glass and fluttered dizzily away, while the other hit the open half, came straight inside, landed on the floor, hopped about for a second, and flew back out again.

So if a bird in the house means a death is coming, and trouble comes in threes, I am in big kaka right now.

Seven days in the laundry room makes one weak

I think today I will spend knitting. The rains have begun, so it's a lovely dark, wet day with chilly floors and a sleepy dog, and I am working on Elijah for my sister's son. I think I might do some spinning, too, and maybe a little cross-stitch. I'll just stop by for a half hour and visit with all my projects, see where everybody's at.

When it comes to doling out the relaxation, I think I am more owed than owing. See how my laundry room looks?

I put a gallon of paint on the wall. Unfortunately, I need another gallon to deal with the other half of the room, so my photos all resolutely face the one direction.



This room is also my 'school room' and though some people on this earth have lovely school rooms with lots of coordinated colours and tasteful wicker baskets in cubbies, I am stuck in the wretched teal laundry room, with some kind of weird rubber floor and no practical (or beautiful) storage options.

But we work with what we have, so I'm slowly transforming this space to be more hospitable. We need to WANT to be in there.

More updates will come. My next priority (after today's binge of laziness) will be getting a roll-end of carpet for the laundryschoolroom. It'll make a big difference.

When I started homeschooling (FOUR years ago, good grief) I resisted all pretense to formality. I didn't like the preoccupation that other HS mothers had with their schoolrooms. It felt like playing, to me - like they were more interested in lining up pretty glass jars with paintbrushes in, than they were in facilitating their children's natural tendency towards discovery.

It was a 'baby' and 'bathwater' thing.

Now, with Charlotte starting Grade Four, I've noticed a few things. Firstly, the higher the grade, the more organisation you need. The simple fact is, there is more to cover. The time commitment is greater, the content is more demanding, the child is more inquisitive and both deserves and can handle more detailed information. A kindergartner can be given an important lesson just by handing them scissors and coloured paper, and reading them "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish". It doesn't keep a nine year-old nearly as busy.

Secondly, the dark, cold, chaotic laundry room just doesn't have the right vibe. The feng shui of the place practically pushes you out of the door physically. It's like a WalMart - the second you walk in, your hips start to hurt, your feet cramp, the fluorescents make your eyelids twitch and you get an irritable headache. That's not good enough for my kids.

Lastly, we keep thinking of it as the 'laundry room'. That is just plain bad prioritising. It can't be 'the laundry room where school happens', it has to be 'the schoolroom where laundry happens'.

So I'm making a schoolroom. It has a map of the world, it has an art line. It has a dictionary and a thesaurus, and a guinea pig. It will have a globe, soon, and a magnetic calendar. It has a weather chart, a planisphere, several compasses and a protractor.

And it will have math, and spelling tests, and hand cramps from writing, and it will have lying-on-the-carpet (when we get one), and listening-to-audiobooks-while-painting, and playing-with-the-guinea-pig, and lying-around-knitting.

So it won't be a place of constriction, or a monument to the mainstream, and it doesn't make me a martinet, or my children droids.

I think I can handle it.

Ruby Slippers

It wasn't too long ago that I would have considered myself a city girl. Before the kids were born, I was fully immersed in the urban lifestyle. Double income, no kids, car-free apartment-living, lots of traffic noise, washing my blinds four times a year to get the black exhaust residue off...and loving it.

My transition to a small town has been painful at times. It took years for me to get over the loss of my City. There are still things I miss about it - shopping choices, advanced recycling programs - but with every year that goes by, I am introduced to more and more compelling compensations.

It could be that the virtues of small town life, in themselves, are of lesser importance than my emotional need to be happy...maybe I have just adapted to this slower pace, this smaller world, out of my own need for contentment.

I'm not sure it matters.

I've learned a lot in the last 9 years. Even more, I've learned a lot in the last five years. Conservation becomes ever more important to me. Careful consumption. Stewardship. Mindfulness.

The blog has been a big part of this learning process. There have been times I've been tempted to drop it - to stop this (increasingly occasional) conversation we have. Today, though, I was doing some small jobs around the house, and thinking about mending, and the things on my needles, and how I really should get the wheel outside and work on the Shetland, and I realised something.

I want to tell you about it. I like to talk funny nonsense, say sad things, and show you what I'm growing.

I would miss you if you were gone.

And if I'm going to live a humble life in a little place, and learn big things from it....I'd like to keep sharing.

So thank you, for being on the other end of this tin-can phone. I'll try to pick it up more often.

XO

Shannon

FWIW

I was doing a bit of tidying up tonight, and while deleting old draft blog posts I came across this one. I wrote it two years ago, on April 22, 2008, but never posted it. I don't recall why - it seemed finished enough. Whatever my reason, come April 23, I didn't want to share it anymore.

The story is of something that happened to me when I was 34, and 6. It still amazes me, the clarity and sharpness of the vision I got that day: reading this post brought it all back.

I hope you like it.

Charlotte started Girl Guides in September. The meetings are held at a local elementary school - the oldest in the city. It's the school I went to for Grade One and the first half of Grade Two, before we transferred a few catchments over.

The first week I took Charlotte to her meeting, I spent the hour roaming around the halls, trying to remember exactly which classroom was Mrs. Flynn's (Grade One) and which was Ms. Decourbe's (Grade Two). It was fun to see the gym again, with the national anthem posted in French and English, above the ancient stage where we put on plays in which we starred as rainclouds, and animals, and maybe shrubbery. My memories of this school were vague, mostly pleasant, and involved things like the smell of the hallways and the height of the water fountains (pretty short).

In the following months I mostly spent the Guide hours sitting on a chair in the hallway, knitting. A month or so ago, I decided to use that time to run, taking advantage of the once-weekly guaranteed free hour to get some exercise in. One night I finished my run at the school, and walked around the outside for the remaining ten minutes, doing some stretching.

I wandered around the outside wall of the gymnasium. I turned a random corner, stepped up into "the covered area" and found myself face to face with one of my most powerful memories.

I was six years old. It was the first day of Grade One at a new school. I didn't know anyone there, except my brother who was a year ahead of me. In Kindergarten, they had had only one recess, during which you you ate your snack and played outside. So when the bell rang at my first recess in Grade One, I took my red nylon packsack outside to the covered area and looked for somewhere to sit. I spotted a door across from me, with an unoccupied concrete step underneath it. Clutching my bag, I made my way over to it through knots of playing students, almost all of them older than me. I opened my packsack, took out my lunch and ate it, trying not to catch anyone's eye, or stand out in any way.

I was finishing the last thing and putting all the waxed paper back in, when my brother ran over, breathless, holding a ball of some description. Several big boys trailed behind him. He said, "Shannon, it's only recess - you don't eat your lunch until next break."

He ran off again and I sat there frozen, hot embarrassment flushing my cheeks, almost immobilised with anxiety. What would I do at lunch? I had nothing left to eat. I looked around furtively and realised I was, in fact, the only kid who had brought her packsack outside. I tried to wad it up so no one would see it and realise my mistake, and carried it back inside when the bell rang.

I don't have any other memories from that day. I don't in fact know what happened at lunch, when I had no more food left.

When I came around the corner of that school a few weeks ago and my eyes fell on that step, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I felt the anxiety again just the way I did twenty-eight years ago, even as my 34 year old self marvelled that it could be so - that a little doorway with a little concrete step could make me feel this way - bring it all back.

I stood there on the faded hopscotch, getting the memories back one by one.

Then, just around the corner must be the place where....yes, that's where I stepped on a nail and hopped all the way back to the office with it protruding out of both top and bottom of my foot.

And around that other way must be those big doors and the ramp where we played 'prison'. Yes, there they are...and the window - that's Ms Decourbe's classroom, it must be. I remember standing there looking down at them outside when I was kept in at noon to finish work.

I walked slowly around to all these places, surrounded by little children in bell-bottoms and bowl cuts, some whose names I could remember and some whose names I couldn't. I went back to the covered area and leaned against a railing, looked at the concrete step. There I was, little blonde child with a firm grip on her packsack, nervous, feeling more lonely than I ever had before.

All that fear made me cry. I don't remember whether I cried at six, but I cried at thirty four. It made me remember everything that has gone in between then and now. It made me think of all the things I never dreamed would happen...things I never thought to fear while I was worrying about having already eaten all my lunch. And I wanted to say to her how sorry I was for the way I made her life turn out.

I went back there last night. While Charlotte was in the gym with 17 other little Guides singing "Day is Done", I was in the covered area, photographing this place which is almost unchanged from the way it was in 1979. I know it looks empty to you, but to me it's a busy scene, full of kids I was having to constantly step around while shooting - kids who bumped me, ruined my focus, and ran off calling a careless, carefree Sorry, breathlessly.

No Foolin’.

Hey, lady:

You are wandering around the grocery store with one ear glued to a cell phone, your iPod in your other hand, diamonds dripping off you, shooting verbal abuse at your two children between the inane, slanderous conversation you are having with your phone, and loading your cart with chips, diet mixers, Red Bull and Lean Cuisine.

I followed you around the aisles for forty minutes, getting my own jobs done, and I think I have your measure.

I do not believe you are a yogini studying balance and centredness, no matter how many lululemon logos you are sporting – I counted four. Five if I include the bag. You can wrap yoga wear around your soft, dimpled, privileged arse every day of your clueless life, if you like. When I look at you, I see Kmart clearance.

Peace out.

Shannon

Twitterty-Gibbet

I'm a bit conflicted about Twitter. It seems like unalloyed narcissism. But then, I've been giving it a try for the last week or two and I've noticed that it comes in handy for odd one-liners that I might have turned into blog posts but which really don't deserve that much air time.

So in that way it's potentially useful, provided one doesn't become unhealthily obsessed with apprising the internet of their every eye-twitch.

There's a per-tweet entry limit of about 140 characters (160?) and I often wonder how this will affect the next generation of upper-academia: how much do you want to bet some first-year university student will some day print off a week's worth of tweets and submit it as her writing assignment? God help us all.

B-hnd

I just sent my first ever text message. It said, "Where are you guys". It's really bothering me that I couldn't figure out how to add a question mark. Punctuation must be possible, right? Just because other people don't use it in their text messages, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Shall keep you updated.

================

I did figure out the punctuation (Options - Symbol, yay!) and my phone has a shift key - a terse little up-arrow on the bottom left. All is right with the world.

Need-B-Gone

I am a willful and determined person. I am also sometimes extremely annoying and pushy, but it helps get things done and I'm not ashamed of that.

There is a downside to having a personality like this, though. (Besides the "annoying and pushy" thing.) In the course of my life, many high-maintenance people have attached themselves to me, I suppose hoping that I have enough strength to carry them as well as myself. If I were on the Titanic, I would have drowned for sure - fifteen people would have grabbed my spangled ball gown as I struck out with optimism and a good, churning Australian crawl towards Newfoundland.

I'm beginning to feel like I might kick some of them in the mouth and leave them to fend for themselves.

Seemingly Inchoate Post

The post yesterday was a big lie - I queued it up weeks ago and put some random date on it. The truth is I am not in any shape to go to a shop, thrift or otherwise - I am vilely sick, with a horrid cold and a pernicious cough. I spent Thursday and most of Friday curled into the fetal position in bed, shivering and hacking and filling up two wastebaskets with Kleenex.

To make matters worse, the only thing I had to read was the world's most depressing novel, which I doggedly kept at, sure it could only get better. I was so, so wrong. I'll tell you more about that later.

I have lost my senses of smell and taste, so am taking this opportunity to eat vegetables which I normally abhor, drink appallingly sour unsweetened fruit smoothies of powerful vitamin density, and pound back shots of garlic juice.

My daughters are miserably sick and the youngest one is clinging on to me and crying fractiously, "Mama, 'nuggle", incessantly.

Mr HalfSoledBoots is treating us like lepers, constantly Lysoling the doorknobs, and muttering about flu shots (which we don't get).

I was too sick to knit Thursday or Friday, but did some work on Fern today. It's coming along beautifully. No pictures because the camera is all the way across the room.

I had a great time at my brother's place, centre of contagion notwithstanding. Actually I think I was Patient Zero, since my lungs started feeling "weird" on the very day we arrived, when everyone else was still perfectly healthy. Out of the fourteen of us that were in the house, not a single one remains untouched by the Dreaded Lurgy. We have all been huddled under our duvets of pain for a week now, give or take.

I read a book last week - a good book. Yann Martel told me about it. It was maybe the best book I've read in fifteen years. In this book I found a word I had never seen before. That's AMAZING because, not to boast or anything, but there aren't many words, in common usage, that I have not heard. The word is lour.

I tried to look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary but it turns out you have to subscribe to look up words in the OED online, and a subscription costs a mere $295 per year. Or if you can't commit to that you can just pay $29.95 monthly.

Words are important, don't get me wrong, but.....maybe not that important.

Which brings me to - I once had a brilliant plan to steal the entire 20 volume OED from the UVic library, using 9 co-conspirators, five different emergency escapes, and the basement fire alarm. Then a few nights later we would return them through the book drop. Only a geek could appreciate the humour of this plan - startled librarians checking in restricted books that you can't take out the front doors without getting locked down, and baffled classics students trying to figure out what boustrophodon is without the go-to resource......ha ha ha - it still gets me. Nobody would agree to help me out, though, and I regretfully decided that stealing two volumes just didn't have the same kind of punch.

I think I'm going to go make myself a new pillowcase. I picked up some fabric when I was away and I could really use a lift during these dark days.

Hopefully when I return, I'll have something useful to post.

But maybe don't count on it.

Somebody stop me.

You know what's weird? When I watch a movie from earlier than, say, 2001, I can't get over how yellow everyone's teeth are. Take a look at Michelle Pfeiffer in Midsummer Night's Dream, for example. And I just watched Groundhog Day, and stared at Andie MacDowell's mouth the entire time.

Ocean LIEner.

So I went to the Cunard website today, because I have this fantasy where I fly to Wales, spend a few weeks walking the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, go by rail to Southampton and then cross the Atlantic by ship. When I came back I would be different - changed somehow. Quiet. Introspective. Wise. Laconic. There could be an ineffable air of quality.


Anyway, I was looking at the pretty pictures of ocean liners, dreaming of brass door handles and parquet dance floors, windy balconies and sparkling portholes, and I noticed a link inviting me to order free brochures to be sent in the mail. You could choose any three of their glossy publications, including an informative DVD. I ordered that one, naturally, along with "Transatlantic Crossings" and the "2009 Voyages" brochure.


They asked me to fill out some information. Address and phone stuff, mostly, but then they politely inquired whether I had cruised before, and would I please check all the cruise lines on which I had travelled?


This is the weird part - I blithely told them that Yes, I had cruised before, and I had been on Princess, Norwegian, and Holland America. I was planning a cruise in the North Sea and was interested in Scandinavia. And - Oh, what the heck, send me more info on the Mediterranean as well. Why not!


What compelled me to spin a web of lies for the benefit of an anonymous and uncaring Cunard clerk? Would it really matter to them if they knew that every cruise I've taken, thus far, has been with the classy, inimitable BC Ferries? (I recommend the Pacific Buffet, by the way - you can make your own toaster waffles - many as you like.)


I read over my newly-minted Cunard profile, wherein I am (apparently) a woman with nothing but money and time to lay on deck chairs all over hell's half-acre, and wondered what on earth possessed me. It occurred to me, on reading the places I have (not) been, that I had invented a curious blend of where my parents have been, and where I want to go. It's very odd. Plus I think I put "Norwegian" on there because I would like to go to Norway. How nonsensical is that.





See me? I'm waving out of one of those portholes.

All but the crying.

Well, it's the least wonderful time of the year.


Everyone has gone home. The snow has turned to rain. A few cookies lie dessicating in their tins. The tree is still up - I was meant to take it down today but I didn't have the heart to. Maybe tomorrow.

We had a great time during Christmas. My family is big on Christmas - as kids we were completely mental about it, stretching the celebration out from the end of November to about January 10. And my brother and sister and I have not been together for Christmas since 1997, so we had some catching up to do.


In this picture, I am in my pajamas. I don't remember whether it was late at night, or early in the morning (or, let's face it, midafternoon), but let me just say that the presence of a bottle of rum doesn't really offer any clue as to the time of day.


You know how when you get to a party the host usually says "Red or white?" We prefer to be 'and' kind of people.


Here are our children, who are apparently learning by our example. The substance of choice in this case, though, is sugar rather than alcohol.


New Year's was at my place, and turned out to be quite cheese-centric. My friend owns a deli and she hooked me up for my party. Three kinds of chevre, a triple-creme brie, a baby blue, some smoked cheddar, manchego (sheep's cheese), and their attendant crisps and condiments...delicious. We drank five bottles of champagne that night. We also got dressed up...my sister has this great mulberry taffeta party dress which I forgot to take a picture of.


There were a lot of cameras at our Christmas, which is good. Between us we probably have several hundred photos of the good time we had, and 20 or 30 minutes of video that, when we watched it the night before everyone left, wrung our hearts.

Now I've begun the gloomy process of packing decorations away, with a heavy heart. This whole holiday reminded me how sad it is that money stops us from being together. People go where the work is. I suspect that being far away from each other is one of those things that prove to be a source of lasting regret. It always seems like an inconvenient time to pull up your roots just to move back to your family, but...in the end, I think it might be worth it.



Thanks for dropping by, everyone - I took a long break there but I think I'll be back more or less regularly, now. Thanks, too, to knititch and Jo for the Christmas cards, and to The Other Shannon for the beautiful card and picture of your family.

Grist.

I didn't have such a great day yesterday, after putting up that post. First, my friend came over in the afternoon and said gravely "I read your blog."

"The one about the rat?"

"Uh huh. Y'know that U-cut guy? [pause] That's my dad."

A few hours later Mr HSB came home from work and we had a little talk about loyalty, and perspective.

So let me lay it all out, here. There's a word for the little events that happen in my life, what strikes me funny, and what strikes me irritating - material. I may or may not choose to use it, but it's all there for me.

Authorship works like this. The event happens, I process it, and I relate it. Then you comment. The incident itself is A, the story I tell is Y, and the comments are Z. The processing is what takes it from B to X, and by the time it gets there, the event itself may or may not be recognizable. For example, U-Cut Tree Dude, while sticking to his price, was completely friendly and not mean or rude. And Mr HalfSoledBoots is not supposed to handle things like litter boxes, or rodents, or dead things. There are health issues around his transplant. But doesn't the other way make a better story? Yes. Absolutely.

A little poll.





I can understand that some people might like a warning before they appear in glorious technicolor on Half Soled Boots. So, for anyone still looking for the perfect present for Shan, may I suggest this?

Imperfect, Inimitable

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

Volume 6 Number 3

Quilts of Provence - the Art and Craft of French Quiltmaking

by Kathryn Berenson

I've been meaning to tell you about this book for a long time. I got it a year or two ago and I've been reading it off and on ever since, trying to work up the courage to try this beautiful incarnation of the textile arts.

Broderie de Marseilles is a method of quiltmaking in which two layers of fabric are densely quilted, by hand, with no batt in between. There are often several parallel rows of stitching on the edges of the piece, with the centres featuring designs of flowers, suns, and plants. There are extant pieces featuring more abstract designs, too - usually in a very romantic style. Lots of swirls and curlicues.



Once the entire piece has been quilted, the finished item is corded and stuffed - that is, each individual channel between quilted rows, or each quilted pocket, is stuffed with cotton. To do this, the quilter uses a needle to carefully open a space between the threads of the fabric until it is wide enough to admit a darning needle. She threads a piece of cotton cording into the eye and runs the needle through the channel until the entire channel is corded. She cuts the cord, manipulates the end in through the hole in the fabric, then wiggles that hole closed with her needle. If it is a pocket that needs stuffing, she opens a hole as before, then uses a needle to curl the cording tightly into the pocket, bit by painstaking bit. The holes are all closed up afterwards, and the entire piece is washed.



It takes an unbelievable amount of time, and careful work. When I first saw the book, I was drawn to the gorgeous finished pieces and declared to all, "I am going to learn this technique and make a bed-cover!" Then I read on a little bit and decided, "I'd better make a table runner instead." Then I got to the part with the templates and the instructions for cording and stuffing, and thought to myself "I could really use a coaster."



This book is a sumptuously presented, intelligently arranged blend of history, instruction, and eye candy. Stunning photographs depict gorgeous, brilliantly-coloured textiles, dated from as early as the 18th century. There are closets full of antique quilts, sofas covered in folded florals, and dress forms garbed in authentic Provençal regional costume. There are instructions and templates for 11 projects ranging in difficulty from an easy placemat (in imitation broderie de Marseilles) to an advanced single-piece, corded and stuffed wedding quilt in ivory silk.



What impresses me most about this beautiful book is not the inspiration to try the technique - although I am dying to, one of these days - or the respect I feel for these women who clothed their families in this incredible art. What I think about most is the concept of regional dress: the idea that at one time, any given People expressed their identity, their history, their place in the world, and their sense of community through clothing and textiles.



I thought of this book when I was at the Fleece and Fibre Fair, walking around the venue and taking in the knitters, crocheters, felters, and spinners all around me. There isn't one unified dress sense, at all, but there is a unified pride in our accomplishments. Some people are visibly....well I must say tickled pink to be wearing their first botchy, lopsided hat, while buying more yarn to make coordinating chunky mittens. Others are standing watching the spinners, their backs straight and their heads carried with quiet pride above dreamily soft, perfectly-executed lace shawls in baby alpaca.

It was, really, the incarnation of what people refer to as "the fibre arts community". We aren't neighbours, we share neither a place nor a history. We are united not by a common tradition, but by our love for the craft. Maybe there isn't a region, strictly speaking, but there is a regional dress: there was so much Handmade in that hall, it was exhilirating just to breathe such a creatively-charged atmosphere.

I don't imagine the Marseilles needlewomen felt quite the same way about their handwork as we do. In the days before widespread mechanisation, it was nothing extraordinary to clothe one's family entirely in garments made by one's own hands. The extraordinary thing, in fact, would have been to spend the family's money purchasing clothing and linens when you could make them yourself.



Then, as now, the beauty of these items is in their uniqueness: no two pieces are exactly alike. It's a little depressing to look around me, sometimes, and realise just how many things in my house are mass-produced, and therefore also in the homes of hundreds and thousands of other people. I like to think of myself as an individual, a non-conformist, but the reality is I buy the same Rubbermaid bins and Levis jeans as everyone else does.



Times have changed. Making your own clothes isn't unheard of, but wearing them is much less usual. I like to see people taking pride in the works of their hands. I like the feeling of wearing something I've made, and I don't mind when people ask me, "Did you knit that yourself?" As some never tire of pointing out, you can buy a sweater for $40 at the Bay. But nobody can buy MY sweater. I made it myself, and there'll never be another like it.

One of these busy, full days, I'll try some broderie de Marseilles. I have some fabric that I bought specially to try it, and I have even sketched out a template for a stylised sun, very much in the Provençal style. It's a little intimidating, but I think if I'm patient and careful I can do it. I'd like to have something that no one else has - even if it's just a coaster.

Saving Nine

The year we got married, my mum and dad made us a quilt. Isn't that nice? They did one for each of us kids around the time we all got coupley: and the weddings went as follows.

Eldest - 1995
Youngest - 1996
Middle - 1997

So it was a hectic few years. My dad was off work due to an injury (broken neck, believe me or believe me not) during much of that time, and spent a lot of his recovery quilting. I love that.

Anyway, I am not one of those people who redecorates their house every year or two and has multiple sheet sets for each bed. I can't justify the money and the waste. But, I hadn't realised just how well-worn this quilt was until I was inspecting the fall linens in preparation for the cold weather, and saw the edge of it up close.



Ten meters of 5/8" double-fold bias tape, a little bit of pretty stitch work from the Pfaff:

and Presto! the quilt is ready for another ten years of duty.


When I was folding it up after rebinding it, I noticed two small holes in the patchwork top. I'll repair those and show them to you next week.

But in the meantime, I'd like to reflect on the concept of stewardship. I think it's one of those things that became unfashionable around the same time as marriage did - during the decades following the Second World War, when people were tired of making do and women were tired of staying home. I recall a magazine article I read in about 1982, entitled "Are You a Supermarket Miser?" It had a little quiz where you could find out if you were committing the sin of trying to save money.....sorry, I mean "pinch pennies". One of the questions was "Do you use plastic grocery bags for the trash instead of buying proper garbage bags?" The whole article was smugly tittering...you certainly got the impression that "Yes" was the wrong box to tick.

The article was written at a time when consumption was the height of fashion, when manufacturers were scrambling to make everything disposable. But you wouldn't have caught a pioneer family, or a Depression family, or a wartime family, throwing away a quilt that could be repaired for less than a half-hour's wage, or a towel that could be cut down into facecloths, or a facecloth that could be turned into a diaper, that could be turned into a rag.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this in the last while, especially since my bike was stolen and we realised we can't actually afford to replace it. Living on one income is difficult with gas at $1.34 a liter (and we're grateful it's that low), and flour costing me $15 per 10 kilo bag. As expensive as the essentials are, though, they're not what puts us into the overdraft.

Being part of a privileged class in a privileged nation brings with it a certain carelessness when it comes to small luxuries. I remarked to my sister the other day that it would be interesting to save all our receipts for a month, then go through and highlight everything we bought that was nonessential. Every bag of chips, every tall nonfat extra-hot latte, every video rental. I think it would be a little shocking to see the total.

I have a lot of skills. I can patch jeans. I can make bulletin boards, and clothes, and muffins. I can even darn socks, though whole-wheat breadmaking remains a challenge. I may not be making a wage, but I can at least avoid spending a wage we don't have.

As I spend year after year raising my children rather than editing government audit reports, living costs climb relentlessly. Like the Elliotts, we must retrench. Part of that is fixing my quilt, sure, and part of it is buying too-short thrift-store jeans and letting them down, but most of it is attitude. There's a......yes, I would say almost a shame that comes with being careful with money, even when it's by necessity rather than by choice. I had to search, there, for a phrase that wasn't demeaning: the first things that came to mind were "cheap", "skinflint", and "miserly". It's interesting: I'm obviously a product of my generation, latchkey kids raised by two working parents who bought cookies and threw away worn linens.

Is it okay now, at the beginning of a new, expensive century, to value skills like patching and darning? Can I be proud of myself for having saved that $90 for a new quilt?

I think so. I think the world might be ready for a person who spent five years in university, then four years wearing heels to a government office and getting $60 haircuts every six weeks, to stay at home every day educating the children and patching quilts. I might not be Rosie Riveter, but I'm still doing my bit for the war.

Pin-ups

It's interesting how we humans are so very much creatures of habit. This is true not only in daily things, such as tapping my toothbrush twice against the side of the sink after brushing, or Mr. HalfSoled always having Mini Wheats for breakfast, but also on a larger scale: a seasonal scale. It's like clockwork. Summer winds down into fall, and I start itching to clean out my house. Destash. Donate.

I have a theory, actually, that people in modern Western civilisation suffer from depression, boredom, apathy, and stress partly because they are suffering a conscious disconnect from the natural world, while still being unconsciously affected by it. If we weren't affected by its cycles, or if we were aware of them and embraced them, I think things would go a lot more smoothly for us.

Anyway, this is all to say that I've been mucking out the old HalfSoled stables, and thoroughly enjoying it. (The only problem is that spiders keep creeping in to the piles of stuff I have carefully organised and sorted, and freaking me out.)

The other day I found several cards that I had stashed on top of my bookcase. They had been sent to my children by a lovely kind blogger and I had put them up to avoid damage. I searched for an album to put them in, but to my dismay there was no room for them. What to do?

I don't know what you'd do in this case (I suspect you'd probably go buy another photo album, which would take less than an hour and cost less than ten dollars) but what I did was make my children a bulletin board for their mementos from afar. Here it is:



It's a fairly simple project, and you, too, can have one just like it (possibly not featuring Strawberry Shortcake, but to each his own). All you need is:

- a foam core board about 20" by 30"

- lightweight cotton fabric, 45" wide, approximately 1 meter

- batting cut to the same size as your foam board (I used Thinsulate because that's all I had)

- about 6 meters of 5/8" grosgrain ribbon

- hot glue

- $2,500 sewing machine to make pretty hearts. Totally worth it!


This project gives me major destashing points. I had all these things lying around, with the sole exception of the grosgrain ribbon which I bought for $0.75 per meter at a poorly lit Fabricland while REO Speedwagon serenaded me tinnily from a small radio sporting a huge, cornea-threatening antenna. (After all these years they still can't fight that feeling, in case you were wondering.)

Lay the foam board face down on the wrong side of the fabric, and trace around it. Add 2-3" on each side for wrapping and glueing, and cut out.

Baste the batting to the base fabric, keeping in the lines you marked in step 1.

Cut a pocket piece 2" longer than the base fabric, and about 8" wide. Mark the centres (by folding fabric in half) of both pieces, and then the quarters (by folding in half again).

Hem the top edge of the pocket, and lay the grosgrain ribbon along it. Stitch along both long edges of ribbon. Embellish with your very expensive sewing machine.



Lay ribbon across base fabric in a cross-hatch pattern, pinning at junctions.



Use costly sewing machine to make little embroidered hearts at junctions, to tack them down and look oh, so pretty.



Pin pocket to bottom of base fabric, matching centres, quarters, and edges, and pleating extra fullness into pocket edges as needed. Baste. Tie off all threads. Press whole shebang.

Lay fabric face down on table, place foam core board atop it. Hot glue around the back edge, wrapping the fabric tightly around the foam board as you go, to stretch the ribbons on the front. Trim and miter corners.

Turn over to admire your work and realise you've forgotten hangers. Crochet some chains and with difficulty hand-sew them to the back of the fabric, cursing yourself for doing such a very thorough job of hot-glueing.

Hang on a wall, preferably with a level.

Adorn with lovely postcards from Denmark, if you're lucky enough to have some, and if not then make do with a few woebegone photos of your family standing in front of the Grist Mill, or sitting under an orange tarp as rain hammers the campsite.


And when the craze sweeps the continent, you can say you saw it here first.

Then I Played the Concertina While She Interpretive-Danced to the Skye Boat Song.

Last night I dreamt that I met a woman at a conference, and befriended her. We went out for coffee a couple of times over the weekend we were there. She liked my kids. We had some really good conversations and during one of these I discovered she was a knitter. The day she left, she brought a box of yarn over for my daughter - the box was huge, like the size of a coffee table. She said she had this kit and wasn't going to knit it herself, so Charlotte could have it. I was astonished to see "Isle of Gress" on the box, and peered rather closely at my new friend.

It was Alice Starmore.

ALICE FREAKING STARMORE, and she LIKED me! She really liked me! I woke up feeling the press of happy tears, and I wouldn't have been a bit surprised to find my hair had all turned white.

True story.