Promises, empty, empty promises

There is a clearing near a river in the jungle which gets smaller each passing year. In the middle of this clearing is a marvelous tree which has the most beautiful flowers. Every day the flowers are more beautiful than the flowers were the day before.

Once there was a village where this clearing is now. It is far away from other villages. The people who lived there were slower, less fleet of foot, than other people. Most had made their way to this remote place and stayed because when you are slow-footed in a village of the swift the neighbours avert their eyes when you pass, and even your family suffers shame.

The villagers had gathered in that particular place because of a plain and very unremarkable tree that grew on the riverbank. It wasn't particularly tall, it didn't have lovely flowers or beautiful foliage, but it bore fruit year-round, day in and day out. It wasn't exciting fruit. It wasn't sweet, or spicy. It was bland, it was hard to peel, stringy and sometimes tough to digest, but it was nourishing and gave you strength to keep the jungle at bay. They didn't know what kind of tree it was, so they called it the gwehdee tree - the meal tree.

The villagers foraged for food in the surrounding jungle. Sometimes it was plentiful, usually it was scarce and you had to fight the monkeys and jungle pigs for it. But whatever the season they could depend on the gwehdee tree. Year in and year out it stood at the edge of the river bearing fruit. When the jungle provided not- quite-enough or when the jungle provided nothing; when every belly was empty as a drum, the villagers could always go to the gwehdee tree, lift a leaf and the food they needed would be at their fingertips. The tree was so dependable that it simply became part of the background.

Generations came and went... all as slow-footed as their forefathers had been. One day, after many years, another tree grew up, right in the centre of the village. It was a beautiful tree, with a graceful trunk and delicately beautiful leaves. Its flowers were simply magnificent. The entire village gathered around to admire it and speculate about what wonderful fruit was sure to come from such bewitching blossoms.

Through the weeks and months the flowers came, each one more beautiful and delightfully fragrant than the one before, but not a single flower ever produced a fruit. Once in a while a small green fruit would follow a flower, but within a few days it would shrivel, blacken and fall to the ground. But still the villagers were mesmerized by the beauty of the tree, and every day they sat around it and waited - certain that wonderful, delicious fruit would soon appear.

"I imagine it will taste like honey," one said to the other. "Oh," replied the next, "like honey with mango and peaches and jasmine, all together. We will certainly swoon with delight from the flavour." "The texture will be like the freshest date, as soft as green coconut," said another. "And we will be able to eat the peel!" cackled a toothless old woman, who was tired of a lifetime of peeling gwehdee fruit.

And so into the night they'd invent ever more fantastic flavours, textures, fragrances and attributes the fabulous fruit would surely have, when it ripened. And then they would go home with their growling, empty bellies and curse while eating roasted lizards and the stringy, bland and hard to digest but nourishing fruit of the gwehdee tree.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the village, the river had changed course. The gwehdee tree loved water more than almost anything, but the water the tree depended on had moved away. The tree grew thirsty, and longed for a pail or two of water from the river it could see glistening a hundred feet beyond its reach. But it was the fat season and fruit in the jungle was plentiful, so no one came to the gwehdee tree except some men who passed and remarked how ugly it was, compared to the beautiful tree in the centre of the village.

The heat shimmered above the river. Insects buzzed up and down on errands and little fish leaped from the water as they played tag with their hundreds of brothers and sisters. The river wandered even farther away. The gwehdee tree ached for water. The dryness burned in its leaves and rootlets. The pain crept down the stems and up the roots. Ever so slowly its inconspicuous flowers shriveled and fewer and fewer fruit formed under the shelter of the leaves. Still, no one noticed until one morning when a villager felt too ill to forage in the jungle and went to the gwehdee tree to gather some fruit and - there was none to gather.

Alarmed, the villagers ran to the gwehdee tree, but it was too late. The tree was dead. As the season turned from fat to lean and food in the jungle became scarce the villagers had little nourishment. Without the strength the gwehdee tree provided they were soon at the mercy of the jungle itself, which cares as little for the slow-footed as it does for the baby monkey who becomes the python's meal.

One by one the villagers disappeared. The little huts quickly fell into the mouths of the ants and termites and the waddling mother rat who carries away your best cloth as a nest for her young. It hardly mattered. There was no one left to care.

But even now in the centre of a rapidly closing clearing grows a lovely tree, with magnificent flowers, which will hold you spellbound with their promise...

And the seasons slowly…

In May the apple trees blossomed,

In August the crabapples glow.

The hail ate most of our flowers,

Put divots in the Zen garden's moss,

But here and there, spared a small rose.

I hope there is a cure for that

A long-time friend moved recently. She wrote yesterday, relating that she'd found an excellent paediatrician for her daughter, who has a genetic illness, and that her son's second year of college has begun well.

She wrote, "Overall, things have worked out well, though I keep waiting for something bad to happen. I have turned into a pessimist. I hope there is a cure for that." 



When you think about it, pessimism is used as kind of like a talisman in our culture, "Don't get too happy, or too comfortable or too confident, or too anything joyful whatsover, because it can end in a second!" 



Relentless gurus churn out dozens of number one best selling books every year, all promising the secret to everlasting happiness and peace. But even they come at you with the not-so-veiled message that the reason you have to grab that inner peace, seize the day, or live the moment is because the sky could fall on you at any moment! Like if you don't seize each moment and wrestle it to the ground like it was a Texas longhorn steer something bad might happen!!!   We pretend, no let's call it what it is; we have this superstition that pessimism and anxiety are a shield that will protect us from the falling sky.

When my father died unexpectedly I was unable to make the very long trip to his funeral. Although I knew rationally that it didn't make any difference to Dad it meant I never said a proper goodbye to him and that's a grief that has never completely resolved. But that grief manifested in a strange way.

Dad died in late November. For Mother's Day the next April the boys asked, "What do you want?" and I said, "I want a kitten." And so a grey and white five-week old kitten whose short legs and fat little body made him look like a furry caterpillar came into my life. He was a clown in a cat suit and he lived almost 18 years, but from the day he arrived until the day we had to ease his old body off to sleep, every time I held him and looked at him I felt anxious about losing him. That anxiety kept me from enjoying him as much as I should have. Every time he squeaked I panicked. It's as if I felt my anxiety could protect him, and me from the pain of parting. It did not.

There's a Zen story which says that anxiety makes no sense, regardless of circumstances. I haven't mastered this anxiety-free life so at the moment it's purely conceptual but it interests me. 



“There is a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly. Tigers above, tigers below. This is actually the predicament that we are always in, in terms of our birth and death. Each moment is just what it is. It might be the only moment of our life; it might be the only strawberry we’ll ever eat. We could get depressed about it, or we could finally appreciate it and delight in the preciousness of every single moment of our life.” ~ Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World  

Open or Closed?

It's been my observation over the years that people do one of two things as they age, they either relax and become more open to new people and experiences, or they grow ever more fearful of change, narrow-minded and set in their ways.

We've led a gypsy's existence for all of our 47 years together. I think this last move was our 36th, and as a child I attended 16 different elementary schools. Moving was always an adventure, a new beginning waiting just over the horizon. So I was astonished and appalled when this last move unsettled me and left me depressed and heartsick. I've never in my life suffered from depression before.

Yes, we left a beautiful location where we only had to step outside the door to be in the heart of nature, yes we left friends we had come to love, and I loved our little RV, but we have a lovely and much more comfortable and convenient home here. We have our paintings and books and treasured pieces of heirloom furniture - but it still doesn't feel like "home", and I don't know why.

Or perhaps I do. Somewhere between that move in early 2008 and the one in 2011 my adaptability clock crossed that line into age. The "open up" or "close down" clock kicked in, and left me a bit at sea as to what to do about it.

It's a challenge to work with (and resist) this pull toward negativity. Oddly enough this feeling of displacement in the condo is the only place where I'm experiencing it. I love living in this end of town, where probably 75% of the people are immigrants and we are surrounded by people of colour, other religions and other cultures. It's vibrant and vital and makes me feel as if the world itself was at my doorstep.

At the same time I'm having wonderful conversations with our sons, who are both going through periods of exponential growth. What joy it is to see your children grow in their awareness of the world around them, and realizing their potential for good. They are so different in personality from me. Both are blessed with their father's gentle temperament. Both have such wisdom and are far more skillful at dealing with others than I have ever been.

The body ages. Despite advertising to the contrary I will never look (or feel) 22 (or even 62) again. I have annoying periods of aphasia, when I can't recall the exact word I want to use. I may not be able to fight these off. But I will not secede to the "old, narrow-minded and set-in-her-ways" demon. Whatever incantation it takes to ward off that particular evil spirit will become my mantra.

Man stands in his own shadow

and wonders why it is dark.

~ Zen Proverb

The Devil Lives on Lewis Street

Hi Ya'll,

You know I am a genealogy addict. Well, since 23 and Me testing I've been swimming in an entirely new depth of genealogy never dreamed possible even ten years ago. Read about that yourself on the 23 and Me site if you want, but what I wanted to share with you today was a link to a story.

The woman in question is Elizabeth Bennett Hensley, though no one is certain which was her maiden name. She was an extraordinary woman for her day. She lived to be 108 years old, was wife of Joseph Duratt/Durard and mistress of Timothe Demonbreun, by whom she bore children William, John, and Polly that he acknowledged in his will. Both Demonbreun and Elizabeth are mythic figures in Tennessee.

In the Carney Cemetery, Cheatham County Tennessee ELizabeth and Timothy's stones are adjacent:

DEMONBREUN Timothy 1747-1826 - Jacques Timothe Boucher French Canadian Fur Trader of French Lick Officer of the American Revolution Governor in Command of the Illinois Country Early Resident and Merchant of Nashville ET QUOY PLUS

DURARD Elizabeth 7/24/1740 - 2/7/1856 Mrs. Elizabeth Durard by her son J. B. Demumbrine (Note: This stone is adjacent to Timothy Demonbreun)

One of her descendants and I are trying to pin down our mutual genetic connection and this is our "crossing point". Elizabeth may well be one of my gggggreat-grandmothers.

Knowing me as you do, dear reader, you'd know I'd welcome such a woman as a granny. In this story, richly evocative of the south I grew up in, Elizabeth is the central character. She builds a fire for the devil and uses his help to escape an abusive husband, or so the story goes. It is superbly told here by "Aunt B". Read it, you'll enjoy it.

You don't have to be pretty;

I've been thinking about buying compression leggings/tights to offset the mild lymphedema I develop in my legs when I'm on my feet for very long. It's genetic, I also have it in my arms, which is really attractive. It's not especially noticeable in my legs and feet but it's uncomfortable. On the other hand, compression tights are hot and uncomfortable too, so what's a girl to do?

I've never been one of the ruffles and lace crowd. Not that I haven't tried that route a time or two, but I feel ridiculous wearing ruffles. I am much more comfortable in a garden row than a drawing room. I keep thinking I really need a sort of uniform; a T-shirt and some comfy pull-on pants and some comfortable shoes (crocs come to mind, though my more sensitive reader may faint at the thought). Same "uniform" every day, which would mark me as something of an eccentric but relieve of the burden of trying to decide which color goes with what and if X is "dressy" enough to wear to "Y".

How much do we have to dress to please others? Frankly I don't see that a great number of young women have this problem, but it is still more "acceptable" to reveal quantities of naked rippled buttock or vast tracts of quivering breast than it is to allow a back brace to show. Anyway, I found the following post very interesting, there's a whole discussion on the values lying behind what we find "pretty".

Reposted from: Erin's Blog Post: You Don’t Have to Be Pretty

So the other day, folks in the comments were talking about leggings. I'm pretty agnostic about leggings, but the whole discussion (which centered on the fact that it can be *really* hard to look good in leggings) got me thinking about the pervasive idea that women owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness.

Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked "female".

I'm not saying that you SHOULDN'T be pretty if you want to. (You don't owe UN-prettiness to feminism, in other words.) Pretty is pleasant, and fun, and satisfying, and makes people smile, often even at you. But in the hierarchy of importance, pretty stands several rungs down from happy, is way below healthy, and if done as a penance, or an obligation, can be so far away from independent that you may have to squint really hard to see it in the haze.

But what does you-don't-have-to-be-pretty mean in practical, everyday terms? It means that you don't have to apologize for wearing things that are held to be "unflattering" or "unfashionable" — especially if, in fact, they make you happy on some level deeper than just being pretty does. So what if your favorite color isn't a "good" color on you? So what if you are "too fat" (by some arbitrary measure) for a sleeveless top? If you are clean, are covered enough to avoid a citation for public indecency, and have bandaged any open wounds, you can wear any color or style you please, if it makes you happy.

I was going to make a handy prettiness decision tree, but pretty much the end of every branch was a bubble that said "tell complainers to go to hell" so it wasn't much of a tool.

Pretty, it's sad to say, can have a shelf life. It's so tied up with youth that, at some point (if you're lucky), you're going to have to graduate from pretty. Sometimes (as in the case with Diana Vreeland, above, you can go so far past pretty that you end up in stylish, or even striking (or the fashion-y term jolie laide) before you know it. But you won't get there if you think you have to follow all the signs that say "this way to Pretty." You get there by traveling the route you find most interesting. (And to hell with the naysayers who say "But that's not PRETTY"!)

Four dozen donuts and a dozen red roses ...

The perennials I planted earlier are all doing very well, with the exception of the foamflower, which was the recipient of the last hard freeze we suffered. It will doubtless recover and do fine next year, but for now it looks a bit crestfallen. Everything else is fairly leaping from the ground in a blaze of colour and/or texture.

I lucked onto a sale of mini roses, which are very winter hardy here, and bought 16 of them! I put half in the garden downstairs and will pot up the remaining half in containers on my own balcony. When mine quit blooming in the fall I'll move them to the garden downstairs.

At the Annual General Meeting there were many happy comments about the beautiful flowers and general "smartening up" of the front garden, to the point where it was suggested we put in a similar garden on the southern entrance, which has only a grass-lined walkway. And while I was initially enthusiastic about this idea, I have now put it on the back burner, for this year anyway. I still have much work to do in the front, and I'd rather do the one well, than two badly. Over winter I can think about the south entrance and plan a low maintenance garden which won't look like a dog's breakfast if I can't keep the shrubs pruned.

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) has always been somewhat confrontational and an ordeal. It has always been difficult to get enough owners to come out to reach a quorum and they were cranky and quarrelsome. I suggested to the rest of the condo board that this year we provide chairs and food afterward. At earlier meetings people were expected to stand for a two hour meeting. No wonder they were cranky.

We sent colourful invitations requesting the pleasure of each owner's company. The invitation said would provide chairs and a light lunch afterward. And instead of 20 short of a quorum, and an hour of knocking on doors and begging people to come to the meeting, we had a dozen over quorum within five minutes of start time!

Along with the chairs, our president brought in two large folding tables. I organized tablecloths, colourful napkins and plates. A few hours before the meeting I did some needed pruning on a few trees, gathering enough blossoms to make an enormous four foot high bouquet for the table. I'd made a series of colorful (and funny) posters telling residents who to call when they needed help in different situations, when "quiet" times are in force, emphasizing that home should mean pride of ownership, peace and safety and respect for your neighbours.

Add a veggie and dip tray, a cracker and cookie tray, a fruit tray, four dozen fresh donuts, hot coffee, and four kinds of cold pop, and you have the makings of a party. What a change! Instead of the room emptying with the rapidity of a fire drill as soon as the meeting concluded, people gathered at the table, and stood in little groups, introducing themselves to neighbours they had not officially "met" despite years of passing each other in the hall or sharing elevators. People laughed and talked for a good hour before the room cleared. We divided the left-overs among our elderly residents, who seemed to really enjoy the chance to socialize. In all a *huge* success.

So what has all of this accomplished? Residents have been seen taking photos, not only of the flowers, but of their children standing beside the flowers. A real pride is growing in the garden and the building's appearance.

The front walkway used to be constantly littered with fast food containers, drink cups, bags, wrappers, pop cans and cigarette butts by the dozen. Residents simply tended to drop their garbage without a thought. There were days before when you could fill a garbage bag with the litter outside. That has stopped. Dead in its tracks. Today, although I hadn't been outside to pick up litter in four days all there was to pick up was a crumbling styrofoam plate which had blown in from somewhere else and a single cigarette butt at the far (parking lot) end of the walkway.

Many residents used to make a lot of noise as they came and went. Now they are much quieter. People are sitting on the benches in the garden just enjoying the sun or talking to each other, which you never saw before.

And to think, I was not happy when we moved here, but that's all changed. Now I wouldn't want to live anywhere else.

Is this Heaven or what?

The last few days have been devoted to that prime joy - gardening. One of the devastating parts of leaving our little tin palace on the lake in the Okanagan was that I left behind my lovely garden that I'd put three years of work into. Granted I learned something valuable there, namely that you shouldn't try to stuff one of every kind of plant that will grow in your zone into a six by 40 foot strip of gravelly soil. But it sure was fun.

Yesterday morning Kevin from Excelsior Landscaping came with a helper to set up our community garden. They assembled the garden beds and filled them with garden mix. Those should be ready for the gardeners in another few days, as soon as we have water piped into the garden. After Kevin and crew left I planted some of the plants I'd bought, and today I planted more.

We arrived here in the dead of winter and it took me ages to settle in. The trees blossomed gloriously in the spring, then the "landscaping" began to grow (or not, depending on its quantity of ambition). There is a 20 foot wide and 100 foot long walk approaching the front entryway. The third closest to the building gets only two or at most three hours of morning sun.

Serviceberries, which are a plain Jane shrub if ever one was, but which will grow in the deep shade, are planted in a 12 foot long bed to the right in the bed nearest the building. Last year these got seven feet high and just as wide, over growing the sidewalk. But the bad part was that they were absolutely, completely, covered in aphids. The aphids secreted so much sticky "honeydew" that they hung in long and snotty globs off the coagulated leaves. I've never seen such a mess. They were disgusting.

The other "landscaping" consists of half a a dozen potentillas; four yellows, a pink and a white. The yellows bloom from June to frost, the white and pinks don't bloom til mid-July. There's a single lilac which bloomed feebly, *a* rose, and a couple of wolf-willows.

All of these were rankly overgrown, so, as you have been told a dozen times, I've been pruning at every opportunity. Still haven't completely finished but I have all summer.

Aside from just plain neglect, the difficulty with this "garden", such as it was, was a lack of texture, colour, and variety of forms. I began by putting in loads of tulips, daffodils, narcissus, squalls and grape hyacinths last fall. We had a horrendously dry winter and only about 1/2 of the bulbs survived to come up, and of those only half have flowered.

The aphid infestation and the dry winter was the death knell for several shrubs. I know it isn't nice to celebrate the death of a poor hapless plant, but having those ugly things dug out out gives me a place to put healthy and beautiful plants in their place.

The list? All of these are in multiples except the bergenia and foamflower, which they only had one of to sell. So alyssums, several kinds of mint, thyme, bergenia, foamflower, lavenders, may midnight sage, salvia, hostas, geraniums, coreopsis, petunia, calibrachoa, impatiens, and lots of dusty miller. A mix of perennials and annuals to get a quick shot of colour. I also bought a big bag of poppy seeds and will seed them generously in the sunny areas and around the trees. They don't bloom long but they put on a show when they do.

Tomorrow or Monday I hope to finish putting the rest of the rest of the flowers in. Everyone coming and going as I worked today commented on how beautiful the entry garden is looking. I am pooped, but feeling so happy and content. I wasn't sure how I'd live without a garden, and here I have the biggest one I've ever had, with big husky men to do the hard work for me, and someone else footing the bills. Now is that heaven or what?

A Thousand Pounds of Love

I don't know what else to call it. In Japanese it's called a karesansui or dry landscape garden but when someone, namely your eldest son, totes at least a thousand pounds of rocks and gravel to build you one, you can hardly call it anything other than love.

This started, you may recall, two or three weeks ago with a trip to the mountains to select rocks. I picked half a dozen candidates, we ended up using three, as more would have been too much crowding for the space. We'd had some difficulty locating the right gravel. He ended up at a local gravel and stone purveyor and brought 300 pounds of small gyra stone. We thought 300 pounds would be plenty. We were wrong.

We got rocks set, gyra poured over the larger gravel base and discovered we needed twice as much gyra stone as we'd bought. He made a mad dash for the stone purveyor a good distance away. He arrived four minutes after they closed. So he hunted around in the various home stores until he found pea gravel of a reasonable colour match, though larger, and bought a couple hundred pounds of pea gravel in bags.

As we poured it on it looked as if it was going to be a disaster, but bit by bit we worked the large 1" bore gravel to the outside edges and as a kind of "wake" behind the stones closest to the wall and outside curbing, and blended in the rest - and it turned out beautifully. Admittedly it is not going to be a zen garden that takes to raking patterns, we could not find stone fine enough to allow that, but that's probably for the best as it looks good without the burden of daily maintenance.

We installed lawn edging around the largest standing stone, and inside the perimeter put a bag of garden soil. I planted moss and then we covered the raw soil with a layer of crushed clay, to hold the moisture for the moss, hide the black earth and make the colours more consistent. Now I hope that island of soil is not right under where the water pours off the roof during heavy rains, or the downpour will make a mess of my pretty moss garden.

We both also discovered how difficult it is to photograph a garden like this effectively. The "good" spots are filled with shrubs, and neither of us felt like lying on the sidewalk to get the proper perspective, since I'd been hosing down the sidewalk and it was not only wet but muddy. Trust me, it's much nicer than one would expect from my poor pictures. And the moss has doubled in area covered overnight!

As people came and went we had many positive comments, people seemed really happy to see something done with the weedy gravel patch that had been uncovered when I pruned back the shrubs. We've had three or four warm days and there are tulips, daffodils and narcissus in little bunches all up and down the flower beds, and more green spears emerging every day.

We also planted what's called elephant ears locally but is really a member of the saxifrage family bergenia and a foamflower. I had foamflower in my garden in Summerland and loved it. Both bergenia and foamflower do well in the shade and should do well where they are planted. They will get a couple of hours of morning sun and be in the shade the rest of the day. The bergenia gets quite large and I'm now wondering, looking down from the balcony, if I didn't plant it a bit close to the sidewalk, but even if it grows over the sidewalk at that point it won't be in the way.

All in all a lovely day with my big boy - who lived up to his childhood nickname of "Sunshine" - and brought me flowers and 1000 pounds (rather than carats) of rock for Mother's Day.

A Broken Man

I live with one. He's kind of like one of those crazy wind-up toys that charges into walls and bounces off, except he doesn't bounce that well. While unloading the garden bed kits for our new community garden last Friday he slipped on the gravel in the parking lot, fell and broke his right elbow.

I was upstairs unloading my cart when it happened. Not easily dissuaded from his duty (the postal service missed hiring someone obviously born to carry the mail through sleet, snow, rain and dead of night), he loaded the half-dozen four foot long boxes on our little trolley and managed to somehow get them through two huge heavy doors with a dangling right arm.

He then got them all on the elevator, except they all kept falling off the trolley, and getting off the elevator he got boxes and trolley wedged in the door. I heard the commotion of falling boxes and elevator bell/buzzer and thought, "What the....?"

Seeing his white face and that weirdly shaped arm made my knees weak. I helped him down the hall and got him seated on the sofa in the living room, then rescued the boxes from the jammed elevator door.

I'd already been out shopping (obviously) and the allergy medication I'd taken earlier had left me shaky, so I called Ian and asked for help. He jumped to and was here in half an hour and we were off to the emergency room.

Long story short, his right elbow is broken. The end of the bone is sheared completely off. But it's a not a break they can set and they are trying to avoid surgery if possible. He's been in a restrictive sling but we saw the orthopedic surgeon this morning and he said that Tony must now begin to use the arm, despite the pain, to keep the elbow from freezing up. Poor old poop. He's not the happiest of campers. It hurts to wear the sling, it hurts to take it off, it hurts to sleep, it hurts to move, it hurts period.

He's also a sort of appealing pinto-pony pattern of bruises on his right side and down his leg, minus some skin and seriously shaken up. We bought him some different shoes on the way home from the surgeon's clinic today. Good tread on the bottom, and velcro closures so he doesn't have to mess with laces.

Now all he has to do is heal...

Starry, Starry Night

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Green Day

Yesterday was cool and foggy, with a fine mist clinging to the tree tops. It's been a very dry winter. All day the parched earth looked up at the lumpy, leaden sky and pled, "Rain, rain, please PLEASE RAIN!"

Finally, as the sun set, the clouds reached their holding capacity and the rain began, earnest and steady as your granddad's old plow horse. It moved up and down the streets and lawns and fields without the fanfare of thunder, it slid down gutters and flowed along curbs. Slowly it soaked down through the hard top layers of soil to bless dry and aching roots.

By 6:00 am this morning the rain had withdrawn into the clouds again but what a transformation it had wrought in the dark. The winter-bare branches of our apple and plum trees have leaves thrusting out like baby's hands, apple-tree green and plum-tree purple. The grass that was tan everywhere but beneath the downspouts is brilliantly green overnight.

The robins, yesterday pecking apart last year's withered plums, are gorging on worms brought to the surface by the rain. Green spears of tulips, crocuses and daffodils have emerged and unfolded. Crocuses that were invisible yesterday today bloom in bunches.

It is Green Day. The day after the first rain of spring. The cycle of rebirth begins again.

Off to Buy Vitamins

I'm on Facebook, it's how I keep up with my dozens of friends and family members. But the "targeted" ads I am served are absolutely a hoot and some days are as entertaining as the FB posts. My favourite is the one about a 50-year-old woman whose dermatologist hates her for her age-defying beauty secret which makes her look 25 (and which she is willing to sell me). I won't buy it because if I looked 25 people would expect me to act 25 and if there's one thing I love about looking old it's that you don't have to apologize for being slow anymore.

Another frequent ad is from a dating service which laments the fact that their "senior men" can't find "faithful senior women like you Deborah". If I answered that ad I'd not be the "faithful" woman they're looking for would I? Besides their supposedly "senior men" (models dressed as policemen and firemen and doctors in lab coats) - are all about 35! My sons are older!

Still hoping they have a merry and potentially wealthy widow on their hands (I gave them NO information other than name and age and a hometown I left at 11) they offer to move me into a high-end retirement home, then try to entice me to join a single-seniors-only cruise. I sense frustration as they try to find something, anything that I might buy. A decorator will come to my home and make sure it doesn't have that "granny vibe" we all fear. Sadly I do not want a $12,000 sofa that looks like three ironing boards grafted together and covered with fuschia-coloured patent leather.

The ad servers are flummoxed. Abandoning the hope that I am high-end, single-cruising-cougar widow, they test the theory that I am a crippled-up penny-pinching old party pooper and offer to sell me the secret of how to get $35,000 free dollars from the government because I am infirm. When I don't even want to know how to get $35,000 of free-for-the-taking-money desperation sets in.

They abandon all semblance of targeting and simply go with alternating stereotypes. It's well known if you are over 65 you are (obviously) either infirm or an elderly Olympian. So they alternate advertisements for medical aids with those for hair-raising adventures. Do I need a new wheelchair? No? Do I want to go a sky-diving? No? How about standing out in the geezer crowd with a hand carved cane from Borneo? No?? Surely I'd enjoy a life-changing (I read this as "life-ending") rafting trip down the north face of Everest? NO??? Perhaps I could do with a medical lift or a potty chair to sit beside my bed? NO? A day of mudding with my dune buggy?

When I don't throw the credit card at any of these wonderful choices, I visualize them hunched over their keyboards with knit brows, shuffling their ads like a deck of solitaire cards. One, gnawing his thumbnail, says tensely, "Pull back just a little, offer her (long pause) square-dancing lessons." They watch with nervous expectation as the ad comes and goes, all Madison Avenue Ad agency sweat under the armpits as FB stock ticks lower by the second. A vein in a temple pulses visibly. The old dame is holding out. She's still not BUYING ANYTHING!

In rapid succession they promise to hide my varicose veins, lift my sagging bosom, glue chalk white facades on my discoloured teeth, ease my aching joints. This gives me pause. I've never noticed any of these problems, perhaps Facebook has a "Future Afflictions" app I have inadvertently signed up for? I was actually beginning to worry about it and even stopped to look in the mirror the other day (an activity I usually avoid).

But the real topper was when I got a message from my cousin Mac this morning. Facebook has apparently developed an app which does what no other web application has ever done before; transcended that final curtain which we have never peered beyond.

My dearly-loved cousin Mac passed away last December. However, he's FB'd me today to recommend a well-known brand of senior's vitamins. They finally have me. I'm going to buy some. If that brand of vitamin pill can make Mac feel well enough to post to FB from where he's gone, they might finally make a square-dancer out of me.

The Zen Gardener in Action

Commonly repeated axiom, "Everything comes at a price."

So my glorious Saturday afternoon in the mountains became my early-morning attack on Sunday, followed by a day of wobbly legs and aching chest. Today's not a lot no better.

But like the unrepentant Toad in Wind in the Willows when he was chastised for his obsession with driving motor cars at break-neck speed down country lanes, "I'm not sorry, and it wasn't folly at all! It was simply glorious! and the first chance I get - OFF I'll go again!"

It wasn't just the trip, or the walking, that did me in. I'd pruned shrubs Thursday and Friday, and really did too much on Friday, to the point where I wasn't able to step up the six inches to get out of the flower bed on my own. Tony had to give me a pull to help me out.

Am I sorry? Heck no! I could sit in the rocker and do not much of anything, but it doesn't make me feel better physically and it certainly doesn't make me feel better mentally. While I know I should probably quit before I fall over and start gaping like a fish pulled from the water, I tend to want to reach a goal. I start with reasonable intentions, "I'll trim two shrubs", but then I see that next one in the row… and think yes, I'm sure that would be fine… By the time I've done this three or four fine times it's not fine, it's nuts!

Three days of this level of physical activity makes me as legless as a cowboy who has just downed a bottle of Kentucky whiskey. Legless in a different sense, as I still retain consciousness… mostly conscious of my exasperation when I realize that I've done it yet again, when the last time I swore never to repeat the same stupid mistake.

But back to, "Oh but it was so lovely." I enjoyed every branch I lopped off and every step on that rocky trail.

Now I look over my balcony at the gravel pad where my Zen garden will be born, but not today. Today the Zen gardener is in the rocking chair cultivating a crop she has had little success in growing thus far, patience.

Image is a close-up of the stone garden in the karesansui style, Ryōan-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan taken by Tedmoseby, on June 30, 2008.

Preparing to go Zen…

I've continued to prune the shrubs out front, pecking away like an old hen, a shrub or two at a time on days when it's been warm enough to be outside. There are perhaps 30 shrubs, several of them seven feet high and as wide. They are full of dead wood and crossed branches.

I'm taking them back to healthy wood and a decent shape, assuming they don't simply die of the shock of being cared for! I'm now down to the last third of the job, with about 10 shrubs left to do. Only three of these are large, the remainder are cinquefoils, which are not large but are very dense. Many many branches. Anyway, they are beginning to green up and I need to get them done in the next week.

But while cutting down the enormous shrubs I've noticed that there is an irregularly-shaped gravel bed to the left of the entryway, right up against the building. It was hidden behind the jungle before. It's perhaps 14 feet long along the wall, eight feet deep with an outer edge of eight or 10 feet. The end closest to the building is angled to run parallel to the sidewalk. It's bordered with railroad ties and filled with very coarse (inch or larger) gravel, some of which has evaporated over the past several years to reveal landscape cloth beneath.

I'm not quite certain why the builder put gravel there, rather than the lawn which is between all the other ground floor unit patios, but for whatever reason it leaves me with the perfect opportunity for… you guessed it… a dry Zen garden.

And after the site the first requirement of a Zen garden is rocks. Yesterday was a glorious day, the first we'd had in a very long time. It was sunny and warm enough that you didn't even need a jacket. I'd asked Ian if he'd take me on a rock-hunting trip, and he was kind enough to say yes. He even said he'd feed me lunch first!

He picked me up about 11:30 and away we went. He drives an enormous four-wheel drive monster of a Land Cruiser of an age which requires veneration in the automobile world. It goes about anywhere given time and assuming you have no loose fillings. We had a delicious brunch at a nice little place in Inglewood, which is sort of Calgary's "Old Town". A friend joined us which was really nice, and it was a very enjoyable start to the outing.

The hills surrounding Calgary are still dressed in camel-coloured grass. The trees are bare but beginning to appear to be enclosed in a light mist as leaf buds thicken on bare stems. As we rode along I saw two trumpeter swans in a slough alongside the road, a well-fed coyote trotted through a field, red-tailed hawks circled, keeping a sharp eye out for any gopher foolish enough to stray far from its burrow.

We pulled off the road where a recent slide had brought down tons and tons of rocks. I walked up the slide, selected my half dozen stones, and then we went on to the Trans-Canada Trail. It was lovely back in the woods. The rocks along the trail were covered with orange splats of lichen and wooly green patches of moss. Two crows argued in the distance. An aspen clearly showed the effects of a heavy snowfall on its branches at some early stage of its growth which left the branches permanently deformed.

Ian pointed out a nearby mountain and told me of a climb when he reached the top of the cliff to find a bald eagle hovering above him in the up draught of warm air rising off the cliff face. We live in a beautiful country.

It was a perfect day. That day will be a part of my Zen garden, along with the hours I spent with one of my favourite people in the world. Zen gardens are all about symbolism. I have plans.

God says yes to me...

by Kaylin Haught


I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I’m telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

Old Friends

I remember clearly the first time I heard this song. I was a young wife and mother, 22 years old, living in Phoenix in a hundred-year-old adobe house with two foot thick walls and plank floors laid directly on the original packed mud floor. Our older son was not yet two, the cicadas sang outside. We had very little money but I was so very happy.

At the time I associated this song with Edie Hewitt, who'd been our landlady in Oak Park Illinois the first year of our marriage. She was 72, I was 19 and we became the best of friends. Tony worked evenings so she and I would have dinner together, her friends Bess and Viola would come by and we'd play canasta for hours.

Edie Hewitt was feisty and knew exactly how to get her own way at City Hall or the local grocer's. Her late husband had been the City treasurer for 17 years. He had died a year or two earlier but she still had contacts. She had "the dirt" on everyone in City Hall, and wasn't above using it. One thing you weren't supposed to have in our upscale neighbourhood was renters, but she didn't like going off and leaving her place empty while she visited her son "Young America". So we were renters/house-sitters.

One day a City Inspector came to the door with a complaint about her "illegal renters". She told me this afterwards with a little twinkle in her highly mischievous eye. She invited him in, looked over his paper and proceeded to let him know that she knew where his particular bodies were buried at City Hall. He thought a minute, put his hat on, straightened his tie and said he was happy her adult grandchildren were able to help her out, now that she was a widow.

One day I found her laughing so hard she was wheezing and crying. The nearby grocer delivered a box of groceries for her a couple of times a week, she'd broken her elbow and found it hard to carry things. She'd call her order in and Frank the grocer would bring the things by an hour or two later.

On this particular day she'd decided she wanted a salad, so she said she'd asked Frank the price of a head of lettuce. He said it was 19 cents. She was outraged! "Nineteen cents!" she told him, "Frank, at that price you know where you can stick that head of lettuce!"

"No, ma'm I'm sorry," the grocer replied. "I can't, I've got a head of cabbage and three pounds of pork chops up there already and it's only 10:00 am."

We kept in touch for years, she visited us when we moved to California, and we exchanged cards at holidays. She passed away in 1973 at the age of 80. I still have some of her letters. She was a lovely friend and it warms me, just to think of her.

This week's Catch-All

I've been very busy the past three or four weeks working on a paper for a neurology journal with neurogeneticists Frank Lehman-Horn and Karen Jurkatt-Rott. These are two of the finest minds (as well as the nicest people) in the field of channelopathy genetics and I was gobsmacked when Frank invited me to co-author a paper with them. I'd have been thrilled to have shined their shoes or pressed their lab coats!

It's been a steep learning curve. Though I've written hundreds of articles and several books on neurological subjects, I've never written for this caliber of audience and I've learned a tremendous amount.

I thought when I sent off the "final-final" edit about ten days ago that I'd hammered down the last nail. Frank and Karen were going to add some slides and expand on the discussion. But somewhere along the road from final final to press someone did what I often do, and turned the paper on its head.

With an appeal, "Please don't hate me!" I got a request this morning to populate five pages of tables with patient-by-patient statistical comparisons - by Monday. This means going back to the original data and pulling out the information piece by piece. Eighteen hours later I have just finished one of five tables. I started with the "easy" one.

It's a groaner of a job, but as I'm doing it I can see why it's valuable. Patterns are emerging that were not apparent before. Funnily enough I did the original research as a sort of "test run" for a much larger project, just to get the feel of the software. I never actually thought I'd uncover new information.

Garden Meeting

My garden meeting went well. Ten people showed up, including an older Indian couple who live around the corner. They speak very little English. Their granddaughter came as translator with her Granddad. But I've been dying to meet them. We pass in the hallway - she is tiny and uses a walker, he walks with great difficulty but they are always smiling and cheerful. I hope we can transcend the language barrier and become friends. The other attendees were from young to older, some who had gardened before and some who never have. I'm not sure all will participate, but if we have five or six it's a start. It should be fun!

And something no one should have to find

Day before yesterday one of the ladies who had come to the garden meeting came to the door, quite upset and in tears. She couldn't explain what was wrong, but asked me to come with her. As we got off the elevator on the third floor the smell was overpowering. She led me to a door, and it was obvious the smell was coming from the apt inside. I couldn't reach our management company or any other board members so called the police and explained the situation.

The young man who lived there had been in the hospital for 10 days, and had been back about 10 days. Asking around, no one had seen him the previous week, but his mother had gone south for a holiday so the neighbours thought he'd gone to join her.

Alas, not so. The police came, broke down the door and found the poor fellow had been lying there dead for over a week. It was not foul play, or even suicide, the coroner had made the assumption while here that the young guy had taken his medication and then had several drinks, which is a no-no with so many prescription drugs.

So it has been a week filled with incident as Lady Bracknell would say. I have now decompressed from my hours of statistical concentration and am going to go off to my comfy bed. Tomorrow is a brand new day.

The Day of Reckoning

Or at least of finding out whether any of the other 250 or so residents of this building are avid (or even aspiring) gardeners. I put up posters on the doors and in the elevators several days ago announcing that we were setting up a community garden for residents and inviting anyone who is interested in participating to attend a meeting at 7:30 tonight.

So tonight we find out. Is there enough interest to start a community garden or not?

If not I will happily confine my gardening efforts to the landscaping which surrounds the entrances to the building. The main approach to the building has a 100' long x 20' wide stretch of sidewalk. It is flanked on both sides by potentillas, saskatoons, a single lilac, a single rose, three wolf willows, and a mugo pine. All were planted when the building was new and have not been touched since, except as noted before, one of the wolf willows has been run over and flattened by a vehicle. You can see by this photo, taken last June, that the saskatoons were trying to take over the walkway, even at the beginning of the season.

I've now managed to prune four of the large and five or six of the smaller shrubs. There's a lot of room in these beds for more plants, and several dead conifers need to be dug out and replaced by more suitable plants. I think some early spring colour would do this place a world of good.

Anyway, we will see what happens. Either way I'm good.

Like life-giving water...

It's never been my object to go back to the year dot with my genealogy. Some of my lines seem to come to an abrupt dead end in the late 1700s, but while adding documentation to a 7th great-grandmother I discovered her maternal line has been documented, not just by genealogists but by historians, all the way back to 450 AD. Fifteen hundred sixty-two years. That's a heck of a pedigree.

Everyone on earth has a pedigree like that. They may not know their ancestors' names and the places they lived. The struggles they endured may not have been documented, but they are back there all the same. So I found the words from this beautiful video especially poignant;

"We all go back so far. And In this present moment on this day, all the people you meet, all that life from generations and from so many places all over the world flows together and meets you here like life-giving water if you only open your heart and drink."