A brand new immigrant buys underwear.

Just for fun, two short tidbits about buying underwear in  my first months in Canada. People expecting titillation because of the title will be sorely disappointed.

Someone posted this image on Facebook, which is the heart of my social life these days. 

This brought back the memory of the first time I went to buy a female piece of lingerie in the spring of 1969. At the time my command of the language was fine when it came to the written word, but I still had to focus in order to listen to the radio.
I could not find the department and had to ask a saleslady. The pronunciation I used was more like the word used to describe the noise of a donkey. The saleslady passed me on to a colleague with the words: "She doesn't speak much English". Oh, the mortification. 

A few months later I used my fresh driver's license to make an epic trip through Alberta and B.C. Chris was working in the field near what is now the town of Grande Cache in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains . The town was not there yet. The way to the camp went through wilderness over rough dirt roads. The supervisor had told Chris  "If it was my wife I would tell her to stay home." He added that one certainly should not try the roads without four wheel drive, especially if it rained. 

When you are 26 three months with only one brief conjugal visit is a long time. Nobody was going to tell me when I could see my husband. I loaded the VW bug with a tent and food for a week. I was prepared to set up a distance away from the geo camp and feed myself if I had to.  The bug performed like a champ. After a sweet three day visit to the camp, on a river meadow blooming with Indian paint brush and other wild flowers, I struck out again.

I had a few weeks to kill before starting graduate school. That is another story. The plan was to cross into B.C. through the Pine Pass. The road led through the town of Dawson Creek, still East of the mountains but in B.C. It was here that the second underwear episode took place. 

Looking at the  simple white cotton briefs on the counter the sales clerk asked me: "Are these for yourself?" And I was like, HUH? Why do you need to know?? Remember, Alberta has no sales tax. It turned out the panties would be taxed if meant for my own youthful behind, but tax free for anyone under 14.
Learn something every day.

Two love stories

A post for Valentine's day, different from my usual more cynical input.

One of the perks of being a Home Support Worker was learning the life stories of fascinating people. These two love stories really happened. The protagonists of the first one are long gone and there are no close relatives. I am pretty sure "Felix" would love to be so remembered. The second story is shared with permission of son and daughter in law. Even so I feel more comfortable not using real names.
Hearing these stories was a true privilege.

The first time I met Felix his beloved wife had just died and he was a lost soul. A soft spoken gentleman who loved nature and books he lived in a tiny airstream trailer in a beautiful spot by a small lake. The kind neighbour who owned the property kept an eye on him. I was sent in to help with basic housecleaning and some meal preparation. We quickly developed a routine of getting the chores done so we could get to the important part: Twinings Earl Grey brewed properly by Felix in a Brown Betty pot, to be enjoyed with Peak Frean biscuits and serious chat. 

Felix' start in life had taken place in Victoria, B.C. in 1910 or 11. He remembered being devastated by the death of his mother when he was 9 years old. The little boy and his mother were both sick with the Spanish flu and were being nursed in the same bed. He lived, she died. 
Felix was doing some kind of clerical work when he met "Annie". She healed the loneliness he had felt ever since his mother's death. Annie must have been something special. Not long into their relationship she informed her suitor that she did not intend to become a housewife or have children. What she wanted to do was "mess about with boats." So they did!

Somehow this city couple managed to transform themselves into fisher folk. They spent most of their working life living on their own boat on the glorious coast of B.C. To get an idea of their life on board read "Fishing with John" by Edith Iglauer. John had been a friend.  After retirement they enjoyed some blissful years in the airstream trailer by the lake. Compared to the ship it was spacious! They lived simply, not needing much  beyond the natural beauty, the neighbours and each other. A highlight was the weekly trip to our wonderful local library. When Annie lay dying she took her husband's hand and said "It's been a great adventure".

 "Paul" and I shared a home town. He had moved to Canada from Amsterdam as a young man in 1929, forty years before we did. His sisters sang in the Amsterdam branch of the same choir that had played a role in my grandparents life. Most of our conversations took place in English, but once in a while we'd share some Dutch. A particular pleasure was inventing phrases consisting of the most unpronounceable Dutch words. Dutch speakers can find them in the footnote.

The routine we adopted was getting the noisy vacuum cleaning out of the way first, so Paul could put on music while the rest of the cleaning got done. We both loved Edith Piaf, and Paul taught me to appreciate American musicals. I always think of him when I hear a song from Oklahoma. Somewhere between music and Dutch jokes his love story got shared. It is romantic enough for a Valentine's day post.

When young Paul told his father that he wanted to emigrate to Canada to become a farmer his father wisely suggested that he should work on a Dutch farm first. Take the time to see if the life style really agreed with him. Paul duly spent a year on a farm in the Eastern part of the country. You guessed it, there was a farmer's daughter. Several in fact, but Paul became most friendly with the one who was only 12 at the time. Let's call her Maggie. After Paul moved to Canada they wrote back and forth for some years. When Maggie turned 16 Paul broke off the correspondence. He enjoyed the contact but he worried about it "not being fair to her". Those were his words, decades later. He did not want her to miss chances to meet available boys. Some years passed, tough depression times. Enter WWII. Paul, still single, joined the Canadian army and was part of the liberation of his native land. He was even billeted with his own father at the end. On a whim he decided to go visit the farm where he had lived before he emigrated. And there was Maggie, still unmarried! She had cried for months after Paul stopped writing and never found anyone who she liked as much. The rest is history. One more war bride! 

Footnote. Say can you say:
Door de schuifdeur van de bijkeuken van het grachtenhuis dreef de geur van groene gaargekookte spruitjes.
Van teveel scheepsbeschuit krijgt men scheurbuik.
Door de verschijning van de politie was de schurk verschrikkelijk geschrokken.

My seventies show. Christina Lake, part 1

Warning. I am writing this for my own pleasure, not for publication. I never took many pictures back then. Much of what I did take was destroyed by moisture and mice in the attic of the old house. This will be the verbal equivalent of filling an album with snapshots. I will shamelessly indulge in as much detail as I remember, which may be boring. Links can provide illustrations.

Here goes.

After a nine months prequel in Calgary our true Canadian life started when Chris got a geology job in Grand Forks, B.C. They were investigating if the historic copper mine of Phoenix still had some life left in it. 

He started in January 1970. As mentioned in the very first post in this blog, I got dragged away from the city under protest. The move to the Kootenays is one of the best things to ever happen to me. I am leery of all this goal setting stuff, let alone New Age manifesting. The best things in my life happened in spite of my plans, not because of them. 

The first view of Grand Forks had been in the late December dusk, on our way back from the trip to Vancouver where the job search had taken us. There had not been much snow yet. Everything looked grey and dingey. I did not look forward to the permanent move. That all changed the first weekend I took the bus out from Calgary. Chris had found a house to rent in the community of Christina Lake, 22km to the East. A good snow had made everything look spic and span. I loved it! In early April the courses I was taking at the University of Calgary were finished and I drove the fifties' VW Bug through the Crow's Nest Pass to my new life as a country dweller. I have been one ever since.

1970 was a wonderful summer. We lived mainly in sunshine, surrounded by natural beauty among sweet smelling ponderosa pines. I made some stabs at starting an M.A. thesis but had a clean conscience about not working for pay. Hey, we were in the sticks because of his job, O.K.? We had no money worries and enjoyed exploring the surroundings on weekends. On week days I could just walk to the beach in front of the old hotel, a few blocks from home. It was so quiet back then! I used to get seriously irritated by the sound of a single motor boat, hard to imagine in these days of the infernal jet ski. 

This picture  must have been taken in that summer. The VW bug died on a trip over the Santa Rosa road on my birthday.

Our neighbours at the base of Fife road happened to be Dutch. Of course we  became friends. Jos and Coby came from a small town/rural background. Jos was a carpenter by trade and was building his own house. It is now a stuccoed two story mansion, unrecognizable.  At the time they were living in the downstairs, a big square box with tar paper and raw plywood still visible on the outside. There was no yard yet. The outside was a level sea of gravel, with the exception of raised bed vegetable plots bordered by logs. Koby was a Maker. Apart from having produced two beautiful small children she sewed her own clothes, grew food, canned it and made wine. These days young women doing the same activities make a big fuss and write blogs about it. Coby was 13 years  younger than Jos, petite and lovely. My favorite memory picture of her is this. We are hanging out with a smoke in a summer evening on the logs that bordered the square vegetable patch in the front yard. The kids are in bed and Coby is wearing her lounge for the evening outfit: a sleeveless, bell bottomed wine red jumpsuit with a square neckline that she had sown herself. It beautifully set off her delicate creamy skin. She was years ahead of her time in staying out of the sun.

All these DIY activities were new to me. With their encouragement I hacked away at the neglected garden plot under the trees in our yard. I started too late, had no good soil and too much shade but by golly I produced a few meals worth of snap beans! I was hooked. This was the start of a lifelong passion. I still think of Jos and Coby every time I order my seeds from William Dam, a firm they introduced me to because "they sell kale seeds". This was long before kale, a traditional Dutch and Scottish winter food, gained cult status among hipsters. 

We got our first whiff of the back to the land counterculture that spring. 
On April 26, on the way back from a Saturday trip to Nelson, we were surprised by a late snowstorm. I made a mental weather note about the date. When we spied two guys with backpacks  on the long slope leading out of Castlegar to the Paulson pass it was a natural thing to pick them up and put them up for the night. We fed them brown rice, stir fried vegs and juicy steaks. They were most impressed by the rice and veg part, saying it was just like being home in the commune. They invited us to visit the PX ranch, so we could see how they lived. 

Silly straight people that we were, we took them at their word and used the May long weekend to travel 5 or 6 hours to the PX ranch near Ashcroft. Our two guys were not there, but after some awkwardness we were invited to stay for a meal and overnight anyway. Did we bring a tent? All I remember for sure is a communal dinner that included the inevitable brown rice and dandelion sprouts that some girls were very excited about. They had walked behind the guys roto tilling a garden plot and "gleaned" them. Their word. It seemed a bit over the top. At some point a girl wearing the countercultural uniform of long hair, long skirts, plaid shirt  and sturdy boots arrived to ecstatic welcoming hugs. She and her backpack had hitchhiked solo from somewhere far away, California? Later, a visit in a dimly lit smaller cabin talking with draft dodgers and deserters from the Vietnam war. In some ways these people were more our intellectual kin than anyone else we had met so far. Anti Vietnam war, aware of the dangers of pollution and so on. 

All through the sixties I had become increasingly concerned with the direction the world was taking. The Dutch geology crowd we met in our first months in Calgary was a lot more conservative. I was about to meet the people who would indirectly change my life, but it will wait till the next post.

My seventies show, prologue.

The passage of decades is a funny thing. When one considers adult life as a teenager the imagination tends to stall around age 50 at the most. From that vantage point adult life is the quarter century between 25 and 50, a seemingly endless stretch within which all the important things happen. Becoming fully adult, selection of mate, perhaps children, profession and adventure.  Life beyond middle age is merely a slide into the grave. Old people are Other. One just cannot imagine turning into one. 

When we are twenty and consider a time thirty years in the past it appears as History, a different epoch peopled by quaint folks wearing funny clothes doing old fashioned things like using dial phones and writing letters. Again, subtly Other. 

Children are time made flesh. Without growing children in our daily life it is easy to lose track of the passage of years, nay, decades. A movie may be on my radar as something recent that I intend to see one of these days and by the time I get serious the remake is a classic.

The thirties, the decade in which my parents came of age and met each other, has never been anything but history, a time completely sealed off from the present. WWII made that even more so of course. Everything was Before and After. Yet in the fifties, my formative decade, the thirties were only twenty years ago. Here it is almost 2016, and surely the nineties were only yesterday? 

The Spanish Civil war was as far removed in time from our tipi years as the tipi years are from the present. It doesn't feel that way. I find it fascinating to see the times of my own life turn into the stuff of imagined history. 

It is winter, no garden. My future may hold a stint of caregiving but it is not happening yet. Time to start writing some memories down, just for the H of it. 

For May first: a memory of singing The International.

The time: between three and four in the morning of March 26, 1969. 
The place: a small apartment behind the upper row of 3 windows in the house you see here, Westerstraat 191, Amsterdam. At the time it was used for housing  married student couples. We had been assigned a flat in September 1965. It was incredible good luck and I was very happy there.

The picture dates from 2009. By this time the gentrification of the Jordaan neighbourhood had been under way for decades, as had the wave of privatisations. We were a very fortunate generation. Did we even know it? Not really. We were too busy identifying with every oppressed group around.
Being oppressed was status. We digress.

Later that day we would board the plane that would take us to Canada. We had celebrated the last night there with the two other couples who had apartments in the building. In the mainly empty flat we sat around on the floor with bottles of booze. At some point the need for coffee arose. The grinder had been sold, the small espresso thingy packed. Chris had the brilliant idea of grinding coffee beans with an empty coke bottle and boiling it in a saucepan, coffee Tobruk style.

And, for whatever reason, we ended up drunkenly singing the International, in several languages. One of our housemates had spent time in Italy and sang that version. Somehow the name Togliatti featured in it. His lovely wife was Danish by origin and sang it in Danish. Not that any of us knew the whole text. We mainly roused the wretched of the earth. Was it the straight laced student of economy from the top floor who sang in French? "Debout, vous damnés de la terre!" Memory fizzles out there. 

Anyway, it was a grand time, and I think of it every time I either hear The International or have to improvise a way to grind coffee.

Three, nay four! books and the city of my heart

As usual many winter resolutions have fallen by the wayside, but some were kept. I am actually studying acupressure, which includes giving practice sessions, and doing some serious reading.

I was not planning to spend a literary month in the city of my youth, but that is what happened. Pictures are random. Earlier I did a blog about places Old Dutch and I used to live. 


The road to Amsterdam started in Oran. I read La Peste because I wanted to catch up on some classics, revive my French, Camus had been discussed on CBC, and Ebola was happening. There were some good, even haunting parts in it. How could it be otherwise with that topic, a city isolated from the world by an outbreak of the Black Plague. However, as a novel I found the structure pretentious, needlessly laborious, and detracting from the powerful narrative. I did not see why Camus had earned a Nobel for literature. Maybe he had earned it through another book, supposedly a master work. On we went to La Chute, The Fall. La Peste was still on the shelf as a memento from a previous life, but the internet delivered La Chute for a few bucks. I may get to do some more non English reading.

The Fall is set in Amsterdam in 1953, long before the hippie invasion that started in 1970, before the red light district spilled out into Damrak, the street leading from Central station to Dam square. Background music: Jacques Brel's "Dans le port d'Amsterdam". 
I wasn't crazy about the unlikely frame for the story. An expat French lawyer  meets a country man in a bar in the red light district. Ancient mariner style, expat supposedly keeps fellow French man spellbound night after night with the story of his life and his moral dilemmas. Yeah, right. There is nothing else to do in Amsterdam. There were some interesting ideas and I enjoyed Camus' observations on the Dutch. But I wish Camus had simply written some essays and reportages. Marcel Proust would have agreed. He once said that a novel with 'ideas' was like a gift with the price tag attached. 

Nevertheless, I enjoyed walking along for those few scenes when the narrator and his guest step outside into the fog or walk along the quay in the drizzle. When the narrator leaves his guest at the edge of the red light district to cross a bridge to his hotel on Damrak, I am there. That never happens to me with fiction taking place in London or New York. 

The next book, Cees Nooteboom's "Rituelen", (Rituals),  also takes place mainly in Amsterdam. It was part of the Dutch collection transfered from my brother's Kobo. I have still not decided if I love it or hate it. It is beautifully written but somehow it lacks heart, at least to me. Perhaps that was intended. It is not a long novel and I may well reread it in order to understand what everyone sees in it. It has been widely translated and won awards. The three sections of the book take place in 1963, 1953, and 1973, in that order.

I don't feel like reviewing it here except to repeat how much I loved walking along the streets of a city that will always be in my heart. An important scene takes place in the Spiegelstraat, home of antique and art dealers. Again, I am standing right there, looking through the window at a single raku bowl.

Finally, I just finished listening to the audio version of "The anatomy lesson" by Nina Siegal. It tells the story of the origin of Rembrandt's famous painting. 

It takes place in one single day, January 16 1632, the day the lesson takes place. By necessity this is also the day the man whose body is being dissected has been hanged. The book is historical fiction at its best, a brilliant mix of invention and research. The fictional character of Flora, pregnant lover to the dead man, adds heart and drama. Through flashbacks we get to meet the dead criminal, a mere career thief, not a murderer. Rembrandt's thought processes as he reflects on how to compose this important commission are of course imagined, but not unlikely. We get a wonderful sense of time and place. The city, a boom town with all its brash nouveau riche glory and teeming smelly humanity, is like an extra  character. I loved it. Five stars.

Addendum. After this, alerted to it by a reader of this blog (Thanks Christa!) I read The miniaturist, set in Amsterdam in 1686/87. I felt mixed about it. I found the writing good in places but pretentious in others. Above all, the characters don't convince. Is there such a thing as psychological anachronism? 

Anyway, the Guardian said it already, here is their review.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/10/miniaturist-jessie-burton-review-history-modern-day-heroine

My life and times in the wonderful wacky world of network marketing, in installments.

First this: Everything you have heard about Network Marketing AKA MLM is true. The bad, the ugly, the crazy and the good, they are all true.   

This is a set of memories, most emphatically not meant as advertising. I will most likely eat the product that got me into the industry till it is no longer available or till I die, whichever comes first. But I can no longer do that "This will fix everything for everybody" thing.

Chapter one. A bottle of green pills.
My stint in the wonderful wacky world of  MLM started with my friend Mary handing me a small bottle of green capsules. By the way, this friend is an extremely private person. Her name is not Mary. Everything else is true. 

"I have a little present for you", said Mary in the fall of 1996, handing me the aforementioned bottle of green capsules. Mary is one of the most generous people I know, and we shared an interest in health matters. I got to know her when she and her husband took an introductory Reflexology class I taught.

A picture of my life at this time: 
I was the main family breadwinner, never mind that story. I had a day job in Home Support and did Reflexology on the side, as well as the odd horoscope. I gardened and kept chickens. Daughter had launched and I missed her terribly. Teenage son was still at home. My body was doing the puberty in reverse thing known as peri-menopause.

I never had a single hot flash. Instead there were many small annoyances and some big ones. My neck was often sore and stiff. My hips and knees were starting to whine when I got up after sitting down too long. My hair was thinning. And muddled! Dear Earth, was I muddled! You know that thing where a name is on the tip of your tongue, but you can't get to it right now? My brain was doing that with ordinary words. Fridge might become "Eh, you know, the cold thing with the food in it". At one point son said: "Mother, who will finish your sentences for you when I leave home?" 
But the worst symptom was the frequent bouts of debilitating fatigue. On a bad day I looked forward to crawling back into bed from the moment I got up. I had pneumonia in the spring of 1996.

In short, I was a mess. This was in spite of a healthy lifestyle, a generally upbeat attitude, and various supplements. Adelle Davis had been my guru. I swallowed iron and vitamins from A to Z, including B complex for energy. They always helped for a while end then I would stop feeling them. Take some time off and start again. I would dread the time off.

So, when Mary gave me the bottle of greenery I was like, "Another pill. Whatever. Sure, I will try it." I took the odd one along with the rest. After a few weeks Mary called to ask if I was noticing anything. "I am supposed to feel something?" She encouraged me to be consistent and take one daily. I did. For Christmas Mary gifted me another bottle, with the advice to try 2 a day. I did. And the lights came on. 

By mid January my words were coming back. My neck felt better. There was less hair in the drain after a shower. Best of all I was needing fewer naps. That whole horrible feeling of being on the verge of collapse was going away. I went to visit the Holland family in early spring and breezed through jet lag. 

When the second bottle ran out I actually bought the next one, even though the price was much more than I was used to spending on vitamins and minerals. Whatever this green stuff was, it worked for me in a sheer miraculous way that nothing else had. To this day, I think of life as Before and After AFA, Aphanizomenon Flos Aquae, the wild bluegreen algae from Klamath Lake, Oregon. To this day I remain grateful to Mary for having introduced me to it. She is welcome to any money she made off me.

Now, to the business factor. My friend is a discreet person, a Scorpio. Every now and then she would slip me a cassette tape (remember those?) and never mention it again. I tried listening to some of them. They were so American, rah rah rah, like a revival meeting. I never got beyond the first minutes before turning them off. Meanwhile, I was telling Reflexology clients who had problems with fatigue to give Mary a call.  She was selling this wonderful stuff you couldn't get in a store.

Fast forward to August. I am in my Reflexology room in the village, giving it a thorough cleaning. Entertainment was wanted. Anything would do, even one of Mary's cassettes. This one was actually nice, no rah rah rah. A bunch of people were sitting around a living room in Northern California telling each other how much they love the green stuff, and how much they enjoy being dealers and earning some money on the side. "I could do this", thought I. I enjoy selling if it is something I believe in and I sure believe in "the algae", as AFA is known among its fans. The next time I came to Mary's house to pick up a bottle, I left her a note. Would she mind terribly if I became a dealer too, even though she was the one who had introduced it to Nakusp? 

Anyone who has ever been part of this industry will burst out laughing at this. But seriously, that's how it started. 

Chapter 2: I see the light and turn into an evangelical monster.

Where were we. Oh yes, August 1997. I had left Mary a note, asking of she would mind if I became a seller of the product she had introduced me to. Really. Needless to say she was all in favor . "I was hoping you would ask that! It's a total win/win. Come for tea and let me explain".

Reader, I was an MLM virgin.  I fell for the hype hook, line and sinker, as had Mary. Residual income on a sale, just like artists who get royalties, the idea that I could get paid on the sales of people who I had introduced, and a percentage on their people, what's not to like? Time freedom, working from home, oh yes! The whole concept blew me away. Selling a product not available in a store made even more sense in those days when the Internet was just starting.

I had a bit of disposable income and got fitted out with a business kit. Then I went to work.  Thanks to even more green pills I no longer knew the meaning of the word tired. 

I wanted to put algae into every tired face on the street and show the compensation plan to every friend who was struggling with money worries. I made cold calls. I set up meetings to show the expensive kit with a whole health program. I even sold quite a few. I was rather like a fresh convert to a "Hallelujah!" church who has just seen the light, has stars in her eyes and wants to save everybody else too. In retrospect I must have been insufferable. In my defense I must say that I came from a place of total sincerity.

In January 1998 I broke my right ankle skiing, right here on the land. At the time I was quite happy about it. A guilt-free break from work, yeah! I was not in pain, it was just a matter of letting time do its healing. Mary had been to the company convention and came back laden with motivational tools of all kinds. There was a stack of issues of "Upline" magazine, videos documenting past company conventions, and piles of cassette tapes. I have fond memories of basking in winter sunshine on the couch and immersing myself in a world of glowing testimonials, success stories and positive thinking. 

I even made a few sales by phone, earning money from home, just as the propaganda promised. I was high on the drug of endless possibility. It was a good time.

Part 3: I find my niche and my medium and do some good work.

After the initial rush of success reality set in. Not everyone responded as well as I had. Some people wanted their money back. They got it. Others liked the product fine but balked at the price and did not reorder. I was also running out of easy people to talk to, and the friends who had joined me in the business soon ran out of steam. 

In the spring of 1998 a group of distributors in a nearby town had organised a workshop with Dr. John Taylor, author of some books on ADD/ADHD and learning disabilities. He had an arms length relationship to the company. He sort of recommended the product but did not directly benefit from its sale. Mary, her husband "Bob" (also not his real name) and I made the 2 hour trek to Castlegar to attend. 

I went just because this would help me sell product. I knew nothing about ADHD and pictured only kids who could not sit still. I was gobsmacked when I heard the man describe members of my family as if he knew them, including yours truly. The strategies he described seemed helpful. I was fascinated. Thus began an educational journey into the topic and a time of learning and sharing. Nutritional support for ADD became my niche. 

As for the medium, later that year we replaced the 386 PC with a second hand 486 and joined the internet. Well, sort of. The dial up connection was excruciatingly slow and we could barely cruise, but we could do email and join email groups. That became the medium.

I made a few beginners mistakes by being too eager to mention my miracle stuff. Again, coming from a place of total sincerity. But I did some good work. I would spend hours replying to group emails and gently educating people on the importance of nutrition for brain function in general. Every now and then someone would email me privately and I might make a sale. One of my favourite stories concerns the mother of a son who did not respond well to ritalin. She confessed to being "a microwave Mom". With encouragement from the whole group and the help of a website I had stumbled upon she started to cook from scratch. The family never did buy any algae. But the kid improved to the point where he no longer had to take medication. 

Yule again!

Well, if the Sun is not on its way back to our hemisphere it won't be for lack of us honouring it. Our sort-of neighbors Mickey and Brenda Lee hosted an incredible party. They have been keeping Solstice since they came here a few years ago, but I was never sure if this was one of those happenings that are open to everyone who happens to hear about it, or by invitation only. It turns out to be the former, but I ran into Brenda Lee and got personally invited, for which I am truly grateful. 

I love marking the Earth's turnings. 

For many years a Solstice celebration at the home of our friend Magda at Summit Lake was the highlight of our festive season. As the name implies, Summit Lake is at a higher altitude from us. Winter wonderland was guaranteed, even if it was slushy around town.

This was Maggie's big social event of the year, and the family always pulled out all the stops. The trail from the road to the house was lit with coloured lights and there was a fire pit in front of the house with benches around it. The potluck supper usually featured Maggie's succulent chickens, raised on sprouted wheat and kale. 

Oko, the gentle giant Rhodesian Ridge-back, would wind around people's legs and allow himself to be petted. Apparently he could be terrifying when his ruff was up, but in all his 11 years we never once saw that. 

Our children were friends with each other, and having a good time doing snowy slidey things. There might be drumming and guitar playing around the fire, fooling around with sparklers, and at some point a display of real fire works.

Oko has long since gone to the great lion hunt in the sky. The children are grown and gone to the city. Some of the good friends who were with us around those fires have died. Beth, Marilyn, here is a toast to you!

Four years ago Magda and her partner moved North so they could have more land. Solstice has not been the same.

Until last night. Holy Moses, those people know how to create a party space. 

I didn't take any pictures inside. Let's just say the place was crammed with people and great food. Potlucks are always the best.

Above: lights and prayer flags between the house and the fire pit.  I tweaked the picture, the reality was darker. Below: This fire had been lit and nurtured for hours. A big bed of coals made the whole area really toasty.

Below: Music around the fire. 

More music. This town can drum!

Brenda Lee must have been High Priestess of Stonehenge or something like it in a past life. She invited us to a little ceremony: write something on a piece of paper that you would like to leave behind in the old year. We'll ceremoniously burn it later.

Everyone was handed a lighted lantern thingy to carry through the woods. We were supposed to chant something, but that came out a bit thin and mumbly. We are an inhibited lot in some respects.

If you really look you can to see the string of people carrying their little lights. It was rather neat.

And at the end of the trail there was.........another fire laid out!

This one was for ceremonial purposes. Our host Mickey came out of the woods with a dramatic home-made torch and let her rip.

 This fire had not just been laid, it had been designed.

Once it was going, we threw in our pieces of paper with undesirable whatever. 

Then we were asked to form a circle, hold hands and do some light-inviting chanting. This time people were more inclined to participate. 

Like I said, if the Sun isn't on its way back it won't be for lack of us doing our bit.

I got a bit teary with nostalgia for times past and people lost, but in a good soulful way. This event was less intimate and more orchestrated than our Summit Lake gatherings. Besides, in those times we were socially at the heart of things, instead of on the edge.

But I was very happy to be there and celebrate a real Solstice again. 

Memories of 1961, and filling gaps in my musical education.

I have never been much of a music person. It just wasn't part of my early life, and I was not drawn to it either. Books, yes. Music, not so much. I do love to sing, even though I cannot hold a tune, or so I am told. 

If someone turns on music I may well enjoy it, but left to my own devices  I tend to forget about it. An exception was the first two years after I left home, before I moved in with my future husband. 

A music loving girlfriend was a huge influence that first year. Yoka came from an interestingly broken family on the edge of Bohemia, and was infinitely more world wise than I was. She in turn was fascinated by the sight of my parents singing together while doing the dishes, after 20 years of marriage. 

Inspired by Yoka's influence I allowed myself to discover sex. This was quite a daring thing to do in the pre-pill no-choice fall of 1961. After a lifetime of trying, in vain, to pass as normal, I adopted being on the edge and felt deliciously Bohemian.

Happiness was not fashionable in that milieu. Existential angst was. I tried hard to be sophisticated by pretending to understand movies like The Last Year in Marienbad, Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel. 

In Yoka's tiny room, up 6 flights of stairs in the tower on the corner of the Postjesweg, just before the bridge to the Kinkerstraat, we played Vivaldi and Bach, Schumann's piano concerto and George Brassens, and talked about Life, the Universe and Love, which at that age is Everything. 

Eventually my heart was duly broken, and I did not get much else done that year. It was time well wasted. 

The next year there was of course no scholarship. I tried becoming a student nurse. In my room in Sint Elizabeth's Gasthuis, in lovely old downtown Haarlem, I replayed the soundtrack from the previous year and spent my off time digesting the experience. Those years were the only time in my life when I'd put on a record (remember vinyl?) as soon as I found myself home alone.

Fast Forward to the Sixties (the real ones, which started after the death of JFK) and early seventies. With the exception of the Beatles, who we loved, the sound track is a blur. One knows names, and hears things on the radio, but even though we lived through the golden age of rock and roll I didn't take much in. 

I was in my forties before I discovered that Rock Around the Clock had not been Elvis Presley's greatest hit.

So, fast forward to today. I am home alone, Chris is driving our fellow grandfather to hospital in Kelowna (about 31/2 hours away). I  decided it was time to fill some gaps in my musical education. Classic Rock 101, courtesy of YouTube. 

I listened to Stairway to Heaven. Loved the sound, guess you have to be under the influence of substances to get the lyrics. And found out that Led Zeppelin was NOT from California. Honestly, I had no idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8

The word for waste was sin.

Waste of food seems to be the theme of the day. I railed on Facebook about an event in Nevada, where the Food Police forced the destruction of precious food that was supposed to feed 72 people.

I was literally stuttering and sputtering with indignation. You know the system is insane, but the reality surpasses one's wildest paranoid fantasies.

Read about it here: http://farmtoconsumer.org/quail-hollow-farm-dinner.htm

Then Melanie on Multiply had an item about frugality, that prompted a comment about the incredible waste of packed school lunches. The thought of all those apples in the garbage makes me REALLY MAD.

During my childhood the memory of the Winter of Famine, 44/45, was still quite alive in the collective mind. Food waste was totally not done. 

On the rare occasion that something did go to waste, my mother or grandmother would say: "Wat zonde".

Zonde, dear readers, is the word for SIN.

Only recently have I realized how profound that expression was.

March 2011

So that was March 2011.

Full of violent happenings in the world, quite peaceful here in my blessed neck of the woods. We had a classic Kootenay winter this year with lots of snow. Traditionally March is the month that it melts, and so it was. The beginning of the month was still quite wintry, but with some lovely sunny 

days.

.s

The snow roof does a beautiful job of shedding the load, without anyone having to climb up on it.

We did have quite a pile in front of the porch.

I have been scandalously lazy this winter. Even the planned indoor chores, like getting the scanner/printer installed, did not get done. Daily yoga is a fond memory but alas, also on the list of "ought to". But I enjoyed the leisure. I did spend quite a few afternoons with my Parkinson-afflicted friend, so my existence had some use beyond pure self indulgence. Now the snow is almost gone.

Some bare ground is visible in the left for-ground. This is a block from home.

Here is some more. Believe it or not, if you have not seen the ground for a full four months this is an exciting sight. OK, when it comes to Nature I excite easily.

And what is this? A blade of grass? Trumpets please!

Eranthis, snowdrops and crocuses almost start blooming under the snow. The moment the load is lifted there they are.  Eranthis make me smile not only for their own sake but because of the fond memories. They came from the garden of a special local lady, now long gone. 

Edna Irving used to be the matron of our local hospital in its heyday, when surgeries were performed there and babies were born. When I got to know her she was well into her nineties, still living in the home she and her husband had built, and suffering from Alzheimers. She had other helpers, I just filled in now and then during the lunch hour. In spring we'd leave the house behind and walk in her garden, full of hardy perennials. She never lost her joy in Nature and life in general, and was a pleasure to be with. 

Wherever Edna is, I am sure there are flowers around, and she just might bump into my dear mother while tending the garden. They were both daughters of an all-girl family, had 2 boys and 2 girls, were head nurses and passionate gardeners, and lived well past 90.

 I can think of no nicer way of being remembered than by blooming in someone's garden.

Edna and Elizabeth, these are for you.

The first time it is just April 2

Originally posted on Multiply April 2 2010

April 2.

For the first time in my life and that of my siblings it is just another day in early spring.

April 2 was our mother's birthday. Mom's birthday was always a big deal, she made sure of that!  She died a few weeks after her 93rd birthday last year, after a long, productive and mainly happy life.

She was years ahead of her times. Her happiest years were her fifties, sixties and even seventies.

She lived in a place that she enjoyed, (Nieuw Loosdrecht, for my few Dutch readers) surrounded by natural beauty and with the chance to garden.The times had caught up to her, and she had a late brilliant career as the vice-director of nursing in a large extended care facility. Dad had resigned himself to her new status, and after retirement they were both active in the community and enjoyed almost 20 good years.

The mind got a bit fuzzy around the edges in the final years, and losing Dad in 2000 was tough of course. My sister Margreet, who lives nearby, was the Rock for both Mom and Dad for many years. Mom's good job made many trips back and forth to Canada possible. She often came with Margreet.

Above: a vigorous game of "Globe Trotters", the family favorite board game, with the grandchildren and Margreet. This must be the early nineties, looking at the  kids. That makes Mom in her mid seventies here, looking darned good!

I had been planning to do a sort-of eulogy thing here, but it is getting late. I must be able to get into the garden tomorrow. Mom would understand.

Ingredients for a great meal

Originally posted to Multiply January 17 2010

Collect the ingredients.

Pull from freezer: Vegetable stock made from peelings. Chicken stock made from the carcass of one of Linda's home-grown chickens. A baggie of frozen dill, bought from market buddy Colette last summer.

Get from pantry closet in the hallway: Organically grown onions, from the neighbors in Washington State. Home-grown potatoes and garlic. A can of B.C. wild pink salmon, a can of clams, origin dubious but we can't be perfect.

Get from fridge: Organically grown carrots from our heroic local farmer Janet Spicer. Celery from the supermarkt, "corporate organic."

From spice cabinet: A bay leaf. Whole mixed peppercorns, Caribbean seasalt. A few cloves.

Invoke the memory of Dot, my boss at the Frontier Drive-Inn in Grand Forks who taught me how to make Clam Chowder in 1972. I think of her every time I make it. I cannot remember Dot's last name, though the government of Canada could help out. She was one of my sponsors when we became Canadian citizens in 1975. I remember her tears when she found out our first-born had died a day after birth. It turned out she had lost her first baby too. When you break a leg suddenly the world is full of broken legs. So it was with dead new-borns and other failed first pregnancies. We digress.


Ingredients and memories collected, now for the most crucial part: turn on Sunday Morning radio.

I absolutely love CBC's Sunday Morning. It is a leisurely paced program presented by the donnish honey-voiced Michael Enwright. It has room for documentaries, a bit of music, unhurried interviews and thoughtful analysis of what's happening in the world. It lasts from 9-12, and is a perfect accompaniment to the making of soup.

I even saved the extra potato water for baking bread tomorrow. Sometimes I am so virtuous I can't stand myself.