modern woman

on the list of things to do today:

- shower, get dressed in business-appropriate attire 

- make coffee

- review materials for client meeting and make notes

- start a sewing project

- send off invoice for previous writing gig

- gather things into classy attache for meeting

- go to said meeting, discuss a series of four newsletter publications

- rush to mother-in-law's house and wrap all of her Christmas gifts for her

- eat dinner

- drive home

- pour a glass of wine

- finish sewing project

- sleep

the annual christmas gathering

In bed at 3 o'clock in the morning for the second night in a row and am feeling just as alert and wide-awake as I did this time yesterday.

Tonight my best friends came over and we drank mulled wine and ate way too much food. We gave each other Christmas gifts and baked treats and little handmade treasures. We talked and laughed until late. Our old jokes are still successful, but we continue to add stories, share experiences, and find common ground to string our decades-long friendships out even longer, year upon year. I sometimes think that we are not at all the same people we used to be -- that we've all learned and moved forward (or sometimes backward) and adapted to be a completely new set of people. And we're still friends, even now, after all of that adaptation. It's like being part of a family in that you really have no choice but to accept and rely on these people. It is a love we will always share.

After the food had been eaten and the presents had been given, we all gasped and gathered around the living room window to look out at the street as new snow fell out of the sky. After we'd just had a discussion about how disappointing it will be to have a brown Christmas this year. It felt like we were in a movie.

And now the dishes are all done (a miracle I had the gumption to do them tonight and not leave them until tomorrow, a mess of crusted-on remnants and wine-stained china mugs), and I've unplugged the lights on the Christmas tree and the strand I'd draped across the top of the piano. I've brushed my teeth and put on my coziest pyjamas and have crawled into bed.

It has been a most excellent winter's night.

the day before a christmas party

Today while the dog comes in and out of the room sighing, I am attempting to be productive. I ploughed through 40 work emails, managed to have a shower (a special delight, I know). Now I'm going to try to clean the whole house, all at once -- a task I have never been good at accomplishing.

pre-christmas malady

After a weekend of fighting it, I've succumbed fully to the flu.

Meanwhile, the dog is restless -- she wants to go for long walks and have me scramble around with her in the yard, but I can't do those things until I can get myself out of bed. Even at this second, she is licking my fingers while I type and nudging my hands with her nose. And her long tail is curled around my feet like a snake.

And the house sits in disarray and the emails pile up in my inbox.

The sun is shining on the snow in the yard, though. If there were any birds to sing, they'd be singing, I'm sure.

also, today:

I watched the newer Pride & Prejudice. I did it while starching snowflakes (which, by the way, is an entirely too long and involved process and takes much more time than you'd think).

The landscapes in that movie are breathtaking. Eric came home halfway through and sat with me and didn't make fun of me when I mouthed some of the dialogue along with the actors. And how I kept narrating like my dad does during movies.

But it was lovely and makes me think back to sitting in a cafe in my little hometown, devouring the second half of the book in one afternoon. That was the first time I'd read it, and the first time I'd ever been served a real coffee with latte art. And I sat by the window, drenched in sun, drinking coffee and reading for hours. What a perfect memory.

update on a little to-do list

things accomplished december 9th:

- finished crocheting the pink scarf
- starched three snowflakes
- purchased Christmas tree

and a bonus: took the dog for a two-hour walk through a neighbourhood I hadn't walked through yet.

so the day wasn't a bust.
and I'll try again tomorrow for all the other things.

an honest list

to do on friday, december 9th:

- respond to all of the work emails and all of their associated tasks
- make a test batch of vanilla-cinnamon candied nuts
- finish crocheting the pink scarf
- starch four snowflake ornaments
- clear off the desk
- read the National Geographic impulse-bought at the gas station
- purchase a Christmas tree

abandoned farm

Yesterday I took my horse on a ride (or rather, he took me) through a new winter landscape. A countryside we haven't explored before. Winter this year has come on gently; no parka, no scarf wrapped up to my eyeballs. And the snow -- it's different this year. The stubble of last year's crops rises above its soft surface. It only lies deep where the forest protects it from the wind (and we rode through there, too).

I kept looking around and thinking about how things lie dormant. How they never really die, they just close themselves up and wait. There is nothing more patient than winter trees. They know the verdant life they hold inside of themselves, and they close it up and hold it tight and wait. They hold in their crooks the brambling nests of hawks, empty -- abandoned. The forest waits in silence for a season it knows in its bones will come again.

Unsure where to go in this unfamiliar wood, we followed a fence line, which took us past an old farm. The house was small, but two stories, and had at one point been painted yellow. The windows were all dark, some smashed in. Everything looked broken and warn. The shed had a collapsed roof; the big red barn had collapsed from underneath itself: the loft and roof were still intact, but the base of the structure was gone. The snow in the farmyard was undisturbed.

I looked at this scene and imagined who might have lived there. A family, in the house they built themselves and painted yellow. A clothesline, a dog. Kids running out to the barn to do their chores. Pioneers. Hard work. Their prairie lives, like the one I lie awake and think about late at night. Forging a home through the wilderness, through a stark winter with only a wood-burning stove to warm them. Only their determination to make things work.

Where did they go? Why did they abandon their life on this farm? Everything looked so right. Like it had once been idyllic. Can it ever return?

I wondered if someday someone would come across my own home and wonder the same things about the place we've left behind. What will they know about my life?

tread softly

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths,
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

a blessing and a curse

A benefit of working from home: watching BBC documentaries about space while doing the more mundane tasks of the job.

A curse: an inevitable descent into insanity.

missing

This morning the dog is anxious.
She paces from room to room, whining a little,
unsure of where to lie down or what to eat.
I don't feel anxious at all. Instead,
I am missing. The gerund and the verb.

goodbye

Goodbye, my small friend. You were a brave little soul. Your wings were swift and your song was sweet.

I will always miss you.

sunday

began with an intense time of community and contemplation, wherein I mentally reviewed my lifeproblems again, and tried throwing them away with a stone into dark water.

and then family and friends gathered in my kitchen to eat together, feeding my desire for closeness with others, helping me crack out of the shell of isolation I've been piecing up around my bed, from which I've been living my life, for the most part.

and then cozying up with many blankets and pillows and a warm puppy to read a book that's been on my list for five years.

and, I hope, a nap to help erase the many hours I spent lying awake last night, looking at the sliver of light the streetlamp makes at the edge of the blinds, wondering why sleep is always so elusive to me, timing myself to see how long I could go without moving, without opening my eyes.

a certain kind

I am the kind of person who starts lunch for the next day in the slow cooker at 2 o'clock in the morning because I'm up anyway and I might as well. Now the house will smell like pulled pork all night while we sleep.

on getting out of bed and making real choices

Today is a day for getting down to business. For making coffee and writing that article and sending for approval. For making good on my professional promises and being a real grown-up. And also for buying Christmas lights and supervising while Eric climbs on the roof to put them up. And then for going to a rodeo (!) with three old friends, and for getting the chance to wear my cowboy hat and think about life on a ranch. It will be a good day.

Much better than yesterday.

friday night project

after:

calling my mom to ask in which direction one should cut woven fabric, then
deciphering which of several presser feet was actually the zipper foot and
figuring out how to put that foot on the sewing machine, then
breaking the needle sewing the zipper (i guess i was wrong) and
going out to the car to get the extras (why did i have them there?), then
determining how to exchange a new one with the old and
dropping the old broken needle tip on the floor several times, then
making a big mistake and ripping out an entire seam and
fiddling around with wonky corners and crooked edges, then
making another mistake and ripping out another entire seam and
finally turning the project and realizing i probably did one part wrong, then
deciding that it didn't really matter all that much,

i created with my own hands one small zippered pouch.

journal excerpt: new brunswick

We camp in Fundy National Park. It takes us several drives of the campground loop to pick what we consider the ideal site. After the tents are set up, we hike down to an inlet. The tide (the largest in the world) is in, so the inlet is full of seawater, and it's calm and warm. Amy and I swim and Eric skips rocks. 

Afterwards, we stand dripping water from our hair, our bare feet making prints in the rocky sand. We're waiting for a family of hikers to stop admiring the waterfall and ocean inlet so that we can change out of her bathing suits in the bushes. Amy remarks that she feels so alive standing here by the sea in her bare feet, and I know what she means.

Later, while Eric eats granola bars and naps in the car, Amy and I hike through the woods to a waterfall. It is, of course, beautiful. We take photos, but I don't know how to change the shutter speed, so my photos could be better.

On the hike back down, I happen to look down to see a small purple flower, lit by a tiny square of sunlight coming through the canopy like a spotlight. I am struck by its simple beauty, its tenacity and innocence. A delicate thing growing up through rock and moss in the dim understory.

By the time I get the camera out, the sun has moved and the moment is gone.
This precious moment of pure light probably happens once per day, and I am blessed enough to have seen it. 

Some beautiful things are just gifts not meant to be preserved. 

the first of november

It turns out my plan of reading-dogwalking/thinking-writing is not working. I am too distracted. Also, walking the dog is more about training her to be awesome and less about drumming up poems and reorganizing my gentle melancholies into something productive. Still no writing. But I have thought about writing (does that count? Probably not). And at some point I will endeavour to execute my prior plan.

Meanwhile, this afternoon I am doing research for a new freelance job. I have to go tonight to interview rich strangers, and I am afraid. Because of my policy of courage, I agreed to the task. And also, because I am broke.

Right now the dog has been put out in the yard to play with her friend, Maggie, and it is time for me to get down to business.

a method of operation

I have had enough with feeling this way. With my lazy, unfocused lifestyle and this inexplicable melancholy. The lack of writing anything real. The lack of creative ambition. The desire to lie in bed all day, every day, which doesn't seem to ever lift.

Here is the new method of operation, to be practiced every day upon waking at a reasonable hour:

1. Read something. Anything, for any period of time.
2. Take the darling puppy for a walk, and during this time, think. About what I've read, or what kinds of things I want to write and how I'll write them.
3. Write something. Anything, for any period of time.

And then, of course, I'll do some actual work for pay and continue doing all of the necessary things, like showering and buying groceries and contributing to society.

Lost Child

When I was very young, I lost my mother
at the mall. One minute we were together
in the dollar store; the next I was standing
at the store's entrance, crying
next to a stand of cheap sunglasses.

I am no longer a child. I have adult things
like a mortgage and a career and a husband.
But still I flounder, searching up and down
the aisles of a place too big for me to know,
finding nothing. Giving up.

Going back to the start and hoping to be found.

the first saturday in october

This morning I rode my bicycle to the market and came back with a very full basket of ingredients for stew, wine made from Alberta Saskatoon berries, a tall and leafy sage plant, and a bag of the smallest, most beautiful pears I've ever seen.

And now I'll do a few good hours of real work. I've got video contests to administer and an e-newsletter to write and a host of social media (not mine personally, a client's) to update with clever and upbeat remarks about autumn and registration deadlines.

I am resisting the urge to curl under blankets with ginger tea and All Creatures Great and Small (a charming and silly diversion).

I will resist the urge to get bogged down by all of these feelings of heaviness I've been having.

And I've got cubed pork thawing on my counter to be made into my first stew (and I feel brave for making a stew my mother doesn't usually make). Hers was a staple of my childhood, something warm and thick and hearty to be eaten at Sunday night family dinners. My granddad would warm his slice of bread on the side of the stew pot, and I've copied him all these years. But this stew is just for my tiny, two-person family, and I feel like a change.

wilderness

in autumn i am a wandering thing
in broken-in boots
on horseback
rambling

through country i do not own
(and why should we
own what is wild?)

if i disrupt the forest
with hoofprints
between aspen
it will make a change
(in some way)

this country is a gift
and i am not to misuse it

but it keeps calling me out

or rather, in

how do you roast a beet?

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.


- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

on being productive:

have coffee out with Eric
buy a birthday present
buy thread for sewing
clean kitchen
clean office
hang new curtains
laundry (two loads)
get rid of all of the dead plants (there are eight)
stir the compost
put away gardening things
try to hang new shelves
bake sweet potato muffins
make dinner (even if it's breakfast food)
start sprouting a pineapple
watch a classic movie

These things happened today. Eric mowed the lawn and raked half of it. And he vacuumed the floors and displayed his strength and manliness by holding two six foot wall shelves up on the wall at once so I could see what they'd look like.

This is a start.

fall

today the air was crisp
and i was out in it
i learn more every day
how to appreciate it
the beauty of it
the gift of it

a truth

This is the truth of it: I feel sad.

I had a lovely weekend with my best friends on our annual pilgrimage to Spruce Meadows to sit in the sun together and watch beautiful horses jump incredible courses. It has always been a carefree time where we can be ourselves and be involved in something we've always loved, and the thing that brought us together as friends in the first place. I am grateful for their company. I am buoyed by all of the laughter this weekend, and the fact that this trip still delivered on its promise of being wonderful.

But going there always makes me re-evaluate my life with horses (which used to just be my life). What am I doing with my horse? Will I ever show again? Who will coach me? Will my friends come too? Will anything ever be the same? Am I truly alone in this, after so many years of doing it together?

I often worry that I am truly incapable of letting go of the past and moving forward on my own.

Mostly I just miss her, and that is a truth that will remain forever. A sadness that seems to stretch onwards out of sight.

on the grasshopper and cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
-- John Keats

duldrums

some days
you must trade
data entry
for riding
on a sun-dappled lane
with a friend
you've had for a while

today is not
one of those days

value

Lunch today with my sisters downtown.

This is unproductive, but valuable none-the-less.

I will be productive this afternoon.

things that are wrong (and right)

I am having some problems.

There is the headache. It has been there, in varying degrees of ugliness, for three weeks. Mostly it's neck pain radiating up the back of my skull. Sometimes it reaches my temples. One awful night, it made it all the way to my eye sockets and down my jaw. When Eric pressed on a muscle on the back of my neck, I felt pain radiating up through the roof of my mouth and into my sinuses.

But this is not the worst pain. What is worse:

I have not felt like a writer.

No poems. Or anything.

After seeing so much, there are not any words. I think my heart has absorbed the great wilderness I have seen. I am grateful for those wild places, but although I've been inspired to appreciate, I have not felt inspired to write.

And I thought I would.

This summer, I don't recognize my own voice. After I write something, I know that it doesn't sound like me. The thing that distinguishes one writer from another, that most important thing: voice. And when I read old poems of mine, the ones I liked enough to make books out of, I feel foolish. Foolish and I don't know what my own voice sounds like.

And I have regrets. I pictured myself in my little home writing studio: the rolltop desk, the pussywillows, the clear light through the window, me in there operating my own little business. Going to work in the morning to that back bedroom. Sitting on the weird, clunky futon to think things over between bouts of real work.

But it's too cluttered. The futon's covered in junk and the desks are a mess. The pussywillows remain hopeful and sweet on the windowsill, but that is all. The peace lily languishes in its desert pot.

It is true that I have paid bills with money from writing and editing, but it isn't enough and my words do not sound like me. I find this disturbing.

And I have struggled with productivity.

I didn't cut the peonies when they were blooming outside in the front bed. I didn't even support them. I just let them bloom, droop heavily to the ground, and die. I could have relished their enormous happy faces, but I let them turn to the ground. They're hard as rocks, now, the dead blossoms. Like brownish-red softballs of my own neglect.

I have two new potential freelance jobs, waiting at the other end of the phone I haven't picked up. I have no reason not to call. To introduce myself (and we've already spoken through emails) and be a grown-up with a real job and life and everything, but instead I've just flipped aimlessly through cookbooks on the couch, thinking about soups that take all day and an endless parade of baked goods. What is wrong with me?

The insomnia which plagued me off and on all winter has returned in summer form. I am sending emails to people at 4:30 in the morning, because I am too anxious to sleep; I am anxious about all of the things I should have been doing when I whiled away half the day lying in bed, telling myself "thirty more minutes" over and over.

And I worry about not doing the right things to make Eric happy.

And the idea of tidying the house every day is inconceivable. And the sheets need to be washed. It seems this summer something always needs to be washed.

These are mostly problems that could be fixed. If I could just make myself have some more ambition, or if I could at least exhibit some control over my own sloth-like behaviour, or something.

I cannot remember the last time I submitted anything anywhere to anyone.

However:

I have ridden horses through green fields at a full gallop, I have gone swimming in prairie lakes and the Atlantic ocean, I have seen stars against the blackness of the sea and sky together, I have felt sun-saturated and sleepy in early evenings, I have baked pies for my family and felt pleased with myself, I have been married one summer, and most importantly, I have felt blessed.

And these are things which I truly love.

But something has to change this fall, or I will wither away in our little house, voiceless and unproductive in such a messy bed. This cannot be the nature of things.

free book sale

They were giving away books to keep at the library. I expected hordes of people to be there, ravaging the shelves, but what I found was an utterly silent room.

There were four people there. We all just silently shuffled around from table to table.

I touched so many books, felt their weight, ran my fingers across their pages and spines. I was experiencing their gravity, connecting with their physicality as much as with their words. I was aware that a wonderful moment was occurring, right then, to me.

When I left, my arms could barely contain my finds:

Without by Donald Hall 

The Door by Margaret Atwood

Embryo Words by Margaret Lawrence

Spin Dry by Greg Hollingshead

Island by Alistair MacLeod

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay

A Likely Story by Robert Kroetsch

All of Baba's Children by Myrna Kostach

Since Daisy Creek by W.O. Mitchell

Enduring Prose by various authors (among them are Churchill, Stephen Leacock, W.O. Mitchell, Plato, and Leo Tolstoy)

and several back issues of Other Voices.

My happiest find was Without, a book I've never owned but have read several times. The first was during research at the library for a paper on the connections between grief and creativity. I read the whole book in one sitting, hunched over in a chair at a table in the study section, pulling my hat down lower on my forehead to hide my tears.

These are poems that tore right through me. They bear such personal significance to me that as I read them, even now, I think, "I have written that exact thing." I have thought a long time about grief.

Each of these books is such a lovely surprise. It is good to have them as my own. It is good to hold them, to think about so many Canadian authors (and some others) and place my hands onto their landscapes.

It was a good day.

a soul place.

There are so many places to love in the world, but this one might always be my favourite.

canada is a big, wild place

now i've been all over.

now i've felt an icy ocean crashing

over my body   rocks slipping

beneath those numbed feet

which belong to this eastward wanderer

i have stepped over acorns

and fossils in rocks 

thousands of years old

to stand on the shore of a lake as big as an ocean

one in a series of freshwater seas.

now i've seen the best sky God has ever created

the living breathing thing of it

so bright i thought it would fall

down on me   small on the atlantic shore

my heart is a fist in my chest

which has opened completely

it longs for vast wilderness

those secret forests it had never known

and still   though the land was more

than i ever thought it could be

and there could never be enough time to explore it

when i moved from canadian shield

to my wide open prairie

my heart felt more glad than ever

it could only sing out across those fields

sloped by river valleys   pooled in by lakes

wandered by deer and coyotes and cowboys

it was flung free across that expanse of gold and green

and ran clear into the crisp line of horizon

and is left to echo into that enormous upwards-falling sky

now i've been all over

and now

it is time to come home.

outstretching

We live in such a magnificent, wild place. I have seen so much of it, felt seawater and lakewater rushing over me, walked through boreal, deciduous and coastal forests, felt cramped in our most crowded cities and felt small in the vastness of our wilderness.

One night in Prince Edward Island, I stood on a field next to the ocean with its ever-rushing crash of waves -- a sound so constant and easy that it seems almost like rain -- and looked up at the most spectacular stars I've ever seen. Not even my enormous Alberta sky could compete. As I stood on this island looking up at the sky pinpricked so heavily with light it almost looked like everything in the heavens was moving with the flow of some supernatural force, I thought about the distance between me and my home. Such vastness lie between us, my prairie and me, and I felt so glad to have treaded on so much of it. 

So often it is good to feel tiny compared to our universe, and it is this insignificance in the face of that wide field of undulating stars in a place so far from my home that makes me know that I am blessed. That moment, a sleepy stumble across a field in the middle of the night, catching sight of bright constellations even on the horizon and tipping my face skyward, that happenchance encounter with the works of God's hand, is my experience to have, and I will have it forever. I am blessed.

Thank you, Canada, for keeping so many wild and historic places safe for me to visit. I have been to nineteen national parks and historic sites so far. I can't wait to explore the rest. 

West Coast and our mighty North, I am coming, I am coming.

I am almost on my way.

space to fill

sitting in a hostel in quebec city thinking about ways to be a better human being: to make better use of my time, to appreciate more, to be more full.

there is a lot of space between home and quebec city to fill.

cross country

Tomorrow, we are going to get into our little car and drive clear across the country.  I know my heart belongs on the land, and I am so happy to be able to free it into the western sky, bring it down to the rocky earth and deep lakes of lower Canada, and let it skip out over the Altantic ocean.  It wants to sing with excitement; it hums its anticipation in my chest.

he and i will wear sunglasses
hold hands in the car
stare out at a slowly shifting horizon
until we reach the sea

We will carve a path across the land, through such an enormous, wild and beautiful place, until we cannot go any further.  And I will keep my eyes open as long as I can and take in as much as I can until my heart and head are fullfullfull of our wilderness, our boundless potential.  We are so lucky.

the pigeon in the road

today in the middle of the road i saw a decapitated pigeon. it was lying on its back, clawed feet slack, downy feathers viridescent in the way pigeons' feathers sort of shimmer like northern lights.

it was startling.

i wondered where its head went.

and these days i feel the same as the pigeon in the road. not that i feel dead -- just that i wonder where my head is, too.

here is the way to live your life

When you should be in the city, in the thick of things, driving in cars through congested streets, the air hot with engines and exhaust, leave.

Drive out to the lake with your mom, don't even listen to music on the way, just talk to each other.

Make lemon-saskatoon-berry muffins and drink a beer on the deck.

When you know you should be working, do a little bit -- it helps if your mom sits at the big kitchen table with you and works on her sewing project at the same time -- but then go for a walk up the beach when she suggests it.

Stop judging your own body. Change into your new bathing suit, look in the mirror, think "this is what I look like," and move on.  

Lie down on the beach and read a book while your mom sits under an umbrella commenting on the weather and let your skin feel the wind coming off the lake and the sun warming the backs of your legs and try to remember to stay in the moment, because your laptop awaits and so does the work and you've left a messy house at home with dishes on the counter, and you haven't been getting enough exercise, and you haven't made enough money this month, and you haven't had time to find a place for all of your disorganized things in your little house, and you haven't spent enough time with friends.

All manner of things will be well.

diversions

It's summertime and it's hot out and the house is a mess and the garden remains largely unplanted.

I feel busy and slow at the same time.  I am having trouble focusing, problems with productivity.  I feel guilty about my own relative uselessness, but at the same time I am loathe to finish tasks.

It is a strange and altogether uncomfortable feeling.

one-thirty

I am listening to the pet budgie climbing around in his cage in the dark, trying to get comfortable, unable to sleep.  I know he likes to sleep at awkward angles, legs splayed, head cocked, somewhere in the top corners of his cage.  Tonight the usual places just won't work.

I understand him well.

steps to living life today

in the midst of feeling like the least productive person ever

i will change out of my pajamas
i will get in the car
i will work the afternoon away

and then i will go on a long, rambling ride on my horse by myself or with friends, because that is something that i really like to do.

apres moi, le deluge

It has been raining for four days.

Last night we stood on the front porch and watched the downpour.  Rain you could hardly see through.  The tiny pepper plants looked dismayed.  Overwhelmed.

This weather calls for drawing inward.  Curling up and settling in.

But there is no time for that.

eight days later

after all of that running around
passing plastic to so many cashiers
being so careful about shades of green
and blades of grass
and spots on apples

after such a string of late nights
and early mornings
and too much coffee
getting rollers in my hair
and nail polish on my toes

after such a long day
after seeing so much beauty
and feeling so much love
and wanting to fall asleep
for eighteen days

here is what is left:

your arm slung across my shoulders
in bed this sunday morning

your sleepy smile and slow kisses
and your feet on my feet to keep them warm

the promises we made to each other last week
and the rings on our fingers

last saturday

This past Saturday, I got married.  Outside, under a beautiful sky in my home town with my family and best friends all there to see it happen.  

And now I get to move all of my things (those familiar bits of my life I've carried around with me all these years) into our cozy house and start to make it our home.

I think about the house I grew up in and imagine that one day this house will be like that -- the backdrop to so much living.

I love Eric so much.  I can't wait to find out what our life will be like.

tomorrow

ten days until i make some lifelong promises.

five years since the day my life went down a different road.

people die and are born, make differences and grow old, stay young.  the world never stops, not ever.

five years.

so it's still true.

five years
and you're still gone
and it's still true
that you always will be.

i will never stop trying to wish you back to life.

anxiety

If I am being rational, I will admit that there is a numbered list of things I have to do, and that I can, reasonably, accomplish them all.

I am frustrated by my anxiety.  It overwhelms.  It renders me useless.

The solution to having "too much to do" is neither to try to do all of them at once, nor the other option: curling into a ball in my bed and doing none of them.

I feel unproductive.  Guilty.  Absent-minded.  Nauseated.

When will it be July?  When can we get into our little car and drivedrivedrivedrive until we reach the shores of the other side of our country?  When can I eat an ice cream cone at a gas station in the middle of the prairies and think about how my life contrasts with the life I'm living now?

Things pile up.

the world is home to many distinct beauties.

This weekend was spent in the wilderness, where my heart so longed to go.  We hiked past creeks through the mist, hoods up, droplets forming on the tips of our noses.  The mountains were snug with clouds so low I thought we were a part of them, perhaps.

When I returned to the city, I discovered the smell of wet pavement outside and fresh laundry hanging all over the house to dry indoors.

And the best two things of all: the apple tree in the backyard had burst into full, white, radiant bloom, and my love was there to say, "welcome home."

the house at night

our house is like a ship

it creaks, groans, climbs

swells, is beaten

by wind, feels small

and i am small

within it

my ear to the wall

bare feet to the wooden floor

so this is what it's like

to be travelling

to a distant country

to imagine a morning

somewhere farther

across calmer seas

backyard

just in from the summer's first campfire:
hair smells like smoke, eyes burning slightly,
belly full of smokies and beer.

this is first of many sweet days
of convening outside with my love
and my friends

laughing at each others' jokes,
sharing micro-brews and mustard,
watching the dog run around the yard.

this will be a most wonderful summer.

happy morning

new buds on my backyard apple tree
make this morning with coffee in a green cup
happier still.

birthday

another year.

- troves of gardening supplies to nurture infant plants into edible adults
- american micro-brewed beers to drink around a campfire
- a bohemian-looking bag to put too many things in
- rain barrels and composters to make my yard look more like a hippie-haven than it already does.

i am feeling strangely melancholic (and have been all day) but i don't equate it to birthdays.  i know i've accomplished much.  i like the person i've become.

seam ripper:

you are a true friend.

on journalling

I am keeping a paper journal again.  It's been a long time.  I have been thinking these past few years that writing should have a purpose -- and there was no purpose in the recording of simple thoughts and daily activities.  Feelings could be better represented in thoughtful poetry.  Daily activities transcribed into creative nonfiction pieces.  If there were no deeper meanings to the things that happened to me and the ways I felt about them, they needn't be recorded.

I realize, of course, that this is not so.

I spent four years in school tapping every creative pool that I had.  Mining my life for stories.  Searching my world for images.  Thinking about lines of poetry on long drives.  I liked doing this, but it was all because I had to.  I took classes like "Narrative: Function & Technique", "Short Fiction Forms", "Publishing Poetry", "Creative Non-Fiction"... my raven self could only collect so many ideas.  Beyond what I had to produce, I was tapped.  There was no time for today-i-went-out-and-this-is-what-saw-and-this-is-how-i-felt.

There is time, now.

But I haven't progressed to the point where I sit down and write in my journal because that singular activity is the only one I want to do.  Most of my journalling is done while waiting.  Waiting for Eric to meet me for coffee, waiting for my take-out sushi, waiting at the doctor's office.  It is a way to kill the time.  But there are less useful and meaningful methods of passing the time, to be sure.

My journal this time is a red moleskine; I received it as a Christmas present two years ago and have been waiting for the perfect time to start it.  I had hoped there would be a natural pause in the progression of my life and that I'd know exactly when I would be standing upon the cusp of a new stage.  This is not how life generally works -- for the most part, you just live it, and then time progresses in such a manner that the "right time" to start a thing generally never obviously presents itself -- so I finally decided just to rip the plastic off and start using it.

An excerpt:

I am concerned about my garden.


I guess, first: I decided to plant a vegetable garden.  I have never successfully grown anything, ever.  This is an ambitious undertaking.


The materials are expensive.


Some of my seeds never germinated.


My tomato plants, who were the strongest of them all, are now showing signs of weakness.  A stunted growth.  Leaf tips drying up.


I am not sure how to proceed.


I just wanted to eat garden vegetables, to minimize my footprint, to become more connected with my food.


This might not work.  I will be disappointed.


Please grow, little tomatoes.


The last time I really kept a journal was almost five years ago.  Before university, and during a particularly dark period in my life.  I don't know if I'll be able to keep writing while I feel relatively normal.  In the past, I've always had to feel damaged in some way to want to write anything at all about my life, which is, in general, quite ordinary.

Then I was living in painful fear of losing a loved one, and after she died, living in constant grief.  Now I am living in fear of losing a tomato plant.

You just live life, and time progresses.  You might as well spend your wait-times writing in a red moleskine.  It really can't hurt.

small prayer

thank you
for another chance
to greet the day,
to wander through aspen and birch,
to break snow with hooves
and squint in sunlight.

starting again

today

i sat in the saddle
of a beautiful horse

followed goose-tracks
down a snowy road

and i felt fine

never mind

never mind:
a blizzard.

the snow levels the ground once more
spring puddles in depressions are now one blank plane

and Alberta's landscape will never stop changing
just when you think you know what it will look like
it turns and shows you something else.

a good sunday

Today I wore a dress in the sunshine and embarked upon the world to buy pots in which I'll plant little herbs -- mint, for cool, summertime drinks, dill for autumn pickling, and basil for many lovely things.  I stood for the first time on my the grass of my front lawn and envisioned poppies and raspberry bushes and pole beans snaking up a trellis so high.

The daffodils on the dresser are dying, but outside everything is slowly remembering how it is to breathe, to face the sun, to reach upwards and grow.

I am turning out to like the person I'm becoming this year.  I'm more thoughtful, more creative.  A better steward of the earth.  And I'm learning to how to be more like my mom -- nurturing and talented, self-sustaining and brave.

Tonight, I'm going to try to make chili for the first time.  I have plans to include all kinds of things in it that my mother never put in hers -- for that reason, mostly, I'm unsure of my success.

an end

This is not the end, just an end.  I have mixed feelings about the whole situation.  I can't help but feel sad.

I also can't help but feel free.

the next four days:

1.
making plans, careful choices
running headlong into the future
and holding hands in the car

2.
doing something for the last time
feeling nostalgic, drinking rum,
remembering the start of a wonderful thing

3.
togetherness and knowing it's easy
simple things like apple crisp
and a sunday stroll

4.
a new challenge, but also
splashing through puddles
with an old friend

wilderness

I am getting restless, feeling compressed into a tight fist.  I need a change.

I want to go away somewhere with actual trees that are growing because that's where the seed landed, not because a developer planned it to be that way. 

I would like to wear short sleeves and listen to birds and bugs and marvel in Alberta's sky.

I could really use some wilderness, now. 

april 1, 2011: springtime

so the city unfurls itself
finally
after being clenched in a tight white fist

outside:
the sounds of water running
(a sound almost forgotten)

remember the sight of a tiny green bud
being born, or waking up, or taking breath.

a freedom, a fear

so it's back to wondering where i might go and how i might get there.

upon waking to unpleasant weather

the bird is not chirping today;
he is all hunched and fluffed
and hiding one foot in his feathers.
he looks cold and tired
and slightly grouchy

outside is miserable wind
slush turning to ice and back again
the constant spindly bareness of trees
an unpleasant day marked by grey
and the sounds of cars going by

i feel the same as the bird,
who can't be bothered to sing
and only wishes to nest quietly
begrudgingly
breathing slowly and ignoring the day.

a distinct freedom

This is something about love, or an element that is like love, but exists someplace else.  It is one of the things I know to be true, and must therefore protect.  It's a gift.

I own a horse; he is almost ten years old.  For so many years, riding was the focal point that the rest of my life arranged itself around.  Even when I had other concerns: jobs, lost or never found loves, high school and its awkward pains and unfounded stresses.  Even while I began to love the man I would love forever, I remained steadfast to that first romance.  The smell of hay and the feel of coarse mane tangled through my fingers.  Leather boots and riding gloves, and after a long day feeling tired but not too tired to stand around in barn alleyways.  To linger in the yard, listening to the horses move around in their pens with a grace they don't know they have, and thus can never put on as an act.

For a long time my horse lived in a pen right below the big dipper and the north star.  I remember walking him out at night in the wintertime, seeing my breath and looking up at the constellations.  Alberta is so vast -- it is a wide and wild place.  I am lucky to have such a sky spread out its story for me.  I would stand in the driveway, lead rope in hand, staring up.  Not worrying.

The days stack up on each other, just building and building, slowly burying those sweet days and nights deeper below what I've deemed important to me now.  Farmers markets on Saturday mornings instead of riding lessons.  Dinner and beers on weeknights instead of standing under the stars, lead rope in hand.  There is nothing wrong with these choices -- these replacements -- and they're lovely in a different sort of way.  But my first love, its voice muffled by new days, wonders where I've been.

Tonight I lie awake, slipping my hand into insomnia's lukewarm palm, allowing the concerns I've pushed aside all day to gather around me like mayflies in the summertime and I think about moments I've had.  Moments of distinct freedom.  A freedom from sound and gravity and breath, and a freedom to keep trying again to get to that place.

A horse is a natural jumper, he wouldn't leap over the objects I put in front of him if he didn't want to.  I can't go that high on my own -- my feeble legs would never take me.  My own body isn't made for it.  But he can do it so effortlessly, so enthusiastically.  I am so grateful.

At the apex of every jump there is a moment distinct from all other moments, and it is so brief that for so many years I forgot to notice it.  An interstice that shuts out sound and fear and careful planning.  It's a fraction of a second.  It's nothing.  It's not any single thing, and it is perfect.

It is a distinct freedom.

I've left it for a long time, allowing myself to think it lives somewhere else.  I haven't found it again.

enough

remembering the promise of pussywillows
is growing ever more difficult
their smell and the walk through slushy streets
on the way home from market
is growing fainter, foggier

we're all frozen toes and block heaters
and hibernating these days
it is the first of march

this is growing tiresome

on growing

a stretch --
-- suppling
or something.

i will allow myself to be influenced.

horses

i would watch them for longer, if i could.
if life were long enough just to stand
at the edge of a fence at the end of the day.
when the sun is sliding toward the crest of that hill
and frogs begin humming their songs in the pond ---
there are no more manmade sounds.
i would watch the darkening gleam of their backs
in the fading light which turns white into pink and orange,
black into purple, brown into red.
when the smell of sweet hay bursts into my nostrils
i will be truly content to hear jaws move methodically,
hooves press softly into the spring's earth.
tails swish to reach buzzing flies,
and over the hill, coyotes cry, they howl
for their young to draw near, to curl golden warm bodies into dens.
these horses will gather to eat their hay;
they don't even know their own perfect grace.
perhaps life is long enough after all, for this:
a quiet song at the end of the day.

winter is not over

cold is a sharpness that presses in on all sides
a bed of nails
an inescapable truth

bright and gentle future

longing for spring, i step out into the world

careful on the ice, silly pretty shoes

no hat, happy to be touched by comfortable air

at the market i buy pussywillows for one dollar

and my spirit soars just to look at them

soft and promising and kind in a glass on the windowsill

tomorrow i'll take the saskatoons from the freezer

to make treats that feel like summer

and maybe step out into the world again, reclaiming.

a rocky start

These days I've been thinking a lot about bravery.  About how it is closely related to honesty.  How I am honest with myself but now lack the bravery to take action.

I want to sit in a sunny room, drink coffee, write poems and stories and make art with paper and thread.  Why would I ever do otherwise?

This year's had a rocky start.  I hope I make it better before summertime, because I can't let summer be ruined for anything.

to be honest

i traveled through a wide field on horseback

it was not hard at all to deafen all sounds

with wind in my ears like a force field

until my breath rasped out raw

legs and arms softly failed

hoofbeats a breaking rhythm    heat and life closes in

it always does     if you’re honest enough to stop

another letter to you, it's february 8, 2011

Dear friend,

Sometimes when I selfishly think of all of the worst things that have happened in my life, I think of you. I wish I didn't; I wish you were only the best thing, and nothing else.  But you were.  You were both -- the best thing when you were here, and your death the worst.

How can I still struggle with realizations that I am profoundly different because of the fact that you died?  My heart circles around the same drain.  I wonder how long before I put a plug in it.

All this is to say that I miss you.  I wish you were here to help me decide how to live my life these days.  This was something you were always good at.  Something I haven't been.

Love,

Deanna

vague couplets

the poems are falling into a pattern.

must read more.

to be brave

i dreamed you up again
the only way to see you now

endless wheat field and golden light
and your hair and your hands

you knew what to do
you always did

you told me what it was
but when i woke, i forgot

i would have to be brave
to be honest this time

this time and every time

february

craggy aspens stripped bare brace spindly arms against snow
they are white on white on white    ground air sky
along the sides of a country road i know so well
and i want to go there every day    at least in my mind
touch frost with my fingertips without getting burned
let the air crack into my lungs    thin and crisp like snapping twigs
but for now it's sludgy streets    red lights    walk signals
busy cafe and neon pizza signs emblazoned across the street
too many colours here  
not enough white

thirty below

frost branches on window panes
cold snap of knee joints and a settling of rock ice at the base of my spine
a stiffness
slowing
down

so this is how it feels to be the most tired i've ever been
the most desirous of some other life

birds in the window
no clouds.

in lit windows

walking home after dark i am an interloper
mostly alone in quiet    but afforded glimpses
into windows, warm inside, evidence of lives
of people having regular wednesday nights

kincaids hung above fireplaces
spider plant in the window trailing down
old christmas cards
an orange tabby
bookshelves
an ashtray
a candle

suspended in a moment outside moments
walking in between my own life and someone else's

soon i will be in my own moment, among my own things
a place i know without seeing    nothing to note here

a wreath i should have taken down
a green pillow
a bird cage
a ring

a fullness
a quietness

snowfall

and fall
       and fall
              and fall
and fall

untied winter boots
staying outside for way too long
having to pee and ignoring it
making snowforts in the hill
made by dad when he shovels the driveway
and my mother saying
don't go in there
it'll collapse on you
but it was just too perfect to let be

another sort of love

friend, you are loved. this is nothing new; you’ve had all of our love

for a long, long time. since we spent all our time riding horses
and drinking slurpees in the car, sneaking into bars and waiting around
for something that would resemble a real life. and then we all just became
grown-ups, or something like that. do you remember when?

i remember being right in front of the stage at a pub in a mountain town,
drinking beers and dancing and taking too many aerial self-photos, all crooked
and missing the edges, a crowd at the periphery we won’t remember.
do you remember how you told me then, yelling above the clamour,
that you loved him? a first admittance, the first step towards the best realization:
that you could be with this other person forever.

you and i have come so far from where we began:
from teenage silliness and the biggest heartache either one of us as ever known,
from drinking coffee and doing the crossword and holding hands during the eulogy,
from always knowing that we would love each other no matter what,
to learning something new: that there is another sort of love altogether.

this other sort of love, it comes with a big promise, the brightness of a future
you can rely on, a circle unbroken as the ring on your left hand.
this is the sort of love that you’ve been preparing for without even knowing it.
and you have your whole life to grow in it.

the first day

First real day in the new house and I am lying on the brand new bed, looking out the bedroom door at the china cabinet in the hall.  Eric has made sure to place Gumby behind the glass, arms spread wide, legs in a fabulous disco stance.  It's like he's singing, "welcome ho-ooome!" from inside the cabinet.  My head on the bare, new pillowtop.  I laugh.

He comes in, holding two pillowcases and one pillow.  He puts the first case on, chatting to me about washing machines.  He starts to put the second pillowcase on.

"Why are you putting that on?"

"This pillowcase?"

"Yeah.  You already put a pillowcase on that pillow."

"No, that's just a pillow cover."

"How is that different from a pillowcase?"

"It protects the pillow."

"Isn't that what a pillowcase does?"

"No, this protects the pillow, and the pillowcase---"

"What does it protect the pillow from?"

"It's in case your head explodes in the night."

"Okay, put the other pillowcase on, too, then."

This first day in our first house is also the day that marks five years of being together. We stand in the back porch, coats on, ready to trudge through the snow to find sustenance, and he arranges the hoods of my sweater and jacket so that they fold inside each other without bunching.  Just as he did five years ago, standing outside under the trees somewhere far away from this back porch.  He is older and stronger and better.  I feel so different.  This is our back porch.

This is something like a blessing.