cats and crickets

my kid fell asleep in the backseat on the drive home, long day, late bedtimes. I parked at home but left the headlights on and turned up the country station, always makes me maudlin. A single lamp on in the kitchen, and then the low headlights, there are horses in the pasture out there in the dark, the cats emerge into the light to greet me, then go back to hunting crickets and shrews and spiders under the stairs. I unload the car from a shopping trip the Island, from the dim house, through the dark, to the headlights of the car, following the country music, it makes me want to dance, drink, stay up late, climb roofs, show off my legs with boots, it gives me energy, wakes parts of me that have been shoved to the edge of extinction since before motherhood, since that previous life. But that's not the maudlin part; listening to country music, alone in the evening but honestly anywhere, anytime, brings up incredible sadness, mostly for Ham and I. It is so linked with those early days, early years and they were intense. All my bones want to two step, in the grass or a deck or a quiet kitchen, just on the edge of porchlight, headlight, kitchen lamp's glow, with crickets and cats in the dark edges and horses snorting and farting further out. I miss liking each other. We used to learn new dance moves together, practicing over and over, flips and spins, when we trusted each other, when we actually came into physical contact. We'd get compliments at fairs, rodeo dances, bars, parties. That previous life.

9pm postering telephone poles

midsummer burnout, group project burnout, is it them or is it that I am an overfunctioner? I don't see how it's a bad thing to make things happen within the time frame the group has intended, and when others keep dropping the ball, I take on the project and make it happen, grinding my teeth and feeling resentful and further burrowing myself in my endless lists and sliding deeper into a To Do hole. I can see, a little bit, that it's an addiction, a pattern of mine, I can feel the pull of the familiar anxiety of keeping it all together, the lure of self sacrifice, plus high germanic standards plus the lived experience of watching my single mother keep a beautiful household while raising a child and working. I see it's doable, I would be failing if I didn't handle this well, it's not within my capacity, in no bone of my body, to let things slide, to forget the list, to leave things where they fall. But I do overextend myself. I guess I usually justify it culturally -"it's a germanic thing," "canadians' motto is 'good enough' so there's a disconnect there," but the proof is actually in how I feel, right now, deflated like a spent balloon, shuddering at the list, wanting to nap in the hammock but not letting myself, limbs heavy, no appetite, dreading Monday. Does the self sacrificing pattern come from becoming a parent figure to my parent, as a child? I see the pattern in my strange marriage situation too. Saying 'husband' feels strange on my tongue. More and more he's 'Felix's dad'. I needle felt watermelons for our activist group while watching world cup, stay up late handsewing brooch pins on them while watching herbalist plant monographs. The weekly garage saling continues, another addiction. Making core memories for Felix though. His mother waking him early with breakfast waiting in the car, list of addresses in hand.

Disappointed

felix and I came back to the yard from pruning back the blackberry along the driveway, after hamish had peeled out, drunk and irate, when felix found his dart board impaled by a huge round file, thrown angrily. he was just so disappointed, he kept saying, it's my dartboard...what the heck? he didn't seem confused or mad, just really disappointed in his father. Welcome to the club kid, to having shit broken randomly by this man. "here you are again, spending the whole session talking about him, what you can do to change his actions, what if? This is codependent, but I get it. Women, forever, have been doing whatever it takes. We buy time to save money, to find an escape route, to gather ourselves, till the kids are a bit older, till we find a place, we do what we can to keep the peace and to create a sense of stability and keep our stuff from getting broken for another day, have a peaceful dinner, etc. I get it." The racoons have been so relentless that we havent slept with the sliding door open as we usually do on warm nights, but it's actually become unbearable, so I move the cat food dish into the bathroom and drop the heavy curtain over the open door. my mama ears woke me to a soft sound in the night, immediately I knew it wasnt one of the cats, it was the sound of two little hands groping in the dark for the cat food box. I hissed loudly and there was a wild scampering. I've got ring tans, a blood blister, flea bites, blackberry scrapes, shin bruises, and some vet wrap around my hand covering a plantain poultice over a secateur slice got while pruning the grapes. The wisteria has fallen and is hanging over the kitchen window. The mama deer gets into the garden almost regularily, day or night, despite all my attempts at fencing. The morning and evening rounds through the veggies are trepidatious, my heart in my throat, expecting to count casualties. I literally put my beans to bed each night, covering them with big sheets, though I know that's neither slug or deer proof.

Dropping branches

a counselling session after a long time without, with the woman who for ten years has been advising me, listening to me, breaking into my dark corners, knocking things off my shelves and putting back the things worth keeping, swearing at just the right moment, knocking me straight and usually I'm crying but grateful at the end of it all, though bruised a bit. She would make a great deep tissue massage therapist. I'm tearing up over everything today, the day after, feeling a bit raw, without a hard shell on. Just sad, but not with any ego involved, or fear. Just grieving what could have been in my marriage, grieving the past, sad at the potential I know is there, but that most likely won't be reached. Sad for the refusal to do the work, sad for my son. Sad at all the chances I have given him, and still do, even when he's yelling in my face that I'm out to get him. All the songs on my massage playlist at work gave me the feels, even the pre hamish tunes, the Harry Manx from the last summer at Purden, alone in the yellow aspen fall, cleaning up the park in grey coveralls and in love with those little toyota pickups and a tall sassy ginger. A word, like a mantra, has settled on me to carry me forward, peace, and it's what I want, not necessarily seperation or togetherness, just the flowing absence of aggression and volatily and sudden mood changes and broken boundaries and feeling like I am a negotiator in a hostage taking, speaking calmly, so carefully neutral, keeping my tone and movements light as he roars up in the truck, throws equiptment around, open ipa tall can in the console, starts erratically throwing wild allegations, badgering an overheated felix to ride his bike some more on the hottest day of the summer so far. the exhaustion afterward he's peeled out as if I just had an encounter with a bear and managed not to run but to calmly back away. Peace is also the founding and central theme of my little activist group, it's what we rally around, the dove, the white, the opposite of rallying against war, rather for calm. A fitting personal goal. "you're trying to run together but one of you's a sprinter and one is an endurance runner. You're on completely different wavelengths. Love changes. Needs change. You birthed a child with medical needs and then had to parent your drunk husband who wonders why there's no spark. Your system doesn't know what's safe or not, everything is on high alert, and the purpetrator of your trauma is in your kitchen everyday asking for a hug and then swearing at you five minutes later. Of course you have health issues." I can't leave our child with him unsupervised, another layer of heightened danger surveillance for my nervous system. "So you'll for sure not be in the tree dropping branches for the hour and a half felix is with you, right? You'll find something else to do?" Yes of course, assurances, he's an arborist, what am I even worried about. I come back and felix is tear streaked with papa checking for blood because he dropped a branch on him from up in the maple. I can't say anything, 'but write it down,' says my therapist, 'just in case you need proof, worst case scenaros, it can get ugly.' I remember the moment I moved from Silver Creek, everything hurting my heart and the creek told me it'd be all ok, there was another place waiting for me. And now that I'm wanting to believe the same is true here, I spend time at our little creek, looking for the same assurance.

blue moon

a peaking of manic bubbly energy, community everywhere, a horse connection, a sick boy. in one of those rambling hundred year old Wildwood backyards, under an apple tree, various members of the rally group needle felting watermelon pins. Felix had a snack station under the table, played on the floatation device repurposed as a swing , investigated the old trike in the yard, reported back on the lupines blooming further back. We started talked to each other at the table about where we came from, saskatchewan, austria and the trapline, france. My new favorite person, pierre, mentioned something about having been a horse logger. We have known each other as rally allies for a year and a half, it's been a gentley unfolding friendship, but never did we think we had drafts in common. Replaying yesterday in my mind, I realize that we alienated everyone else for the next hour and a half, "you're STILL talking about horses?!" everytime Lorrie came back to the table. Talking made both of us miss the north and drafts and leather and brass and snow and hay and that hard work. We found a two degree connection via the Caravan Stage Company, and I pulled up old pictures on my phone of tandems, log skids, horse archery, me riding into my wedding on a big black percheron. my fiddle teacher way down the street on her bike, we recognize one another from a ways off, wave in passing. Felix gets a closer view and explanation of the flour mill and the nut grinder at the bulk refillery while I do my shopping, the owner gets me the sauerkraut from the basement that she hasn't put on the shelf yet. I spend the saturday noon hour with the rally group as we wave signs, shake our heads at the state of the world, hug and cry with strangers over global and middle east sorrows. The days are the perfect length, the mood is high, the skies clear. The creek meters behind the cabin is bubbly and robins call out and bumbles hum zum around, the garden is popping. Giant foraged salads are a dinner item again, as long as I eat lots of bitters and warm tea too, and there are early morning colouring sessions with my kid and he's lost his first tooth and wanted the tooth fairy to bring him a bean seed in the night. She did. We planted it. The kind was called Painted Pony. The sauerkraut at dinner smelled off to Felix, he questioned it and we convinced him it had just been in a hot car all afternoon and that it'd be fine. Maybe it was the dates he had later, that I hadn't returned yet, after I had seen vegetable oil on the ingredients list where it never was before. They smell like canola oil. Either way, as I was reading Charlotte's Web to him in bed, he said he had the feeling of sharp metal spikes in his stomach. He woke an hour later in more pain and then neither of us slept more than ten minutes at a time till 1 am, when he started vomiting and we moved out bedding to the bathroom floor. I blearily read through many many homeopathic remedy finders and symptoms lists while he writhed and moaned on a sheepskin beside me squeezed between counter and shower. We didn't make it outside till noon, but the pain has lessened. I don't think it's to do with his Hirschsprungs, and we may not need to go to the ER for IVs. He's so detailed in descriptions of physical symptoms. Later, he felt up to laying in the hammock tucked in while I did some gardening, planted the discounted peonies and the sunflowers I started inside ages ago. He was like a little butterfly cocoon. He does better inside though when he's sick. I'm the opposite. He gets to watch kids shows in bed, hamish is passed out next to him, and I'm sitting half naked in the blazing sun on my little deck, shady cedar forest to the left and too hot garden on the right. I dreamt of driving draft horses. Flies and dust and hard hooves and chestnuts, docked tails and hame balls adn tugs jingling, horse snorts and farts and big bellies.

front load

this is the manic time of year. part of my personal peak in an annual timeline. This is like my 10 or 11 in the morning. March and April were 8:30 -9. All the parts are moving well, the system is working, the engine is humming, things are getting done, front loading the day, the cycle, the year. I haven't really front loaded my life though, come to think of it, haven't done the heavy lifting early to spare me later, haven't quite set myself up for success. I don't learn from mistakes the first or second time round. I wake at 5 with the light, even in the rainforest here, it's pouring in the skylights, the sliding glass doors. I do some strengthening on the cork mat while felix and the cat sleep ever so cutely together, I'm trying to get rid of my flat mom bum and double butt crease, then I go out into the garden - my other child, my other job. Pick a yogurt container full of slugs, bring them to the frog pond, check on the overnight damage to seedlings I set out the day before, parsley, tobacco, elecampane, lettuce. I water, I clean up forgotten winter corners of the deck, I answer emails, I sell things on marketplace, I'm sorting, I'm tightening the loose ends. I want animals in the pastures so I listed the pasture for a horse and there's a huge response and it should be a lesson to me, less naval gazing and more forward action. By the time Felix and I are having breakfast, I've rewritten lists, scratched half the items off, massaged my child, prepped dinner in the slow cooker, decluttered, exercised, gathered and bundled herbs, gardened. Some days the energy fades by late afternoon, hence the slow cooker, on the days when it doesn't feel easy but rather like a race that starts the moment I wake up, but this week, it's all systems go, I've abandoned the attempt at early bedtime for my child and we just go till dusk, another slug hunt for when they emerge in the coolness, unplug the wifi on the way upstairs, reading a chapter of Charlotte's Web, pass out. This time of year, I feel like I am made of light, like I am afloat in it. The energy I have feels almost effortless. I get to channel it now and sink into the dark in the winter as part of the balance.

ten years

Ten years ago yesterday I met Hamish. And despite very conflicting and turbulent feelings between us, we did go out to the pub in honour of that anniversary, we wore what we wore then, the infamous horse shirt with pearl snap buttons, a tight dress with tall doc martens, we played pool, poorly. We lit a fire in the woodstove when we got home, plinked around on ukelele and guitar and went our seperate ways. We don't look too different than then, just I've got a haggard face, he's a little stouter. We're on the coast now, not dry Kamloops, he's not a firefighter anymore, though not for lack of trying. We didn't touch all evening, there was no roof climbing. There was though a little human with us, a white blonde with a bob haircut, a yellow vest with a pocketwatch, red cowboy boots, sipping his kombucha to make it last all evening, moving our crib pegs for us and counting points. He'd retrieve the white ball when it got sunk, he took turns with the cue, cheered us on. He's our main connection, that and our past, two shiny things with bog and quicksand in between.

mother's day

overheard conversations with a five year old on a ferry, specifically in the bathroom stall: being explained to that when one swings a bucket of liquid around really fast, it doesn't come out, explainging that this is centrifigal force and relating it to getting spun around by uncles and playground devices, sounding out the word minimum, explaining what it means in two languages, explaining that no one lives on this boat all the time, explaining what a captain is and what the crew are, explaining that no, there aren't any pirates roaming these waters, being explained to that said child had seen a pirate in town one day, and the theory was that the pirate was in powell river looking for a crew for his ship. The pirate was wearing a tie dye headband and blundstones. a little wooden shelf was installed above the little children's bed which used to be mine, on the shelf are a trilobite fossil, a horse's tooth, a horse's chestnut, a cracked open geode,a 4 inch length of bamboo, various blue, gold, and pink gemstones and a large quartz crystal. There is a beauty and balance to the way he arranged everything, and it's a beautiful glimpse into his inner workings and maybe his future self. There's another shelf, a small treasure cabinet with two little glass doors that open out. This one is arranged in browns and blacks: a skeleton key on a string necklace, a gold coloured pocket watch, aviator sunglasses missing the arms, an old leather encased german made light meter, Toby the Tram who's at least 50 years old, various red and brown and green gemstones and his 90 year old folding bellows camera. Everything is placed just so, with clarity and order and balance. I love gardening but I do wonder why sometimes. Today I felt truly as though I was being made a fool of by the plants I slave for. I spend so many hours at this and am mediocre in my results and really could be out hiking or restoring the cedar strip canoe, or doing geneology work, buy into a CSA instead. It's truly a relentless naive optimism that prevails over me, thinking that maybe this year my lettuce or carrots or strawberries will do great. I do have some luck - the kale is kind to me, feeding me and my clients month after month. The red currant bush is overwhelmingly packed, and the herbs and apples really take care of themselves. I really can't bring myself to buy and eat the supermarket veggies though, and hunting and fishing isn't taking place, so gardening it is. the contents of our car coming home from a day on texada, early May pleasures, armloads of lilacs in all shades, a new to felix bike bell scavenged off a rusting tricycle, black slabs of texada rock for the path, palestinian flags, bags of fresh lettuce, soaked clothes from watergun fights, dregs of hibiscus ginger mint ice tea in mason jars, mother's day rosemary plants, some corn starts, corn flowers, a tired boy. My movie star sunglasses and my grandmother's summer dress from the 50's.