Ice storm, aka “the day they should have cancelled school”
So, this has not been a productive couple of days. That photo, above, was taken this morning around 11am. It is dark, it is raining, the rain has frozen on all the branches, the sidewalks are treacherous, and, oh! School’s on! Except not for AppleApple (power outage), or CJ (power outage). Albus and Fooey were feeling very cheesed indeed when I dropped them at their very-much-open school.
We woke to no power and a rapidly cooling house. The kitchen was dark. AppleApple lit candles. I lit the gas stove (thank goodness for gas stoves!). But we couldn’t make coffee because we grind the beans every morning in an electric grinder. Hey, remember those old-fashioned coffee grinders with the handle and the little wooden drawer? We needed one of those.
I also may need to trade in my large non-portable computer for a laptop, I realize, on a day such as this. My programs and files are all locked up in iMac silence. But you know, all I can think about is the interview tomorrow, so my brain is basically distracted and inaccessible anyway. I am typing this at Kevin’s office, on a borrowed computer, with AppleApple by my side. There is power and heat here. AppleApple is whispering the many many many stanzas of Poe’s The Raven, which she’s decided to memorize for poetry month. As far as I can gather, this is only loosely a school assignment, and she could have chosen to memorize, say, a sonnet, but, no, she’s gone for an 18-stanza marathon. She has til the end of the month. She’s on stanza 11. The raven has made several appearances, and, she reports, has already spoken his famous line several times. “Nevermore.”
All I can hear is the whispering. I can’t concentrate. I’ve got nothing more, just now.
“Snow” day in April
Was relieved to get up early for yoga this morning, if only to escape the circular anxiety dreams.
But I was tired in yoga class. As I lay, half-awake, in the final shavasana, I thought to myself, nothing had better get in the way of my morning nap, or I’m not going to make it through today.
Huh.
Must have been a premonition. I drove home through the rain, thinking, the kids aren’t going to enjoy their walk to school today. And I opened my email to discover: SCHOOL CANCELLED! Apparently a massive ice storm was in the offing, though I can’t say it’s materialized as promised (which is not a bad thing, I realize). Frankly, all I was thinking was: with school cancelled, how am I going to get my nap???
I was desperate. I told the kids they could play electronics while I went back to bed. Worked like a charm, although those dreams were even more bizarre. I was on a train in Syria doing an aerobics class led by a Serbian instructor whose moves were comically complex. I couldn’t follow. I sobbed into my seat cushion (being on a train, remember), a feeling of fear and despair permeating the dream, which I understood was a dream, and I worried in the dream about having a dream that would make me sob.
And then I woke up, and cleaned the house. Electronics time over.
I stopped cleaning at lunchtime, in a really grumpy mood. I made a delicious homemade chicken noodle soup. I went outside and grabbed some ice photos. The photos aren’t terribly impressive, there not being much ice. As far as I can see, the cars keep whipping along our street without any trouble at all. But not to worry, the kids are safe, playing soccer in the living room and creating a Lego bomb in the upstairs hallway. It is now around the time I’d expect them home from school. I’ve hooked them back up to their electronics again, which gives me the luxury of writing this post. I’ll admit no feelings of guilt.
I’m still kind of grumpy, though. Can you tell? I’m not hiding it very well.
Yeah, well. We’re all a little grumpy. We’re all accustomed to activity and go, go, go, and even if it’s not a really bad storm, the weather is still yucky and cold and wet and not conducive to outdoor play, and everything’s closed, and we haven’t gotten up to anything more exciting than electronics and housecleaning.
::
Total side note before I sign off and unhook the children: Have you seen The Mindy Project yet? It’s a sitcom, so if you hate sitcoms, don’t bother, but we find it hysterically funny at our house. We’ve been letting the older kids stay up to watch (be warned, there is some adult content). I found myself fighting not to giggle out loud while lying on my yoga mat this morning, waiting for class to begin, because I was remembering scenes from the episode we watched last night.
On becoming a writer of historical fiction
getting ready for school
Awaking out of my comforting morning nap, a number of blog post subjects floated to the surface along with me, and then apparently floated away on a light breeze because I can recall none of them.
Oh, yes, I remember one thought. Back in undergrad, I had a fascination with a 16th-century poet who published a handful of poems in the popular press, and who identified herself as a woman: the first known to do so, though of course, the popular press meant these weren’t poems printed in a bound book, but poems printed in short runs on a few sheets of paper, rather like an advertising flier — “popular” as in cheap and meant to be easily available, light entertainment, easily consumed — so there may have been other women poets before her, lost to the recycling bins of time, or others who published but did not identify themselves as women (as is apparently the case TODAY for many female bloggers who write on “male” topics like science and technology). Anyway. As I’m writing this out, I’m realizing how much more research I would need to do into the physical details to really get this right, but the point being, I had a fascination with a female poet who published in the second half of the sixteenth-century (that’s Elizabeth I’s era) in London, England, and because almost nothing is known about her life, I imagined a life around her, and she’s remained a character of interest to me, in an era of interest to me.
About a century later, the first handbook on midwifery that was written by a female midwife was published. (Male midwives had published other handbooks before her; and yes, there were male midwives in 17th-century England.) I read that handbook for a research paper a few years ago, and was horrified and fascinated by the techniques and remedies recommended therein. I’ll spare you the details, or perhaps save them for a book. Let’s just say, midwifery through the ages was not for the faint of heart. And that was the thought that bubbled to the surface this morning: somehow linking these two women and writing about them. Do they belong in the same book, separated by nearly a century? Could I take liberties with time? I’m a fiction writer! Of course I could!
The key will be discovering the plot that might emerge around two such characters. Or perhaps she is only one character. I won’t do all my thinking out loud, here, promise. But my mind is drawn to starting up a new, big project, and having just completed a manuscript of what I’d have to call historical fiction, I’m thinking, hey, I liked that a lot. I could write more of that. Plus, I’d get to start with one of my favourite past-times: research! Maybe I could even hang out in a rare book archive, like the one I used to frequent as a grad student in Toronto.
Writing in the present is trickier. Habits and moral codes change, trends and brands and music and tastes in colour and fashion and food all change at a rapid pace, important details the inclusion of which may stale-date an offering before it comes close to publication. I’ve never been cool anyway. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. I’m not going to write today’s version of “Generation-X,” like Douglas Coupland. (Although, as an aside, I do enjoy tapping away and adding to and subtracting from a never-finished manuscript set in the present, which I find endlessly amusing, but regrettably plotless; it reads rather like a series of sit-com scenes.)
This is no way to conclude a blog post, and yet, I shall.
Life in fast-forward
Above: letting the photos tell the story of a Big Moment in her life so far. Her older sister has no interest in ear piercing, so it was a first for me too. We went with her friend and her friend’s mother, so all of us had peer support on the adventure.
But that was only one of many things that happened this weekend! While the two of us were at the mall, Kevin was at our doctor’s weekend clinic, trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with CJ, who was sick and getting sicker by the minute. It turned out to be strep. There’s always something, I tell you. Meanwhile, Fooey and I had arrived home to a weirdly empty house — the two other kids were with friends. We had a few minutes to eat lunch, then realized Kevin and CJ would never make it home in time for us to get AppleApple to her soccer practice. Thank heavens for the carshare! I was able to book a car within fifteen minutes of us needing it, and AppleApple ran home to change, and then we all ran about a kilometre to the available car, zoomed out to practice, zoomed back to the lot, and Fooey and I ran home (Fooey in her new shoes, dragged along, and starting to complain of muscle cramps), just in time to meet my brother, who, at the very moment we were puffing up the sidewalk, was pulling into our driveway to pick me up for my sister’s piano recital. With Kev and CJ still on their strep odyssey, Fooey came along too.
new shoes, her choice
How I enjoyed the hour of peaceful listening, with nothing to do but sit in stillness and absorb music. I thought about how we are fed by ephemeral, transient offerings we don’t fully understand, by the hard work and efforts of others to create and interpret and share beauty.
with her aunt Edna
Fooey went off afterwards with her aunt and her grandma for a sushi treat, while I caught a ride home with Kevin and the rest of the family, reunited post-soccer practice, with meds for the sick lad. I would have enjoyed the sushi treat, too, but there is such a thing as duty, and Kev had done some hard time all morning and most of the afternoon. Instead, I used leftover fish heads to brew up a rich fish stock, which I used as a base for a potato and corn chowder. Supper was served terribly late, and only a few of us would eat the fishy chowder (DELICIOUS!). The rest had grilled cheese instead, made on the waffle iron — Kevin’s handy-dandy innovation. We are teaching the kids how to use it so they can make hot meals for themselves next fall. But as CJ was falling off to sleep, he claimed terrible hunger, and what was he hungry for? “Chicken!!!” We had no chicken in the house, so I promised I would go and get him some right away, and that is what I did, with the two big kids giddily joining me on the late-evening mission to the grocery store. We picked up supplies for the week — of course there was no rotisserie chicken left at 9:30 at night, so we chose a packaged of pre-roasted slices that I would never ordinarily buy. Ever. Except when my sick kid wants chicken, I guess. We came home and gorged on mangoes, Kevin already asleep on the couch.
Through the night, I played nurse to the sick boy, who slept restlessly, but woke somewhat better. At least he was no longer getting worse. Kev was feeling under the weather, so I got the kids going, (chicken for breakfast, anyone?), waking AppleApple with mere minutes to spare before driving her to swim practice, and then it was time to put on my writer’s hat. Or pants, as the case may be.
“Are those new jeans?” Fooey, my fashion-conscious-child, inquired. “Nope, not new, but I only wear them for special occasions.” “What’s happening? What are you doing today?” [said with slight panic in her voice] “I’m going to a reading in Hamilton.” “Why are you dressing up?” “A reading is like a performance. I’m the entertainment, so I’m getting dressed up.” [note: “dressed up” is a term used loosely in our family, and yesterday involved the aforementioned jeans, a short-sleeved blouse and a jacket, with boots, and a necklace made of unpolished stones, plus or minus lipstick]
I drove to Hamilton to take part in GritLit, that city’s spring literary festival. I appeared on the short story panel with Cary Fagan and Miranda Hill, a pair of very entertaining performers, indeed. Questions answered, books signed, hands shaken, I then drove fast and made it to my soccer team’s first playoff game, changing in the bathroom and racing onto the field before the whistle blew. We won! Back at home, Kevin was making supper, the laundry had multiplied into a slightly scary mountain, the older children had played in an exhibition soccer game together, and Grandma had come and gone. The sick boy was still sick. The piano had been fitfully practiced. The dogs needed walking.
two sick boys
Today, I’m home with two sick boys, which has been a bonus, as the elder of the two is not that sick and has sweetly entertained the younger. I’ve achieved only the minutiae among goals, but sometimes that’s the best one can hope for. The laundry mountain has been mined down to a timid hill, the boots I left at the soccer field (oh, my spacey-post-game-brain!) have been retrieved, I’ve swung kettlebells in the early hours, and answered emails, and organized our week on the chalkboard, and I’ve even written this blog post. Hallelujah!
But the whole damn weekend went by too fast, and Monday is going too fast, too. I’m sensing a theme. Life, the fast-forward version.
Time to pick up the kid from the school bus
I would just like to say that today has gone by too fast. This week has gone by too fast.
I would also like to say that I’m not looking forward to my evening run in the still-cold, still-blowing, still-flecked-with-occasional-snowflakes springtime. At least it will be light.
After saying those things, I would like to confess that a pleasure of mine this week has been re-reading blog posts from last winter, when Juliet was being launched, with all of the excitement and busyness that surrounded that time. I note that we had lilacs budding and lettuce growing in March last year! I note also that we were “cooking with the kids” regularly, and that we had guests over much more often. The difference between then and now, aside from the weather, is an uptick in our evening activities. AppleApple swims three evenings a week, and practices soccer three evenings a week (sometimes back-to-back on the same evening), while Albus and Kevin are out two or three evenings a week, too. I can safely say that supper is disrupted five out of five weeknights. AppleApple can go all week without getting a hot meal. (And I haven’t even mentioned the weekend activities.)
Next up, the season of weekend soccer tournaments, with two kids now involved in rep play.
As always, the balance is so imperfect. Forget balance, I think. Live life where you’re at, so long as it’s working for you. So I’m appreciating the dog walks with the little kids in the evenings, and I’m thankful that my mom comes to help out when we’re going in the several different directions all at once.
I’m also happy to be reading almost every night to the kids. We are now into one of my favourite Laura Ingalls Wilder books: On the Banks of Plum Creek. It’s structured in such a quietly dramatic way: the borrowing to build the new house, the debt, the wheat, the hope, the plague of grasshoppers. The kids were solemn as I read last night about the glittering cloud of grasshoppers that descended and ate every green thing there was to eat. “But that’s their food! And they have the debt!” said CJ. I’m not convinced he’s got the concept of debt down, but you never know. He was really worried about it.
We were all solemn, thinking of the enormity of the loss for this family. And yet, the mother responds with gentleness, not grief. “We’ve gotten by before, and we will again.”
It made me feel utterly spoiled for choice. What do I have to complain about?
Oh, but how could Ma be so patient?
“At least they can eat the prairie chickens!”
But that whole garden lost, and the plums on Plum Creek, and the wheat … and the debt. Could I bear to wait and wait in hope as they must?
But I’ve run out of time, completely! Must race to get to the bus stop before CJ gets off.