The Grade One Colours: turquoise, scarlet, violet pink, and wild strawberry

Markers have had a lot of appeal to me ever since I was given the green light to start using them. They come in vivid colours and usually produce lush, unbroken lines As soon as they were introduced to me, I immediately abandoned crayons and pencil crayons. Crayons were always a bit disappointing to me. They look so charming in the box but when they are applied to paper they do not saturate the paper as their marker counterparts do. They break when they are gripped too hard. For these reasons, I was a little puzzled when my daughter started lobbying a few weeks ago for a box of crayons. She's had access to markers for a couple of years now. What would she want with crayons? She was so vehement I was curious to see what she would do with them. The crayons came home and through her eyes I began to understand. "Oh Mama, I love this one. It is called scarlet." "How about this one, turquoise?" I started to see how the nomenclature of these colors stirred some new possibilities in her. I also discovered that,with crayons, you can mix colours and create new ones that you can also name if you like. This is something I had never explored.

This is an amazing chart of all the Crayola colours that have been created since their invention. Stephen Von Worley at datapointed.net has charted all the crayons ever named by Crayola between 1903 and 2010.

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I entered August without you.

I won't visit you this month. You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you. I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Fists full of lettuce

It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom. She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer). Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life. Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years. Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer. It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still. We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue. Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision. They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped. Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...

Growing Versions

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