"Would you like milk with that?"

My kids have a few consistent games/play scenarios at the moment. Some of them have endured for years, others are fixed to a place. My daughter continues to play some version of restaurant. She's been at it half of her life and now it has become a lot more sophisticated. For a while in the summer, she had a Tim Horton's set up in the living room, she has since decided a cafe would be more fun. She stockpiles throw-away coffee cups and continues to revise the menu. For my son, he is much more likely to make up games that involve manipulating objects (creating an elevator with a scarf on the banister or a marble/car tunnel with a wrapping paper roll). If he's at Grandma's he insists on pouring and re-pouring a lot of tea with his mobile tea trolley and if he's at Mana's he and his sister raid the wrapping paper drawer and wrap and re-wrap/decorate various objects and practise giving them to us all. I keep watching, noticing, the subtleties of how the games/scenarios change and new ones emerge. What will come next? How about you? What games do your kids play? Are they new ones to you or do you remember playing similar ones?

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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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