Growing Versions

As we trudged through the rain once again...the light filtered down through the darkening sky and reflected off of the pavement. Indoor games and stories and plans all seemed so lifeless and secondary. But we soon adjusted to the diminished light, and we turned inwards to conjure new spells and pull old tricks, hatch new plots and explore the worlds of our dreams.

Write what you know. Paint what is in front of you. My son took all that to heart.  I present: "Blueberries and Strawberries in a bag", 2012.

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.  Maya Angelou

Due to illness, we were all housebound the other day.  The kids were bored and looking to "make stuff". I suggested we draw pictures.  We started out a little slow.  My daughter was demanding suggestions for what she should draw but each suggestion was met with rejection (a fun fair/no!, a picture from our vacation/no!, a place you want to go/no!).  Finally, we hit on drawing pictures of our family. There was a fair amount of discussion about who to include.  Does the fish count?  Also, it was decided by my daughter that the humans in our family should wear hats but the cats deserved crowns. They did some experimenting with crazy noses that they could give each others' likenesses.    My son gave me lots of curves and also included a rocket ship into our brood. 

My daughter made up a joke the other day.  Instead of running in circles, you can also run in rectangles, or diamonds or octagons. We are very fortunate to live very close to our kids' school.  We live no more than 500 metres from door to door.   Despite the short distance between home and school, my son still finds a way to make the run  500 metres longer than it is for the rest of us. As we amble along, he sprints ahead, up the hill, down the other side, across the top and back down again.   Indeed, he proves you can run in ovals, triangles and hexagons too.

When anyone becomes an authority, that is the end of him as far as development is concerned. (1948) Frank Lloyd Wright Do you consider yourself an expert in something? Have you been called one before? Recently, I was.  Instead of feeling full of pride, I felt deflated and stuck. I had to ask myself why. Well, for one thing, the term expert is so loosely used that we all get to be one, one way or another.  Lately, I've been noticing the term "expert" increasingly being bandied about in my work but also at dinner parties, thrown around in a half joking/ half serious way of describing a person's knowledge.   Secondly, experts are not necessarily that accurate or reliable.  I myself flat out refuse to learn some things because I reason an expert is already doing all the heavy lifting in that area and they can think it through for me.  As it turns out, when I watched the Doc Zone's documentary,  The Trouble with Experts  , I am not the only one....

Friday the 21st was the International Day of Peace.  To honour peace day, the kids made a special craft with their grandfather at Messy Church.  They decorated Peace Necklaces.  They all are adorned with the classic peace symbol, some have more layers on top of the symbol than others.

The summer was splendid.  It kept coming and giving until it started going.  I sucked all I could from its teat and then the fall weather began.  The rain that we undoubtedly needed came and I tried my best to cope with that.  The temperature fell a bit and the clothing was adjusted.  We also adjusted our schedules to include more sitting-at-desks time and not-swimming-outdoors-time.  The trees have even started to give up their leaves.  Despite all these season changing markers, I, for some crazy reason, cannot get my bearings.  I'll see an image in a book about Easter and I momentarily think it will soon time to think about that season.  I momentarily lapse into thinking that summer is not far off, or spring.  I get a temporary sense of displacement and disorientation. I'm not really mourning summer, I enjoyed it fully and I'm at peace with the inevitable change. I just can't seem to keep track of the time and the season that I'm in...

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.   -Langston Hughes

My son came home from preschool last week to announce that he has a new best friend and he wears a yellow shirt.  When I asked what his name was, he said he did not know.  When I asked him to describe him, he went into great detail describing his shirt.  "He wears a yellow shirt with a soccer ball going into a net."  Over and over again over the weekend, my son referred to his friend as the boy with the yellow soccer ball going-in-the-net shirt.  Finally, he returned the other day from preschool to report that his friend wore a grey shirt that day.  "He was not wearing the yellow shirt with the soccer ball going in the net today."  This morning, he exclaimed brightly as soon as he saw his friend, "there he is Mama, can you see him? He has a squid (an octopus) on his shirt." So, my son has made a friend, which is wonderful.  What we know about him is that he has at least three shirts. My daughter is much more straightforward about such matters...

Every summer we get reacquainted with View Master Technology.  We dig up the old View Master and the reels dating between the 40s and 50s and serially look at one reel after another.  The most popular ones are the ones that depict fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel (above), Cinderella and Jack in the Beanstalk.  We also have a lot of "adventure travel" reels.  60 year old pictures of children in Sweden and festivals in the Netherlands are super saturated with then state of the art technicolour. I love how the pictures stand up away from where you think they should be, early 3D technology. The fairy tales are a favourite for a reason.  In 6 short frames they re-tell a story that we all know so well.  What I like is all the miniature detail and I like to imagine a little room with lights and a tiny set somewhere in America in 1949.  Maybe right off to the right of where I can see there is a rotary phone ringing or a coffee pot perking or a person smokin...

Me: "What is a church anyway?" Him: "Let me talk to you about what a church is. Some have schools, some do not. They have a sharp part that goes up to the sky, it is a sky scraper. Sometimes they have long windows, sometimes they do not. Look."

My daughter took a book out of the library a few weeks back called Beverly Billingsly Borrows a Book .  At first it did not get much attention but now it ends up throwing us both into a fit of giggles.  It is all about a little girl who gets a library card and then ends up having an overdue book (ghast!!!) and her concerns about having to pay lots of money and/or serving jail time cause her to put off returning the book even longer.  It is great because my daughter really gets worked up about getting in trouble and we've certainly had our share of overdue books. The funny part though is when she applies for a library card she gets asked questions before she is approved by the librarian.  The writer doesn't elaborate on which questions the little girl gets asked but that has given us plenty of room for imagination and we've thought up a list of potential questions. We really get going. 1. Do you plan on composting this book? 2. Will you scribble in library boo...

According to my son, it is acorn and chestnut picking-up season.  He displayed unfettered delight when he spied the first chestnut of the season-- a beautiful, smooth round chestnut.  It signalled the first time I had witnessed him remember a season. A season before that had included making a friend--a friend to pick up chestnuts with.  Now, that is what the memory of a season feels like, smooth,  round and perfect in his little hand.

I have been doing a lot of math the last few years. I started a business and suddenly, I leaped into a world where basic accounting and math are a defined part of my job.  I have always been nervous about math.  I still wake up with a start some mornings fresh from a dream where I am convinced I have unfinished math business to clear up back in high school, until it dawns on me that somehow I closed that chapter already. I am very conscious of not letting it rub off on my daughter.  I realize that basic math and its more complicated aunts and uncles are just part of the world, a language like any other, that we use to explain our world in a particular way.  No more, no less.  However, some part of me still holds onto anxiety about math. I've never viewed myself as a "number person" and yet, even before I started this work, I did several calculations a  day. As the demand on my math skills has increased in recent years, I have begun to realize t...

My daughter is a lucky girl.  She has someone in her life who is utterly devoted to her.  

reasons I write things down. 1. I narrated one too many stories in my head in the grocery store, in the swimming pool, at work. 2.  I decided waking up from nightmares and dreams and still ruminating on them 2 hours later could tell me something different in print.  3.I feel the need to talk to myself(out loud) sometimes. 4.Being a creative decision maker is a very different thing than being a financial and business and worker decision maker. 5.I could never resist an audience. 6.Someday, it will be cool for my children to read about my inner thoughts and go "ohhhhhh, so that's what was going on." 7.I can't help it. 8.I  called myself a writer and never wrote a word.  Now I can call myself a writer again(and not squirm). 9.There are some beautiful things in the world.  And some unimaginably horrible things.   10.Now that I've started, I can't stop.

For the first time in about 8 weeks, I made my bed.  The minute the calendar ticked over to September 1st, something inside me clicked and I started to turn towards ensuring my household was in order. I embarked on a flurry of making ready projects, washing bedding, putting clothes on the line, putting all the laundry away in their respective places and beginning to think in terms of regimented scheduling again. The making of the bed was the most symbolic for me.  After weeks of vacations and overnighters and late nights lingering beside campfires or watching movies, I clung to the idea that a made bed was a waste of time, after all I barely spent anytime in it.   Making a bed was associated with school work and assembling lunches and remembering milk money.  But as soon as that full moon made its presence, it was like it switched on my bed-making reflex and it suddenly became extremely important for me to get into a bed with fresh sheets, without sand. The su...

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset. -Saint Francis de Sales Okay.  I'll try.

My daughter asked me yesterday, "What is longer?  A moment or a second?" Temporarily thrown off by the question, I was at a loss at how to respond.  My husband supplied, " a second is shorter." Yes, yes of course.  Slowly, I pieced together an answer, talking as I went.  It is measurable after all.   A moment can be a year...a month...a few days or a cluster of seconds.  When I look back at a period of time, I reflect on that chunk of time being a moment, a coordinated series of days or minutes that are held together by the memory we hang onto for a reason.  A moment is only measurable in words or by the unspeakable by one or a particular group of people that happened to experience a span of time exactly the same way. It is either a fateful one or a significant one. A meaningful glance, murmured words or a realization that dawns on us as we witness something that stands out.  It is a way of remembering a time, a still photograph in the midst ...