Growing Versions

Here we go down the slide into the tunnel. We attempted to make it a swirly slide, but the angle was just not right. So, we now have a slide that you can ski down!

Last time my son was sick with a virus, he spent a lot of time upside down. He said it helped his voice.  "My voice is too close, so I need medicine" he explained. His attempts at explaining his condition so precisely from his unique perspective in his own words impressed me. He explained that being upside down helped him to get his "voice not so close". I thought about when I am sick and about how all the ways I have of describing how I am feeling are unoriginal pat sayings.   "I feel like there is someone pounding my head with a hammer." "My nose is stuffed up." "I feel like I have been run over by a truck." I don't go deep inside of myself and think "where am I at with this?"  I wonder if the way I describe my symptoms influence how I cope with them or not cope with them. I don't turn myself upside down. I just lie there. Inert. Or slog my way through the day. Waiting to feel be...

When I was about 8, my mom read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe out loud to me.  I can still picture a stand alone wardrobe positioned to the right of the entrance of a stark whitewashed room across from a single window, through which the children travelled into a magical world.   Beyond that, the only other thing I remember is the emphasis put on Turkish delight.  It was a really big deal in that book. I was drooling listening to it being described and by the end of it, I couldn't stop thinking about it.  It seemed like a delectable treasure drenched in sugar that would be well beyond my expectations. One day, my mom went to the city and came back with some Turkish delight.  It did not meet my expectations. The disappointment was staggering. What?  Sure it is drenched in sugar, but as far as I was concerned, there was a reason for that, it wouldn't be particularly edible without it. "Edmund    was already feeling uncomfort...

I thought I would go crazy if I heard it said one more time. "Do you have a copy I could borrow?" "No, but the library should have one." "Have you seen that movie, I'd like to see it." "No, but the library should have it." Those words became the bane of my existence. Every time I heard it or thought it, I would get rigid.  I was both riddled with guilt about the fines I had already incurred that prevented me from going there anytime soon and glazed over with inertia. The concept of me "nipping" down to the library, given the tight schedule we ran, was inconceivable.  So improbable,in fact, that I literally had to laugh out loud anytime it was casually suggested. I knew all the great reasons we all need a library.  Libraries have often been there for me in my  hour of need .  For me they are like a holy place, with the added bonus of being impartial  with a mandate to serve everyone. It is a public institution designed to...

It's the same question every Friday afternoon. "What am I doing this morning?( tomorrow morning) "You have a free morning.  We don't go anywhere.  We'll all stay together here." "Yeah!" "You can sleep in." "What is sleeping in?" "You know how we have to get up early usually so we are not late for preschool? Well on Saturdays there is no time to get up. You can stay in bed as long as you like." "Oh.  Okay, I am going to sleep in." I really wish I had explained the meaning of sleeping in before this.

What if you woke up in the morning to a whole yard covered in heaps of play dough? What if you could slide down a hill of gobs of play dough? What if you could form a giant dough fort? I know, it would be great.  That's what I thought as I willed my toes to retain feeling this afternoon.  All this malleable snow is like play dough on a grand scale.

Yesterday, I was finally cleaning up the house after the chaos created by a snow day, a sick day and a weekend.  As I finally removed the Christmas tree that had been sitting idly in the corner and tackled the mount of crumbs and craft projects that were clogging up the high traffic areas,  my son lamented that he was so  bored.  He complained loudly.  I had to keep my spirits up, I had a lot of tidying and putting away ahead of me, he was not exactly pushing my progress forward.  I made a few limp suggestions, you could put together a puzzle? You could play with your tubes?  You could make a ramp?  But the truth was, the mess was a threat not only to health and safety but also to self-entertaining as well.  Suddenly, he exclaimed, "I know! We could move the couch and see if there are any toys under it!"  I often move the furniture around a little to sweep in hard to reach places.  On a regular basis these temporary re-arrangements...

I have this habit of tucking things away.  As storage solutions go, it's not always great because I end up wondering for months at a time where something that I once designated "precious" is tucked away . But every once in a while, I end up stumbling on something that has been tucked away for a long time that I have completely forgotten about, and it is so great to see it in plain sight and hold it in my hands again after its months or years of it being hidden. Sometimes those treasures get re-incorporated with all the untucked away stuff, but other times they get ushered back into a darkened handbag or in a drawer or box of other treasures once again. What have you got tucked away? 

 As we increasingly become self-conscious about the Christmas lights still tacked up on our porch,  we still feel the need to lighten the dark days, even if they are technically lengthening. I notice we are all a little bit asleep. A little reclusive, a little far from each other, as the cosy den threatens to muzzle us with insulation.  We still need a solstice state of mind.

Like fragile ice, anger passes away in time.  Ovid

It started out as a dog eating everything. Then there were several hours stewing and doing nothing and watching too much t.v. There was a mom resistant to all the ideas that were proposed much to her shame.  But then, like a strike of lightening splitting the sky, a vision about how a nut might be conveyed by a swirly slide came charging out and changed everything. The dog became a tunnel through which an attached and more than a little broken toy turned into a new toy.  More boxes and more milk cartons were added and angles were experimented with .  The mom started to loosen up a little and was in charge of cutting and duct taping.  The kids kept bringing more things out of the recycling bag.  More possibilities were discovered and more vehicles, beyond the nut, were tried.  The milk carton became a channel through which a bouncy ball could pop out of.  Soon enough, the dry version was outmoded by the water slide version.  Inste...

       "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." -Pablo Picasso

Sometimes I want to colour within the lines.  At those times, I say give me a  colouring book  full of professionally penned drawings  of exceedingly perfect images the way I either expect to see them or in ways I could never have imagined them myself.  I want to participate in fill in the tiny spaces cordoned off by bold dark lines. I bump up against those boundaries outlining and detailing sailing boats, clowns, flowers with the tip of my marker and am content to be confined by those elegant fences and cul de sacs.  With already drawn pictures, I know where to stop and start.  I shut a part of my brain off and am pleased by the process of giving over of creative control. My task is singular.  I fill in the prescribed blank spaces with colours that suit this vision of a fish or a bowl of fruit or a butterfly.  I can choose to just see one space at a time and not all the other spaces they are connected to. Sometimes I get an urge to make t...

I just learned about a magic nail.  Its' magic is that you only need it and one piece of wood to make a tree house with an elevator.  It is kept secret for obvious reasons. It is kept in a box covered in shiny fabric. I know where the hiding place is but I'll respect the person who told me about it and not tell you where it is. As someone who almost flunked out of home economics because of the sewing component, and who would love it if there was a magic needle  that could assemble any number of amazing projects out of all of the beautiful fabric in the world, a magic nail has a special allure.  It sure would come in handy.  I need tools and the inclination to know what to do with them.  They need to be magic ones.  Right now, without magic, my dexterity is limited. Is there a job that requires you to laugh at jokes?  Is there some kind of compensation for admiring other people's handiwork and having good ideas about what could  be made? ...

On the way to school on Monday morning, we were all a little taken aback when we cast ours eyes upon the very green hill behind the school.  For a couple of weeks until then, we had come to take for granted the first fluffy layer and later, sheen of icy, snow.  It was a source of very free entertainment and it provided a much needed pressure valve to our house/school/office bound days.  Suddenly, it was gone. Despite its brief tenure, the school grounds looked like they were missing something crucial.  It felt a little like there had been a circus tent erected next door that had provided hours of free shows and excitement and a place to head to escape normal life.  And now, it appeared a team of carnies had come in the night and taken down the tent and moved on.  All that was left was the last crust of crunchy crusts of snow for cracking. This morning, a promise of another snowfall is in the air.  My son announced that a bicycle sled would be a fa...

The other day my dad brought this little rig along. It is called a "Paterson Design 101"  slide viewer. I must have seen it before in one of my many forays into their basement, but it kind of took me off guard.  It is so simple to use and yet it has a secret world inside, just waiting for me to pick it up. Along with the slide viewer, he brought along 20 slides of pictures from my time in Hungary almost 20 years ago. For the next hour, I spent time with the Paterson Design 101, peering into the back lit past. Pictures of new (then) friends who I haven't really seen since, houses, markets, the control room of a power station, and the grandparents of people I met. I retreated into a world where somehow I ended up in a parade in a town I cannot remember the name of... ...that had a culture house that kept homesickness at bay.  It illuminated a time in my life, a coming into my adult self. The slide viewer helped me to experience those images in a whol...

"Begin anywhere." -John Cage

This parody,  Look at this Instagram , made me cringe.  It pokes fun at our collective obsession with taking pictures of every little thing.  We take pictures of pie, breakfasts, messes, evidence that we have cleaned our closets, before, after, toenails, feet in sand, feet in water, soap, basically everything we lay our eyes on. Ever since I picked up my iPhone my previous photographic output has become a speck in comparison. I would go months between photo taking spurts before. Even after getting a digital camera, I would either break it and have to save up for a new one, or lose the cord so I could not download the pictures or, well, there was always something. Now, of course, there are no limits and maybe that's a bad thing or maybe, just maybe, that's a very good thing. Predictably there are lots of concern about taking so many pictures, particularly of kids.  In this recent  article  published in the New York Times from October, the author ra...

The other night, trying to extract as much fun from the finite sledding season as possible, my son and I head over the road. The wind was fierce. It howled and blew us off course several times.  Bitter cold gusts swooped in and shut out all other sounds.  At intervals, the wind would subside a bit and you could catch your breath and brace yourself for the next barrage of cold air. After we got to the first hill, and there was another lull, my son looked up and said very seriously, "The wind listened." "What?" I asked. "I told the wind over and over 'better'...'better', and it got better!" With that, he turned and clambered to the top of the hill as I braced for another onslaught of icy wind.

Not to be outdone, when my son started a parachute making kick this week, my daughter jumped in and tangled a tiny doll she had lying around and attached it with left over Christmas ribbon to a dollarama bag too.  She had great fun deciding which was more parachute worthy, tiny girl doll or tiny wrestling figure.  I guess it depends on the criteria, but perhaps, because her parachute was considerably bigger than his, the girl doll fell more dramatically, with a fuller parachute in her wake.

Accentuating. Throwing. Shoving. Rolling. Muzzling. Softening. Warming.  Charming. Blanketing. Frustrating. Delaying. Curtailing. Accelerating.  Quieting.  Blocking.  Stopping.  Starting.  Suppressing.  Protecting.    Transforming.

Teeny icicles, not yet given enough time to get humongous, came into being in thin air this week. Out come the mittens, and the ritual of dressing that is reserved for this time of year. I am trying hard not to hate it. A big part of learning to like this season is by following in the crunchy ice encrusted footsteps of my kids.  Both got gear for enjoying snow this year.  Snowpants, warm boots and copious "pairs" of mittens (most of them still paired up, yeah!) all go on without complaint because they know that it all means one thing, fun in the snow is coming their way.  Even when we were waiting for a bus a little too long (for my liking) in what is in my mind a desolate place (a business park), they still managed to find the terrain magical and exciting to explore. As my knees knocked together down below, they frolicked high above on the ridge of a crusty snow bank.  I have to say, that despite the initial discomfort and bulkiness that I experience ...

“But not all dark places need light, I have to remember that.” -Jeannette Winterson, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I overheard a young(er) woman on the bus a few weeks ago talking on her cell phone.  Listening to her made me innerly grimmace.  Every phrase (not sentence, mind) was punctuated by "like". I was cringing because I could hear my voice in hers.  I distinctly remember training myself to use like when I was about 12 or 13.  I trained with the dedication and discipline to adopting this useless habit that I applied to skills I have forced myself to learn: typing without looking, driving in snowstorms and navigating the photocopier.  It is hard to believe now that I willingly and intentionally threw the chances of a credibile sounding speech pattern under the bus like that, but here we are.  I find myself rummage around in the dark for the right word or the willingness to say what I want to say directly and, unsure of my next step, "like" lights the way. But just like any adult who picked up smoking in her teens, now I need to quit before my kids get wind of ...

There is a tiny door in my mind now, behind which there are things I do not wish to even deign to imagine. I prefer to keep it firmly shut. I turn towards the light instead.  I cannot see clearly looking into such dazzling light but I am going to trust that walking forward into it will not be a bad move. However, what is the substance of this blinding good light?  How do I add to it and not dim it? What creates peace in this world?  Is losing my temper with my kids while I'm trying to do any other thing (especially unrealistic-in-the-first-place things) disrupting peace really or just a natural part of this journey?  Sarcasm? Rolling my eyes?  Is keeping anger to myself violent? I know these actions and copious examples of inaction can diminish peace in a thousand splintering ways but where is the line between that and violence, between violence and no violence being committed?  I already know the answer but I don't always act like I know. ...