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Showing posts from December, 2014

Binder Clause

My kids got more than enough toys with batteries and shiny paper the other day. It was overwhelming and memory making and all that, but one gift stood out. My husband gave my son a binder. No, no you read that right. A binder. He has just started to write and draw in earnest and he thought he would get a kick out of having his own binder.  Up until now, he's just been an idea boy, now he can put that stuff on paper.  He's thrilled to have these new skills. I have seen him use the binder more than any other gift he received. Last night I fell asleep on the couch by the light of the tree.  My son busily wrote and drew in his binder while I slept.  When I woke up I was half buried in snow flakes, drawings of cubes (which he had been practising all day) and notes. One note read, my dads moms dads dad. Some things you really have to figure out on paper.

I have a cabinet

Time off from school inevitably leads to a camping night in the living room. It is bound to happen. Tonight, my son is sleeping in his "cabinet" by the woods (Christmas tree). Next to the cabinet in the woods is a quaint little karaoke cafe that serves wine late and hosts Apples to Apples Junior and Crazy 8s tournaments. Under the table where we play a child is now sleeping under a tent made with bedding. I love this little village that gets erected during Christmas vacation. It gets incorporated only after a couple of days of boredom undoes the glue of regular play.

All the pickles

We ate all the pickles and all the scones and the bacon. We ate all of the fudge and the cookies. We kept going. We drank all the pop and the wine and we ate some more cookies. All that is left is the brine from the pickles and the bacon grease. Leftovers made way for new courses and we ate those too. We ate more than enough and we are now looking for more.

Sealed.

Just like that, after several years of putting up a fight against the demise of sending Christmas cards (real live ones), it seems that we collectively kind of sighed and put them aside. We got a handful of cards this year. Yes, and that means I have five fingers.  I atleast made some vague effort before, but this year, no, I put it out of my mind. I got another five electronic cards and countless Facebook/Twitter/Email greetings instead. I am an advocate for writing cards, for care packages and for letter writing, but even I have surrendered.  I want to want it more. I know we will miss something.  Down the line there will be a petering out of artifacts from this season, in this era.  I still treasure Christmas cards my mother was given, and that I gave my parents.  When I read ones from the time before that, I am rather in awe of the artistry that they feature, the humour that now seems stranger than funny, and the sentiments that echo down the line.  However, I can't help mys

Snowflake

It is always a gift to spend time with one kid at a time.  Things get revealed. Things that are hard to see when I get distracted by the demands of keeping track of more than one person.  One on one, I can calibrate to that kid and plug into his voltage.  

The Mind Has Mountains

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep, Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. -Gerard Manley Hopkins "No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief."

Inside out

Update: the library opened.  It is gorgeous as expected, but also hushing and so powerful it turned me inside out upon impact. Turns out all the words got used up reacting to it the first time I entered it. I walked through it the other day on my own and ended up feeling small and stranded a bit.  I felt like I have when I have visited other countries.  At first enchanted and then later, excited and now a bit daunted about all the parts of it I don't understand yet or know how to be in comfortably.  Looking forward to my next quiet visit when I can get turned inside out by it once again. It unzipped a big seam in the sky and the ground into which I stepped and have yet to emerge.

Light in the dark.

It is rather easy to feel like a failure at Christmas.  The crafts that go unrealized, the visiting that gets short circuited and the gifts that never get made or bought. Undiluted expectations get created and then begrudingly let go of. New expectations get found and half met. The light dims to almost nothing until today.  We hastily blaze up the candles and the lights and the tinsel to feel less alone in the dark.  Then we wake up after the solstice and there is a smidgen more light than the day before.  We prepare to live the following days in the half light, trying our best to live freer from expectation and catch the light any way we can.

blanketalanche

A whole bunch of blankets falling onto something is a blanketalanche, I've been told. Chipping ice. Freezing 7 stacked cups into a bag of water and then removing it to create a fountain. Grating chestnuts. Discovering that cutting wafers with scissors does indeed create a lot of crumbs. This is the age of exploration.

catch me off guard

I was clicking through photos this morning in preparation for Christmas and I came across a photo that stopped me in my tracks.  It was not a photo from the Christmas concert or a photo of them doing something delightful. It was almost a mistake. It was taken by my son as we walked along the street somewhere this fall. Mid-step, we walk in the sun somewhere together. Someday,this photo, as unintended as it was, will be so precious to me. A little boy (who is not so little anymore) walking by my side everywhere we go.

The glue

The churches in our province are struggling to keep the doors open, the furnaces lit and to stay relevant. They used to be the glue in many of our rural and urban communities. They provided a place, which, at least theoretically, was meant to provide shelter, comfort and a meaningful structure to life. Our city is just about to open a outrageously gorgeous library which we are all eagerly awaiting entrance into.  We've been teased with the odd picture here and there of it's magnificence and I can only imagine that the real thing will be something to behold and be breathlessly proud of.  Finally, a public space right downtown in which we can seek shelter from the sideways rain of winter without having to buy anything in the process. The first few photos are stunning. The library even made the impressive list of  10 eye-popping new buildings you'll see in 2014 on CNN.com .  It is going to be fabulous. It is set to open on December 13th. I am itching to see it wit

The house permits the light

Before I started taking photographs, or whatever you can call the outcome of taking pictures with an iphone, I heard about photographers falling in love with light. It is a well worn cliche I thought, but now that I have been regularly taking pictures I am starting to get it. There is a light that I love. A light that the house creates at certain times of the day.  When I see it, I drop everything and find my phone and start taking pictures. I know it when I see it now.  I wouldn't be able to get there scientifically, but the house permits the light and I accept it when it is available.