Growing Versions

Christmas culture is full of miniatures.  Mini villages lit from within, mini skates hanging from the tree, mini tree cookies, gigantic snowflakes, but mini Jesus and his family and all his visitors, mini booze bottles made of chocolate and a mini town under glass that fills with snow when you shake it. While these things are shrunken, the feelings are exaggerated, the memories over sized, the rifts magnified, the love enormous, the shopping is excessive and we eat bigger plates full of bigger portions, and we drink more out of  fuller glasses. It is sometimes hard to feel like the right size at this time of year.

I went window shopping with various groupings of my family this weekend. When I go shopping in the mall, I buy what I have to get, or am swindled into getting, and get out as fast as possible. Window shopping is different. It is meant to be enjoyed leisurely. There is no personal cost to staying a minute longer in front of a beautiful display. No burden is levied like there is when I brave a mall. Window shopping with a family member or friend helps you figure out what your loved ones find wonderful. It is window shopping, and stoop shopping and sidewalk shopping all at the same time. I noticed all kinds of buildings and doorways along the way that I normally march past. Window shopping is a slowing down activity.  It is a window of time that helps us see each other and the city in new ways.

Dr. Vandana Shiva came to visit our city a couple of years ago. I remembered her visit when I heard her speak about the Paris climate talks on the radio the other day. It goes without saying that she was incredibly inspiring. She opened her speech by saying something like, (I am paraphrasing): "The sign up there says I am going to talk about all kinds of thing under the sun...food security, poverty, sustainability...(meaningful pause, I was waiting for her to self-deprecate and say something like, "that's a tall order"...but, no, she said)  "good thing everything is connected". Her full-hearted belief in her own message inspired in me a confidence that even I could do something to improve the world. One thing she talked about was, her book Soil Builders.  She talked about farming with reverence, that making soil a nourishing place for food and plants  and diversity to flouirsh is noble and is a vital role that cannot be diminished or d...

  There are years that ask questions and years that answer.                                      - Zora Neale Hurston

I've been learning about math all over again thanks to the updates in the math curriculum in the intervening years between my childhood and theirs. It is more understandable and they are less freaked out than I was.  I credit it with an emphasis throughout the curriculum on identifying patterns and with encouraging the kids to interpret every number in words, pictures, equations so that kids can understand the number and its relationship to others from many different angles. We were taught to show our work, but not taught how to show our work. Showing your work helps show how you got to the final answer. I am beginning to feel like this blog is me showing my work.  It is me showing me my work.  It is not going to lead a final "answer", but it is showing incremental steps towards something,  I am looking forward to where the breadcrumbs will eventually lead.

 It you lived here, you'd be home by now.

I stumbled on this fire  in the school yard a full week before I took a picture of it.  The fact that it lasted more or less a full week tells me a lot about how lovingly and steadfastly it has been tended this week.  It has cooked meals for and provided a home base for countless roaming formations of families hobbled together by democratic and not so democratic decision making amongst school children. "I'll be the mom, you be the dad. You can be the baby. Can I be the cat?"

Twice now, I've returned to visit  two of my old elementary schools (we moved a lot), only to discover that they had long since been torn down.   The fields within which they sat did not betray their pasts. The land that once hosted thousands of drawings, and glue and tears and snot and fear and beginnings and endings and friendships now held none of those things. A young tree and a well manicured lawn grew in the place of one, nothing but overgrown grass occupied the place of the other. This week I watched the daily progress of an old school be dismantled on my way to work. Watching a school get taken apart is hard.  Even if I never attended this one, it's vacant and slowly deteriorating shell was holding a place. Now the halls that it contained, the stains, the way the light fell on books so many days in a row is only occupying the minds of former students and teachers.  And later when our minds lose those memories, this school ...

Here are some of the games my son insists should be available and findable on the internet. "A butterfly catching game and then you release them in a house, then he turns into a catepillar and then he goes outside  and he squiggles around and you then the fox eats them up and then you can see is in his brain whoever eats the catepillar and then whoever picks up the catepillar you can see in his hand." "A pot catch with the pot and then you could look inside their head and you can make your own slide and get something to put on your slide.and animals make it and go down it and you can bring with you like playing bey blades down it." If only, and maybe, someday.

As we head into winter, I stumbled on this memory of growing a boy in spring. Growing a boy in winter is very similar, it just requires more layers.

 The day started with me reading the words, "respect your freezer." It was an appeal to utilise your freezer to its best advantage by creating space in it for food that's cheap to use later. I created space by emptying the freezer of crusted-over-good-  intention-derived frozen veggie scraps, meats that could have been a contender and beans that could not be saved. I created space, as it turns out for slushies, the  slushies that we learned how to make on youtube.

As the weather changes, the craft supplies start to surface. We spend more time inside and start gifting each other with cardboard boxes. This morning I woke up to a new cat car in our living room. Last night we made angel wings for the cat.  They wouldn't stay on. These arts are like rafts, helping us stay close and dry as winter strands us together.

"When you are colouring, let your hand go free."

I have long admired the versatility of  pipe cleaners .  Their durability and flexibility make excellent construction tools for kids because they don't require any tools. Pipe cleaners played a pivotal role in Hallowe'en this year. Kazoo holster ( the kazoo , when played emits a high pitched sounds that lays waste to the bad guys) Head gear. An excellent way to hang stuff And they help you display the treats after you get them.

Yes, I know I misspelled couch.  I meant couch, not coach. I have this bad habit of going to bed before my kids. I am trying to change things by laying on the couch and instead of waiting for their impossibly late bedtime (9 p.m.) for stories, I get them to bring me stories and we take turns reading them with silly voices. My son has a real command of a hushed, authoritarian and his whole body is composed as he reads. My daughter adds commentary as she goes that keeps me in stitches. It is entertaining. They are learning and my guilt is assuaged. The best part is I am lying down and still fulfilling my duty.

This time of year reminds me of travelling, of train stations, and carting around bread and cheese in my back pack and sun drenched moments sitting on the edge of forests and rivers and city parks.  The combination of blue skies, wood smoke and diesel take me back to a stoop in Istanbul, a fruit vendor in Delhi and a canteen in Budapest. Yesterday, in my own city, without a passport, that feeling suffused the air. I was walking downtown on an errand and that wood smoke laced crisp air sent me on a different route than usual. I went left instead of right, up the hill, instead of down. I took the next street over when I usually never do. I ended up seeing the city through new eyes and the food trucks and market vendors could have been anywhere. I walked through the train station and I could have been going somewhere. I came home having travelled somewhere.

There were two falls a few years ago when my son was obsessed with chestnuts. The pre-school had an enormous chestnut tree in the backyard and it yielded dozens of beautiful chestnuts to collect and to carry in pockets and buckets. Wordlessly, that tree introduced my son to the word chestnut.   "This thing here I am giving you, that thing you are smoothing with your thumb is what they call a chestnut." The glossy brown sheen of chestnuts entered his lexicon of childhood in a way that it had never entered mine. Now, as I walk to work and pass by chestnuts on the ground, I pick one up so that I can rub my thumb over its smooth surface for the rest of the way. I remember that time of his learning about chestnuts. I learned the word chestnut at the same time.

For the past three years there has been a version of the Hallowe'en vending machine.  It was initially invented to deal  with us monstrous parents intent on stealing Hallowe'en candy.  It was a little rough around the edges, but it definitely resembled a vending machine. Put money here, take one candy. Last year, it was resurrected  again. This year, a full three weeks ahead of schedule, a whole Saturday was devoted to creating the latest version. Like an Apple Launch , the vending machine version 3 was launched with much fanfare, a little bickering, and a lot of treats (for a price, mind you). I introduce, generation 3 Hallowe'en vending machine. Separate slots for pennies and bills.     Easy to use dispensing slot.  Plastic viewing panel This version has improved on earlier designs to dispense candy to greedy parents.

I don't think I have enough words or the right ones to describe my child's love of balloons. He views balloons the same way other kids view lego, full of possibilities and as tools of his imagination.  Balloons can be engines, they can be ornaments, they can be fasteners, they can be bombs, they can carry messages ( and they do)... There are no limits when it comes to balloons.  I really had no idea. My mind was so limited before. Why don't, you ask, do I not have more balloons in my life?  At a children's birthday party where a magician was making balloon animals, my son patiently waited his turn and then asked the magician to make him a sweater with the balloon.  

When I step away from writing for a while due to illness or work or whatever, I force myself to write something. Anything.  I try my best to not get too down on myself about what or how I write that something.   I write to Prime the Pump.  Sure enough, once primed, I start to get eager to write, I start to narrate posts in my head on my way home. The tap begins to drip.

Each night, when I come home from work, I get this urge to light a candle. For me it is not thought through or particularly intentional, just an instinct. I started doing it a few years ago, as the supper hour starts to gradually get darker. It is a flame that invites me to stay, not go. To put my house in order and make it a place I want to be. With it's glow, I begin to make use of the fuel I have harvested from the summer sun. I turn my attention inward, to protect us from the cold.

Just come in. If you have a gift or you miss me,  sign in.

I've felt this way before  and no doubt I will again, after all it is seasonal, but this time of year always confuses me.  It is warm enough that part of me gets tricked into thinking summer is just about to begin.  Another part of me, stumbles over a trip wire that signals a torrent of let's make soup, plan Christmas and nesting feelings. When I walk off the beach for the final time of the season, it feels like a raw wound opens in my chest. In time, slowly, the two broken flaps of skin find each other and knit together quietly.

He comes here and then I go there and then he comes here, it's a pattern. I eat toast and then cereal and then toast, it's a pattern. I decorated it with purple and yellow and purple, it's a pattern. Making a snack is easy. Cracker, peanut butter, cracker, cheese whiz, cracker, it's a pattern.