Growing Versions

 Christmas vacation is the first time since summer when our lives are rearranged.   Our diet shifts,    the furniture gets moved around,  activities change, and the decor is altered. As everything gets rearranged, so do we.

I have had a bad relationship with math. As a grade 2 student, I remember not really understanding what the teacher was getting at when she placed a handful of cubes on my desk and asked me to take some away. Things became more fraught in grade 4 when I was one of 2 kids who was disqualified from a class taco party for not knowing all my times tables (we were eventually brought back into the fold). I developed math anxiety which made things worse. I excelled in other areas that involved language and I came to accept that I was just not a math person. As a parent, I was determined not to pass on my anxiety about math to my daughter.  By then I was also running a business that involved daily math and I discovered things I actually liked about math. I embraced math, outwardly at least, as much as possible. One day this week, my daughter wanted me to help her with her math homework. I took on the task with gusto, not betraying my underlying self-doubt. I stared for a ve...

Boxes are a hot commodity in our household.  Squabbles will be fought and lost (or won depending on the outcome) over really good ones. One day we saw a box for a large appliance down the street and we were so excited only to get down to the street to discover it had already been pinched. That was a sad day. Boxes contain not just 4, but  6 or more sides ( chances) to create a world, a room, a closet, a machine, a....anything.I save up boxes for days when we are home bound and they rarely disappoint. The best boxes have two elements.  Sturdy material and interesting features...  ...they do not have to stay intact to be good. It will take a long time for me to break the box collecting habit.

As the winter set in, the mice returned to their home village.  The castle, at the base of the Escalier Mountain, maintained its reign of the kingdom.  Dominating the landscape and protecting the princess' domain that the peak, it kept its secrets tightly kept. The mice spread out in search of comfort materials from high and low, although since they had last been there, there had been considerable loss of habitat and provisions. The guardian of the crumbs and bits , was rather dismayed at the lack of detritus in the main domain, as was the usual expectation after such a long absence from the village, but alas, she quickly turned to her delegation to rectify the problem, dragging seeds and drying husks from back behind the kingdom walls. The quiet imposed by the castle made the mice wonder what turbulence the summer months had wrought. Sylvester, the head of comfort material management, was not pleased at all to discover a stable full o...

I have been horrified by my kids in their Halloween costumes. They often toy with iterations of costumes in the weeks and days leading up to the big day, only to give me a shock the night of. Bunny, zombie business man, kid lost trick or treating, pharmacist gone berserk, ghost, bunny, skeleton. While none of these costumes are elaborate, if the light is right...they make you squint and see them as the terrifying little essences that they can be. My daughter, long haunted by Coraline, scared my socks off one year with her rendering of   Coraline's mother , her personal bogey woman. This year, my son finally settled on a skeleton and when he stretched out on the sidewalk, I could barely look at him through my fingers.

I started knowing this city at university.  Every other place in the city was over there. Then, for the longest time, all schools were there and I was here . Next the daycare was way over there .  Then it was right here , and now it is back over there. While we were going to preschool it was here  and elementary was over there . Now that school is here and the junior high school is right here too. The high school is not far away, it is right over there .  Where will I be when they are all over there?

I've come to except (and accept) little pots of gooey gunk littering my home for a quite a while now. Corn starch, vinegar, baking soda, food colouring, pasta in water that is growing mold and oatmeal face masks run amok. These potions have been fermented, boiled, frozen, baked into pie shapes, smeared and set on fire. What can I about these secret potions? Their mystery persists.

I was filthy. My mind was cloudy and overworked, my spirit was spoiled and cramped. I took a forest bath and came out clean.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”                                                                                               ...

Kids and matches together are considered inadvisable. However, there is a lot more to learn about fires than just about how they can burn you.

Sometimes we end up in a place that we have not chosen but ends up being a good place to be in that moment . I ended up in Winnipeg Manitoba earlier this week and it stretched my mind in really unanticipated ways.  Manitoba is part of the Prairies. It is flat. The only hill I saw I told was a hill because it used to be a garbage dump.  Being on prairie land, even for a few days, had an interesting affect on me.  It helped me flatten my mind and read it like a map.  It helped me determine my longitude and latitude, which with all the hills and valleys and gullies and ocean floors that usually surround me, I was having a hard time doing lately.

You know what is really great about swimming? One of the main reasons I like to swim and be in water is that it lets me do things I cannot do or cannot do anymore in real life (IRL). My kids and I have a game at the pool called "do what you cannot do IRL".  We impress each other with manoeuvres that gravity prevents, but water allows. For example, my handstand days IRL are over (as I painfully discovered), but in water they carry on. IRL I cannot carry my kids anymore, but I can cradle them comfortably in water. I can hold myself up with one finger underwater and I can hold onto a rail and be parallel with the floor only in a pool. I can leap and lean way way back in water. Swimming makes things possible that are not possible on earth otherwise. Is there nothing swimming cannot do? How about you? What can you do in water that you cannot do IRL?

The first petition he drafted this school term was about addressing the wasp population on the school yard. He told his classmates that if they signed the petition, he would let himself be stung 7 times and then deliver the petition to the school office. After accidentally getting stung by one a short time later, we reassured him that no one expected him to put himself through that 6 more times.  The petition was plenty. This week, he has drafted a new one. A petition is only ever a start, but a start it is.

The eye of the storm is where all the action and destruction is. Sometimes being displaced from the centre or the axis  keeps you safe. Feeling off-kilter can feel strange and uncomfortable. However, being off-centre gives you something the centre cannot. 

This has been a challenging year for me and my family.  Through grim periods and light, buoyant ones, I have often turned to art for inspiration, solace and distraction. I've always understood on some level that art is important, not just as an optional luxury that can only be valued when times are good. However, this year, my understanding went bone deep that art can keep us breathing. I have been writing for fun, which has encouraged my kids to write for fun.  We've been tracing images, creating comics and inventions. We watch movies and make movies and critique movies. I have been reading books to shut out the world or to open it up. A friend recently admitted that she kind of wished that she were just enough sick to be in hospital on i.v. fluids for a few days to get caught up on sleep and netflix.  "You know," she said, "i.v sick, but not so sick you cannot sleep or enjoy movies." I like to think about art as a fluid.  It is normally circulatin...

This summer my kids grew a little more before my eyes. They tried out new roles and looks out of the range of the scorching eyes of classmates that have known them since preschoolhood. Video games and ocean currents re-wired their circuits. Most nights, my kids went to bed long after me.  I woke up to inventions carved out of syrofoam and pop cans and the leftovers of a Barbie rave. These campfire sparks. These flares.  These tiny red hot embers. These night lights.

What have your surroundings been telling you this year? Have they been embracing you? Or repelling you? Have they been giving you good ideas or draining you of all of your goods? Is there a tree that gives you a comfort? Or a chair in a special place that makes you feel at home? Where do you go to be set adrift? To be rooted?

When I was brought home from the hospital, I was brought home to a tiny but vibrant little part of the world. It was right next to a busy corner.  The church and a restaurant/store and very active neighbours. Going back to visiting the corner, felt like looking at a map of the world after only looking at a picture of one house.   The mountains, the sky, the terrain that knit together my early world.

The things I do on my vacation are never predictable. 1. You already heard about the homemade unicorn costume. 2. I got to go to the Co-Op Grocery store in Bay St. Lawrence. It is a pretty humble place but it had been sitting there in my imagination, unopened, for a lot of years. 3. I finally saw the Hangover.  It made me laugh a lot. 4. I had a magical work related meeting in a magical town and it didn't feel like work. 5. I finally took pictures of Southwest Cove. My vacation went beyond my expectations.

Vacations are like checkpoints. When one is really needed, you cannot really go forward without one. It is the fight you have with your partner just as you are trying to leave the house. It is the travel hiccup, the lost luggage or delayed flight or the flat tire. It is the awkward reunion with people you used to know, but now discover you don't know as well. You need to stop and do an inventory of your luggage. You need to scan the horizon and decide which route to take from here, do you have the right documentation for this journey, should you stay with these companions or should you hastily re-organize your entire journey? You have to wait more on vacations.  Waiting that can be idling, irritating, or relaxing. You can be held up or held onto. Pause. This inconvenient stop can make the rest of the trip smoother or longer, decide which way you want to proceed.

Love is a lot of things. It is a lot of things we never expect it to be. It is making a unicorn costume with a painter's suit and a cone of styrofoam. It is gluing it together with superglue. It is gluing it inadvertantly to a near by bucket (and getting a little superglue on your fingers). It is ripping the cone and the painter's suit off of the bucket and making a big hole. It is taping the gaping hole closed and supergluing it all over again (and not sighing the whole time). It is thinking, I hope he isn't embarrassed by his superglued unicorn costume when others show up with Superman costumes. It is gracefully accepting that because the cone listed dangerously, the homemade unicorn costume had to morph into "garbage man". It is looking your kid in the eye (and without laughing) agreeing that this unicorn costume can be resurrected at Hallowe'en. It just needs a mane and a tail. We forgot the tail and the mane this time around.

 In the summer, it is not uncommon for me to wake up to the left overs of a "project".  It sometimes takes a while to figure out what came out of the project. Eventually, i discover it....

A lot is unknown. A lot is known. I do not know exactly how much I do not know. But I know what I know. Steer clear towards what you know, don't let the unknown scare you off course.