The Complications and Connections of History

The pictures from Japan are shattering to look at. Those from the earthquake and tsunami are frightening enough. All physical signs of human habitation destroyed in a matter of seconds. The frailty of humans up against the power of nature. Et cetera.

And there are the nuclear plant explosions.

Broadcasters say things like, "Japan is the best-prepared country for handling a crisis like this," and "Of course Japan has extensive experience in rebuilding." I wonder how many Americans remember where that need for rebuilding came from, and how exactly we all know so much about the effects of radiation on the human body.

Further, I wonder how many Canadians know their own country's contribution to the development of nuclear weapons.

In 1998, Gordon Edwards wrote an anti-nuclear policy piece for the Montreal Gazette. It includes a brief summary of the work performed by Canadian scientists in Montreal during World War II. A link to it is here.

It's an excellent synopsis. Here are two relevant paragraphs:

In 1942, the British moved their own plutonium-production research team to Montreal -- away from the Luftwaffe, closer to the Americans. Canada paid all expenses, and Canadian scientists joined the team.

The Montreal Lab focussed on the best ways to produce plutonium for Bombs. The French group was there too, with their heavy water. It was known that reactors moderated with heavy water would produce more plutonium.

My mother was one of those Canadian scientists. A mathematician with a Ph.D. from Radcliffe (the part of Harvard open to women at the time), she worked directly with researchers who went on to lead computing and theoretical groups at Los Alamos National Laboratory after the war.

Los Alamos--where both Fat Man and Little Boy grew up.

And, by the way, where you'll find Otowi Station Bookstore and Science Museum Shop, an excellent store with an extensive collection of books about history and science, as well as nice people and fun science toys. You should go there.

I am of course proud of my mother and her work. And it makes no sense to blame anyone now for the fact that we know so much about the effect of radiation on the human body.

At this point, we can apply what we have learned to fix the current situation. As the immediate crisis passes, we can also make sure we apply what we've learned so we can prevent nuclear accidents in the future.

And finally, we can dig through the butterflies-and-puppies, mushy elements of phrases like "we're all connected" to remember that in vital and direct ways, we really are all connected, in all our human frailty.

Wikileak Worthy

I've been trying to come up with something to say about the Wikileaks "revelations" about Canada. I'm feeling a little...torn, I guess you could say.

Here's what my Canadian half has to say.

I don't know, I just wonder, maybe, I guess I'm saying that what I think I might want to say, isn't really, you know, very...pithy or interesting or...valid. It's not as good as what Americans say about Canada, that's for sure.

Because they think we have an, um, inferiority complex? Like, we are so inferior, because of being, um, smaller and not-American, as a country, that is (because we are waaaay bigger in square miles, really, and three coastlines to contend with), and sometimes we show how bad we feel about ourselves by overcompensating and pretending to act all superior and smug.

Like when we make the U.S. the bad guys on our TV shows, and I might add those are based on real-life stories like Maher Arar, but maybe, you know, that's out of line.

Or maybe when we point out that we're actually, like, BIGGER than the U.S. as well as a whole separate country, and therefore, not-American is pretty much exactly how we should feel.

I'm sorry. Was I too loud? Just...I need a moment. Thanks.

Here's what my American half has to say.

Canada. Yeah. Hmm. They're like, north of Alaska? We don't really need them, not for anything important like oil or building materials or minerals or anything. Wait, let me check my BlackBerry...C-a-n-a... Oh, the Olympics, right. Like that hockey game meant something. They speak some French up there, don't they, and have a lady on their money?

I don't mean to make mock. Well, maybe a little mock.

But hey, World, here's the deal: Diplomacy is not the same as honesty. They have a separate word for it and everything.

Now, isn't there something else we could all be doing? Like maybe not bombing each other?

47 Days of Gratitude and/or Thanks, Week 5

Here's this week's round-up. For what this is all about, go here and start at the bottom.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 29: I'm grateful for aaaaalll the laughter about changing the clocks: "I turned all the clocks back!" "But I did some of them already" "Did you do this one?" "I don't know, what does it say?" "Well what time is it?" Etc. Note to self: next year, this is the job of ONE PERSON.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 30: I'm grateful for a day with some chunks of time to put toward projects, as opposed to the slivers that have been more typical of my days lately.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 31: I'm grateful for the ongoing warmish weather, which is allowing us to clear the trees off the camp roads in shorter sessions, a couple of hours a day, instead of in two or three backbreaking days. We're maybe 1/3 done. Good exercise!

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 32: I'm grateful for the wee aches and twinges my body shares when I do real work outside instead of an approximation of work in a gym setting. It's a nice grounding in the physical. (Also nice to get trees off the path.)

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 33: I'm grateful for those who speak their truth about their experiences so that I learn what their sacrifice was like.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 34: I'm grateful for days that bring a variety of tasks. If something isn't going well, I can move to something else for awhile.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 35: I'm grateful for today's lesson in the meaning of the term "exponential." As in, two grandsons cause exponentially less mayhem than three.

This week brought a nice mixture of ceremonial gratitude, with Remembrance Day, and solitary gratitude, with opportunities to work outside. It started with the companionable laughter of the two of us bumbling our way through life's tasks, and ended with a more boisterous family time, when two grandsons spent a night and a day and reminded us again that learning the right way to safely cut your sandwich with a sharp serrated knife is really fun.

As my husband is wont to say, "Life is good."

How Much?

Here's what it looks like around here today.

This is just one tree, too.

There will be firewood! And yes, it also looks like this sometimes, or it did a few weeks ago.

Living here is definitely worth the work.

47 Days of Gratitudinous Thanks, Week 4

The days are flying by (tickety-boo*), rather like the years (tickety-boo-hoo) and we come to the end of another week.

For what this is all about, go here and start at the bottom.

Here are the individual days from Week 4, followed by a lesson or two.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 22: I'm grateful that I shared part of my afternoon yesterday with a whiskey jack (gray jay). While I sat at the dining room table shuffling papers and scribbling notes, s/he hunted flies outside, first on the front porch and then on the back deck. They have a way of looking at you that is so friendly!

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 23: I'm grateful for the comfort and nurturing of quiet morning routines: making coffee, emptying and refilling the dishwasher, taking out the garbage.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 24: I'm grateful to have made it through a full five decades of life. I can't wait to see what the next ones bring!

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 25: I'm grateful for all the kind birthday wishes and for being in touch with family and friends via FB, via regular mail, and in "real life." Also, last night I had the opportunity to remember "the saints"--those who live on in my mind and heart. It was a great (grate-ful) day.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 26: I'm grateful for the lesson I learned yesterday while watching a pileated woodpecker go to town on the insides of a downed pine tree: find a likely spot, work like hell, and don't let anything distract you or scare you off.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 27: I'm grateful to have a front-row seat to the changing seasons. This morning, the lake sports a thin skin of ice near the shore.

47 Days of Thanks, Day 28: I'm grateful for the security of having food in the pantry and refrigerator--and even some choice about what to eat!

The effects of the storm and power outage linger in the form of gratitude for the simple and natural things, like the company of animals (I didn't write about the pair of foxes that came to play on the lawn between the house and the lake, or the several deer that have cavorted through).

Also, speaking of the power outage, we threw away a lot of food that was spoiled, though we didn't lose too much. It's nice to know our food supply is safely replenished--and I am recognizing first-hand the role of food as a measure of security.

Again and again, and especially this week, I am reminded of just how wealthy I am, in family and friends, in life circumstances, in health. It's humbling, and inspiring.

*Hmm, I knew "tickety-boo" reminded me of something. Pooh's "tiddley-pom," anyone?

47 Days of Thanks/Gratitude, Week 3

Here are the posts from Week 3. To see "What the heck is this?" and weeks 1 and 2, go here and start at the bottom.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 15: I'm grateful for days when the toughest pre-9 a.m. decision is "Is THIS gorgeous sunrise worth taking pictures of?"

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 16: I'm grateful for friends whose infectious laughter cuts through the hubbub of a restaurant and makes everyone smile.

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 17: I'm grateful that I stopped to investigate that black thing bobbing in my morning coffee. It WAS a bug. And now it's down the drain, and I get to drink fresh coffee while sitting inside, dry and warm, on a windy, rainy morning.

47 Days of Thanks, Day 18: I'm so grateful the high winds haven't knocked our power ou--

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 19: I'm grateful our power is back on. In this house, that means not only light, heat, refrigeration, and Internet, but also running water! Flush toilets and warm showers!

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 20: I'm grateful that of the ~25 trees we will have to deal with (not counting ones that fell that we're leaving), only two came close to structures, and the damage was minimal (one eave).

‎47 Days of Thanks, Day 21: I'm very grateful to be married to someone who, when hearing that trees are down, rubs his hands together and says, "This will be fun!" Then he gets out the chainsaw.

And here's what I learned.

1. Never say "I wonder what Week X will bring." Week 3 brought gale-force winds and a big storm that brought down trees. As you might have gathered. Which was slightly freaky to me, as you also might have gathered. On the up side, being without power for more than 30 hours has made me more mindful of the little things: Lights that come on when you flick the switch. A functioning plumbing system. The invention of things like candles and batteries.

2. Doing this exercise has kept me mindful longer of those things, which is usually not the case. When I'm sick, I long to feel well. But when I'm well, well becomes "normal" and I long for something else. Because of reviewing the things I can be grateful for, the gratitude for normal has stuck around longer.

3. As I told a friend over coffee, I would suck as a Chilean miner. It wasn't so much the discomforts of being without power that bugged me--those were minimal. It was the not knowing, and the many, many arenas in which I couldn't know. When would the lights be back on? Was that balsam at the point coming down on the little camp? Where else would the roof leak? What's happening in town (they also lost power in spots)? That balsam--we should have taken it down but how could we when it wasn't safe? And speaking of safe, when will it be safe to go outside and check the trees? Et cetera.

4. Even in the middle of the gale, there really was a lot to be grateful for. Namely, that I was in a house, however leaky when rain is driven at the windows with such force, and thus relatively safe. Also, 30 hours is not that long in the scheme of things. It's October (though the weather has turned chilly), not January, so heating was not as big an issue as it could have been. Lots of extenuating circumstances and I was more aware than otherwise of those, thanks to this gratitude exercise.

LOTS of learning this week. Evidently I enjoy control and routine. Also being able to take a shower whenever I want. Which isn't learning so much as re-learning or being reminded of. Which is okay, too.

The Hour without Power

We've had one this morning. I was in mid-post, too.

But fortunately, we've had only the one.
(So far, I add, trying to walk the line between guarded optimism and "sucker!!".)

There's a leak into my office--not a bad one, and it's stopped.
(For now, I add, ditto with the guarded optimism.)

Anyway, it's like this here today.

Oh, and the kids go (back) to school today.
Wonder how many believe the sky is crying just for them.

It's Raining!

Hooray. And whew, because of the dry-ish* well.

* Technically, it wasn't completely dry. But each "ask" from the pump produced only a couple of cups of water. Until suddenly we got a few vertical inches, as measured on the side of the cistern. Then several more hours of teaspoons, cups, teaspoons. Then another glut. Each glut still smaller than the normal amount the well produces in response to an "ask," but more than the accumulated total from the beads of nervous sweat we were producing.

In any case, the cistern filled last night. And this morning, rain!

So, now what?

When the cistern is full, we can no longer see how the well is doing.
(The down side of a full well.)

We have decreed:
Back to "normal."
Tentative normal, that is.
No more rainwater flushes.
No more coldwater washes.

Yet.
I don't "normally" cross fingers and toes,
send up a faint breath
of gratitude and (yes) an "ask" of my own
before starting a load of laundry.

But perhaps I should.

It Ain't Just a Metaphor

This may come as a shock to you, as it did to me: the term "dry well" actually refers to something in the real world.

It's not just a dismissive way to talk of someone who doesn't have the emotional wherewithal to be intimate.

It's not just a description for your creativity when it needs time to meander and stare out the window instead of produce actual creative-ness.

There's a concrete thing to which that metaphor refers, and that, my friends, is what we have here today.

We do NOT have a failure to communicate between pump and well and cistern.

We have, essentially, a dry well.

A state of affairs I have fretted over and anticipated for oh, two or three years.

It's a dry year. The lake levels are lower than any other year that anyone around here remembers. The birch leaves, which are yellow and falling, are actually dry. These all should have been my clues.

After our eleven days' worth of company left, I blithely waited for the cistern to fill, which it did, and then started in on laundry. Yesterday the cistern had fallen below the spot where it normally asks for water and the well wasn't delivering, but we've had that problem already this summer, and it turned out to be the pump. So surely it was the pump again. Right?

Uh.

We opened the well cap and performed the Pebble Test. You would know this as "dropping a rock down the pipe." It fell and fell and bounced off the sides of things and eventually plunked.

I've worried about this before. And now, apparently, it has come to pass.

I'm feeling all "Laura and Mary" except that we have it better than they did. We already drink "town water," which we keep in attractive (?) blue jugs on our kitchen counter. We put that into the cistern and every time we go to town will fill up with another 19 liters to add. We could have a man with a water truck come bring us water, but we're not quite ready for that.

We are flushing toilets with the accumulated rainwater. This whole situation may also get me back to my health club, where I understand there's a shower. Of course I'd be too embarrassed to shower only so I'd have to work out, too, and that would be a good thing.

We are actually fine, in the sense that there's a lake in front of us and we have access to potable water.

But we could use some rain. Normal amounts. I wish Pakistan could send us some of their water. They probably do, too.

In Celebration of Our Wedding Anniversary

Dear Mother, to use the name you signed to the letters you wrote,

Sorry to bother you wherever it is you are. I suspect heaven, to be heaven to you, would include a class for you to teach, and you are probably pretty busy. But I think you're going to like what I am going to say. It was something I couldn't or wouldn't tell you while you were alive.

Remember how furious I was with you for selling the middle portion of the family property in the mid-1980s? Of course the property was yours to sell, and you had what you thought were good reasons to sell it. I did grow to appreciate the nice bathroom you added to the bigger camp, because it allowed us to take hot showers while still experiencing the rusticity of the original camp property.

However, the sale occasioned much wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part. Lots of “How could you?” and all that. While I grew quieter about it, I never really got over it. Partly I was afraid that you'd sell more of the property without consulting us kids. But mostly, I grieved the loss of the whole—our family legacy had been ten acres in the most beautiful place in the world, our Paradise, and now the middle was gone.

Not only that, the buyers bulldozed most of the trees and built a honkin' year-round home there. Who knows what nefarious plans they had that would change our experience of the place? And before I could relax about that, they had to sell to some other couple with two kids, all complete unknowns to us. At least these new people owned a canoe, let trees grow up, and left much of the shoreline natural, which we considered hopeful signs.

But still, as the years became a deacade plus, I
harbo(u)red a resentment, the one that starts “if only.” If only I had been older and presumably more flush with the money you needed. If only I had won the lottery or cured cancer or published a spectacular best-seller or otherwise amassed enough wherewithal to prevent that sale. Ah, I sighed, “If only.”

Well, I am telling you today what I should have known all along: you did the right thing. Not only is it okay that you sold the property. It was the wise and right thing to do, and I am grateful for it. You were right, an infinite number of times over.

Here's what happened. The family that bought the house endured happy times and sad times. The kids grew up and spread their wings. The wife grew sick and passed away, because sadness and death come, even in Paradise.

Seasons change. Eras come to an end. You knew this. You had watched your own parents age and, eventually, die. I heard you talk of it, but I didn't understand the consequences of the turning of the earth and accumulation of years. I know now.

As it happened, the man living alone in the house still knew himself to be Paradise, even in the sad times, even in the fallow time after his wife's death. While he waited for life and hope to grow again, he watched the fawns appear and grow until they lost their spots and even had fawns of their own. He saw a fox dancing with snowflakes. He skied over his property, and ours, and he walked carefully and lightly on it, and he saw that it was beautiful.

You'll recognize this, Mommy: “Reader, I married him.” How could I not—a man of such sense and caring, who shares my values so explicitly? Three years (thirty-six months) ago today, in fact, we stood on the beach in front of the little camp where I write this, which your father built 85 years ago. We cried through the reading from Ecclesiastes—“To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven”—and through our vows to ourselves and to each other. This morning, I woke up with my husband in the house you made possible some 25 years ago, when you sold the middle part of our Paradise.

I cannot say enough good things about this man. Get this: he likes the family. Really, he does! He welcomes friends and relatives, some of whom are virtual strangers to us both, and helps them enjoy our Paradise in whatever way they like best. He was my Mr. Knightley in the time of Daddy's sickness and death. He somehow accepts me as I am, with all my imperfections, and yet challenges me to be my best self.

I'm not sure what I do for him. Sometimes I bring him coffee or bake scones. When we go out in the canoe, I let him steer. He gets to do projects. For example, he put a new roof on the little camp and dug the piano out of the collapsing floor in the back room and shored up the floor and foundations. He has the fun of using his chainsaw on the trees that threaten the various structures here. These things seem hardly enough, yet he claims they are plenty.

Mom, I am not daft enough to imagine you could have foreseen this particular life for me. But you and Daddy were people of faith. You believed, among other things, in the inherent goodness of humanity. You believed that we all have the responsibility to do what we believe to be the right thing, even when that action is unpleasant, while trusting that doing the right thing is the best way to serve the greater good. So you showed that faith is a verb. You sold the property and you trusted in the outcome.

And that is the greatest lesson for me in all this. I can't see the future, but I read Ecclesiastes, and I know that death will come again to Paradise. As if I needed a reminder, gold leaves are falling from the birches as I type this. Someday, my husband and I, as well as the rest of your “kids” and grandkids, will have more decisions to make. They may be hard decisions. They may require active trust and faith in the process of birth, death, and renewal, of a time for every purpose under the heaven.

Fortunately, we have your example to guide us.

Best of all, we don't have to make those decisions today. Today, our only decision is whether it's a good day for canoeing, because in Paradise, the best way to celebrate one's third anniversary (or pretty much any day) is by going out in a canoe, or on skis, depending on the season. Or even for a walk, perhaps with a chainsaw or camera.

In closing, Mother dear, I'll say again: thank you—you were right.

Love,
Marion

Well...

So, people are coming to visit. That means I'm obsessing about the level of water in the well. Which I do with some frequency. Even though I know how it works, the diagrams and whatnot.

Most of the year, the well produces enough water for the two of us to do daily ablutions and one water-sucking activity, such as run the dishwasher or wash a load of laundry. Maybe two loads of laundry, if they're both medium-sized. It has to do with the 40 feet of clay through which the fresh water must filter when it slowly fills the well.

Most of the year, I don't have to think about the water, but when I do--which is late summer--I do.

And when do people come visit? Yes. Late summer.

Anyway, this year I have been trying not to whine about the high humidity. I grew up with 99 degrees and 99% humidity, so I know about humidity, and I know that what we have isn't nearly that bad, blah blah.

I also know that a constant 75% humidity is NOT NORMAL here, and we don't have air conditioning to take the moisture from the air, and every surface in the house feels wet. The facecloth doesn't dry out from evening to evening. (Also, I will point out, I live HERE because we DON'T have 99/99, so it seems unfair for high humidity to chase me up here.)

Mostly I can be grateful for this summer. The temperature is generally nice--also in the 70s (today). The breeze is also nice. Just damp. I'm just not used to living in a clammy, clammy world.

On the up side, when the visitors want to take a shower, I can hand them bars of soap and send them outside to dance. They don't even have to go in the lake. The air is liquid enough.

See? That's me, always looking for the up side.

What is This Thing Called "Vacation"?

Still not sure. But I'm on one. At home. People are here. More people are coming in a month. Hard to say "no" to someone whose roots here are deeper than my own.

Meanwhile, I'm experiencing border crossings in the car again. Expect a report when vacation, whatever that might be, is over.

Between now and the next raft of company.

Kermit was Right

It's nearly full-on summer around here (officially on Monday). The warm dry days of May are now the cooler but warmish wet days of June. The out-of-doors is available for enjoyment about 20/7, since "night" accumulates near midnight and the sky starts to get light at about 4 a.m.

Everything grows like crazy these days--energy made visible at the ends of evergreen branches, at the tops of lily plants. The "lings" (duck- and gos-) totter after their elders on dry land and strain to catch up to them in the water. A fawn peers from behind its mother.

So. Creativity. Visible growth. New projects. Energy. Everywhere.

Except here. Here, it's about saying some good-byes. It's about saying some "no, but thanks"-es. It's about hearing some "no" and some "good-bye" and even some "meh." Ouch.

Here, it's looking backward to review and assess. What worked? What didn't? How can that get fixed--can it get fixed, is that even possible? Is it worth it to me to fix? If it's not, is it okay with me if it dies a quiet (or not-so-quiet, or lingering, or very very public, or embarrassingly unobserved) death?

Even the forward-looking part of the process--conjuring dreams, visions, what-ifs, if-this-turned-out-perfectly-it-would-look-likes--are less inspiring than tiring (or, dare I say it, depressing).

And meanwhile, everything outside is green. But...



As usual, Kermit has more than one good thought. It's easy from here to overlook the green, in all its solid ubiquity, because the water is sparkling--over there. I'd rather be doing that shiny stuff.

And the thing to do, when one is out of synch with the season, is be grateful for all that is green. All the projects attempted, however badly executed, were still creative acts. The lives now finished brought joy and interest and laughter as well as annoyance and irritation. Without the joyful parts, there could be no sorrow at their end.

It's only those events that occurred in time that can't be fixed. Anything on paper can be revised at a time when I do have ideas and energy and creativity. And those someones who want to improve on the events that happened in linear time will have my notes to consider or ignore.

But Kermit's best thought for me, now, is "Why wonder?" I'm in the middle of a life of creativity, even if this part of it isn't the fun part.

Overall, this life is green, and it'll do fine, and I think it's what I wanna be.

Into Each Life...

Some trees must fall.

(Two, actually, although you can only see one.)

Fortunately, some lilies are also blooming--and more will, too.

Unless the deer get them. Although the deer seem to be scarce this year--we've seen one fawn, one time. Then again, today I learned there's a yearling bear in the area. Which may be why.

Trees, fawns, bears, flowers: Going to my happy place now.

Ahhh.

Hopes for the Summer

This summer is different than previous years in lots of ways. For one thing, in the cosmic sense every year is different (to me) because I'm different. For another, every year is different because the lake is different. Also the trees, some large number of which reach the end of their lifespan and fall down, usually in an inconvenient spot. And this year, we have unrelated people living next door.

It's also a different year because our projects are different. Except for the trees, which never seem to get tired of falling down.

Anyway. See this picture? Speaking of trees and some falling down.



See the green thing on the tree? That's a piece of tape. That indicates a trail. A nascent one. Call it a trail-to-be. For skiing. For walking on. For admiring views.

In previous years, the projects here have been focused on the camp, and seriously structural to boot: shore up the foundation. Put on a new roof. Re-roof the bathroom. This year, knock on wood, we don't have those--just painting, but I suspect that will be like the trees, never what you might call "finished."




But in the distance (like the corner of the "it may be a shack but it's our shack," above), I can see a time when NOT ALL the projects fall into the "because the place will fall apart if we don't" category. We'll be doing things like cutting the deadwood (and junk brush) out of those trails.


When we're not sitting on the beach, of course. (The spots in front of Caribou are kayakers. This is also one of those photos of a loon.)

It will be interesting, come September, to take stock and then to make our new resolutions for the fall. Resolutions being, like trees, never quite finished.

So Much for Holidays

The holiday frame of mind...

and yet, work remains.

Deadlines and whatnot.

Even "fun work": goals, you know.

But when I make the time to raise my head,

I can usually see something like this gull,

standing there

being a gull.

And that's still pretty darn cool.

There is no "After"

Oops, I did it again.

In spite of my best resolutions, I again forgot to take a "before" picture, so any "after" picture I were to post now wouldn't show the true results of my hard work.

Which is okay, since I don't happen to have an "after" picture. I could go take one, but it's not really "after" yet. I'm not sure when "after" is going to be.

I've been making our larger camp ("cottage" in southern Ontario, "cabin" in Manitoba) habitable for relative strangers who have been warned about the virtue of approaching this experiment with a sense of adventure. One of the group is expected tomorrow. And, in a near-miracle, we seem to be ready. Even the water seems to be okay, for now. (That sound is me madly knocking wood.)

All this "strangers at camp" stuff is new territory for my siblings and me. Until our parents retired in the late 1980s, our family always stayed at the other place, the "it may be a shack but it's our shack." This other, larger camp had been built by my grandfather so that he and my grandmother would have a "nice" place to stay and dote on grandchildren from afar. However, they were incapacitated around 1960 and stopped using the place.

Because my mother preferred the shack and our time was always limited in the summer, the "nice" camp lay fallow for about ten years. Then a math colleague of my mother's mentioned that he and his wife were finding it too difficult to paddle Quetico in their retirement. My mother said they were welcome to stay in this place--and issued the warning to them I mentioned earlier, about the virtue of approaching this experiment with a sense of adventure.

For some fifteen years, the Mendenhalls stayed in this camp. They were a treasure. They brought it back from edge of ruin. They cleaned and painted, fixed and fiddled and futzed about, and generally made do with the quirks of the place. Every year when we arrived for our three weeks in the summer, my mother would comment about a new piece of furniture (an end table made from a painted wooden spool, a lawn chair with new webbing and a grafted-on wooden arm), and Dr. Mendenhall would allow, "Picked it up cheap." Which meant, "at the dump."

The Crapture delivered the "nice" camp from many vestiges of his, ahem, ingenuity, and that of my parents. (The four of them could have given those Hoarders shows guaranteed syndication.) A few last bits are stored in an outbuilding until we have another full load. I think of it as a form of reincarnation: from the dump it came, and to the dump it shall return. Er, landfill. Ashes to ashes, dump to.... never mind.

So tomorrow is a new beginning. And as Green Day says, "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." Which is as close, I guess, to an "after" as I am going to get here.

And that's okay. Because the "before" was "now," and the "after" will be its own "now," and I know that the "now" I'm living in is pretty darn good. (But, that wish list.)

Angel in a Beat-Up Van

Sometimes I know I am Heard.

See? (Lots of heavenly pictures around here in the morning.)

Yesterday, my husband's solution to the water issue seemed promising. Today, I plucked a few moments from the rest of my to-do list to go see how I could help. Then I heard an old van full of handy-guy stuff lumbering up the path. (Similar to a percussion ensemble.)

Yippee! the guy who knows all about our water system, who had been taken out of commission by a wrenched knee and painkillers, showed up just in time to coach Roy through the pump stuff and confirm information about the (sadly, apparently useless) well.

Is everything resolved? No.
Do I still have a wish list? Yes. In spite of all the blessings.
Absolutely, I do.

But I do have hope, and I have a new appreciation
for the divine nature of relationships.

Because, baby, that lake
is big
and cold
and wide
(if not deep).

And,
like it or not,
darkness does gather--

And we have each other.

And yes--that is enough.

Before and After

Last November, this happened.


Last week, some other stuff happened and now it looks like this.


No, one of those things wasn't a paint job. The woodshed looks greener because of the quality of light. (It's fabulous this morning. The wind is really fierce off the lake, though, and it's chilly.)

Now, after the birch spent all winter bent over the woodshed holding up two other trees, its reward is...what? Being cut down--on purpose. No, it's not fair (as my mother used to say of life), but in spite of its service, it's leaning toward the structures, and we want to try to manage its descent.

And the corner of the woodshed is making Mr. Roofing Man rub his hands together in eager anticipation.

Now, if we could only figure out what is doing this:

We would think "bear" except no tracks anywhere, and likewise no scat. Our next thought is "bird," because the ravens are known to do weird things with wood, and the pileated woodpeckers have been around.

In any case, we want this picture to be the "after." We don't want it to be "before" and have an "after" that includes a blurry picture of a bear, perhaps taken from its innards.

Lesson Re-Learned

I have suggested here before that knowing and doing are two different things.

Here's another lesson I'm re-learning. You know when you're vacuuming something above your head? Like in a tiny space, like an attic? And it's just so disgusting, like buggy and spidery and cobwebby and you pretend those can't be rodent nests because if they were you would scream like the cowering 10-year-old you are inside and be SO outta there?

That's when you should keep your mouth shut. Yes.

When vacuuming a surface over your head, close mouth.

Of course, "close mouth" is not bad advice for me in general.