Nothing Gold Can Stay

The Cranes came to say goodbye to me today, just before they left on their extended winter vacation. They say they won’t even be back for Christmas. To be honest, I thought they’d already gone. They’ve been pretty quiet the last few weeks, a change after their ubiquitous 5pm dramas all spring and summer. Their farewell was poignant and noisy. They landed in my bald browning meadow for a few minutes, updating me on their flight information and taunting Rebel the Dog. For a moment the dread of another long snowy winter swept through my veins and I wished I could join them on their graceful journey south. To fly off to a place with no winter only to return to this beautiful place when the sun is once again warm and the prairies and forests verdant, would the best of all the worlds. Then, with a majestic slapping of massive storm cloud blue wings and another round of raspy goodbyes, they were off. They flew a final circle above the yard and I with Little B and Rebel watched them disappear. 

I’m going to miss this weird couple. They’ve been here for everything this summer. Days before Little B was born they cackled from the air when Rebel tried to chase them and then settled back into the swamp to watch my heavy waiting body trudge down the road. They communicated to me through the quiet days of new motherhood. They must’ve been having their own babies right about then. They knew what it was like. They’re a dramatic pair. Life must have been a little stressful for them for a while because for weeks they had noisy arguments I could almost set my clock by. They went on daily flights across my yard from one slough to another. They were predictable when many things in my life weren’t. 

It seems a little early for even the cowardliest of birds to be leaving, so perhaps they are making some stops (to see relatives? to tour the marshes on the other side of the quarter?) along the way and forgot to inform me. Nevertheless, this feels like the beginning of the end. Summer is ebbing. The fields are browning. The weeds in my garden of weeds are dying. The sun is still warm on my face, but the evenings and nights have the whisper of winter in their breezes. @RobertFrost said it best. Nothing gold can stay.

 *poetic license was taken in the narration of this tale 

The Almond Milk Woman and Mother Intuition

I wasn’t prepared for the sheer amount of  people who want to talk to me about my baby when I’m in public with him. 90% of them are women around my mother or mother-in-law’s age who tell me that their children aren’t planning to have children or that they only have one grandchild and that grandchild lives two thousand kilometres away. All of them tell me how adorable and precious he is.  I already know this, of course, but I love hearing it just the same. There’s also a few men who like to talk to bébé. They say gruff things like “high buddy” or “this year’s model, eh.”  Big B finds these conversations amusing. He loves the “aww he’s with daddy” or “he looks just like you” comments he gets when he carries bébé  around.

Most of these people and conversations are forgettable and
similar, but a few stick in my brain. The Almond Milk Woman is one of them 

You are a good mother, she told me she when we met in the organic aisle in Superstore only a few weeks after Little B was born. We were standing in front of the coolers that held milk alternatives. More specifically we were both reaching for the almond milk. Her words tried to make my hormonal sleepy new mom brain tearful a little, but luckily i realized that Superstore wasn’t the place for that. You are a good mother even when you make mistakes or think you aren’t. Always trust your *mother intuition. You know what is best for your child. And then before she left she said, I usually make my own almond milk, but today I was lazy. Now I know it was because I was meant to speak to you. 

No one else has been quite this dramatic or full of advice. None of the others have told me they were meant to speak to [me.] My little judgey heart says that if I hadn’t been wearing my newborn in a linen sling and standing in front of the almond milk display in the natural foods aisle  Almond Milk Woman wouldn’t have deemed my level of crunchiness high enough for her to speak to. Nevertheless, I was happy that she did. And,  Almond Milk Lady, if you ever happen to read this, please know that, even though I don’t make my own almond milk like you think I should, my sourdough starter was rising on my counter at home as I spoke to you in Superstore and I have since started a kombucha journey. 

About mother intuition / parent intuition -I would love to know other parents’ thoughts on this topic. Is it legit ? Not a real thing ? One Mother I trust and love told me something similar not in this exact terminology but still about trusting my mother intuition, since I became a mother. My sissy passed on  something she’d read on this topic: a mother’s intuition is right 80% of the time. For intuition being just a feeling, 80 is a high percentage of correctness. Are you a believer in mother / parent / caregiver intuition? Do you have experiences where your intuition has been right? -or wrong ? 

VBS

 

Vacation Bible School

We’re now on the VBS committee. An ambitious gym building project at the school complicates tradition / habit so we had to host VBS at church this year. The guys hauled in swing sets and play houses and soccer nets to entertain the children at recess. We brainstormed to create 3 large classes out of one big open space and banished one group to the too-small nursery. Everything was labour intensive but it also worked better than expected. Still, we spent a lot of time at church organizing, facilitating, cleaning, and just being there to do whatever needed to be done and help out with any kid drama such as gravel scrapes and forgotten lunches .

Here’s how it went:

One class had an usually large amount of kids so I got to spend some time with them several days. It made me feel like a school teacher again.                                    Frisbees on the roof every day. Children on the roof, too suddenly. 

The back row of boys cutting up, singing crazy, their favourite song the duck song. Bébé B is enthralled. They like him too. 

No throwing rocks near the church windows. no throwing rocks full stop.

Say kind things. The group of preteen boys I worked with a couple days seems to have forgotten what those are. The girls conversely are full of over the top compliments they don’t actually mean.       

Beading. Macrame. Hot gluing.                       

Painting. Signs at the road, verses, something pretty for the walls.      

Flower arranging. Foraging. Everything looks like autumn. 
Crafting with the big boys. There’s so many 11 and 12 year olds this year. Their crafting skills are above par. Otherwise they act 5 but with 15 vocabularies. Little B watches in awe. As do I. 
Food. Juice boxes. Chatting with the snack ladies every day. Someone always asking to hold bébé, giving me a couple minutes to be more efficient. 

Killing time but always busy. 

Picking up “my” girl (Lexus) every day. She is such a joyful sweet child. 

So many tables and chairs and glue sticks and pencil crayons and a hundred or more pairs of scissors. 

Muffins from Paula, buns from  Val, supper from Paula and her girls, kombucha scoby from Heidy, a housewarming snake plant for my entrance from Paula. Cucumbers and another housewarming gift from Heidy . Kittens from Tiffany.  Generosity abounds. 

Pizza party to celebrate the last day. Pop pizza Caesar salad ice-cream. Food of champions. The children are all joyful and foodfull and some are a little sad that it’s all over. 

The program is great. The silent skit of the first and second graders. The only half wild Only a Boy Named David and If You’re Happy and You Know It. The hauntingly harmonized God Makes a Lot From a Little. BTT gets to do the thanking and do the closing praying. 

The after party is long and exhausting because we are in charge of making sure everyone gets fed and then we  have to stay until the end to clean up. 

Then we go home and rehabilitate our new kittens and my sister and her husband come and we go to the lake and drink ice coffee and cook over the fire and talk a lot about Airbnb and babies and sleep.