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. 

 

Another Summer of Bittersweet, But Different

It’s been five years since the original summer of bittersweet. I am not the person I was that summer; loss, marriage, time and now motherhood have changed me. 

The bitterness that started one late spring afternoon in 2017 as I sat in the ditch of a lonely Saskatchewan highway haunted me for long. It still can when I give it power. It’s especially real at this time of year, the time when everything went down. 

The summer of 2022 has its own sets of bitterness and goodness, possibly bringing the bittersweet into higher relief  than recent  years. I’ve relived the intensity of emotions that crammed into the weeks before and after our wedding. There was so much tragedy happening to people I knew that summer, not only to me, but, at the time, my pain was I all I saw.

This summer there was the bitter again.  The days of shuttling my infant through hospital hallways, both of us dreading the next medical procedure or bad news from a doctor. That’s the bitter. The long lonely hospital nights. I despaired of ever finding the sweet again. Those days passed and are mostly just something I complain about now. I’m not good at handling the bitter parts of life. It’s easy to be happy, to smile, to praise when the bitter is over and I’m sitting on the rocks at the lake cuddling my contended 3 month old and dangling my feet in the icy waves. But on the hard days when Bébé was being poked by careless nurses, when a doctor wasn’t  careful with my newborn, when i face any hard thing I dissolved into an angry mess. In hard times my entitledness fully lives these song lyrics: “I was sure by now, God, You would have reached down And wiped our tears away Stepped in and saved the day. But once again I say, A-men, and it's still raining” * When things get better and they inevitably and unexpectedly (not the way I imagine) do, I wonder why I can’t live the rest of the song: “And though my heart is torn, I will praise You in this storm.”* 

Now there is the sweet. When I’m rocking my precious child in the cool breeze wafting in on the sunset and drinking Agua Fresca or iced coffee with my husband, that’s the sweet. I want to freeze this moment and replay it infinitely on repeat. This is your cue to gag, my unsappy people. There’s so much more good. A sunset walk with my puppy and my child, days at the lake with BTTs family, fresh garden produce, sunshine, having coffee with the neighbors. Many days have felt too good to be true. 

*Praise You in This Storm by Casting Crowns

Almost Chimichurri

 Almost Chimichurri  

a sauce, a marinade, a sandwich spread

Ingredients:

 •Handful of fresh herbs

       Parsley

       Basil

       Oregano

       Dill

       Chives 

•A few over ripe cherry tomatoes. 

•small spoonful minced garlic 

•salt and pepper

•olive oil 

•thawed chicken breasts or thighs 

directions / comments 

•Using a sharp knife or herb chopper mince herbs into small pieces. Incorporate garlic. Crush the tomatoes into the herbs with a sharp knife. Sprinkle with salt -use enough to bring out the herb flavour. This should look something like:

•Rub the mixture onto chicken. Drizzle with olive oil. This should look something like: 

•Grill slowly over medium heat until internal temperature reaches 165•F. We’ve been using baking stones on our grill and love that they keep meat from drying out during the grilling process. Unfortunately I forgot to take the following photo should’ve been the chicken once it was cooked. 

•Once the chicken is cooked remove it from the grill and let it rest for a couple minutes before serving. 

•Eat the chicken. If you have some of the herb mixture leftover use it as a dipping sauce for the chicken or you can just use bbq sauce or your favourite dipping sauce . Recently I like to top everything with sautéed onions, sweet peppers and jalapeños and that is how we’ve eaten this chicken as well. 

•For a full meal Serve with a carrot / sweet potato / Irish potato bake (airfrying is a faster crispier option) and a quick Caesar salad (our boring favourite salad). These have  been  my go to easy sides recently. Garlic bread can be added as well. 

•The following day we make leftover chicken into a sandwich for a quick packed or home lunch: sour dough bread, garden lettuce, tomatoes and onion, New Bothwell cheese. Try using the sauce for a bright pop of flavour. 

the Good Things

The Good Things 

I feel like I’ve been living a nightmare since last week Wednesday. Find the good things, BTT says. Of course, he is one of them. Here are more of the good things. 

The prayers a lot of people are praying. I know people are, they’ve told me that. And these prayers are being answered. Also. @grandmamavis is such a prayer warrior. 

All the new things Bébé B is learning even in a hospital room tethered to an IV machine. 

The all’s right with the world feeling when BTT and Bébé B and I all fall asleep under the same roof. 

Hope that treatment plans will be worked out and we’ll be home soon. This hope has been very tenuous at times; tonight it’s stronger. 

The many people I’ve met these last nightmarish 1.5 weeks. Sometimes i see them for only minutes. Sometimes we don’t exchange any pleasantries. I am not a people person so being forced to come into contact with so many strangers is overwhelming. Still, I like the times when  I find out how many grandchildren someone has or the names of someone’s kids or why someone regrets choosing the job they did or why someone loves their job or about someone’s wife’s pregnancy complications or where someone grew up or who knows someone who shares my baby’s name. I like finding relatable things about the strangers. 

The woman smoking under the No Smoking sign outside the hospital door who made my day with her uplifting comment, “you look snazzy in green.”

Our local hospital supports and advocates cosleeping even though the big city one doesn’t as we found out abruptly and sleepily at 2am. 

The sacrifices people have made so our child could receive the care he needs. Specifically

1 . The man who “has a thousand children” (his coworker’s words) who stayed at work late to care for Bébé B. He probably skipped having supper with his wife and all his kids to help us, BTT pointed out. Really it was his SO and 1000 children who made most of the sacrifice.  

2 . That unnamed child somewhere in Regina General who is still waiting because bébé B received the IV line meant for him. Our child was somehow prioritized over someone else’s child and we are so grateful. My heart is also hurting for the child and the child’s parents who are still waiting. 

This child who makes us so joyful in hard times. His epic whole-face smiles and his sparkly blue blue eyes. His cuddly chubby body cuddled against my shoulder. His conversations. (is he always going to be this talkative?)  The fact that two months in we still argue sometimes about who gets to hold him.

One Year Later 

I’m posting this on Canada Day, remembering my July 1st post from last year.  It’s been another Canada Day filled with heart ache and mixed emotions across my country. Canada, or rather Canadians, have had a rough couple years. We’re struggling to reconcile our differing opinions on how our country should function through the pandemic and into the future. We’re struggling to respectfully acknowledge and mourn a terrible past, the horrific things our country as we know it today was built upon and move forward. The words of our national anthem ring truer than ever tonight, God, keep our land. God, keep our people. 

A Revelation

A Revelation

The Sermonette I wrote to myself tonight.

“casting all your care upon him; 
for he careth for you.” 1Peter‬ ‭5:7‬

No one (but me) ever talks about their least favourite verse in the Bible. Because so many others love this verse I’ve only thought of it as a cliche and never as words that could be meaningful to me.  I’ve never stopped to think about the meaning of it. Possibly the main reason I’ve avoided thinking about casting my care on anyone else but myself is that I love to carry my cares around alone feeling all proud of my broad shoulders.