Winter

[photo by Jon Merk]

Sunday morning

lies still

beneath its

winter blanket.

Winter Fields

                                     

Snow has crept all down the hills now in this valley, and this morning it was standing room only waiting for one's turn to get their winter tires put on. The South Island already has snow, my youngest daughter reports, sitting cosily beside her fire this chilly morning. Mid-Island we are expecting it to get very cold tonight and to snow tomorrow.

The mountain passes in both directions are deadly in snow and ice; we are not looking forward to it. They have been telling me the predictions are this winter will be the worst in fifty years. Yikes!

My son Jon sent these photos from the Okanagan, where he and Zenny spend most weekends out in the wilderness, nearly year-round. These deer were so unconcerned with their presence, they were able to get quite close to them.

Some of them were still reclining during the photo shoot. 

This winter Jon equipped Zenny in camo gear so now she can trek with him

without freezing half to death.

(Would you believe this tiny girl is the one who

dismembers and cuts up the elk carcasses?

And helps pack them out of the bush?)

Since Jon was ten, he has loved the wilderness: hiking, camping, fishing, boating. In recent years, he added hunting to his list of pursuits. [As far as I know, no animals were hurt during this photo shoot:)]

Off to check out the terrain.

And finally home again, snug and sound, where Yogi

is happy to have them back.

A Few Great Reads

My favorite type of reading is non-fiction, true accounts of people transcending difficult circumstances with some manner of grace and courage. These are some of the books I have read recently that had me totally immersed in the author's experiences. Even Silence Has An End is Ingrid Betancourt's account of being taken hostage by guerillas while she was campaigning to become President of Colombia. She was held captive, often chained at the neck, deep in the Amazon jungle for six years. During that time she made four daring escapes. The recounting of what the days and nights were like for her and her fellow hostages is rivetting and  their dramatic rescue  at the end of the book is the stuff of films. I could not put this book down.

Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly is a beautifully written love story, set first in Burma and then in Thailand where the author recounts her love affair with the leader of the Burmese guerillas. This was a beautiful read, poetically written. A love story with historical context, showing life on the run with revolutionaries.

Stolen Lives:Twenty Years In a Desert Jail by Malika Oukfir is so good I am re-reading it now some years after first experiencing it. Talk about spirit overcoming difficulties! Malika was raised as a princess but, after her father staged a coup attempting to assassinate the King and was executed himself, Malika, her mother and siblings were held for twenty years  in a penal colony under the starkest of conditions. They actually escaped confinement by digging a tunnel with their bare hands. They survived for five days before being recaptured. A story of resilience, courage and humor in the face of acute deprivation. They were released in 1996 and Malika now lives in exile.

Now this one - oh my! This one blew my doors off. Perhaps you have seen the movie. Jean-Dominque Bauby was 43 and at the top of his game as editor-in-chief of the Elle magazine in France when he was felled by a stroke. When he regained consciousness, only one muscle in his entire body still worked - his left eyelid. With that eyelid, he devised a manner of communicating: a helper would point to letters on an alphabet board. When the correct letter was pointed to he would blink: once for yes, two for no. In this manner, letter by letter, he dictated this book. In it, he took imaginary trips to places he had never been, ate gourmet meals, wrote about his life and his children. He died two days after his book was published to critical acclaim.

After reading this, I decided I had no right to ever complain about writers' block again. After seeing the movie, it felt like a true miracle to be able to get up out of my seat and walk out into the evening air, see the lights of the city, board a bus for home. A miracle.

 

I came upon this little book in, of all places, the Sally Ann, paid my fifty cents and took home one of the best, most gripping books I have ever read. Xinran Xinran is also the author of The Good Women of China, which I read a few years ago, itself a wonderful glimpse at what women's lives are like in China. This book, Sky Burial, tells of the author's twenty-year search for her husband, a doctor who had been serving with the Chinese army in Chinese-occupied Tibet. She was told in 1958 that he had died. She was determined to find out what had happened to him. She had also been told that the Tibetans welcomed the "liberation" of  their country, and was surprised to arrive in the midst of conflict. She was taken hostage, and this book recounts her twenty year journey, living among the Tibetan people, revealing the country and the Tibetans in all their beauty. It is a rare inside look at their way of life day by day. When she discovers her husband was given a sky burial, customary in Tibet, (the laying out of the body, to be "cleaned" by vultures) she returns to a China she doesnt recognize, the Cultural Revolution having happened during her absence. A fantastically gripping read.

                                         

This is the book I'm asking Santa for for Christmas! Perfect Hostage: A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi byJustin Wintle, tells of Suu Kyi's imprisonment  for speaking out for the pro-democracy movement, thereby becoming the figurehead of an oppressed people. She spent fifteen of those 21 years under house arrest,  separated  from her husband, (who died of cancer in 1999), and from her children, who live in exile. Suu Kyi is the third child and only daughter of Aung San, considered the father of modern-day Burma. Oxford-educated and reserved by nature, she was not primed for life as a dissident but because of her belief in democracy, she took a stand for her people, at the cost of living her own life in freedom. She was finally released just this month, on November 13.

Can't wait to read it.

I rarely read fiction, but three books in recent years really caught and grabbed me: The Kite Runner and Ten Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini are so well known a recap is likely not needed, both set in Afghanistan. This is some of the finest writing I have encountered.

Rice Mother by Rani Manicka is a fascinating look at daily life among the impoverished in Malaysia. A wonderful tale of mothers and daughters, it is an extremely interesting look into these women's lives.

So there we have it - a list of great reads about "ordinary" lives (if there is such a thing) that become extraordinary through circumstance, and which ultimately transcend extreme difficulty in such a way as to offer hope and humanity to those who observe them.

People are inspiring!

Remembering Jonathan

My friend Lynette posted a haiku and photos today for the Poets United think tank prompt: wings. She referred to Jonathan Livingston Seagull and reminded me about how pivotal that book was to my own odyssey to the sea.

Back in the Day, when I first read Jonathan, I was on a quest for personal freedom, having already experienced a fair amount of oppression in my marriage. Then I saw the movie, sound track by Neil Diamond, and was blown away by the pulsating beat of the music, the mesmerizing beauty of the images on the screen, and the resonating truth of the words Jonathan was speaking. I didn't yet understand that I was an ocean person. That came two years later, when I was making a car trip around the province. The Rockies, the Interior, all were beautiful, or pretty or pleasant to pass through. But when we turned the nose of the car up the Sunshine Coast, a short ferry trip across from the Lower Mainland, I began to erupt like a geyser as we turned each bend and there before me was the forest, the rugged coastline.

Soon I lived there, right on the ocean, and that is another story. In less than a year, we had to leave, and before long I was inland, raising my kids alone in Kelowna. I began to collect ceramic seagulls. I hung photos and quotes on my walls. I even took up bicycling and pedalled way out of town to the dump where - oddly - there were inland seagulls. I yearned for the ocean all those years.

The man I most remember gifted me one Christmas with three life sized cement seagulls perched on a huge nubbly piece of driftwood. When one wing emerged from the wrappings, I flung myself at him and smothered him in  hugs and kisses. Those seagulls went with me everywhere and, finally, to the front porch of my trailer in Tofino. I left them there, where they belonged, when I had to leave.

I stopped collecting seagulls in Tofino. I didn't need them, they were all around me. I had the real thing. I remember one winter afternoon, when I was the only human walking the beach at Combers, gray sky lowering, and a seagull flew past low, right beside my shoulder. I felt like I was in an outtake of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and smiled to think what a long journey it had been, and to know I had finally - finally! - come home.

I had forgotten Jonathan for a while, immersed as I am in my rural existence. It is time to play that album again, time to watch the movie. Time to remember that time of all times in my life, when I lived the truth of Richard Bach's words. When I reached high, when I flew farther than I ever had before. When  once I soared.

The Volcanoes of Haleakala

[The volcanoes of Haleakala, in Hawaii, photo taken by my second cousin,
Lindsay Knitter, who stood on a cliff high above them,
her head in the clouds of heaven, her feet on the earth.]

posted for the Poets United Thursday Think Tank prompt: wings

Beam me up, Scotty,
from the drop-sheets
and the painting,
the hammering ,
the barking, displaced
and disgruntled dogs.
Let's glide up and over
the mountains
to the
sea all
wreathed in
fog,
all earth's
beauty
waiting
for us
down below,
the waves
beneath us
rolling in,
endless
and slow,
its shoreline
holding
all the beauty
that I know.

Then down
to Oregon's
dramatic
rock-strewn
beach,
catch the
currents,
windsurfing the sky,
midst beauty
rare
we'll  soar,
until we reach
the volcanoes
of Haleakala,
find us a firm place
to land,
perch on the edge
of this legendary place,
its ancient mysteries
try to
understand.

Then lift us up
and away,
across the Andes,
swooping down
their slopes
to buzz the treetops
of the Amazon,
hear the parrots
making all their
squawking cries,
part the
palm fronds,
let in
some light
from those
uncertain
ever-changing
jungle skies.

Then let's
cross the sea
to Africa,
beloved country,
soar across
the bare brown plains
of the Serengeti,
pause to watch
the wildebeeste,
huge elephants
lumbering
through the sand,
as  tawny lions
make their way
across
the living land.

Let's coast the sky
above more
swirling seas,
whitecaps below,
let's catch
the ocean breeze
to Asia,
with its temples,
its Mystic Mountains                 
round and still,
mandarins
tending rice paddies
along the
terraced hills.

And then away
to cross
the Russian steppes,
frozen archipelago
reflect its
icy glow,
for it is time
to make
our wayward
journey home.
I see it
waiting there
for me
below.

When we arrive,
just beam me down,
revived,
where I'll slip on
my metaphorical
monk robes,
like the tired monk
has said,
enter
my newly spotless,
freshly painted
little home,
my dogs once more
at ease
on their dog beds,
I with my book,
a grateful Om
that clearly
must be said,
then Silence,
lovely silence,
all around.
Home,
where
safety,
peace
and quietude
abound.

Mess and Upheaval and Stuff, oh my!

I am in the middle of A Great Upheaval in my teensy trailer. For years, I have been pining for laminate flooring to cover the 45 year old very worn green lino it currently sports. My sister kindly bought some for me for my birthday and I saved  the money from my income tax refund  to have it installed.

It should have been done in good weather, of course, and before Jas had her operation, so the dogs could be in the yard. But this is my life we're talking about, so the first contractor had us wait all summer then, this fall, stood me up three weekends in a row. I had already ripped my place apart to be ready for him, so my house has been upside down now for actual months. Grrrrrr.

So I lined up someone else who might actually appear.

He will begin tomorrow so I have been  moving more stuff out of the way, dismantling my stero etc. (ack! no music!)  so he can work. I have no where to put anything, and he needs my porch to cut boards on. So my little extra room is full, no space to walk, with books, dvd's and cd's. The teeny amount of actual floor in my bedroom has the accumulation of things I value and dont want broken, and the stuff for Christmas that I have been gathering. This means, when I want to get something out of the closet, I need arms five feet long to reach over all the stuff on the floor.

My sister decided since everything is bare and ripped apart, now is the time to paint it, so she is gifting me with the painting of the living room and hallway for my Christmas gift. (My sister is a very thoughtful and generous gal!)

Also, since this is my life we're talking about, the rains have come. The woman starts painting today and her husband will start laying the floor tomorrow (painting still going on around him, how's that going to work?) and as if that isn't enough melee to have going on, I somehow have to keep two very large dog bodies out of the way. Jas has to be in because of her surgery, and Pup  cant be in the yard because of the rain or on the porch because of construction. I think I may be spending a lot of time with them in this room, hiding out with the door shut. Pup, who is wolfish, is not going to enjoy that one bit. He hates loud noises and he gets claustrophobic indoors, though he does deign to come in at night and when the weather is nasty.

Plus I get antsy when things are not in their places and this has now been going on a long time while I waited for Contractors Who Didnt Come.

Oh well this cant go on forever. Unless I've died and this is the hell that was prepared for me:)

When painting and floor are done (whu-hoo!), I will paint the bathroom myself. Then put everything back together.

I just took some Before pictures and they are very scary indeed. Will post them with the glorious After pictures when it is all done.

Stay tuned!

Some updates

image from http://www.watergatesummer.blogspot.com/



Remember Allie from www.watergatesummer.blogspot.com
who befriended the family newly arrived from Iraq? We heard her story, and the family's, 
 during the Blogblast for Peace event. Allie writes that she has helped the family navigate through the intricacies of accessing services. She accompanied the children to their first pediatric exams and their first dental appointments, scary for the little ones. But they were brave and got through it. She made sure the heat got fixed in their apartment. And Allie reports that through her blogging, gifts from NINE states in the US continue to arrive for the family: blankets, coats, clothing, baby gear, art supplies.

She reports  the children seem much happier and are more relaxed, there is a lot more giggling. They do a lot of coloring, and every time Allie arrives with the latest donations (which she packages in big bright green gift bags to make it more festive) they get very excited to see what has arrived.

This one woman, quietly seeing a need and stepping up to the plate, has made this family feel welcomed in their new home.

I post stories and poems about some of the sad things that I come across. But I enjoy it so much more when I come across a story like this. Nothing big or heroic, just a woman who thought perhaps that family needed some help, and  friendship, and went over to offer it. Lovely. I so love big-hearted people! Read more about this family, and about Allie at Watergate Summer (link above). You'll be impressed. She shows how much one person CAN do to make a difference.

Yesterday my sister and I made a quick trip to Nanaimo, an hour from here. She dropped me at the mall while she went to an appointment and I had a happy time picking up a few Christmas gifts. We only have a Walmart here, no mall, so shopping is limited which usually doesn't matter. I don't shop much. But I wanted a few specific items, so yesterday was my chance. The gift that made me the happiest was buying a lovely light soft fleecy deep purple blanket for the elderly lady I clean for every Tuesday. She doesn't have a blanket, she uses the cotton cover the ambulance personnel use to cover patients in the ambulance. Purple is her favorite color (and mine.) I can't wait to see her face when I give it to her.

But the update on this little couple is a bit scary. When Faiza came home yesterday, she found Bill lying on the floor. He couldn't get up and they called the ambulance. Bill is in hospital now, on oxygen, on IV's. He wants to be home but he is in the right place. The down side is that Faiza, who should be lying down recuperating from back surgery, is toiling back and forth to the hospital to be at his side. She is exhausted, she is over-doing. But she is a woman whose own needs have always come last after everybody else's. I worry about her. Her back has not had a chance to heal, and her legs are giving her much trouble and she is over doing because she has no choice.  I know very well what that is like because I have done it myself my whole life too.

I pray he lives through Christmas. This couple is so close and loving, I can't imagine her when the dreaded day does come that he is no longer with her. She will be lost. Hopefully, he will perk up. But we have been watching his decline in recent weeks and it isn't looking good. Yet, still, her entire conversation is sprinkled liberally with "I love you's", and "habibti's" and "sweethearts" and "thank you's". Such a sweet little woman.

Pumpkins! Yesterday when Lori and I went to Nanaimo there they all were lining the road in the kazillions. Lined up atop cliffs, alongside the forest, sitting on rock ledges and one was stuck atop a stake right beside the road, like something out of the killing fields. All grinning. They looked adorable and I was chagrined I had not driven out that way when I did my pumpkin shoot. I KNEW they were there but the drive is an onerous one and I was tired. However, just know you received highly inferior pumpkins to what could have been on that post!

My old Mr Dog is still here, still hobbling. When he walks beside me, it isn't like walking a dog. He pads stealthily beside me like the bad old wolf that he is. He is failing, I am amazed he is still here and as he walks beside me I am thinking about the day not far off when he  no longer will be. It never gets any easier to think about.

Ms. Jasmine, however, is rockin' and rollin'. From day two she was putting her full weight on her rear leg, which blew our doors off. At her two week checkup, when she got her stitches out, the vet could not believe how well she was doing and in fact told me to not let her over-do it, to rein her in a little. She is bored but being very good and is healing so well. She has to be walked on leash for bathroom duties, as she can't be free for months yet. So every time I walk her out to pee, Pup gets very vocal and indignant as in his mind she is getting a ton of walkies and he is getting one a day. No fair! I love that he still has the fire to care.

The vet did me a huge kindness by waiving her surgical fee, thus lifting a ton of stress off my shoulders. I took them  a card with Jasmine's big smiling face on it, and a flat of doughnuts. The most expensive doughnut the vet ever ate. "Thanks for the surgery, here , have a doughnut!" It still cost a lot, but a thousand as opposed to $1700 is a considerable difference. People have kind hearts. And I think the fact that when she told me Jas needed surgery and I literally almost passed out, (they had to revive me with water and cold compresses), that actually helped me out a little. They didn't want me to go into cardiac arrest paying the bill, hee hee. Kind people with big hearts everywhere.

My sister and I drove around looking at properties yesterday on the outskirts of Nanaimo. Found some lovely rural areas that were also near the ocean (be still, my heart!), saw little farms that would be so lovely to live in with all our animals and the horse. "Farmhouse, mobile and five acres," she read on one sign we passed. "Sold!" I leaned forward and stared up at the heavens: "STOP IT!" Like God was showing us all the lovelies we couldn't afford and couldn't have.

"So now we can go home and stick our heads in the oven," she said.

"And just our luck we have electric stoves, not gas," I retorted. "A lot more painful!"

Cackles.

But when we did get home, and saw the sun lighting the poplars and a faint mist rising from the fields, there were our two cosy homes and all of our eager critters just waiting for us. We are pretty lucky, after all.