Moving Day: Meet Me at My New Online Home

Alas, my days at blogger.com were numbered from the start. It is a fine place to begin but, being me, I have to be the Master of my own Domain (http://www.thingsigaveaway.com/), and be able to customize it into a cozy little reading room.  So, come on over and visit me there. Come see the dandelions, the empty Tim Horton's cups and riffs on the wonder of vacuum cleaners. See you there!

The Windsurfer Stays

In the upper recesses of our garage, an ancient windsurfer presides.

It rests on the top shelf, tucked behind the leaf blower, an old bicycle tire, and tiny ski boots we’re holding onto for the grandkids. I think the grandkids may have actually outgrown the boots by now, but never mind. Project for another day.

The windsurfer stretches, oh, twelve feet in length, eating up precious storage space. (Yes, for those of you are compulsive organizers, you know what I’m saying. This thing belongs in the far reaches of the basement storage with other stuff we never use, not in this precious relatively-close-at-hand space.)

We wrestled the beast up there when we moved into this house in, um, June of 1995. It hasn’t moved since. We never so much as touch it, except to tighten the restraining cords when it occasionally slips down and threatens to decapitate someone. It is covered in a decade-and-a-half’s worth of grime, dust, cobwebs and mouse droppings.

We’re keeping it.

I know what you’re thinking: I’m on the wrong page here. Clearly this item belongs on the Things I Give Away List, dear one, unless you’ve recently lost your marbles. Except, that it doesn’t. It’s not mine, you see. It belongs to my husband, and it is his memories, history and hopes that are pinned to this maiden of the lake, not mine.

Yes, hopes.

There is hope pinned to that dusty old thing. A wish and a dream that he would teach our now fourteen-year-old daughter to windsurf. That’s still a possibility, of course, but with our eldest grandson having reached the magical age of five, the burden of my husband’s hope has fallen on his small shoulders. Frankly, I think Ben would rather, you know, play with his Playmobil carwash and monster trucks, but whom am I to say?

And that’s just it. It is not for me to say. This is where that first commandment of marital harmony comes into play: Keep Thy Mouth Shut. We have the room to store the thing. That’s not an issue. So what’s the problem here?

There is no problem. No problem at all. It is just stuff, after all.

This windsurfer predates my relationship with my husband, probably by a decade, at least. It was a pastime he shared with his first wife, and I’m okay with that. When you come second in the spousal line, you get used to these echoes of a former life – that’s true anyway, whether or not there was a previous marriage.

I was on this board exactly once, on Lake Temagami. I hopped on, full of the piss, vinegar and the stupid kind of confidence that only a twenty-four-old has, easily whipped downwind and then couldn’t get back. My husband and his former brother-in-law sallied forth in the powerboat and rescued me. The details of said rescue are foggy now. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure it was this board that I sailed off on. Never mind. This beat-up old relic can represent the memory, stand as an icon of a footloose stage in our relationship where I wasn’t perpetually mired in maternal worry about, oh, a zebra mussel cutting someone’s foot. If it is going to be sitting up there forever-more, I might as well infuse it with some kind of happy memory.

And so, it stays. I have made my peace with this windsurfer. It is not for me to decide what my husband chooses to keep, even if I am the Household Dominatrix of All Things Organized. The board stays until he says otherwise.

Small Acts

A writing friend wrote to me lately, “I am a bit discouraged about continuing on with my piece. First, some sad stuff happened next. I need to transform that for my own well-being ….and plus, I was just at such a fragile age - I really am bigger than age 14 now – and all that happened really then were small acts.”

Small acts.

Something in me shifted when I read this. A small voice rose, and twisted, and grew into a shout. I wrote back to her.

“Oh no you don't, young lady.” My friend is, I don’t know, in her late sixties, bright and accomplished. I have no business calling her a young lady. I railed on:

“Your writing sparkles! I read a LOT. I know! Have you read "Durable Goods" or "Joy School"?”

If I were speaking to this dear friend in person, I would have been flinging my arms in the air for emphasis.

“Small acts! Small acts are the stuff of life! And furthermore, in our memories, we are all still – we are always – fourteen. We are every age we've ever been!”

I have a feeling that someone else said that before me. I have no idea who, but it rings strangely familiar as the words fall across the page.

My husband is on the trampoline with our grandson. They’re playing the ‘bad guys shooting the good guys’. Girls don’t do this, he reports to me later, his eyes sparkling. Having had four daughters, this kind of play was a revelation to him. A renaissance. He found his five year old self again at the ripe old age of sixty-one.

And then there’s me. One of my first acts of motherhood, was to order a few Dr. Seuss books. The Cat in the Hat. One Fish Two Fish. Green Eggs and Ham. As an adolescent, I had shelved Dr. Seuss in some dark recess of my brain, turning instead to the mature books of Judy Blume. But all it took was opening the first pages, reading aloud the words again…. I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I hadn’t forgotten at all. It was there all along. Even the musty smell of the library I visited as a child. The wooden cube shelves in the children’s section towering over me. Books of varying heights arranged in alphabetical order, jacketed in crispy-sounding cellophane. I’m still that five year old, holding my mother’s hand, Dr. Seuss, Beatrix Potter and Curious George pressed hard to my chest.

And of course, when I was fourteen, four teenage girls at the roller rink threatened to beat me up because my jeans were too tight and my shirt cut too low for their liking. I hid in the bathroom, then never went roller skating again.

They matter, don’t they, these moments? They’re worthy of our words, our shouting, our stomping of feet in indignation on the page. The mere clenching of a jaw, the tightening in our chest, desolation, contentment, sorrow, disappointment. Purely because they happened to us is reason enough. This is our story – all our stories - and it all matters. The birth of a star. Black holes. String theory. Birth. Death. Illness. Marriage. Loss. Peeling potatoes and picking up the mail. Falling down and scraping a knee. The day you got a C-plus instead of an A. The stuff of life. All the ages we’ve ever been. Small acts. All that’s ever been, all that will ever be.

Not a Cross Word Between Us

It started when I was in high school, doing crosswords with my mom, after dinner, over a cup of tea and a cookie or two. Maybe three. We had a three-cookie-rule in our house back then, the maximum allowed at one sitting.

I’ve long since moved into a home of my own, but whenever the opportunity presents itself – a Sunday dinner, a shared holiday - my mom and I will huddle together over a newspaper, a cup of tea each, cut with milk, an erasable pen in hand (Mom’s preference, I’m more of a pencil girl). My mom will choose a puzzle from her stash in the magazine rack. She saves the crosswords out of the paper, every day, for this very purpose. We hunch over the table, taking turns with the pen, reading the clues out loud:

“Critical situation, starts with a ‘c’?” she asks.

“Clutch?” I offer.

“Maybe,” she says. “I’ll pencil it in.” She enters the letters neatly, her printing far more legible than mine.

“Big band? Ends in r-n-s.”

“Horns?” I scrunch up my nose, unsure. “It fits, but that makes absolutely no sense.” We scribble it in and later it turns out to be right. You can’t count on a crossword puzzle to necessarily make sense.

“Light brown,” says mom.

“Light brown? What kind of a clue is that?" I ask, rhetorically, of course. "There are only about three thousand words for light brown.”

“Ecru?” I suggest.

“No, it's five letters.”

“Cream? Um, beige?”

“Maybe beige. It does end in ‘e’… “

We pause, staring at the page, stumped. Then mom moves on:

“Frequent disclaimer.”

My brain is still working over light brown. “There’s another word for it.” I say, leaning back, staring at the ceiling. ‘Light brown.’ It’s the colour I painted my front hallway for pete’s sakes.”

Mom continues without me. “Rubbish? Hmm. Maybe trash? No, tripe.”

“Coat named for a British lord…”

“Taupe, it’s taupe!” I sit up sharply, practically knocking the chair over in my enthusiasm. Sweet relief!

“Good one, Lis!”

We are jubilant, over taupe. Who knew? The next few answers come easily, quickly. We are humming along now, riding a wave of cross-word momentum.

“Boss?” mom asks. Last two letters a-d.”

“Lead!” we exclaim at the same time.

“Corn devices,” mom says slowly, contemplating.

“It looks like ‘loppers’,” I say, knowing that’s silly. Corn loppers, you know, to detach the corn from the husk.

“Poppers!” quips mom. It goes like this sometimes, like a volleyball game, one setting the ball, the other spiking it over the net.

“Impose… first letters are o-b-t. Seven letters.” I start running through the alphabet trying to decide what letter would logically come next.

“Obtrude?” I don’t know which of us came up with that. Neither of us knows if it is even a word. But it sounds good, and that is always a useful test.

After about an hour, a handful of clues are left unsolved. We give up for the evening. My neck has cramped from scrunching over the paper. Mom packs up the paper and leaves it on the buffet. We pick it up again over breakfast the next morning and I finish the last few words at lunch-time. There is something about leaving unanswered clues to simmer overnight, over a few hours even, that works a strange magic. Answers that eluded us at first try will suddenly present themselves.

It takes us fully two days to finish this puazzle, but we do, in the end, defeat it. Our favourite kind of crossword, it takes time and considerable thinking. A strange bond over words we have, my mom and I. Scrabble. Writing essays in high school, I’d read aloud a paragraph and she’d offer edits. Searching memory for exactly the right word to express an idea. And through all these years - living at home, growing up, learning, rebelling, leaving finally - this is one place we could always come where there has never a cross word between us.

Keepers Shortlist One Fine April Morning

Ok, some would say that this is not such a fine April morning. It is grey outside, overcast, windy, the sky showing no promise of the sun ever breaking through. I am happy to be here though, at the dining room table in my Florida winter home, happy to be sitting at my laptop, typing,  my mom to my left with a newspaper, my sister to my right with her own computer, my dad grumping about leaving his glasses on his bedside table: "Oh crap, I forgot my glasses. Now I have to go all the way upstairs ...that really makes me mad".

Today's shortlist of happiness:
• One liners: What might brother suggested I do with the the burned off pot-bottom:“Bottom is now a frisbee – lethal, mind you.” My brother is, and always has been, a comic genius, like most of my extended family.

• Dry walkers ™ – these bulky grey slippers fit over your shoes, thus allowing you to walk into the house with your muddy workboots on. These are especially useful it, like me, you have a chest-nut sized bladder requires frequent emptying. Also, you can kind of skate in them if you have ceramic tile floor. You can buy them at Lee Valley.

• MS-Outlook ® reminders – OK, admittedly, I misuse these. Everything is an appointment to me: “pick up kids from school”, “change furnace filter”, “books due back at library”. I think of Outlook as a replacement hard drive for my brain which, ever since I had kids, has been running kind of glitchy. My husband wanted me to put “have sex with mate” as a daily recurrence at 5 pm, but I resisted. Acts of nature just can’t be scheduled.

The Miracle of Ziplock® Containers

We are keeping the plastic Ziplock® containers! My husband suggested I use old margarine tubs, for pete’s sakes. Clearly he isn’t the one who runs the kitchen. You try facing a half-dozen identical margarine containers stuffed into the freezer. Label them? Are you kidding me? Do you know how much time that takes, and - what? - are you going to label all four sides? Do you think you can count on having the one labeled side facing out all the time? And have you seen my hand-writing anyway? You expect me to be able to read that? And, no, I am not going to use my fancy-pants Dymo® label-maker for labeling all four sides and the top of individual margarine containers. Not happening! Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to date them, too, but, tell you what, I’ve got a day job. And furthermore, old margarine containers are round and that just adds up to a gigantic waste of precious freezer space. Efficiency, people! Honestly. So. Case closed. We are keeping the Ziplock®.

Kite Caught in a Tree

It’s an unseasonably mild spring day. A warm breeze buffets the tree boughs, the sun is out in full force. It feels like the middle of June, not the first of April. Everywhere people are out washing cars, puttering in gardens. In two different drive-ways kids are playing hockey. That’s not typical, seeing so many kids out. But this is Easter weekend. Family is visiting.

My husband and I walk around the block, talking idly about work, jobs to be done at home. We live on a crescent just outside of town, a perfect one-mile loop, dotted with houses on two-acre lots. Mostly retired folk live here. There are children in our neighbourhood, to be sure, but you don’t really see them much. It is not like kind of place where children are out and about, dashing from one house to the next, skateboarding down the middle of the road, or playing 500-up with well-worn baseball gloves. That’s the kind of street I grew up, forever tearing across the narrow road to my friends’ house, banging on the screen door and asking: “can Lonnie come out and play?” That doesn’t happen here. The houses are too far apart. Play-dates are organized by phone.

We round the corner and I see it: blue, green, yellow, orange. A kite stranded in the highest branches of an ancient maple tree. It sways a little in the breeze. I stop for a moment and stare at it.

“What?” my husband says, stopping, too.

“Oh, I love that!” I say, pointing at the kite.

My husband looks. “Huh,” he says, “must be stuck.” He starts walking again.

“Isn’t that cool? It must be too high for Mr. Canning to reach.” Mr. Canning lives just a few houses down from us. He is out in the yard with his trade-mark rubber boots on, but he isn’t working, today. He is playing a game of pick-up hockey with a handful of his grandkids. When I grow up, I want to be like him. A retired school-teacher and trustee, he’s a dab hand around the yard, but someone who knows when to throw the rake down and pick up a football.

I start walking again. “I remember a long time ago when our kite got caught in a tree. You were away, I think”.

It was a gigantic box of a kite the kids had. A colourful fish monstrosity, with a long flowing tail. The wind was blowing gale-force that day, and it yanked the spool right out of my daughter’s hands, carried our kite up and over the pine trees in our side-yard. We took off after it at a gallop, following its trajectory to a vacant lot about three yards over. It caught on birch tree, about mid-way up. Mr. Canning came to our rescue, with a long hooked pole, the kind of home-made contraption that wise grandfatherly types always have on hand.

I start walking after my husband. “I love that it is stuck there,” I say. “It says: ‘children play here”.

My husband smiles. “Maybe we should keep it,” he offers, “as a sort of neighbourhood flag”.

“Yeah, that’s a great idea.” I know it won’t last, but I hold onto it anyway. To heck with the manicured hedges, the golf carts on their way to the country club at the end of the street. Here, kids rule.