About Halfway

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July 1 marks the halfway point of the year. And this year in particular, The Year the Virus Stole My Job/Graduation/Sanity/Fill-In-The-Blank, is one that many of us just wish we could Do Over.

But the toothpaste is already squeezed out of the tube and there ain’t no way to get it back in, short of toothpaste tube surgery. That sounds messy, sticky and without guaranteed results. Might as well regroup and figure out a new container or use for the toothpaste.

I am a person who likes to make resolutions at the beginning of the year (yes, I’m one of THOSE people), but I also know that without periodic review and re-engagement, I can lose focus. An auspicious date like July 1 – not just Canada Day (yay!), but 6 months from and to January 1 – is a perfect time to re-resolute.

I have kept a journal for many years now and I noticed a pattern a few years back – I often return to the same resolutions year after year. Most resolutions for me are not One-and-Done or else they wouldn’t be a recurring phenomenon. Maybe it would be better to call them Intentions. Or even Reminders. Re-Minding is all about getting your mind right again.

These are a few of the things I see as good things to remind myself.

Drink more water. Such an inane resolution really, but for me, I need to remind myself to not just drink my black water (a.k.a. My Beloved Coffee) but to intersperse my cups of java with cups of the clear stuff.

Quit eating crap. Well, not so much of it anyway. I don’t subscribe to an austere diet – although a reset like The Whole 30 once in a while doesn’t hurt. But coming through COVID-19, a.k.a. The Great Global Baking Challenge, it’s good to get back to soups and salads for lunch. And thankfully, fresh garden produce is just around the corner for extra incentive and general yumminess.

Move. Everyday. The older I get, the more thankful I am for the ability to move my body. Some days I do hard stuff like my boot camp class. Some days I just go for a walk or vacuum the house. I set timers to make myself get up from my desk and stretch, look out the window, refocus my eyes, get a glass of water. And I try everyday to go outside, which seems to require and inspire movement in and of itself. For an Indoorsy Girl, this is a miracle and a revelation that I can enjoy being outside (almost) everyday.

Keep in Touch. Along with Indoorsy Girl, I am also Introvert Girl. However, introversion is not the same as Doesn’t Need People. The pandemic introduced me to the Walk-And-Talk – talking to a friend on my cell while we both walked in our respective locations. Normally, I don’t like talking on the phone, but since this was the best option available, it became Okay. And even though I had some of my family around me 24-7 for the intense six weeks of quarantine, I was reminded how much I miss actually seeing people, talking to them in person, hugging them. Most of the hugging is still on hold but I do make sure that I break up my working-at-home-weekdays with at least one In-Person-Friend-Date. It’s always good.

Start Something. Keep Going. Finish Something. I always have some project I’m working on. In the past it has been more hobby-related like scrapbooking or organizing (anything, I like organizing ANYTHING). These days, I’m trying to focus on writing. I have one project I want to finish by the end of the year, one I want to keep going on and one I want to launch. Deadlines (as my husband reminds me) are a good thing. They keep you honest and help you GET STUFF DONE. If it’s important, you need to set aside the time to do it. And for me, my writing projects, are IMPORTANT. And if I keep doing the small and simple stuff above, it will give me the energy and the sanity to stick to my bigger intentions.

What’s on your Redeem-the-Rest-of-2020 list?

About Gardening

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It’s only late June but already my vegetable garden is promising to be amazing. NOT.

Sigh.

One of the things I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that while I love me some fresh garden veggies – tender peas still in the pod, green beans that have never been frozen, carrots with dirt still on them – I’m not as enthusiastic about all that has to go into growing those things myself.

The trouble is this: vegetables, like babies, refuse to be independent. Gardens need to be weeded, watered, fertilized – and not by the neighbor’s cat. If it doesn’t rain regularly, my garden is in trou-ble. And I tend to wait until the weeds are large enough not to mistake them for fledgling zucchini plants that I sowed too late and too deep. But you never know. Hope spring eternal that old seeds will birth future zucchini cakes.

It’s not really the once-a-week kind of commitment that I tend to make it. My inner monologue goes something like this:

“Oh hey, Self, let’s go look at the garden.” This necessitates I don my flip flops and traipse out the backdoor as my raised boxes are hidden from easy window surveillance. The garden doesn’t make any noise, either, demanding constant inspection like the neighbors jackhammering their sidewalk. (What are they doing with that shed in the backyard, anyways?)

And then. “Oh, sh*t! Half the cucumbers plants died? And shrivelled into dental floss? What? How? Ohhhh, I suuuuuuckkk at this.” There is no sign of any zucchini plants performing a Lazarus. The beans are looking sketchy, despite the fact that I double-sowed them. And only half the sunflowers are on their way to not making it through the summer. Thankfully, every single tomato plant, of which I planted way too many are stretching to the sky and enjoying the hot southern side of the house. Maybe they like the privacy.

It’s not like I don’t know how this should go. I was birthed by a Gardener Extraordinaire. Mom’s gardens weren’t just the means for her to feed her family and teach us to love All The Green and Growing Things – they were also her canvas. She created fantastical flower beds full of all the old favorites – petunias, geraniums, delphiniums, sweet peas, snap dragons, bleeding hearts and tiger lilies (to name only a few). But Mom also did magical things with her vegetable gardens. One garden spot was never enough and, in each spot, you would find repeats of everything she planted in different configurations: rows parallel and perpendicular, bunches, square plots, volunteer dill everywhere and all of it hedged in with cotoneasters, lilac bushes and raspberry canes.

A visit to Mom’s house in the summer always ended in the garden, but sometimes began there, too, if she was prowling around it like a grown-up Mary Lennox in her Secret Garden when we arrived. She would be ready for a break and we’d go to the cool of the house for an instant coffee or better yet, her vegetable soup if we made it in time for lunch (which was 11:30 not noon.) Summer visits sometimes meant helping Mom with some weeding or picking 5-gallon-pails of beans or peas or ice-cream pails laced and tied to your waist with old nylons for a hands-free raspberry-picking experience. And bonus, you got to take your winnings home – you were doing her a favor.

When it was nearly time to go home, we’d go dig up some new potatoes, some onions, some carrots and wash them in the big tub under the outdoor tap and Mom would send us home with the pail of artfully arranged wet and gorgeous veggies. Supper was easy that night, which was a good thing because I would have a lot of shelling and blanching of peas and beans to do. Once, when touring my boys through, Mom pulled up an onion and Simon asked what it was. His Baba laughed and said, “It’s an onion. Do you want a bite?” And so, Simon did take a bite – it looked that good.

During Mom’s last summer, when she had moved to Vermilion, I was able to pop in on her quite often. Despite cancer, despite feeling crappy most of the time, in between the many naps she had to take each day – I would find her in the yard, watering the plants, picking some weeds, pulling up some carrots, cutting some flowers to take indoors. Her garden never flagged, not for one moment. She knew what it took.

I know what it takes, too, but I’m not there. Thankfully, there are people around me who still let me stroll through their canvases and inhale that mysteriously fragrant combination of dirt, rain and leaf that I grew up with. Sometimes they send me home with a zucchini or two. But I’m okay, I have my own tomatoes.

I don’t have to be a great gardener to appreciate the magic that takes place in garden plots every year or to remember the riches of my mother’s garden. And bonus: my husband says he needs a new hobby. Maybe he’ll take up gardening.

About Clarence the TV Dog

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There are some books that were a part of my childhood that I just cannot shake. Perhaps it was because I read it a zillion (and a half) times or maybe it was because the name Clarence, for a dog, is kinda memorable. Especially because – spoiler alert! – Clarence turns out to be a girl, delivering a litter of puppies at the end of the book. At any rate, the story I most remember from this particular book – which, alas, I no longer own – isn’t about the dog or the TV or even about his (er, her) adoptive family which included tweens Brian and Sis.

No, the most memorable story (for me) had to do with a certain less-than-favorite spinster aunt who injected herself into the family for an extended visit. (And in all honesty, I’m not sure if this chapter is from this book or the end-of-your-seat sequel: Clarence Goes to Town.)

Aunt Spinster was a fifties stereotype of the unmarried, unattractive, unmarriageable woman: a bossy, angular know-it-all – at least, this was the kind of nemesis character that populated children’s books. And most definitely she did not approve of Clarence. Dogs, and children, were to be seen and not heard. Dogs should not watch television or act like humans. And most definitely, dogs (or children) should not mess with skunks.

Except Clarence does mess with a skunk. And you know what sort of havoc and misery that can cause.

Up until the skunk debacle, Brian and Sis have been harangued by their Aunt – not only is she always telling them what to do or what to think, she tells them how to do it or how to think it. Her accomplice in her mean knowledge is a mysterious Everything Book – some sort of mystical encyclopedia that Aunt S carries with her everywhere and consults constantly and religiously. The proper temperature to cook chicken? The capital city of Eritrea? The etymology of the word etymology? All of this seemed to be at her fingertips with a flip through her Everything Book. Sort of like Pre-Google.

For Brian and Sis, harangued to an inch of their lives, their collaborative solution seems like it would be obvious: Find the Book. Destroy the Book. But no, the siblings just want to get their hands on it so that they can get their own copy of said book and start beating their aunt at her game, looking up the answers and ringing in before she does. I’ll take ‘Famous Know-It-Alls and Their Comeuppance’ for $2000.00, Alex.

When they finally do manage to send their aunt on some urgent mission sans book, they page through only to find out that it’s not a book: it’s a scrapbook, a compendium of curiosities cobbled from newspapers and copied from books.

Oh, how I wanted a book like that.

Maybe that’s what sent me down the scrapbook-making quest I have been on since I was a tween myself. Partly a thirst for wanting to know All The Things and partly a love for pasting things into books, I have been creating my own Everything Books for years. Sometimes I call them Art Journals or Junk Journals or Just Journals with Extra Bits of Goodness Stuck Inside Them, but all of them are basically my attempt to save everything, know everything (at least the stuff I want to know) and remember everything.

This blog, I have realized has become a new kind of Art/Junk/Everything Journal for me. And bonus, it’s highly searchable, with a flick of my fingertips just as Aunt S would do when I want to look up something that I want to remember.

Of course, Bossy Aunt Saves the Day, consulting her book and instructing the kids in how to bathe Clarence in tomato juice to rid him of his/her skunky odor. And they decide (as she’s packing up to leave) that maybe she and her book have some value after all.

About Hard Lessons

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Welcome once more to Throwback Thursday.

Recently I’ve been re-reading the newspaper columns I wrote about twenty years (!) ago, seeing if there are any new/old story ideas I can use. I’m so happy I recorded so many things my boys said and did when they were little. Sometimes they make me a little sad and nostalgic, but most of the time they make me LOL.

This story turns out a little dark, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself laughing with a hand over your mouth because it shouldn’t be funny. But it is. Enjoy.

            There’s a huge advantage of living out of town that few people mention: the frequency with which one is able to study dead animals.  Most wild animals just don’t sit still long enough for you to take a good look at one. Porcupine or badger sightings occur so few and far between that if it wasn’t for the occasional lump of dead animal on the side of the road, my kids would never know how big one of those suckers really is.

            Sometimes, however, it isn’t the wild animals that bite the dust, but a more domestic critter right from our own yard. If someone ever calls our place a farm, I usually correct them, saying we don’t really have any animals besides the occasional borrowed horse and of course, our herd of wild cats. When we moved out here, the previous owners left four cats behind and these cats have made it their mission to propagate their species in an exponential fashion. Unfortunately, we almost never find the kittens when they are born. Once they were old enough however, these wild kitties had no trouble clamoring for their share around the supper dish.

            The latest addition to our feline family was a pair of peaches-and-cream kittens, one of which was smooth and silky, the other very fuzzy, looking like he was badly in need of a hairbrush. The kids appropriately named the fuzzy one Messy and his sibling, Jessie. These kitties didn’t start making themselves known until they were old enough to run off from the kitty dish with a whole chicken leg in their mouth, but we were persistent and eventually could catch them and pet them if we really felt like getting all scratched up. Then the snow came and the temperature dropped and the kitties suddenly disappeared. We suspected the worst.

            A couple of days ago, at least part of the mystery was solved. The boys were outside when suddenly I was summoned at top of someone’s lungs to come to the door. Simon and Gil were by the garage, crouched down, examining something on the ground. An agitated Tim was at the door, saying (and I quote), “Mom, there’s something wrong with one of the kitties! I think its head fell off!” As happens only too often, the kitten had met its maker when it sought some heat from a warm engine. I expressed my sympathies and something possessed me to ask, “Can you tell which one it was?” To which Gil replied, “Yeah. It was Messy.” No kidding.

            There were no nightmares that night about decapitated cats or even tears over a lost kitten. Instead the boys were just wistful that the kitties wouldn’t be around anymore. I don’t want my kids to be hardened to the whole experience of life and death, but I don’t want to shelter them from it either. Maybe these are some of the best lessons our little acreage will ever teach us. 

About George Floyd

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I am typically the person that resists spouting strong opinions. I keep away from Twitter for that reason, because I am conflict-averse. Worse, it all just gives me unnecessary anxiety, whether I am in the fight or not.

I might look at George Floyd and then at the color of my skin and say, “This is not my fight.” And I would be wrong.

Over the past couple of days, I have tried to measure my response by looking to those voices on social media that I respect, even though I could feel it in my bones that, “This should not be happening.” It is so easy for a person who has never been disadvantaged by race to open their mouth and let Stupid fall out so I tend to be cautious. But as Joanna Wilcox @ketoincanada said on her Instagram story this week, “I can’t be afraid to mess this up when my intentions are good.”

A few years ago, Rick and I had the privilege to visit The King Center in Atlanta and then last year, the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Both places had interactive displays where you could “walk” with those who protested or “sit” with those who refused to give up their seat on buses or in restaurants. We didn’t have to imagine what it felt like, we just felt it. It was a powerful experience and speaking for both of us, we felt a dawning realization for the scope of what really went down. It’s easy not to think about it unless you allow yourself to be confronted.

We must allow ourselves to be confronted with the deaths of George Floyd and Brionna Taylor, with the outpouring of rage, the acts of trauma, and the peaceful protests gone bad. We must test ourselves for those voices inside that ask:

“But what if he was breaking the law?”

“Riots and destruction of property are not the right response.”

“That police officer was just doing his job.”

While this might appear to be sound and reasonable thinking, in light of repeated and continual offense to the black and brown community, they become words of excuse that deny culpability.

It can sound an awful lot like: She had it coming dressed like that.

Or: That autistic kid looks creepy. He probably did it.

Or: She’s old. She doesn’t need her house/money/visitors/love/respect anymore.

We cannot be distracted from the real issue: Such a blatant offense to a human being is wrong. Murder that hints, or screams racism, is wrong. It’s a crime, even if it was committed by a police officer, and it’s just wrong.

I can be guilty of thinking: I’m in Canada, it doesn’t apply to me. It’s too far away. It’s not my problem.

Or even: I’m not racist. I didn’t do anything. I have no responsibility here.

But as I’m learning from those voices I’m following, it’s not enough anymore to be non-racist. I need to be anti-racist. It starts with examining my own unspoken thoughts and feeling. Honestly. Because, there, but for the grace of God, go I.

It continues with listening – through podcasts, books and social media and learning from those who are making this their life’s work. Because if your bookshelves and your playlists are overwhelming white, you’re not seeing (and hearing) the full spectrum.

Here are some recommendations from Canadian Sarah Bessey:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CA8RSbuB1Sj/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

And then there’s this:

Because saying “It’s not my problem” is not enough anymore.

About The Big Wave

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Before I ever understood anything about Pulitzers or Nobel Prizes, I read the slim book The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck, who incidentally clocked in with both of those honors. So, it is no small thing when a writer of such caliber chooses to write for children, which, despite the heavy content, this book is written for. That being said, I think adults can always benefit from reading good children’s stories.

Kino, the son of a farmer, lives near a Japanese fishing village where his best friend Jiya works with his fisherman father. Tragedy visits when a tsunami wipes out the village even though The Old Gentleman who lives in a castle up the mountain offers refuge at the first signs of danger. Jiya alone, sent by his father, manages to get up the mountain in time and then watches with Kino as the terrible ocean wipes the beach clean.

Years later, Jiya decides to return to the beach, to help rebuild the village and to become a fisherman like his father. Kino is baffled with Jiya’s decision and The Old Gentleman derides those who have started the rebuilding. He warns them that he will never again offer refuge in his castle, what he claims is the only safe place.

Jiya answers him:

“Your castle is not safe either…If the earth shakes hard enough, your castle will crumble, too. There is no refuge for us who live on these islands. We are brave because we must be.”

In some ways, this pandemic has felt like The Big Wave – sweeping, arbitrary and devastating. Many people have died and our way of life has changed in somewhat drastic ways. It’s easy to feel like it will never be the same again. It’s easy to be afraid of The Big Wave, of The Next Wave.

In a podcast I recently listened to, Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talks with Jen Hatmaker about this feeling of shock that people have – like they’re suddenly out of control, when in fact they were never in control. As Liz puts it, “The world is doing what our world does. The world is just being itself…and it’s doing it perfectly. Because what the world does is change every second…And that’s what it’s always done.”

I take great comfort in those words, which to me paradoxically echo those in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” The world does what the world does – as it always has. We were never in control. But we can be brave because we must be.

And though it feels like things may never be the same, we won’t go backward. We aren’t meant for that. We are meant to go back to the beach and build again. And to treasure what we have, if only for this day.

About School Lunches

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As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)

There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)

Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.

Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.

When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.

School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.

So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.

When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.

I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.

My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.

There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.

By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.

Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?

About Me and Books

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There’s a lot of talk about minimalism and tiny houses these days. Generally, I figure that most people who choose to live in a tiny house probably don’t have much stuff to begin with. Or they’re just not that materialistic. They’re outdoorsy, probably, and live in warm climates. They entertain only small parties, if any, because they only own 2 plates and 2 forks and one knife. And they seem to have a romantic idea about sleeping on plywood beds in treehouse style loft bedrooms conducive to hitting your head if you suddenly sit up.

I’ve watched a few of those shows and frankly, it just looks too much like camping to me. Tiny bathrooms where you can sit on the toilet to shower (not a high-value efficiency for me), steps that hide dog dishes (because tiny house people always have room for the largest dogs), shoe storage that doubles as art installations – all these things look nice – in theory. For reals, I’d like to see the stats on how long before these tiny house owners put their digs up for sale on Kijiji.

Maybe the only ones that pique my interest are the tiny-house-book-lovers. You know, people who basically build themselves a self-sufficient closet to hold all their best friends – er, favorite books. Books as art installations? That I understand.

However, as a bookishly nerdy person whose favorite activities all center around words, I don’t have as many books as you might think. Oh sure, I have plenty, more than the average book-bear probably. But I actually don’t have a problem with getting rid of books if – IF – they no longer serve me.

I think my purging prowess started when we moved for the fourth time in the first seven years of being married and I lifted a box heavy with university textbooks that had not been unpacked from the previous move. What purpose did it serve me to save my Microbiology textbook from my ill-fated first year of nursing school? When would I need to urgently look up how a virus evolves the life span of a paramecium? And given constant scientific research and updating, how could I ever know if my textbook would stay “right”? And finally, I never really read it in the first place. Microbiology, Biology, Zoology – all the science-y textbooks – are long gone. And I never missed them.

I started my theory of decluttering before the internet became a THING – when copious amounts of unreliable information were available on the Google – in mere seconds. Way back then, my first criterion for letting go of a book was: Can I find this at the library? Oh, sure, it’s nice to have something around sometime just because you like a subject. Case in point: I never did let go of my Art History textbook from 1988 and I still look things up in it. Because I’m interested in art, especially old art, for which there’s not a lot of new research being dug up, archaeologically speaking. And, in my opinion, an art history textbook makes a nicer coffee table book than Physics, a textbook I also never read but which additionally gives me the heebie-jeebies.

This brings up my second criterion, which was to honestly ask myself: will I ever actually read this – again or for the first time? When I first started homeschooling my boys, I supplemented our bookshelves by haunting garage sales and second-hand stores. I bought anything and everything that looked educational, classic or fun. The result was bookshelves overflowing with many, many unread books. While it served us well to have lots to choose from, I was again confronted with this problem when staging a house to sell. Rather than box up the bulk and shove it under the stairs, I purged again – this time, asking myself the hard questions like: Will I ever read The Count of Monte Cristo or Mein Kampf or HTML for Dummies? Yeah, no.

But that’s me. Physics and HTML might be your perfect bookshelf fodder. And maybe at one time, it was for me, too. On a podcast that I listened to this morning about this subject, the guest talked about letting go of the things that are “no longer you” – which is sometimes hard to do. But she also said that she trusted herself to remember what was important. The result is a lot more room in your brain to focus on what’s here and now. And maybe a lot more room on your bookshelves.

These days, I try to “preview” books before I ever buy them – meaning I use the library again, a lot. There’s nothing worse than spending $30 on a book that you open up and say, “Oh no.” Of course, COVID-19 has made using the library a little different (hurry up, Phase Two!) but in the meantime, I’m shopping my own shelves for reading material. Because I still have books I have to read. And plenty more to give away.

About What I Learned While Homeschooling

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Along with all the other inherent stresses imbued in a global pandemic, parents right now are finding themselves thrust into a scenario they never wished upon themselves or their children – schooling their kids at home. It’s not for the feint of heart, taking responsibility for the education of your kids, but then neither is parenting. Having kids is probably not what you ever thought it was gonna be: it’s way harder and way better.

About twenty years ago, Rick and I made the decision that we would willingly take on schooling our kids at home. There was no virus threatening our safety, just three little boys testing our sanity. It’s actually a little amusing to me right now that the government is telling parents they need to do this, because it wasn’t always a sanctioned choice. I never was a vigilante-homeschooling mom, insisting that everyone should do it. But I did always maintain that it was an option, like public school or private school were other schooling choices out there. And for us, at the time, it was the right one.

That’s the way you have to look at parenting in retrospect, whether giving grace to yourself or your parents: you do your best with what you know at the time.

I admit that I’m relieved that my kids are graduated and responsible for whatever the heck they want to learn now. And COVID-19, with all it’s social distancing challenges, has really put parents schooling their children at home to the test: no playgrounds at “recess”, no fraternizing in the hallways except with your enemies (oops, I mean siblings), no sports, no clubs, not a lot of anything to let off steam except screens and backyards.

It was a different time and a different place, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I learned while homeschooling my boys – with the perspective of being past it all.

One of the best things I heard at a homeschooling conference once was that educating your kids was like creating a hammock for them. You need to make sure they have the basics to support them – through the next level, through regular life – but there’s always gonna be a lot of holes. If kids only get the basics – like the original trifecta of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, that’s a pretty good hammock. It will hold up. And there’s no way you can ever fill all the holes anyways.

Secondly, what you “routinize” is what your kids will get used to and what they will also do, for better or for worse. Whether it’s schooling at home or working remotely, you get more done if you stick to a routine. Plus, more beds get made, teeth get brushed, fish get fed and books get read. It takes a lot of muscle to build a habit but then after awhile, it just becomes the new normal.

Thirdly, you can’t predict what your kids will remember. While I went off the deep end teaching my boys lots of history and reading them great stories, they don’t remember a lot of the specifics. Frankly, neither do I. It’s pretty scattershot, really. But we did give them learning “hooks”, meaning that if they encounter an idea or some history or a person that we learned about in school, they have a place to hang that knowledge and build upon it. You can’t always remember stuff from first encounters. And now that they are in their twenties with their own Google machines in their hands all the time, they can look it up. (So can I.)

Fourthly, they will remember what was fun and unusual, and mostly, that’s the stuff that families are made of, not school. There were lots of things my boys do remember because we enjoyed them: nature hikes, reading all the Harry Potter books as a family, theatre performances, road trips, music lessons (well, maybe not the lessons, but the knowing how to play afterwards), holiday traditions, sleepovers at Gramma’s house, backyard hockey rinks and road hockey in the summer, crazy youth group events, house renovations. (Oh, wait, maybe that last one was just fun for Rick and me.) And if you think about it, what you remember about school when you were a kid was probably less about what you learned and more about what you did and who you did it with and especially if you had fun.

I’m willing to bet that the COVID-19 classes of 2020 won’t remember a heck a lot of what they learned “in school” this year. Which is not to say that it’s a futile exercise: schoolwork teaches your kids how to learn and it builds their repertoire and frankly, it just keeps them a little busy. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will remember all the weirdness, and hopefully a little bit of the wonderfulness, that a quarantine can offer. I mean, you’re in it now: might as well make lemonade out of them lemons. And while you’re at it, your kids can learn math and experiment with taste buds and have (lemonade) drinking contests and then they can wash the damn dishes. Which is also a good skill they probably won’t learn in regular school.

Home, after all, is where they first learned to walk and talk and cut their own hair somehow with child-safe scissors. Maybe they can cut yours now until we get our hair salons back. It could be fun. Just sayin.

About Running

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Just in time for spring and peek-a-boo sandals, my toenails are about to fall off.

Not all of them. Just two. And those would be the ones on my “pointer toes” – the abnormally tall next-to-big-toes. You know, the weird looking toes. Come to think of it, toes in general are weird looking. They’re all different from each other, thoughtfully fashioned to each have their own piggy personality.

So back to my imminent toenail departure. At the very beginning of COVID-19, just before that last memorable snowstorm swooped in, we went for our obligatory daily walk. (And by daily, I mean, four times a week if we’re not too lazy or…ahem, busy.) It was a beautiful March Sunday afternoon and we took the long way around town. We were probably a couple of miles in before I started to question the error of my footwear choice. The garage was still in a state of disarray from moving and rather than upend that Jenga tower, I had opted for a crappy pair of convenient old loafers with which to plow through the puddles.

Cue the blisters and the repeated battering of my extra-long toes. The result a couple of days later, besides the impressive sore-toe-ness, was that my two toenails had turned a royal shade of purple. And now a month later, they are loosening and threatening their exodus. Jeez.

I have heard about marathon runners losing toenails after their big race and for some reason I thought that they just peeled off along with their socks immediately after they had crossed the finish line. Duh. This makes more sense: they hurt like the dickens and they color up pretty and a month later, they take their leave.

So basically, I’m in the same boat as a marathon runner. Except I’m about 22 miles short. And I didn’t run.

I am the best of walkers, sometimes I’m even a tremendous hiker. I love pumping up and down the hills in the Provincial Park out my back door – at a reasonable pace. But running – I suck at running. I have no gumption for it at all.

Nowadays, I blame my knees, having inherited my mother’s arthritic joints. However, my mom never let a creaky knee or elbow keep her from jogging to the chicken coop or running up from the basement with a quart jar of pickles tucked under her arm, like a Heisman winner. And so, I take a page from her book and insist I will not give in either. I will jog a little on the treadmill now and then. I will do squats and lunges and take this kind of medicine to keep me strong and limber (because I don’t have chickens and I don’t make pickles.)

We’ve all heard of people who lace up and discover a whole new kind of freedom when they start to run. (Watch Brittany Runs a Marathon for a great example of this.) I listen to (and watch) these stories with envy. Because that has never been me.

Way back when I was in grade nine, I had some fancy ideas about becoming a runner. Running would keep me fit and maybe slim me down, but best of all, I could call myself: A Runner. It went totally against my nerdy, bookish persona and just like every junior-high-schooler, I desperately wanted to be something different from Who I Was. And so, when the Annual-All-Schools-in-the-County-Track-and-Field Day came along, I signed up. For the Long-Distance Event. (Oy-yoy-yoy. I’m pretty sure that’s what was in the thought bubble above my Mom’s head when I confessed this to her.)

Let me be clear: I went to a very small school. There were about fifteen of us in grade nine. And only one other girl from my school had signed up for my Event. Additionally, there was no training – not in gym class, not after school, not even a hint of a suggestion that: perhaps to avoid humiliation, one should practice a little for this Event.

Well, not that I remember.

I took it upon myself one lovely day in May to lace up my knock-off Converse runners (ahem: NOT a RUNNING shoe) and try running around my town. And if you know how big Derwent is, that’s not really saying that much. But I got about a block away from home and I was winded. Whew! I decided that that was probably good enough for one day and I walked back home. With good intentions, I thought I would go out the next day and “train” some more.

Well. Time flies when you’re in high school and I woke up one day and Surprise! It was Track and Field Day. Thankfully, my mom had sewed me a cute outfit, so I wasn’t going to look like a complete idiot. And I was sure that on that day, I would somehow be able to complete the race by sheer fortitude, a quality that I had never displayed in gym class before.

When the time came for my Event, I lined up with all the other two entrants in my race. The fake gun went off and I ran. The other girl from my school was pretty much in the same boat as me and when we saw our competition pull ahead, we unanimously decided not to deprive her of victory. So, about a block in, we both dropped out.

This is not the end of the story. Apparently, I did moderately better than my home-town compadre and for this mere effort – like the milliseconds between Olympian medalists – I was awarded a Second-Place Blue Ribbon.

Pretty great, huh? (And this was before participation medals.)

There is no moral in this story – well, not one that I want to explore, anyways. There are a couple of points however: I never was a runner and unless I get me some new knees – AND SOME FORTITUDE – I never will be one.

And: I may not be a runner, but I AM a (second-place) winner. I have the blue ribbon to prove it.