All is forgiven.

The sun came out today and it feels like a new beginning. Spring. Finally, in all it's itchy glory has arrived and I was there to meet it's train, help it with it's bags and ask it what took so long. Now that the waiting is over I can barely remember the wrath of anticipation.

Spent a bit of time in the greenhouse today planting flats of basil, kale, and squash. I saw a coyote running in the freshly cut field, he saw me too. There were eagles everywhere enjoying the updraft along the rivers edge.

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Great Falls, here we come!

So the much anticipated trip to Montana is just around the corner. We leave friday morning bright and early with our friends, writers Stephen Howie and Maria McLeod. We are driving the Mercedes for this one as the stereo in my car is toast and we would have to take out a small loan to buy gas for the Starfire. It will be a gut wrenching 12 hours to Great Falls. I've got new knitting needles and I am looking forward to non stop chatting with Maria in the back seat.

We were invited to celebrate last call at the Sip and Dip Lounge by my old friend Jack Tielman who, in his wandering days as a collector of rare vinyl stumbled across this shrine of Tiki culture in the high plains. For years he invited me to gatherings there but I was never able to make it. When I got his email this year announcing Last Call, I decided I just had to go. Mark was up for it as he is a Tiki culture enthusiast and I have never seen him turn down a cocktail served in a fishbowl. Maria and Stephen were in shortly there after and the die was cast.

Stay tuned for updates as we go along. Not sure if I can blog as we go, but I can certainly twitter. Pearl was a bit choked that she could not come and even offered to just hang out in our hotel room while we got polluted in the bar. What a considerate soul she is.

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Don't slash those wrists just yet...

It really feels as if we are in some kind of weird pre-apocalyptic state. It has been gray for a very long time and it is affecting my mood profoundly. On a good day I struggle to manage my thoughts and feelings but this weather is proving to be very challenging. My only defense currently is to lay off the depressants and ramp up the exercise, I am also on a strict diet of cute images that seem to momentarily cheer me up. Like the photos my mother in law Bar sent me of a depressed Tigress raising some piglets after her tiger cubs died at birth. The zoo had dressed the pigs in little tiger suits, it was super cute and I felt happy for about 13.5 minutes.

My doctors office has just called partway through this entry to inform me that my vitamin D levels are really low and that they want me to take a mondo supplement twice a week. Of course I was thinking I don't want no stinking supplement but then the cheerful receptionist informed me that a low level of vitamin D can cause depression, heart disease and a litany of other horrible afflictions. I backed up a moment because at first I thought she was saying that the supplement caused depression. In my depressed state I was having trouble understanding what she was saying I guess. How serendipitous. I have been not wanting to blog because I have been feeling so very negative and now like manna from heaven I have been offered an interesting chance to see if I can alter my mood without actually signing up for dreaded anti-depressants.

Stay tuned and keep sending the cute pics just in case.


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Redemption

I was redeemed on Tuesday after my bad mothering morning. I took Pearl to the field after school for a little forced labor. She planted a huge row of carrots, spinach and radishes and on our way home I asked her if she wanted to eat at Nina's Cafe. She answered almost vibrating "you are the best mom ever".

There you have it, redemption. All it took was a little understanding and some fried food.

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Motherhood can really suck

I accused Pearl of lying to me this morning about washing her face. What kind of a monster am I?

She may have done it although I never heard the water running, but I could have been distracted as I feel like I am about 94% of the time. At any rate it didn't look clean, and she took real offense. Who wouldn't? What a bizarre thing to be accused of lying about. I am weary I guess, tired of reminding her about all these little things, brush your teeth, wash your hands, pee when you get up, pee before bed. It's the same thing over and over, tidy up your room, pick up your stuff.

I really want to be able to rise above the maintenance aspect of motherhood into the enjoyment of motherhood. Attitude, I command thee to change!

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Time

Had a little scare this week when I misplaced my watch on Wednesday morning. The watch can be a forgetful thing. I put it on once I am dressed but this week it just wasn't in an obvious spot so I didn't put it on and then the day wore on and petty soon it was Friday and I was still not wearing it.

It got me thinking in a superstition direction. When my mother was slowing dying of cancer she and I took a trip to Greece. We cruised the Cyclades for 10 days on a small ex fishing vessel. Near the end of our trip we stopped at an island called Ios, it was a warm afternoon and we rode a bus away from the marina to a beach where we could take a swim. My mother was always a strong swimmer but the cancer, which had settled in her lungs had made her timid in the water. The boat had anchored at various spots and some of us had swum in the warm and salty Adriatic. She would not join us, she was afraid to be in the deep water with those compromised lungs. So she was excited to be able to wade into the water at this beach and paddle around.

When we got out and put our clothes back on she discovered she had misplaced her watch. It was a watch she had had for her whole adult life, a gift from her mother. It was an old Longines with a stained face, a delicate woman's watch that she had managed to keep with her for 50 years. Suddenly it was gone. The irony was not lost on me. She was dying and time did not matter, it was the beginning of the letting go. She died 6 months later.

I found my watch yesterday when I stripped the sheets off my bed. I was relieved. I still have time.

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Here Vs There

Mark and I went shopping today at the Great Canadian Super Store. It is much as it sounds, great and super. It has everything. I bought this can of Baba Ghanoush or Eggplants (yes plural) Dip. It was 2.17 which to me seems worth it. It is all the way from Lebanon after all. I am quite curious to see what's inside. Delicacies from a foreign land, you don't see so much of this in Everson.

First Day at the Field

On Tuesday this week I picked Pearl up from school and went over to Nancy's farm. It was our first day of helping out there. The field is located on the Nooksack River that flows through Everson. The whole valley along the river is a rich agricultural area. The soil is clay and sandy and good for growing. Our job on tuesday was to help tie up the 4, 250ft rows of raspberries. Pearl's job was to cut the string for the 3 adults who were tying up the berries. We also cleaned up last years canes out of the rows as well as pulling up great dry stalks of lambs quarters from the previous season. It was sunny and quite windy but totally pleasant. We worked for about an hour and a half, not so long on our first day out. Nancy came over to our house for a bowl of Barley soup and we looked over some seed catalogs to see what we wanted to plant. There seems to be a consensus on Sungold Tomatoes, I wanted some Fingerling potatoes, and Nancy has seed leftover from previous years for cabbage, broccoli, carrots, etc. She suggested we grow a few pumpkins too and said we could carve designs and words into them gently when they were small and the designs would expand as the pumpkins grew. I felt a bit tired from all the bending over and moving up and down the rows but it felt good to have put in our first day in the field.

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