38

Frigid again today, not much exercise except for running up and down several staircases having forgotten essential materials which needed to go from the Art room to the classroom where I was teaching. Also threading needles, at which I found myself better than most 7th graders, who looked quite physically and mentally challenged at times, trying desperately to push that thread through the eye of the needle.   And then some arm-wrestling with my 8th graders to shouts of Bou-wer! Bou-wer! (I won some, lost some, but only to the biggest strongest boys!).

Mountains of snow on the sidewalks, on the edges of the highways, in designated areas of parking lots, where the town snow gets dumped.  People become very angry with one another during cleanup after a huge snowstorm in the city, because where do you put all the shovelled snow?  Each household is responsible for clearing the sidewalk in front of the house, and any fire hydrants, but there is no space to fling the snow to, as we have here on our hill in the woods, where we can pile it up next to the wood-pile, or on to the lawn, or shovel it down the bank of the hill through the trees.

There are feuds about parking places too, because if someone has just taken all the time and effort to shovel the space, they are not going to be happy when another person takes advantage of the spot without having done any of the back-breaking work.  So people constantly leave objects to save their spaces, and sometimes they are really weird things, like cooking pots, large pumpkins, cat carriers, standing fans, and even an ironing board.  There have been cases of people taking others' spots and coming out in the morning to find their tires flat, shot with nail-guns.

But of course, like everything else, snow-removal comes with an ecological price.  The roads are treated with chemicals before the storm, or during, and then all that snow is collected and pushed into parking lots, sometimes tipped directly into rivers and ponds.  But even if this is not the case, when the mountains of snow melt in the spring, all the chemicals are mingled with the runoff which of course goes into the groundwater and the rivers and ponds and ultimately, the ocean. Oh, I think I just found another thing to worry about, woohoo!

Today on our way to lunch my friend Mohamed noticed that a funeral was taking place in the large cemetery near our school.  The temperature was about -5C and the mourners stood around the grave in all that cold and snow.  I didn't even know they could bury someone when the ground is covered in ice and snow.  I suppose it is a leftover from some book I read where they couldn't bury the body in the frozen ground, but of course now, in the 21st century, we must have the technology to dig a six-foot deep hole even in the dead of a New England winter.

I am reading a book called A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, which is rather wonderful and fascinating and has similarities to the remarkable Stranger than Fiction, which was Nick's favourite movie for the longest time.  Much of the story takes place in Japan, and when the old great-grandmother Jiko, who is a Buddhist nun of 104, dies, I was captivated by the description of how the body is prepared for cremation.  She is washed and then dressed in a white kimono, hand-sewn with no knots in the cotton, so that she can slough it off easily and not be tied to the world.

The body is placed on a metal tray which goes into the crematorium oven, and when it is over, the tray is slid out again and all that remains is a skeleton of warm white bones.  The relatives all stand around with one chopstick each, and they work with a partner to pick up all the bones and deposit them in the funeral urn, starting with the feet, because you don't want her to be upside down for the rest of eternity.  The most important bone is the nodobotoke, which I think is the hyoid bone.  It is called the Throat Buddha, and is the last bone put on the top of the pile in the urn, and if it is found it is very good luck and that person will enter nirvana and the ocean of tranquility.

In the western world we are so scared of death, have such an aversion to the subject, that when it comes up invariably someone will propose that we change it.  Death is inevitable and it seems strange that there is such a taboo about it.  I love the Buddhist idea of reincarnation, because it means that dying is just a part of the whole circle, as one's soul is reborn again according to your karma, which depends on how well you lived in your previous life.

When I arrived at school this morning I was greeted by this beautiful maple.

 And then this evening when I made my way out to the cold parking lot at dusk, it bade me goodbye.

And when I arrived home in the dark I nearly tripped over the mermaid on the steps, still fast asleep!  Snow mermaids, huh?  What a life.

Day 37

The snow was wet and sticky, for a little while at the end an icy rain.  Then the temperature dipped way down and so this afternoon, even after the weak sun has shone most of the day, every tree is outlined in white.  It is as though Krishna, the mischievous god, had roamed around in the night, tracing each tree with a white crayon.

My exercise today was plodding through the woods, where I found a deer-bed.

You could see the where the warm body had lain, clearly imprinted in the shallow snow, under the protection of a thick weave of cedar branches, a good choice during the storm which dumped about 9 inches everywhere else.  

Also hauling wood, taking care up the steps not to bother the mermaid, who is sleeping.    

Mermaid, tired from surfing, asleep under the rhododendron.

My friend Kate who lives in on an island in the Hebrides (where I have always wanted to go after falling in love with Gavin Maxwell and Mijbil when I was 12 and read Ring of Bright Water), wrote a post on women born in her sign, the, year of the Dog according to the Chinese Horoscope, with a link to an interesting site where you can look up your own sign. 

Sculpted Chinese Zodiac: 12 animals, one standing for each year.

The 12 year system describes how people perceive you or how you present yourself.  There are also animals designated for each month, (inner animals), each day (true animals) and also for each hour (secret animals).  So you may appear to be a Dragon because you were born in the year of the Dragon, but internally you may be a Goat, truly you may be a Rat, and secretly you may be a Snake!

So of course after reading the attributes of people born under Kate's sign, which she said was surprisingly accurate, I looked up the rest of my immediate family.  We also have a Dog (Jess), as well as two Goats (Emma and Anne), two Monkeys (the boys), and a pig (Tim). 

I agree with Kate, there were several credible attributes for each person, it was quite uncanny, and I rarely follow such things, but it is interesting to know about all the theories of origin, the mystery of what makes us who we are.  (I am an animal that I loathe, by the way, and I think secretly I am really a Dragon.  At one time I thought all goats should be eradicated off the face of the earth.  They are such destructive animals, and ate all our new little trees we had planted at Nombulelo, the school where I taught in Grahamstown.) 

My two Monkeys are very different people and there are several attributes which relate to one and not the other, but I can see both boys in this excerpt, "Monkeys are hard workers once they have a piece of the action. The bigger the piece, the better they do. Monkeys like to travel, and they want to do it first class. They need a certain amount of excitement in their lives."

And my Jess, a Dog, like Kate.  "They are extremely protective of themselves and their loved ones. With a passion for fair play and justice, they never fail to rescue you time after time. They may rant and rave, but they never rest until they right the wrong. They are true humanitarians and suffer with the world.
Once Dogs classify you, they rarely change their minds. There are few in-betweens. Dogs perceive things either in black or white. You are either friend or enemy." Jess has always been like this, since she was a small girl.

And the stubborn Goats, Emma and I.  "The goat is known for gentleness and kindness. They also worry. (You see, we can't help it!)  Sometimes clumsy in speech, they are always passionate about what they do and what they believe in. They are compatible with Rabbits, Pigs, and Horses. Goats like to set their own hours and will not tolerate too much discipline. They are also very offended if they are criticized."  Yes, we are both like this!

So Pigs are very loyal and kind.  They are compatible with Rabbits and Goats.  According to the website, "Pigs do not dazzle or shimmer. They possess the old-fashioned chivalry that grows on you until you totally depend on it. It is so easy to trust Pigs. They have a calm expression and a sincere manner. They are blessed with endurance and work steadily at tasks with great patience until completion." Yes, all this is true, except that Tim definitely shimmers.  He is, after all, my knight in shimmering armour.

Thirty-six

Snow day today!  It's like a public holiday as just about everyone stays at home because travel is so dangerous.  Sometimes the only vehicles on the roads are the snow-plows trying to keep the streets clear for emergency vehicles and then for the next day, when everyone brushes all the snow off the cars and everyone begins their normal daily routines again, until the wonderful unexpected holiday of yesterday is forgotten, like a lovely dream.

Yesterday all the students at my school were very excited at the prospect of a snow day, the younger ones because they would go sledding or watch movies at home, or just "chill out", the older ones because they would be able to catch up with work.  I felt so sorry for these responsible youngsters, just 16 or 17, working so hard so that they can get into the right college, have the right life. They need to play more, we all do.

Billy Collins, one of my favourite poets, has written a wonderful poem celebrating days such as these, called Snow Day.

Our driveway requires much attention on days like this, so late this afternoon we went out, even though it was still snowing lightly, Tim to snow-blow, me to shovel.  Good hard work, and then I could play, but by the time it got dark I hadn't nearly finished the snow-mermaid I was fashioning on the steps, and the wind was hurtling snow down on me and her, so she is still a bit rough, but large as life, surfing a wave of snow, next to the rhododendron.  While attempting to photograph the mermaid we were utterly overcome with snow from sky and trees doing its best to sand-blast us, so the photographs are very hurried and quite poor, and don't show her beautiful flicking tail either.

About this time last year we had another snow day, well it was in March actually, and I made a snowman.

And here is a little baby ellie who came to visit Molly one day last winter too.

While writing this blog tonight, I had my headphones on listening to my itunes on shuffle, and suddenly a harmonica came on and with a familiar shock I knew it was my dad.  Alan, my darling nephew, arranged for my father to record his harmonica-playing in a proper recording studio in 2006, a few months after my mother had died, and then gave me and my siblings a copy of the cd.   He was a self-taught player of the mouth-organ, my dad, and pretty accomplished.  The thing is that he talks on the recording, answers questions from the sound engineer, and tells a couple of stories as he used to do when he answered questions.

And to hear that voice again causes a small earthquake in my heart.  Usually I turn it off, it is too unbearable to hear him, my 88-year old dad, the habitual voice of my childhood, hear him pronouncing Afrikaans words in that funny way, where he says the Afrikaans 'g' sound as a 'k'.  All the songs were for my mother, he keeps saying, "oh, and she loved this one" and "have I played this one already?" not wanting to make a mistake, because he was slowly sinking into dementia and he knew it.

He was a big strong man, like a great old tree.  And when my mother died it was as though he had been struck by lightning. His nickname for me when I was a tiny thing was "Anne-pan", and he still called me that, even when I was already 50 years old.

So I am determined to end on a positive note.  Because here we are, we're alive still.  We're lucky.  We're warm inside with electric lights, comfortable wood-stove, food in our bellies.  We have four lovely children, three of whom I spoke to today.  And two dear little granddaughters. We have good jobs that we love.  This is our thirtieth year together and I would still carry Tim on my back if he were injured ( I'm not sure how I would do that but it is a metaphor, I expect).  And we laugh. 

On Skype today, Emma was telling me and Stuart, her husband, about her outing with her two friends.  They all have babies who are more or less the same age.  The two little boys are not really crawling yet, while Luna has been mobile for months already, and is a very busy little girl indeed!  So at the restaurant, the two little boys sat quite happily in their high chairs, shovelling bits of food contentedly into their mouths as babies like to do, while Luna tried desperately to escape from the straps holding her in, and when at last her mother took her out to put her on her lap, proceeded to throw her arms and legs about in a tantrum as she wanted to get down to explore the floor!  Stuart piped up in the background, "Well, those boys are learning a valuable lesson, you should love food more than women".

35th day

 I wrote an entire blog, was just finishing and cut and pasted a sentence in the wrong place, so pressed Alt-Z to undo the paste, and my entire entry has disappeared. 

My first paragraph went something like this:

A beautiful sunshine-on-snow day.  It is important to delight in these short sharp bursts of pleasure, because if you think too hard about the world just about everything is pretty awful: elephants and Monarch butterflies becoming extinct, female genital mutilation, the situation in Damascus, rivers of radio-active water being pumped into the Pacific after the Fukushima disaster, human trafficking, too much plastic in the oceans, too many people...

Mother and baby in Addo Elephant Park in South Africa.

I am too tired and sad to re-write everything, I was trying to cheer myself up with trees and birds, so it will have to wait until tomorrow, I wish to go to sleep like a tree for the cold winter, and wake up to a verdant spring, and burst into blossom.  But it is going to be a snow day tomorrow, so I will re-write it then, or write something entirely new and happier.  

I loved this explanation by a tree researcher who discovered that the concept of mother trees and a communication system between trees which was so beautifully created in the James Cameron movie Avatar, is actually true.  

Day 34

I "ran" two miles on the elliptical machine today, at the gym.  It is always so hard to get up early in the morning to go there, it is not where I belong.

There is a man and an old lady whom I see every single time I am at the gym, and I go at different times, so why are they always there?  The old lady is always walking very slowly on a treadmill and the man is always standing talking to some poor person who is trying to exercise.  And no, he is not the trainer or the person on duty.  All those people wear special t-shirts so you know who they are in case you need to ask questions or be rescued from weights or something.  It is a mystery. 

We live close to the Essex River, a serpentine tidal river stretching sinuously from our town to its mouth into the great Atlantic, from which our town gets it name.  Recently it has been covered in ice. 

The meandering Essex River. Panoramas taken a week apart, from the same vantage point.

There are many words in the English language.  It has the most words of any language because of its origins, as it subsumed foreign words as it grew like a large organic creature swallowing everything in its path.  The Oxford English Dictionary describes it in a more polite, mathematical way: "The Vocabulary of a widely diffused and highly cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits... there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference."  A beautiful concept, exquisitely explained.

I love my language and studied it formally for years. Even grammar fascinates me, syntax, structure, the theory of it all.  I can be reduced to tears by a line of a poem, or touched by words uttered by my husband or children. I can sink into a book until I am in that world of words, so far removed from the ordinary present world.  But there are many experiences for which there is no language, or there are only limited words.  Perhaps we don't know enough words, our vocabularies are too small.  Out of the 1,022.000 English words, estimated by the people of Google, we only maintain a small percentage in our brains.  And although as human beings we use language to express ourselves and communicate with one another, although we use the same word, for example, the word "love", we probably all mean very different things when we say it.  We can't even be sure that when we say "That is a yellow wall", we are seeing the exact same colour.

Matthew and Nick were my last children to leave home, almost three years ago now.  Nick lives in the city, about 50 minutes' drive away.  Matt lives a bit further, just over 2 hours' drive from our home.  They are both away from home.  Each day I think of them, knowing that they are away, absent from my daily life.  I picture them in their rooms, walking, biking, taking classes, because I have visited them both and have these experiences to inform the pictures in my head.  But now Matthew is in Senegal, the "away" takes on a different meaning.  On the one hand he is still away from home, as he would be at university, but he is somehow more "away" because he is so far afield.  He is more "away" because I can't see where he is, I can only imagine the streets of Dakar, his room, his host family, his new friends, the classrooms. 

My daughters and granddaughters are away in a different, faraway sense too.  It is the nature of our "Global Village", some say, and yes, people move around so much these days, all over the earth, but I would prefer them in my real village, where I don't have to wait for my vacation days, buy an expensive ticket and get on a plane to go and see them.

And now I will go up to bed, so tired from shovelling snow, and more to come on Wednesday and Sunday!  And I will fade "away" into delicious sleep, perchance to dream.

three three

This atheist walked to church this morning along the causeway, in the balmy 5C temperature, with the sometime sun glinting off chunks of ice in the swiftly flowing river. and a beautiful sky of swept clouds.

What was an atheist doing in church?  You may well ask.

This is the Unitarian Universalist church, known by some as the UU church.  It's a church founded in Massachusetts, and I like the ideas behind it. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister.

Christian Universalism "denies the doctrine of everlasting damnation, and proclaims belief in an entirely loving god who will ultimately redeem all human beings."

Unitarianism denies the trinity of Christianity (the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost) adopted by the first Council of Nicaea in 325.  The Unitarians instead affirm god as a singular entity. The first Unitarian churches were formed in the 16th century. 

"Current concepts about deity, however, are diverse among UUs. While some are still monotheistic, often from a Judeo-Christian perspective, many profess Atheism or Agnosticism. UUs see no contradiction in open Atheists and Agnostics being members of their community because of the rich Unitarian legacy of free inquiry and reason in matters of faith. Still other UUs subscribe to Deism, Pantheism, or Polytheism. Many UUs reject the idea of deities and instead speak of the "spirit of life" that binds all life on earth."  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

These are all such wonderful attitudes, so inclusive, so kind.  

The reason I went to church today was because my piano teacher is the pianist at the local UU church, and as Pete Seeger (who was a member of the UU church) died last Monday the church had decided to do a "special" on him this Sunday.  My cousin Rose had sent me a really beautiful Pete Seeger song, To my old brown earth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VHVY8KOzuw , sung by Seeger himself to the accompaniment of his banjo, and then in four-part harmony by a choir of voices accompanied by the same simple banjo.  I showed this to Julie, my piano teacher, who was elated, as she had been looking for something to play during the offertory.  She spent hours transcribing it into sheet music, as she was unable to find it anywhere on the web, and today played it so exquisitely that my eyes were shining.  I wished my cousin had been there sitting next to me. 

I found the rest of the service utterly enjoyable too.  Music is a huge part of this church, and they have many great musicians: guitarists, flute players (who used to be called flautists but don't seem to be anymore), and pianists.  Pete Seeger believed in the power of song to bring social change, and worked much of his life as an activist.  We sang his songs Where have all the flowers gone? and If I had a hammer, which I had always thought was by Trini Lopez.  The powerful civil rights anthem which Seeger popularized, We shall overcome, was the last song.

The sermon was short and sweet and also filled with musical references.  As I was listening, I thought how my little blog entries are like my own short daily sermon (if I were a preacher).  And looking through the official hymnal, Singing the Living Tradition, I noticed conventional hymns and ordinary songs side by side, and in the back, where all the blessings, response pieces, words for funerals and weddings and so on are located, I was absolutely enchanted to find some of my favourite poets, like Mary Oliver and Adrienne Rich, Henry David Thoreau and Kahlil Gibran.  There is a hymn by Holly Near, called We are a Gentle, Angry People, which includes a verse which goes, "We are gay and straight together", which would cause apoplexy in most of the Christian churches I have frequented.

Church music is such a strong part of my culture, my roots, something completely familiar and comfortable. I rejected the religion which would not allow my dog a place in heaven, but I still went through Christian National Education where we had assembly every day with a hymn or two and a bible reading.  Hymns were the poetry of my school choir (where I fought so hard to stay, even as I was nearly expelled from school several times, and therefore lost my place in the choir too.  I didn't care about the school, but I begged [a rather difficult thing for a proud 17 year-old to do] our choir mistress for her forgiveness, and she succumbed, to my great delight and gratitude).  I sing hymns in my head while I'm running, perfect rhythm.  I sang them to all my babies to help them yield to sleep.

We had an annual carol service in the quadrangle of the school, beloved by everyone who attended, year after year, with the dusk coming on, little bats flitting through the warm air, nabbing mosquitos. and the pure eternal voices of girls floating away into the coming night.

My fifth choice for my Desert Island Disc is Mozart's Clarinet concerto in A. K622.  2nd movement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QAAZ29cvfU   This adagio is so beautifully performed here by Sharon Kam with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra.

I am always drawn to the slower pieces, the minor keys, the segments which pluck and pull at your heartstrings, working them into a kind of emotional ecstasy.

32nd day

One month done.  Eleven to go!  Seems a very long time.  This quote from the book I am currently reading: "And apart from me, who else would care?  I mean, if I thought the world would want to know about old Jiko, I'd post her stories on a blog, but actually I stopped doing that a while ago.  It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.  And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting, -- it kind of broke my heart."  -from A Tale for the Time Being: a Novel by Ruth Ozeki.

I remember this whole self-indulgent dilemma in 2010 as well and can't remember how I got over it, but obviously I did because I completed the year.  I suppose at the most basic level it is a promise I have made to myself and also a kind of dare, to see if I am capable of the curiosity and self-discipline required to continue for another 334 days.

So here goes....

I ran just over 2 miles (about 3.4km) on the elliptical machine, which Tim has persuaded me to try because it doesn't hurt your knees, and you exercise your arms at the same time.  It is quite a brilliant apparatus actually, except your toes can go a bit numb.  But my knees are smiling, so I will persevere.

Taking the clean washing out of the dryer today, I was aware of the reverence of folding garments.  When we first moved into this house, as I took clothes out of the dryer I made four orderly piles.  Now there are usually only two, except when the boys come home. Nick went back to the city a while ago and Matthew has been gone almost a week now.  Every wash seems to have had something of Matt's in it, and today his last shirt to be washed was brought out, scented with rosemary from the essential oils I put on the woolen drying balls.  Soft fabric neatly tucked and turned.  I wonder what he took with him, there seem to be so many clothes now sitting in neat stacks on the spare bed in his room, waiting for him to return and animate them again.  

I do not have immaculate cupboards.  I am not a fastidious person at all.  I do NOT iron.  But I always fold the clothes as I take them out of the dryer, I never just heap them out into a basket.  It is actually a rule in our house, my rule, that if you empty the dryer, you have to fold everyone's clothes.  It is part of being civilized, like eating with your mouth closed, like waiting your turn.  And the reverence comes in thinking of each person as I touch the worn jeans, smooth the softest old t-shirt, marvel at the lightness of the warm fleece, hang the formal shirt, or try to remember which undies belong to each boy.  I know those beautiful bodies which wear these clothes.  One is my beloved husband's, and the others are my two boys who have grown from tiny womb-mates to great tall creatures with big hands and broad shoulders.

My fourth choice for my Desert Island disc is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSmxBNFnvkM