DianeOutLoud

“How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise – the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream – be set down alive? When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book – to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.”

The introduction to John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row is wondrous. Reading that first page as a fifteen year old girl, the effect on me then, and still, is the same…

When last we left me, it was one full year ago, and I was living in my little home beneath the tall firs that rose above it. I could not speak my stories that Spring and the Summer that followed. Things had quieted me down to mute. I was preparing for my leavetaking of the Shed, and Fort Langley. And with the Fall’s approach, the spiders began again to make their presence known. They were looking for a mate. When a male detects signs of a female nearby he checks whether she is of the same species. Laying in bed at night reading my book I sensed movement out of the corner of my eye. Bounding towards me was the biggest, hairiest fellow yet. Did anyone hear that scream? I had to laugh. I flicked my arm so wildly, (I sounded so demented), and off he ran towards the side of the bed. As he jumped, his purple cape billowed out behind him and I heard the sound of numerous little boots hit the floor. Oh my, there’d be no sleep tonight. Where was he hiding? Exactly where was he reconfiguring his position so that he could run at me again?

There were three of us, best friends; Garry and Roland and me. I would be walked home to my parents’ house by eleven, and Roland and Garry would turn around and head back across Niagara Falls to their apartment on the other side of the tracks. It was a shanty, just off River Road. They told me about the rats they saw rustling through the cans in the dark alleys, then disappearing over the old stone walls that lined the embankment. Diving down through the bushes and trees of the escarpment towards the river. They both swore that one night they were terrorized and held hostage in their own kitchen. Huddled up off the floor on chairs against the wall, they tried to stay out of the way of two large rats that had taken over their apartment for a meeting. The rats wore plaid lumberjack shirts, one green, one red, and they stayed for hours. Later, when my friends described the incident, I looked beyond the pot smoking. I saw how shaken they were, and I believed them. Seeing with my own eyes the hairy little hustler that made a move on me, reminded me of Garry and Roland’s misadventure. Another aggressive species attempting to camouflage themselves, also with poor taste in clothes. Even in the dim light on my bed I could see that the purple sheen of the spider’s cape was very eighties disco.

I eluded that spider all night and by dawn I was victor. No details. I was definitely not going to miss spider season in the Shed.

Let’s skip ahead (if only figuratively). I landed in the west end of Vancouver, only blocks from English Bay and the mighty green of Stanley Park. The sun seemed to imbue the whole month of September with the colour of gold. My friend Roslyn bought a home just up the street from where I was house sitting, and we giddily created our modest little bucket list. (Neighbours at last!) Spontaneous invitations to walk, crepes off the cart, sitting on a bench with fish & chips, two beers on the beach at sunset time; seemed so idyllic. I was asked to help a friend’s friend with his memoir and the next six weeks whirled by with another round of projects.

But for all the lightheartedness things had weighed me down. There had been so much work to do. I had lifted and hauled, purged and divvied all of my possessions down to one last pile. My significant treasures, but mostly books, were delivered to my friend’s basement; stored at Cathy’s for my future home. I felt compelled to stay on my path of lightening up my worldly load. I liked that Jonah had my bookcases and the family table, that Sarah and Adi got my bed. The manuscript was finished, my rolly suitcase packed. I arrived at Roslyn’s door on Halloween night to stay for a few days of fun before at last, at last, heading south to Texas.

It was not to be. I fell down. Completely stopped. I was going nowhere.

In the months that followed my friends and I have talked a lot about illness. It’s been a humbling experience realizing (living it), that I, that no one, is exempt. The irony of the conditions that have un-abled me, does not escape me. While I have determined to become lighter, while I have thrown everything overboard in acts of generosity and intentions to be free, I lost my anchor and my ballast with a double whammy that literally slammed me down to earth.

Last week I sat in the window of a coffee shop with my friend Brent. We watched the world rush by. I said, “What is it about my neck? The little butterfly in front is crushed and struggling (thyroid), and inside at the back the crystals are out of whack (vertigo). I seriously think that I was strangled in another life.” He looked at me and said, “You were guillotined. You were a young, male aristocrat in the French Revolution accused of collaborating.” My neck hurts. I believe him. I once phoned Brent from an old phone booth in the parking lot of the IGA. I’d arrived early for work at the bookstore. (Oh bright and shiny morning in a sleepy little village; I’d felt a surge of happiness.) We were catching up when suddenly he said that he’d just had a vision of me crouched beside a fire under the biggest, blackest night sky. I was a good looking man with really white teeth. He said I lived a solitary life working outside. By choice, at peace. I often recall that picture that Brent re-created. It ignites in me still an upswell of inordinate joy. Brent, my looking-backwards-through-time-and-space auger (who also makes me laugh (nice touch with the teeth)), I believe you. Some things just feel familiar, and true.

“If you cling to the edge of the wheel you can get dizzy. Move toward the center of the cyclone and relax, knowing that this too will pass.”

November crawling, December staggering. January back down. February sitting, March walking. The Buddhists say that if you are pointing in the right direction, keep going. Good advice. In the bloom and bud of April, I am looking inward waiting. I know my compass will stop spinning soon. I have donned my Superwoman costume (tattered, knock off) and the S will stand for story. Talking tough, I am back.

Good Life
diane

Spring runs in and out like a child opening and slamming a door just to irritate us.
– Joyce Sequichie Hifler

It is flower stealing season once again and I’m so excited about the Spring. Forsythia on my table, right here before my eyes. The sunny yellow stars of its bloom could have been drawn by children. Yes, this is what heaven looks like, how did they know? I’m happy to have that feeling this year. When I was a teenager I called it nervous fits of anticipation, what had me tingling with a barely suppressed sense of…something. Somethin’s gonna’ happen. It still feels the same.

But the very big plan, oh that master plan of driving to Texas in the Spring, has now been moved forward to the Fall. I had begun noticing a stirring of wistfulness about leaving the Shed without experiencing what I know will be a magical time in the other seasons; the Shed nestled under burgeoning greenery already teeming with birdsong, my windows open to the long summer nights. The carefree living of hot and sunny days. Sitting outside on the stoop through the day’s heat and the dark’s calm, nodding my head yes, yes, to this life of mine.

My vehicle has not yet materialized and my Texas money is more funny than fund. I wondered about all this, the timing, but I trust the process and know that I will go when I’m supposed to go. So it is with curiosity and acceptance, not frustration, that I will wait a little longer. And the inferno of a Texas summer is no place for me.

…amaranthine pink blossomed branches from the trees along the river bank…

Years ago I sat on my piano bench and watched the dancers learn to pirouette across the room. And some would dizzily careen in circles until they crashed into the barre or spun wildly out of control. The trick being to keep your head steady and your eyes focussed always on that point on the far wall you wished to go. We practice the grande pirouette through our days when not only us but the world seems to be spinning, and it’s all about balance and whatever we need to do to keep ourselves upright. Things happen.

A Friday night last September I got a call, my friend Cathy said, “If you come down to the post office corner right now, you could probably get hired. I’ll introduce you to the locations manager.” Down I went, hired I was and spent the next two months happily working here in the village as a production assistant. Money was made, my plan leapt forward in an unexpected way.

Then December brought the journey back east to my mother’s side, to say hello, and goodbye. I found, on my return, that I needed to sit and be quiet. The Shed weathered the storms of winter and so did I. I sat at my table with scissors, a glue stick, and a pile of National Geographics fashioning fantastical collage cards – Tibetan asses trekking single file across a Catskills sunset, a swirl of giraffe legs round shimmering burgundy coral is a flower. For calming a twirling mind, the hands kept the focus.

I didn’t work, I sat. People had been behaving badly, I sat. It rained, it snowed, it howled. I sat. The Christmas season brought its joys and extremes and I kept cutting and gluing. I moved out of the Shed only once, at -18 C. with the wind chill factor. Looking around this peaceful solace filled with music and candlelight (bundled in layers for warmth, even wearing a hat), generated gladness. I would not have traded my paradise for anyone’s.

But I have another home away from home just up the street. When my friend Suzanne goes off adventuring, or to teach her art, her Loft is my sanctuary. It was mine the whole month of January. So I hauled my PC up the stairs and finally circumvented the internet woes I’ve been experiencing for so long. Sat in the alcove staring up through a high window looking skyward. There is that hawk again, reminding me to watch for messages, to look at the overview rather than the mouse view.

The Spring is here and friends are leaving. One turned in his sleep and left as quietly and heroically as he’d faced his disease, without complaint. The other was taken cruelly and without a chance by another’s murderous intent. There are times when out loud is barely a whisper to one’s self, the sound of my pencil moving across the page. When we have trouble executing our turn across the dance floor, we must sit that one out.

…the translucency of a glistening bluebell…

The Loft has the bathtub I miss here, the height, the skylights, and Pete the cat returning home through the window from his night prowls. From kitchen to bath, from table to bed; how I love the drift of open space living. The Loft’s kitchen allows me to say thank you with muffins: Thank you for fish, for dinners, for surprise treats, for tea. For coming to see me, for leaving me be. For all the kindnesses that fill my day. For reading my words, for hearing my silence. For reminding me that you remember me, and that I love you. For the joy of sudden and unexpected goodness.

Surrounded by ingredients and all the people on my mind, I stand at the counter. The muffin recipes say don’t overmix or they won’t rise. Just fold it over…enough. Reminds me of loneliness, don’t put it in the mix. Don’t fold it over and over into your day. It makes you tough, keeps you low. I stand here in a crowd of lovers. I can hear Holden say, “It’s a goddamn crowd, it’s so goddamn beautiful.” What a crowd, I’m tripping over you! Thank you. Thank you! You’re everywhere. You’re everyone. Lovers everywhere. It’s a largesse, it’s a lord…it’s a lord of lovers.

………..

…the beautiful coin of now slaps down in your hand – Rumi

Good Life
diane

I’m not brave.

I am afraid of sardines.

Sardines have been on my mind, yes, on my mind. I think I should smarten up; increase my nutritional intake in an eco-smart, cost-efficient way. But all my life I’ve been terrified of eating the headless, tailless ones.

I confessed this to my friend and she told me she makes a sardine frittata and would invite me for dinner. Now for this story only the name Trixie has to be a pseudonym, because “Trixie” is mortified that it be known she would make pelagic pie for a Sunday dinner guest.

With great excitement Trixie issued a formal invitation, “I look forward to serving you the little fish with no heads.” With sincere trepidation I said I’d be there (and wondered again why I have to make such a big deal about everything). I seriously hoped the little buggers would be disguised in something very distracting.

We often improvise at Trixie and Jan’s, this night would be no exception. Trixie had doubled the ingredients for tonight’s dinner and kept checking the consistency of the pie. There was too much liquid in the bottom, damn, they could be swimming down there still. Back in the oven it went.

So toast was made and spread with Marmite. I grew up with Marmite and my South African friends did too. When Trixie asked if I’d like a drink of coke and milk (coke? and milk? together?) things were getting eerily reminiscent of scenes from famous books; Jesus feeding the multitudes on the hillside (the Bible), and Doc ordering a beer milkshake (Cannery Row). We raised our glasses and drank (what tasted to me like the poor man’s Kahlua) a toast to…the sardine! The smallest butts of any joke.

Phew, sliced large mushrooms, huge chunks of zucchini shielded the little ones from view. But there, ooh, and there, ah, was that inescapable, unmistakable texture; very much like the furtive paper notes we’d chew and swallow in school to escape detection.

The Bible recorded two separate miraculous feedings of the multitudes (although no definitive word on the Marmite). Jan said we shouldn’t bother with the second one (wuss), but I would eat them again. It’s uncanny though, I’ve yet to remember to buy them.

Trixie left a message after I got home. “God bless you (little fish and all).

The moral? One can practice bravery.

Good Life
diane

For Brian and Janice, Trixie and Jan…zany and courageous, the best combination!

I have been spending a lot of time by myself. I’ve said this before, working on my mojo. Studying books about the mind and heart, reading about people who live lives with the expansiveness I long for. I’m moving into new territory and the leaps I’m taking are not into darkness but along a well-lit path. There are visionaries that have come before us, and mystics and wise ones amongst us. We only have to watch what it is that happy people do, to learn great lessons on how to live a good life. If we are only willing. It’s the peace in every step. Yes, I want excitement and surprises and every high emotion. It’s the little dramas that no longer appeal, mine and everybody else’s. A part of me is stepping back and yawning really loudly when I hear myself going into my own dance; spinning the tales, blowing smoke and tilting the mirrors a certain way to prop up my position on the way it is. Because I’m not interested in the way it is anymore. I’m interested in the way it’s going to be.

I want to feel the ground give way as I jump. Being grounded in reality has just ground me down for far too much of my life. When the spirit in me, this wondrous joyous bubbling irrepressible life force has waited so patiently for me to pay attention…to me.

I have been under-employed for a long time. And much of my writing has been about faith. Watching my dwindling resources, but reveling in the life I have now of simplicity and far less compromise than at any other time in my life. It has not been hard to make these choices. But I have become aware of the huge difference between knowing what you don’t want, and knowing what you want. It is the same difference as concentrating only on what you have, rather than looking towards what you want. The different perspective makes all the difference in what happens next.

A huge hand has reached down and tapped me on the shoulder. I feel it still. In my little notebook where I am configuring my plans I have a page of lists that I am constantly adding to, and gleefully check marking when I have achieved my goals. It started out very basic…food, money, a computer, a vehicle, body care. But it’s important to fine tune exactly what it is we want and my non-grocery list looks like this:
pens
running shoes
a new toothbrush
stamps
heater for the Shed
bath bubbles
visit to the dentist
candles
acupuncture
essential oils
lap top
a road worthy vehicle
printer ink
socks
vitamins
a Maggie Woycenko
hand cream
road atlas
passport renewed
Bach Flower Remedies
underwear
new glasses
a pot with a lid
jeans

I have celebrated every check mark with elation and pride. Undeterred that it is the smaller things on my list that have been the first and easiest to attain. Until now.

The Fort Gallery on Glover Road here in Fort Langley is a place I have been visiting for a few years. At first I’d only stop and look in the windows at night when I walked this town in the dark. Every few weeks two more artists in the collective would mount their work on the walls. Eventually I started dropping by for an hour at the Friday night opening party, going in for the colour and warmth. One such night last year, I stepped into the smaller back room where there was more art and the food, and spied a painting that hung behind the desk. A blue night sky, dark water, a small boat seen across the way, were those stars?…Venus in Transit. I loved it! I asked the secretary, “Who did that!” and she said, a little non-plussed by my enthusiasm, “I did. I don’t belong to the collective but they said I could hang one.”

Maggie’s Venus In Transit has floated in and out of my mind since last year. Something, something about it. And one late night in September I looked through the window again and saw great heaps of clouds and movement, and sensed right away, aha, these were Maggie’s too. I am a sky watcher and when the gallery opened I went in to take a closer look. Yes! The title of the show was MESSAGES. Maggie and I greeted each other and then I stood before her paintings, marveling at the beauty and mystery in them. But then something happened. I turned and saw a painting that I had not been able to see from the window. Standing before it I experienced something that I have heard tell of, but it has never happened to me. I felt a sensation in my chest and started to cry. That painting moved me. I felt it move inside me.

I had walked into the gallery so cheerily and now I felt undone. It was words. Snatches, arrows pointing this way and that, blues, reds, browns. Feeling myself tumbled in a sea of passion, swept by words, the power, the call, the call of the words…longing. The sentences themselves indistinct and yet individual words…hear, roar, draw back, pebbles, the sigh, yield, all that is lost, the sea, faith…listen. These were my words, and the call was unmistakable. It was a call to my self.

I turned to Maggie. What? What was behind this painting? What was her inspiration? How did this happen? She told me that a poem had always stayed with her since high school, by an eighteenth century English poet. He’d written Dover Beach. My mind flew to a poem I’d printed off the internet. I just knew it was the same poet, Mathew Arnold. I had looked him up because of the impact he’d had on four young men in Victoria who’d studied his poem The Buried Life in their English class. They’d made a pact to make their dreams come true, make a list, and make a difference too. For every dream they realized, they would help someone they met with a dream they had too.

I took myself to the river in wonderment at Maggie’s painting and what it had touched in me. The name of the painting…Listen to the Poets. It brought up a sadness, but not the kind you choke on. It made me feel alive, and re-minded. I remembered all I wanted to say.

When I saw Maggie at the next gallery party, I told her that I was still affected by her painting, still felt energized, and that I vowed some day, some day I would own a Maggie Woycenko.

I live in a stand alone room, the Shed, there by the grace of friends on whose property I live. I am working to pay off my bills and all debt. This will be finished soon. I am going on a road trip. I will be in the dream of bigger sky all the way to Texas. And I could not stop thinking about that painting. There had to be a reason for this, something more I needed to pay attention to. In a moment of fervour and optimism I had written 1 Maggie Woycenko on my wish list, just as I joyously crossed off pens and stamps and a heater. Just as I continue to believe that I will have an atlas in the glove compartment of the vehicle for the road trip in the Spring.

But if we listen to our hearts, and my heart yearned so loudly for that painting, well, what of that? There is spartan (always leaning towards frugality) as opposed to simplicity, and bare subsistence compared to the feeling of abundance. I had never, ever put an art work on my list of sustenance.

There was an art show coming up on the Friday, a party that I was not going to attend. I wondered if Maggie’s painting was going there and would leave with someone else. Every ticket buyer was guaranteed a piece of art. I had to know, I emailed Maggie. Yes, she replied. Her painting was still available and did I want her to include it in the Blue Plate Special? In a rush of words I said no, no, no. I said that I was working on a Plan, and had been under-employed quite a bit, and had to really pick and choose where I went, what I did, what I bought. That I was the kind of person that would go see Leonard and then gladly eat eggs for weeks. Or keep the same things for years in exchange for time to wander without a schedule. I said I did not consider myself hard done by at all, but extremely fortunate. My choices are my own, but I had never wanted oh wanted a painting like I wanted her painting. I don’t even own a wall to put it on! But then I did it, I asked if she would consider me a secret buyer (because Lordy I did not want my friends and family to know of this “extravagance”). I asked how much it was, and if she would let me pay in installments. I would take it when it was paid in full.

It’s taken me a long time to tell this story. To tell you that the painting, Listen to the Poets, lies on my bed by day and is propped against two chairs at night. I can see it from my bed. Maggie wrote back. She said that she was giving it to me. That she had seen the effect it had on me and wanted me to have it. No cost. She said that she often painted over paintings, but this one could go to a home where it was really wanted.

My initial reaction? Joy! And then came the feeling of shirking unworthiness. And a cringing horror that Maggie may think I was being manipulative, and writing in a “poor me” way, coercing her into making this incredibly grand gesture. I felt desolate that I could never have that first feeling and believe that it was the true feeling. That I immediately go into an argument with myself over what is the right thing to do. I knew, I knew deep down that I was not honouring myself or Maggie now by second-guessing. Staying small. I knew she was a smart woman, intuitive, deeply gifted, and I was sorry that my fears now cast shadows on her decision and what was taking place. That unloving yammering voice in my head was trying to shame me into silence once again.

My daughter Sarah was with me that night and bless her she was lovely, she was clear. She said, say Yes. And so I did. I shook the dirt off my feet and said yes. Yes to me, to Maggie, to her art that spoke so loudly, to the radiant response of my heart to that call. I embraced believing that there is more that is food than food on the table, and there is nothing frivolous about feeding a hungry heart the beauty that it needs.

My table has always held the overflow of books. They run the length of it where it meets the wall. In the Shed there is one wall only that will hold the size of the painting, above that table. Today I walked to the hardware store and spent 25 cents on nails. I will dismantle the collages, the sticky notes, the piles of books stacked up the wall, and I will put my Maggie Woycenko in its place of honour. I have never, ever expected to own a painting so wondrous to love, and now I do. There are layers and layers of meaning in the lesson I’ve learned in this give and take.

Rumi always helps me with the last word, and the child in me is smiling yes, listen to the poets indeed.

Children Running Through

I used to be shy.
You made me sing.

I used to refuse things at table.
Now I shout for more wine.

In sombre dignity, I used to sit
on my mat and pray.

Now children run through
and make faces at me.

………..

I am learning about abundance and the beauty that I have yearned for so secretly, so quietly all my life. I am learning that there is more than just enough. There is more than enough. You’ve seen those teddy bears and garden gnomes in people’s travel photos. They are posed before the Eiffel Tower, and on the Great Wall of China. I am taking my painting with me when I go. No walls. If I need company on a side road in Wyoming, or leaned against a picnic table under the skies of the Dakotas, what a reminder. To listen, and to live, out loud.

Good Life
diane

For Maggie, in gratitude, for your many leveled gift.

A hot day. So restless. Hawks circled slowly, high above the manicured back yards, perhaps eying the lap dogs sprinkled on the lawns. My life felt too small and I needed to break out. Solvitur ambulando. I set off walking mid-afternoon towards the familiar touchstones of library and post office, with a sense that something could happen would happen if I went out to meet it. Terry! Terry was just coming out of the PO and we had a happy and exuberant reunion on the sidewalk. All these years of living in the village and I had not met Terry until last winter when we both worked at Chapters in Langley. I liked this woman and had been shocked to discover that we both lived in town. Hers was the beautiful old wood house on Church Street, barely visible behind a latticework of greenery, aptly named Wildwood.

A short time after I’d left the bookstore Terry posted a jubilant comment on my blog site, saying that I had inspired her to quit Chapters, too. She had done the math and figured out that she could earn the same amount of money, no, a bit more, by teaching two art classes in the time it took to work four shifts at Chapters. Duh! Well pshaw, it was no credit to me. Terry is an educator, a children’s book author and illustrator, and one of the most creative, artistic people ever! Chapters has a very high turnover and eventually if a door doesn’t open you kick out a window or the cliff beckons.

Our conversation continued down the street, there was so much to catch up on, and neither one of us had a schedule to keep. We went for tea, and then still talking we stood here and there in the hot July sun. I told Terry that I didn’t know where but that I had decided to move by the end of the summer. Without hesitation she said, “Move into my shed.” I’ve got to admit my first reaction was, “What the…?” I thought she was being flippant but one look at her face showed otherwise. She was sincere and she was smiling. “Terry, Terry, what do you mean by that?”

Terry said that years ago when she had needed some space, she’d moved into the shed in her yard. It had helped her. Then the shed became the hang out for her daughters and daughters’ friends to have privacy. I was intrigued and getting excited. “Show me,” I said.

With much apology Terry explained that it was currently full of junk. With her frozen shoulder and the pain she was plagued with she was unable to do anything about it. But if I was willing to clean it out, it could be mine. By this time we had reached her yard and inside I was thrumming and clicking. There stood my future home. And yes, the shed was crammed from floor to ceiling with microwaves, boxes of papers spilling everywhere, old TVs, the assorted flotsam and jetsam of kids that had grown up and left a few things behind. I never felt an ounce of dismay at the work ahead. I knew it was doable. We would make piles, I would do the grunt work. One pile for the kids to come and retrieve, one garbage, one give away.

Over the next few days I contacted Terry by email quite a bit. I told her that I was sure, but if she wanted to change her mind there would be no hard feelings on my part at all. Each and every time she cheerily replied that she did not.

Something happened before we even looked at the shed. There we were still talking, standing in the IGA parking lot, and Terry had just invited me to move on to her property. I was quizzing her on why she would do that. I didn’t know Terry that well, and couldn’t believe that she really meant it. She said she liked the idea of helping me with my plan to go to Texas. (The going rates for living in a shed are really, really affordable.) That day I was wearing my old Chapters’ work pants, and I stuck my hand into the depths of the pocket and felt a little bit of paper. I pulled it out. It was one of the many rotating talismans that I’d carried last winter to keep up my strength. Unfolding the tattered little note I read, “Believe in magic. Expect the unexpected and be prepared to be amazed.” Dazzled, my head reeling I handed it to Terry and said, “Now this is yours.”

We did it. The plan grew. I still thought to myself that if nothing came of this at least I would have helped Terry move some very old energy around. It was okay for Terry to change her mind, but she never did. When I started telling my friends that I was moving…to a shed, I gleefully watched their faces. Yep, horror and dismay. But once they saw the vision (they already knew my plan), how quickly they knew that it was right. The capital S Shed is me. But how they wanted me to change the name. Couldn’t I puleeze call it a cabin? Or romanticize the name just a little? They were squirming and I was not. I proudly announce that I live in a Shed. And it took me a while to get it, I was in my bed one night grinning in the dark, envisioning life in the shed, when I finally really heard the word. I got it. I got it! And started laughing. SHED! I am still shedding! So of course, the Shed is perfect.

The ceiling was pale blue and the walls a sunshine yellow. Though I loathe to paint and it bores me silly, with donations of leftover paint from Eliza and Laurel the Shed’s interior became an austere white and the floor sage green. It was worth the effort. I did not want to feel that I was living in a cast off playroom. The shedding began with furniture dispersed and more and more possessions given away. My books were boxed and sent down the highway for storage at Roslyn’s. Living in the Shed was going to exemplify living simply to an even greater degree. One table, two chairs, one bed. Only one bookcase, space is limited. Music, my eight plants, and only the personal treasures I need to keep close by.

The Shed is 11 feet by 17. Blue curtains hang at five little windows. One door. I have a small kitchen area and pantry with toaster oven, hot plate and mini fridge. There is no running water. I take my water jug across the yard and up the porch steps into the big house where there is a bathroom just inside the back door. The Shed sits under an old fir tree that rises a hundred feet above me. The yard has been left wild and untended. Two sister dogs, Georgia and Lily, plummet out the back door, racing down the steps to chase the plentiful squirrels back up the trees. Five luxuriant cats roam the house and yard, taking turns at my door, waiting to be let in.

In the night when I need water, or the bathroom, I make my way to the house in whatever clothes I throw on to keep warm or dry. On the way back I loiter until the darkness lets me in. It is so quiet and still. A dim light glows warmly behind the curtains in my windows. I look up up up to the sky above, see the moon and stars, sense the trees, feel the rain and wind, and know my connection to all that is. This is where I live. I moved in September 1st, and feel grateful to have found the perfect fit. For now.

Good Life
diane

(Saying Grace…Jack and Terry and Harvey and Virginia, you are lovely.)

It takes time for all the hundreds of faces to fall away and begin receding in memory. No longer riding the bus into Langley to work at the mega bookstore in the strip mall put me back in the village for the summer. I felt that I was reclaiming it again, settling in after seven months of leaving town. Oh the luxury of the post office and library, my two best pillars of society. Heading towards them was my familiar daily ritual, done at my leisure now, rather than sandwiched in between a hectic schedule. I regained the expansiveness of time again in which time cannot be measured and good times elongate and expand in deliciousness.

I needed to empty out. Live with my decision. I’d toughed out the hardest part of the year and trekked back and forth in wind, rain and snow. May is a good month to run free. And June. And July. But I was walking again, walking for my life.

It is a funny thing to defiantly reclaim your day for yourself. I am not retired, and my joke is that not only am I not out to pasture yet, I will be cutting through pastures for the rest of my life, on my way to earning my daily bread. But not right now. I am still young and foolish enough to know and relish the necessity of living in the now. And I insist on discovering the beauty of now.

At the intersection of Mavis Street and River Road there is a roundabout in the middle of the road, Spirit Square, with three regal carved panels on display; one each of wolf, beaver, and salmon. They are the artistry of Drew Atkins and with his permission I am reproducing the information about his carvings that is written on the plaque at the roadside.

Wolf - Inspiration for the first panel comes from the richness of Kwantlen history and traditions thousands of years before contact in the time of transformation. Kwantlen translates to “tireless runner.” Oral tradition tells of a great Chief whose daughter gives birth to wolf puppies that transform themselves to human form and become descendants of the first Kwantlen families. It has been said that the wolf blood gave the Kwantlen messengers stamina whose task was to run and deliver messages throughout and beyond the vast Kwantlen territory. Today, the Kwantlen government and Kwantlen community members continue in their efforts to work tirelessly in all that they do for their families and Nation.

Beaver - The Colonial History is represented by a beaver, an integral part of the fur trade. The fur trade brought the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader fort and the signing of the proclamation in 1858 to Fort Langley. The beaver is also nature’s engineer and builder, symbolically building the foundation from which the colony grew.

Salmon - The Post Colonial period is represented by a salmon. The salmon industry is the original industry of the Fraser Valley and has always been the economic base that helped First Nations and other communities along the Fraser River thrive. It is also a reminder to us all that if we do not honour and respect the river and the environment, we will lose our precious dwindling resources.

Dedicated to the Kwantlen people; Past, Present and Future. Design and carving by Drew Atkins and Xwa-lack-tun. (2008)

When one walks, or sits, when one has time, it is amazing how the little faces come into focus. The sudden sideways iridescent glancing of hummingbirds on red flowers. Timid brown bunnies tucked beneath the wild blackberry bushes along the railway tracks. To blend in, to become a part of the life of trees where birds chatter and swoop. I walk across the Jacob Haldi Bridge down the road to the river to stand on that dock. Out of the corner of my eye the splash of the salmon jump, a sandhill crane steps daintily in the shallows and lifts off. Today I watched a lone duck paddle towards a one log boom and dive neatly under the water. I watched and waited for it to emerge, and it did yards and yards past it on the other side, to join its mate.

I am on Kwantlen territory when I walk past the bridge. There is an area of the woods that has been cleared ready for building. The long Spring rains left deep pools and ruts between tree stumps where frogs accumulate to sing their song. It seemed that every time I walked past this clearing the frogs were calling, louder, insistently, and I started to pay attention, began to read up on the significance and symbolism of the animal kingdom.

The Frog says, “It’s time to release all things no longer appropriate to bring on your journey. Then you can hop to the next lily pad, light and free. (Colette Baron-Reid).

I heard the frog’s song in places where I had never thought a frog could be. Where I stepped off the bus at night I was greeted by ribet. In the shrubs at the corner where I turned onto my street the chorus would continue. Frog speaks of new life and harmony through its rain song. The deep tones of Frog’s “ribet” are said to be a call to the Thunder Beings: thunder, lightning, and rain. The “ribet” is the heartbeat that comes into harmony with Father Sky and calls for the replenishment needed.

Frog sings the songs that bring the rain.

Frog teaches us to honour our tears, for they cleanse the soul. (Jamie Sams and David Carson – Medicine Cards).

I’m reading about the twin hemispheres of our brains that have different personalities. The left side dominates critical and analytical thinking, while the right side is all about creativity and intuition. The right side of the brain which controls the left hand will say things you don’t know that you know. There are exercises one can do to have a bilateral conversation. I picked up a pencil with my right hand and wrote a question, How’s it going? then switched to my left hand and wrote the answer, Like a tree frog in a burning forest.

Well holy shit and let the rains come! Leap, frog, leap!

………..

On a sunny day a walk to the river in companionship with my dear friend. Roslyn and I stood on the dock, elbows resting on the railing, looking this way then that up the channel. Dusty barked, Bob called up from his boat, “Do you want a fish? Do you like salmon?” Would I! He chopped and sliced the long body, tipping the head and guts into the river and slid the great fish into a bag for me. I carried my catch home. We climbed the steps to my house sit where Roslyn sat at the counter reading the paper, golden sun falling from skylights. She would take home half for her household, to feed herself and her students. I stood at the sink, the tap running cold. The water poured across its sleek sides, cleansing the body of blood. My finger traced the silver scales over and over down its powerful body. Water flowed. I stood staring, hot sun on my shoulders. Through my finger I felt the cold wet strength of the fish and knew its journey. Felt its twists and turns through the shallows and the rapids. Began remembering. Knew myself nosing deeper and deeper into the gray green depths of the river, my powerful tail twisting and turning, disappearing into story.

Good Life
diane

There has been some concern voiced that I will disappear and then reappear in a posting with a whole new set of circumstances and no explanation of the upheaval in between. Six weeks have gone by…

I am here. Still unemployed. Money has shown up from unexpected sources, invitations to work and earn which have been gratefully accepted. I am now calling myself The Dinner Slut of Fort Langley (if you cook…). I have picked up where I left off more than eight months ago when I began busing into Langley to work at Chapters. My time for those seven months was spent getting there, working, and getting over it. Now I am wandering again, that is what I do when the day is my own. Yes I am on a job search, but primarily I am up here in the Loft working on my mojo. Do I believe something will materialize out of thin air just for me? I most certainly do. All things begin first as energy before they take their worldly form, and I have the opportunity now to work on mine in my solitude or in the company of my fine friends. I will not gasp for breath. I will believe in rarefied air; air that allows me to breathe who I am into life.

Am I chewing my nails? I have had a few panicky moments but when the fingers run out I move on to the pleasures of my life. I am so easily distracted by a good book, the call of the world to walk in, or the time available to catch up in person with the people I love.

I have a curious mind, but I think a lazy one too. I am not delving studiously into any particular subjects but letting myself browse and pick at whatever catches my interest. The archetype The Fool comes to mind. I know people are wondering what the heck is going to happen to me, living the way I do. The Fool laughs at Life, or laughs because of Life. Leonard is willing to be The Fool for Love so I cannot have his crown. It is worth it to me now to be The Fool for Me. For Me. The definition of The Scapegoat is one who is cruel or who takes on the cruelty of others. I did that for Chapters. I sacrificed my employment to make a statement, that I was not willing to not be paid my worth. I still miss all those books, my co-workers who became my friends, and the book lovers who needed me. Oh yes I do.

And so the leap continues. I’m spiraling slowly, looking out at the view. The bloom of purple lilacs has been replaced by pink rose scent. There are no lines of demarcation that differentiate between my day and night. I walk to ground myself when it feels like I am free falling too fast, too hard. I slide open the glass door of my bedroom to sit on the porch floor when the sunset flings its colours across the sky. When I dream of you and me and it wakes me, I turn on the light and pick up my book again to read myself into daylight and the life I live without you.

This flight cannot fail nor is it the first cliff that I’ve leapt from. I’m doing this for me and for anyone who wants to watch. I’m saying it is important to heal a heart that’s hurting. Doesn’t it save your life to stop the momentum when it becomes clear that the direction you’re heading is taking you Nowhere? What looks like falling down is taking me to higher ground.

Good Life
diane

(Blowing kisses to all the angels in my life. Thank you.)

I have done it again, quit a job before having another. This seems to be my way and I will not regret it. Balance may appear to be precarious. There are things I need to broach, to try and explain myself, and I’m struggling to reconstruct whether there is a beginning and a middle to this. I’ve been on a long journey and been silent from this page. Even I am still struggling to voice exactly where it is I’ve been.

So I will start with where I am now. I am standing on a cliff. It is an exhilarating view, from a long climb, and the air is so fresh that you can eat it. You can survive on it. The sky really does lead one to heaven. Behind the clouds roll and churn what you are glimpsing is not something that is replicated down on earth. So, the cliff, I am poised. I am breathing. My posture is good, I stand tall. It is not the quitting itself that means a thing. I am done now. It was something I gave my time to, to earn enough money to support myself. Something that I am very good at, but one that debilitated me with its teenager’s shifts and its teenager’s wage. What matters to me are the manifestations, inner and outward, of where we are going within ourselves.

Back to the cliff…

I told you about the perfect rock. I wore it looped through my belt when I was a teenager. The water in the lake had worn away the weak and unsubstantial to create a hole, and what surrounded that hole was the strength of the rock. What was left was perfection, its endurance and durability. I’ve fumbled, trying to express how necessary the holes are to bring what surrounds them into definition. That absence also creates presence.

I feel as if I have been living the hole of my own life, this long winter. Still in my Good Life, but living in the absence. Still my life but everything somehow opposite. Everything mirrored back. Living in the shadow that fell from last year’s happiness. I know I felt it coming, prescient is what I am. I knew it was coming, I held on to that attic by my fingernails until the very last moment. I knew that everything was going to change. And it did.

From outward appearances? No. I moved to another good place. I got something to work at in which I excel. Small dramas. For a blessing counter I was still in the Good Life. But inside of me it all changed. I started living in the minus column. Follow me here…I still had all the checks and balances in the plus column (the smooth gray stone around the hole), but I was now in the part of the rock that wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t, I wasn’t. It felt as if a more real life was being lived inside of me, in that walk by myself through the dark, while my life on the top in my daylight living hours was but a reflection. Walking but now limping. Still saying thank you but through tears.

We all have a secret life. Sometimes secret from ourselves. Our secret life of dreams named and unnamed that we birth in our breast. We dream and we dream. We journey through a nighttime of interior wastelands. We tire, sometimes forgetting what we are doing and where we are going but then the dawn comes when these dreams break through the surface of our lives into the light of day. I felt the piercing loss of a love I was not giving. The loss of a love I was not receiving. Experienced the absent life. My secret life. An unlived life.

On the surface though, I kept going, but I felt paralyzed. My muse turned to mute, the hand at my throat my own. Watching and listening. Moving through this world but stumbling in the dark inside, wondering about the why of experiencing this opposite, this negation. Suffering through the loss of what was never in my hands, never made into a dream. It isn’t faith I’ve lost, it’s still here, up here with me on the cliff. Faith is what made me make the climb. But I let go of what I never had. This is what I know now. I let go of what doesn’t exist. I had to embrace the absence to let it go. Joy does not escape its grieving.

………..

I was shocked to be back at Chapters again. Going back is something I don’t do. I don’t go back, to men or jobs. I liked it a lot when Eliza said, “It’s only going back if you’re looking back.” That helped. Previously I had impetuously quit last summer’s job and found myself with no income for quite a few weeks, hence the return to Chapters. But why was I repeating where I had already been? Then it was brought to my attention three times in one day why I was back in this bookstore. And then I got it. A synchronistic meeting in the bookstacks with a woman named Mange enlightened me. She told me that she had had it all twice. Twice. And lost it both times. And that now she knew why. Because she did not have gratitude. We both pulled amethysts from our pockets. In amazement we touched them gently together and raised them in a toast to each other. And aha! I knew why I was there again. For these encounters, for these teachers. For the gift of these people. “Until we find the lesson in the things that we perceive as obstacles, we will be forced to repeat them.” I began accepting the blessings embedded in the bleak.

But not just accepting them. I began embracing them with gratitude. As I walked towards the store I was making deals. I was saying my prayers. Teach me something, or let me be of service to someone, somehow. If I had to be there, then let’s get this thing done, so I could be finished and move on. My quota was two mindful, significant connections with people per shift, or I would jump off the Jacob Haldi Bridge. I started watching for the moment when my reason for working in a job that was too small for me was unmasked, and its greater purpose was revealed. Oh, how my prayers were answered! What bounty rushed towards my hungry heart.

………..

The universe talks to me. Talks to me in words and signs and I am listening. I was given a Pathfinder. Let me spell it out for you, a P-A-T-H-F-I-N-D-E-R. Sure the universe has a sense of humour. It was a dogmobile that friend Janice used to shuttle hyper and upset dogs back and forth from the Pound. It doesn’t smell so good and it’s covered in dog hair. And just to make it more interesting it’s a standard and my technological skills end at the toaster. So there are things to do. Challenges I must rise to. Getting down the road isn’t going to be easy.

Goethe said it, “Until one is committed…” John Burroughs’s “Leap, and the net will appear,” is a rallying cry to faith. I believe that job was done and enough lessons learned. When I told Jonah I quit, my son sent me a note of cheer, “Go Mom, go! Leap and Annette will appear!” I am laughing now. Four times this week already women by the unlikely name Annette have appeared in my day. Thank you crazy wonderful Jonah! You have triggered a plethora of Annettes. And thank you my angels for sending me reminders that I am getting closer to my path again, on higher ground.

………..

I have a friend. Her name is Dale and her moniker is The Lazy Wizard. When you conjure up a picture of Merlin think the opposite, of a gloriously feminine version of a wizard, this is Dale. Statuesque, long hair blowing about her face (even without a wind), and an invisible wand she waves to create fantastical creations. I told Dale that I was ready to take flight and she said, “You need wings. Come over and lay by the fire, we will put henna wings on your back.” Just the thought of that was enough for me. I savoured the deliciousness of wings to fortify my resolve. On Wednesday I walked over to survey my Pathfinder which sits in her driveway; waiting to be cleaned, waiting for me to learn how to drive it. I was accosted at the door by Jacy, daughter of Dale, like mother like daughter. Wielding her cake decorating tool filled with henna, filling the air with the smell of clove oil to darken the stain, I sat as Jacy drew a long stemmed rose up my spine. Attached to this on either side, two perfect wings unfold across my shoulder blades. I sat in a dream before the fire and didn’t leave until I had more; puzzle pieces. Two on one wrist. On the other arm three interlocking pieces and two pieces straying from the others.

They will fade, the pieces not the puzzle. The Pathfinder will become mine. I will claim it, drive it, travel new roads. The wings beneath my shirt are my secret strength. I cannot see them and will never know when they ever truly disappear. Annette is standing by, I jumped anyway (these wings have come in handy). I’m waiting for more signals from the control tower. Communications are coming faster now. Dr. Bill told me something that pilots say to one another…Runway behind and sky above are useless to a pilot.

…………

It’s late, and the telling of this story has taken me far into the night. This is the first day of another new beginning. I’ve come to an understanding. I can feel the integration of my light and dark, loss and love, visible and invisible. I accept what is and what isn’t; the perfection of my life. The rain is thrumming on the porch roof outside my bedroom door. I have brought in lilacs. I will smell them as I lay in the dark. I will take the beauty of Rumi’s words into my consciousness and take them down, down, down where I don’t need a net, where I already know how to fly.

MAJESTY AND HELPLESSNESS

Always check your inner state with the lords of your heart.
Copper does not know it’s copper, until it is changing into gold.
Your loving does not know its majesty,
until it knows its helplessness.

………..

Good Life
diane

Our lives take on such different shapes, each one from another. Years of seeming sameness, when one can look rooted to the very same spot, can suddenly transform, and then the changes come one after the other. Faster and faster.

I have been home from Texas for ten months now, and both Mary and I looked at the calendar on December 29th and wrote, “Wish you were here,” and, “Wish I was, too.” Only ten short months but I have been chafing. Feeling as if my life is moving so slowly, the chasm so wide between my struggle to live in the moment, whatever it brings, and the leaps I wish to take. And yet there is movement. Increments.

With great sadness I left the Attic and my friends in that wonderful house, and am now ensconced in what I call the Loft. For all my mourning it was time, and my new home with different friends is again very, very special. The thought of leaving the skylights had me in despair. But here I am, the Loft is high and bright, and I have not lost the sky. This house where I now live is on a rise, the wall I face from my bed is glass. There is the western sky, with only the bits and pieces of coloured rooftops below, and the bare branches of the trees in between. I will not miss the sky at all. I’ve been given more than a glimpse, it is all there. Choosing these changes has tested me. Wanting to embrace Lao Tzu’s, “When I let go of what I have, I receive what I need…” My friend Anna’s words resonate, have comforted me, “You are moving faster into your future.”

I am working again in a bookstore, so there is the calming and exhilarating company of the books that I love and the books that I will someday read. “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” Walking through the industrial area from the bus loop in Langley to the major intersection where Chapters is located, triggers something in me, something bleak, and sometimes holy.

Bridging two worlds is the little community shuttle bus that drives the nine kilometers from Fort Langley, winding along the country road through fields we go. Frank the bus driver plays the best blues. Oftentimes the fare counter is broken and we all ride for free. Leaving the sleepiness and pace of Fort Langley for Langley, my feet hit the pavement for my walk to the store, and the journey is both inner and outer. Langley is a car culture. A pedestrian walking the sketchy sidewalk on that particular road is a rarity. I see it in the drivers’ faces, what an oddity I am, how they can’t relate. They stare through impenetrable glass as they race past.

And November. November was my last month in the Attic. My books were boxed up, the decision made, my life in transition. New job, that adjustment, and the rain. Oh! how it rained. I have always admired the sucker punch of Edna O’Brien’s book title, “August Is A Wicked Month.” November was a gaping hole the deluge poured through, every day an endurance test. I thought, “November Hasn’t Scabbed Over, Yet.” November had its own shade of black.

I struggled with myself. Not liking me. A lack of gratitude is, in my experience, the worst character trait to be missing. I’m still grappling to understand how dark my inner landscape. I am not completely unaware; I know very well how much I have and how very rich I am. I sloshed along the road to work, struggled in gusting winds with my umbrella, drenched to my knees. Guarding myself against the walls of water thrown up by the cars that would not slow down in the puddles that accumulated along the roadway. Entering the brightly lit/in your face/you’re on public display, pre-Christmas retail world was like coming in from the cold and wet and then being hit with a bucket of ice water. No more solitude for me. But it was not the job nor the people in cars that I resented. I wasn’t sorry for myself, nor did I envy them. I understand my choices and where they have brought me. I came to this – that although my shoes were wet, I still had feet. My comparisons brought up not anger against the haves, but looking sideways, pain for the have nots. For all that I felt, there were those that felt far worse. November’s blackness was a lack of hope. Mine would return, but what about the longsuffering?

Every day I pass a store named nood: new objects of desire. Something happens to my soul when I see that. This transparent marketing of a way of life (because you can never ever get enough of what you don’t need) makes me very, very sad. I risk my precious life inches from hurtling vehicles unmindful of my vulnerability in the dark and rain. Walk my to and fro at a human pace, foot to ground. And all about me the Christmas hysteria sped from one store to another, shopping for Jesus. Shopping for Jesus. And that was November, and December, too. For Christ’s sake, indeed.

………..

The road to the ferry that is no more is a good one for me. Now that the ferry traffic is gone, it is deserted enough. Once I cross the Jacob Haldi Bridge my little town is behind me. The silence rises up from the earth, I can see it seeping up the trunks of the trees. The silence sifts down from the sky, flows through the bare branches. There are more moments of silence than the occasional car. It is still. There is the sound of me again, the sound of my own footfalls. Here I can walk safely, not distracted, nor looked upon.

Sometimes it is hard to reach such a short destination. I want to continue on, but I’m stopped by the channel. I do nothing but stand and wait until I really see the mountains, letting everything come into focus. Until the quietness wraps itself around me. I am standing on a small, government wharf. Down the ramp from it there are three fishing boats moored. One is called ADVISE. I wonder about the naming of that one. There is a cocker spaniel named Dusty that barks at me from the deck of the furthest boat. The shifting water, a few bobbing ducks, the land across the way, the faint but steady roar of the highway that runs along its shore. Then the mountains lift from the back, ice peaked, sometimes invisible in a low sky socked in by rain clouds. Leaning on the railing I look east up the channel, turn and look west. Getting my bearings, finding my place, gathering in all of me and rooting and resting my weight down through my body, through my shoes, onto the wooden dock. This moment is my home.

I met a man named Natch on my way back down the road. We stood in the wet day. He asked me how I was, and what little social pretension I have fell away. Why lie? “Sad,” I said. Looking out at the trees, rain falling on our faces, he said, apropos of nothing, “It takes a long time to get over things.” We stood quietly, standing in our knowledge, in our own histories. I told him the road to the ferry dock was good for me, and that I hoped I wasn’t bothering anyone, as I was walking through land of the Kwantlen Nation. He said no, it’s a good walk. Then he told me a story, and I knew that these stories come along for a reason.

He said two of his uncles had been killed on this road. In the fog when cars used to speed recklessly to the ferry. Just racing down that road to get in the lineup. Natch said he’d been fishing one day, he was on the far side of the channel in his boat when he got a feeling, and heard a scream. He got his boat back to this side as fast as he could. He heard the emergency vehicles, saw the lights. And when he got there the police were there and the ambulance, and his dead uncle. A kid sat in the back of the cop car and Natch got in and sat with him. The kid just kept shaking his head and saying that all he saw was the uncle on the windshield and his face looking in at him before he was thrown away.

I don’t know Natch, but I know he is a forgiving man. The way a person tells a story tells a lot about the storyteller. Natch was shaking his head now. His uncle dead, a horrible death in the fog on a cold road. An eighteen year old kid rocking back and forth in the back of a police car. At the funeral, Natch said, the moment they were laying his uncle in the ground, that kid in the jail cell, his heart stopped. He just died. Two deaths, Natch said. For nothing.

………..

In one pocket my purple amethyst heart, folded in the other a piece of paper with the words of Camus, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” These are the talismans that keep me strong and keep me walking forward. I pray for those whose seasons never change.

Good Life
diane

I wanted to see an armadillo before I left Texas. There are all kinds, from a giant up to five feet long, to a Pink Fairy the size of your hand. The postcards I bought with their picture, called them the Texas cockroach. That was my determination, to get up close to one of these strange armored beasts and have a real look. I tried. Even on the frigid nights, I’d put on my coat after supper and walk the neighbourhood. The stars throbbed their white brilliance in a black fathomless sky. On the road the occasional light from the widely spaced lamp posts. But I knew there was no sneaking up on these nocturnal creatures. I created an uproar wherever I went. No matter how quietly I walked the streets the dogs that resided in every house just wouldn’t let up. Barking frantically long after I’d picked up my pace and turned the next corner.

The girls at The Tuesday Night Supper Club were amused by my interest in the pests that should be run off, hosed out, or shot. Every week they’d say, “Seen one yet?” and I’d have to say, “Nope.” Then one day Lonnie, Mary and I were stuffing our faces with doughnuts, sitting around the counter in the kitchen of the Inn. I was explaining about a hard chew, trying to get my point across with my mouth full of doughnut. That if you ate a hard vegetable or fruit (like a carrot or pear) two hours after eating breakfast, then you wouldn’t get late afternoon sugar cravings. It was about 5:00 and Jeannie burst through the door.

“Did you see an armadillo yet?”
“Nope.”
“There’s one right now in the backyard of my church, rippin’ up the lawn.”

I ran across the street just in time to see a little leathery fatso scurry around the back of the building. There was a hole in the foundation and I saw him disappear. Okay! Location was now pinpointed. I went back for my tea and returned, settling down for the vigil. And so began my armadillo watch.

It didn’t look like a church. It was a small red brick house with rooms inside that I guess were used for administrative purposes. There was a concrete stoop at the back door. I’d sit and lean against the screen, all my supplies around me; my cup of tea, the camera, notebook and pen. I knew that armadillos have poor vision, and I wasn’t downwind of his home under the house.

The sky changed colour. The nights came on. I took pictures of the red gold slash through the bare winter branches of the trees in the yard. Risking the sound of the shutter for that beauty. It didn’t take patience. I was still, resting in the quiet. Then not one but two. There, working his way across the yard, was an armadillo, turfing up the dry yellowed grass with his sharp claws, and then using that snout of a nose. I heard the rustle of his mate beside me and up it came.

In 1974 I lived through a rainy Vancouver winter in a three story house with a bunch of friends, all of us displaced from Ontario. We left the arm up and played a Jerry Jeff Walker record full blast on the stereo. He’d wail, “I wanna’ go home with the armadillo, good country music from Amarillo and Abilene. The friendliest people and the purtiest women you ever seen.” We took turns rollicking my baby Jonah in our arms, round and round the room.

There are signs proclaiming that a particular city is a sister city to one in another country, although it feels like the whole world away. I walk these streets of Fort Langley and see the mounds of dirt that the moles leave behind, and smile at my parallel universes; Fort Langley in British Columbia and Archer City in Texas. The moles busy here in town being a nuisance to the gardeners and the lawn proud. The armadillos in Archer puncturing through the vegetation in their search for grubs, leaving behind a patchwork of shredded yards.

It was a very early airport run the morning we left. A bitterly cold north wind blew, hurling the chimes on the porch into a frenzy. We struggled to get the suitcases out the door of the Inn. The wind so strong it slammed the car doors shut over and over. Val had come down to stay with me and Mary for FIVE DAYS IN TEXAS, and she and I were travelling back to Canada together. I drove, the car buffeted along the wide open expanse on the road to Wichita Falls.

I saw it in my headlights, cutting diagonally across the road, heading straight for us. And I knew I wouldn’t drive us off the road to save it. All I could do was a sharp twist to the steering wheel and keep going. The back wheels of the car hit the heavy body of the possum, I can feel that sensation still. Leaving was hard enough, running over that possum was a sad thing. I know I love Mary, I know I love Val. I’m sorry about the possum. But if it’d been an armadillo, I don’t know what I woulda’ done.

Good Life
diane

For Colette in Texas, on her fourth birthday.
“You’re a big girl now!”
xo Mo