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Is That Thanksgiving Knocking?

~ pebblesandclay ~ Leave a comment

Thanksgiving in Canada is always in the beginning of October and it always catches me by surprise. Usually the leaves reaching their peak colour are my visual cue, but this year for some reason, maybe the wet summer and late in the season hot/dry spell, the leaves are mostly still greenish with shades of brown and red spattered in. All this to say, I’m not ready, as usual.

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The interesting thing about living in Québec is that Thanksgiving is not really a holiday that the Québécois celebrate. I remember teaching English as a second language one year at this time and, by way of making conversation, I asked my adult students how they were planning on celebrating the holiday. One of them said they were going to wash their windows and another that they would be getting their firewood in. “But…what will you be eating?” I persisted.

“The usual,” was my answer. They even looked a  little quizzical that I would be asking such a question. I was a bit dumbfounded. I have been living in this province many, many years and I had no idea my neighbours weren’t celebrating in the same ways we were.

I guess it’s time to muster the Thanksgiving spirit and do a little decorating, bake a pie, buy a turkey…

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I thought I would start by buying a pumpkin since we don’t grow them ourselves. I’m really not sure about these green, warty ones. I chose the one in the foreground with the stem. I really like that classic pumpkin look. While I was here at the wholesalers, I also picked up a few apples in case I decide to make a head start on the pie.

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I bought honey crisp for eating and a few cortlands to make the pie. I don’t eat apples at any other time of the year  because I only like them when they are at  their ripest best.

Now for the turkey. Time to call Farm to Table and hope I’m not too late.

Or  I could just be like my Québécoise friend and wash my windows instead.

Seven Lessons In Seven Days

~ pebblesandclay ~ Leave a comment

I wrote a few months back about seven things I learned in seven days to help me make sense of a hard week I had experienced. It was cathartic and fun, and I thought about revisiting it from time to time. So here it is, the second instalment of Seven In Seven.

Seven Things I learned In Seven Days

  1. October is much different than September here in southern Canada. All signs point northward. (The Big Dipper hangs low in the northwestern sky on our after dinner walks that now take place in the dark, the jet stream shifts, pulling cold arctic air down into our area, and north winds make me walk faster and pull my coat closer.)IMG_0396        See where it says shots of cold air. That’s us.
  2. I have a lot of expectations. I expect a lot of myself and others, but there is more. I also have expectations of how things should unfold, how meals should taste, how work should proceed. It is unrealistic and sets me up for disappointment. I have decided to expect less and love more. (I have been practicing for about a week now and it’s working. The present moment is usually a very fine and adequate place, if we allow ourselves to be there.)
  3. It’s a good idea to have working radar if you’re sailing in the fog near a ferry lane.IMG_0387
  4. On a recent visit to Martha’s Vineyard I discovered wampum. Wampum are beads made by the Wampanoag (Eastern Band Cherokee) of Aquinnah from the quahog, a hard shelled, purple and white clam. The Wampanoag fashion these beads into bracelets and earrings and belts. I am still thinking about my friend’s bracelet that just spoke of the sea to me.                        images
  5. Prince Harry is a very good motivational speaker. I just watched his closing speech for the Invictus Games. We can all do amazing things…and should.
  6. Yes, there is such a thing as a fogbow. IMG_3536
  7. I feel numb (Las Vegas). I feel badly about my numbness, but I don’t know how to respond anymore. These events just seem inevitable given the refusal to investigate these tragedies as rigorously as we do plane crashes or terrorist attacks and to take measures to prevent them from happening again. My heart breaks for all those families who will never be the same because on a warm night in October some members decided to go and enjoy an outdoor country music concert.

Mini Breaks and Short Escapes

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We all live busy lives and I have come to  believe that taking a mini break is some of  the best self care we can offer ourselves.  We live in the mountains,  so for us an escape to big water seems to be what we crave. We are lucky enough to live near a large lake and are only a five hour drive to the coast. These are our “go to” places when we are in escape mode.

We are currently visiting friends in Martha’s Vineyard.  Whenever a short escape involves a ferry ride, I know I’m onto a really good thing. Leaving the mainland is such a symbolic way of letting go.

With the mind hushed there is so much more space to experience sounds and smells and changing lights. We visited a beach here called Lucy Vincent on our first morning.

IMG_0379The dramatic rock formations, ethereal in the early morning.

We try not to have too much of an agenda when we are away. For us, it’s not about doing or seeing but more about being.

Our sail in the fog the next day certainly took away most of our visual references.

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It became foggier and foggier as we left the mooring and entered the big water. It was as if the sun had burnt a hole in the fog just above us to let the light in, but all else was veiled.

IMG_1265Ghost ship in the fog.

We moved silently in nature’s spotlight. Without the usual visual cues, sounds became so much more intense…and important: foghorns and the bells on the buoys and engine rumbles in the distance were our only points of reference. (For all of you sailors who might be worried, yes, we did have radar.)

Short escapes are all about these sensory experiences that take us “away’ however briefly.  It reminds me of the children’s story Frederick by Leo Lionni. While all the other mice are busy gathering food for the winter, Frederick is gathering colours and words because the winters are grey and long.

We might not have been furthering our winter preparations  these last few days, but we have been filling with colours and words. We will bring these out on some cold winter day to give us nourishment of a different kind.

 

 

 

Release…Mexico Bound!

~ pebblesandclay ~ 2 Comments

IMG_0325It took a few hours for her to show some interest in leaving the glass bowl that had been her home for the last month. Fanning her wings and inching her way to the top of the rim were the first signs.

I took her to the outside deck. It was the perfect fall day for the release, warm and calm.

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IMG_0339.JPGAnd…she made a surprise landing before her final departure.

Looking back on the last month, there were a few highlights. Finding the caterpillar was definitely an exciting day. The milkweed is more abundant here than in previous years, but it still required looking at many, many plants before I finally found her.

IMG_0356.JPGThe second experience that took me a bit by surprise was my emotional reaction when she finally encased herself in the pupa. One day she was in her caterpillar body and then she was gone. It felt like a loss, and I wasn’t prepared for not seeing her anymore in the same ways.

I felt such joy when she finally emerged, especially when she  fanned her wings and I could see her in her full beauty. But I need to say something here about joy. Brené Brown, the social scientist who presently has a book on the New York Times bestseller list, talks about joy being the most vulnerable emotion we experience. “We’re afraid,” she writes, “that if we allow ourselves to feel it, we’ll get blindsided by disaster or disappointment. That’s why,” she continues, “that in moments of real joy, many of us dress rehearse tragedy.” This helps to explain why, as I saw her sitting on the pine branch, I imagined a giant bird, maybe a heron, swooping down and grabbing her. I also knew, however, that the antidote to this kind of thinking is gratitude, and the butterfly and I had lots to be grateful for. She brought me, and by extension you, many moments of wonder as this whole process unfolded. It also turns out that if I hadn’t found her and moved her inside she would have died when the farmer harrowed the field where she was living. There were many moments of grace, capped off by her release.

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Safe travels, little one!

It’s a Girl!

~ pebblesandclay ~ 4 Comments

The pupa had been changing the last few days. It was turning from its original  chartreuse to this grey green. If you look closely,  you can begin to see the wings forming inside.

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A day later it looked like this. The body is showing clearly now through the chrysalis which has become transparent.

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I knew it wouldn’t be long.  I came home two hours later to this.

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When monarchs hatch the body is quite huge, filled with a liquid that gets pumped into the wings. I missed this part. It rested quietly for a few hours and then…

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There she is finally stretching out her wings. She took my breath away!  I wasn’t expecting the intense, saturated colours of her wings or the joy that bubbled up from inside as I watched her. It wasn’t until she fanned her wings that I knew she was a girl. (Male monarchs have two distinctive black dots on the lower corners of the wings.)

Her release came on this same beautiful, September day but that part deserves a story of its own. I have a video to edit and some words to find that wrap up this whole adventure in raising a monarch. Stay tuned.

 

 

The Well

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I came across this old well in the woods the other day.  I stopped and looked at it for a long time, mesmerized  by the dark water and the green mosses that have made their home along its rim. Our relationship with water is so primal.

This spring provided the water to a cabin that used to be on the land next door sixty years ago.  It is not that easy to get to this well, so it must have taken some searching and ingenuity. For starters, they had to get the water from here across a mountain brook that is often just a trickle but can also be impassable at times. Finding a good water source dictated where you could live and build your home here in the country and was always the first order of business.

Water….finding it, keeping it clean, preserving it, has always been serious business.  But it  has also inspired a rich history of story telling.

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Wells have inspired stories from the beginning of time. Many fairy tales use their dark depths to bring something of importance to the surface. From the Frog Prince:

In olden times, when wishing still did some good, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, who, indeed, has seen so much, marveled every time it shone upon her face. In the vicinity of the king’s castle there was a large, dark forest, and in this forest, beneath an old linden tree, there was a well.

Don’t you just love the line, “In olden times when wishing still did some good…?”

In many fairy tales something that at first seems dark and sinister emerges from the well. In the above case, an ugly frog who offers to help the princess – but, of course, wants something in return.

One theory for wells always housing fearful beings in fairy tales is that parents in times gone by conjured up these dark forces living in wells to scare their children in order to keep them far away from the very real dangers that wells presented.

Wells were also revered. They were sought out for contemplation and for making wishes. (I am thinking that wishes in days gone by were more like prayers.) The idea that a wish could be granted came from the notion that water was the home of deities or had been placed there as a gift from the gods.  And in many areas of the world where water is scarce or unclean it must have truly felt like a gift from the gods to come upon a well.

Maybe most importantly, wells  were community gathering places. It was here that life unfolded, and stories were told, and life became meaningful because of the sharing.

My question is, how do we revive the tradition of the well as gathering place?  In this time in the world when there is so much divisiveness it seems to me we could all use a well in our communities to come together and share what we have in common instead of what divides.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conkers, Brights, Shiners, Cheggies, Obblyonkers,Cheeses

~ pebblesandclay ~ 2 Comments

 

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Gawd, the Brits have the best words for EVERYTHING! In the American midwest they call them buckeyes. Not to be outdone by the Brits, they have even come up with a peanut butter and chocolate candy made to look like the nut – also called a buckeye. In this part of the world we just call them chestnuts or, if we’re being really fancy, horse chestnuts.

There’s something about chestnuts that take me back to a simpler time – not necessarily a better time, but simpler. Sometimes I wonder if these times were simpler just because I was a child. My parents might have a very different story to tell.

IMG_0285Drilling holes in chestnuts to make necklaces or to play conkers is stored in my memory bank in the same file as wild bicycle chases playing  “cops and robbers” and games of hide-and-seek lasting long after dark with the neighbourhood kids.

These games seemed to have met the same fate as the chestnut trees in North America. At one point, 25% of the forest here in the Appalachian range was comprised of chestnut trees.  In the early 1900’s a chestnut blight ravaged the forests and now there are very few old specimens left.

I have had two chestnut trees play a role in my life. One was in my hometown watched over guarded by an old lady called Mrs. Moody. (I couldn’t make up a better name if I tried.) The other is a lone surviving tree by an old foundation up the road from where I live now.

I feel the same way about the chestnuts as I do the bats that also got decimated by a fungus. There are now only two bats on our road which swoop over our heads on evening walks when in my childhood the air was full of them.

I’m wondering if I’m hanging  onto these memories because it’s a good thing to wish for survival of a species or if it’s just hard to say goodbye to what once was.

 

The Crickets Sing a Song of Sadness and Change

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“The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year – the days when summer is changing into autumn – the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.”  (From Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White)

The crickets I captured today on video seem to have an urgent message for you.

 

I think they may be telling you to  put down whatever you’re doing and enjoy these last days of summer.

 

 

Ruthie’s Clothesline

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My friend, Ruthie, takes pictures of her clothesline and it says as much about her as any selfie could. From this picture, you might have surmised that Ruthie is a colourful person, living a fairly relaxed lifestyle in the country. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

I began being curious about clothes and how they can tell our stories better than any photograph after reading an article in  The Book of Life called The Serious Business of Clothes. The article ended with this line, “Our wardrobes contain some of our most carefully written lines of autobiography.” After reading this, I decided to write my autobiography around different clothes I wore throughout the years.

I began my autobiography  with the first article of clothing that I remembered being truly excited about. Here is my recollection:

“I can still see them resting in the cardboard box with the cellophane lid. It couldn’t have been a better gift if the prince himself had delivered them. My six year old hands trembled as I carefully lifted the first one from its tissue paper nest. The sunlight shone on the sparkles in the clear plastic and they whirled and danced inside. Magic.

Tentatively, I slipped both feet into the glass slippers and inched my toes under the white elastic band with the pink and chartreuse flower embroidery. I took my first hesitant steps trying to adjust to the pressure under my arch that supported the kitten heels. There was something about those heels that caused me to hold my head a little higher and move with a grace I hadn’t known before. There was power in those shoes.”

I grew up in a very masculine household with an energetic father and two brothers. My mother was British and wore “sensible” shoes. This was one of my first remembered experiences of what it felt like to be a girly girl – a princess, if you will. And I loved it!

In the spirit of Ruthie’s clothesline as self portrait, I decided to take a self portrait of my own. Since I began my autobiography with a story of shoes, I thought it fitting that my updated self portrait  be of shoes. I tried a few combinations, as you can see.

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It’s not as easy to take a self portrait as you may think. I’m liking the relaxed look of Ruthie’s clothesline  more and more after my experiments this afternoon.  My self portrait might be considered interesting, but relaxed, no. And that just about says it all.

 

*The Book of Life is the “brain” of the School of Life co-founded by modern day philosopher Alain de Botton. It is a gathering of the best ideas around wisdom and emotional intelligence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metamorphosis

~ pebblesandclay ~ 1 Comment

One day he is there in his caterpillar body hanging from the lip of the glass jar that has been his home for the last two weeks, and then he is not. It’s a death of sorts and has me feeling mournful for his loss this morning.

IMG_0092You can see him attached and suspended in the J position.

He had been acting differently for about three days. He stopped eating and moved to the top of his glass jar. He stayed in a horizontal position there for a day or two until he suspended himself yesterday.

This is the scene this morning.

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Lack of appetite and failure to move are maybe the first signs a death/transformation are imminent for caterpillars…. and for humans too. Can’t help but think of the similarities. I am wondering if in the last three days he had been sensing that some big change was about to happen. Certainly his body was giving him signals.

I find myself trying to imagine the organic shiftings that are happening within the chrysalis at this moment: cells rearranging themselves, tissues dissolving and reforming. On the outside all looks quiet. He has pulled himself in and shut out the world. His home for the next two weeks this beautiful yellow/green orb with gold dots sprinkled around the top.

This is the universal story of  death/rebirth coming to you from a glass jar on a screen porch. We are now in that quiet place, removed from the world, encased in a protective shell, waiting on the work of  forces far greater than anything we could ever dream possible.  It’s a miracle really.