Day 6 - Squashed Cherries

I just like looking at the colours in this photo. In fact, I'd like to blow it up to about two feet across, and mount it on my wall in a dark wooden frame. This is one of my photo walk pictures from Monday. I was becoming discouraged, because except for the brilliant blue sky, the whole landscape was painted in multiple shades of brown and several dark and grimy hues of green. But then I walked down Main Street in Emo, and lo! there was the Rainy River in all its splendour, glistening and dancing, chiaroscuro daubed on the winding course of water. And lo! (I like that word) a lone tree, burdened with red berries, the remnants of an earlier bounty. The grass at its base strewn with fallen, bruised fruit – a panoply of autumnal magnificence. Possessing beauty even in their demise.


A sense of obligation, to my readers and even to myself, compels me to admit that I have been lazy these last two days. I have utterly neglected this blog - and I'm not even repentant. This admittance is less an apology, and more an unashamed proclamation of my recent lethargic state. Having said all that, well, truth be told, there hasn't been much to write about. (Except hands dyed henna-red, and I didn't want to go there, for reasons some of you may understand.)

I spent several hours yesterday in the offices of various health practitioners, was examined, and queried, and queried again. The diagnosis?

Now! Let my readers note - and I know there are a few of you by this time (I even know your names!) - note well, that, well, well. I'm not certain what it is you're supposed to be noting.

I don’t really feel like announcing my illness in cyberspace. So I won’t. Let it suffice to say that there is much hope for a complete recovery, and that my Scottish doctor is wonderful, and her accent rocks!

I have two days left till I’m back in the city – approximately 47 hours, at least 20 of which I will spend sleeping, leaving me with 27 hours of waking bliss. I think tonight I may go milk a goat!

Day Five - The Aftermath of Henna

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm????????????

Pondering

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Milking Goats - Day 3

Mom has a variety of very interesting friends. Today I walked along Main Street in Emo and dropped in at Carol Inkster's craft store. Her shelves are filled with handcrafted projects by artisans in the Rainy River District: pottery, jewellery, knitting, sewing, canned jellies, jams, and preserves.

Carol herself runs a hobby farm just two miles from my home. Her menagerie includes llamas, goats, miniature horses, rabbits, potbellied pigs, ducks, chickens, sheep, turkeys, and I'm sure others I'm not aware of. While running an almost entirely self-sustaining farm, Carol shears her llamas, goats, sheep and rabbits, washes, dyes, cards, spins, weaves and knits their wool, and sells the articles of clothing she creates. She also milks her goats, churns butter and cures cheese. Goats' milk is also a key ingredient in her unique line of skin care products and soaps. Today I purchased three bars of Willowtree soaps: Goat Milk 'N Cinnamon, Goat Milk 'N Flax, and Goat Milk 'N Oatmeal. At $3.00/bar, this soap is a bargain, as on average, one bar will last me for 6 months. (And I do wash!)

Goal for this week? Take Carol up on her offer to learn to milk a goat.

Day 2

 

When I brought myself downstairs this morning at 11:30, Mom and Dad were standing over the stovetop making breakfast together. Typical of my parents, Mom prepared the eggs (basted) and fried tomatoes, while Dad dealt with the pig.

 

Pork is an object of much contention within this household. Dad and my four brothers are ardent advocates of consuming the animal, while Mom and I hold that it is unhealthy and even harmful. To quote my mother: "As long as he cooks it himself, it's fine. I don't want to be party to his death - that's what I tell him."

I learned a while ago that pigs have only non-functional eccrine sweat glands. This explains why they roll in the mud - they have no other way to cool themselves. As omnivores, pigs eat nearly anything they set eyes on. Ever wonder why being called a pig is a terrible insult? Well, aside from the obvious connotation of greed, pigs will consume even their own excretions, rotting carcasses, and their offspring. Humans and other mammals sweat and exude toxins through eccrine sweat glands constantly. But pigs make use only of apocrine sweat glands – so although they smell, all the toxins from the trash they eat remains under their skin – in that fatty layer that we know as bacon and bacon rind, or cracklings.

In addition to the attractive picture painted above, pigs are hosts to a multitude of parasites and diseases to which humans are susceptible, including trichinosis and cysticercosis (roundworms and tapeworms). Yum, yum, yum!

While I don’t look at the first five books of the Old Testament as a code of law to be followed verbatim, I do think that God had reasons for many of the rules He gave. He said don’t eat pork – I think maybe He had a reason.

Sunday Afternoon

Our Scrabble Game

Pretty good I think, considering the diverse age and education range of the players! We used all the letters. Dan and I spent a good ten minutes pouring over the board after everyone else had left, searching for a home for his one left-over 'E'. Do you know what an 'en' is?
According to the New Webster’s Dictionary and Thesaurus, an 'en' is defined as follows:

en (en) n. (printing) a unit of measurement of type width, half an em

I thought that was funny: an en is half an em. Anyways . . .

At Home

I have a week to spend in the serenity and serendipity of nowhere - at least nowhere that you've heard of. I grew up in Emo, Ontario; population 1200 people, thousands of cows. Tradition has it that Emo was named . . . I think the story has something about a cow in it. I'll have to ask the town librarian to boost my memory sometime this week.

The word 'serendipity' was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole. Thank-you, Mr. Walpole. I'm feeling very serendipitous at present.

I have a whole week to spend relaxing in Emo. Today I spent hours typing away on my laptop and reading online - granted, dial-up Internet is a cross to bear. But, we endure our persecutions and they make us stronger??? I visited for three and a half hours with a friend who lives two miles away, in Emo itself, while attempting to reproduce my former success with pita bread. A miserable failure, the dough ended up as rather tasty, crusty dinner rolls instead. I'll have to try for pita bread again later this week. Later in the evening I listened to an entertaining philosophy lecture, and mused over some Pascal, then telephoned a friend and chatted for another 2 hours.

There are times when a sentence I read seems to resonate strangely within me, as if responding to an innate awareness of truth, and evokes a passionate concurrence. I think Pascal has explained this phenomenon aptly in the following:


"When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. And thus this benefit renders him pleasing to us, besides that such community of intellect as we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love."


To sum up: if Day 1 was any sort of prophetic precursor – I’m more then ready for this coming week.

A Curious Quote

"If somebody knows quite a lot about things, it takes you quite a while to find out whether they’re really stupid or not."
- JD Salinger
I came across this purely accidentally - I am not a fan of JD Salinger, although I've only read "The Catcher in the Rye" which I didn't like and can't believe they make students read in high school - but you know, I think it's very true.

The Return of the Native

I won't write about anarchy, or anarchism, anarchists, or anything anarchal, even though I had Moroccan Mint Tea at the Mondragon Bookstore & Coffee House tonight. I could also write about enlightening conversation, although since at the present the only person who reads this blog is the person I was conversing with, such a description is unnecessary.

However, I will state, reserving the right to rescind said statement, that I plan to write some sort of review, or critique, or analysis of 'The Return of the Native' by Thomas Hardy and post it here in the near future.

I finished this book last night, reading far too late into the night / early into the morning to be healthful. And found it intriguing.

And, as it's late tonight, and I work in the morning, that is all for now!

Flaming June

Just for you Andy!
I'd actually never heard of this painting before, but thank-you for drawing it to my attention. It's wonderful.
If anyone was wondering - yes, I do like orange.

Picture of the Day

Couldn't resist - I've wanted to post this since day one, a whole five days ago.

Character Analysis

I debated whether to post tonight - and decided I should. I fall victim to the slippery slope phenomenon (there you go Mr. K. - I used that term outside of the classroom!) far to easily; if I didn't post tonight, then tomorrow I probably wouldn't either, and the next day I would procrastinate and end up putting it off till Sunday, and before I knew it, I would have ended my blog with only four posts. Isn't it wonderful to know yourself, or at least to know about yourself? I suppose, yes, if knowing actually makes you take a different path than the one you would detrimentally and weakly default to.


Speaking of character – my brother Dan, next in age to me at 17, is in grade 12 this year, and currently enjoying ‘The Scarlet Letter’ by Nathaniel Hawthorne. If you knew Dan, you would understand why ‘enjoying’ is italicized above. His latest assignment was to write an essay documenting the character evolution of Roger Chillingworth. Of course his first recourse (that’s fatigue speaking, ‘course’, ‘recourse’) was his big sister, who comes in handy when English is the issue at hand.

So, having procrastinated a full six hours, I sat down at 9:30 and proceeded to come out with a rough outline for above mentioned character growth summary. I actually think this is a good assignment, although I probably would have hated it two years ago, when I was digesting Hawthorne’s masterpiece.

I read ‘The Scarlet Letter’ for my own entertainment when I was 14 or 15 (I’ll come back to this topic some other time), so when we got to it in Grade 12 English I was ahead of the game. But still, even after two or three readings, recalling it after a couple years of virtual brain sabbatical was tricky.

But I think I came up with some reasonable suggestions – and thoroughly enjoyed myself in the process – because after all, not only was I getting back to literary criticism and analysis, but I was telling my little brother what to do!

Now, before I get too transparent, and start revealing the true degree of my controlling nature or ranting on why Dan had to come to me to figure out this English assignment and why hasn’t the twelve years of the public school system he’s already withstood prepared him to write a character evaluation – to quote C.S. Lewis in ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’, “Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools?” – I think I’d better sign off.

Hamlet even on Halloween!

To quote Shakespeare, ‘Like Niobe, all tears’ I gazed out my window this last morning of October. Flurrying more than drifting, a host of (oh, here's a good one!) Santa's dandruff? wafted to the muddy pavement. Inwardly cringing at the so apt reminder of encroaching winter, I headed off to the café to face Tony’s good natured gibing.

Despite myself, I couldn’t help but notice the air of serenity that the frosty flakes : ) lent to my otherwise edgy Central Park vista. Note: freshly fallen snow obscures beer bottles, yellowed plastic and broken glass – at least until it melts! And the rebellious glimmer of excitement that sprang up unbidden was hard to suppress. (Don’t tell Tony!) I tell myself that the first snowfall only excites me because it means one less snowfall until the May long weekend . . .


Radical digression from the current topic supervenes:

I have this wonderful friend who is old enough to be my mother. Now that I think of it, a whole darn lot of my friends here in Winnipeg have taken on quasi parental roles, and not least of all because of their age! This one woman in particular has played a large role in my life recently; I will grant her anonymity because I can’t foresee which of my acquaintances may stumble across this blog, and name her Ruth.

Ruth spent many years living homeless on the streets of Winnipeg before the Lord reached out and touched her heart. Today she runs a ministry in the North End; seeking to give back to God what he has given to her. This evening I accompanied her to Wal-Mart, after which she drove me home by way of her old haunts, through the slums of the North End, pointing out boarded-up crack houses, child prostitutes, and other ministries like her own – flickering but persistent lights in a gloomy, oppressive haven for the enemy.

It was the women I saw that grabbed and yanked, not pulled, at my heartstrings. Ruth says the girls can be as young as ten. At ten I was writing poetry and building dams in our creek with my brothers. I tend to filter everything I see through my own experiences, to hold up hard realities alongside my sheltered life. I’m sure this is natural, and not solely my experience, although I wonder at its efficacy. Does comparing another’s life to mine distance that individual from me? Or does the stark contrast bring the painful truths that much closer to home?

Of one thing I’m certain. It will take much to erase the haunted eyes of the black-haired teen selling herself on Halloween from my memory.

. . . winter . . .

Winter is beginning to howl through the streets here in the wind scoured metropolis of Winnipeg, Manitoba. I walked to work today under a slate gray sky and skeletal branches reaching up toward the heavy, snow-laden (God forbid!) clouds. The remains of summer's happy foliage lie sodden and decomposing in the gutters - scattered with rejected cigarette butts and candy bar wrappers. The grass is crisping, losing its green health and taking on the sickly hue of light-starved vegetation, the hapless victim of nighttime's frost.

I work at a unique café in Winnipeg's West End. Founded by the Christian activist Harry Lehotsky, the Ellice Café is a non-profit community development initiative run by New Life Ministries. Most of us staff live downtown Winnipeg or in the West End, and though we come from staggeringly diverse backgrounds, we have a lot in common.

Winter though, is an issue that divides us into two camps. I don't hate winter; really, I don't. I just don't see the point of it. Why? Why, when one could be bathing in the sun, hiking through the Whiteshell, slapping mosquitoes, slathering on sunscreen while canoeing some winding river, rollerblading or biking down a leafy, oak-canopied street . . . why snow?

Scarcely a day passes without Tony, burger boy extraordinaire (I don't get that nickname - why burger boy?) and me debating the pros and cons of the snow-blanketed season that is winter. He taunts me with foreboding forecasts, and eagerly glances out the tall windows at the low hanging, heavy clouds. Winter is marching relentlessly down from the arctic wastes - and I wait for it despondently, sinking further under my feather tick and sipping my piping hot chicken soup and crackers - Wheat Thins of course!

June, I'm waiting!

Fluting

I pulled my flute out today - the second time in months. It's funny how an instrument sticks with one; dexterity and nimbleness fades away - but the head knowledge is all there. If only I could transmit that 'know how' to my fingers, but skill is something that only practice will increase. Interesting, isn't it: if the smartest individual existing doesn't exercise his mind, then he may as well not have one. Skills, abilities, talents - they are only as profitable is the time and energy we put into them. Indeed, they don't revert to dormancy with under use, but degenerate. Like my writing . . .

merely scratching

This is my first blog of what I hope will be a long series of postings. As I am utterly unfamiliar with the confusing world of bloggging, I will be scratching away at these posts for quite awhile until I get the concept cleared up in my head.

I like the anonymity of blogging; anyone can read what I write, but they can't criticize my day-to- day existence. I suppose that's not the best reason for blogging, but at present it's mine - freedom of expression on my part, and feedback from readers, but not condemnation, at least none that can reach through my browser window and shake my world.

So long for now.