Like a Six Word Bio, the message stared back at Kay from the lid of the packing box

B. Penny

S.S. Numidian

Winnipeg Via Portland, M.E.

Written in hand painted letters across the planks of the big travel box, this message had become faded with age, obscured by the dust of time. It was nineteen hundred, the turn of the last century, when Kay’s grandmother at the age of 28 braved the ocean voyage from Liverpool to Portland and thence to Winnipeg to meet Kay’s grandfather, a friend since her teenage years on the Estate of Miss Bordillon. Grandfather was the son of the gameskeeper. Bessie was a maid and then, as years went by, Miss Bordillon’s lady’s companion.

William left home at 17 to make his fortune and he must have done that very well because he traveled frequently back and forth to England - frequently for those days. On one of those trips, now an established and successful British subject living in Canada, he proposed to Bessie and she agreed to follow him to the pioneering city, that Canadian hub of the railway network of North America, to Winnipeg, plunk in the middle of the vast, flat prairie.

And here Kay was today, happily, diligently, scrubbing that box that she had jealously envied before her Mother died and which she gleefully had inherited when the estate was resolved.

The box had moved from each house that her Mother lived in. It stayed in the basement, filled with curtains and other linens and precious clothing that Mother had been unable to part with. Her mother’s wedding dress was in there and a grand, very flat black hat from the ‘Fifties designed in Paris. It looked like Audrey Hepburn’s hat from Breakfast at Tiffanys.

On Monday, Kay had been laying a chunk of carpet in the basement. In order to bring the carpet out to the lawn to cut it to size, she had to move the box; so she pulled it from its temporary storage place, outside, sheltered from the weather, under the porch overhang, thanking the muscle gods for her gym work-out. The darned thing weighed forty pounds at least.

When Kay moved to the house a twelve months previously, there was no room for the box. The sheer amount of goods - her mothers and her own - had priority stored in the basement. The box would likely survive the winter. Those boxes were still there encumbering the passages, stacked to the ceiling. Some of the goods were waiting for the box to come in. There were days when Kay felt the chicken and egg syndrome was mocking her. The Catch 22 principle. She couldn’t put stuff away without the box. She couldn’t bring the box in until stuff was put away. She sighed deeply in exasperation.

And now she had recuperated carpet from a friend who was laying hardwood flooring.

“Perhaps I should be installing hardwood flooring,”: Kay ruminated; but she had carpet and it had been free. Now carpet laying was the first step to sorting out the basement into show room, art storage and studio. And now the box was in Kay’s way.

Kay hauled the heavy crate up the three cement stairs to the sidewalk area and left it in the hot sun to allow it to dry thoroughly and to air it out.

That was Monday, and in her inimitable red hen state of mind, the nine by twelve carpet was installed with great amounts of heaving and dragging, lifting of unpacked moving boxes from one place to another. Tuesday Kay felt like she’d packed seven days into Monday, and so she rested. She was, after all, a senior.

Wednesday, taking advantage of the weather, Kay got back out and spent a full day in the garden - the weather was fantastic, perhaps a touch too hot and bright, but beautiful. Midway through gardening efforts, Kay noticed that water was dripping on the box.

“Now how could that be?,” she pondered aloud. “We’ve had almost 10 days without rain. Each has been hotter than the next. Everything is sere and dying if not fed by piped in water, but this box, sitting under the eaves is getting great water drops on it.”

The sky was blue overhead. Not a cloud. There was not a bird in view. She drew the box away from the eaves and still the water spots mysteriously grew.

Now thoroughly perplexed, Kay gingerly stuck her finger in the clear wet substance and sniffed it. It wasn’t oily but it was sticky. In seconds, it filmed up on her finger tip, slightly grey, slightly brown, translucent. She stuck her finger in again, and once again. No smell at all. Just that sticky, filmy residue.

Kay returned to her garden patch, dug it free of iris root bit by bit. Time passed. The final root mass was lifted when, all of a sudden, an idea arose in her mind. It was wax! The heat of the midday sun had melted it!

Now it was Friday, and Kay, seeing the clouds finally gather high above, decided that this was the day to clean up her grandmother’s the travel box. It was the first thing to be put in on the new carpet. Then it would have a new generation of contents. It would be a great container for her medium sized paintings. If anyone came to see them, they could easily flip through them without them sliding down in an untidy heap at their feet.

Kay drew a hot pail of soapy water from the kitchen sink, took a scrubbing sponge and a terry cloth rag out to the back yard and began to wash down the trunk. The soapy rag pulled away an ugly layer of fine dirt.

“How much of this am I willing to take off?” she said, talking to herself as she worked. “… Can’t ruin the patina. ….Want to preserve the historical feel of it … must protect the lettering … don’t want to make it look brand new”, and she scrubbed all the while. The sponge came away with a fine layer of dark brown dirt which she rinse out with the garden hose. “No use putting that thick film of dirt into the washing water.” she thought.

Should she take away the careless blobs of enamel paint, some white, some vermillion red, some in forest green that decorated the lid, evidence of the box’s reincarnation as a surface to hold things in father’s workshop? There were paint can rims of oil merging into the brown stain of the wood. It all seemed part of its history, its character, its life. Kay considered, then left them. Had she removed them, perhaps there would have been raw new spots of damaged wood like open wounds in an ancient skin. It wasn’t worth the risk.

She liked to think that her Great-grandfather had made the trunk for her grandmother. He was both a carpenter and a cabinet maker, she’d been told. It somehow made the trunk that more important; that more valuable. An antique dealer wouldn’t have given her peanuts for it. It might have fetched a twenty dollar bill at the Salvation Army. But for Kay, it had an intrinsic value; a family historical value; and it was going to be useful.

The one by four planks had been made before electricity had been used in mills. The outer sides were planed smooth and fitted perfectly together, but on the inside, the saw marks could seen. These were hand made planks! The wood on the inside was clean and fresh looking as the day it had been constructed. A length of wood had been split in half and then again to form four corner braces. These had been rounded off, or rather, the inner side had three facets to it - a nice finishing touch on a utilitarian travel box.

On each end of the box, a sturdy handle was affixed with rough iron screws. The handle had been hand-forged from a thick rod of iron that would bear a man’s muscled hand, the kind of hand that was used to lading heavy crates of merchandise, bales and vast amounts of traveler’s trunks.

Now, as Kay scrubbed along the lid where it joined the box, she saw that the hinges had been hand forged as well. She tipped the box forward to inspect the underside of the box. How many spiders had taken up residence, installed their cottony nests of eggs? But there were none. Despite the rainy torrents of the winter, the box had fared well. It’s short feet had kept it above the standing water level. It was clean. It was dry. It was mold free.  But the sides, she could see now, more exposed to light, still had a layer of grime on the lower two planks as if the crate had suffered it’s various crossings, sitting out in the elements waiting for the carrier to take it on it’s way home, mud splattering, drying, ingrained on the lower boards.

Scrub, rinse. Scrub, rinse, Scrub rinse. It was no easy job after all; but after a good hour of cleaning, inspecting, scrubbing, rinsing, she was done. Kay opened the lid to check the state of it’s innards.

Yellowed papers lined the bottom. The Vancouver Sun. 1978. It had been thirty years since Mother had cleaned out the trunk, refreshed its lining papers, repacked the trunk and closed it for posterity. Kay had uncovered a time capsule - The comics page had Peanuts, The Family Circus, Shoe, Fred Bassett, Broom Hilda, Doonesbury and Rex Morgan, M.D., still going strong today, though Love is, Kerry Drake, Casey and Tumbleweeds seem to disappeared into the ether.

Kay’s horoscope predicted: Work seems pleasant. Concentration level good, energy level optimal. Tackle complex projects.

The Career Option page had advertisements checked for Branch Manager/Mortgage Officer, starred with three blue stars against the title “Economist for the Province of British Columbia”. and a long blue pen mark highlighted the qualifications for a Supervisor, Pricing and Business Analysis for B C Buildings Corp in the adjacent advertisement.

That must have been Otto, Kay reflected. He would have been thirty, just home from his year of world travel, jobless and living with Mom and Dad.

A headline stated ” Return to synagogues, N.Y. rabbi urges Jews.” In another headline, “Man charged with killing wife, says he never lived with her”. It went on to say:

• A man charged with the first degree murder of his wife claimed in assize court Friday that he never lived with her. …. when asked why he married her, Mr. C replied “I don’t know.”

That made Kay laugh though it was tragic, really.

Entertainment, You, The Courts, Sports, Careers. All these are here, but the events of the day were missing. But perhaps these snippets were enough to give a flavor. As much as things change, they stayed the same.

“Enough!” she chided herself. “What would Mrs. Stepford say” Mrs. Stepford, her next door neighbour was her Devil’s Advocate.” Why do you care? What does it all mean? Why is it important?” she would say.  Mrs. S was a great one for throwing things out, living simply and directly, not getting distracted. She chafed and complained regularly about Kay’s incessant wool-gathering.

It had been an active hour of cleaning. Now it was time for tea. Kay went in and prepared a cup then sat communicating with her computer. Firefox…Google… S.S. Numidian she typed in. There were 17,100 responses that popped up in a nano-second. Kay selected StockImages

http://www.photographersdirect.com/stockimages/s/ss_numidia.asp

and found beautiful undersea photos with lovely tropical fish darting between the rotting framework of the vessel and its subsequent reef full of swaying Anenomes and coral in a cyan blue sea. Had the S.S. Numidian sunk? Grandmother’s ship? And navigating away from the photos, Kay explored another post or two:

Yes it had sunk. Steve Smith, writing on

http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/discus/messages/6937/38118.html?1032335203

had answered another seeker of historical trivia about her family and said:

• The S. S. Numidian was built in 1891 by D. & W. Henderson & Co., Glasgow, Scotland. Tonnage: 4,836. Dimensions: 400′ x 45′. Single-screw, 13 1/2 knots. Triple expansion engines. Two masts and one funnel. Steel hull. Passengers: 100 first, 80 second, 1,000 third.Maiden voyage: Liverpool-Quebec-Montreal, August 20, 1891.Made her final voyage to Boston in 1914. In the first World War she was filled with cement and sunk, so as to block a channel against submarines. Sister ship: Mongolian.

Kay felt nostalgic and sad. It was the way of all things. Nothing lasted forever. People came and went. Lived and died. Ships were built and sailed, became obsolete and were sunk. Wars came. People had jobs, had no jobs, found jobs, built purposeful lives, got old. But the box was still here; and Kay was going to give it a new incarnation.

She finished her hot cup of tea, rose and went to tackle the next move. Just how was she going to get that box into the basement?

Bio 1. Artist searching unusual beauty, looking, recording.

Suburbanlife tagged me with the Six word bio project. Of course, she didn’t explain although it seemed relatively simple: choose six words to describe yourself. Nonetheless, not liking to get things wrong, I Googled these three words to see what I could find. Very interesting….

Some wily fox, instead of writing about himself, declared he had found a loophole. It said Bio not Autobio. He proceeded to post a mystery bio . From his cryptic bio, we were invited to guess which famous person it referred to.

Both exercises Bio and Autobio (sounds like names you’d chose for twins of the small furry pet variety, doesn’t it?) are rather interesting.

I stumbled over another rule that hedges the simplicity of the exercise. It was that you could take three runs at it. However, without more prolonged thought, I’ll decline another six word description of myself

The next task is to tag five other people to provide Six word bios. So here are five of my favourite bloggers for you to check in on and see if they are interested in engaging in a response.

These five people are bloggers have enriched me with their thoughts and I invite you to explore their writings, photography and/or art through their web logs. There are many many good bloggers out there Care to share your faves?

• http:/www.forestrat.wordpress.com - wander through the woods with him, appreciating running water and the quiet beauty of nature
• http:/www.marshaobrien. wordpress.com - great photography and great advice for living to the full
• http:/www. bluedragonfly.wordpress.com - sensitive thoughtful writing
• http:/fencer.wordrpess.com - super writer, esoteric subjects (for me at least)
• http:/blinkandbreath.wordpress.com - sensitive, thoughtful, living an artist’s life…

There are many many good bloggers out there. For those of you whom I’ve tagged, would you care to share your faves?

K

Kay lay steeping her sore muscles, soaking in the hot water that surrounded her. She leaned her back against the sloping tub side, a green terry face cloth the only thing between her wet skin and the hard almond colored enamel.

“It feels so good,” she said aloud, although no one was around to hear her but herself. The pleasure of the heat caressing her skin pleased her no end. She contemplated a nice relaxing bath snooze and let herself sink into that half-consciousness. As long as the water stayed hot, she would stay in, she promised herself. It was her reward.

It was her reward not only for a day of digging out a long neglected flower bed but also for her successful navigation through three weeks of preparation for the Art Fair, two weeks of house guests and a week away at the Music Festival. Six weeks! Six long weeks she had been driven to do things that had to be done. Now she had time to luxuriate. She had time to contemplate. She had time to listen to the silence. Everyone was gone.

Kay dismissed the thought of the visitors. She preferred to luxuriate in thoughts of her day digging up the weed encrusted soil, running her fingers through the silty silkiness, tearing the clumps of grass or buttercup apart to release the precious earth from between the roots, and sifting the soil to remove stones and rogue roots that, if left to their own devices would simply procreate a whole new vigorous weed-plant. The buttercup was the worst. Just a tiny quarter inch of fresh root could regenerate a new plant. It was a vital, eager and aggressive reproducer.

As Kay reminisced her day in the garden, she entwined her thoughts of it with the papers she had stumbled across only the night before. Kay had been trying to reduce the mass of family records still encumbering the room she used as an office. She had selected a storage box with her father’s professional papers, thinking that she might be quite successful in throwing them out, reducing volume. But it hadn’t been so.

True, there were files that were beyond her understanding, rich with scientific detail, complete with explanatory drawings. The drawings were made in an extremely precise manner, in her father’s hand, illustrating his hypotheses for his thesis in Engineering. Although she couldn’t understand them, she couldn’t simply toss something that had been hand drawn by him. Somehow, it kept him close, though he had died almost twenty-five years before.

Amongst the files was one that held horticultural notes written in a fine, even script in an ink that had faded. Or perhaps the ink had been diluted to make it go further. The document had been written in tougher times when cash purchases were a luxury, an impossibility. Ink could have been one of these.

Kay ran her fingers lightly over the unlined paper. Each of the written lines was straight; the height was consistent. It was a real find, she thought. It was only the second hand written thing that she had from her father’s father. On her mother’s side, there was nothing written by her grandparents at all.

Kay marveled at the writing that had no hesitations, no erasures, no scorings through words. She marveled at the elegant word choices and the careful structure of the essay. It was his second language, Kay thought, “and yet there were no grammatical errors, no spelling errors“. She sighed as she felt the fragility of the acidic paper that was browning and drying out. With just a little bit of handling, it wouldn’t last long.

Grandfather on her Father’s side had come to Canada when he was only seventeen. He had worked on the railroad just like her Grandfather on her Mother’s side. He and his brother worked, frugally saving every possible penny, until they could afford to homestead. Kay’s father was born on that homestead in the Interlake district of Manitoba, many miles north of Winnipeg.

Kay’s grandfather’s family had always had a teacher in every generation and held a high respect for education. And so, after a long day of working to create a farm, to tend to the fields, to tend to the farm animals, to tend to the family of six children, her grandfather studied. By correspondence, he studied English until he had it to perfection and Agriculture and Husbandry to ensure better yield from his crops and the health of his farm animals. By correspondence, for his pleasure, he took an Art course and a sign-maker’s course.

No television for that one, Kay reflected wryly.

The text was entitled “Fundamentals in host” and it explained the importance of preparing the soil for planting; recognizing the various soil types; improving the soil with manure or chemical fertilizers; cleaning debris and old roots out the soil; and tilling and harrowing the fields to make them even and free of depressions. In the same file, there was another shorter essay, “Shrubs and Flowers for the Home Grounds”, describing the planting of perennials to landscape a home garden.

Kay spent a few hour transcribing the found texts onto the computer, checking the spelling of the plant names through the Internet, especially the ones she hadn’t heard of before. Delphinium, Columbine, Gladioli, Tulips, Mock Orange, Lilies and Day Lily had been familiar. Trollius or Globe Flower, though, was new to her until she researched and found it was in the family of the Buttercup; and Evonymous, too, was unknown to her.

As Kay luxuriated in her warm bath, she relived her efforts in the garden. The massed Iris had formed a solid clump of root. The shovel would not go through it and when she thought of bringing out the machete to cut through it, she rejected the thought. She hadn’t the muscle to make it work. She tugged at one peripheral root and yanked it. It separated from the mass and brought a long trailing root with it. With the persistence of a dog worrying a bone, she separated and pulled the roots one by one until the mass was reduced from an umbrella sized plate to the size of a dinner plate. Finally, with one good thrust of the shovel, she had been able to liberate the recalcitrant mass of roots and wrest it from the soil.

” I wonder what kind of soil this is?” our amateur gardener pondered. It was dry and finely textured. Its brown silkiness slid easily through her fingers like warm beach sand. Beneath the root mass, there were no weed roots nor rocks. The soil had retained no moisture at all. But if one did not know what loam, peat, sand and clay soils were, then what good did it do her? How was she going to improve it?

As she raked the remaining soil with her hands, her fingers lodged against a tiny, bright blue object. Her archaeological find was a very rare species of scarab, Scarabaeidae plasticus from the late 20th century, a child’s toy. It was not the first artifact that Kay had found. She still had the yellow and black dump truck from the sand box where she had been preparing grass seed for improving her lawn. In the Hosta bed, she had found a cup with a broad red band of forest green on the bottom and a slightly smaller red band on the top and she had found several tiny confetti angels seeded in between the raspberry canes. Juvenile Humus sapiens had lived here before.

Kay shifted in her bath, stirred the cooling waters, drained an inch or two and added hot. She settled back into her reclining position and closed her eyes. The sultry waters lulled her. Was it imagination or reality? In her somnolent state, the tiny blue scarab was traversing her clavicle, feet so lightly tripping rapidly as if to sneak across without being felt. She shifted and opened her eyes. It was a spider! A tiny white spider no larger than a pin head was barely grazing her skin. It must have hitched a ride in her hair and now had completely lost its bearings.

Kay submerged herself and the spider floated away on the surface of the bath water. It was time to get moving, she thought, and she pulled the plug. The water receded. In seconds, an eddy had formed at the drain hole. She rose and dried herself, pitched her work clothes in the laundry basket and went in search of a whole set of clean ones.

“A final thought” she said out loud to no one in particular; after all, the house was empty of anyone but herself, the pin sized spider and the blue scarab.

It was a quote, the ending line from her grandfather’s essay on home grounds:

“Whereas the love of money often separates people, the love of flowers brings them together”

With that, she donned a summer dress, her new tan sandals and went looking for her new white straw hat, looking like the only time she had spent time in the garden was for an afternoon of tea and biscuits.

You may have wondered where I went to. I simply went hermit.

I had a lengthy bout of taxes - not just mine but Mother’s and the Estate’s. I’ve been chasing after bits of paper - an invoice here, an explanation there - digging through files that I thought I had left behind. But no. They continue to chase me and I’ve had little heart to describe my day to day happenings. After all, it’s been raining for forty days and forty nights, or so it seems.

I pride myself on having purchased a home with excellent light that streams in on the east side of the house in the morning and from the west in the evening. I barely have to light up a light bulb during daylight hours. But today the sky was heavily overcast and rain fell in bucket loads. Niagara Falls was dropping from the sky, it seemed. I put lights on all over the house to bring some cheer into the house.

Heather and her husband are staying with me until Thursday. They’ve just returned from a family reunion in the States - his side of the family. Whistler. my nephew, their son, was with them but came home a different route via Los Angeles, San Francisco, the Oregon Coast and Seattle. This wee house is rocking with the extra company.

After his long drive up the coast, Whistler arrived on Sunday and then slept the sleep of the just until late today. We woke him up for meals and then he went right back to the living room couch, covered himself with the duvet and promptly went right back to sleep. With four of us in the house, we’ve run out of beds; he being the youngest gets the couch.

This morning, we other three went down to the gym and all cycled or treadmilled our half hour before tackling the weight/resistance machines. That set us up for the day. After all, if it was going to continue raining full tilt, there were no interesting things to do outside, neither hiking nor walking nor gardening.

It’s the first time I’ve taken Heather and her husband to the gym here. He’s an aficionado so I didn’t need to set him to work, but Heather needed a little guidance. I took the opportunity from time to time to point out some of my favourite denizens of the gym.

There’s an Indo-Canadian fellow who is quite stocky and bull- necked, but he has the flower of youth upon him and he walks with the grace of an acrobat and, at the same time, he has the gait of a seaman. He has a tattoo that gracefully decorates his right arm in a swirly interlacing pattern that incorporates what appears to be a Madonna and child in the midst of it. He wears one of those sleeveless muscle undershirts that scoops around the shoulder muscles giving them admirable prominence.

I don’t dare stare and I haven’t screwed up the courage to ask if I could inspect the tattoo at close quarter. It just doesn’t seem appropriate, somehow. Once, I saw him doing some manoeuvre that had his tensed arms out at right angles to his body and he hung suspended from the machine he was using. I thought of the Crucifixion and how similar the pose was. It was a tempting composition for a painting, but of course, I would have needed some reference photos to work with and that was unlikely. I haven’t given it a try, but I don’t expect that cameras are welcome in a gym.

With all the seriousness of muscle building going on in the gym, he refreshingly has a smile on his face fairly often. The other seem too absorbed in their grimaces of force to be enjoying their travail; and the other young fellows are still gangley and growing. They look as if they had been 90 pound weaklings who had gotten half way through Charles Atlas’ program of exercise but still had a long way to go.

Then, I rather enjoyed the few young ladies that haunt the place. There is one that comes in hip hugging exercise pants that have a four inch gap separating the waist band from the lower edge of her tight fitting exercise top. She too allows her sculpted arms to show. On the elliptical step machine, she walks without holding onto the safety bars. She treads as if walking on air. I envy her agility and balance. But when she finishes her tread-milling and turns around towards us, she has four rings in her nares - two each side. Such a pretty face, such a beautiful figure! What a disfigured look the rings give her.

And then there was Nick. Nick has MS and gets around in a scooter. The exercise, he believes, will stave off the wicked disease. He strives to maintain his muscle mass and keep up what agility he can muster. He must have been six foot four before the disease ravaged his ability to walk. I often watch him surreptitiously as he transfers from his scooter to a machine and admire his quiet persistence, his determination, his independence such as it is.

Later in the afternoon, when we were home, I tackled the ever-present stack of bills and business correspondence. The only way I can face it is to do one piece at a time, finish it, then put it away. If not, I keep on moving the piles of paper and reshuffling them.

I can report, though, that although this day seems lackluster,  no reportable incidents like raccoons burrowing into the roof have occurred. It has been a quiet life.

The only other thing I can report is that my neighbour showed me how to get successful macro lens pictures from my digital camera. Ah, duh! It was so simple. Really I need to read the manual! But of course, I can’t put my hands on it, so……

here’s a photo for your observational pleasure; It turned out rather crisp, don’t you thnk?

Lizbet,

It was after midnight. The house was silent. I heard an odd rhythmic buzzing sound that I couldn’t identify. After a few minutes of intense listening, I got up to try and find out what was about to explode in the house. I crept down the stairs quietly so I could get nearer and nearer the sound.

I must have inadvertently put the phone on vibrate. It was my cell phone dancing across the kitchen counter with a deep throated rumba rumble. Whoever the caller was, he had an unidentified number so I couldn’t call back. So I checked my e-mail and they hadn’t left a message. Now I was up and decided to wrap myself in a warm sweater. I had to look around my computer desk to find the instructions to pick up the message. There was nothing for it. I was totally awake again, so I decided to do a bit of computer work before I went back to bed.
I found this picture that Heather and I came across. It belongs to her but she let me scan it. It’s of Grandpa Jan’s father and mother (our great grandparents), Dad’s grandparents. When I looked at it, I wondered what they thought of this new country that their sons brought them to- so vast, so very hot, so very cold, so wide open, so wild, so isolated . After the nearness of things and the cultivation in Holland, it must have been a huge cultural shock - even more so than it is today.

Was this the grandfather that was a school teacher? There was one in every generation, Father said.

Sleep tight,

Kay

I must say that I can remember equating expenditures to how many sheets of watercolour paper I could purchase. It gave rise to this kind of outcry:

“A pair of shoes at a hundred dollars? Do you think I’m crazy? I could buy ten sheets of 300 pound Arches watercolour paper with that! I’ll go barefoot first!”

I will also admit that the idea of counting in values other than currency really hadn’t occurred to me as a phenomenon until Dara commented on an e-mail from nephew Hugh.

Hugh has an opportunity in front of him. Proud aunt that I am, I am sometimes marveled by his ability to find and seize opportunities and then to make them happen. He’s done very well with his studies and has been asked by the Director of School at the University to carry on to his Doctoral degree. In the course of his research which he does during the school year as a part time job and now during the summer as well, he found a course that was being offered in California that was exactly what he was studying. The course would bring together a number of the most important scholars studying the non-proliferation of nuclear arms. Hugh, needless to say, was elated at the idea of joining the course.

Sometimes dilemmas arise when we are presented with such opportunities. He would have to find some way of missing three weeks of his research job. He would have to find money to go there. He’s a student, not starving, but not earning big bucks either, and the travel costs alone would be daunting, but the cost of the course was three thousand dollars plus. Hugh was drooling over the computer keyboard in anticipation as he read about the course. He just had to attend it!

In his excitement he sent out an e-mail to a few friends telling them about his absolute joy in knowing that such a pithy course was available somewhere in the North American continent. All the longing and desire was wrapped up in this comment that he finished his e-mail with:

“I’d love to go, but the course is worth at least two brand new, top of the line Mac laptops.”

I could just see him weighing the course in one hand and holding up two Mac laptops in the other. Neither was tipping the balance. If only he could have his course and his laptop too! But in fact, he could probably have neither unless…..

He’s a smart fellow. I knew I’d be hearing more from him. His e-mail must have been sent to me and his friend Dara and maybe others because she “replied all” with a light hearted comment about him being the only guy in the world that she ever had met who measured the worth of something in units of new laptop-ness.

He’s a computer nerdy type of guy and he knows his equipment. As an annual activity, he covets the newest computer hardware offerings. Like clockwork. If there is something new and better, he wants it. Of course, he’s the kind of person who will do it justice.

And so there he was stuck on the horns of a dilemma. And there I was, toying with a new concept of worth, value, an equal trade off, and quid pro quo.

The idea was settling in my brain and having a comfy go-around when the phone rang. It was nephew Ron, Hugh’s brother, who was calling.

Now there’s a miracle. In two days, I’d heard from them both. I keep in touch with Hugh very often. Our academic leanings gave us a somewhat more common ground for bonding while Ron had had more difficulty in accepting his relationships with anyone, not just me, and was more distant. I only heard from Ron about every three months, and even then, it was often due to a prompt from me - like a message left on his cell phone which he never answers. He screens his calls.

Ron announced that he was working in the community next door to the one I’m living in. Ron works in construction as an apprenticing mason. He’s graduated to this state after a number of years of being a reliable and dedicated labourer. Ron never liked school; in fact he hated it, and nothing could persuade him that he would be better off with some post-Secondary education and that education in the trades could triple his salary if he could only make himself go back to school. Sometimes, one just has to let a person find his own way. Ron is one of these.

Ron has tremendous talent and intelligence. He’s mechanically inclined. He learns more aurally and kinetically than in other ways. He learns by trial and error. He figures things out. Don’t expect him to do any reading for pleasure unless it’s a mechanic’s manual to fix a car or an explanation of a diagram accompanying a piece of machinery.

Add to this that Ron is a hard worker with a great work ethic. He’s up at five in the morning to start work at six, hauling cement and mortar, rocks, bricks and other materials pertaining to the masonry trade. He’s muscular and active, a bundle of youthful energy.

So it was no surprise when he said to me in a very short phone call:
“I’ve got fifteen minutes for a coffee break. Can you meet me at Tim Horton’s?”

“Which Tim Horton’s?” I asked. There were at least two I was aware of.

“The one up by the highway into Maple Ridge, whatever it’s name is. You know. It’s the highway coming off the Pitt River Bridge. Tim Horton’s is up by the Silver Screen there,” he added.

Fifteen minutes to see Ron wasn’t much; but I haven’t seen much of him since we all moved away from Mom’s house last year. Ron was one of the first to go but he was always back and forth, in and out, coming to repair his car in the back or borrow the rug cleaner or catch a hasty snack on the run. Now I didn’t see him at all and I missed him and his exuberance.

“I’ll be there,” I said and rang off. I was in the car within five minutes and down to the cafe in another seven. Ron and a friend were already there. He came out, tall and atheletically gangly still, his shorter friend following close behind. In one hand Ron was carrying the tallest coffee you can buy at Horton’s and in the other, he held a glazed doughnut with a healthy bite out of it.

“Hey, Auntie Kay!” he greeted me in his husky voice. “We got here before you!” He had a huge grin on his face and he came over and hugged me. “This here is Manuel.” Manuel, it turned out, was a Mexican lad of about the same age who had come to work for the summer. There were so few labourers available in this hot job market that the Canadian Government was relaxing its rules to allow some foreign workers to come fill the vacancies.

“Are you working as a mason too?” I asked. But Manuel was just starting, at the bottom of the totem pole. He was lifting, carrying, and transporting bricks and mortar around each job site. When the summer was over, he would return home with enough cash to buy a small business and go to school. He wanted to be an Electro-mechanical engineer. I could tell he wasn’t the normal labourer. He knew two languages, for instance, and I never heard a swear word out of him, although I could imaging that Ron and his cohorts were probably completing the slang language part of his education for him with glee.

“We’re working just down there on Harris Road” Ron explained. It’s just down by the Subway.” He looked at me expectantly. “Y’know where I mean? I looked a little blank. I’d been in the community for nine months now but I had no idea where he meant.

“It’s down by the railroad track. It runs right through there. I thought it might be fun to take the train one day, but the train only goes one way in the morning, so it doesn’t work for me. The train station is right there on Harris Road. It’s right where MacDonald’s is, on the highway. ” He was now peering at me, wondering whatever had happened to my education. Didn’t his Aunt know where the fast food places were?

‘Yeah, yeah, I know where you mean” I said as it clicked in that he was talking about Subway the food place, not Subway the rapid transit train station though it really was the West Coast Express out here in the burbs.

“Well our construction site is the first one just after the railroad tracks.”

A light bulb turned on in my mind. Hugh might equate values with laptop computers. Ron equated location with fast food outlets.

I’ve got a date on Tuesday with Ron. He’ll come up and see the house, but not for long, he made it clear. He’s on the fly.

I’ve got an update on Hugh. He took his dream to the Director of his School who agreed that the course was just too juicy for Hugh to pass up. Of course Hugh could go! He could make up the time he missed some other way and they would figure that out together.

Hugh has also inquired about the hint of a scholarship in the course prospectus that seemingly was proposed for tuition, room and board. It was probable that he was exactly the kind of candidate they were looking for. If that were so, then the only thing he needed was airfare and he thought he could manage that himself.

They’ve both grown up to be independent and useful citizens. I’m proud of them both and I’m a happy Aunt to have had a hand in getting them to this point; and a happy Aunt, to have heard from them both in just this one week.

After 40 days and nights of rain, it seems, we had a brilliant spring day. Spring, I say, because tulips are just showing when they should have been gone almost a month ago. Scilla is just up and blooming in all its blueness; daffodils are getting brown and paper-like and falling over. They’ve had it. But this is all late. Only a few days ago, the temperature went down to 5 Celsius at night. It ought to be way warmer.

Mid afternoon today, I deserted my cyberspace companion, my loyal computer, and braved the bright light in my garden. The temperature had risen to 20 degrees. I mowed the back lawn with the rotary mower, cursing despite really enjoying the physical effort; swearing that I would get my own lawn mower when my ship comes in. Then I spent a good hour pulling out well-rooted dandelions on the front boulevard which is thankfully narrow; then gave that stretch of lawn a haircut as well.

At six, I gathered tools and my substantial collection of dandelion roots and leaves to put them away until tomorrow, which, according to the Weather Channel, will be as glorious as today. I congratulated myself on the now tidy stretch of lawn. I took a few minutes to take stock of the damage caused by the steady downpour of the past two days before I went in.

First was that the sweet, pale orbs of dandelion seed saw fit to make a stand on my front lawn. Where had they come from? I’d just pulled out a whole clear garbage bag of them three days before. So I took time to gently, ever so gently, cup each of these and get them into the now sodden and compacted collection bag before they could scatter and seed.

Then, some of the earliest showing tulips had lost their petals leaving only a narrow yellow green gizmo at the top of their long bare stem. The flowering cherry tree that was spectacularly beautiful two days ago has gone brown and saggy. The camellia has scattered brilliant pink blooms on the asphalt driveway. There’s not much left on the tree. A few of the early bloomers were going off. Spring was on its way out. Summer was edging its way in.

Lastly, the lawn has grown another two inches. That’s the Wet Coast for you. Heat and water. Jungle growth. Everything that I had mowed the day before will need re mowing by tomorrow!.

Mrs. Stepford and I were going to the Philosopher’s Cafe up near the Municipal Centre at quarter to seven and I was driving. I only had twenty minutes to get supper, get clean shoes on and get ready, so I rushed through a cup of coffee and an “eat-up” dinner of two weiners wrapped in bread, two oranges and a luxury dessert - a maple cookie. When we got to the cafe just in time for the philosophical fray, I ordered an Americano and plunked myself down very gratefully on a cafe chair, glad to be off my feet and simply relaxing.

The warmth of the afternoon had not abated. The accordion doors of the cafe had been folded to each side of the front wall, opening the cafe right out onto the sidewalk patio. Four men were having an animated discussion on the building of the new bridges over the Pitt and Fraser Rivers. Late shoppers were coming to and fro from the grocery store. Cars were shunting in and out of the parking lot. A woman with a small hairy dog walked by the open window frame tugging her recalcitrant pet behind her.

Nigel, our moderator, started to play his harmonica then got a few of us clapping in tempo. It caught our attention and we began our philosophizing.

It was a good topic - Is history really the lie most communally agree upon? It was attributed to Voltaire but when I went to look it up, I could find nothing to quite match it. The closest I found was

History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.

Our group of ten stumbled through the first hour getting hung up on the definition of “History”, then of “communally” and then of “lie”. In fact, we skirted each definition and in the end were no further ahead, but we had talked. We all seemed to be in agreement with the basic statement that history was not an immutable fact but was open to interpretation depending on which side of the coin your were on. History was often written by the victor. Though there never was a vote, we seemed to communally agree that official history was self-serving and often packed with lies. The best kind of history was the kind on might find in a novel or a personal journal of someone who had lived through the time - someone who could tell what they felt like, how he or she was influenced or affected by the events that had occurred.

As a result of us all seeming to be on the same side of the debate, Janet proposed that we talk about our community’s fund raising quest for seven million dollars for a new local museum. That got us arguing!

There were those who felt that seven million was an outrageous amount of money to spend to house archives of the region. Some felt that the community’s history was only about a half dozen families and that the museum wouldn’t be broad enough in subject matter to engage the public to raise such a large amount of funding. So many people were from elsewhere. What benefit would they get from a museum of history they hadn’t even participated in? It looked like selling the idea would be a tough one.

Soon we wrapped up. It’s our last cafe before the summer and when we come back our Artist in Residence will be on to different things. We will need to find a new moderator for our group and we will need to find a whole new set of ideas to discuss.

Mrs. Stepford and I left the cafe at half of nine after some lengthy parting discussions with new members that we had found interesting - a woman pharmacist, another woman and her daughter. All three recent were immigrants who had joined the group for the first time.

When we got back home, I had a cup of tea with Mrs. S then came back home, just next door.

It was then as I made my way out to the sidewalk that I looked up and saw a three quarters moon in the clear night sky. The temperature had not gone down. The night was warm, dark and silky. Stars were out in profusion. The night sky with its patterns of light hung over the earth like a chenille draped blanket flecked with gold.

I stood, bathed in contentment. Summer had come.

They are constantly at it. Even if you cut their heads off, they refuse to die. Their brilliant yellow manes wither and wilt but transform into a zillion seeds waiting for an unsuspecting heel to crush them into the dirt. Or they wait for a breeze to lift their silvering mane into disrupting the dessicated remains, airborne, to land in scattered bundles of reproductive generations.

I uprooted about fifty of these entrenched, persistent roots yesterday; loosened the earth, gathered its green skirt and headdress, wriggled the embedded legs of it from the softened soil and gently but firmly pulled. About ten of them came out more or less whole and were relegated to their yard waste grave, a clear plastic bag with yellow tie. The remaining forty managed to snap somewhere an inch below the surface. It is so hardy that this determined fragment of root, this tiny keeper of DNA and the juice of its life, will regenerate, continue to grow and reproduce once more, triumphant against the hand of man or woman.

In this day and age of “Save the….” mentality, chemical warfare is no longer permitted; eco-diversity frowns on changing the biodiversity of any earth location. Natural methods are all that are allowed. Acetic acid drops might kill a worm or a nematode and upset the balance. And so I dig, and wrench. I cut off their heads to defer their uprooting to another day, buying time while preventing these aggressively successful plants, these insidious invaders of my garden from spreading even more seeds.

Last week, I did only that. I plucked every yellow head, every budding head, every seeding head, every leaf I could easily yank so that the darned things, even if I hadn’t eradicated the weed, had at least set it back in its reproductive cycle so that I could regroup, re arm and re attack on a more level playing lawn. I gathered an entire garden waste bag! It’s twice the size of a normal garbage bag! I suspect the lions of Dande will divert my dreams of gardening into a nightmare of unplanting.

Two days later, the cheeky muggers are brandishing their gold pennants with lions rampant in the field, laughing in the springtime wind. Ha ha! Ha ha! We’re winning!

Goliath rolled up to the traffic light, a huge red-cabbed Mack truck towing a huge bin of gravel behind it’s regular construction bin and stopped short by twenty feet.

The black luxury car saw the green light and would have barrelled through but for the fact that Goliath, the Mack, was stopped and not moving. The black car stopped. Kay instantly noticed the why-for that had halted the giant.

There on the asphalt, directly in the middle of the lane, was David, a tiny robin still dressed in it’s infant clothing, speckled and shivering. Stunned. Goliath had seen and stopped and David was saved.

Kay put on her hazard blinker, opened the door and leapt out. The tiny bird did not move, so stunned it was. Kay came carefully out then, up behind the bird and cupped it in her hands. It fluttered with strength, found a finger to clamp the small talons to, and trembled. Kay held it high for the next motorist to see and understand.

Kay stepped then to the sidewalk, found a potted fir behind a wrought iron grill and posited the creature beneath the lowest branch. It fluttered its wings again and rested, saved.

As Kay drove away, she thought The truck could have driven right over top of it and not touched it. and then, If the bird had shifted or moved, it would have been just one more road kill.; and then she was thankful that there generally were no cats wandering in the downtown area. The bird had had strength. It had been stunned but it would recover.

As Kay drove away, the truck tooted a thanks and proceeded. The driver in the car behind waved. It had taken less than a minute and it had changed her day entirely.

What a twist to the tale of David and Goliath!

Our local writing group meets once a month. We get a ten minute exercise during the group and a homework exercise each time. This week it’s Haiku constructed on a 5 syllable, 7 then again 5 syllable form for a total of 17 syllables.

It’s not as easy as it seems, to capture a thought in such spare form. They turn out quite cryptic and elliptical. It’s almost as if one needs a 100 word explanation to accompany them.

Here are two I’m working on:

driving on the ‘One,

red lights lead, white ones assail

Trans Canada trail

And the second one:

tender morning sun

marks leafy vein and shadow

with verdant kiss