power down, part II

Monday morning we woke up with no power.

The sun was shining, the air was frosty, and in the distance we could hear the low hum of our neighbors using generators. We had porridge like we do each morning, but no radio in the background, and washing the dishes was a bit more time-consuming: heating water, or at least waiting for the gravity-fed trickle from the tap -- cold water, of course -- to fill each bowl so we could scrub it. Then we both did our best to make ourselves presentable with washcloths and combs and deodorant, and headed into the village for appointments and errands.

However, all was not well: Mum was starting to worry about our freezers. We rely on two deep-freezes to keep summer garden produce, meats, berries, sauces and soups frozen until we need them. They can sit unopened for 24 hours and stay frozen, but the top layer of each freezer was starting to thaw, so Mum took Monty up on his offer to bring his generator over and give some "juice" to the freezers. When we got back from town there was a rumbling hum coming from the other side of the house, and the freezers under their insulating blankets were working again. Hurrah! A generator, as you probably know, works on fuel, and converts that to electricity, and so it sounds like a souped-up lawnmower.

Monty gave us the news that apparently, the problem had been located on the power grid, and it happened to be right behind his house, in the woods. However, it was a complicated problem involving a new pole and some special wires not readily available, and there were no local crews available either! So it would take some more time before linemen from New England arrived and it could be fixed. The power company people were saying "power will be restored maybe late tonight," but we weren't holding our breath.

It began to cloud over again around one. While we prepared a lunch of onions fried with the leftover mashed potatoes, and cold cuts of chicken on the side, Mum cleaned out the fridge and moved most of the items to the covered porch, where it's colder, especially at night. We were starting to get testy: Mum griped, "I didn't ask for this job!" I stayed silent, knowing that for me to be snarky just now was to get on both of our nerves, which we didn't need. Lunch, however, was delicious. "As long as there's the smell of frying onions," Mum said, "it feels like a home."

Later I called the library to renew some books, as the phone lines still worked. The librarian lives near us and she was dismayed to hear that the power down our way was still off. "Oh ... that upsets me very much," she said in her trademark soft, quiet voice that never sounds upset at all, and didn't now. "I'm sorry!" I said, "Please don't shoot the messenger!" "I won't," she said, laughing. But her household, like many others, has an electric stove, so they couldn't cook food or heat water at all, making the power outage that much more uncomfortable to endure.

An hour or so before darkness fell, we went over to Monty's to take him up on another offer -- hot showers. Using his generator, he got his water heater going, and even though I had only been two days without a shower, it felt remarkably good to under the nice hot water. I went, then Mum did, and while she showered, I blow-dried my hair at the kitchen table, by the light of a bare bulb on a lamp that Monty had rigged up for me. It reminded me a bit of the days when I was a small child, when my parents were together and we lived in the cabin in the woods. During the winter, after a bath, my brother and I would wrap our towels around our small bodies and stand, wriggling with pleasure, by the wood stove, allowing its heat to bake our skin. Roughly 400 square feet contained the wood stove, bathtub and the rest of the house, and the warmth and intimacy of those evenings remain a fond memory.

That evening I called Janice.

"Hi," I said, "I'm calling from the 19th Century!" She laughed, then said, "What?"

"I'm using a kerosene lamp to see, and I'm boiling water on the stove to do my dishes!"

"Oh ... well, I'm using the Internet," She replied, cheekily. Later I thought that this conversation is the closest I'll ever get to time traveling.

That night we again sat around the kerosene lamp, playing cribbage. Monty's generator was again working hard keeping our freezers going, doing double duty and being moved back and forth between his home and ours, an 8-km drive, every few hours. As well, it provided a constant hum in the background. We were all tired and kept miscounting our crib hands, to the point that we started light-heartedly accusing each other of being stoned, two fifty-somethings and me.

When I went to bed that night, again in long-johns and wool socks, I fell asleep even with the generator going in the room next to me. At that moment, I didn't much care if there might be electricity the next day -- the only thing I was interested in was the cozy confines of my bed.

To be continued...


(Photo by Marlo)

mission: dill, part II

So I ended up making dill pickles! Who would have guessed? Considering that I've never canned anything before, I impressed myself, at least! And ain't that who counts? But I'll try my darndest to impress you guys too. Here goes.

I started with obtaining pickling cucumbers from the garden of a friend, as well as dill he'd graciously given, too. I also had two conflicting recipes and the Bible of backwoods cooking, "Mrs. Restino's Country Kitchen", which uses a wood stove as the standard, not a gas-fired or electric range. Hardcore! We don't actually use a wood stove, but her book is certainly helpful for a pickling novice in crisis. So after some deliberation, I decided to use Mrs. Restino's step-by-step instructions, because the first recipe I had was hurriedly scribbled from the dictated memory of another friend who makes dills, but who rarely measures his ingredients, and the second recipe used sugar and I'm trying to cut that out of my diet. So, something plain and easy to follow and not including sugar looked like my best bet.

On Tuesday, after following Mrs. Restino's directions for about an hour, I found myself in the kitchen standing over a pot, in which boiled a mixture of water and vinegar, and which also had peppercorns, mustard seed and garlic cloves dancing in its acidic depths. I was also looking over at a smaller pot which held five new "snap" lids, percolating. On the counter beside me were five pint Mason jars, sterilized, and I had put a dill flower in each, along with five or six bright green pickling cucumbers, small and tough and knobby. Then I poured enough of the boiling vinegar mixture in each jar to come almost to the rim, set a boiled snap lid on top, and a screw lid, but not screwed all the way down.

Had I really done it? The five jars sitting side-by-side certainly made it look like it. I was quite ecstatic, but I had to wait a little longer to see if the jars would seal. In the end, three out of five did seal, and headed for the cold room to live in storage, and the other two went to the fridge. I didn't know how long I was supposed to leave them in there before they could be eaten; Mrs. Restino was silent on that point.

Skip ahead three days, and my brother Mat and a friend of his are home for the Thanksgiving weekend. They've just arrived, it's late Friday night, all the bags have been brought in, tea poured and the necessary introductions made. We're sitting around talking when suddenly I remember my pickles! I jump up:

"Mat! I made pickles!"

I run to the fridge, pull out one of the two jars. Then I grab a plate, a knife and a fork. We unscrew the lid and pull out a now-mild-green pickle. I slice it into pieces and pass the plate around. The moment of truth, and the proof is in the pickle! Amazingly enough, we each bite into a very garlicky, quite vinegary dill pickle. I have the look of a proud mama on my face: I did it! It's like alchemy, at least for a beginner like me. Into the jar: raw cucumbers and boiling vinegar, plus a few other ingredients. Out of the jar: crunchy, tasty dill pickles!

The ecstasy only lasts so long before the agony sets in: in my hurry to eat my pickle, the vinegar has gone down the wrong tube and is making the top of my throat itch and burn. I cough and cough, embarrassed but proud. My pickles may be small, but they're mighty, and I seem to be living proof. Note to self for next year: cut back on the vinegar!

It's hard to top that kind of victory, but the weekend ended up being pretty great all the same. The weather was that perfect Fall blend of cold air, colorful leaves, a high wind and clouds the scud across the sky. All our food and visits were memorable. And I even got the Janice Fuller Dill Pickle Seal Of Approval, and it's not every day she gives that one out!

I'm giving thanks for pickling cucumbers great and small, friends old and new, and for the cozy feeling you get indoors on a rainy Fall day with a good book. Oh and of course loads of thanks for and to Marlo, for letting me use the above photograph. What about you? Best answer wins a virtual dill pickle.

after the storm

Wow. Well. Here I am, after a full month of not posting. It feels surprisingly good to fire up the ol' Blogger again, to click on "New Post", to put tentative feelers out into the blogworld --and the world in general-- again.

I can't believe, in some ways, that it has been a month. Each week has brought a fresh batch of challenges, a fresh batch of decisions to make, and feelings to sort through. The "grubby details", as Marlo called them, belong to me and a few close friends, but the truth is simple: I've been sick, am still sick, and am taking time off from school in order to rest and get my strength back. I burnt myself out, more or less, and have had to deal with the consequences, which have been more than I bargained for.

My life has changed since I posted last. The things that remained the same are physical location (Fredericton, New Brunswick, the East Coast of Canada), and the dear friends and family who support this old bean. It's really funny, surreal actually, to stand at the center of your life and watch it change around you, watch yourself stop doing things because you can't do them anymore, and mourn your losses. It's like traveling to a foreign country, not knowing the language or the currency before you get there: you see what happens one day at a time, sometimes one hour or minute at a time, even one breath at a time.

This makes for a more intense experience, for better and for worse. I have certainly become "hyper-aware", as one person put it, of my self, my feelings, my needs and my desires. Having this awareness does not make it any easier to put such needs into practice, but it helps. It also influences what I have to talk about, necessarily! I can't wait for the day when I have a conversation with someone that doesn't include my own issues. But in time, that will come, and I know that having been there for a number of the people who are holding on to the corners of my "safety net" right now means they do, actually, want to be here for me. I'm not a burden as much as I'm just taking my turn at leaning.

What I'm doing right now (along with the physical acts of resting and no longer attending classes, taking a break) is what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls "homing" or "returning to oneself". She writes about the necessity of this in her bestselling "Women Who Run With The Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype" (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995):

What is homing? It is the instinct to return, to go to the place we remember. It is the ability to find, whether in dark or in daylight, one's home place. We all know how to return home. No matter how long it's been, we find our way. [...]

For some, home is the taking up of an endeavor of some sort. Women begin to sing again after years of finding reason not to. They commit themselves to learn something they've been heartfelt about for a long time. They seek out the lost people and things in their lives. They take back their voices and write. They rest. They make some corner of the world their own. They execute immense or intense decisions. They do something that leaves footprints.

For some, home is a forest, a desert, a sea. In truth, home is holographic. It is carried at full power in even a single tree, a solitary cactus in a plant shop window, a pool of still water. It is also at full potency in a yellow leaf lying on the asphalt, a red clay pot waiting for a root bundle, a drop of water on the skin. When you focus with soul-eyes, you will see home in many, many places. (pp. 283-6).

So I'm homing. I've come through a storm, and now I'm sorting out the mess it left. I'm resting, I'm making good food for myself, I'm taking up things I haven't done in too, too long (writing for myself, drawing with charcoals, pencils, pens, inks, reading a book that isn't for class). I'm mourning the losses, and trusting in something --faith? life? the way things tend to go?-- that the voids will be filled. I'm seeing that indeed they are, one breath, one moment, one day at a time.

Oh and, the picture was taken by Marlo. I like using her photographs to illustrate my writing, because they tend to be of subjects in my immediate environment (since we're room-mates and fellow Fredericton residents and explorers), and she takes such thoughtful and striking photographs. At least, I think so. I also thought that this one, called "iceplants", is both fragile and strong, the kind of strength that comes from remaining, and therefore pertinent. I also really love the colors.

What do you do to go home? What are the endeavors, actions, creations and thoughts that bring you back to yourself? Have you done them lately?

a virtual cuppa

At the moment I'm not up to posting anything personal, because I'm not feeling well. That's really all the Internet needs to know, but it does make for a quiet blog. "Someday I'll tell you why I wasn't able to meet you, but for the moment, I'm still here," as Tom Hanks' character Joe Fox types to Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly in "You've Got Mail", which I watched for the umpteenth time the other day. (And it's still as good as it always is...strange how that works with some films.)

So I thought I would post a photo of Marlo's instead, and we can all talk about one or more of the following:

1. The virtues of tea. What's your favorite kind?
2. Time for tea. Do you get it? If not, do you miss it?
3. The qualities of Marlo's photography, not that I know anything technical about such forms of imagery. If you do, what do you think? Can you guess where it was taken?
   
4. The qualities of "You've Got Mail". Have you seen it? Do you like it? Does it make you want to hurl, or curl up with a blanket?
   

a day for red gumboots, too bad I haven't got any

I got a little tired of putting webcam pictures up. "Good," you're saying, "I got a little sick of seeing your mug!" Well, that makes two of us. Or however many of you read this, I really don't know what that number is. All I know is, I thought it was high time for another delightfully good photo by Marlo, my room-mate. This also features a mug, however, it is not mine. It is Marlo's, and she drinks tea out of it, daily.

She took this last year but the kitchen hasn't changed much. And on a day like today, when it rains and rains outside and my jeans get wet walking home and a cup of hot Chai with four Simple Pleasures Chocolate Thins is a grand idea, it is also a really nice place to hang out, read scholarly articles, and hear the rain pattering against the window. No, rain really does patter. Have you ever listened to it? It's a day for bundling, for wearing sweaters, for warming stew.

Today's also one of those days you want to pack up the van (or whatever vehicle you have, provided it has cover, like a Volvo, a Subaru, an Audi if you're lucky) and head somewhere, most likely west if you're east, or east if you're west. Get out of the ordinary and see new places. I have a hankering for the Yukon. I was looking at the map of Canada on the side of my fridge earlier (not just procrastinating, although God knows I'm a Gold Medal winner in that category) and imagining places like Ross River, Elsa, Old Crow. What would they look like? Could I rent a house for cheap? Could I help harvest the last of a limp, frost-bitten garden, and drink hot coffee in the mornings, and wear plaid and gumboots?

Between tea in my kitchen and moving to the Yukon, I can bet which is actually going to happen today. But while we're dreaming, what would you do with a full tank of gas and all the time in the world?

And just like that, fall is here.

Last Tuesday was so muggy my Deviance professor (not "deviant professor", that would be Michael Clow), Stephanie Bruce, had to open the door that goes outside to get a cross-breeze. We were all melting out of our clothes, even those of us in skirts and tank tops. By Thursday, though, in the same class, we were all bundled up and glad to be inside. The sun was shining but the wind had a bite.

The air is crisp, you can smell wood-smoke in it, and the leaves are starting to turn. I wear my apple-red Sew Inclined hat and my silver bracelets as I walk along the sidewalks of Fredericton, and every now and again, as it did this morning, the sky spits a little, just enough to get your coat spotty, and bead on the wool of your hat, but not enough to drench, to freeze. I wear Mum's knitted socks inside my Birks and don't care if not a single fashionista would do the same. After all, even Vogue this month is extolling the qualities of Fall:

"In Autumn those sense-memory-charged pleasures are even more intense. You draw a pair of opaque tights (black or maple-red or apple-green) from the package and remember that boy who took your hand at the fifth-grade square dance. You slip a sweaterdress over your shoulders, rub the cashmere sleeve against your cool cheek, and think of Mom. A new tweed coat smells of clean wool. An armful of gold bangles clicks and clatters with the sound of a woman setting seriously back to business. October...couldn't you just shiver?"

For October, read September, and for gold bangles, read silver. What cracks me up about that paragraph --at the same time as the aesthete in me revels in every image in the panoply that is Vogue-- is that as carefree and "Fall"-like as it's meant to sound, it was carefully put together by the style editors, crafted to evoke memories and sensations, and ultimately, use those delightful associations of Autumn with new clothes to part rich and not-so-rich women from their money, in the great big happy wheel of economy that Vogue services so beautifully. But no matter. When this is my weekend treat, I'm not going to scratch too deeply beneath the surface.

The point is, I adore fall. It's my favorite season. The best things about it are free: rosy cheeks, mingling outside among bundled families at the Saturday market, looking at the array of pumpkins, gourds, red peppers, broccoli, apples, cranberries. Making a big pot of soup at home and listening to some spicy salsa music (my suggestion: Jesse Cook) at the same time. And speaking of color, there's also Celtic Colors, where this year I'm going to get to see Flook, that energetic flute-centred band from the UK that Catriona and I adored the first time around. With my red hat on, of course.

So when the weather forecasters say things like "Cloudy with periods of rain, winds South 30 km/hr, High 17", I get excited. I fire up the soup pot. I go walk in Odell. I'm happy to be inside with my books. I turn on the Be Good Tanyas, who are good year round but particularly suited to autumnal weather.

Why do you like Fall?

(PS. Thanks to Marlo for the photograph. She took it in Odell Park, last year. She's a fantastic photographer, and lucky for me, allows me to use some of her images to show you guys.)