Forgotten

Quick! Name the seven dwarves. My husband and I tried and we both forgot Bashful. That figures. Poor guy. 

Eeeee

 Even elegant eagles enjoy eagerly eating  extra enormous eggplant and escargot enchiladas with eggnog every evening even though eyelashed emu eggs and elephant ears are equally excellent though elusive and expensive. 

Diamond dear

In 1977, beside a lake as blue as the sky, with leaves twirling down like confetti, my smiling boyfriend placed a diamond ring on my finger.  In the spring of 1978 a glittering wedding band was added and neither ring has ever left my hand. They have felt like constant friends. 

The other night as I sat reading in bed, my rings caught my eye and I duly admired them, turning my hand to catch the light.  Lovely.  It occurred to me that I should take them to a jeweller and have the claws checked. How sad it would be to lose a stone.  

The next evening as I sat in the same spot with the same book my subconscious self who is apparently scanning and noticing, jolted me out of my reading trance. I had a feeling of trepidation as I raised my left hand and slowly turned it over. 

Gone. 

Six tiny golden claws gripping absolutely nothing. 

My husband was as stricken as I. 

Isn’t losing something dear a jolt?

“It’ll be alright,” I said, “At least I still have you”

Cherish

 I thought I would talk about crochet in honour of the letter C but as I sat huddled and cold, watching my grandson play hockey this morning while birds slept, I realized the letter C was all around me.  Not just the cold either.  There are coaches. Some, the definition of cool, calm control and others, “sound and fury.”

There is the constant crunch and crash as players launch themselves into the path of danger.  And a whole lot of checking and cheering. 

But the biggest C by far is the clock.  The large fickle clock that goes far too slowly when your team is perilously in the lead and far too fast when you are clawing your way from behind. 

The clock that says there is ten minutes left but you know by doing a series of complicated mathematical formulas that there is actually19 minutes of play left. 

And when you straggle out into the light of day, older and wiser, you are thankful because you know those moments are a limited time offer and therefore, something to cherish. 

Bookish

 “B, b, what begins with b? Barber, baby, bubbles and a bumblebee”  This snippet of awesomeness is Dr. Seuss, quoted from his alphabet book. I can still chant the entire volume front to back from memory, having read it and reread it, first to my tiny daughters and then to my equally tiny grandchildren. Aren’t books wonderfully re-readable? I have favourite books that I read once a year or every few years. In 2021 I read Silas Marner three times! I found it such a comfort; how he is crushed, numb with despair but gradually emerges into the light of love, his faith destroyed and then reformed aright. 

And I’ve read LM Montgomery literally dozens of times over the years. I wish I had to write a term paper on her view of war and how it shifted right along with public sentiment from the First to Second World War. And her commentary on the role of women in society is worth discussing at length. 

Some books have aged right along with me, their message morphing. When I first read Elizabeth Von Arnim’s Enchanted April in my 20’s it grated on my romantic sensibilities. Where was the passion!! But when I reread it years later I laughed and laughed.  How clever the author was. How witty and charming and hopeful and redeeming her view of love! 

Books, some books especially, have been my companions for years and years and have helped me through some perilous times,. 

“Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” Psalm 119:105 

Falling for autumn

 I am still astonished that I can pick up my phone and with a few taps, begin to read something written moments ago by someone on the opposite side of the globe.  The nature of social media means that one can stand in a circle  with others who are happily chatting and just nod and smile without saying a word though. In fact, they will not even realize you are there as a tiny but happy fly on the wall. Now, there is nary a thing wrong with observing and absorbing  kindness and creativity found in others but in the absence of knowing looks and warm hand clasps I’m resolving to speak up now and then with a ‘thank you’ and a ‘well done.’ 

Some time ago I came upon a blog called Small Treasures, written by a gentle and warm hearted woman in England. There was a pause in her posting but she is back now and creating a daily post, working her way through the alphabet. What a marvellous idea!! 

I was instantly seized with a desire to do likewise! Thank you Pensive Pensioner for the inspiration! 

This blog post is brought to you by the letter A. 

The first thing I think of when presented with a letter A is autumn. I tend to think of these misty, musty days as autumn and not fall as many do. When I consulted the Wise Man of the Mountain (google) about the seasonal alias, autumn AKA fall, I was informed that autumn is British whereas fall is more commonly used in North America.  And if you go back through the mists of time, no pun intended, you find a connection to the French word autompne and the Latin word autumnus. There is apparently a connotation to the passing of the year.

Well that’s good to know I guess. Autumn or fall; bring on the sweaters. 

(Now there’s another word worth pondering. Sweat-er? Sweating for sure? Apparently the original sweaters were for competitive boaters and were meant to bring on sweating and weight loss. Google seems to have an explanation for everything.

Ten years

“How did we get so old?”my husband asked, “Ten years at a time,” I replied.

Doesn’t ten years go by in a blink? And isn’t each decade so eventful?

The first ten years is childhood. The second, we transform into teenagers. For my husband and I, our twenties were the decade of babies. And in our thirties, our daughter’s decade as teenagers whirled us in a circle and deposited us into our forties. That was the decade of all things new it seemed. Children sprang from the nest.  There were new jobs and a wedding. A new house. A new town. My parents moved to live with us. I went back to school. But time did what time does. I was amazed to wake up one morning and discover I was 50. And even more amazed to become a grandmother! Cue the music and fireworks. Cue the balloons. Cue the Lego and fisher price, and story books and pretend.  

How in the world did so much life and change happen in those ten years?  

I’m smack dab in the middle of my sixth decade now. I’ll let you know in five years what it was all about.