mumma yaga

July 30   Link to Bob Dylan's Changing of the Guards: https://youtu.be/qZhMvLuoMaM "Sixteen years Sixteen banners united over the field... I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down"    My brother died on July 29, 16 years ago. We were having a heat-wave and he had no A/C, and in the afternoon he suddenly felt quite unwell and lay down. An old friend was with him (for which we were glad) who called me after calling an ambulance, but by the time I arrived David was dead. We were all there (K came with), my other brother, and our cousin and his wife (very close). After we'd been to see him, we waited outside at the front of the house for the coroner. The house was a mansion re-purposed to a rooming house, a strange setting for such a gathering. We stood, rather small, on the apron that was the driveway; the wide steps and the house rose behind us old and heavy, the trees were old and heavy. David w...

july 26 spider plant. I don't have much of a green thumb. I'm a haphazard gardener: a lot of love but very little knowhow or actual gardening! Some years our house has been plant-free just because the only spare surface with good light was too out-of-the-way to remember to water! Now we have a plant corner in the front room, with my old spider plant (not related to the one in this story) and my mother-in-law's plant that I adopted when she died and Tamar's spider plants from her office. She brought them home when the office got covid-closed.They are from my current spider plant. I only remembered today that my teenage obsession with houseplants began with a spider plant. My mother, father, brother and I were staying at a bed-and-breakfast near Meaford for a weekend of skiing. We went out in the dark, to see the cows in the barn all warm, stomped through the deepest snow I had ever seen, feet of it. (I remember how my dad seemed different that weekend. Why do i think tha...

July 24        Chapter 57:  Wherein Mumma comes to her senses and doesn't forsake her family.    I recently had an “existential crisis” about becoming vegetarian (a whole n'other story). That crisis is on the back burner, simmering, while life in the pandemic continues to be very busy in that slow purposeful way, three-dimensionally as it were, or, because it concerns time waves, four-dimensional.     Today I recognized Surrender Never Surrender * as part of a bigger crisis, which is unresolved and still active: I have run out of spoons.** It was on the 3rd of July I felt disoriented (and a little punched in the stomach) - that’s where it started.*** But even while the stalled mosaic project began to work again, and I fell back in step with this universe, I realize today that these past three weeks and counting is one big existential crisis.     Since March II I have cared for my family throug...

july 23 Good afternoon, or evening! It's 4:15 where i am and and I've been in the kitchen getting some dinner prepped prepared. The eggplant is ready for the oven and the chard for steaming. (The zen of cooking in the slow storm-waves of covid-19 time.) I thought of pouring a manhattan, as it's cocktail hour and then I started singing John Prine. Things are busy here, and I expect they are at your place too. Thank you for visiting. I hope you will check in again in a few days. When you subscribe (see below header), mumma yaga posts will be sent to your email in-box the night of posting. (But as a suspicious internet user, I frequently skip a subscription or a "follow", so I get it if you don't want to do that.) You can also list the blog under  "favorites" or "bookmark", so it's just a click away when you're visiting your browser. *John Prine, When I get to Heaven , 2018.)

July 17 Fig pushes his bowl off the bed (where he is fed) onto the floor, as if to say, "Done. Nice dinner." and he washes his face and paws. (He has been given dinner on the big bed (ours) since he was six weeks old because he would not eat with Betty, our bouvier mix, because she was the alpha dog. But also because he didn't know how to eat and was hand-fed for some days. He has a heart murmur which makes him cough. He fell over twice today, from coughing. **** There is always a paper clip in the telephone cupboard: our version of kitchen drawer. It was called the telephone cupboard from the beginning because it was next to the telephone in the kitchen so we kept the telephone books there. On the inside of the cupboard door was a list of emergency and frequently-needed  phone numbers. This predates cell phones and the internet. (We moved here in 1990. Now, even though the phone is no longer there and there are no phone books anywhere, the cupboard retains its name. ****...

july 18 [An ex-blog reader once commented that they lost interest because bloggers (slice-of-life style) did not truly reflect all the slices of everyday ups and downs and so lost authenticity.] Last night I ran away from home. I packed my guitar and overnight bag, water, devices and a blanket, change of clothes and medicines in the car (mine). I left the dog because I didn't know what to do with him: I couldn't take him to a hotel; I would go back and get him (and my cash stash - oops) if I decided to go to Quebec. I soon found that, short of driving to Montréal, there was nowhere to go. There is no-one to whom I can go in this circumstance: its urgency is slight, covid 19 makes a lesser problem unimportant. It was sad, really. It would have been my parents, when they were alive. They were always there. But now I am the only one I know who would take me in, whom I could ask.  So I came home again and went to bed. The children were gone to bed with Tamar.  Sometime in the...

summer dinners you sit on the wooden bench bare feet dangling and all the big brothers tall and grown-up around you at the table while mother and father talk the day over under the grape vines leaves and twining tendrils reach out at you like hands brother teases brother  routine arguments are brought out for review you, little sister, sit and listen the sun setting shines green through the vines the silhouetted trunks like veins  among the leaves bunches of grapes ripen purple black and hazed blue while hidden green and hard more clusters lurk under the large hand-like leaves the vines shut out the world a room with living walls flagged with white stones the meal ends trays are stacked with plates, forks, cups and carried back into the still-hot house brothers, sister disperse  on hand-me-down bikes, in second-hand cars out into the summer night streets

July 9 Waiting under some trees near the hospital while Indre gets stitches in her toe. She stepped on a piece of broken ceramic or a twig blown down in the storm.  [Raise your hand if you are the designated family hospital person (DFHP). You have made dozens of hospital trips, many very memorable hours spent waiting. You have learned how to communicate with doctors and nurses and you know what questions to ask. I've been the DFHP at least since the children were babies. Then my parents needed my assistance in hospital visits, then cousins and in-laws. But with the grandchildren I am wanting to pass on the role to Tamar. She is very capable.] So, I am waiting in a shady (And free) parking spot. In the covid world I have nowhere else to be! But unable to get a coffee and wi-fi.  Waiting. It's 33 degrees: 39 humidex. But there is a breeze under the trees, I have books and sudoku on my ipad, and cool water to sip.   At last they are done.The removal of some vegeta...

Sanding. I actually had a lazy susan in my craft room large enough to hold the mosaic.  A little bit me!! I don't know what happened to this fly after I noticed its alien presence. Didn't see it again. For a short while this was a double rainbow. Amazing storm today. I covered the mosaic and put the top on the tent because i expected rain. The sky was so black. Then the wind went crazy. Auntie Em called, "Dorothy!", and the rain poured. Thunder crashed. I stood on the porch to watch the rain. Lighting struck our tree and a branch fell on the house. I felt the lightning tingle to my fingers when it struck. 

July 7   The person who lives at the corner has a wild garden and it spills through the hedge, pretty and profuse. In the field there are wild black raspberries. I checked on them yesterday - another week maybe. I never get used to the "gift harvest" that ripens around us. An old apple tree, gone wild, makes apples, free for people and creatures to eat.    July is my favorite month, being the most summerish.    I had a breakthrough at last with my mosaic (I was stalled), and I found my footing again in time and space. Things resolved slowly over a day and a night and a bit more day. I decided that if I still felt weird Monday I would get a Covid 19 test! That helped me get through Sunday. On Monday I was able to move ahead with my sea-log work and spent much of the day sanding the wood. Now I am laying the background mosaic in blue. Of the strange unease I felt I know little. It remains a hazy island of hot days.    Last week, K and I saw a UFO. At lea...

Friday the 3rd   Wednesday was the unofficial start of summer. School was out (in some "virtual reality"!) and Canada Day was here. With all the gatherings that didn't and won't happen all summer, and the holiday plans we were discussing in February brushed off the table in March, I am disconcerted or disoriented, as if we have side-slipped into an alternate universe where everywhere everything is toxic. It only hit me last week that our summer trip is gone. K and I had hoped to go and see Rain and Elf et al, and catch a Cirque de Soleil show in Trois Rivieres. The last stop was Perce Rock on the Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec. (Bucket list)  Elf was to dance in the Cirque show, but it was cancelled along with all her other dance projects. (Cirque plans to mount the show next summer.)   K said in April, "what if this goes on for two years? we will need plans in place." Now, heading into summer in earnest, Captain Covid is still on the warpath. As each state and cou...

  I have lived in Toronto almost all my life, except for being born in Vancouver. My father was born and raised in a small prairie town and brought my mother home from England after the war. She embraced Canada as her new home and spent her first Canadian winter in Biggar, Saskatchewan! The young  couple lived for a while in North Battleford while my father trained pilots with the Air Force. Then to Vancouver where Dad earned an engineering degree on the government's nickel while Mother ran a boarding house and raised two boys. We came to Toronto just after I came along.    By the time I was grown up, I had travelled to the west coast three (more) times and as far as Alberta a couple more times. I had also been east to Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. My big brother learned to say "deux patates frites", and we stopped at every chip-stand all the way across Quebec. Also in Quebec we discovered butterscotch and chocolate spreads that came in big square jars with ...