mumma yaga

 Jan 27         Sunday's writing took me by surprise. It felt like sad was something I had not confronted consciously before but suddenly it was there in its basic form, unalloyed by anger, guilt, regret or depression. It has been easier in the past, for me to subsume sadness beneath and behind less painful feelings - less painful perhaps because they present as actionable or causal.  Depression has been the go-to in my mental repertoire most of my life. It's like a hold-all, I have been dumping feelings in there without looking at them, or naming them or wondering where they came from. Sometimes their provenance has been too painful to examine, sometimes I never knew what they even were: fear, primal fear; anger, useless without an aim or a nameable enemy; regret, fruitless and weighed down with sadness. Even hate must be repressed or denied, because it too is impotent. It won't fix anything: too brittle  and sharp, like a shard of glass that, wielded as a weapon, will cut

Jan. 24  Six days it snowed: sometimes there was no world at all beyond our clearing. Yesterday there was a pale sun, but the mountains were still obscured by the blowing snow.      Today the sun shines in earnest; but still the snow blows down the hill.   For six days it snowed: the valley and the distant hills were obscured by cloud and blown snow. Yesterday even though the sun showed a pale disc in the sky, the world beyond our small hill was still hidden. It seems as if we have been alone for weeks. This morning, the valley is back and the shoulders of the distant hills circle round again bleak and distant, black with forest and patched with white, and the sky, at last, is blue.  Still the snow blows down our hill and the wind howls in the chimney, though the sun shines in and turns the snow outside to diamonds. I love this place with a heart-wrenching ache, literally I feel the twisting burst in my chest , watching the reckless twirling snow along the black line of trees. The isol

 jan 19 Time Jump Driving east on Eglinton,  I approach the lights where Jane Street runs down into a valley and  Eglinton slopes down to meet it.  Slowing, I imagine a shift  like a wind change and I'm  Almost certain That if I turn the corner and go north  my mother will still be alive.  I'll go up Jane,  to the top of  the hill,  turn left and drive to West Park, at the end of the road, overlooking the ravine full of trees.  There in the open, modern hospital,  she will be sitting, patiently,  waiting for a visitor or  resting, tired from physio.  It will be nine years ago  and she will be two operations and six years  away from her death.  We'll go outside and walk where flowers edge the pavement,  to the gazebo,  above the trees.  I will say to her all the things knocking at my lips,  put a hand on her arm and feel her warmth,  make her smile, talk about Jane Austen, about the baby.  I'll give her the baby to hold. It would be Tam just born,  not Rain, whom she nev

jan 18 My mother never knew Rain, who was born the year she died. She never saw any of my Christmas gingerbread creations.  This poem was written twenty-seven years ago. It was thirty years ago that my mother died. I can't believe I have been so long without her. After she died I discovered I was mourning two mothers: the one I had just lost, and the one I had lost twenty years earlier, when she was first diagnosed with brain tumours. The tumours took away so much as the years went by, she had difficulty walking and suffered headaches that curtailed her social life. She spent months in recovery and rehabilitation after each operation: the tumour kept growing back. I mourned the grandmother that my children should have known, instead of the one who needed quiet and couldn't join in their games. I mourned the mother to whom I could have gone when I needed someone to lean on. ***** anniversary so much in the past three years  I have wanted to share with you the smell of the hyacin

 jan. 12                Fish swim up the window.                                           The primordial valley. The Missisquoi River - 375 million years flowing.   Let it be a place we find in heaven, but living here while we rest is enough. "sixteen miles from seven lakes, way up among the pines"  "a cabin and a backwoods trail" The Hideaway, somehow, again. "When I die let my ashes float down the green river, let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam. I'll be halfway to heaven with paradise waiting, five miles away from wherever I am." * Have I come home? ... to a home I have never known? - where the British soldiers lichen grows, that I used to see at the Hideaway, on the Bruce, where I can bathe in a mountain stream, where the sky is. The doors and bones of the house are ones I must have chosen. The fish lights in the window, found at a church sale somewhere, where else did they ever belong, though they hung about my Toronto house waiting. I lo

 jan. 9  The edge of the world. The mountains and the valley were gone when the day began. We looked out from the edge of the world. But the sun climbed higher and shone intermittently and all the while snow blew down the mountain from the north. After sunset the sky cleared and the stars shone close and bright, almost the first cloudless night we have had this winter.  ***** A pair of ravens lives on the mountain. We see them hunting throughout the day and hear their hoarse voices calling. In the wind and snow a flight of little birds blew like autumn leaves erratic across the meadow, looking black against the sky; chickadees, of which there are many or some other small bird that stays the winter. In the night I heard the hooting of some night flyer.  ***** I was having a down day. I was feeling flat, in the "pessimist" sphere. It was okay; it comes and goes and mostly now it goes. I have only recently begun to trust that the sun side, the positive, active side will return;

jan. 7 This morning the sun is shining. I must turn my attention to what is on my own plate today. I have duties to those in my sphere of care, and chores to perform, but I don't want to ignore the events of yesterday which the whole world watched in shock. The frightful scene of the security officer's retreat up the staircase of the Capitol building as the invading protester tracks him, his repeated stand and retreat is straight out of a horror film as the monster advances and the brave defender is forced backwards with nowhere to go.* The animalistic howling of a painted man in fur and horns is a nightmare.** "Awake! Fear, fire, foes!" Once again I am transported to the fantasy world of The Lord of the Rings. I want to cry out the Horn-Cry of Buckland.*** I decry and mourn the deaths and injuries of yesterday's insanity.  The emperor has no clothes. Stop pretending, stop allowing the lies to go on. The meanings of truth and reality are on the line in the United

 jan. 4                   I went to bed early on December 31, not even staying up to see the New Year in. [The country air demands extra sleep, or perhaps it is winter, reminding me to hibernate, keep warm and watch for the sun's return. It already seems to rise brighter and warmer in the mornings. We had so many overcast days in December that a blue sky was startling to see and the sun was too bright in the south.] The first three days of the new year, falling on Friday, Saturday and Sunday became an island of time when nothing was planned, nothing seemed to happen, what little I saw of newspapers seemed to have little beyond a re-cap of 2020. Monday morning, then, has taken me by surprise as I return to the world of politics and pandemic. President Trump's continued blatant disregard for the 2020 election results, his overtly illegal action in pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger to overturn election results (1) and the admission of "concerns [which] p