210708 Summer, Forty Years, Pathetic Fallacy

 July 8

We have cows again.

Last week the children finished the school year. Indre is going into grade four, and Robin is attending grade one, in September. They attend the school my own children went to for their junior years. That is a wheel turning, a season: picking up one's grandchildren from the very school your children attended. I grew up five minutes from our present home, frequented the same subway stops and parks then as now. For those who were born and raised in a small town this must be the way most families, most circles, turn and turn. But the modern world doesn't reflect this as much. People move, indeed K's family moved numerous times during his childhood, first from town to town in Scotland as his father pursued his medical degree, then through several homes in towns on the Canadian prairies. Two of my four brothers left Toronto as young men and never returned. My own parents both left their homes, my father, Saskatchewan, to go to war, my mother, to come to Canada from England, as his wife. They didn't return to Saskatchewan, but settled, for 9 years, in Vancouver. The year I was born, my father was transferred to Toronto by his company: they bought #49 and lived there until their deaths. I never knew another home before I went to Edmonton, and K and I returned to Etobicoke to live near them. 

Summers between school years are still the backdrop of most of my memories: how the last days of June felt, Toronto summers, hot and humid, how the tar spots on the road felt under your bare toe. There were endless days of swinging on the red wooden swings in the park, and adventuring down to the little wood that grew in a hollow beyond the park, at the eastern edge of the undeveloped field. [I dont know why this field, the only one for miles, was left without houses, though a street ran through it.] The field itself had a bike track of bare packed earth that went up and down the bumps and furrows, where we put our bikes through their paces and skinned our knees. When I was old enough, I was often sent along with my brothers on their adventures, and, as they aged out of swings and bikes, I began to take my little brother along with me. We played as a neighbourhood, all the ages and genders stirred together, other clumps of siblings, in various combinations, as the games and availabilities changed. They were eternal days - time was just the same ticking circle turning round, when dinner was ready, when it got dark. July, still so far from September was heaven-month, a hundred days long. That happened last week for the covid children.

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Also last week K and I celebrated forty years of marriage. It is so different put into those words, folded into four decades, like a closed book on a shelf. Two weeks ago, it felt like lifetimes, ours', the kids', and little ones', The previous generation now gone were so large in our lives those many years. The texture, the embroidered pictures, memories small and clear and polished with frequent handling, the hundred best lines, from movies and from our lives are written on the walls. Last week it was suddenly packaged, black and white, as if into an envelope. That shrunken image will fade and the memories will be coloured-in and textured, and we will have the complete tapestry again. A milestone, though, is a good place to stop, and look back, and look forward. That happened last week.

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The third thing that happened last week was that K and I received our second covid vaccine. I was excited about it: I found myself barely able to believe in our first, nine weeks ago, long past and unreal when I thought back to March of 2020, when plague threatened from day to darker day. 

The first morning after the shot, I imagined that I felt a little stiff, a bit unwell, but it passed by noon. The day after that, however, I was thrown into deep water, my body was stunned and the muscles and bones didn't work - the most pronounced feeling was that my lymph system was in flare. I was aware of every node and vessel pouring out a curative tonic that nonetheless immobilized me, sending me back to sleep and sleep - for three days and nights. For three days the sky was heavy and sullen with clouds, (though without rain), as if damping my recovery.

On the fourth morning I was able to get up and stay up, and each day afterwards I have felt better. I continue to feel my lymph system as clearly as I do my bones, though it is beginning to return to normal. As soon as I was able I began gentle exercises and short walks. I have adhered to a diet high in vegetables and fruits, with plenty of water to drink, in order to facilitate a quick recovery.

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I ventured across the meadow yesterday and up the ridge stream to see the tiny worlds perching on rotten logs and moss-covered stones.

I found a circle in the lower meadow where I am certain the witches gather on summer nights, a private sheltered hollow where they sway and murmur, their tangled hair hanging down, though in daylight it is bright and innocent.

Summer is here, the young birds are hunting with their parents and the old trees by the barn: their small green apples hang like bracelets on their tumbling boughs, and the last few fireflies of the season blink among the milkweeds while the stars come out and the wind blows warm.

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The year of the plague and the vaccine year: sea change years through which the world is passing now.

I would not dissuade anyone from receiving full vaccination. If my reaction was an echo of a body to this covid virus, I would wish it on no-one. It is a storm, a deluge of illness, capable of taking out bridges. If you react, go to bed, enlist helpers from friends and relatives, drink water, take baths, and sleep. I wish you safe-keeping and health.

Mumma Yaga

Rainbow, the evening after our vaccine.