230101 another day

It felt like just another day. I walked with Rocky in the field. K joined us for a circle. Then I went to the rink in our neighbourhood park and had a skate! The first since perhaps the winter of 2020. That seems like a long time ago now. The beginning of the pandemic, the last winter I spent in Toronto, until this one. 

Rock and I had the rink to ourselves for most of the time, and then a father and son came and practiced hockey, kindly sharing the space. I began a little out of practice, but my mojo began to come back and I felt the joy of remembering how to fly. 

When I was growing up, we lived right across the road from skating rinks - one for hockey and one not. I skated most winter days from the time I could stand up in a pair. My father tied my skates for me, for years it seems. Always he made them evenly tightened, just right. Every autumn we went to the skate exchange at Duke's on Bloor at Kipling; it still does business, but I am not sure if it still does exchanges. They kept us all (five kids) in pre-loved, outgrown skates, which we in turn outgrew, for all the years we were children. I just last week got my skates sharpened there. Neighbourhoods. Our villages. 

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       (Can we just not fight?)

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It is astonishing - the things I have heard in my life, and learned, but not learned. Now the words go through my head again, long-memorized, once-processed, twice processed, and yet only now I begin to "realize", make real in my life, some of these lessons. On each turn, and return, of the circle, the important lessons, the lasting ones, are more thoroughly learned. They gain importance as mortality becomes more palpable. You learn and re-learn how to be a better person, family member, parent, friend. Because, of course, when you are twenty-seven - of course - you believe life will last forever. But then you cross thresholds. A child of the next generation is born. A member of the previous generation, the first grandparent, dies. We become orphans, though we are already in our forties or sixties, and we inherit next-in-line. We become a bit wiser. We are more frail and more wrinkled. So it goes.

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I returned to the rink this afternoon with Indre, Robin and Nick (their dad) for another skate. It was ideal, the ice not too fast, the temperature pleasant. A gaggle of small children was learning to skate, pulled, like a trail of goslings, behind a parent! Indre and Robin do quite well, and Nick is a pro, from his hockey days.

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We had a family dinner tonight, the six of us. I prepared ham, potatoes, kale, corn soufflé (a signature Christmas-time dish), and baked beans, with pineapple, and red pepper jelly (which came in my stocking). The meal was excellent and the company was delightful. 

Here is the dollhouse on Christmas day - the family together, gramma on her way down in her olden-time dress - that is her in the children's room in blue and white. We decided that she could share the children's room. Indre has made a bathroom to the right of the house, outside.

Today, January first, is the traditional day to eat the gingerbread. I took a last photo and then we pretended we were time, hundreds of years, bringing down the castle, the horses long dead, the trees fallen.

Happy New year to you. Keep well.

Mumma Yaga

For those who have not seen it before, this is my "dollhouse station", with storage underneath, in what was the spare room and my dayroom for many years. Indre has been a faithful partner in keeping the house arranged. Everything is second-hand, collected piece by piece over many years. (Except for the lights.) Finding a house, at last, happened eleven or twelve years ago. It is second-hand, handmade, and well-sized for most of my furnishings.