mumma yaga

Feb 7 Yesterday was warm enough to sit on the porch and watch the snow falling. Fig preferred to stay in and sleep.     The snow gets piled up in front of the house as the plow person keeps our driveway cleared. This snow shovel is my new workout equipment. No lifting just pushing and tipping.       Mumma's Stovetop Baked Beans When my children were little I developed the practice of making dinner in the morning. At five o'clock, when one might usually begin cooking, I was tired (and out of spoons - although we didn't have that expression then), the children were hungry and needy, the kitchen a disaster area and the house a "tip" of the day's clothes, toys and adventures: laundry, crafts and newspapers. Breakfast and lunch were simple; the ingredients were household staples. Dinners needed more attention to nutrition and variety, timing and shopping, and a lot more work in the kitchen. But if the chicken was cooked, or the vegetables prepped, or if the whol...

 Feb. 5 This morning I woke to a pink sky.                           This was the view north through the trees above the house.     Tuesday we had a most excellent snowfall. On the left are the witches in the storm, and on the right, the hen house. It snowed all day and into the night.  Wednesday was warmer and before the snow started again Fig and I went for a walk down to the farm, our next neighbours down the hill. (We have one neighbour above us on the road - the family that Blackie lives with.) It was our first walk in a while, because Fig can't manage if it's colder than minus 10. I put him on leash and we set off. He seemed excited and ran along beside me down the road. After a while I let him off the lead and he seemed to sense where the road was and barely ran into the snowbanks at all. He enjoyed smelling along the road and you wouldn't know he couldn't see! It was reassuring to see ...

 Feb. 1: Cold and Bright Saturday, Jan. 30 It is snowing again; a very fine snow like mist is blowing down the mountain beside us. The valley is hidden by cloud or snow and we are again stranded on the edge of the world. It might be an edge of time, like in The Langoliers, beyond which there is no past, the southern hills just a memory. * It is later now and there is not snow on our hill but the valley has snow and the more distant mountains are hidden. For a few moments the sun came out and shone onto my desk. I have tied my coat belt onto Fig once or twice for a leash, for instance when the farmer's tractor wanted to pass us, but other than that I had stopped using a leash soon after we arrived here. But that was before Fig became blind. It has taken me these five weeks to figure out that Fig will be better, for now, on leash. Yesterday, when I thought to take him out with collar and leash, I discovered my instinct was right - he came along happily and confidently, he chose a spo...

 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...

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 ...

 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 Aust...

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 hyaci...

 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 win...

 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...