Life Off the Grid 39 – July 22, 2012

8:00 AM

Woke up at 6:15, just in time to see a beautiful grey-blue heron type bird take off from the shore. And then it started to rain. The rain stopped fairly soon, but it continues to be overcast. I may or may not get any painting done today.

And it's raining again. I may have to re-arrange my to-do list. This is disappointing.

According to the news, it is one year since Anders Brevik shot all those people in Norway. Meanwhile, in Halifax, people are celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812. The world is a strange place.

12:50 PM

Finished the first can of paint. Got the front of the cabin and half the east side rolled. It looks so different. Vastly different. Like a whole new cabin. But it isn't. As I paint I become acutely aware of the wood. Where it is solid and where it is failing. There are several boards that are quite rotted and I am worried about them.

The deck is still brown and looks very dark and I am wondering if it should be the same colour as the cabin, or remain brown, or maybe some intermediate colour. I think I am leaning towards a mocha...

Cell signal is very sketchy today. Trying to communicate with Jeff about tool sorting and bookcase design and I find it is just not working well. I am trying not to be frustrated by this. It is a great blessing to be able to send or receive at all. I should be very thankful. I shall keep telling myself this. As my maternal grandmother was fond of saying, “Possess your soul in patience”. Often very good advice.

Another thing she was adamant about was bed-making. There are a few things of her I carry with me and that is one. Patience and made beds. Does anyone make their bed anymore, besides me? Duvets have made it so easy and yet, if my husband and children are any example of the common population, even straightening the sheets and spreading the duvet neatly over them is a thing of the past. I'm not even sure hospitals still do hospital corners. But I do. Making your bed makes a huge difference in making a bedroom look cleaner. I keep telling my kids this. And eventually, once in awhile when I can stand it no longer, I steal into their rooms and make their beds. Because it drives me nuts. OCD, remember? I don't wash my hands to excess, or recheck every little thing. But... I like my spices alphabetized, I like things sorted (and I like sorting, I find it calming), and I like beds to be made...properly.

The third thing of my grandmother's I carry in my life is making sure I say, “You're welcome” when someone thanks me. Or, more peculiarly, I use her words as often as not. “You are entirely welcome.” It's sort of weird when you realize that you have heirloom behaviours.

There is one other thing I share with her. My name.

My maternal grandmother was a lady. She carried monogrammed hankies (cloth hankies are so gross, no I do not do THAT), she never revealed her age and she drank tea out of treasured Royal Dolton china, not a mug. I don't remember ever seeing her in pants. She wore a slip under her dress, even in the hottest days of summer, and wore long cotton nighties to bed. And she would be appalled to read this. She called her friends of decades by their surnames, “Mrs. MacIntosh, Mrs. Baker, etc.” even as they sat together sipping sherry and playing bridge. She collected royal memorabilia and left several large scapbooks full of clippings of royal weddings, christenings, visits. Her hair style mimicked Queen Elizabeth's all the years I knew her, and the old photos from before I was born suggest it was ever so. She had doilies on her furniture and scented cachets in her drawers. Ok, there's another thing I do, except I have sticks of incence in my drawers so my clothes smell like patchouli and sandalwood. I remember as a little girl, picking rosehips with my cousin and sewing up little cloth bags with drawstrings to give Grandma MacBain sachets for her drawers. As I recall, she made a bit of a face but took them and thanked us profusely. She had a passion for lavender and always had clove lifesavers in her purse (do they even make clove lifesavers anymore?). I loathe clove lifesavers.

She was very proper and was always on about standing up straight. Keeping your chin up. And, of course, making your bed.

But she was never rich and she did not have an easy life. She was born in the NorthWest Mounted Police (forerunner of the RCMP) barracks in Regina towards the end of the 19^th century. Her father was a veterinary surgeon with the force, looking after the horses and breeding race horses on the side. They moved to Fort MacLeod when she was quite young and I think they moved to other posts during her time at home with her parents. These places were pretty rough and ready back then. There were no cars, no electricity, no phones, no indoor plumbing. Kind of like here at the cabin. Wood stoves kept them warm inside, furs kept them warm outside in the winter. First Nations people would come to the fort (yes, Fort MacLeod was a fort back then, not a town) to trade furs and my grandmother said they would come to the door and ask for a cup of tea. Her mother was always worried because some of these folks would make such a fuss over her little blond daughters. They were fascinated with the blond hair and kept saying “pretty!” and she was afraid one of them would try to steal one of the girls. Racism was rampant back then. These first or second generation Canadians found first nations people alien and off-putting, and held tight to their European (mostly British) traditions.

I was shocked when I learned my grandmother had taken an active role, along with several other family members of her generation, in breaking up the romance of a second cousin. The young lady he fancied, you see, was most inappropriate. She was Jewish. It's hard to understand that way of thinking these days. But, unfortunately, it was normal back then. Another cousin owned a plantation in the southern US. My grandmother and her sisters were taken there to visit a few times during their childhood. Even as a small child it made my skin crawl to hear her tell stories about the plantation and refer to the people who worked there as “darkies”. She was oblivious to the discomfort of everyone else listening.

But, as I was saying, she did not have an easy life. After she finished school, she became a teacher. And then she met the man who was to become her husband. I can't imagine her parents approved. Or perhaps they did initially. He was a carpenter. He was also a gambler, but I don't know at what point that became really apparent. I do know that my mother, and her sisters, were moved from town to town all over southern Saskatchewan during her childhood because either there was no work for him (this was the 1930s), or the gambling debts were catching up to him. From grade one to grade twelve my mother attended about 10 different schools in different towns. Jack could not make enough for them to live on, or gambled the money away, so Grandma went back to work. She taught school, and in some places she was the principal.

Jack was also a notorious womanizer and just generally not a nice guy. We ( my cousins and I) learned this after Grandma started to suffer from dementia and she would rant about Jack and his women. About bills and bruises. It was shocking to my 13 year old self. Our mothers would try to shush her, or get us out of earshot...

Jack got sick and Grandma packed him off to Winnipeg where he could be closer to medical services while she remained in a small town, probably enjoying a peaceful life for the first time in many years. He died several months before I was born, so I never met him. My Dad told me once, when I was older and had children of my own, that Jack was a right old devil and downright nasty to my Mom. Calling her stupid all the time, saying she could never do anything right. In light of this, my Mom's many anxieties and profound lack of self-confidence suddenly made a lot of sense. And yet, she and her sisters adored him. They referred to their parents as “Mother and Daddy”.

I'm not sure of the chronology of their separation. At 17, my Mom went to live with her father in Winnipeg to attend university. She was the oldest, with one sister 8 years younger and the other 10 years younger. Only the youngest left now. Which is part of why I am writing this. Not because I imagine that most readers will find this remotely interesting, but because it is important to record family history somewhere. Maybe my children will find it entertaining... or maybe they will find it explains some of my weirdness...

My grandparents were married in 1922. And by 1941 they were living apart. And the world was at war. And it wasn't a time when people talked about separation or divorce. It just wasn't done. So Grandma lived her life, with her 10 and 7 year old daughters and Jack lived his. I think the story was he went to the city to find work or, conversely, he went to the city for medical treatment. He wasn't well, that much is fairly clear. But it's one of those family mysteries as to how much of his departure had to do with economic and medical circumstances and how much had to do with his behaviour and my Grandmother's inability to tolerate it any longer. They were together when he died. After Grandma retired and Jack was really quite ill, she moved to Winnipeg. It may have been earlier. These things weren't talked about. I wish now I had asked my Mom while she was alive, but I'm not sure I would have got much out of her. I may ask my aunt...

My Grandmother had a sister, Helen. Her young man was struck down either in the First World War or in the flu epidemic of 1918. I was never sure. Anyway, she remained single the rest of her life, like one of those tragic Victorian heroines. She was the older of the two. I remember her hands shaking terribly. I knew nothing of Parkinsons, and it hasn't been said, but I suspect that was what she had. When I was 4, my mother and my Grandmother and I were coming back from shopping to the apartment the sisters shared. Being a bouncy little girl, I went sprinting through the door as quick as Grandma could get it open. There was Aunt Helen, on the kitchen floor, surrounded by broken crockery. She had been making a cup of tea. I don't know if it was a heart attack or a stroke... I was deemed too little to go to the funeral, but I remember the gathering after... That was the first of many deaths.

This happens when your whole family is old. I was a late-life child for my parents. Which meant pretty well everyone in the generation before them was really old. My next oldest sibling is 16 years older than I. My childhood, from then on, was punctuated by wakes and funerals. Consequently, death in the family is something I do really well. I know the drill, you might say. My husband had been to his grandmother's funeral and his cousin's funeral and my sister-in-law's mother's funeral and my sister-in-law's funeral and my Mom's funeral, but when my Dad died I was surprised that this was the first dead body he had ever seen. That I kissed my father's forehead and said goodbye I think really shook him up.

As a society we have sanitized death, removed it from our lives. Maybe that's part of why some people are so cavalier about wreaking havoc with guns and knives. Death is an abstract concept. Real death is handled by professionals. Nurses and doctors, personal care-home staff, paramedics, police, coroners, undertakers... Used to be, someone in the family washed the body and prepared it for burial. Death was personal. And that care was a last gift to the deceased.

4:30 PM

The thunderstorm has passed. The sky is bright and cheery again. And I am hungry. My two eggs for breakfast seem forever ago now, even though it was only 8 this morning.

5:20 PM

Really hungry. What to eat? I have eaten everything. Several times. Curry sounds good, but I have less than 500 ml of yoghurt left until Friday. Pasta. I guess it's going to be pasta. But I have to fetch water first.

5:40 PM

Water retrieved. Filtered and in a pot getting hot. There should be veggies to go with. Hmmmm...

Really not inspired. Hot. Tired. Ok. I give in. Basil pesto it is. Maybe some crushed chilies.

5:55 PM

Crap. The propane is out. Glad I dragged that full tank down. Gotta go out and switch tanks and relight the fridge. Reminds me of my Mom talking about living someplace where there was gas-light and the gas would go out and they had to plug the meter with coins to get it going again. Only here, I have to lug a tank into place and use pliers to undo the old tank and connect the new one. We tried to hook up those modern type connectors with the handle to turn, like on barbecues. Didn't work for some reason. So we had to put the old lines back on.

At least the fridge came back on first try. That is a bonus. It's always a bit stressful, pressing the electronic ignition, over and over, with no result. First thing to go on barbecues... And the old fridge you could light with a match. Circa 1940s propane fridge, only way to light it. Not sure how to light this fridge if the electronic ignition fails.

I was wondering why the water was taking so long to boil... Now it will boil, and then, soon after, there will be food. Possess your soul in patience.

6:20 PM

Dinner! YAY!

6:30 PM

So much prep time, so fast gone. However, I am sated, so it's all good.

7:00 PM

Guinness is sleeping. He's having some sort of dream, legs twitching, barking and grunting...

7:45 PM

It's got quite dark in the cabin. Seems fairly clear outside. Must be the changing angle of the sun, relative to the trees, that's making it seem dark so early.

Starting to think of going to the cabana to read and, eventually, sleep.

8:00 PM

I think that's it. Off to read in the cabana.