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 19th 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.
