Prompt #1 - Who Are You?

Prompt #1 (September 3, 2013) – Who Are You?

I am: a Canadian, a writer, a reader, a blogger, a teacher, an editor, a photographer, an advocate of human rights.

I am a homeowner, a driver, a sister, an aunt, a great aunt, a friend, a brunette, a Scrabble player.

I am an ex-wife, an ex-screw, an ex-Manitoban, an ex-lover. A traveller, a collector, a lover of nature, a lover of cats, a lover of art.

I am J.M., Joan, Joni, Bridget, Eartha, Jamie. A female, a woman, a watcher, an observer, a natural.

The wording of the question "Who" implies to me, a very literal-minded reader, a noun response. Not adjectives or adverbs. The public exposure of a blog invites positive responses, keeping up the facade, a persona of optimism and positivity, of what is acceptable, expected.

Ideas abducted from reading other posts: I am an introvert, and a Sagittarius.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside awakes. - Carl Jung

I love Carl Jung, but I'm not sure about this one. It would seem that “inside” would need adjectives. I found a great image though. I visited the Book of Kells in May.

My grandfather used to play “Beautiful Dreamer” for grandma on the mandolin. “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are awaiting thee . . . ” Stephen Foster

Prompt #2 - My Birth

Prompt #2 (September 10, 2013) - My Birth


I was born in Rivers. I have always loved the sound of that. Borne in rivers. But Rivers is a town ten miles from our farm, which was five miles from our home town, Oak River, in Manitoba, Canada. I was born in Rivers, in Mrs. Madden's "nursing home" which meant a private home where pregnant women went to deliver. This was before the age of rural hospitals. I always knew that Donnie M was born there at the same time, and my Mum and his mother remembered each other. I did not know until more than 60 years later that the mother of another friend worked at that nursing home, possibly as a midwife, and thus was present at my birth. I wrote about this "coincidence" in my Dancing With Ghosts: A Cross-Cultural Education. http://www.dancingwithghostsaneducation.blogspot.ca/

I was born on December 16 and ever since, 16 has been my lucky number. I do believe that my first memory is of a field of sparkling white snow (over which we would have driven to get to the farm, possibly in a horse-drawn wagon because the snow made the route for the car impassable.) The lane into the house was not built until the year I started school.

There are photos of me swaddled and in my parents arms, with a winter woodpile and axe in the background, and more from about six months of age, by the time it got warm enough to take babe in highchair outside. This was before the age of flash.

I was lucky last Christmas when my cousin Carol from Toronto forwarded me two pieces of paper she had gleaned while sorting through some trunks belonging to our mutual maternal grandmother. My birth announcement: a small card, a circular globe with a babe bursting through, like a chick hatching. Inside, my names Joan Margaret (after my godmother, my grandmother, and my mother), the date, time 11:30 pm, and weight which I cannot decipher, perhaps 5 or 7 and three-quarters pounds? And a letter inside a birthday card sent to my Grandmother (whose birthday was May 16) written by my mother, thanking her for gifts of a baby kimono and diapers and telling her about hand-me down bonnets and dresses from my cousin, and a wee wee pot. Mum describes how I was already sleeping through the night and how I "sure was good." I joke to friends how she never in my memory said such things to me.

I don't know whether I had hair. I know my brother was bald for his first eighteen months. My eyes are green and I believe have always been, like my Mum's.

Twins: I've always felt like a twin, although technically, not. My brother next to me is only eleven months younger. Donnie M had a sister born the same year as he was, and cousin Carol is also only less than a year older than her brother. It was after the war and people were making up for lost time, for the families they had postponed while the world was at war. I also have a twin cousin, Lew, born the morning of the very same day and year. He's the smart one. I don't think there was any collusion. I was born in Manitoba nine months after my parents were married in Kettle Valley, BC, with Uncle Tom the only relative of Dad's who was able to attend. Lew was born in Peace River, Uncle Jim and Aunt Dot's second child. Also, our best friends and next door neighbours for the first ten years of my life were twins, Linda and Leila, who were born in April, between my birthday and my brother's. I think being the oldest, and the only girl, have both had more impact.

Prompt #3 - My Physical Self

Prompt #3 (September 14, 2013) My Physical Self

This is a topic I do not like. My appearance is not something I care to spend much time on, beyond basic cleanliness. I have a broad back and very square shoulders. I carry my excess weight mostly in front, below the waist. I'm never happy with my hair. I like it--still brown, chin-length bob, wavy, but super sensitive to humidity, and hot, hot, hot, in this hot summer we've had. But I don't want to cut it short. It curls, and short hair, especially bangs, remind me too much of being a kid. I'm glad to be past that stage. I like hats, especially a beige cotton one I wear all the time to keep off sun and rain. Bought it at a garage sale years ago. Just toss it into the tub, it's wash and wear.

I never wear earrings and do not have pierced ears. I'm glad that I inherited from my mother a lack of interest in such things. I never wear lipstick either, mainly because I do not wish to draw attention to my mouth. I was young before the days of "braces" and thus my teeth are farther apart than the standard American chicklet smile. Lipstick always wears half-off. I have a few fillings but not many. I dread getting older and losing teeth which I will not be able to afford to get replaced.

I'm Caucasian female, 5'3" tall, 30 pounds overweight, size fluctuates, with brown hair, a small bit of grey at temples, and green eyes. I've worn glasses since Grade One (for almost 60 years) and expect to do so forever (astigmatism). Plus, I feel naked without them. I have two small scars. No, maybe three. One from exploratory laparoscopy through my belly button. (Fibroids, not serious.) One on my left breast, for a biopsy which I was later told had been unnecessary. And one on my forehead where I was hit by a stone at recess in the schoolyard in Grade 3. That time, there was lots of blood. A boy named Mervin was blamed. He was big, older, but already behind in school. The story was that boys were competing to see who could throw a stone the highest, and I happened to be standing where one of those stones came down. I always suspected that my brother knew something that he did not confess about this incident. He was there.

My hands are large, I think. With long fingers. Glove size 7. I love rings but often forget to don them before leaving the house. For everyday I prefer silver, and semi precious stones, smokey quartz, rose quartz, garnet, jade, moonstone, amethyst. This is connected to my passion for geology, mica, obsidian, tourmaline. The diamonds I have to keep in the vault so I seldom see them let alone wear them. My prize ring is a diamond band made from half the diamonds in an old cocktail ring that belonged to my grandmother. Mum had the ring taken apart--the prongs (claws?) were too worn to wear it safely--and had two rings made, one for her and one for me. Now, of course, I have hers too, which features a large solitaire with two other diamonds on each shoulder. I cannot remember if my fingerprints are loops or whorls. I was fingerprinted twice, both for the purposes of employment as a peace officer in the federal penitentiary system. I've only had a good manicure once in my life, and one other time when it got messed up as I was getting into my car. What a waste. And I probably only got the manicure because it came with the pedicure. I do like my feet. Size 6.5 or 7. Long toes. I love wearing thongs (flipflops) and slides. Maybe I should take a selfie of my feet.

Anderson Cooper, eat your heart out.

Prompt #4 - Seasons

Prompt #4 (September 22, 2013) My Favourite Season

For my favourite season, I think I have to pick fall. Probably because it meant the start of the school year. New clothes, a new lunch kit, new scribblers and pens. The smell of cedar shavings around the classroom pencil sharpener. Of someone's orange rinds in the wastepaper basket after lunch. And the end of the farm year, with combines and grain trucks, augers and elevators. The hot noon lunch driven out to the fields, eaten "on the run" so as not to lose even an hour of warm dry days. Hot tea drunk from quart sealers. Cookies stuffed into dusty shirt pockets. And the garden harvest, Mum's kitchen becoming a factory production line. Blanched peas and corn for the freezer. Rows of cellar shelves stocked with sealers and more sealers full of every kind of food for the winter. Apricots. Blueberries. Cherries. Crabapples. Peaches. Pears. Raspberries. Rhubarb. Strawberries. Tomatoes. And pickles. Beets. Mustard cauliflower. Mustard beans. Rhubarb relish smelled the best of all--onions and cinnamon stewing together. Tomato and cranberry catsup. Thousand day pickles. Dilled cucumbers. Dilled carrots. Old hens and venison. Grape jelly and strawberry jam. A full potato bin. A huge crock of sand with carrots and parsnips buried within. Stacks of pumpkins and vegetable marrow. Cabbages hanging upside down from the joists. That was what it seemed to be all about. The world turned upside down. With everything that had been "going out" now coming back in, in a flurry of lonely or communal labour.
 

I love the colours. Gold. Red. Brown. Orange. I loved the full pumpkin harvest moon climbing from the horizon. The smell of earth in the air. The colours of the sunset exploding with all the extra dust. And in the olden days, when they used to burn the stubble and the fields were a line of fire, yellow and orange and red against the black of night. The smell of clean smoke.
 

I live elsewhere now. There is no real harvest except for decorations on school windows and displays in the supermarket. And fall here means the beginning of the rainy season. I can already hear it strumming as it hits the roof. Everything is still lush, even the crop of leaves which have fallen on the moss of the lawn. A different kind of beauty. The same wet earth smell. No basement. No canning. A wealth of generous friends with gardens.

Maybe I'm feeling nostalgic because my brother just phoned me with the news. The house, the yard, the barnyard have all disappeared. Bulldozed like the windbreak and the pasture and the sloughs which used to surround it. Bulldozed, burned, buried, levelled, cultivated over into the one grand wheatfield. Owned now, rumour has it, by some giant corporation on another continent. Things change. Life goes on. Mine goes on virtually without wheat, and without a cellar full of home preserves. I'm just glad that such abundance was once a part of my experience. I'm glad too that it sewed in me an appreciation of how so much is given.

Prompt #5 - My Childhood Home

Prompt #5 (September 29, 2013) - My Childhood Home

I lived in the same house on the same farm for the first seventeen years of my life, until the day I left home to go to university. And I never lived with my parents ever again after that. I loved living on a farm even though I was not the typical outdoors type of person. My father and brothers did what few barn chores there were and my mother did all the gardening and lawn care, so my responsibility was pretty much just my schoolwork. But I loved walking out into the pasture or across the fields or walking or biking down the roads and over to the nearest neighbours which, for the first ten years, was where the twins lived, Linda and Leila, and after that, my cousins, four boys all younger than me. The pasture was a magical place of grass, low box-like shrubs, and scrub bush, mostly Manitoba maple and poplar, with willow in the lower sections surrounding the sloughs (rhymes with “clues”) which are places where rainwater and runoff water collect, mostly in spring, and which have usually evaporated before the end of summer. If the water did not evaporate, then it would have been called a lake. The farm was on the Parklands of Manitoba, three quarter sections around the home place, most of it “broken” meaning under cultivation, planted in wheat, oats, barley, or flax, with clumps of bush around the farmstead and along the fencelines.

Set atop what passed for a hill on those plains, surrounded by a mature windbreak of Manitoba maple and American elm, and covered with grey asphalt siding, the house was old. It came with the farm. It had been built in 1891 and did not have a foundation or a basement. There was a cellar dug into the dirt underneath the main building which was accessed originally by a trap door from the kitchen. The house was heated by the cookstove and a space heater which burned originally, coal, then briquettes, then oil. The upstairs was heated by a chimney which snaked through the floor and walls and out through the roof. My mother always tried to improve the house. She had grown up in a much larger ranch house built the same year but in BC, about 2000 miles away. She painted and wallpapered and eventually got built-in cupboards installed and running water in a bathroom after “rural electrification” arrived, and a water cistern under the new master bedroom. We never had “flush toilets” at home, just an outhouse, but also the luxury of an “indoor honey bucket” during the winter. The downstairs floors were beige tile and the upstairs, grey linoleum. There was yellow congoleum around the kitchen walls and painted v-joint wainscotting which was removed and the walls covered with gyproc when a picture window was installed in the living room. I can barely remember the pre-electric light days, although I still have some of the kerosene lamps that we used back then.

My room was one of two small bedrooms under the slanted ceilings upstairs. I inherited its white wallpaper with red roses which I loved. The room had two big windows facing south which for one week every month were flooded with moonlight. I loved that room and the moon is one of the things I missed most when I moved to the city with all its light pollution. I still miss the moon, and the Northern Lights, and the winter sunlight on snow. And the wolf willow. The way it smells in June when its shy flowers bloom.

The first leaving consisted of day trips, going to school. A van (a private car contracted to transport schoolchildren) picked us up at the door at 8:25 am and drove us to school and home again by 3:55 pm. School was in town, Oak River, about five miles away. I did my whole school career there, eight years in the elementary school and four in the “new” high school, Oak River Collegiate (although my brothers, only one and three years behind me, both graduated from Rivers Collegiate, in a slightly larger town, about ten miles from our farm, because of consolidation.)

I left home to go to university, moving into women's residence at the University of Manitoba's Fort Garry campus. I loved university, and living on campus. There were 20,000 students there at that time (only twelve in my whole Grade 12 graduating class) so it was a bit of a culture shock, but in a good way. I learned to negotiate the buses around Winnipeg, a city of about one half a million people, then and now. I was there for four years and then three years summer school for teacher training. Some of the best years of my life.