Prompt # 22 - Daily Routines

Prompt # 22 - Daily Routines


My main daily routine is coffee. Then some small breakfast muffin which usually includes oatmeal. I try to work (write) every morning. This winter I am experimenting, trying to heat the house with wood because my neighbor, Denis, gave me some free wood, and the hydro bill gets so high between December and March.

My friend Carol and I try to walk usually at least four afternoons a week. I go uptown to her place or she comes over here. I shop for groceries about twice per month. I have no housecleaning routine although I know I should.


My home routine during childhood included: Dad getting up, lighting the fire, putting on the coffee to perc for Mum and making a pot of tea for himself and probably his own breakfast. Mum would get up and get the kids up for school, making our breakfast and our school lunch, while Dad was outside doing the chores. The school van arrived at 8:25 am and we returned at 3:55 pm, just in time for me to have one cookie and settle down to watch The Lone Ranger.


My favourite weekend or holiday routine was urging my Dad to hurry as we drove over the "blind" road the three miles to Grandma's house. My goal was to get there before Grandma put her teeth in (no idea why this appealed to me) but if we were on time, she popped them in and then applied white creamy Jergen's hand lotion on her hands and rubbed the excess on my hands. It had the most lovely smell which I have since learned is almond.

Prompt # 21 - Childhood Hobbies

Prompt # 21 - Childhood Hobbies

My childhood hobbies, besides reading, included stamp collecting and rock collecting. I carried on stamp collecting in an album my mother had started. I may still have it, or I may have given it to my nephew Roy.

I also still have my rock collection, and parts of my brother George's rock collection, and some of my mother's more prized pieces. I collected mostly with my mother and with my younger cousin, Cameron. Friends often give me rocks as gifts because they know me and honour my passion. A dinosaur bone. A Gulf of Mexico rose. Aragonite. Selenite from the Winnipeg Floodway.

I have written about rock collecting on my other blog, Earthabridge. Please feel free to check it out. http://www.earthabridge.blogspot.ca , three posts on The Joys of Collecting Rocks posted September 27, 2012 (09/27/12), complete with pictures.

Prompt # 20 - The Feeling of Home

Prompt # 20 - The Feeling of Home


Everything I write is about home. I have used the title “Writing Home” more than once, and published a creative non-fiction piece “Without a Map” about one of our regular return visits to the old home place on the Manitoba prairie. It's all about home or the feeling of home. Of belonging. To some place. It's place that connects us to the planet.



All my places have trees. At the first place, the farm outside Oak River, the trees were poplar, Manitoba maple, American elm, willow. With, on the lawn, lilac, honeysuckle, caragana, and the fir tree my mother “rescued” from a road allowance ditch near the national park boundary. And in the bush, there were hawthorn, saskatoon, chokecherry, box, and wolf willow. This home had lots of space, big sky, sunsets, with stars, bright moons, northern lights.


In Winnipeg the trees were mostly American elm, so big that their branches entwined over the pavement making in summer a green nave in front of my house on Ruby Street. There was also an avenue of elms leading into the University of Manitoba campus, planted as a war memorial. I think they are gone now, victims of Dutch Elm disease.


When I first moved to BC, the trees around the house in Agassiz included fir, weeping willow, holly, laurel, and black walnut, with a wild cherry and a bouquet of white birch at the back, a yew tree in front of my studio, wisteria over the front deck, and some strange vine-like “weed” tree, perhaps acacia. I looked that up. It looks like Robinia pseudoacacia .


The year after my mother died, I moved to live on a corner of the ranch where she grew up. The trees there are ponderosa pine with an old Manitoba maple in the yard, brought when the family migrated west. Willow trees, and a flowering quince. Something with hot pink flowers. The Kettle River valley is high and long and people take their lawn chairs outside every night to sit and watch the sunset.


Out here they have a saying about someone who likes to dress the part--”He's more hat than cattle.” My place now is like that, “more tree than lawn,” and that's exactly the way I want it. Mostly grand fir, some hemlock, cedar nearby, dogwood, at the front, over the rhododendron and box and the moss lawn, a bouquet of “weed maple.” With fern around the edges. The mountain to the west blocks the setting sun, but the mountain to the east, the backside of Mount Hope, is a spectacular view, especially when the sun climbs it in the morning and then bursts out, and when the moon climbs the mountain at night. It is really too beautiful. So beautiful that I sacrifice work and opportunities and choose to stay happily home instead. Maybe I'm just feeling nostalgic because the neighbour is out there as I write, wielding his chain saw.


I've been ridiculed in the past about my love of trees. A tour of the Scottish highlands with only pictures of trees. “But where are the people,” viewers ask, perplexed. But the answer is simple: “I didn't know any people. Just trees.” Don't know why or how this obsession started. Something to do perhaps with names. My grandmother born a Woodland, my godmother a Mrs Grove.


My homes have to have a river too. My home town was called Oak River, although we were maybe three miles west of the river bank. There were sloughs along the lane and behind the barnyard. In Winnipeg I lived on both the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and in northern Manitoba, along the Nelson River. In BC I've lived in the Fraser River valley and steps from the Kettle River. Home today is within the sound of Silver Creek as it makes its final rush to the Fraser River. If only I could get this darn upload to work, you could hear it too.

Prompt #19 - Who Do I Miss?

Prompt #19 - Who Do I Miss?

Who do I miss? I miss my mother.

A few weeks after she died in 1993, I wrote this piece, imaging a final farewell hike. The feeling of abandonment was and is still very real.

Bridal Falls

Through arching green boughs draped with silver moss we ascend to the granite rockface washed with whitewater cascading in tiers from invisible Source to the tumbled boulders below. The rustle of this billowing train whispers in the echoing nave.

We have hiked this trail before. Skirting the Pixie Cups and Fairy Slippers. Tending the Shooting Stars. With child ears I still hear her telling me the understory—Five Fingers, Maidenhair, Bracken and Swordfern. With her eyes I first did see bruised white blossoms 'neath the canopy dappled with growth and decay.

In this box of polished cedar I carry the woman who carried me. Defying the signs, I leave the path, break a pungent trail through fallen timber. Beneath the nurse log suckling twins, I sprinkle her into beckoning Ghostfingers, onto pallid Angel Wings. With the mist rising from Bride's veil, she vanishes into the tapestry of the grove.

I step through the falls into a shaft of light and return alone to the plain.

My mother is not. She is moss. She is cedar. She is jade. I am no one's daughter. I am a space in the lace of Bride's crown. I am shadow dancing in the shimmer of brocade. I am willow pining, water winding home below the falls. I am dogwood centred from all the trees—in a rush of confusion as the nails enter. Say you have chose, not forsaken me. Tell me this pain is ecstasy.

Photo is from Windows Free Background images, photographer unknown.
This looks very similar to Bridal Falls.

"Bridal Falls " Copyright J.M. Bridgeman

Prompt #18 - First Gift

Prompt #18 – First Gift

It seems I am not alone in scratching my memory for a first gift. Hand-me-down clothes. A potty. My panda which I called Teddy. My baby doll BettyAnn. A book from my Grandma called Just Like Me which had pictures of all sorts of baby animals. Then someone's Bunnykins helped me remember my dish. A baby dish that is so heavy that only a Paul Bunyan baby could pick it up and toss it from the high chair tray. It is cream coloured, about eight inches round, with a thick edge. On the back it is stamped Royal Doulton so I expect it came from my Grandmother or perhaps one of her aunts still in England. The decal under the food is a girl in a pink dress and sun bonnet with a watering can watering rows of flowers (an iconic image which still applies to me today.) And surrounding the scene are four lines from a nursery rhyme--Mary Mary Quite Contrary/How does your garden grow?/With silver bells and cockle shells/And mussels all in a row. (Usually, the rhyme says "pretty maids all in a row.")

I have loved flowers and gardens all my life. One of my nicknames was "the flower girl." I loved the challenge of learning to identify flowers which were not local--silver bells, cockle shells, mussels, pretty maids? Were the sea shells just fertilizer? Perhaps some will say that the verse gave me permission to be "quite contrary" which is another thing which also still applies to me today. Then, I learned later, the history of the rhyme. Mary was Queen Mary, King Henry VIII's older daughter, who attempted to reinstate Catholicism to England during her short reign and did so in a somewhat "bloody" way, by executing people who challenged her. Dreaming Casually in WhatDoesHistorySay.blogspot.ca says that the bells may refer to church bells, the shells to pilgrimage (the image of the Camino Way), and the pretty maids to nuns. She adds that the bells and shells may also refer to methods of torture, the pretty maids to those waiting to be beheaded, and that the "garden" which is growing is actually a cemetery becoming more and more crowded with executed subjects. I also learned even later, and am continuing to explore through genealogy research, that some of our relatives were indeed "flowers" in the gardens of Mary or of Henry VIII. So this verse which I saw three times a day for my first few years was an early lesson in the power of art as commentary, and in the power of art as the memory of a people and their history. Stylistically, it is linked to my awareness of the use of rhyme as a memory aid in oral literature, and to the way we associate it now with childish verse or song lyrics.

Many years later (more than 25 years ago) when I was working inside federal correctional institutions, I extrapolated on this verse in a poem of my own. I still like this effort which, if nothing else, is proof of Wordsworth's truism that the child is mother to the woman, or that beginnings are important, or that the past is always with us, or that life is a braid of past, present, and future. All the Best for 2014!


Mary Mary


It's Easter Monday I'm

thirty-nine years old

digging in   delving deeper

preparing the beds

for re-planting

I've collected donations from all my

acquaintances--calla lilies, mission

bells, twinflowers

sweet baby's breath

--how does my garden grow--


Yesterday

rototilling the south plot

struck shard of pottery

which miraculously dug out intact

this morning my fork strikes

tinkle of metal

a tarnished key

dropped by Raven

on the thirty-ninth day

Searching for meaning

I deposit them both into

the dishwasher

Surprised by Joy

they wash up clean

smooth and shiny the little dish

swirls of green and blue a nest

for my key and the one hollow chocolate egg

I have managed to resist


Thirty-nine years old and single again,

a woman over forty has

a greater chance

of being killed by terrorists

than she does of marrying

the clock is ticking   the clock

ticks Lock them all

bombers hijackers kidnappers too

in the west wing

--pretty boys all in a row--

I carry the big brass keys myself

I keep them safe

I watch them grow


Finish this digging

then transplant

Proud lilies crowd out

the bleeding heart   worms

have eaten the cherry tree

I have made this bed I have made

this bed And I am tired

A soaking bath by candleglow

--you are a creature all enraptured--

blue wax drips

into shiny blue bowl

the impression of a key

the key was in the garden

--in the garden wet with rain--

©

Copyright J.M. Bridgeman