In The Quiet Hour

 I don't know what to write about. I don't want to write. Why did I ever start trying to post once a week? I hate the list of topics I have to write about. Why did I ever think people would actually be interested in me and my uneventful life? 

I'm sitting on a dam just outside a small town situated between my sister's place and our place. It's 6:45 am. An occasional vehicle crunches by. The gulls lined up on the yellow bouys are waking up and calling to each other. Off in the distance I hear the rush of the dam water as it falls into it's new rushing existence. It's a foggy morning.  I can only see about a quarter of a mile in any direction. The lake before me stretches out until it blends into the fog and seems to reach up to meet the sky, curving above me in that bluish grey color and falling seamlessly into the marsh behind me, obscuring any view of the town. A lone paddler slips his kayak into the lake and glides silently into the fog almost before I notice him.

I used to think I was a night owl. I used to think I liked to read and sew and do who knows what til all hours of the night. I loved the night sky, I'd sit and stare at the stars for long minutes at a time. I hated mornings and 8:00 am was too early for me. Somewhere along the line I changed. I imagine it was due to a few different circumstances. Half of last year breakfast was at 8:00 sharp and often a girl had to be down by 6 or shortly thereafter to watch Children or get them off to school. Or if I didn't have that duty I'd be rudely wakened from my sleeping reverie by someone yelling 'Dirty diaper second nurse' and I'd have to scurry out of bed at 7:00 to go change a diaper. And then when I came home I launched into a busy life with a job and little siblings around a lot of the time and to get everything done or even have time to myself I had to get up earlier. And I started loving it. I started loving the quietness, the aloneness, the peacefulness. That hour or so when people are up and even heading to work, but not really awake. I get that feeling that I'm the only person in the world. Just me, the birds and insects, and God.

It's almost a powerful feeling. To be all alone where hundreds of others pass by during the day. To hear the birds and crickets and know you are the only person hearing those exact sounds right now. To watch that last little bit of sunrise on a new morning and know that while the day ahead of you might become riddled with mistakes and worries, right now you have a fresh start. A new day that will maybe become the favorite of your past week or month.

 I wish I could explain my feelings and thoughts about mornings in a way that would make you want to try it once. I wish I could explain mornings in a way that would make you see the wonder and splendour of them. I tried, but when I started waxing poetic, suddenly i was writing in run-in sentences about dirty diapers which is decidedly not poetic. So if somehow my unpoetic prose has inspired you to get out of bed earlier some morning, I will be thankful at least one person took my advice. If this inspires no-one, then I shall be thankful I'll be able to keep my mornings and their quiet musings to myself.

Ordinary Dirt

 The thoughts in my head paint amazing pictures of beautiful scenes, but when I open my mouth the words come out as ordinary dirt.

                                -My 18-year-old self

The World Is Your Oyster

  Most of the places I've been I was at before I was a teenager. I am passed even the teeanager years now and I often wish that I would remember more of what I saw when I was a child. I often kicked myself for not remembering those experiences better. Now I look back and realize that while it might partly be my nature to just take things in stride, I also had a bit of a brain overload. It was just normal to me to be touring yet another country or city so I didn't care that I slept thru most of our 2 hour double decker bus ride thru London. Now I wonder how in the world I could have been so bored and uninterested. This was LONDON! And I could have told people I saw Big Ben or maybe even Buckingham Palace from the upper deck of a bus but all I can tell people is that I slept in the back of the bus most of our tour through London. Actually if it was indeed Buckingham Palace (some of my family members seem to be as forgetful as I am) then I can boast that I have seen it. I remember a glance of it, but my memory fails when I try to put that picture into words.

 That isn't how it always was tho. I'm not sure if I should comment on all the places I've been or how I should narrow it down because I have been to a lot more places (slightly exotic ones at that) then most of my friends have been. 

 When I was 4, my parents moved us to Malawi, Afrika for a few years. I don't remember much about Malawi that was outstanding to me, it was just normal life. It was normal life to live in a walled compound with a guard, normal life to have darker skinned friends whom I didn't nearly always understand, normal life to walk into town right into the loud, bustling market with no street visible, heaps of clothes and stacks of fruits and vegetables and all manner of other goods spread out beside tiny shops built out of any material that was at hand. Witnessing poverty was also normal to me, so much so that I don't remember much of that. I never had to worry about where my food was coming from and I didn't have the mind at the time to think of what my friends were going thru. I do remember people begging for money because they hadn't eaten for a week or since Thursday. I remember going with my family to food distributions and seeing the long line ups of people waiting all day in the sun for the month or so worth of food that we had to offer them.                                                                                   It was during these years spent in The Warm Heart of Africa that we traveled to Zimbabwe and got the chance to ride those big beasts called elephants. In my mind we waited for a long time and finally we climbed onto a big platform and mounted the waiting beast in groups of 3 or 4. In Zim we also visited Victoria Falls which are considered to be among the largest in the world. Another time, we drove for a few days without air conditioning and spent a few hours of our vacation swimming in the surf of the Indian Ocean off the shore of Mozambique. Snorkling off an island in Lake Malawi with schools of colorful fish nibbling at our toes is yet another thing I can boast of. 

 On our way home from Malawi the first time we were there, we toured our way home through Europe. We took in the sights of Paris (France),  Rome (Italy), and Amsterdam (Netherlands). Here again I wish I could say I remembered more but as a 7 year old who divided her life almost in half between two continents, I didn't really care about seeing another one. Of course the memory of the Eiffle Tower has stuck in my mind, those being super monumental moments in my life, although I cannot tell you my impressions of the structure as I don't remember them enough to form them into words. I also remember viewing the famous Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre Museum in Paris and I seem to remember thinking that this was something I could boast of to my friends for years to come. I cannot tell you anything about Rome as I cannot specifically recall anything of the city. I have a few random memories of random street corners or fountains but I cannot go back in time and tell my 7-year-old self to remember more of the situation or even what city or country it was in. After our stay in Paris (I imagine it was just a few short days) we boarded a train and rode thru Belgium into Netherlands. Here we toured some sort of tulip greenhouse and bought wooden shoes from a small (tourist) shop. I wonder if we took our leave at that point and made for home.                                                                                          Having toured Europe, our next trip home from Africa about 3 years later had to top it. Our first stop was Egypt. By now I was just days away from turning 11 and I knew how to appreciate my life better. Still not to the extent I wish now that I had but I remember more details of this trip. (I did still have to ask my sister and mom where we went first, but I do have more details stored away in my memory) We spend our afternoons lying on our beds, trying to beat the heat in our 19th floor rooms. Mornings and evenings were spent eating exotic foods and touring around with our personal driver, Achmed. It seems to me that Hummers seemed to abound in Cairo and Achmed tried to tell us some sort of joke about camels and Hummers. Something to the effect of hamir (sp???????) meaning camel in his language and some form of the word camel meant Hummer. Maybe I've got that all mixed up in my head but to this day I can recall that he told us that hamir meant camel and often think of that when I see an actual Hummer. There was a bit of significance there because at one point in our stay we boarded our respecive animals and rode in style to see the massive Pyramids of Giza. Some of these beasts were your typical horses, but at lest two of them were camels. And we all got our turn to climb up on the humped beast and hold on tight as they lurched to standing positions from their awkward kneeling poses. I don't remember getting very close to the pyramids we rode to, but I know we were not supposed to touch these ancient, magnificent tombs which might be the reason we didn't get too close to them. I do remember they were huge and I was in awe of them. After our beast were returned, we also walked around to visit the Sphinx which is a great stone creature with an animal body and a human head. One other highlight of visiting Egypt was our midnight trip to the market. At high noon in Cairo it is much too warm to be out shopping, so much of life is lived at other hours of the day, and even night. It was sort of exhilarating mixing with the throngs of people, sitting at an antique table drinking tea delicately poured out of a china pitcher into our china cups, at midnight.                               From Egypt we went on to Israel. Here again we visited markets, but the part I remember best was the Dead Sea. First we took a bus to the ruins of Masada, and from there we took the bus to the Dead Sea. It was hot so the sand felt like it burned not only the skin of your feet but into the bone as well. And the sea itself, well at that point I wasn't very fond of water and I couldn't swim, much less float. But there I could float without even trying. The only problem was that as soon as there was a bit of splashing and the water got in your eyes it stung like crazy from all that salt and you would have to stumble blindly to the washing station that had a bunch of sinks to wash out the salt so you could go back in and do it all over again. 

My stories about other continents have run out and I'm reduced to writing about my own continent. I am very thankful that I have been able to see and live around different lifestyles and cultures but North America will always be my home home. In all our travelling accross many waters, we have not done much traveling in our own country, or the United States. I have traveled through perhaps about 15 states (that is a guess) and even lived in New Mexico for a few months (a major highlight if my life as you all know). I have visited the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park (namely Old Faithful, the geyser) and Niagra Falls. I spent a week in the beautiful state of Oregon and went to the coast for a day while I was there. That was the first and so far only time I have been to the coast in North America. The only other body of water I can boast of swimming in is Lake Erie. That's actually the last monumental place I can think of to boast about.

I have spent quite awhile on this post, a lot of that time I should have spent sleeping. So now again I will post this as it is. Mistakes and not making sense and all.

Oh The Places You'll Go

And once again I have neglected this til the last possible minute. Well, hour. No, no. Make that at least a day late. Sigh. If you expected me to post on time or even early when I suggested my writing every week, I'm sorry. Sometimes I feel ambitious and that happens but mostly I've been prioritizing working and sewing and being outside or with my friends and I neglect my blog. Poor thing. It must feel unloved.

I've decided I'm a boring person. I haven't had anywhere I have dreamed for years about going and know everthing there is to know on that place. There's not this one city in some country on some continent that has captured my fantasy. Sometimes I see pictures in a magazine or somewhere and I gasp and say 'Where is that. That is my dream destination' and I keep on reading or driving or doing whatever I was doing before this life changing revelation hit me and within a minute I have forgot the name of this wonderful place and the revelation has turned into forgetfulness or boringness or whatever it is. 

Actually I do have some (very unrealistic) dreams. I'd love to visit a castle. A real humongous deserted stone castle. I'd like to live in it for a few days. Somewhere out in Scotland or Spain or wherever there are still some castles waiting for me to find them. I'd also like to pay a visit to all seven continents sometime in my life. I only have three more left to make it to that goal and I am hoping to cross South America off that list in a few weeks from now. As a child, I became slightly enamoured with Cuba when I wrote a paper about the country. I have since forgotten almost all of what I learned for that paper but I think I would still like to visit Cuba. I became quite attatched when I had to write about it and I guess that attachment has not totally been forgotten. Another place I'd like to visit is somewhere where the streets are water and your transportation is boats or your own two feet.

I guess I do have some realistic dreams, too.  I visited Portland once for a few hours, and decided I wanted to go back. I'd love to explore that city and other. New York. Albuquerque. Paris. I'd like to explore the restaurants and shops on back streets and major streets. I'd like to visit bookstores and take the books I buy to remote cabins and castles and spend my days reading. Well. I guess this isn't quite so realistic anymore.

Once again I wrote this on the fly and have not proofread or added padding to make this easier on the ears.

A Habit I Wish I Didn't Have

The title clearly states my topic. I am going to talk more about my personality today. More specifically, my habit of not being very open to personal topics. I'm not talking personal as in super personal. I'm talking personal as in daily life. In a sense I am a very boring person because when someone touches too much on a topic that might be a bit personal I right aways shy away.

Them: 'Hey. Do you run?'

Me, to me: If I tell them go on a jog almost every morning, they might think I'm doing it to lose weight or something and that's not a topic I want to discuss with this  person. Besides, I don't really run I just go on a short jogs almost every day.

Me, to them, after a long pause: 'No.'

End of discussion. Not a very long or interesting one, and afterwards I kick myself because who cares if everybody knows I do a small amount of jogging or whatever it is that people are asking me. I think that people can sense that about me even when they are meeting me for the first time and most people don't try much more than the nicities with me. I guess I'm a bit hard to get to know that way. I don't really ask people about their 'personal' lives either. I'm not one for starting lots of conversations unless it's about me. I feel weird asking my friends specifics about their jobs or exclaiming to my Granny that I saw that her tomatoes were starting to turn red already.

Sometimes I almost forget myself and start a conversation with someone about somewhere I've been and she's going and then suddenly I'm actually in a conversation and have to keep up my side of it and I start silently panicing and then I clam up and feel all selfconcious and quickly put an end to the conversation because I'm actually having a good conversatiom so why would keep that up!

Excuse the run on sentence. I'm (hopefully) going to be a teacher in a few weeks. I'll have to learn not to get so long winded when I'm writing.

And that, my friends, is the post of the week. Written and posted at the last possible moment. Well technically it is about 5 minutes late already, and as I am already lying in bed I will post it without proofreading and go to sleep and maybe fix it up another day.

Ten Years Later

This week's topic is a broad one. I am to write about a memory. I thought of a lot of memories over the passed few days but none of them had any real story or meaning to them. Just passing moments of my childhood that have stuck in my mind. I did come up with something tho. I'll see where it takes us.

I was a few days shy of 11 when we arrived home from our home in Central Africa. We had spent almost 5 of the previous 6 or 7 years there and I had it in my head that that was home. I wondered what Canada was like and I was eager to come back but that walled, red dirt compound was my home. My friends were all dark skinned. My life was simple. Sometimes I had to help unload groceries after a long day in town when all I wanted to do was fall into bed and sleep but that was about the extent of my worries. I attended school a few mornings a week and the rest of my days were spent playing ball outside our compoud gate, or driving for hours to spend what felt like a few minutes visiting some friend or friends of friends in distant villages, or drinking tea with and eating brown sugared rice with the night watchman. Oh those blissful evenings sitting out under the stars with our friends or sticking our head out the window to feel the cool evening breeze, singing those Chichewa songs by memory. That's what I remember.

And then we came home. I don't remember much of the coming home prep but suddenly we were home and eventually the newness wore off and I had to learn a new life here is Canada. Where nobody waved because vehicles and white skin weren't a novelty. Where I had to find a place in the group of a few white girls and moany white boys who had spent the last few years of their lives together instead of in far off distant lands where any number of dark skinned children wanted to be your friend. Where second hand clothes were perhaps scorned and a lot of money was spent on new clothes. I remember crying myself to sleep many nights because this just did not feel like home. I wanted to go back to my easy, sunbleached life in the Warm Heart of Africa. I remember waiting for my sisters outside of some stores in the mall, wishing instead for piles of clothes on plastic tarps on the ground to sift through.

Slowly those feelings wore off and I became used to my new life. It's been 10 years since I left one home for the other. I have had more people come into my life and then leave again, taking more pieces of my heart away from me. I have passed those stores that I used to scorn and refuse to go in to and now I wouldn't dain to enter those stores for the opposite reason. I now live a life where there's things go wrong all the time and I realize that I will have had bad days in my childhood days in Malawi, those just aren't the times I remember. Instead I've got the good memories. Giggling with friends with whom I shared only a few common words, singing the starlit evenings away, living my life to its fullest.

Happy

What Makes Me Happy

• What makes me happy? I used to write 'Thankful Lists' once every few weeks. I still get them from my sister sometimes and they themselves make me feel happy. I don't write thankful lists with items like 'my existence in a community where I am loved and accepted for who I am, yet corrected when I have stepped out of line' or 'the balance of natural and man-made creations, resulting in an ease filled life.' I'm not saying my sister does either. Her thankful lists are definitely a lot deeper than mine but they don't sound corny like my examples.

Here I go again. Procrastinating. Elaborating on something that should be simple.

The happy list of my day/week/year/life

•Sewing - the new dresses I cannot leave in my closet til the day of the event they were sewed for, the bookmarks, bags, quilts, shirts, etc. I make with many scraps I have accumulated, my beloved little sewing machine that finally quit a few months ago. I made it work hard for 5 years.

•Long quiet drives. Just me, the road, and my book. Meandering down dark city lanes or lonely gravel roads. Long quiet hours. Just me, my thoughts, my book, wandering down the driveway on a lazy Sunday afternoon or winging dreamily in my hammock.

•2-year-olds who wrap their arms around you, their little hand absentmindedly patting your back, who run to the door when they see your car coming down the driveway and open the door, grinning at you. Who can talk a blue streak without real words. Who get very excited tones in their voice and point their little fingers at the 'mume' (moon) whenever they can see it.

•Deliciousness like cheesecakes and brie with maple bacon and goat cheese and pesto and corn dip and generally anything creamcheesey or just cheesey.

•The time of evening when the sun leaves us for the day and the sky lights up in a different rainbow of colors every evening. And then the stars. The dark. The 'mume'. Give me a small fire, a few people to softly chatter and laugh in the backround, and a sky full of stars and I'm happy. Or the few early hours of an exceedingly warm day and small patch of Rapids to stare and wonder at.

•Playing baseball or volleyball or hockey with my friends. There's competition and encouragement but no real boohing when someone messes up. Sitting around the fire with them, singing, chatting, joking. These are the people who I've grown up with. We've been friends <or frenemies> since we were kids and we know each others' quirks and oddities and we enjoy their presence because of that.

•My two jobs.
    -Mowing lawns for people I only know by how they keep their yards. Dripping with sweat on somedays (feels like +39) and dripping with rain on other days when the clouds unexpectedly decide to open upon us and force us into the trailer for a few minutes. I love being able to spend at least a few of my days outside.
    -The last three days of my week are spent in an office, answering phones and cleaning and doing anything small-business receptionists do. I didn't like the job at first but I have become a lot more comfortable with my coworkers and the aspects of the job and have been given more responsibilities as my abilities have magnified and I am happy to have this job with these people. I have actually sometimes started to look forward to the phone ringing.

• Family time in the form of a 6 hour truck ride, the girls in the back, giggling over things that most of us would just have rolled our eyes at had we not been riding together for a few hours. My sister who made herself at home in our house that used to also be hers and helped herself to my closet for the afternoon cuz she knew I wouldn't care. My other sister who comes from a bit farther and does the same thing, for a bit longer. And the days and evenings I spend yammering to them and they have no other choice but to listen.