Oh YEAAAHHH!

Was walking the dogs this morning and saw the first robin of the season. Woohoo! Spring is officially here. Like, bam! overnight. Brio saw the bird at the exact same moment I did, and instantly froze into a classical "pointing" position, one foot up, eyes riveted to the robin. And he didn't flinch a muscle until the bird flew away a full two minutes later. Geez, what kind of dog is this? Poodle, my eye.

Now the first robins I sighted last spring were on March 10, so we're well over two weeks later this year. Usually our "last frost date" is around Victoria Day, May 24, but I'm thinking I'm not going to plant anything outside (other than cold-hardy things like lettuce) until the end of May, to be safe. Which means I should start my tomatoes and gooseberries indoors the second week of April. So exciting! I'm sure we're still in for more cold and snow meanwhile, but we're finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Up and Down the Rollercoaster

Okay, so here it is, what, a couple of days later, and I can see signs of spring:

• It got to about ten degrees today, which feels absolutely balmy. I didn't even bother with a coat today.
• The snow is almost gone from the grass.
• The dogs got their spring haircuts, so now they look like chihuahuas.
• The gardening spam emails are starting to fly.
• The oleander has a million little flower buds on it.
• I found rabbit poop in the backyard.

So we may have weathered this after all! It's amazing what a little sunshine and warmth will do to my mood. It's almost embarrassing -- one minute I'm lying like a bag of wet laundry on the couch, unable to function, to think, to blink. All I want to do is sleep and cry. And suddenly I'm up and baking French bread and writing and running errands. Sheesh, you'd think I'd be tougher after 25 winters in Canada!

I definitely need to find a solution to this Winter Blahs thing next year. I need to bank my money and my vacation time and take off three months to spend in southern Italy or something. Like the spindly tomato plants I will soon have growing on my kitchen counter, I need sunlight. I crave summer. I can taste it coming.

A ditty for the day

I sit inside my padded cell
and look out at this frozen hell
and wonder if all we said we'd do
when 'hell freezes over' will now come true.


Temperature -21 today... This winter will never end. We have entered the next ice age. I have no motivation to do anything. Including breathe.

Writing: Don't Try This At Home

I sent in a new manuscript a few weeks ago---a year's effort---and was told that the publisher has decided not to "do" dramas this year. They are focusing on romance and suspense instead. So I'm to put this manuscript away for now. This isn't a refusal. In fact, it's a refusal to refuse. I have to give them another shot at that one in a year or so, to see if they've changed their focus by then. Meanwhile, I need to dash out something else instead to put in their hands by August or September.

Panic. Fury. Desperation. Sorrow. Resignation. What can I do but try to rise to the challenge? So I went into the bedroom and looked at the row of binders on the closet shelf. Other people keep clothes in their closets. I keep books, journals, musical instruments, cans of latex paint, and about twenty-five thick binders of past writing efforts (having outgrown the stuffed filing cabinet ages ago). Was there anything worth reviving from one of these binders that I could polish for Covenant?

What ensued was a week or so of self indulgence, self criticism, and nostalgia while I browsed through my old half-finished works in search of something worth developing. Some dated back to high school, and others were clearly written while I was in the frazzled-new-mother stage. I gotta say, while I think my writing even years ago wasn't that bad, my imagination was downright appalling. What was I thinking when I scribbled some of these? How cliché and predictable can a person get? Did I honestly think these saccharine stories were any good? Where on earth did I get those ideas and why on earth did I actually develop them? More to the point, why have I kept them and hauled them with me from place to place all these years? It's a good thing I can't speak to my younger self, or I would soundly discourage me from ever trying to write anything again. We are our own worst critics...but unfortunately my criticism didn't kick in earlier!

Okay, so once the tears and muttering were over, I decided they weren't all that bad, and from the pile of stuff that needs discarding I have dredged up a couple that I am exploring as possibilities. They will take months of rewriting, and even then I'm not sure the editor will want them. All I can do is dress them up as best I can, slick down their hair, wash their faces, feed them a last good meal, tell them to stand up straight, and march them off to judgment. They deserve a chance at life, at least. It's like launching your children, sending them out to face the cold cruel world armed with nothing but crayons and an aluminum lunch box.

Think about that---I give birth to the thing, but someone else takes charge of it, names it, and sends it out into the world. Once it's in their hands, it's out of mine forever. I've got six months to gestate. It will be a close thing...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

A foot of new snow and more still coming down. I'm getting the decorations back out and making eggnog.

Brio looking out the window, wishing Spring would come.

 

Meanwhile, Maple just can't get motivated...He's been in this position since September.

Blame Farley Mowat

Okay, so two days after I said I'm taking a break from the computer, I'm back. It's because I read a really good book by Farley Mowat called High Latitudes, and it got me thinking. And when I think, my fingers automatically reach for the nearest keyboard.

The book was written in 2002 but it's about his travels through the Arctic in 1966, visiting various Inuit communities and recording what the people thought and felt about how things were going in their world. And time and time again, the conclusion was the same: they wanted to work, they wanted to better their circumstances and provide for their families, they wanted to be left in peace, but white men wouldn't let them. White men exploited their resources until it was impossible to hunt or fish anymore to support their families. White men moved them from place to place, broke promises, broke up the culture, devestated their ecology, took their children, all under the guise of "helping" them and bringing them into the white men's world. Only they weren't brought in, they were left abandoned and floating around the edges, unable to participate fully but unable to go back to the life they had known and enjoyed.

It was a horrifying little book, really, when you stop to consider the impact of the things Mowat related. Families displaced and broken up, connections to each other and to the land broken irreparably, language stolen, way of life disintegrated. The people he interviewed said they no longer knew who they were or how they fit into the world. Parts of it made me want to weep. Things went on in the Arctic that rival the worst tales of genocide and cruelty going on elsewhere in the world today. We just don't hear about it in depth because it's remote, involving a relatively small and quiet population. Textbooks tend to gloss over it in the name of progress, dwelling only on the explorations and extraction of resources and military might and high adventure, and not mentioning the loss of life and livelihood, the trash left behind, the fragile places ruined. Certainly the true extent of the destruction isn't taught in our schools.

No one can possibly make this right, give back their dead, reconnect their families, restore their happiness and their culture. And no one can fix the devastation of the environment. Some steps have been taken and some gestures made, but once sorrow of that kind has been experienced, the memory of it can't be erased. The saddest thing is that we haven't learned, as a people, as a species. We continue to hurt and destroy, all the while thinking that we know best. I heard a quote once somewhere that said something like "Other people's cultures aren't failed attempts to be you." I look at the Crimea, at the Sudan, at Somalia, at...geez, pick just about any continent...and it's all about one person taking something for himself no matter what it costs someone else to get it. We're spinning through the giant universe on this tiny lump of a planet, arguing over microscopic specks of dirt. The longer I live, the more I think Dr. Seuss was a genius. His Yertle the Turtle was bang on.

I watched a TV show the other night about a twenty-something chap in a kilt who left society behind and now lives as a forager in the pacific rainforest, completely off the land. He has entirely divorced himself from "civilization." And I totally understand. There are times I want to join him. And yet there are other times I think it's worth hanging in there, to see if I can have any impact and help even in a small way to change the broken world around me. Flee or fight? I'm balancing on the fine line between them.

March Break!

Good news! The temperature is supposed to get up to above freezing this week! I can hardly wait. I have next week off of work and will spend it taking my kid to the orthodontist and doctor and catching up on housecleaning, yes. But also doing puzzles, reading, writing, napping on the couch with the puppies, and maybe some day trips to go bowling or something. Maybe I'll go to the community centre and stew myself in the hot tub for a while. And definitely making lavender cookies. A week of lovely possibilities before me!

I think as part of my mental health break I am also going to restrict my use of the computer for the week. True "down time" will rejuvenate me physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We are constantly bombarded with input and noise, and it sounds peaceful to make it all stop for a while.

So have a good week, everyone, and I'll be back in a few days!