Joy and Sorrow

This picture brought me to tears today.



Just a picture of a baby asleep on her grandfather's shoulder. Not just any baby, to be sure. It's Kelle Hampton's precious daughter Nella.

Do you see that absolute trust? She just melts into him. And do you see his love? It shows in his stillness, his relaxed, unfocused eyes, his continuing to hold her after she has fallen soundly asleep and he could easily lift her to her bed. He treasures her. He cherishes her.

It makes my heart ache for my own father.

Dad holding my niece Diane and talking with my Aunt Anne.
You can see my skinny blue-and-white-striped tushy just behind Diane's little feet.

He died almost a year to the day after he retired from a lifetime of blue-collar work in mining and construction, when I was only 27 years old.

That dark tan? He worked twelve-hour days through the summer months. He would get so dark that we swore there was some Mediterranean or north African blood in his gene pool. (Of course, Diane's congenital paleness makes him look even darker, by contrast.)

And he loved me. Oh, I know, I always knew and never doubted, that he loved me. Even when I was a careless teen and stayed out till all hours not thinking that he was worried about all the evil, dangerous, deadly people out there.

(I didn't know that one afternoon the flickering lights of his construction vehicle caused a rapist (who thought the lights were police lights) to release his victim. She ran half naked from the woods to my father, who wrapped her in his plaid jacket. Years later I found his deposition for the trial.)

My dad could be an asshole. A bigot, a racist, a loud-mouthed schnook, he and Archie Bunker would have seen eye to eye. He had a temper: at more than one big family dinner (Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving), he threw down the carving knife and meat fork and stormed out of the house. [Was it more than once, or was it just such a terrible occasion that it echoes and repeats?] He was not a great husband; I used to pull a pillow over my head to drown out the noises of my parents fighting, things being thrown.

A hug before we head to the church on my wedding day.
As Aunt Winkie said of this picture, "It speaks volumes."

But do you see? He loved me. I loved him. It's as simple as that.

And he loved my little girl, Katie, but she was too young to remember him. He never knew my three younger children.

So that picture up top, that's what I've lost. And it always strikes me at Christmas, as these things do.

I miss him, and I wish my children could have a small taste of that love. I hope I've trickled down at least some of it.

What a year!

No, no, I promise I'm not going to do a newsletter-y version of the year in review. Instead, here are some of the posts from this blog that capture highlights. Or just some of my favourite posts. 

How do you spell "schlock schmaltz"? in which I talk about Stephen.

There is no way for me to write about my husband without causing readers to gag on the saccharine sweetness. It will drive you into diabetic shock; it will have you running for a wet paper towel so you can wipe the stickiness off your cheeks. You will envy me and loathe me. 

 The Short Way's Fast, but the Long Way's Pretty in which I show you why I love my commute.

I feel very blessed that my daily commute takes me along the parkway - one of the city's secret treasures. It isn't the shortest route for me to take, but it is definitely beautiful. These past few weeks as the snow has accumulated, I've been captivated by the play of monochromatic hues: white, grey, blue.

Oh, puh-lease! in which I rant.

I just saw a new all-time low for abuse of homonyms in the English language: thei're

Girl on a Mission in which I share a story from my youth.

I was once a teen missionary. When I was 17, my cousin Ruth and I went with Teen Missions International to France. Yes, indeedy, I was an evangelist in France.

Caution: Hypochondria can make you sick  in which I expose you to mental contaminants.

Will I never learn? DO NOT GOOGLE IMAGES FOR DERMATOLOGICAL DISORDERS!

Birthday Bliss in which I share the pleasure of my very happy 49th birthday.

My birthday present this year was a be-yoo-tiful new Nikon D90 digital SLR camera. I'm still baffled by all of its settings and buttons, but it sure does take some very fine photos. Even the bad photos are better than with my old camera: the underexposed areas have very little noise and the edges do not have the significant warping that I found with my other camera.

The road to a friend's house is never long in which I talk about Joe and Mary and the fun we had.

That's easy for me to say, since I didn't make the trek. But our friends, Joe and Mary, drove 3,000 km from their house in Colorado to ours in Ottawa (including across Kansas, which I have learned is the most boring drive on the planet) - and we are so glad they did.

He says, she says in which you get a peek into our bedroom.

Steve and I lay down on the bed as the air wafted gently over our sweaty bodies.

Peter's in stitches in which Peter is injured.

There I was, enjoying my Saturday-afternoon nap, when the phone rang. Assuming it was a telemarketer, I let Brian answer it, but it was Peter, and he sounded distraught, like he couldn't quite get his breath.

And then the world turns grey in which I open up about my struggle with depression.

One of the unfortunate things I've learned is that, for me, that monochrome world of hopelessness is really never far away. This reality is exhausting. It is like building a house on a constantly eroding shoreline.

A Prickly Situation in which I lament Movember.

See those hairs? They are STRAIGHT and POINTY! When he puckers up, those little needles aim RIGHT AT MY SOFT, VULNERABLE LIPS! They're like hundreds of tiny swords aiming at my mouth.

Advice You Never Asked For in which I try to explain what I think makes our marriage happy.

Nobody asked me - not a single one of you! - but I've decided to offer it to you anyway. I'm going to share my thoughts on what I think has helped my own marriage.

It's been quite a year. Did I choose the same posts you would have?

Insomnia

We had our first real snowstorm the other night. While Steve and I dug into a bagful of popcorn and watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the flakes drifted gently down and blanketed our car. We drove home in the muffled winter that glowed yellow as street lamps lit the drifting crystals.

Arriving home, we worried that our car might not make it up the driveway, but our snow tires gripped and carried us safely into the garage.

I was restless, not tired. Perhaps the root beer at the theatre was caffeinated; perhaps I was haunted by Lisbeth Salander's wary eyes and solitariness in the world. Finally, I climbed our squeaky stairs and glanced into our son's bedroom on the way to my own.

Through his bedroom window, I saw that the storm had picked up steam. I went back downstairs and grabbed my camera.

It is always brighter than one expects when it snows, the meagre night-time light reflecting off so many prisms. One full fifth of a second captured the trajectory of the snow. To the naked eye it simply fell; to the lens it threw itself down. No longer a gentle prayer, it was now a loud fury driving winter to ground.

I watched for a long while, the beeps of plows drifting through from the major thoroughfares.

I went back to bed and tried (in vain) to sleep. When I came back down, the plows had visited our quiet street and the snow had tapered off.

Still golden, still magical.

Dawn came almost imperceptibly and still I could not sleep. Steve woke up and we went for a walk. I KNOW! I WALKED! Outdoors, even. What's more, it was my idea! All so I could take some pictures.

But I had dawdled too long in my hunt for the right boots and gloves. Twenty minutes earlier, this tunnel through the forest would have been aglow like the forest in Narnia. Still, it beckoned.

As we walked through the forest, the light turned blue as the sun tried to burn through the clouds.

Snow still clung to trunks, not yet disturbed by wind and dogs and cross-country skiers.

We scurried as we turned around and headed out of the forest and into the biting wind.

Sad elephant is sad.

The park was abandoned.

It was good to step inside, instantly blind as our glasses coated with steam. And I settled down to a hot coffee and slid the memory card into my laptop to see what treasures the lens had captured this time.

All this, and it wasn't even eight in the morning. Those morning larks may be on to something, but I'll never let on.

Time for a Makeover

Poor, sad 45-year-old exterior.

I really can't say that I love the curb appeal (Hah!) of our house. That insipid yellow makes me want to smack someone. The dirty "white" bricks make me anticipate harvest-gold appliances.

Admittedly, a lot of what it needs is a good scrub of the bricks. The original owner had built a vestibule over the front porch, and you can see where it has marred the brick.

But I like to fantasize about what it would look like if we brought it into the 21st century. As I drive around various neighbourhoods, I've been looking at different colour combinations. Today I played around with Photoshop to see what I could come up with.

Possibly the least expensive: grey unifies the two levels and brick red adds pizzazz.

Doesn't that look happier? Stain the brick a modern grey, paint the siding (or replace it altogether), then add a splash of colour. No major renovation, but it looks like an altogether different decade.

I'm also fond of the classic red-brick exterior. Similar colour combination as above, really, but in different places.

Putty and red brick with a red door. Mmmm. I've always wanted a red door.

A very classic look, which suits my style just nicely.

The deluxe makeover: stone with coordinated siding and paint.

Oh, now THIS I could fall in love with. I've always loved stone, and now the faux stones they make are really quite nice. But also very expensive.

Perhaps I should not have done this little exercise, because now that pissy yellow just makes me mad. But which do you prefer? Grey, red-brick or stone?

Not sure how many lives she has left.

This post may or may not be an excuse to sing paeans of love to our cat (Emily's cat, really), Elly.

Elly is a rescue cat. She came to us with a catalog of feral-cat maladies:

• Bad hip -- She yelps a little if you put pressure on her back end; she also has the absolute worst elevator-butt I've ever seen.
• Clipped ear -- She arrived at the shelter with an infection that would not heal (she kept scratching at it), so they had to amputate the tip of her left ear. If she were male, we might have called her Vincent.
• Feline stomatitis -- By the age of three, most of her teeth had decayed and she had chronic sinus infections. She now has only her four front canines [shouldn't they be felines?] left.
• An intense, almost pathological, aversion to being carried. She will curl up on your lap (or shoulder or legs), but if you try to walk with her? Sheer panic. This almost caused us to lose her at the airport when we moved from Colorado to Ottawa. 

So we figure this cat has already lost two or three of her nine lives. 

But I suspect she came closest to strumming the heavenly kitty-harp after she came to our family. 

(Time for another picture? Okay.)

(Another one? All righty, then. Story continues after the picture.)

Here's the story of how Elly really pushed her luck. 

In our Colorado home we were fortunate to have so many bathrooms that one of the showers only ever got used when we had house guests. So most of the time that shower housed Elly's litter box. When we had house guests, we cleaned out the shower and moved the kitty litter into the adjacent furnace/utility room. 

One such time, we placed the litter box right next to the furnace. For no particular reason.

The next day, the cat left a "present" in Emily's closet. This was highly unusual, but we figured she'd been accidentally trapped in the room or something. 

Then she did the unthinkable: she used Peter's bed and pillow as her litter box. 

"Let us never speak of this."

Peter was beyond appalled. He was disgusted, enraged. He talked about how God gave man dominion over the animals and why should we shelter an animal that would defecate ON HIS BED?! 

We should get rid of the cat, he said. Why would we keep an animal in our home when it had demonstrated such filthy habits and lack of respect for its masters?

REMAIN CALM AND SEARCH THE INTERNET.

That's what I did. Peter sat, disgruntled, while I searched what would cause this behaviour. We finally traced it to the location of the litter box: the furnace fan must have come on while she was doing her business and scared the ^&$@ out of her, after which she was too afraid to go near it. We immediately moved the litter box and she resumed using it.

I explained to Peter that the behaviour was not an attack against him, but I have to admit I'd be hard pressed to feel empathy toward a creature that left turds on my pillow. 

[Incidentally, we did purchase a new mattress and pillow.]

Peter grudgingly accepted that the cat was staying, though he did not give it status of a full member of the family. 

For my part, I am content to let her push her brow against my arm, or breast, or tummy, with all her might as she silently asks me to love her. I accept her purrs as effortless thank-yous. And I will sit patiently for 30 minutes longer than I might have done if she happens to be curled up around my arm or on my lap.