I am sitting here listening to the soft hum of the dryer going downstairs in the laundry room and recalling a conversation with my dear aunt Freda and cousin Lynda on Monday of this week. We've decided how important it is for us to get together more to record the bits of our family history before no one is here to tell how it was in her coming of age days. Sadly, my own mother, the eldest of three girls, died in 1999 at age 67, and the youngest, Lois died in the summer of 2008 at age 72. With them went parts of the story except for what we remembered, sometimes accurately and sometimes vaguely, depending on how interesting it seemed to the listener.
In my thirties, I was keen to take notes from my grandparents' tales of their own childhoods and teen years, growing up in Hants County from births in 1910, and 1911. Through the years of WWI, the twenties, marriage in 1930 and onward. How happy I am that I wrote down as much as I did. Nothing gives a stronger sense of how historical bias and revisionism happens then trying to piece together the whys and hows of your own family story.
Back to Monday, however. Over tea and cake with lemon filling, Freda shared with us some notes she had begun writing of her earliest memories of life in Morden, then moving down into the valley to Aylesford when her father went to sea in the merchant navy in 1940. Even before her husband went away on ships, our grandmother as a young wife had to be resourceful and was absolutely insistent, no matter how little they had, that her family be comfortable and presentable. Much emphasis, then, was placed on having clean laundry.
No wonder my aunt's face lit up when she told of the luxury of them owning a machine when they moved down the mountain! I actually remember this behemoth which stood in Nana's kitchen corner, silent and hulking, until laundry day. It was electric with mysterious levers and rollers and on "the day" we were cautioned to keep fingers away and be scarce.
On fine breezy days, baskets of wet things were taken out the back door and hung to flap dry on crisscrossed clotheslines all over the back yard. All I could see sometimes were my grandmother's feet several rows over as she hung piece after piece up with wooden pins. In winter or on rainy days there was an apparatus in the kitchen which could be lowered to hang clothes on, then raised by a pulley-system to dry over the woodstove's heat.
Gaaaah! So much lugging and scrubbing, and wringing, draining, rinsing, wringing. And I haven't even mentioned the ironing.
I count myself so lucky to have been born in the fifties and to have had the true ease of automatic laundry appliances all of my life. Still, there is something so comforting about the smell of clothing dried on a line in fresh valley air that nothing can replace.
Thank you Great-Gram, Nana, and all my foremothers. I don't know how you did it.
People, people. Do you suddenly forget everything you know about about cooking when there is snow in the forecast? Why does the mention of the white stuff in amounts over twenty centimetres send otherwise sensible folks to the supermarket in droves for bread and milk? Why those two items? What cataclysmic force will make you forget all the other good things in your cupboards and refrigerators in favour of a loaf of sliced bread and a two litre carton of Farmers finest one percent? What about the lure of fresh vegetables, diced and sliced for a crunchy stir-fry? Are thoughts of a slow-simmered lamb curry obliterated by the cascading white flakes outside the window?
It is unlikely here in Nova Scotia that a blizzard will interrupt our normal routines for longer than a day or so. Our towns are well-equipped with snow plows and removal equipment, and we are not novices when it comes to digging or snow blowing ourselves out of the drifts in our driveways. "Snow events", as the TV and radio meteorologists like to call these storms, are nothing more than what we're used to living where we live. A good nor'easter or two is a fact of life in winter.
And yes, sometimes when the snow is heavy and wet, or the wind is wild, we do lose power. But what sensible Canadian doesn't have a propane barbecue or Coleman stove? Many have wood stoves for their primary or secondary heat source; it's not as if we have to subsist on cold sandwiches. But always at the stores, it's the bread and milk shelves that are emptied first.
Milk, I can understand somewhat. There are things you need milk for, especially if you have kids who will eat cereal without hesitation but look suspicious when you offer them chicken soup that you made from scratch and cooked on your woodstove. You need milk to make (acckkk!) Kraft Dinner.
But milk and bread? Come on, what are you thinking? Bread pudding? French toast? A poultice to draw an ingrown toenail? Are you planning to mix the two and use it to caulk cracks around that old window?
Sheesh.
I said when I started my blog that I was doing so more to keep myself disciplined about getting something out there everyday. Instead, I write when the mood strikes and I find it impossible to do otherwise. The creative process is nothing if not the constant learning, inventing and re-visiting ideas and thoughts to examine whether you have something to say or not in your writing. There is no deadline, I tell myself as I sit down to the keyboard or pen and paper depending on my mood. It's just a blog entry, not a submission to a publisher, I say. So why does it seem so important to try for a piece each day?
I'm not good at forcing myself to do things. I either do or do not, to paraphrase Yoda. To bid an idea come may work for some writers, but I'd rather have it come and bid me join it. This is how it works for me most times.
I need food in my stomach. Words come more easily if there are no rumbles of protest from within. I need fluids - coffee, herbal tea, water - in steady supply. Music before and after but never during the writing itself. Quietude must prevail. Sometimes it seems like the best flow comes right after meditation when my mind is clear and open, relaxed and present.
I've been working with great love all morning on another piece, an essay about my late grandfather. I am happy with the first draft and have left it to gel some before I return to it to edit, repair and polish. I'm frankly a little sleepy and hungry from digging in my memory for glimpses of him, his mannerisms and habits. It is a good feeling, almost like an in-person visit with him. I wrote and wrote.
And really, that's all I needed to do.
