The Subdivision Oasis

When someone my age mutters, “Kids today,” that’s probably a red flag. It must mean that I am officially old.

We were the first house on the street twenty-eight years ago. In the midst of all the construction in the area, there wasn’t much that was beautiful to behold. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but posts with wires wrapped around, heavy machinery rumbling around, foundation pits, no trees, no grass. Dust everywhere. Down the street to the west, a drainage and water run-off area was put in. At that time, it was just a couple of big sewers on either end with bars across and some grass put down, a few saplings and bushes stuck in here and there. When it rained, there was a pond of sorts until the water drained off.

Almost thirty years later, that area has become an oasis. Rushes and cattails blow in the breezes, cardinals sing from the top branches of the tall poplars. There’s always some variety of wildflower blooming in the tall grasses. Right now, there are vivid clusters of goldenrod glowing in the light of late summer. Crickets are singing hello to the autumn. Milkweed stalks hold their buds, getting ready to launch their parachutes of seeds. It’s been a balm to the heart, knowing the milkweed is there for the Monarch butterflies, who have recently been declared an endangered species.

Living in a subdivision, being able to walk through a natural area like this has been much appreciated. I go through there every day. Especially in the last few pandemic years, moving daily through a space like this has been meditative and calming. A few weeks ago, I was strolling over the grass there when I passed a couple coming the other way. “See?” the woman told her companion. “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s the neighbourhood’s best kept secret.”

Unfortunately, the secret garden’s cover is blown.

There are responsible teenagers out there. I have known many. But as is the same with adults, there are teenagers who lack respect and those of that ilk have quickly plundered the little neighbourhood oasis. They come in a hoard and sit up against private homes’ fence lines under a tree. While children in their yards behind are bouncing on their trampolines or swimming in their pools, they are treated to various epithets and inappropriate language shouted out from the other side of the fence. Under the tree lies a litter of discarded fast food containers, empty water bottles and tossed Slurpee cups. Torn off branches with withering leaves are strewn over the grass. Much of the milkweed is trampled.

I used to envy the homeowners lucky enough to have their properties connected to this naturalized little stretch of land. This destruction must be very sad and unsettling for them.

Maybe, back in the day I demonstrated similar disrespect. I don’t recall doing so, but I suppose it’s likely that I did. There wasn’t as much onus on environmental respect in those days, although there should have been. But I know that “kids today” have been taught about the threats to our natural world and they should have an awareness that we all need to take conservation and preservation seriously. I was a teacher. I was there for the Earth Day celebrations, the garbage pick-up days, the bulb and seed planting, the read-alouds featuring books encouraging children to love our planet.

And so this burns me up a bit.

What a shame that those who know better don’t do better.

June

     It’s hard to believe that an entire seven years have gone by since I retired from teaching. And yet, the reality is that this last week of June has been full of Facebook pictures of many of my former Senior Kindergarten students graduating from Grade Eight. The math doesn’t lie! Those little whirlwinds with baby faces who sat criss-cross applesauce in the circle and often needed help getting into their snow pants somehow became teenage-tall and have been officially launched into high school.

     Seven years seems ample time for things to get a bit dusty, and yet, those last two years of my career teaching FDK are still so fresh in my mind.

     Also fresh in my mind are the June’s. Oh mercy, the June’s…by far the most challenging of months for a teacher. Perhaps I just speak for myself. I needed the better part of July’s to recover from those June’s. Report cards over Christmas when the weather is generally dismal weren’t such an ordeal. But June reports were an entirely different matter. Once the May long weekend came and went, things always went to a summer vibe for me. The warm weather and the long days called many things to mind, the last of them being report cards. Report cards were due in the office more on the earlier side of June—which meant that everything teachers set out to accomplish for the year was complete and evaluated. By the time reports were handed in, the students were finished, the teachers were finished—and there were still so many days left to pull the kids through, all the while trying to bring the learning forward and keep the focus from sputtering out. This was a challenge because my focus was sputtering, too. The calendar flipping to June was always a milestone reached, but there was still another full month to contend with…and by June, everyone was just plain tired. The end of June often marked moving days for teachers who had to relocate to another classroom. This somehow had to be accomplished while still managing a classroom full of students. If you weren’t moving, you were still cleaning up, organizing or ordering supplies, cleaning and packing learning materials away for the summer. In FDK (Full Day Kindergarten), we had piles of toys and blocks and manipulatives to wash and sort and put away for the following September.

     Thankfully, a massive renovation at my school meant A/C for my last few Junes as a teacher. It wasn’t always so. How well I recall the greenhouse kind of environment of a classroom in June before air-conditioning…all of us wilting and languishing by noon. Teachers brought vast quantities of freezies and popsicles to school, fighting for freezer space. Fans pushed the almost unbreathable air around classrooms filled with sweating bodies and grumpy kids. I remember the upper-level classrooms at my school reaching 40 degrees C. Then, the “shoe rule” came along, and my Birks—my only blessed comfort—were no longer allowed. I used to keep them in my car and pry the “safe” shoes off my sweaty, swollen feet out in the parking lot after school. The air conditioning blasting into my face as I drove home, my feet almost sobbing in relief! Another day crossed off the wall  calendar in the staffroom with a big red X.

     June was also taxing on an emotional level. The children you’d taught and parented and fed and counseled and encouraged and wrestled and nurtured and gnashed your teeth over were divided up on paper into new classrooms, destined for new teachers. They weren’t going to be “your” kids any longer. Graduation sent faces that for years had been familiar and beloved (maybe not in all cases!) out of the building. Good-byes to staff either retiring or transferring were inevitable at end of the year staff breakfasts, sending many of us off into a teaching day with red, swollen eyes.

     I remember the June’s, and all the other months, marking out the school year calendar in their own unique ways. And I think about education workers in the thick of it still, even though I am out of it now (someone remind my brain of that when it’s August and I’m dreaming about the bell ringing on the first day of school when I don’t have so much as a desk in my classroom). To all of you still standing on June 30th, it’s time for a well-deserved rest. May your July’s and August’s pass as slowly as your June’s.

Sprawl

I’ve lived in St. Thomas since I was eight years old. When my family first moved into our house, we had neighbours up and down the street, but the area behind us was fields as far as the eye could see. A few decades earlier, the neighbourhood had been two adjoining farms. The old farmhouse and silo to the west of us were still standing and to the east, the original farmer still tended a few acres in his old age. My best friend lived a good three kilometres away to the south and those same fields connected to her neighbourhood. There was a large area behind her subdivision that sat vacant for what seemed like a long time. There were several enormous sewage pipes that had been deposited there for a future development and a huge dirt hill that was overgrown with grass and weeds. Kids went there on their bicycles or dirt bikes and enjoyed racing around over the bumps and down the dirt hill which was unsurprisingly called “Suicide.” The trails went all the way through the fields back to my house and I walked or rode my bike down them countless times. Sometimes, a boy would offer me a bumpy and thrilling ride to the other end of the field on the back of his dirt bike.

Those open spaces are long gone, filled in now with streets and houses and a mall.

28 years ago, when we were expecting our fourth child, a new subdivision was going up on land that had once been a farm owned by the Olde’s. With great excitement, we hired a builder and moved into the first house on the street. It wasn’t long before the rest of the street and subdivision filled in with new builds.

In all that time as the city grew around me, it never once occurred to me that all this development equated to a loss of farmland. Urban sprawl has been dramatic here. The subdivision where we built our house almost three decades ago used to be on what was then the edge of town. I’d drive out of the neighbourhood onto the nearest thoroughfare and a cornfield would appear on my immediate right. I would sometimes hear coyotes howling in the brush nearby at night and in the spring, if the windows were open, the peepers in a marsh close by would sing me to sleep. An hour reading in the lounge chair in the back yard used to be a quiet interlude, punctuated only now and again by a car driving past on the next street over.

That cornfield and the other fields that used to adjoin it are now a massive new subdivision. That thoroughfare behind us sounds like a highway now, with loud sirens screaming past multiple times a day. I sometimes give up on turning left out of my subdivision and just go the other way. Everywhere I drive, the main streets are clogged with traffic.

The province of Ontario is losing 319 acres of farmland daily. This equates to the loss of one Ontario farm each and every day. When wars disrupt food supply and a challenged economy causes the price of groceries to skyrocket, how can the loss of so much farmland to residential development be justified? I’m aware of the housing crisis, but all these people need to eat, too. It’s not just the loss of farmland that is cause for concern. We are losing green space, wildlife are losing their habitats, our waterways are becoming polluted, and with the construction of all these outskirts developments, more people are driving—a recipe for air pollution which negatively impacts climate change.

These issues are not background ones—we have been urged to do better by scientists and experts the world over for years. And yet, unsurprisingly, the making of money continues to be the priority over everything else.

There are alternatives that contribute to less urban sprawl. Mixed-use zoning would allow for businesses and residences to exist in the same areas, which would reduce demand for these massive outskirts developments and take some of the weight off traffic. Building “up” instead of “out” also helps to cut down on land use. No doubt, there are many other solutions and fixes that the experts out there could detail. It’s time for the people who run things to listen to them more carefully.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners  available to order in print and as an eBook!

Hope is an Action

I wish that I could write about something nostalgic or whimsical this week. There has been a lot of stumbling and backspacing and starting over as I have tried to begin this week’s entry. What happened Tuesday in Uvalde, Texas is beyond any words I could write and even the attempt seems trite. Nineteen children and two educators, slaughtered. That “never again” refrain we have heard repeatedly after Sandy Hook and many other scenes of human carnage in the U.S. is just a blatant lie, perpetuated over and over again.

The epidemic of gun violence in the U.S. is horrific in all of its varied settings, but the school shootings hit me the hardest. What teacher wouldn’t say the same? After countless days spent with children in the classroom, the whole scene is painfully easy to conjure. The children at Robb Elementary were dressed in fancy clothes for a theme day at school, all of them together in their classroom–which was supposed to be a safe place. Then, a monster burst in. The terror those children must have experienced and the hopeless desperation of the teachers as they tried to shield their students is far more clear in my mind than I want it to be. It’s like I know those children’s faces and the sounds of their voices. I wrote a novel about a six-year-old survivor of a scene exactly like this one and for the time I spent writing about Callum’s attempts to make sense of what happened and what it took to move forward, I got a taste of that very dark world.

I can stay away from the television and from social media until the cows come home, but none of this horror goes away. My first response to these senseless events is a seething kind of rage, then the hopelessness creeps in–the conviction that the gun-obsessed U.S. will never change. So many are lost in a right-wing extremism that tells them that it’s not the guns. It’s the violent video games, the bad parenting, the mental illness. This ideology, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, permeates all levels, right up through the state governments and their lawmakers.

Turning away from hope at times like these is a natural response; however, hopelessness is akin to resignation. It’s an easy mindset to fall into. Hope, however, is hard work. Hope has to stay alive because it’s hope that drives change. Impossible and insurmountable as the barriers seem, hope demands work at a time when people are traumatized, soul-weary and fed up. It’s not thoughts and prayers that are needed at times like these, but action–the slow, incremental crawl towards change. Like women getting the vote, this process can take decades.

Mass shootings in other countries have been the impetus for change in gun laws. Families are forever devastated, but at least there is some consolation in knowing that the senseless deaths of their loved ones wasn’t for nothing. In Texas, however, lawmakers just double down after shooting events. Four out of ten mass shootings occur in that state. The Texas lawmakers’ response to the natural and understandable backlash and outrage following shooting events was to DECREASE the age to carry a gun to 18 (an age where a Texan is considered too young to buy cigarettes), allow permit-less carry, allow open carry for semi-automatic weapons, and say that no training or background checks are mandated for people purchasing guns. Research clearly states that the absence of restrictions increases gun violence. Money and power obviously carry more weight than the dead bodies of children. The gun lobby pays the lawmakers and the lawmakers do their bidding. And the NRA has the gall to say “no guns” at their convention taking place today. I guess they’re afraid of getting shot. Go figure. No doubt the 110 people a day in the US that are killed by guns were afraid, too. Gun homicides in the US are 25 times higher than other higher-income countries. How can any parent send their child off to school in a climate like this? Do they really think this couldn’t happen to their children? 50% of Americans are affected at some point by gun violence. Half of all Americans. Canada is far from perfect and we have guns and violence and rampages here, but we just don’t have it on this incredible and ludicrous scale. Because we have gun laws!

I was listening to a podcast where Desmond Tutu was quoted: “You can only pull people out of the river for so long before you have to look upstream to find out who’s pushing them in.” It’s clear who is pushing them in. And the lack of action in doing anything about gun control also makes it clear that the lawmakers have every intention to keep pushing. But people are pushing back. For example, Moms Demand Action is a non-partisan group in the U.S. with more than 8 million members (surpassing NRA membership). They advocate for gun safety and common sense laws to protect citizens and they educate others on the myths about gun control, backing themselves up with facts and research. For example, many people think that a person who wants a gun will find a way to get one and background checks won’t make any difference. Since 1994, background checks in U.S. states have blocked 4 million people from getting guns who were not legally allowed to own them.

Home

This is just one example of grassroots organizations in the U.S. who are done with all the preventable carnage of innocent people and children and are working with hope towards educating people with research-backed information, encouraging voters to use their power to get corruption and greed out of government, or to run for office themselves.

Gun culture is so ingrained in the U.S. No-one is ever going to get the guns out of there, but at the very least, lawmakers must get some rules and regulations into place. Citizens must hold them to account until they do.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

Hey Mom, Look at Me!

The old silo was well behind my house on Sinclair Ave. and over to the west. It was made of poured concrete and had a built-in ladder of sorts–a narrow open gap from top to bottom, lined with rusty metal rungs spaced evenly apart. The silo had stood open at the top and was completely empty for all the time I’d known it to be there. My brother and I would squeeze in through the metal rungs from time to time to explore the bottom. It was fun to be in a round room as high as a tower, but there was nothing to do in there. We could make a fort out of anything, but the silo smelled peculiar, the bottom was mushy, and besides that, it was open to the elements, so it really wasn’t the best choice for a hide-out.

Mom was over at the neighbours’ visiting on their back deck after supper one warm night. My brother and I were over at the silo, poking around. I got it into my head to climb up a few of the rungs. I’d always been nervous to do it up until that point as the cement that held the rungs in place was crumbling in a few spots. As I climbed, I noticed that the rungs didn’t budge or shift at all, which gave me the confidence to keep going. My brother was climbing too, just a few rungs beneath me. I never intended to go all the way to the top. But as I went up, the familiar scenery in the space between the rungs took on a whole new perspective. I’d never seen anything from so high up before. I kept climbing until my head poked over the top of the silo.

As I surveyed the world from my grand perch, my gaze fell upon the back deck where my mother was visiting with the neighbour. There they were, two tiny figures in the distance, sitting in their little doll chairs. I called out into the wide space. “Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-m!”

The wind was moving in the right direction. I saw my mother’s tiny head jerk up and move side to side, up and down, trying to discern where the sound was coming from. I called out again, as loud as I could. Her head continued to wag around. I called out once more.

It finally occurred to my mother to look up. I let go of the rung with one hand so I could furiously wave at her, knowing how surprising and thrilling it would be for her to see me so high up in the air. I saw my mother’s arms fly up into the air in what I interpreted as delighted surprise. The arms began to flail, and battling back over the wind, the sound of her voice made it to my ears. It said, “You…get…down…right…nowwwww….” And then, I saw her tearing down the steps of the deck and barreling full-speed in my direction.

That dreadful sinking feeling, the sudden shift from excitement to dread…I urged my brother to climb down; he was blocking my descent which I knew had to be executed swiftly. The higher up I was when my mother arrived, the worse it was going to be for me. And then it occurred to me that rushing my little brother in this situation could end up resulting in a far worse outcome. But by the time my mother got there, we were both standing on solid ground.

I was happy to listen to her “If I Ever Catch You Doing That Again” speech all the way back home as opposed to the butt-warming I had been tearfully anticipating as I scurried down from the silo.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

Window Time

Many retired people that I’ve talked to say they don’t understand how they ever had time to work. The hours never empty out; they just fill up with other things.

COVID-19 has added a whole new dimension to the ways in which my days have become framed. When I think about the ways I spend my time now, most of it connects in some way to fall-out from the pandemic–isolating, staying close to home, sheltering family members, and soon, helping to care for an infant that might otherwise have been in daycare (this is no time for daycare, if it can be avoided).

Cooking and cleaning and laundry and keeping things tidy become more time-consuming when a house is full of people that don’t venture too far out. The news often spotlights people who are working at home as well as trying to support their children’s virtual schooling, care for toddlers, manage babies, keep up with the messes. I can’t even imagine how challenging that would be. It’s not that I don’t appreciate my fortunate circumstances. I haven’t had to navigate work or small children through this. Even so, the days are not always easy. I’ve found that in incredibly hard circumstances like these, it’s important to find time to back away. It’s not the cure for all the mental health issues that are rising in swarms out of this mess, but everyone need to find ways to take a break.

For me, it’s window time. I may refer to that as “writing,” and it often ends up being so. But it also involves considerable time just sitting at my desk and staring mindlessly out the window at the tree.

The first summer that we were here (twenty-seven years now), some maple keys twirled down into the yard. Quite a few little maples started popping up in the flower garden. I nursed a couple of the little saplings over the next few years, then transferred them to a spot along the west fence. They grew quickly. I’d thought one day, we might string a hammock up between them, but the tree closest to the house ended up being chopped down. The spreading branches were too close to the roof. The remaining tree didn’t seem bothered to lose its companion. It spread its branches wide and shot up well above our two-story house. In winter, the branches and twigs become furred with snow, and the sighing winds catch in its tossing limbs. Spring coaxes the tiny red buds to explode almost overnight, rapidly filling in all the sky-spaces. In summer, the foliage of the tree is dense and green. Sitting at my desk seems almost like perching in a tree house. At the very end of October, the leaves turn to vivid yellow. Watching them release one by one to the wind is more calming than any yoga practice.

I am a task-oriented, list-making type of person, and at first glance, staring out a window does not line up with my visions of productivity. But it snowed a lot last night and the wind is ploughing through the branches of the maple. There is a sparrow hanging on for dear life as it is caught in the tree’s crazy dance. I’m going to take my window time, understanding that it doesn’t prevent me from attending to the demands of the day. Window time makes it possible to meet them.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

The Uninvited Guest

A few months back, I had this idea that I would chronicle one person’s attempt to navigate life in a historical pandemic. I guess the novelty wore off somewhere around May.

I’m tired of it. Everyone is tired of it.

COVID-19 is still very much here. It’s like an obnoxious and uninvited guest that showed up for the party. His loud and off-colour comments make everyone uncomfortable. He double-dips his chips, puts his slobbery fingers all over the silverware, and makes such a mess in the bathroom, nobody wants to use it. He makes people want to sneak off to other rooms to avoid him. If he manages to corner anyone, they stand as far away as they can to avoid his horrific breath.

You spend the first part of the evening hoping. Maybe, he’ll leave soon and the party can continue on just like I planned. I’ll just make the best of it. Everything will be back to normal in no time.

I remember having that thought back in March when this all started. I figured that by September, this difficult chapter would be over and life would be returning to normal. I know a lot of people felt the same way.

But that’s not how this is working at all. It’s not going to be a few months. It could be years.

Knowing that the end is nowhere in sight, I have been venturing out for occasional runs for supplies, masked up and hands drying out with sanitizer use. For the most part, I have been staying home. Lots of walks, YouTube and Zoom exercise, home-cooked meals, outdoor movies with family, porch visits, and writing in huge quantities. The patio at Pinecroft (where the above picture was taken) has been a lovely treat from time to time. The tables are spread far apart under the trees and the servers are in face shields. Going out for lunch was once a treat that I took for granted. There is much in ordinary life that I will never take for granted again.

A vaccine could start righting this listing ship, but that doesn’t happen overnight. And so, the challenge now is to make a new normal around the virus so that life can somehow go on. Because it has to.

It’s a strange and surreal life, though. In all the small ways and all the big ones:

A life where I can smile at a stranger, and then realize she can’t see my smile because there is a mask over it.

A life where I spend three minutes at the grocery store struggling to open a plastic produce bag (when I forgot my reusable ones) because I can’t lick my finger.

A life when I go to the beach at sunset for a walk and go back home because it’s absolutely stuffed with people.

A life where my parents have often been reduced to voices on the other end of the phone.

A life where I am sad for every restaurant trying to stay open because cold weather is coming and their makeshift patios will have to close, and there are a lot of people who aren’t willing to go inside to eat.

A life where many are still too leery to book a massage or a pedicure.

A life where I have missed several crucial checks important for my health.

A life where a government is willing to open schools without the appropriate safety protocols–about which they have been ironically preaching on a daily basis since March.

A life where university students begin their next chapters in front of a computer instead of in a lecture hall, or isolating in a dorm room instead of meeting people and having new experiences.

A life where a family member lies in her last days of life in a hospice and most of her relatives can’t come to hold her hand or say good-bye.

The uninvited guest is still here. We are at the ends of our collective ropes, but it doesn’t change the reality. We don’t get to call the game. It will continue on its own terms until it is played out, whether we like it or not. The uninvited guest will not leave until he wants to. And so, we will have to live around his unwanted presence, putting on our hot masks and following him around with our bottles of spray bleach and sanitizers.

We will get there. If we do it together, it will be sooner rather than later.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

Pandemic Days

I’ve felt an increasing sense of urgency to start documenting these pandemic days. Not in a general sense at all–that would be completely overwhelming with all the layers of politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine–and other specialized subjects that I know little or nothing about. But I could tackle it in a memoir kind of fashion. I’ve noticed that when I want to explore an event in history, I go for the first-person account of it. At any rate, recording the impact of COVID-19 on me personally is something that carries a sense of importance to me.

You would think that self-isolation over a period of several weeks (even months, who knows?) would be a prime opportunity for a writer to get some serious word-count going. Aside from writing, I’ve been considering all the goals I could focus on during this time. Like anyone else, I can’t go anywhere, visit anyone, run errands. I can’t go to the library or out for lunch or to any kind of appointments. What else is there for me to do but write and exercise?

The problem is, the way the world has tipped on its axis with this virus, I find that I’m a little tipped myself. It’s taken me two weeks to find enough calm and focus within to even look at some edits on the novel that I’m working on. As my friend Barbara remarked when I was speaking with her on the phone last night, “It’s eerie.” Such an apt word, when everything looks exactly the same as it ever did, yet nothing is the same. When the outbreak first turned its eyes towards North America, all I could do was clean. Bathrooms, couches, closets. Cupboards, fridge, freezer–in times of this kind of unease, I found all thoughts turning to food and supplies. (I did NOT hoard toilet paper, I’ll get that clarified right now. And yes, I may regret that I didn’t…) Once my daughter and son-in-law got out of the UK where they’ve been living since last fall and flew back to Canada, I felt some relief from the weird underlying anxiety that followed me around and kept me awake until 3:00 a.m. most nights. But it’s still really strange. I know I’m not alone in feeling so discombobulated and off-kilter. Like everyone else, I can’t see my family. I can’t see my daughters, all in self-isolation or quarantine. I can’t see my parents. I worry about my sister who works in a hospital and one of my brothers, who is a firefighter.

Still, there is much to be thankful for. First and foremost, I feel extraordinarily lucky to be in Canada, where our Prime Minister and the Ontario government are taking this seriously and putting our citizens’ safety (and not the economy) first. (Ontario has closed down all non-essential businesses, closed schools, and made it illegal to foreclose or evict). I am grateful for our universal healthcare–at this time more than any other time in history. I am thankful for grocery and drugstore delivery. I am thankful that the people in my family are responsibly isolating and keeping themselves safe. I am thankful for the Teachers’ Pension Plan that keeps me in groceries and ensures that I can pay the bills. Money is obviously a worrisome challenge for many people during this unprecedented time. The Federal Government is committed to supporting small businesses and helping people who are ineligible for Employment Insurance with financial aid, according to Justin Trudeau who makes a televised appearance every morning to deliver reassurances and updates. I am thankful that I can still get out for walks and drives–it’s the only opportunity to get out of the house. I’ve driven down to Port Stanley a couple of times after dinner to take in a sunset.

It’s turning to spring. The daffodils are sprouting. The cardinals are calling. The days are lasting longer. And the earth, with such a profound reduction in human activity, is healing itself.

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

 

The Joys and Pitfalls of Wasted Time

After I retired, I had some preconceived notions about the shifts that would be taking place in my life. After more than three decades of raising children and working, I looked forward to a fresh way of living life, a new path that opened up a whole realm of unending time. The prospect of long, beautiful days filled with writing, painting, playing piano and no end of other potential artistic pursuits filled my spirit with anticipation and joy.

Somehow, those days did not materialize in the way I had envisioned.

I’m in my fourth year of retirement, and I cannot deny that there have been sporadic allotments of writing afternoons, oil painting classes, and choir practices. However, even though the days of showing up for a job are over, those supposedly now-free hours seem to get sucked up in some weird vacuum. You know how retired people often say they can’t comprehend how they ever had time to work? It’s true. One hundred per cent.

First of all, I wasn’t counting on being tired. Being retired means being older. I simply do not have the energy that I had when I was younger. The creative time I have planned in the afternoons following morning chores and errands often ends up filled instead with a “quick nap.”

Another explanation for lost time is the luxury of not having an alarm drag me flailing from my bed at the crack of dawn (or before). I sleep longer, especially when visited by bouts of insomnia at night (which are growing in frequency). And when I wake up, I often lounge around in bed, reading stuff on my phone or toying with the idea of going back to sleep…I think I fantasized about morning lounging pre-retirement more than anything else. And after more than three years, the novelty hasn’t worn off.

Although time doesn’t slow down, the pace sure does. When I was working, I was making tea in my thermos and finding stolen moments at work to take a few sips out of it. Now, I can sit on the couch and nurse my mug for as long as I want to. Before I know it, I’ve been awake for two hours and I don’t have much to show for it.

Another sad reality—getting older didn’t simply readjust my pace. It also readjusted my metabolism. I wish it had left me just a little bit of it rather than taking it away altogether. Because of that, and in the absence of running around after kids at school, it has become imperative that I fit exercise into my daily routine.

I guess this sounds like a whole lot of excuses for why I seem to be losing (or wasting) so much time. But where I saw myself as a full-time artist post-retirement, what I have actually become is a full-time housewife and committed lounger. And it’s absolutely ridiculous!

Although it is quite pleasant to be free of the restrictions of schedules, time tables and to-do lists, I think it is time to concede that productivity in retirement absolutely requires some type of time management. And yet, I don’t want to be overly regimented either, because wasting time here and there is not only delightful, but strangely necessary at this stage of life.

I am also starting to realize that a writer/wannabe artist also needs some designated studio space to make a mess in—and to leave in a mess, if she wants.

Some things to consider for the New Year.

 

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!

 

Beach Day

I had such a busy goal and chore-oriented summer. I realized once September hit that the only beach time I’d had was during two days of “Sistah” time at the cottage. Since I’m  feeling weird and antsy about not being a teacher any more, I decided that the first day of school would be an ideal time for the beach. I got up early (in solidarity with my teacher friends), got the house chores done, went for a sunrise bike ride and then headed down to Port Stanley.

I’ve been to Port a few times over the summer with the goal of getting steps on my FitBit and the beach was as crowded with people and umbrellas as a Caribbean resort. Today, the only living creatures I saw were two turkey vultures perched on the top of a life guard chair and a bunch of seagulls yelling “Ha!” to one another over the water. The beach was utterly deserted. An overcast sky crowded with clouds met the grey water with its slurping waves, the two buttoned together by boats slipping along the horizon. I took a quiet walk along the pier and around the harbour, Lake Erie’s familiar aroma of lake water and fish carried on the breezes. The late summer sounds of cicadas and crickets followed me all the way out to the end of the pier.

After my walk, I drove to Erie Rest and set up my red canvas chair, snuggling in with my e-reader. The sand flies were biting something fierce, so I found a nice stick in the sand and used it to chase them off while I read. It was going to take more than some sand flies to deprive me of my reading time on the beach. My present read is “The English Teacher” by Lily King–a rare find for me because it has seemed almost impossible to find a book worth my time lately. This one is. It whispers to me all day to come read.

Following my happy hour of absorbed reading and sand fly stick-brushing, I took off along the beach for another walk. The sky looked as though it was seriously considering tossing down some rain, but the sun came out and changed its plans. The waves and the distant cliffs caught some light and the morning began to glisten. I picked up interesting rocks and thought about nothing at all. It was like being five years old. Long periods of thinking about nothing are the best part of childhood. Adults call it meditation.

When I left, the sun was out in full force, enticing me to consider that the second day of school might involve a return trip to the beach to see the sunrise over the water.

 

If you would like to read more by me, I hope you will check out my book Corners now available to order in print and as an eBook!