Mother

My aunt made a copy for me of an old photograph of my mum, their mum, and my aunt, found in the depths of mum's albums when we were helping to organize for her recent move:

That's mum on the left, laughing.

My grandmother died when I was just three, but I have a slight, persistent memory of being tucked in safe and happy at her side while she read from a book she'd brought me. She had such a tough life really. Lost her mother when she was just a little girl too young even for school, lost one of her children in the days before kids could be vaccinated for the scariest of diseases, lost her husband when the oldest of the surviving ones was just 16 and the Depression was still an obstacle to survival.  But she's remembered for her gentleness and great sense of humour, traits she passed on in spades to the next generation.

I've been thinking today that that sums up motherhood: the need to carry on - with a good outlook where possible - no matter what else you have to carry, because other little lives have to come first.  I'm glad that mum and I have both lived long enough for me to put her life first, if only in the form of packing and shifting her things.

I finished that job on Friday after about three months of work, and guess what bloomed on Saturday?

I hope you have a very happy Mother's Day today, whether you spend it with children, or mothers, or both.

A tisket, a tasket

.... a pretty floral basket.

This china basket was a present to my mother from her aunt many, many years ago.  That aunt lived to be 104; she was a lovely woman and very kind to the shy young me-as-houseguest, especially along the lines of late-night buttered toast. 

I always loved this basket and for a long time believed the Tooth Fairy lived between the strips of woven china lattice; I'm so happy to give it a new home now.  It is the perfect Easter centrepiece, not least for its subtle reminder about the importance of dental care!

Happy Easter if you celebrate it, happy almost-May if not - and I hope your day has either chocolate or some other little treat in it.

The first aid kit

While not posting here, I've been clearing things out of my mum's old place and into overflow venues, including her new place.  It's a big job! with not so much time for writing (aha, at last a legitimate excuse) or sewing.  Still time for knitting though, what with all the commuting back and forth.

In my travels through the cupboards I came across this tin I remember well, which ended up getting stacked in my storage room with this book I don't remember at all:

This may make sense, since mum and dad didn't consult me about where we would go on our driving trips.  But I did have a lot of contact with the tin, which housed all the first aid stuff.

The tin lived at mum's feet in the front of whichever very big car dad was driving at the time - in the 70s all cars were big, but we needed an especially big one because when I was new, there were five kids to cram in around all the camping stuff.  (By the time I was starting school, the oldest ones were working and didn't come away any more.)

Diversion alert:

The other thing that lived at mum's feet was a square Tupperware container full of sandwiches.  We were all prone to carsickness which mum sensibly put down to hunger, so if anybody complained she would ask what flavour was wanted and hand back a neat triangle - white bread with mustard and ham, or butter and peanut butter (you need the butter to be able to swallow, since the lemonade jug didn't come out till we were out of the car.)

Sometimes we even got peanut butter with potato chips layered between the bread.  It sounds totally disgusting, doesn't it?  But it was delicious, unless you ate it too long after it was made or the chip bag opened, such that the chips got soggy or were stale to start with.

Return to main subject: 

The label is scratched off the bottom of the tin so I couldn't say what sort of cookie - or possibly tea? - was in it when it was purchased, but with all those animals it must have been irresistible to buy in the store when she got it. Also it's hinged at one side which makes it perfect for future uses; you can't lose the lid or leave it somewhere to be stepped on by a bleeding child or an anxious sibling. 

I love how resourceful and far-thinking mum is, even to the extent of choosing a cheery, attention-keeping tin for something so basic as a bandage box.  She would say now that the tin should be tossed, being too messy and scarred for use.  At least, this is what she said about our original cookie tin, a repurposed round stripey Peak Freans tin that held the chocolate chip cookies she baked weekly, when she let me have it years and years ago.

She's right in a way.  But these things, when you use them for so long, develop a second life.  And I think the first aid kit, even empty of bandages, still aids.

This seems physically impossible

Explain the math to me, somebody.  My storage room looked full but accessible before I started getting rid of stuff.  After, it looked like a bomb site with little pathways.

Today I took another foray in there and sent six boxes out to Goodwill and dumped a solid box of paper into recycling and

it looks even worse.

So my questions are:

How is this possible?

and

Can the situation be improved by chocolate?

(no, really, that was a joke, because of course all situations are improved by chocolate, unless it's really bad chocolate - there is such a thing - and there is no other chocolate within ten yards in which case the situation is automatically a disaster.)

The real second question:

Do I need to hire somebody to come in and make it all go away, or should I just go in there and start carrying it all out to the car without considering what I should keep and what needs to go?

The opposite of procrastination

A terrible thing has been creeping up on me the past few weeks. Not spring cleaning, though it is the time of year when you don't wait for all the snow to melt to start raking up last fall's leavings

And when green things start to look even better than usual next to the hibernating ones

And my stone bunny emerges again from under its pile of winter shovelings.

All that cleaning and reorganizing I've been getting up to... well, it got me doing some serious math.  Like, what it would cost me, per additional room, to move to a bigger house.  Which is sort of inflated because I could get the same effect for less investment by adding on to the current house, if I didn't put a value on my sanity mid-renovation, but I do.  And my conservative estimate on the value of the 8x12' room I use for storage works out to about $30,000.  Is there $30,000 worth of junk in there?  No way. 

You can see where the creeping terribleness is coming in.  I would like more space.  I would not like to go through all that junk and figure out what can go to a thrift store and then package it up to go there.  But I would like more space.

And yesterday afternoon, I thought - ENOUGH.  and instead of going through boxes and shedding stuff like I have for the past 15ish years in there, I moved every single box and bag out of it, turning the next room over into something out of that show about people who hoard stuff. 

It took 5 hours, and I am a fast mover. 

Then I dismantled the biggest storage shelf and moved it out for donation purposes so I couldn't put more stuff back in there. 

Then I realized I need to say goodbye to another big shelf if I want to be able to use that room for anything functional so I got rid of it too.

Then I realized I need to get rid of at least 60% of what I was hanging on to because I've lost about that much storage and my workbench was still completely covered in boxes.

(that's okay though.  I don't need the first communion certificate of my dad's childless cousin who died 35 years ago, or six French-English dictionaries.)

It will be a miracle if I get everything out the door or back into the room by bedtime tonight, but hey!

you can see the floor now.

Cleanup rewards: vintage china

I've been clearing up my house lately to make space for new things and ditch the clutter, getting rid of anything I don't use and consolidating what I do.  It's hard to part with things sometimes - I'm sure you've had the same experience!

My aunt sent me a little summary of how to make tough decisions about what to keep and what must go which echoed what I had learned through experience.  It amounts to this:

If you don't need it now but might need it in ten years then compare its replacement cost to the real estate value of the storage space it will take up during that time.  Then get rid of it.

If it cost a fortune and you're not using it, then it's costing you even more of a fortune and not just in money.  Guilt is a heavy burden.

If you've collected a lot more of something than you can display (or use - are you getting the theme here?) then you need to prune.

Things are just things, not memories. You'll remember high school without the leather jacket you bought there in your last year.

Family heirlooms aren't heirlooms unless the current and next generation get to develop attachments to them.  Use them.


Bearing these policies in mind to steel myself for the task, I emptied two out of six storage boxes this week, and one of the remaining four is only half full.  A lot of what I decided to part with was stored china I had collected over years of thrift store and rummage sale visits in various towns I visited, by way of acquiring functional souvenirs.  What I kept, I've put in my newly-cleared out china cabinet where I can get at it.

The plate in the middle was sitting on a crowded table at a church bazaar in a little village along the eastern  coast of England when I found it.  I love it so much for its cheery colours and seeming movement.  Years ago I had it hanging on a wall with these plaid plates (I'm such a sucker for a good 50s plaid plate) but it's been nice these last few days to serve cookies on any of the three.

I can't remember where I got these, but I think they would be perfect at Christmas, don't you?  and maybe for a special meal with a friend.

This one I picked up at some totally unassuming charity thrift shop.  I can't tell you how much I love this plate - it's very smooth and new-looking and toast looks beyond perfect on it. 

I adore these two bowls, too - I did say I can't resist plaids, right?  The pink one has a little chip but I decided I don't care and it needs to stay.  They are great bowls for slipping round cookies or wrapped candies into.

This cappucino-ish set is special - I found it at a flea market it during a weekend spent with a childhood friend who was turning 30 and wanted to revisit all our old haunts, including the near-vertical cliff we used to climb along at the lake.  Horrors!  I'd like to think it wasn't quite so treacherous looking then but I suspect it was just as dangerous.  I've used them once since unpacking them but I don't know... I think I might give the set to that friend, who actually drinks both cappucino and espresso.

These ones are pretty posh by comparison with the rest, aren't they.  An inheritance from my dad's cousin's widow that I have never used, but clearly need to use, perhaps for a small lunch party or a little tea and cake?

I should do something to celebrate all this cleaning, after all, and it really can't be a trip to the thrift store.

Where maple sugar comes from

This weekend I decided that as a lifelong resident of Ontario, having lived under maple trees for pretty much the duration and being more than fond of pancakes, I needed to see for myself what maple syrup looks like when it's really new.

Any time this sort of urge descends upon me I hit up some friends to come along, and somehow even in the depths of summer Sio and I, alone of the group, freeze.  One time we had to talk each other out of buying silk shawls in some 19th century castle's gift shop because it was August for crying out loud.  Unseasonably cold and rainy, but August.

This time I was determined not to mess up.  The temperature was hovering just over the freezing point as I left the house and the sky threatened rain or worse, so I put wool/mohair socks inside my rubber boots, two layers on my legs plus a skirt, a giant wool sweater and scarf, and a wool hat with my raincoat. 

I was glad of the rubber boots.

(Sio begged off by the way, claiming to have too much laundry for gallivanting.  I bet she was warm.)

There are four kinds of maple trees.

I think the one in front of my current house is a sugar.  I grew up with two reds.  Mum didn't realize how big they'd grow when she planted them, and a subsequent owner of our house had to cut one down to save the other (and have natural light in the living room, and get any free time at all from raking leaves every autumn I expect.)

The idea is to tap the trees when the sap starts running in early spring, and catch said sap in something or other.  One of the more picturesque approaches is a pail.

The sap is quite clear and beautiful.

Also in evidence at the park I visited: the more modern method

which eliminates the risk of overflow and protects the sap from marauding raccoons. 

Either way, you have to boil it down.

This is the part that prevents sensible people from tapping the maple trees on their own lawns even if they aren't growing on the municipally-owned portion of same.  I mean, you've got to get the sap down to about a 40th of its original volume to get to syrup, which is a lot of steam, and I say this with confidence because the one guy I know who did once tap his own trees made his wife really, really mad when he boiled the sap in their kitchen.  She had to rehang all the wallpaper.  Hence the 'once'.

(the syrup was delicious though.)

You can get maple syrup in different grades depending on how much water has been boiled off the sap.  There's a brownish fluid that resembles syrup but pours like water, and there's something sweeter and  little denser that says With Real Maple Syrup on the label, meaning just a whiff probably, and there's high quality maple syrup from Quebec that is a rich lustrous brown and glugs out of the bottle or can, and there's my friend's syrup that took down the wallpaper, and then there is the sample they gave us on the trail. 

It only took about 113 seconds for this stuff to hit my bloodstream.  I'm amazed it was still liquid, there was so much sugar in that cup.

There was more of the same for sale in the Sugar Shack.

But my preference was for something with not much liquid left in it at all because

who can resist maple leaves made from maple sugar?