Complements

Rainy days are great for weeding, because the dirt gets looser and it's easier to work the roots out of the ground.  Yay!

Rainy days are great for digging worms, because the dirt gets looser and it's easier to work the worms out of the ground.  Yay!

Rainy days are terrible for people who freak out about worms wriggling up with the roots of some plant and either squirming and curling away or weaving blindly after having been unexpectedly cut in half by a not-meaning-any-harm trowel because there are so many more worms than on a normal sunny weeding day.  Ugh!

Rainy days are great for sitting inside, knitting.  Whew.

Cherry blossom time

On Monday it was brought to my attention that there are cherry blossoms blooming in High Park.  High Park is pretty much on the other side of the city from me, but by a freak scheduling accident yesterday I found myself by midafternoon with fresh bread from the bakery for sandwiches and some friends who wanted to go see some trees and eat a picnic supper.

It wasn't a sunny day, but that didn't seem to bother all the other people who wanted to see some trees.

Seriously, the people watching was incredible.  So many pretty young girls in fancy gowns or otherwise elegant attire posing with trees or rocks for their boyfriends and said boyfriends' telephoto lenses!  So many high heels for the 45-minute blossom walk!  So many white blouses and dresses!  None of which turned up in any of my pictures.  (I felt a little silly taking pictures of that when everybody else was pointing their cameras at trees.)

But the blossoms were also amazing.  I've been to Washington D.C. in May so I know cherry blossoms can be spectacular, but I don't remember this sea of white where you usually see green.

Soooo maaaaany trees!  2000 apparently.

And so many blossoms.

While in the park I spotted other cool things, like evidence of bona fide Canadian beavers

orangey-yellow crocuses

and an odd dirt heap

that turned out to be a maple leaf-shaped flowerbed.

I really gotta get over to High Park more often.

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.