Camping and the Kindness of Strangers

 I've always felt like campgrounds were a tiny bit like Disneyworld, in that you drive through the entrance and it sort of feels like you're in a semi-magical place where nothing bad can happen. We camped a lot when I was a kid, and we always had the run of the place, and I remember my parents meeting and conversing with people who were set up near us, holding babies we didn't know, sharing food. I still have vivid memories of a Greek woman and a man with a stutter, which I had never heard before. I asked my dad about it later and he said it was good that I hadn't asked in front of the man. 

Even before I started camping overnight, when I would take the kids to Sandbanks to hang with our camping friends, I let them run around the park with the other kids and paid less attention than I would have at home. I'm not really defending this as intelligent or safe, but nothing bad did happen, so it's a moot point. Camping there has generally been a convivial experience. People catch floating  toys that have been taken by the wind (at one point there was a distressing tableau that should have been captioned "Losing Nemo" before a kind stranger intervened). People tell you if you left something in the shower that you just vacated as they're entering (when the showers are in use). This year, people told other bathroom users which dispensers had soap in them so they didn't have to touch all of them (leaving aside the questionable detail of empty soap dispensers at this particular point in time - the bathrooms were pretty clean aside from that). 

One year Eve and I got there the day before Matt and Angus, and while we were deciding where to put up the tent a man passing by stopped and told us that it would be better to put it on the higher ground so we wouldn't get flooded if it rained. Another year there was a group of young people camping next to us that looked like a traveling theater troupe from a Barry Unsworth novel. They asked to borrow mustard for their veggie dogs and were effusively grateful. They were gone when we woke up the next morning. I know they were probably just hipsters, but we suspected they might be time travelers. 

This year didn't feel terribly different. The website said there would probably be more empty sites, but we were in the most popular section, and there weren't a whole lot, which is fine - the sites are not too close together. The bathrooms were never crowded - it was actually rare to be in there with other people. We always try to get a site in the same general area, because it's close to the beach and the comfort station and, full disclosure, because Eve and I have the same appalling sense of direction and it makes it less likely that we will set off and never be seen again. We did get a site in the same area, but it was in an inner loop instead of in the same row where we usually are. This was fine - it was actually a little closer to the bathroom - except at night we had to remember to turn right sooner than we usually did. 

I love walking along the camp roads. In the daytime the pavement is warm and the sun flickers down through the trees making a light that you don't see anywhere else. At night it's quiet and dark except for low voices and firelight from the odd site, and when it's clear you can look up and the stars are dazzling. I usually leave my flashlight off when I'm on the long straight part or walking along the beach, and just use it to figure out where to turn. The first campfire this year, though, my flashlight disappeared. I had my phone, but the battery was low so I was trying not to use it too much. I got back to our site once, but I wanted to wash my face and brush my teeth at the comfort station (I usually do it at our picnic table with a lantern, but the bugs were insane this year and I was tired of inhaling them). So I gathered my stuff and set out again. On my way back, I turned into the really dark part, and suddenly realized that 1) I had no idea where the right turn to get to our site was and 2) I had no idea if my phone was in my overstuffed beach bag or if I had left it back on the picnic table.

I stopped for a moment to gather my thoughts and see if my eyes would adjust enough to see the road. They did not. Just as i was about to set down my bag and start digging through it blind to see if I could find my phone, I looked back and saw a flashlight bobbing along a ways back coming towards me. So I just stood there until it drew level and said "sorry, but could you just help me find the turn here?" 

He looked surprised (which is fair - if someone had done this to me I probably would have screamed and thrown a right hook). He looked like he might not speak English (there are a lot of French people who camp there), but was agreeable enough. He shone the light to the right and I found the turn-off and thanked him. He kept it shining for a bit for me to start walking so I thanked him again. He kept going and I kept walking, and I had forgotten that the road bows out sharply to the right before curving back left. I realized I was walking on grass and not pavement and stopped a split second before walking into a tree. I corrected and sighted the light Matt had left on the picnic table for me. The next day the person who had mistakenly taken my flashlight returned it. 

Now that I type it out it sounds kind of dumb, but it was a lovely moment, and I am adding my time with Flashlight Guy to my collection of nice camping moments. Is this some kind of metaphor for how, just when it's too dark to see your way forward, a light will appear to guide you? Or maybe a flashlight is just a flashlight. 

Everything is Fine

HA ha,  no, of course it isn't, I never promised not to lie to you, Radical Honesty is bunk, lies are the WD-40 that grease the machinery of human interaction. Among other things, my blog interface suddenly looks totally different. Do I LOOK like I need a fun new challenge right now, Blogger? DO I? Lucy just scratched at the back door and when I opened it she snatched my gardening gloves off the table and ran outside with them, wtf? The whole world is against me. 

You know which very important movie I totally forgot about when I made my sort-of list of my sort-of top ten favourite movies? The Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm a fake fan. *hides head in shame*

Angus left. We were all so stressed about whether he'd be able to get over the border that we went next door and got totally trashed with our neighbours. Angus - who, over the course of the summer, has had A beer with us, sometimes two - drank most of a bottle of red wine by himself, among other drinks, and was very funny. At once point he was talking about driving on a U.S. highway and said the phrase "portable homes" many, many times until someone figured out that he meant mobile homes. He came inside to go to bed a half hour before us, and when I came in I went to find his clothes and wash them so he could leave with everything clean. I couldn't find them anywhere. I tried to get him to tell me where he'd put them, but, well, if you've ever tried to quiz a drunk person half an hour after they went to bed, you know how successful that was. This might be a mystery for the ages.

He left the next day an hour or two later than originally intended. Our friends had been trying to reassure him that he was going to pull up to the border and some border guard would be snoozing on a chair having had nothing to do for four months and would be happy as hell to see someone. This, as it turns out, is very nearly what transpired. Not even an hour after he left, we got this text:

The guard asked him where he was going, what sport he played, then asked him what he wanted to do after college and when Angus said med school the guard said "you should do it in the Caribbean, it's cheap!" Does that not sound like someone who has been starved for conversation? Or maybe owns shares in a Caribbean med school, idk. 

After that, Matt and I sat around catatonic for a couple of days due to a severe adrenaline withdrawal. Then my sister and her family came for a few days, which was off-the-charts wonderful. We ate some and drank some, but mostly we just talked and laughed at my parents' house, then at our house, then in our backyard, then in my parents' backyard. Somebody tweeted a Ram Dass quote about how spending a week with our nearest and dearest sometimes causes the realization that they are neither nearest nor dearest, which made me realize how lucky we are that we never run out of things to talk about, that we all generally share the same twisted sense of humour, and that we're never ready for the people who have to leave to leave. Also, we got to hear my niece's story about finishing her first university exam at home and then deciding to have her own little party, which involved a bottle of Kraken, some tunes, a Zoom chat and the phrase "I remember getting into my banana costume". 

My smartass niece was taking our picture and we told her to hold the camera higher because older people need help not having multiple chins. 

We haven't done a whole ton of "Summer" stuff, because, well, it's hot as fuck and I hate heat. But we do our weekly bar night in one of the two biggest backyards so we can social distance (two words I have grown to hate and may soon spit on the floor every time they are uttered, wait no, that would be irresponsible, I will only spit metaphorically), and this week-end we're going camping, for less time than we usually do because the showers are closed. It will be strange, because Angus won't be there, and Collette won't be there because she basically gets poison ivy if a gentle breeze brushes past the poison ivy and then brushes past her, and camping with no showers is a no-go. We're also not doing the big communal dinners for obvious reasons, and is camping even camping if you're not roasting a giant hunk of meat on a spit over the fire? So this might be a feeble attempt to say Screw You, Covid, but I love the parts of camping I love slightly more than I hate the parts of camping I hate, so marshmallows ahoy.

Eve's Room, Before and After

Before: aqua and purple, painted by my dad many years ago:

During:

After: Sherwin Williams Sockeye and Nearly Peach, painted by Eve, two weeks ago:

In Which I Suddenly Realize That I Am the Problem

I've been crap at jotting down things to write about which means I have nothing to write about and also that I clearly don't know myself at all. Let's talk about how I keep thinking that Eve is five instead of seventeen and assuming she can't do stuff when she most certainly can do stuff. I mean, I'm not necessarily the type of mom that tells her kids "you can do anything you want if you just believe in yourself!" (My friend Collette (HI COLLETTE) has a funny story about this that happened at her daughter's diving competition - the mom behind her said to her daughter "I KNEW you'd come in first if you just BELIEVED" - she came in first because she was the only one in her age class). I mean, I knew my kids were smart and I tried to teach them critical thinking and I figured they could do a lot of things, but not, like, fly (or even ride a bike, in Eve's case - sorry babe, my fault you were born without balance), or do magic, or ride a unicorn - wait, that's basically flying, I'm being repetitive.

I like to keep our expectations reasonable, is all I'm saying. The year before Angus's baseball team could qualify for the Little League World Series, my sister asked when it was so she could book time off at work. "Pfagh!" I laugh-snorted unattractively "they're not going to the Little League World Series. B.C. always wins. Don't bother booking time off for that." Well, they went to the Little League World Series and my sister had to drive all night to see one game and then go to work the day after on no sleep (no problem, not like being a pharmacist at a hospital chemo center requires alertness or anything) and I was not terribly popular.

Wait, this started as me trying to illustrate that I might coddle my kids a little and has somehow morphed into me being a loser who doesn't believe in her kids. And now I'm suddenly remembering that I didn't give baby Angus pretzels because they were a choking hazard, then sort of forgot about pretzels for three years and when he finally got pretzels as a four-year-old he looked at me like I was some kind of pretzel-hiding asshole. This is terrible! Hang on, I have to go tell Angus he actually can go to med school if he wants to. And maybe bring him some pretzels.

Anyway, Eve decided to repaint her room because we weren't doing Bluesfest. I thought we would make a playlist, crank the tunes and do it together i.e. I would do most of the work. Nuh-uh. My husband helped her move some furniture, but she taped, edged, and rolled on three coats of paint per wall (and it's a big room!). I was extremely impressed. I took her to IKEA to get her a few new things to match the new colours. The main thing she wanted was a tall set of drawers to go with her desk, which only has two little ones. We got to the self-serve warehouse, I tried to lift the box and said "shit, I can't lift this by myself, we'll have to find someone to help us." She raised her eyebrows at me, went and got a trolley and grabbed one end and waited for me to grab the other. Then she told ME not to hurt myself.

When we got to the car, I opened the hatch and told her to hold the cart while I slid the box out to where we could both grab it. She said "No! YOU hold!" Then we got home and she built the frigging thing herself. Last time I tried to build something from IKEA I had to get my husband to help me open the box.

She is salty that you can't tell how much work went into assembling each drawer when it's put together like this

I will post more pictures of Eve's room when we (I mean, she) gets it all put back together. And I guess I'll go buy one of those goddamned "reach for the moon" or whatever the hell posters, since clearly I am a serious impediment to soaring or envisioning or carpe-ing the goddamned diem.

I'd Rather Have Five Minutes of Wonderful Than a Lifetime of Nothing Special

A couple of weeks ago I went over to my friend Kerry's (HI KERRY) house for a socially-distanced movie date, after we got talking about Steel Magnolias. While I was there I told her my Steel Magnolias origin story. I was in first-year university and my boyfriend broke up with me. It had been my first serious relationship and we had dated for years at home and then he went to university the year before I did. I didn't exactly go to the same place because of him - I went with my best friend, and it was a great school for the program I wanted, and I have no regrets - but I didn't exactly NOT go there because of him either. I was devastated. I didn't know what to do with myself. After dinner, I left my residence and just started wandering around. I went to the chapel and sat down and realized I really wasn't very religious anymore, and even if I was this seemed like a really embarrassing problem to go to any deity with. I wandered towards the woods trail and then realized that would be extra stupid in the dark (yes, I did briefly flirt with pulling a Bella-in-Twilight and disappearing into the forest for days without food or water, but my ex wasn't a vampire or still in love with me, I don't like bugs, and I would have gotten over my sadness-related lack of hunger within a few hours. Plus it really wasn't a very big forest). I finally walked into the little downtown and eventually passed the tiny one-screen movie theatre and Steel Magnolias was playing. I don't think I knew anything about it. I had just enough money in change in my jacket pocket to get in - it was five or six dollars. It was the perfect refuge for a couple of hours, and I had the wettest, grossest, most cathartic ugly cry ever. Then I went back to residence and my roommate and friends were panicking that I'd been gone for so long and I felt like kind of an asshole.

Anyway, it holds up. It is sweet and funny and heartbreaking and in my Top Ten of All Time (I say, not really knowing what the other nine are because any time I try to think of it I can't remember any movies I've ever seen. Can I name nine other movies I love without googling? A Room With a View. Gattaca. Cinema Paradiso. Ummmmmm. Three? THREE? That's the best I can do? For fuck's sake. Oh, what's that South African one about the aliens? Station Nine? Plan Nine? Geez, life is hard without Google, especially in perimenopause.)

I'm going to try to move on and see if any other movies come to me, It's still really freaking hot, even at night. My stand fan in my room stopped working, so I ordered another one, but I couldn't get the same one, and the one I replaced it with isn't great. I have a bad habit of getting rid of things and forgetting to note the name of them so I can get the same one. A couple of years ago we got a ceiling fan and Matt installed it and then it didn't work, so he took it down and we've had a hole in the ceiling ever since. We finally decided to order another one, and I carefully researched which ones were highly rated. It came and he installed it way more quickly than I expected. I walked in and said "oh, looks great, is it on low?" and he said "no, that's as high as it goes". I blinked and he said "I think it's rated highly because it's so quiet". Like, excuse me? It's a FUCKING FAN, should it not be rated on it's, ya know, FAN-NESS? My old fan sounded like a jet engine and I LOVED IT. Anyway, my loving husband saved the day by then ordering vent covers with little fans in them. So I still need two fans going PLUS the AC, but now I'm not suffocatingly hot every night.

Terminator two! I freaking love Sarah Connor.

Die Hard. Toy Story.

DISTRICT, it's DISTRICT Nine. Right? Maybe?

I invited my parents over for dinner partly because I thought they'd like to go somewhere that wasn't their house or the grocery store during seniors' hours (or, full disclosure, the liquor store), and partly to force me to clean. I was somewhat less than impressed with my brilliant plan the day before when I was trying to do a months' worth of organizing and cleaning in a day, and it wasn't perfect because Eve is redoing her room and we're still sort of moving things around from when we got the new couches, but having my parents over was really nice and I can now walk through the living room/dining room area without experiencing extreme clutter-related stress and self-loathing.

Moonstruck!

I've taken my disposable cloth bags grocery shopping a couple of times, understanding that I would pack my own groceries which I was before the pandemic anyway. Now it feels a little more panicky though, because grocery shopping is so much more fraught and I really hate to hold up the line - and panicking in a mask is super not fun. Not sure what the answer is, because I also hate bringing home another whack of plastic bags every time I go.

Up. The first ten minutes of Up constitutes one of the best movie love stories of all time, fight me.

How many is that? That's nine. Am I a fake fan? Clearly I don't have a well-established Top Ten Favourite Movies. What I do have is an embarrassingly rambly blog post and a sneaking suspicion that I just said Cinema Paradiso to sound sophisticated. Oh well.

Twelve Monkeys!

Ground Covered

I am not thriving - not lamenting, or asking for sympathy, just stating the facts. I am almost dreading going to bed because trying to sleep has been a torturous exercise. I'm in pain. I am not loving my weight and I have zero inclination to exercise. I'm too hot everywhere all the time, even with AC and multiple fans. I am in that meme where you're riding a bike and the bike is on fire and everything is on fire because you're in hell. I am in the centre of a fiery triangle of grief, perimenopause and pandemic - feel more like a pentagram. I'm not a lover of summer weather at the best of times - right now it's making me feel even more claustrophobic. I want out of the heat and out of my skin and out of my life for a few seconds.

Oh well.

So gardening. How do you feel about gardening? I have a similar love/hate relationship dynamic going on with gardening to the one I have with air conditioning. Basically when we started lockdown I threw open our bedroom windows and left them open for two months. Sometimes I woke up with snowflakes on my reading chair. Matt slept in a hoodie. It was amazing. I absolutely hate when I have to start closing the windows because of air conditioning, I resist it as long as possible because I hate feeling sealed inside and not being able to get any fresh air.

And then gardening. I always start with such optimism. I will shovel, and weed, and be one with the earthy earth, and plunge my hands into the living dirt, and lovingly tend the flowers and herbs and vegetables!

Well fuck, you guys, I don't know WHAT THE FUCK I'm doing! I could read some books or watch some Youtube stuff, but I never think of that in time, and then it's the goddamned May 2-4 weekend and my mother is frowning disapprovingly at my empty front flower bed and I'm panic-buying shit without reading the information tags again. Full sun? Part sun? Annual? Perennial? Even worse, this year I was ordering stuff online, like THAT was ever going to go well. I keep fucking buying stuff that I think is just a pretty flower and Matt says uh, that's a shrub. And reading is supposed to be my thing, you guys, this is not really defensible.

Get a load of this action before I kill them, or myself trying to keep them alive

I bring it all home and plant everything taking the blind faith approach - here I will thrust you and here you will thrive, or not, whatever, I'm not invested, you can be replaced. How do you know how deep a hole to dig? I start digging and then trying to stick the root ball in and it's not deep enough, and then suddenly it's too deep, like obviously the roots have to be buried but the stems aren't supposed to be buried and WHAT ARE THE RULES?

I have gardening gloves because we have those giant evil goddamned nettle things that grow six feet while your back is turned and look like they could eat you and have four-inch long sharp spikes, but I hate the feel of gardening gloves, so I put them on and then take them off and do stuff and then put my dirty hands back in the gloves and then everything is black. Same with my sandals - dirt flies into them, or I take them off and put them back on, or I wander out with no shoes to do one thing and stay out. Also, I say I'm going out for half an hour to pull a few weeds and water and then I get in the groove and Matt has to come out and push me, bug-bitten and wild-haired and covered in mud and blood back into the house.

But that thing, where flowers look totally dead and you water them and fifteen minutes later they are standing up and all dewy and perfect-looking? That will never not be magical to me. I am a sucker for the stupid zombie flowers.

Matt planted seeds before he left for Thunder Bay - SEEDS. Cucumbers and pepper and lettuce. That was foolishly optimistic enough, considering our growing season. Then I realized that he was gone and I really needed to get the garden in, and with one practically useless arm I was going to have to ask for help, which I don't do that often and am bad at. I explained the situation to Eve and what an idiot I was not to have asked before, because she is a mini-OCD-me and when she weeds, she WEEDS. She did the front bed, and I planted it. She did part of the back bed, and I finished it and then planted. I said I might ask for some help for the herb bed the next day. She did it before I got up and, um, didn't realize that there were seeds planted and a couple of the centimetre-high green things weren't, strictly speaking weeds. Oops.

Can you see the Gerbera Daisies? This is the first year they lasted for more than two days without something eating them AND a couple of NEW flowers grew - usually I buy them thinking of them as cut flowers, once they're gone they're not coming back. On the other hand, I think that thing in the front on the right might be a begonia that is frying to a crisp in the son. Oops again.

I feel like I should have some inspirational message to end on - the earth putting forth new growth, nurturing new life, rebirth, blah blah. I got nothing. I wish I had some weed.

For the sword outwears its sheath, and the soul wears out the breast

My mother-in-law died, early in the morning on Saturday. Warmest spring on record in Thunder Bay. Her husband had sat through the night with her because he felt that the time was coming. My husband was nearby.

This is what I wrote on Facebook:

Matt's mom - my kids' Nana Barb - left us this morning and we are bereft. She didn't have a good mother-in-law, so she was determined to be a good mother-in-law and honestly, she probably overshot a little, because I would have settled for one that didn't take her son's side in everything (she didn't, she busted his balls even more than I did). She came and helped me look after the kids while Matt was away - we'd get up early and sit around in our pajamas and messy hair, we'd stay up late and watch weird movies and generally have a splendid time. She bought me my first immersion blender (life-changing) when she couldn't bear to see me pouring soup from pot to blender and back again. She bought me a leopard-print winter hat that I hated, but Eve wore it naked all winter around the house and it gave us great joy. She once mixed me a gin and tonic that made me drunk for three days.

My children are so lucky that they have had full, lifelong relationships with four grandparents and two grandparents. I am so happy that Barb had the adventures she did, that she went places and saw things and had a giant family that she adored. That should be what we all strive for, right? A life that you love so much you can't bear to leave it. A person that we love so much we can't bear to lose them. It's not enough, because it's never enough when we love someone. So I guess I have to be grateful for that, even. Fuck.

This is the obituary, written by my brother-in-law Eric, her middle son of three. 

I've typed a lot of things and erased them, here and on social media, out of some misplaced desire not to sound like a cliché. I have not realized that this is asinine - like people who decide that they're going to be "cool" parents, and their kids will wear tiny motorcycle jackets and only listen to Bob Dylan and Velvet Underground, and the whole family ends up embarrassing and douchey. 

We found out about a year ago that Barb had lung cancer and that it was probably terminal. This gave us some time to plan visits and tell her we loved her. Matt took Eve up for her birthday in November. I texted her pictures of the kids and the dog almost daily. The disease and treatment turned her into a night owl, so she would be awake on her ipad and we would have conversations at one a.m. We made bad cancer jokes. When Angus shaved his beard into mutton-chop whiskers and I sent her the picture and said he looked like he was about to foreclose on the family farm she said "I know! I thought he was going to make me change the will!" She was brave and magnificent. 

So in a way, we're grateful that we had this year to treasure our time with her. But if she had dropped dead of a heart attack on Saturday instead of drifting away on palliative sedation, she would have been able to be at our family Thanksgiving last October with all her sons and their wives and children. She wouldn't have been in terrible pain for the last week or in the hospital without her husband because of Covid last month.

We buried her mother two fucking years ago, at 95. Do you see what I'm doing here? Remember when I talked about doing Covid Math? Now I'm doing Death Math, and it's not helpful in the least, but it's almost impossible to stop doing it entirely.

Matt and I went for a week-end at the end of January. She was doing quite well at that point - she was up out of bed, we had dinners at the table, we had a glass of wine at night, we had great conversations. When I was leaving she said "If I don't see you again..." and I said "You'll see me again". I wish I hadn't. I try really hard not to deal in platitudes. The last time we saw Nana she said "no one lives forever, and I don't feel sorry for myself". Matt said "oh, don't talk like that" and I was like "shut up, dude, the woman is ninety-five". This time I really was confident we would see Barb again because we planned to go up once a month until the end. The only reason we couldn't is fucking Covid, so technically it's not my fault that I was wrong, but I still feel like an asshole. 

She was fairly circumspect about who she wanted to have knowledge of her situation, which is why I haven't talked about it here before now. But when we were leaving she also said "take care of Matt. Don't let him cry", and, well, fuck that, Barb, there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I might even rend a garment or two. 

So there it is. Someone we loved died, and we are sad. If you are so inclined, go for a walk and pet all the dogs you can (sometime in the future after Covid, I guess). Raise a gin and tonic - just a tonic if you don't drink, just a gin if that's what floats your boat. Love your people hard. That's all I've got.