Life Lessons from Little Things

Funny topic for a warm summer day, right?   But if you’re in southern Ontario , you probably remember the Ice Storm of 2013 in Capital Letters too.  Winter is a funny thing here in southern Ontario .   Sometimes, we get a first snow in October and it disappears till January, with a dusting for Christmas if we’re lucky. Sometimes, it comes in late November and seems to stay for an eternity of darkness.   (Can you tell winter isn’t my favourite season?)   And sometimes, there’s an ice storm. The week before Christmas wasn’t a particularly cold one – in fact, it was almost mild, with temperatures hovering around the freezing mark.  My recollection of that winter so far is that of a fairly mild one.  And then, the ice storm hit.  Ice pellets fell, and it froze.  Everywhere.  Streets weren’t inaccessible for long, but power certainly was.  It seemed that all of southern Ontario was without power as trees and lines came down.  And in our home on farm northeast of Toronto , we started

Do you ever feel like you just need to occasionally “stop the world and let me get off”?  I know I do! It’s not a lesson I’ve learned easily, though.   Through much of my life, I’ve been busy running at full tilt.   That roundabout couldn’t go fast enough for me.   My daily average was 120% effort.   Perhaps more some days. I thought I was running comfortably at that pace.   And for a while, maybe I was. There were signs that this was becoming a less-than-good-thing.   9:30pm dinners in restaurants because cooking would mean eating at 10:30 isn’t a good regular habit.   Neither is starting work at 5am because you’re not sleeping anyways, or “just finishing up” some work after that 9:30pm dinner.   Starburst candies don’t make a meal, even if you have one of each flavour. The wake-up call started in 2016, but I didn’t heed it.   An old injury started to flare up conspicuously, necessitating a visit to a doctor, with a referral for surgery.   It continued into 2017 when an imp

In the early part of this century, I lost my home, my business, and a person I believed I loved.    It sounds like a long time ago when I put it that way, doesn’t it?    By definition, though, anything in “this century” can’t be more than twenty years ago.    In this case, it’s less. People will tell that family and health is all that matters.   That’s true – to a point.   But when you don’t know where you’re going to sleep tonight, or how you’re going to feed your children, that same precious family and health doesn’t feel like it’s doing you much good.  We were lucky.  I was able to farm children out to various locations.  The cats and I camped out on a friend’s couch.  And when the homelessness part was still a “hope to avoid” and the business already lost, the “what was I doing about this” end of things was already settled.  And three weeks in, we were finally able to move into a home.  My friends, and others around me, had plenty of opinions on the income front.   Given that we

It’s funny how old memories stick with you, isn’t it?  For me, it’s an incident from more than 40 years ago.  I think this incident has influenced every action I’ve taken since.   It was the fall of 1979.  In our southern Ontario community, students attended elementary school till grade 6, and then a grade 7-8 “senior public” school until moving on to high school in grade 9.  We were a religious, heavily church-influenced family, and my parents did not like the senior public school or the concept of me attending it.  They decided on a nearby private school which also fit their religious beliefs, and I began grade 7 there.  That fall, however, elementary school teachers went on strike – a full strike – for two weeks, and my younger brother quickly followed me in attending the private school.  The news around us was full of conversation about this strike, the first I’d heard of one.  And as is typical in media coverage of strikes, much of it spoke of the teachers’ demand for increa

Aside from the Five Man Electrical Band ( Signs ) reference, this seems to be our byword today, doesn’t it?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve probably spent as much time waiting in lines over in the last month as I normally do in an entire year.  Lines have so many other contexts, though, don’t they? Lines of communication Of demarcation Staying within the lines Stepping over the line Lines of safety Making a beeline There are probably more – which just aren’t coming to my mind at this instant.  Some have simply never made sense to me – like “making a beeline”.  I’m not sure what bees you’ve seen flying in a straight, speedy lines, but the ones I’ve observed have a greater tendency to meander.  This one, in my mind, fails to match its description. Lines, as most things, have good points and bad ones.  Lines of communication are good – when they’re open.  Or, they should be. There’s always that communication which we wish was less open, isn’t there?  Lines of demarcation

When I was about 12, I wanted to be Canada ’s first female prime minister.   As this was a few years ago, Kim Campbell had not yet served in this role, so this was a theoretical possibility. It’s not that I love the politicking – at least, not the kind we see so much of right now.   The campaigns designed to smear and tarnish.   Somehow, this always puts me in mind of a runner in race who trips a competitor in order to cross the finish line first.     The wrongness of it disturbs me. What has always drawn my interest in politics is this:   the ability to effect change. As a child, I remember feeling many wrongs in my world.   Some were silly – though of course the purple bathroom should have been exclusively for my use at five years old.   Others objections had more credibility.   Bullying is wrong.   All the time.   It isn’t fair when people think a girl can’t do something just because she’s a girl.   And adding tax to a $0.25 bag of potato chips when someone’s allowance is a

I’ve always been one with ideas.   One of my earliest memories is from when I must have been five or six years old.   I was in school, and my brother wasn’t yet.   He and his best friend attended a local preschool.   On the day I recall, there was a PA or other non-school day in our area, and the preschool invited older siblings to attend.   As any sensible parent would, my parents and those of my brother’s best friend jumped at this opportunity, and we three “older” kids joined them at the preschool that day. The incident is a simple one.   We were going to draw a cat.   As one would typically do at a preschool (or any other basic drawing setting), we were to begin with basic shapes.   Draw a circle for the head.   Draw two triangles on top for the ears.   Draw a small triangle in the middle for the nose, and two small circles for the eyes.   Draw lines from the nose for the whiskers. Simple, right?   But not for me.   Even at that young age, I wanted to do this my own way, and dr

We all have talents, don’t we?  I’m often envious of those who can coax a dying plant to life, or who have greenery and colour blooming aggressively throughout their homes.  These gifted souls are often blessed with the title “green thumb”. That person is not me.   Plants see me coming, and die to save themselves the agony of my ministrations.   I impressed myself this year and kept a mother’s day plant alive for about six weeks – I think that’s my record.   Until recently, I said I inherited this “black thumb” from my own mother. Illustrations of this talent are legion, but this one is among the funniest.   Many years ago, some unknowing soul gifted my mother with a cactus.  This is legitimately called the bunny ear or polka dot cactus, and rightly so.  When she got the cactus, it was about 5” tall and looked like a bunny.  Round, two ears sticking up.  (You know what a bunny looks like.)  She thought the cactus was cute and put it in a window.  She glued googly eyes one it. 

We’ve all known that person.  Shhh!  Don’t wake the baby.  They tiptoe around the house for the first ten years of their children’s lives so they’ll stay asleep.    That wasn’t me.  Part of that was undoubtedly luck, as I’m confident many of those parents didn’t really want to maintain absolute nighttime silence for all of those years.  But I was certainly fortunate in this.  My children probably would have slept through a bomb – I know they slept through plenty of other noise, including vacuuming their rooms while they slept.  Seriously.   The pinnacle, though, was my youngest son.  Always easy to put to sleep, he simply required flannel.  And while there was a favourite flannel, any piece would do.  A flannel shirt, flannel pillowcase, flannel scrap … it worked for many years.   When he was barely five years old, we travelled by plane to celebrate my in-laws’ anniversary.  Travel is disruptive to most children’s sleep, but he napped through long waits in airports, and in the va