Baked a cake tonight after supper and while frosting it once cooled, I remembered that my grandma (Martha) used to make her frosting from scratch. She would invariably have extra when she was done and would frost up some graham cracker cookies for me to avoid wasting it. My grandparents (and consequently my parents, too) came from thriftier generations where everything was kept or stretched so that it would go as far as possible.
We've lost something, I think, in not teaching our children to value every morsel, appreciate every little thing in our lives. We take so much for granted now and simply expect that what we want, we'll get plus we'll have more than we need. I'm not typically a person who lives in the world of "what ifs?" but I do wonder where we're headed when the majority of us couldn't even feed ourselves for a season...or wouldn't even know how to function if the power went out. We have made ourselves extremely vulnerable in our quest to make life easy. In our effort to prolong our lives with "safe environments" we've inadvertently put ourselves in danger.
But I digress. I miss sitting in my grandma's kitchen on my favorite yellow, metal stool (with the pull-out steps) and watching her as she mixed her ingredients and stirred her batters in a ceramic mixing bowl with a wooden spoon - all in her "house dresses" that she wore during the week. Martha was always busy - if she wasn't cooking or cleaning dishes, she was picking up pieces of lint by hand from the carpet or sprinkling water on my grandpa's dress shirts before ironing them. (She used an old Pepsi bottle - glass - with a special "sprinkling" adapter that plugged into the top like a cork.)
I miss that pioneering spirit, that gritty work ethic, wrapped in a hunched-over body. She kept going and going...but took time to rest and play with her grandchildren, too. She was my druid-like, chicken-loving, nylon-stocking-wearing, yoo-hooing great lady and I miss her. Her birthday was November 30 - though I'm not sure what year she was born any more. I anticipate these memories have flooded back because of that date. Wherever you are, Grandma, sweet dreams. I love you muchly.
Monday, 8 December 2014
Saturday, 6 December 2014
9 Months Later
I realize there's been a silence, a lengthy one. I feel it in my bones - not just on the page. I'm stuck and busy and don't know when I'll kick-start myself into serious writing again. Clearly my brother's death has affected me profoundly.
I have completed the book of poetry to accompany Scott's photographs and got the "blessing" from his children and widow to pursue a publishing deal of the compilation, so I've sent 3 queries out to small publishing companies and another 2 inquiries out to literary agents who represent poets. No responses so far, but it's early days. If I wind up going the self-publishing route on this venture, it will be a printed, bound book since an e-reader / Smashwords won't be able to do his photographs justice.
Paid work has been consuming me. There have been a lot of challenging, time-consuming employee relations to handle - along with the intensity of going for accreditation in two major fields (youth and adult mental health). There were over 500 standards that had to be met and aside from some quick-fixing on one standard, we passed with flying colours. We are now the first community services / non-profit in Canada to attain accreditation in both. It's quite the accomplishment, but it took a tremendous amount of energy. Essentially from January-July, 2014 I rewrote close to 100 HR policies and then from July to September (the date of our onsite review), I worked on cleaning up employee files and catching up with other jobs.
Then in September, the Agency's Executive Director (who has been with the organization for 40 years) announced his retirement. An intense recruitment process was initiated by the Board of Directors (but conducted primarily by me), where I held 14 phone interviews, prepared 2 sets of interview questions for the Board to ask and carried out reference checks on 3 candidates. I'm pleased and relieved to say that our new E.D. starts on Monday. I think he will bring an exciting new vision and direction to the Agency, but as one of his references said, "when you get on his train, you'd better be ready to leave the station." I only hope we can keep up with his energy level!
So that's where things stand now. The new E.D. acknowledged within 30 minutes of our first pre-planning meeting that my workload is far too heavy for one person to carry effectively and has said he's going to change that. Hopefully that means by April 2015 (our new fiscal year) I have some type of assistance in doing the administrative tasks of my position and can actually go back to a normal work week (instead of staying for a couple of extra hours each night). Now that the winter is settling in and I won't be able to do much with the horses, I'm hoping it will give me time to write in the evenings again.
Noel (one of my main characters from the Aquarian Era Tales) has been visiting me again. In the early hours of the morning when I'm emerging from sleep, he's there, always whispering, "don't forget about me...get the rest of my story down." I have to honour that request. He's been very good to me so far. <g>
I have completed the book of poetry to accompany Scott's photographs and got the "blessing" from his children and widow to pursue a publishing deal of the compilation, so I've sent 3 queries out to small publishing companies and another 2 inquiries out to literary agents who represent poets. No responses so far, but it's early days. If I wind up going the self-publishing route on this venture, it will be a printed, bound book since an e-reader / Smashwords won't be able to do his photographs justice.
Paid work has been consuming me. There have been a lot of challenging, time-consuming employee relations to handle - along with the intensity of going for accreditation in two major fields (youth and adult mental health). There were over 500 standards that had to be met and aside from some quick-fixing on one standard, we passed with flying colours. We are now the first community services / non-profit in Canada to attain accreditation in both. It's quite the accomplishment, but it took a tremendous amount of energy. Essentially from January-July, 2014 I rewrote close to 100 HR policies and then from July to September (the date of our onsite review), I worked on cleaning up employee files and catching up with other jobs.
Then in September, the Agency's Executive Director (who has been with the organization for 40 years) announced his retirement. An intense recruitment process was initiated by the Board of Directors (but conducted primarily by me), where I held 14 phone interviews, prepared 2 sets of interview questions for the Board to ask and carried out reference checks on 3 candidates. I'm pleased and relieved to say that our new E.D. starts on Monday. I think he will bring an exciting new vision and direction to the Agency, but as one of his references said, "when you get on his train, you'd better be ready to leave the station." I only hope we can keep up with his energy level!
So that's where things stand now. The new E.D. acknowledged within 30 minutes of our first pre-planning meeting that my workload is far too heavy for one person to carry effectively and has said he's going to change that. Hopefully that means by April 2015 (our new fiscal year) I have some type of assistance in doing the administrative tasks of my position and can actually go back to a normal work week (instead of staying for a couple of extra hours each night). Now that the winter is settling in and I won't be able to do much with the horses, I'm hoping it will give me time to write in the evenings again.
Noel (one of my main characters from the Aquarian Era Tales) has been visiting me again. In the early hours of the morning when I'm emerging from sleep, he's there, always whispering, "don't forget about me...get the rest of my story down." I have to honour that request. He's been very good to me so far. <g>
Sunday, 16 March 2014
Poetry Is Best
My oldest brother, Scott, passed away on February 24 after a 6-year, on-again, off-again battle with cancer. I miss him terribly. The pastor officiating at his funeral service said two things in particular that have struck a resonant chord with me: first, he knew how to love and second, he saw beauty in everything - everything. And he did.
He graduated from a local technical college with his focus on graphic art, always had paintings underway in the basement where he and my other brother had bedrooms, and had a wicked, keen sense of composition with his photography. In fact, it was by looking at his photographs on the day of his visitation (I put together a montage of his best that were displayed as a slide show on my laptop) that I was able to say my good-byes to him. It was in my dad's office, as I scrolled through them, that I had a silent conversation with my big brother.
I saw how he went through phases - from the techniques of Ansel Adams to Georgia O'Keefe to Andy Warhol - and practiced until he found his masterpiece in each genre. I saw how he learned about the effects of light and geometry and brought his unique perspective on the world into his camera lens.
Everything is too raw right now to work on the novel, so for those of you who are waiting for another installment of the Aquarian Era Tales, please be patient. It will have to wait.
I didn't write at all for a couple of weeks - any desire to express (at least in that way) was gone. Now I'm finding that poetry is best: I can coat the pain with imagery; I can buffer the emotions with structured lines.
He graduated from a local technical college with his focus on graphic art, always had paintings underway in the basement where he and my other brother had bedrooms, and had a wicked, keen sense of composition with his photography. In fact, it was by looking at his photographs on the day of his visitation (I put together a montage of his best that were displayed as a slide show on my laptop) that I was able to say my good-byes to him. It was in my dad's office, as I scrolled through them, that I had a silent conversation with my big brother.
I saw how he went through phases - from the techniques of Ansel Adams to Georgia O'Keefe to Andy Warhol - and practiced until he found his masterpiece in each genre. I saw how he learned about the effects of light and geometry and brought his unique perspective on the world into his camera lens.
Everything is too raw right now to work on the novel, so for those of you who are waiting for another installment of the Aquarian Era Tales, please be patient. It will have to wait.
I didn't write at all for a couple of weeks - any desire to express (at least in that way) was gone. Now I'm finding that poetry is best: I can coat the pain with imagery; I can buffer the emotions with structured lines.
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