chronicled & illustrated

white lilacs,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

Lilacs.

Lilacs were not a part of my life until I moved north in my thirties. When I discovered them the first spring, it was as if I had dreamed them. They felt that important and that personal. And yet, I never remember a conscious thought of lilacs before then. Growing up in southern Texas, lilac wasn’t a flower, or a smell—lilac was a color.

In my fifties, I moved even farther north and now I have lilacs in my yard. They are white.

I have to re-dream lilac.

The lilacs in my yard are old; some so tall that we don’t bother to even try to prune them. I can see them from the second story. I imagine they were first planted by Florence Forbes around the turn of the last century when the house was built. She married George Forbes, an engineer and—by reputation—a sweet man, after the death of her first husband. Her daughter by the first husband was named Ava and Ava’s daughter was named Flora.

George and Florence’s house, though large, was a smaller version of his brother’s house nearby. That house was gone by the late 20’s, first abandoned, then vandalized, then burned. The brothers’ family was from Scotland. In fact, George, the elder, was born there. They named their homes after castles in Scotland. The brother’s large house was named Craigevar. George’s more sensible house was named Moneymusk.

George and Florence had no children of their own and when they died in the 1920’s within a few years of each other, the house they built was left to their granddaughter, Flora. But Flora wasn’t the only grandchild. There was another offspring of Ava’s named Billy and Billy, in the vernacular of the times, was a ne’r-do-well. He was a gambler, a drinker (in the times of prohibition) and incidentally, a cripple.

The house was inhabited by Flora and Billy, and soon all of Billy’s nefarious friends. Flora loved the house as she had loved her grandparents. She had lived with them off and on in her later childhood. By that time, Craigevar was no more and her relatives all lived far away in Glace Bay and Baddeck. Some lived in the States. She saw the house she had inherited being turned into a house of ill-repute.

There was a family nearby who had worked for George and Florence. The father did caretaker’s duties and the wife came in to clean. They had four children. In an act of desperation —trying to regain control of Moneymusk from her half-brother, Billy, and his friends—Flora invited the family to come and live in the house.

One can only imagine the sobering effect it had on the ruffians to have a poor, working family with children living in the house. Perhaps there were scenes. Perhaps the friends—who were, after all, only drunks and gamblers, not evil persons—simply left one sunny morning when they realized there were decent people, a family, in residence.

No one knows what happened to Billy.

Flora lived with the family for some months and then, for reasons lost to time, decided to go to the States.

The family stayed and took care of the house. Flora never returned and they stayed and stayed until the mother and father died. The house was left to the oldest son, John R., who stayed and stayed—for many years with his sister, Georgie, who did all the cleaning and caretaking. In his older years, John R. married and he and his Dutch wife continued to care for the house until they grew too old. Georgie and the widow of John R. still live nearby and have told some of these stories but have been careful not to tell other parts of it.

Some of this is fact, and some the stuff of dreams.

But this is true: all this time, white lilacs came back fresh and new every June, becoming thicker and taller with each passing year and if lilacs are white, any of it is possible.

FINISHED: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes
by Jaclyn Moriarity
BEADED CURTAIN RATING:
READING: Causeway by Linden MacIntyre
EDITING: Big Enough, a short story
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
SMELLING: Oh yeah, lilacs
GROWING: Looks like mostly varieties of peas and squash
HOPING FOR: Some beans, too
MOOD: Dreamy

learning our colours,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

One evening while in Maine, I picked up my granddaughter, Acadia, and took her for a little drive. It was getting toward dusk. We stopped between my son’s house and my rented cottage several times as Cadi was asking to “see the water.” We got in and out of the car and took short walks.

These days, she holds tightly to one of my fingers as we walk. I showed her things. A bird flying. White cherry blossoms and lilacs. Bees on the bushes. A feather. A pine cone. The sound the water makes as it rushes over the rocks. The older boys playing on the other side of the street.

Our last stop was where this photo was taken. The wetlands at this spot are always stunning to see whether it’s sun, fog, rain, morning, noon or night. This day had been gloriously sunny. One of those late spring days when the new warmth, super-blue sky and the fresh young leaves and grasses combine for a spectacular crispness that will soon blur into summer fullness—rich, deep green, hot, but no longer new.

As the sun went down I held Cadi while snapping a dozen photos or so. She was patient with me and afterward we talked about what was happening to the colour of the clouds. I reminded her that they are usually white but that sometimes when the sun goes away for the night they change into a variety of colours. Cadi’s only just learning her colours. She has the idea now, but the specifics as to green, blue, red are still in process. Sometimes she gets them right and sometimes she doesn’t.

I started naming the colours in the sky.

“Pink.” “Orange.” “Violet.”

“Yellow,” whispered Cadi, her eyes fixed on the sunset.

“Yes,” I agreed, so pleased that she was with me, “yellow, too.”

READING: I Have a Bed Made of Buttermilk Pancakes by Jaclyn Moriarity
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
PLANNING: Our new front porch
WATCHING: A mama woodpecker feeding her babies in a tree outside the bedroom window

two loves,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

So now it’s time to write. I have other things to do, of course. I am supposed to be working on the update of the EPIC website.

It’s so far overdue that I’m embarrassed—even though there is no one but me upset by it or waiting for it (though my husband will definitely like it—and me —when it’s done!). As well, I accumulated other things to do while I was away. I started a small artist’s site for my son and promised him some business cards. I want to do that asap because his career is taking off in small ways and I want to give him what I can to help. And of course, those are *fun* things to do. There are other things on the to-do list as well. But none of them are crucial. They are all things that can be fitted in around whatever is most important.

So now, it’s time to write.

All the way down to Maine, I thought about three stories in various stages. First I thought about the one I had just started. I have about a page and a half written. JUST a beginning…but, the idea came to me full-fledged (a rarity!) and with hours by myself to do nothing but drive and think, I filled in a lot of what was vague. Or, I think I did. One never really knows until the writing is being done. Sometimes what is in your head, isn’t what comes out on paper and stories can definitely take sharp turns that weren’t on the planned journey.

A second story I thought about was one I did a lot of work on a year or more ago. I liked it, it seemed like a good beginning, but I never could push myself to finish it. So I thought it through. Decided what needed to happen. How I could improve the tone of the piece. I don’t even think it would take that long to have a finished first draft.

The third thing I thought about was just an idea for a story. It has to do with music and communication and ‘races’ of ‘people’ who use music for their own ends. I am not sure yet what else. It’s definitely NOT a story yet but I write down the whiff of an idea here so as not to forget or minimize it as a future possibility.

This is all motivating to me because I had just about given up on writing short stories. Novels, it seems, are my forte. A short story feels frustrating and limiting and I began telling myself that it was okay for me not to write short stories if I didn’t want to. But now…with a collaboration project in the planning stages, I’m motivated again. If I can pull off any of these ideas, it’ll please me to have gotten back to a written form that I should be able to participate in whether it’s my favourite or not.

READING: Tales of Protections by Eric Fosnes Hansen (book club this Saturday!)
WRITING: NetWorld, a short story
WEBBING: Quintessential Abstractions, an artist’s website
PHYSICALLY: lousy, I’ve got a cold
EMOTIONALLY: calm, optimistic

The Illustration: this is a layered composition made up of one of my doodles (marker and gelpens) and pages of my writing. Click on it to see a larger version on flickr.

it’s slip-sliding thru new b,
originally uploaded by nuanc.

I arrived home from my trip to Maine last night around 12:30am.

The day started off hard and just seemed to—not get worse—but just stay hard to the end. Saying good-bye to my son and granddaughter was emotionally hard. Physically I’m at low ebb with a cold coming on. I had three hours of work to get the rented house back in shape before leaving. This became complicated when I hit my head on a wall lamp causing the thing to crash to the floor and smash into smithereens. And then, an 11 hour drive.

I kept comforting myself with how much worse it not only could be but has been! I was remembering the day I left to drive home from Maine last March. It was bitterly cold with high winds and I had to muscle my luggage down a narrow set of stairs and over slippery ice to get it into the car. Then as I neared home late, late that night, heavy blinding snow made the last 3 hours literally life-threatening. Yesterday was NOT that bad and I made sure I never forgot it!

But it made me wonder what it is that makes me do that. I always compare whatever I’m struggling with with something worse that I’ve been through in the past. When I was young and hadn’t been through much, I used to compare a challenge with the time I had to give an oral report on the Algerian-French War in French! Now it seems silly but then, to give an oral report was bad enough, but to do it in another language seemed like an impossibility. And yet, I did it, (I got a ‘B’ and was grateful) so I used it for years as proof to myself that I could do impossible things!

If I can’t come up with something worse that’s happened to me, I comfort myself with the fact that it’s not anywhere near as bad as what others have been through. I clearly remember being miserable during a 24+ hour car trip with my first husband, two young sons and a mother-in-law in a small car. I was sitting in the back literally on the edge of a too small, non-ergonomically designed seat with everything in my body tired and achy. But I was thinking that it simply wasn’t that bad because imagine the poor pioneer women in covered wagons!

Can’t I just be miserable?

Evidently not. Oh, I do my fair share of moaning and groaning. I can be a real baby when sick or injured. But if it’s something I have to get through, it seems to be in my nature to mentally sustain myself with reasons why it’s not that bad. I can then realize that packing up the car on a muggy day in June is certainly preferrable to a blizzardish one in March. That a late night drive alone in familiar territory with a loving husband waiting at home to give me a warm, hearfelt embrace when I FINALLY pull into to the driveway is really just something to get through and not something to wish away. My life is and has been easy and full of many days without danger or real hardship. I know I should not forget that.

I can still feel buffeted and bruised by my day yesterday. Take a day to recover my bearings. Do blog entries. Open mail. Wash my hair. Be with my husband. And remember things like…

…when I was in Junior High School, I did a dramatic interpretation from a play called All the Way Home by Tad Mosel (the playwright’s name is not from memory but from Google). I remember little about it except that the right to do it at a speech tournament was ‘willed’ to me by one Cheryl Somebody, a tournament-winning actress who had gone on to high school at the end of the previous year. What I do remember is that the excerpt required me to sing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the end. This isn’t another story about hard things I’ve been through, as for some reason, doing acting wasn’t nearly as difficult as oral reports in French! My now-husband was in that Speech Class and still talks about being wowed by my sweet soprano tremolo. I tell him it was nerves he heard, but that he believes differently makes me smile, makes me happy. I’m not much of a soprano anymore but he and I still sing together at home—where I am now once again pleasantly ensconced.

This is my wonderful 2 year old granddaughter, Cadi. I’m in Maine right now for her birthday celebration. This was taken on my first full day here. I got to stay with her while my son had some well-deserved r&r. Cadi and I took a walk into the little town where there is a school playground.

I took a dozen or more photos but this one and only a couple of the others are decent. Cadi’s difficult to take pictures of as she moves fast, does not—to say the least—like to pose and often looks away if she sees a camera.

I like that in a little girl. While there’s nothing wrong with a child who knows how to “turn it on” for a camera, it’s pleasing to me that Cadi doesn’t see the need to do so. She’s been seeing images of herself on my laptop screensaver and she definitely enjoys the photos. “Dat’s Cadi,” she tells her dad. She seems to remember certain ones, what she was doing and where she was, even though many of them were taken at Christmas. But she obviously doesn’t like them enough to make herself available for my lens. She’s got more important things to do with her time. Right on, Cadi!

Now, I just need to get a camera with a faster response time!

The jacket and hat that Cadi is wearing were brought from Cape Breton. I ‘won’ them in a silent auction at Girl’s Night Out, a fund raiser for the Sydney women’s shelter. It was made by a local woman who’s name, unfortunately, I didn’t get. I planned on giving it to Cadi as a birthday gift but didn’t really have an expectation that it would fit or that she would like it. But the day we were going to the playground was a little cool and Ty hadn’t brought her a jacket, so I immediately busted this out. She took right to it and especially loves wearing the hat. And doesn’t she look grand in it? I love it when a non-plan comes together.