Bad at peopling

A snow storm blew through yesterday, the day after the snow plow was put away for the season. Sheila laughed. 

These guys were watching me through the living room window, wanting peanuts

With work closed, I sat on the floor of the empty third bedroom and assembled the bed frame my mother sent. She’ll only be staying for a few months out of the year, so it’ll be a guest room the rest of the time. (Or Gavin’s room, if he can’t get a job after he graduates next month.) She sent a gift card for Canadian Tire, and I picked up a gallon of paint in the color she wanted.

Stopping at Sobeys, I tried to practice looking at people. I realized I’ve been walking around with my head down like a teenager hiding behind their hair, and that’s not going to help make friends. So I smiled at the man standing next to the fruit I was reaching for, and he did a double-take, then looked sad and smiled. “Oh, you look just like someone I used to know, you have the same eyes.” He was a good-looking man about my age, tall with a grey beard and a kind face. I said that was nice to hear. “She was a dear friend from Alberta, but she… passed.” He looked like he realized this might be awkward as it was coming out of his mouth, and my guy, I GET IT. I told him I was sorry and thanked him for telling me. We waved and smiled and went on shopping. As I walked through the store I slapped my forehead. Was that not an opportunity to meet someone who seemed like-minded? Why did I not ask him any questions? What was your friend like? What happened? Are you from Alberta? What’s your name? I have been working in customer service and living in crisis mode for so long I’ve forgotten how to talk like a normal human - I either politely tell people to have a nice day or trauma-dump on them, and that is exactly why I’ve been watching my feet everywhere I go. Well, it’s a small town. If I ever run into him again I can have another go at it. And hopefully not be too weird.

Over the weekend, I decided to engage with Zenny and get her out of the house. She groaned and went limp in her chair when I said we should go hiking, so I gave her the good camera, showed her how to use it, and said we were going on a color walk. We drove over to one of the easy walking paths around a small pond, and she started hunting the color red, stopping every five paces to zoom in on leaves and rocks and birds. It took an hour to walk half a mile, but she was red-cheeked and excited by the end. “Tomorrow let’s try another!” VICTORY.

Saturday: she did red, I did white.

Zenny’s

Mine

Sunday: Roy G. Biv, the rainbow.

Zenny’s

Mine

 “I like photography. And I think I’d like baking, too.” Well, fuck yeah. I tossed the Baking for Two cookbook at her and told her to pick anything, I’d get the ingredients. 

She chose chocolate soufflés. We do not have a mixer. I am the mixer. Oh no.

That’s fine. THAT’S FINE. I showed her how to chop chocolate, demonstrated how to separate eggs, took out more eggs when she popped her yolks into the whites, tried not to flail around when she started drawing designs in the melted chocolate with a fork instead of moving on to the next step, then told her to pretend she was turning on the Kitchen Aid and proceeded to beat the shit out of those eggs until we had pale fluffy yolks and stiff meringue. My arms fell off. She folded everything together, put them in the toaster oven, and ate the rest of the chocolate while they baked. They were perfect. They were beautiful. They were delicious. We enjoyed them while watching the season finale of Traitors, and she jumped and clapped like a little kid when the contestants discovered the last betrayal. Before bed, she snuck up behind me while I was knitting, poked me viciously a few times, then laid her cheek on my head and hugged my neck. I love her. Being a teenager is hard, she’s doing pretty good.

I was reluctant to get on the scale this morning for the first time since the weekend, because I had been lazy about calorie counting and ate a soufflé, but the numbers were down 2lbs. Walking and shoveling makes the difference, I guess. When I couldn’t walk around the pond, I took a walk up the road by my house, and felt like I was in the Goonies. There’s an abandoned store just a short trot from my driveway, and I imagined an art gallery, with classes and figure drawing. Who knows? Life is short and the years are long. It could happen.

Day before the snow storm

Department of Big News:

Leif has been accepted into the engineering school at the University of Glasgow, as well as Memorial University in St John’s! He’s waiting to hear back about a possible full-ride scholarship for Glasgow before he makes the decision. They’re both great engineering schools, with MUN being a bit cheaper (and closer to his girlfriend, who’s locked into pre-med at Penn State), unless he gets the scholarship. I would not be mad about having a reason to visit Scotland and drink elderflower cider and eat meat pies, but I’d also love to have him here for holidays and long weekends. Whatever he decides is right for him, I’m so proud.

Spring

This teenager is more of a challenge than the others were. I tell myself I shouldn’t get my feelings hurt by a 13 year old, but it’s hard. Somewhere along the line as I was growing up, I learned to deal with people being unexpectedly angry by quietly cleaning. It gives them space, and keeps me busy while I think, and having a clean kitchen makes people feel better. We’re still working on this relationship, she’s not used to having just one person to absorb everything, and I’m not used to having someone get mad at me for smiling at them or asking if they want pancakes. We’ll figure it out.

The head cold did not clear up after a week, so I used one of my sick days and called urgent care for an appointment (I’m still on the waiting list for a gp). I’m used to the packed urgent care clinics of the US, so it surprised me when they could see me right away on a Friday. I grabbed my purse and drove down the coast, along empty roads and through the fens, to St Lawrence - wondering why the only urgent care clinic on the peninsula was in a tiny rural fishing village, and why a Canadian medical center was named the ‘US Memorial’. The clinic was nice, with a large airy waiting room filled with windows, and I got my answers as I browsed the art and plaques on the walls while waiting for my name to be called.

On the morning of Ash Wednesday in 1942, a 15 year old boy who lived on the cliffs of St Lawrence went outside in a blizzard and saw lights on the ocean. He realized something was very wrong, because the lights looked like a ship, and it was way too big, so he spread the alarm, and the fishermen went out to find a United States battleship crashed in the cove, with hundreds of soldiers floating dead or injured in the freezing water and hanging from the wreck of the ship. The entire town mobilized, pulling hypothermic young men out of the water and creating a makeshift aid station to save them. The crisis escalated when word reached them that a second battleship had crashed in the next bay over, and the village scrambled to organize rescue. The soldiers were covered in oil, and the village women scrubbed them down and dressed them in every dry sweater and blanket they could find while the men gathered the dead. In all, the people of St Lawrence saved 186 young men in a disaster that killed more than 200. Dead bodies were washing up on the shore for months. A third ship carrying supplies, which the Navy had been escorting when they went off course, had gotten moored on the rocks but managed to get out in one piece, and they gathered up the survivors. 

The United States didn’t forget. After the war, President Truman gifted a hospital to the town of St Lawrence in gratitude. It’s still the main clinic for rural Burin.

I felt like that was worth the drive, and left with a prescription for steroid nasal spray. The nurse made me promise to get a neti pot (I have an irrational fear of amoebas, but I’m using the damn thing anyway - whispering fuck you amoebas every time I boil the water) and I picked up a scale while I was at it. Oh no. I refuse to rejoin Fitness Cult - which I only joined to be supportive, until I learned he was, in fact, using it to cheat on me - so I sighed, opened up my old calorie tracker, and picked up the pace on my walks around the pond. The numbers started ticking down again. These meat sacks are annoying. Leaky sinuses and creaking knuckles and wobbly cheeks and groaning joints. Better than not having one, though.

Suddenly, all in one day, the world exploded in tiny yellow flowers. They are growing out of rock piles, gravel pathways, scrubby brown hillsides. I saw a robin, and the blue jays have taken over the bird feeder. I scraped aside a bit of money from my editing gig to order an English rose, and lined up little cardboard pots of soil in a plastic seedling tray to plant anemone bulbs. I’m going to build a painter’s garden over the next few years, plant by plant. 

I’m happy, I’m sad, I’m busy, and at loose ends. I’m dreaming about my kids as babies, and about my grandfather dying. I’ve saved up enough money to buy tickets to Arizona this summer, even if I’ll be mooching rides and food and space in my mother’s hotel room the rest of the trip.

And soon it will warm enough to sit outside on the deck in the evenings, and see what the stars look like at night. Maybe I’ll be a good gardener, and maybe there will be apples on my trees in the fall. I’m looking forward to finding out.

Easter 2026

Sheila must be pissed, because this broom business has been going on all week. People are complaining about the weather, but they know this is the good stuff; a lady coming out of the post office caught me stomping all over the lawn because the firm slush felt so satisfying to smush, and she started doing it, too.

Anyway, now I’m sick. This probably has more to do with having a school-aged kid than playing in the snow, but it happened just in time for all the stores to close for the holiday weekend. I rationed the last few DayQuil capsules in the medicine bin and dragged my carcass around getting the eggs boiled for dying and the baskets hidden. On Easter morning we ate creamed eggs and watched bluejays visit the bird feeder for bits of biscuit.

I put some egg slices out for the crows, and one came down from the tree, waffled around nervously because it could see us watching from inside the house, then retreated to the deck to call the others for help. There are four crows in our backyard murder squad, and I’m calling that one Sir Robin.

We talked to family most of the day, and the boys managed to walk Zenny through setting up Minecraft on the old laptop so they could play as a group while I put the roast in and made popovers. I threw some scraps out for the crows, “A blessing! A blessing from the Lord!” Zenny yelled at me from the living room to stop talking to the birds. I will not. When I was 10, some girls at summer camp yelled at me to stop talking to the horses, and I made up my mind right then to talk to all the animals, forever and ever, the end. I didn’t understand why they would get mad about something I was doing that didn’t affect them even one little bit, or how anyone could get up close to an animal and not want to connect with it. Life is bills and work and cleaning and cooking and child care and health problems and grief, and then we go back to being dead. Let a person talk to an animal. Goddamn. 

She experimented with snow dying and ended up with brown sludge, but she had fun

Need a gravy boat

I ran out of DayQuil and I am loaded on robitussin, so I know better than to trust my brain right now. I’m missing people. My sons, my cats, dead people, old friends. I haven’t connected with anyone here yet, and maybe I don’t want to. One of my online friends invited me to a group chat to share “joys”, and I can’t hit the button to join. I’m still blowing on this smoldering coal, trying to get it going again. I don’t have any fire to share yet.

And that is my cue to get this body to bed. 

Happy Easter.