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    Wednesday
    10Mar2010

    Never get into a thumb war with death. Death has really, really long thumbs.

    It’s all death. PIRATES! Death. PIRATES! Death. LIPGLOSS! Death. TODDLER ROOT CANALS! Death. A POX ON LEAPSTERS! Death. SLUG SANDWICHES! Death.

    I keep thinking I should break the pattern. You know. Write about circumcision. Or those wacky attachment parents. Or how vegetarianism is the handshake drug of complete moral breakdown.

    But death is here again. It keeps asking, sheepishly, for fresh tea. It drinks half, then misplaces the mug. The bottom half always cools.

    +++

    I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, rattled. A roller coaster with bright orange rails. A row of empty cars except for the front one, which arrives at the endstation with Evan on the left-hand side, screaming hysterically.

    Where is Ben? My god! Where is Ben?

    He fell out! He fell out!

    The tape rewinds like in an editing suite. It makes that zipzipzip rewind sound. And again the cars arrive with Evan wailing, and a blank space where Ben had been. Horror. Horror. Horror.

    Motherhood makes you nuts.

    +++

    Kate:  I’m not afraid of you, you know.

    Death:  I know.

    Kate:  I’ve seen you before.

    Death:  I know.

    Kate:  I just don’t like it when you hang around my family.

    Death:  Not many people do.

    Kate:  You’re just so fucking arbitrary.

    Death:  Am not.

    Kate:  Are too.

    Death:  Am not.

    Kate:  Oh christ. Stop that.

    Death:  Oh christ. Stop that.

    Kate:  Quit copying me!

    Death:  Quit copying me!

    Kate: (glares)

    Death: (snickers)

    Kate:  You’re like that miserable fuck who hands out parking tickets all day. Isn’t that, like, totally toxic? Again and again you ruin days, every day. Is that really how you want to spend your life?

    Death:  (pauses, confused)

    +++

    On the way to the hospital I stop for flowers and sushi, the same place as always. I glance across to the table by the window and I see me there, pregnant with Evan and staring terrified at a newborn in someone else's stroller. Zip ahead. It is my newborn, my stroller. Zip ahead. I am newly unpregnant with Liam and Ben, walking through those doors in a daze.

    "Congratulations!" the woman says. "When are you due?"

    Fucking empire waist.

    "I'm not pregnant," I am too tired to be merciful. "I had twins a month ago. My babies are in the hospital."

    Zip ahead. I scan the case and choose swedish meatballs, chickpea salad, a block of mac and cheese, strawberries, yop. I bring them to my grandmother's apartment and lay out a plate for her, then for Evan and Ben.

    "Oh!" she says, watching me change Ben. "I haven't seen him since he was a baby."

    We saw you last week. I smile. "It's been a long time, Gram."

    Nothing has ever been so good as this Fentiman's Victorian Lemonade. I sip and grimace. Victorians were sour. I don't think I like it. I sip again, and grimace again. Victorians were sour. I sip again.

    I look across the atrium at other people and feel more gently towards them than I have in the past. Instead of cruel obliviousness I see, right there, twenty-three journeys. Twenty-three burdens of fear and defiance, each of them different and identical.

    I leave a little in the bottle, a beer drinker's habit. I start off for palliative care and imagine wearing a radioactive suit that makes me invisible to the hospital's insatiability. It's not about me or my history. I am there to sit with my grandmother. But still. To abide with someone in their death is to abide with yourself in your own.

    +++

    I wonder if she can see the clock. I hope not. I don't like the way that clock stares at her. But I do appreciate how it reminds my mother to pass the honour of mothering her mother to the nurses. That she should go home to her kitchen to stir something that smells delicious, to smile through glass as cloud biscuits rise.

    Cloud biscuits will always rise. They make home into home, a warm and buttery scent that embraces you the moment you walk through the back door. Cloud biscuits are my mother.

    +++

    I stroke her hand and tell her she doesn't need to stay awake. I'm not going anywhere, Gram.

    She sleeps, heavy but haunted. I wonder what she sees. She answers, her eyes fluttering open.

    "They're dancing in Italy. They're dancing in the streets."

    "Are you wearing a pretty dress, Gram?"

    "Oh, of course."

    And she is away again.

    +++

    Please don't express condolences. It doesn't feel quite right. I'm sad, and we all are. She's the last of four grandparents, all of whom were fixtures my whole life. We can only hope to have such a life as she has, both in length and quality. Death is work, and waiting, staring at clocks, and replaying all we might have done.

    Please do this instead. Tell me memories of your mothers. Doesn't matter if they're still here, or if they're estranged. Tell me stories of ghosts and cloud biscuits. Tell me the opposite of arbitrary. Tell me what you'll always remember so that I'll know, and my mother too, that motherhood, as nutty as it makes us, endures through everything.

    Even death.

     

    Comment130 Comments |
    DateWednesday, March 10, 2010 in
    Wednesday
    24Feb2010

    sequel

    Hiding. Hiding behind love for Haiti. Behind Glow. Behind my camera. Pretty soon I’m going to kidnap Jillian Michaels and thrust her in front of me, sputtering But my FITNESS! My CHOLESTEROL! Sophomoric failure is nothing to DEATH BY SLOTHERY! I must SHRED! Hiding from the hard work of transcribing distant voices from parallel worlds through a tin-can telephone.

    See, in nine months I am supposed to will submit my second manuscript to Nimbus.

    The blinking, my god, the incessant blinking. I …

    I am …

    Laundry. Groceries. Flickr. A paper for a client on social media and branding. Twitter, to share news of my third Tunnock's 1887 milk chocolate mallow tea cookie. Invoicing. Flickr. Researching root canals for preschoolers. An urge to hear Underwhelmed. Tax receipts. Flickr. Twenty abdominal crunches followed by five bicep curls and three minutes of jumping jacks. Or at least three minutes of considering it, from the couch.

    I've been anywhere else but here.

    Missy is unimpressed. She’s not one for fussing, nor for waiting. She sees a cuff of porcupine quills on a master welder. She wants to tread on permafrost moss and crash a flying beast and engage in illegal sabotage and write to Eric on coded postcards and it’s all stuck at the bottleneck of me.

    She tries to help, but I'm thick as bricks.

    On a crummy it’s always the broken driveshafts. Has to be put on a flatbed. If the driveshaft breaks the whole thing drops into the mud and the wheels can’t spin.

    Don’t ever get stuck behind a moose. They’ll just trot along for twenty minutes in a straight line.

    Blackflies wiggle and crawl. Gotta duct-tape your sleeves and shirt collars. Bandana around your ears. You get used to it.

    Gil Croteau, too. He's the Crummies' navigator. Lâche pas la patate! Tout le kit!

    But how do you start? With the blink, and resigned to a soft stomach.

    +++

    One hiding place in particular has been a thrill. A distraction, yeah, but a thrill. I'm selling a limited run of fine art photography prints now, here, and holding them in my hands is mind-bending.

    I don't tend to make pretty things. I string words together and I can cook well enough, but I'm not crafty or arty as long as you don't count my font fetish and kink for the labels of British foodstuffs. But look! Tactile gorgeousness on cotton rag by a German company that's been making artist's paper since 1584.

    Put a sheep's ass on this stuff and it's the prettiest thing you've ever seen. So have a look through. Every six months or so, I'll retire the existing series and replace it with a new one. I'll start shooting as soon as my book editor turns her back.

    +++

    The other day, Penelope and I sat at a vegetarian restaurant while the peanut butter balls eyed us nervously from behind the glass. First we dealt with the housekeeping of the second edition of The Dread Crew. Tweaks, continuity, special features. Then I gave her the next book, or at least the verbal skeleton of it. And she nodded and interjected with questions readers will ask, because she knows how to nudge, light fires. We knocked ideas around. She told me what she saw as she listened. Then I got home and she sent me an email that said OH MY GOD JUST WRITE IT ALREADY. WRITE!

    sweetsaltykate to Penelope  Giant moths instead of butterflies, maybe? Nocturnal, bumping up against windows? will think about it. I'll take a crack at the 2nd edition today, then you can. Will send you another version tomorrow, okay?

    Penelope to sweetsaltykate  Perfect, thanks. Tingling about moths.

    sweetsaltykate to Penelope  Yeah. I figured you to be that sort of girl.

    Penelope to sweetsaltykate  Goddamn it, you hacked my livejournal.

    And there, just there, at that moment: I know it. I can do this. We can do this, she and I. For the first book we were foisted upon each other by fate and process, my manuscript unpolished but already complete. This time, we are collaborators. She cracks me up and I'm filled up with this... rush. It's already in there. I just need to start typing.

    Every creative thing already lives inside. Every photograph, sculpture, poem, sketch, painting, story.

    That's how it always is, you know, for everyone. All we need to do is find the right space, and the will, and facilitate the stretching of creative legs.

    And get the hell off twitter.

     

    Comment37 Comments |
    DateWednesday, February 24, 2010 in
    Wednesday
    10Feb2010

    on the benefits of a lego neptune sub and other matters of life and death

    HEY YOU GUYS.

    Sometimes I'm sad about Liam. But I really wish we could go to Thomas and Oliver's house because I could bring my knights and we could play knights cause they have A REALLY COOL CASTLE. And I can yell up to the sky like this:

    HAAAAAAAAAAA!

    ...to Liam. So he can hear. Can we get him down again? WAIT. I know how. I will go to Atlantis in my LEGO NEPTUNE SUB and I will unlock the secret key and then I will travel up into the sky and I will bring him back down again. After I fight the giant squid. I will bring him back here after I get the giant squid with my laser. I will bring Liam TO THE EARTH. So I can talk to him. Okay. Good.

    I shrink from 'dead' because death is not the extent of my son. It's too small a word. It’s just something that happened to him. And so I don't tend to pass it on, trying instead, feebly, to plant seeds that open possibilities rather than closing them. It’s not that Evan doesn’t know that Liam died. He does. But 'he died' is not an answer. 'He died' is only more questions.

    +++

    On sad days I've broached our history, afraid of what I might incite. I've feared indulging my grief at his expense. And so I've only asked this twice in as many years, and in a strange, hesitant mumble.

    Do you remember Liam?

    No.

    You had another brother.

    I'm hungry.

    He was only two. The NICU was averse to tasmanian devils and steam engines. And so we always said when he's ready which is parental code for I just don't know how to go there yet. And so it was randomly, through bedtime gloom, Ben already purring softly in sleep, when Evan proposed the Atlantis route, and when we settled on our answer.

    Where did he go?

    Look up.

    Not for gates strung with righteous pearls, but for one of nature's most plentiful and accessible sights. Stars, sapphire blue, wind that drags fingers through trees. Clouds of February, plain and grey.

    Are clouds hard? How can he walk around up there?

    I don't know. How do you think?

    He must be really light.

    He is a river and the eel that slips through it. He is an eagle and a mouse. He is not afraid. He is united, all together, safe. He is not in that plastic box anymore. He is elsewhere, and nowhere, and everywhere.

    There's all that, or there's just

    Look up.

     

    Comment51 Comments |
    DateWednesday, February 10, 2010 in
    Tuesday
    09Feb2010

    to haiti with love: messages of hope

    photos by Renee Dietrich, late January 2010, Port au Prince, Haiti

    As I write this, the people of St. Joseph's find their new path. They're clearing and planning and feeding and rebuilding, safe and settled in temporary shelter. Surrounding them on all fronts is loss and yet there is still friendship, and spirit. There was art here. There was music, and drumming, and dancing. There will be again.

    Messages are getting through as well as hope. What do you wish for them? What made you donate? What made you bid? How did you feel when you first heard the news?

    What is your hope for Haiti?

    Please click through to the To Haiti With Love site to leave your message for the people of St. Joseph's. They're very busy, as are all the Canadians and Americans that work tirelessly to get them the resources they need. But your kindness gets through.

    And thank you so much for one of the most incredible, gratifying weeks ever. You -- your contributions of art, and your bids -- made hope real.

     

    Comments Off |
    DateTuesday, February 9, 2010
    Monday
    01Feb2010

    the beauty of backbone: the 'to Haiti with love' auction

    It doesn't unfurl like silk, release a scent, flutter in breeze. A stem draws moisture, a channel of nourishment as well as fortitude. A stem feeds something beautiful. A stem is a backbone.

    Nurturing isn't just about hope or prayer, as welcome as those gestures are. It's about resources and food and water and shelter. Literal, tangible, everyday caring—the very same we do as parents. Picking up and putting away. Wiping and lifting and stirring supper with one hand while tussling a scruffy, three-foot head with the other. This is the nurturing that makes souls safe, keeps bellies from rumbling. It is plain and often unseen and yet it keeps whole families straight up and down, growing taller.

    For a while, until we need not be, we can be Haiti's stem.

    +++

    Bright and early this morning, the virtual doors opened at To Haiti with Love, an online fundraising auction and gathering of creative spirits.

    René came up with the idea six days ago. She emailed me and I responded by cannonballing into it, landing on top of her head. The generous people at Squarespace agreed to play host and within hours, emails were fast and furious and our community of artistic friends responded without hesitation.

    With all proceeds going to the St. Joseph's family of homes for children in Port au Prince, Haiti, we're selling a Mondo Beyondo pass from the lovely Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher, a parade of beautiful (and many familiar, in these parts) photographic prints, original artwork, clothing, a coveted Shutter Sisters flash bulb necklace, my mother's unspeakably wonderful bird mobile, homemade maple marshmallows, and a ski getaway in a historic cabin in Telluride, Colorado. The Dread Crew's own Sydney Smith has even contributed an original, one-of-a-kind illustration that you're going to have to pry out of my sobbing, wanty hands. That's just to name just a few of the treasures up for bidding, and more items will be added every day—so visit often throughout the week. We've got such fabulous items waiting in the wings I can hardly keep my grinning mouth shut.

    As photographers and authors and painters and toymakers and quilters, we offer what we know. Useful things, beautiful things. All tangible. Perhaps it's not the same as being able to pick up, dust off, offer embraces and warmth as proximity would compel us. Perhaps it's much, much better. It's the means and the resources from which self-nurturing springs.

    Go there now, and browse, and bid. Tweet about it. Share it on Facebook. I'm being bossy because it's for good. The Canadian federal government will match our funds raised if we can get it into Haiti's hands by February 12. Shout it, cheer it, shop it. Are you an artist? Have something to offer? Let us know.

    St. Joseph's nurtures Haiti's future innovators and artists and leaders. It creates family where there was none. Let's nurture them in that good work.

    This post was borrowed from today's Shutter Sisters, because I've been up past 3 AM for three nights now, and I have cut-and-paste tendonitis and blogging cramps and look like a wild boar. So forgive the self-piracy. Off I go to collapse, and to dream of Rungi Chungi.

     

    Comment10 Comments |
    DateMonday, February 1, 2010
    Wednesday
    27Jan2010

    goods for good: to haiti with love

    I've felt useless and hopeless and far away and until today, I've been doing a faithful ostrich impression to counter the uselessness and the hopelessness.

    No more. On Monday, February 1, René of Fruity Fantastica and I are hosting an online auction of fantastic photography, art, papergoods, books, and crafts to benefit the St. Joseph's Family, a home for boys in Haiti with both Canadian and American roots.

    St. Joseph's is a truly incredible group of people. What you see here has been hit hard, with many of their resources and buildings destroyed.

    The auction will last one week only, a fundraising blitz to meet the deadline of the Canadian federal government for charitable fund-matching. Watch this space and twitter and facebook and all other means of yelling and cheering and stamping, and forgive me all of the above, but it's something I can do. It's something you can do. Pass it on, and make an offer, and get gorgeous loot in the mail for your effort. For Haiti.

    Just a tease of what's to be listed on Monday, February 1 to benefit Haiti, starting top left: Everything is going to be alright photographic print by Dutch (a.k.a. James Griffioen) of Sweet Juniper, but you'll have to armwrestle me for it; a gorgeous print by painter Erin Darcy of Starving Artist Ink; a coveted pass for the sold-out Mondo Beyondo, the fabulous do-anything online workshop with my Shutter Sisters Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher; a flat of custom-made organic soaps from the Dominion Soap Company (shown: café au lait); and the Fortunes book of poetry and vintage-style photography by Brooklyn writer and photographer Jen Lee. Also to be included: one of the very last remaining copies of The Dread Crew, author-signed, as well as a few very limited-edition Dread Crew t-shirts, and big, juicy sweet | salty photo prints along with much, much more.

    (This just in: my wonderful mother, founding member of the Nova Scotia handquilting mafia, is making another one of her swoon-worthy, multi-level bird mobiles. Ours hangs near our front door and spins in the breeze. The art coming in for this - really, I can't wait to show you.)

    The To Haiti With Love auction site will be launched in the next day or two, with new items added (and accepted) daily. The incredible people at Squarespace (my elegant, robust, easy-to-use blogging platform) have agreed to host us, and so we're working feverishly to bring it all together in time to make Prime Minister Harper pony up as much as we (and you) do.

    Heck. I'm even thinking of offering a one-night getaway in a one-room log cabin on Nova Scotia's beautiful south shore, complete with brunch of blackberry french toast and automatic morning wake-up call by way of double-toddler tackling. Any takers?

     

    Comment19 Comments |
    DateWednesday, January 27, 2010
    Thursday
    21Jan2010

    pediatric oral surgeries of the backwoods

    I walked down the stairs and to the car calmly, white crunching underfoot. Buckled Evan into his seat calmly. Shut the door calmly. Dialed the phone calmly. Justin answered. Calmly. At which point I stepped out of my kid's frame of view and unleashed fifteen minutes of f-bombs and sobbing.

    Six months ago our dentist said that Evan had a "tiny" cavity, and instructed us to come back in six months or so to get it fixed. Today, it took a mirror on a stick and all of fourteen seconds for her to step back from him, pull me aside and tell me that she suspects he is a werewolf. A werewolf who drinks too much Pepsi.

    Then she told me what she saw in his mouth, other than half-chewed accountants.

    Five large cavities so far gone that one tooth is half lost. A referral for two root canals, two stainless steel crowns and three fillings. For a boy who just turned five. Heavy sedation at best. Hospital and general anesthesia at worst. For a boy who JUST TURNED FIVE.

    Two root canals. He's five. I can't even joke about it.

    +++

    The lady across the road dropped a can of Mountain Dew into his bag at Halloween and he pulled it back out and gave it to her and said, "Thank you nice lady, but I don't drink beer."

    "It's not beer!" she replied.

    "Oh. Thank you nice lady, but I don't drink wine."

    Yeah I know. Move along. The point is, Evan doesn't know what pop is.

    We are unfun (see exhibit A: video game meltdown). We don't buy ice cream or sweets or Sugar Crisp cereal (dammit, Justin) because if you don't have them in the house, they don't cause tantrums. It's easier that way. The kids get dilute juice, if at all, except on special occasions like Christmas or birthdays or Parliamentary prorogue parties.

    Alright. So I guess I can joke about it. Mostly because I don't want you to think we're prissy and due for comeuppance. We're responsible, but not uptight. We're cautious, but not unfair. So I show you evidence of Evan's one and only slushie to prove... what, exactly? That we're neither better nor worse than any other parent? Maybe. That I can take my preschooler's two root canals in stride? That would be a lie. I can't relay the news to anyone without crying and asking to be tied up to the nearest whipping post.

    Most of the time, we're beyond unfun. We're demented. We pour All-Bran onto yogurt and call it Stick Soup and bring it over to the table singing and ooohing and aahhing like it's gold-leafed croquembouche. They think it's dessert. We slap five and cackle behind our hands.

    We brush no less diligently than anyone else with the exception of that family in Blue Rocks that has three sumo wrestlers living in their upstairs bathroom. We do marginally less well than they do at enforcing oral hygiene. Fair enough.

    My story, the one I'm still trying to sell to myself? As a rural kid, he's never had a drop of fluoride. We're on a well and always have been. Combine that with naturally soft or cavity-prone teeth and you end up with a kid with a stainless-steel grill who can bite through electrical cable if required. In case that pesky British spy shows up trying to seduce an almost-37 year-old mother of highly dubious performance, we have an in-house villain.

    From here we go to a specialist, and urgently. Then the possibility of the hospital to fix it, and then what? I know. Carrot sticks and water until he goes away to university. Clothes made of styrofoam popcorn. Payouts to witch doctors and the mafia. Jesus Christ himself nabbed in one of those Holy Ghost traps that you bait with marshmallow fluff, then tethered to my kid with velcro like an inhuman shield.

    +++

    This is just the beginning, isn't it?

     

    Comment79 Comments |
    DateThursday, January 21, 2010 in
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