The Country Mice

Looking south to UBC

As the elder offspring of two devoted teachers I shamelessly support truancy. “If you can’t skip school when you’re *insert relevant age here* when can you skip?” So four provinces over that meant visits to the Royal Winter Fair, seeing the Rockettes, travelling by train from Winnipeg, staring awe-struck at the Lippizaner Stallions, and visiting the zoo, Efton Science Store, my Aunt Clara and Uncle Bob, Chapters, or just plain staying home.

However, in spite of my hard-held belief that there was lots of learning going on outside school walls — even tho I unequivocally attest my children attended the best Montessori school on the planet — I did feel always a not so little pang of guilt when I returned my clearly healthy, pock-free and eager-to-show&tell children to class.

Imagine my shivering delight to discover I’ve landed a world that grants me full complete utter and absolute support of doing something absolutely splendid within school hours and without school walls.

It’s called home-schooling, or home learning, or un-schooling (but most definitely not un-learning). It’s a bit complex — something I’ll save for a later post (or better, see Rickshaw Unschooling for a cogent discussion of non-traditional education).

But most importantly, it’s guilt-free. The Princess and I packed up first thing yesterday morning and headed to Cypress Mountain for a day of skiing. Get this: We live five minutes from the ferry. It took 20 minutes to cross the sound to Horseshoe Bay. Another 20 minutes and we were buckling on our boots. Addition is part of the curriculum: 5 + 20 + 20 = not a very long time from house to hill.

My little girl was so positively delighted to be out with her maman I don’t believe she stopped smiling once. What she did, however, was thank me — THANK me — several times for taking her to the mountain for the day.

Worth the price of the lift ticket.

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A picture is worth a thousand words.

A thousand and one.

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Hands up.

Would your dad have liked a little spa time? A deep, muscular, shiver-inducing massage? Some attention to unruly hairs sprouting from the strangest of crevices?

Would he have liked to be pampered?

It’s hard to ever think of my father taking time for himself. There’s gardens to be hoed, snow to be shovelled, roofs to be patched, Meals On Wheels to be delivered, papers to be read…

But a little Me Time? Not so much.

Fortunately when he’s at the Bowen Island Beauty Spa he’s only a foot soak away from heavenly bliss.

When I was little Dad would ask me to wash his hair in the kitchen sink. Compared to the icy jolt of the well water of his farm-boy youth, this hunching over a lather-filled basin, foamy and aromatic,  would have been true glory indeed.

Once, having read of such things in a single-gal magazine, I decided what my dad really needed was a deep hair conditioning treatment.

I saw him down, flipped a towel around his neck, marched to the refrigerator and pulled out a couple of eggs. I cracked the eggs, separated the yolks, beat said yolks with a fork and massaged the cold yellow goo on to his pate. While we waited for the magic to transpire, we sipped tea, took a phone call or two, read a paper, got distracted.

Upon inspection some time later we discovered the yolk, quite unfortunately, had dried rather quickly and we were left with a crusted and congealed mess, tangled miserably through what was already a rather thinned forest. The removal strategy only worsened when I attempted to rinse out the yolk with hot-ish water (what was she thinking?) leaving only one solution short of complete eradication: removing the yolk slowly and carefully with a fingernail, one single little hair at a time.

Tragic? Not at all. The next day’s unsolicited comments on the newfound shine, body and sheer glossiness made us try it again, tho not for some months later!

Sadly, the effects of the raw egg treatment endure only until the next wash but seriously — thin, dry, brittle hair? You’re only a refrigerator away from sheer loveliness.

But back here at the Bowen Island Beauty Spa our talented aestheticians will cater to your every need.

We like to keep our customers happy with personal service, positive energy, fresh air and free coffee.

We just love to please.

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A lovely little shop making hand-crafted chocolates here on the island.

I’m not much of a chocolate fan but they do have a salted caramel something-or-other that makes me swoon.

I apologize that the following pics are so unfocussed. Something to do with salivary anticipation…

Kinda gross.

But they’re really really really good.

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Trebuchet. Onager. Ballista.

If you can read these words, thank a history teacher.

And if you know their definition, you were a better student than I.

Deep in the dark recesses of our cavernous garage (cavernous because the garage has not yet discerned its true calling; my poor 1982 convertible hunches outside, sulking in the rain) a workshop of medieval proportions takes place.

The workers toil over their hand-hewn lumber, wrenched from the unwilling ground, and gouged with tools forged from the fire of the blacksmith.

No modern conveniences here in this ninth century grotto.

Yeah.

In the spirit of scientific research, Homeboy elected to construct two of the above mentioned castle-sacking devices. The onager, in progress above, was used to great success by the Romans during their successful pillage over much of Europe. The original onager was a donkey — an untameable creature which defeated its attackers by bucking stones at its enemy with its hind legs.

Hence, a catapult named after a donkey, hurtling stones and boulders toward the advancing troops or the castle walls.

A completed catapult of a different sort currently guards the entrance to our home.

The trebuchet originated in China but was later modified in England. Hugely popular during the Crusades, the trebuchet’s shining moment in history was its most effective use during Henry II’s conquest of Scotland’s Stirling Castle.

Homeboy uses chunks of rock as his projectiles but for historic accuracy, he really ought to be employing deceased cows, horses and, I am told, the occasional unlucky messenger.

Look directly above the sling to see a yellowish object of destruction

As the custodial guardian of this child, I admit to taking cover behind doors and inside houses. So far no casualties but weren’t the rack and the iron maiden in operation around the same time? Can’t say I trust the technology.

The plan for the science project is to compare at least two of the catapults and ignoring what the history books say has been the most effective (hint: starts with ‘T’), Homeboy will test the distance and damage inflicted by each instrument of carnage.

*sigh*

My little boy…

* Look out behind you!

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‘Twas the night before Christmas and over on Bowen

The pond was froze over and the wind was a-blowin’.

The rain pouring down, the backyard a pool

The kids were all home on vacation from school,

And happier young folks you never did see —

Just all hangin’ around, decorating the tree.

Then suddenly, around 3 o’clock,

There came a surprise that gave them a shock!

The power went off, the lights went dead!

When Grandpa came in from out in the shed

With an armload of wood, the house was all dark.

“Just what I expected,” they heard him remark.

“Them power line wires must be down from the wind.

Seems sorter like old time,” and then he just grinned.

“I’ll hunt up some candles and get them alight,

And with the woodstove, I reckon we’ll make out all right.”

The teen-agers all seemed enveloped in gloom.

Then Grandpa came back from a trip to his room,

Uncased his old fiddle and started to play

That old Christmas song about bells on a sleigh.

Mom started to sing, and first thing they knew

Both Pop and the kids were all singing it, too.

They sang Christmas carols, they sang “Holy Night,”

Their eyes all ashine in the ruddy firelight.

They played some charades Mom recalled from her youth,

And Pop read a passage from God’s Book of Truth.

They stayed up till midnight and, would you believe,

The youngsters agreed ’twas a fine Christmas Eve.

Grandpa rose early, some time before dawn;

And when the kids all wakened, the power was on..

“Hydro sure got the lines repaired quick,”

Said Grandpa — and no one suspected his trick.

Last night, for the sake of some old-fashioned fun,

He had pulled the main switch — the old Son-of-a-Gun!

— Author uncertain but provided by a Bowen Islander

Merry Christmas from our home to yours!

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It might have appeared to go unnoticed

But I’ve got it all here in my heart.

I want you to know the truth, of course I know

I would be nothing without you.

Did you ever know that you’re my hero?

You’re everything I wish I could be.

I could fly higher than an eagle

Because you are the wind beneath my wings.

Grow old with me — the best is yet to come.

Happy Birthday to my beautiful father!

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Yesterday would have been my mother’s 79th birthday. You have no idea how hard it is for me to imagine her at this age.

My mother hated hated HATED the idea of getting old. She was crazily, hilariously, obsessively obsessed with concealing her age, to the delight of anyone wanting to torment her by determining The Year In Which She Was Born.

Growing up, my family had an intricately carved child-size wooden rocking chair in our living room, one which had been passed on to me from my great grandmother. One year my grandmother gave us a little gold plate to attach to the rocking chair and on the plate were the dates of birth of the three generations to which the chair had belonged — my grandmother, my mother and me. The plate was duly attached to the little chair, where it stayed for years. One day our family priest, a great friend, dropped by. He and my mother incessantly argued, debated, hissed and howled about the state of the church, the state of women (’twas the early 1970s), the state of all holy men and women of the centuries. They always parted friends, but sometimes it was best to leave the room.

One day he looked at the chair. He smiled. It was a check-mate kind of smile.

“Lyla,” said the priest with the groovy sideburns and green 1967 Mustang. “I know just how old you are.”

The next day the little gold plate was gone.

My mother was also an accomplished artist. Growing up in a multi-media house filled with paper, paints, canvas, clay and visiting contemporaries, I kind of took all those things for granted, but to reflect, it was a rich and inimitable childhood.

My mother herself grew up in a small rural community spattered with immigrants of eastern Europe, struggling to re-invent the agricultural wheel as they worked to tame the stoney and late-to-thaw-early-to-freeze earth. But those immigrants kept hold of the dearest traditions of their old countries and as a result there are churches in the area that could have been plucked from the hills of the Ukraine and Poland, filled with food, language, music,  paintings and vibrant community events.

Do you know these matryoshka dolls? They’re also called babushka dolls. My Baba, my Ukrainian grandmother, called the head scarf she wore every day a babushka, although the word is also used as a diminutive in Russian for grandmother, meaning “little mother.”

The babushka or little mother dolls are based on the idea that the outer or largest dolls holds her babies inside like an expectant mother and that each daughter in turns becomes a mother. They are symbols of fertility and motherhood and have a modified egg shape.

Like the long-disappeared little gold plate, these dolls mark the passing of generations, the great passing of life and talents on to the next layer of family. I gave one set to each of my babes many years ago and we pull them out at Christmas time just because.

There’s fun in taking them apart, trying to remember just how tiny the final one will be, marvelling at the blotches of paint which surprisingly form a recognizable face.

Despite the decades, grey hair and wrinkles it would have cost her to get there, my mother would have loved being a babushka, a little grandmother. Because she died young she’ll always stay young, but like our priest, I smile at how inevitably she’d have had to concede to the passage of time, to paint, to share, to nestle with her egg-lets.

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