Monthly Archives: July 2012

staring at nothing, thinking about everything

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Every July I lie on my back and stare up in the late afternoon  and look up at this familiar sight

I think I have been doing this for years

Maybe decades

It is the vibrant blue sky  and green leaves of summer ( nature and its paintbrush)

It is a staring time and a thinking time

I don’t do this at any other time of the year except summer

or sometimes into a fireplace in the winter

You lie and stare perfectly quietly

and you think of nothing and everything

and the time passes in a completely different way

 

take a peek at some favourite summer pictures- some food and one of my best body part- naked. You won’t be disappointed.  Darn cute, IMHO.

get native

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my great indulgence is to be up north  for as much of the summer as I can

(***don’t be too jealous, it doesn’t come without very hard and strange work. I worked backwards from this dream to make it possible)

eager to feel again what we did when we were little and days turned to nights turned to days and then in what felt like forever, it was time to return to the city

but somewhere there must be  a memo going around that grown woman should stay clothed, never swim and certainly never dunk under

we must stay on the sidelines and act serious and look good

I intentionally missed this memo

While true my better look is when I am dry and clothed- I love getting native

After you have been swimming and playing for hours in your bathing suit, you forget your age, you forget your life and the roles you play, you forget what is hard and what hurts and what can’t be forgotten

You feel so clean

Later you go up to finally put on some ugly cottage clothes like your daughter’s best friend’s little sister’s tank top hand me down from 7 years ago and those ugly cut offs you love that remind you of happiness- because why not- and you peel off your damp bikini top in front of the mirror and you see yourself and laugh

who is that?

I forgot my age

I forgot my vanity

and you look closer and there is something on your damp, cold, white,  absolutely defying gravity left breast (ok I made that last part up) and it is a flattened  dead minnow

and you smile

because it is a beautiful thing to get native

and feel 8 again

 

Don’t you love all this about summer? I require it to feel right. And a little VAGABONDER- my favourite summer french verb- click here for a full on translation and picture of me with no top on and the dead minnow 

 

 

conversation with fish

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self portrait of ‘fish’- Habs fan extraordinaire artstudioforchildren

 

The art camper  I nicknamed “fish” for her love of water (this was my nickname at camp for the same reason) -with the  bravest outer shell, was tender last night with me.

” I miss my mom” she said, voice cracking. She has not been away from her much and never this long.

I said “I understand. I miss my dad”

Gosh. I don’t even know where that came from.

She looked at me quizzically.

“When did you see him last?”

I said  ‘in June or several years ago’

She asked lots of great and deep questions and I realized that it has been a long time that I have needed to explain Dementia in child like terms. My children were raised on his slow fading.

“He was once this man’- and I held my hands in the air the way you would if you were holding a beach ball-‘ funny, smart, tall, strong, fit, lean, good-looking and sassy. And a 1000 other things too. Then after he got sick he became a smaller version of himself-my hands travelling to the right in an imaginary line with the hands pretending to cup a smaller and smaller ball as they travelled.

Now all the campers were around us- listening intently, heads tilted.

I turned to the one with the youngest sib-“We begin life like your baby brother with no ability to fend for ourselves, we can’t walk or talk or feed ourselves – he is travelling backwards to where James started off at the beginning. His birth.

Wow,  this is getting deep.

“What kinds of things did he forget?”

“He loved to swim like you and me, fish, and one day while swimming, he completely forgot how. It was sad because I think he was aware of it. We got him out and it was fine. But he never swam again. When I swim now  I do it for him and for me.”

“Can they make him better?”

“Nope”

“That is really sad” they said.

“Yes. Very.”

 

My dad was a tough customer expecting quite a bit from us. Sometimes I wish he could see me now fully because this is the best version of me I have been yet and it would be good to tell him what I can do. He never saw my strongest strong.  He would say with a twinkle ” I am really proud of you, Nance. You are the best” and he would mean it and it would float me for months or years maybe. And then we would go down for a swim. Because we could.

 

 

my dad taught me the lesson of the sweetness of hard work. I have really only come to understand what that means in the last few years, working at a pace that is maybe a bit consuming.  But I have so come to love the sweetness that it brings – click here for thoughts on the before and after of hard work