My Timely Grandma

 My mom told me the other day that my Grandma Enid* read my latest book twice—once to herself and then again, out loud, to my Grandpa. And then she called my mom and told her she was sending her 100 dollars. She was pre-ordering all of my future books.

If that isn't the sweetest thing you've ever heard, you get your money back. (Luckily, you never gave me any money in the first place, so.)

When I was in grade seven (or eight or nine) this same Grandma mailed me a clipping from her town's newspaper—it was one of those student spotlight things where they interviewed local kids and put their picture in the paper with their answers. The kid in the interview that week was a girl named Jessie, someone I'd met at camp one year and become best friends with, though my grandma couldn't possibly have known that. 

The last question in the interview was, "Who is someone you want to be like?" and Jessie had answered "Suzy" and my grandma had circled this question and answer in red pen and drawn exclamation marks around it. Accompanying the clipping was a little sticky note that said something about how Grandma "just knew" I was the Suzy this Jessie girl wanted to be like. Like I was the only Suzy in the world, or at least, the only noteworthy, role-model-y Suzy in the world. At the time, I remember feeling particularly not noteworthy or role-model-y (I was in junior high, after all, and good self-esteem was allotted to only one or two people per grade in junior high), and that note was pretty timely. 

As timely as pre-ordering all of my future books while I'm struggling very hard to even write said future books and wondering every day if there will ever be future books. How does Grandma Enid do that? The timely thing? 

I'm digressing and digressing (for that is what I do best) but all this to say: There is one of two morals to this story (or maybe both):

1. Going out of your way to say something extra kind or encouraging is a good idea, because it might be more timely than you can imagine and/or:

2. I should call Grandma Enid this week and tell her I love her. 

*This is also the Grandma who once sent me the obituary—just the obituary, nothing else, not even a sticky note—of famous piano player Anthony Burger when he passed away of a heart attack on a cruise ship, because she knew I had been to one of his concerts and quite liked it.

My First Prairie Hurricane

 I attended my first hurricane last night. 

Okay, it wasn't a hurricane so much as a snowstorm—but it had hurricane-level winds, they said, topping out at 126 km/h. I believe them. It sounded like an airplane flying around the streets of the city, like something that could bust through your window at any moment. At around 11, a friend texted me a picture of a huge tree that had, only yesterday, been standing in their front yard, but was now resting contentedly on their bedroom.

I tried to go to sleep after that, but we have trees too. So I began to do that thing Barclay loves where I shake him awake every three minutes to run worst case scenarios and show him all of the terrible things I'm seeing on Twitter.

He loves that.

Eventually, though, he became harder to wake, and soon, even when I could wake him, he wasn't coherent, so I had to doomscroll alone. 

But then! Something kind of delightful happened. I was scrolling through the #SkStorm hashtag on Twitter, where people were doing the usual storm Twitter thing—posting pictures of the damage they'd incurred so far and Tweeting at Sask Power that they were having outages. Then someone mentioned that they were starting to feel worried about their house blowing over, and someone else was like, "YEAH I'M TERRRRRRIFIED" and soon there were a whole bunch of local people (myself included) comforting each other and freaking out together and clucking our virtual tongues at the fact that our loved ones were sleeping through the storm of the actual century.  It felt weirdly old-timey and small-towny, but in an on-liney sort of way. 

The internet has not been a place of connection this year, not the way that it once was, but last night from about 11:30 to...2? 3? (I honestly don't know) it was, and that was nice. 

I leave you with this screenshot from SaskPower's Twitter account—an important reminder that Christmas trees make great paper airplanes.

Villa Elaine

 I found my lost Remy Zero CD—not that you knew it was missing. But it was, and do you know where I found it? Behind some books on my bookshelf. I shrieked. I'd thought it was gone forever, or that Scarlett had captured it and made it into a dinner plate for stuffies and I would find it buried at the bottom of her toy box in two years, covered in glue and animal crackers. Anyway. Rejoice with me, Internet Strangers! I'm listening to it right now, and it's all the sweeter after its long absence, after I thought I'd never hear it again. Villa Elaine. 

I guess I could've just listened to it on Spotify or something, but it really does feel wrong to listen to anything recorded in the 90s on Spotify. Not when I've already experienced it on my $10 Varage Sale CD player, when I've already read the whole CD liner and have heard all the songs in their intended order with no ad breaks. 

But listen. I'm not going to tell you not to listen to it on Spotify. But if you do, and if you like it, you should buy yourself a physical copy, and a $10 Varage Sale CD player. You could be as happy as I am right now.

A Sunny Winter Morning With Sullivan

I'm sitting at the kitchen table once again, listening to Sully do his schoolwork. I'd had this idea that it would be fun to sit with him and try to write a blog post while he worked on his weekly journal entry assignment (what am I, new?), but it turns out it's kind of difficult to construct coherent sentences while someone is sitting next to you saying, "THIS. T-H-I-S, this, this, this weeeeeeeekend—WEEKEND, W-E-E-K-E-N-D, was fun, F-U-N. This weekend was fun, this weekend was fun...hmm....what did we even do this weekend? Mom, what did we do this weekend? I need four more sentences..."

Oh well. I'll look back on this in ten years, as one does, and think to myself, "I miss those sunny winter mornings, sitting at the kitchen table across from six-year-old Sullivan, listening to Nick Drake and quietly writing together, pausing every now and again to share a smile or a joke, him to ask me how to spell the occasional word, me to let him know how proud I was of his neat writing and his advanced sentence structure. I did my best writing in those special moments, too. His very presence sparked my creativity. Now I can't get two words down because all I can think about is him speeding around town in that old car of his with no adult supervision..."

Is this what people mean when they talk about living in the moment—trying to capture that rosy ten-years-in-the-future feeling before you've left the present? It's just one of those phrases I've always heard that I thought I understood...but now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I never have? 

I was about to say that I'm not even sure how to go about that, exactly, but then I realized that, even if it wasn't a conscious thing, this is actually part of the reason I like blogging and taking pictures so much—because if "trying to capture that rosy ten-years-in-the-future-feeling before you've left the present" isn't the most accurate description of blogging and taking pictures, I don't know what is.

2021

Okay, looking ahead now, because far be it from me to write a post about, I don't know, our basement renovation on the first day of a new year:

2021. 

Never before (at least, never before in my lifetime) has a year been so universally, almost desperately, anticipated. Me? I feel...quietly optimistic, I guess. I feel like it'll still be a while until the vaccination is widespread enough to achieve that Back to Normal effect we're all craving, but it's pretty thrilling to think things are trending in that direction. I also feel quietly pessimistic, but that's fine.

It's strange, stepping into this new year. It's the first one in a while I haven't been looking ahead to a specific, year-defining personal Event. No book releases, no concerts or music festivals, no trips, no incoming (er...out...coming? I guess?) babies, none of those milestone-type things that inform the shape and speed and feel of the upcoming twelve months. And not only are there no big things, there aren't even very many little things. In-person school isn't guaranteed. There will be no weekly coffee dates in friends' living rooms, no trips to the museum down the street, no date nights at The Exchange or The Artesian. How will I know it's Tuesday and not Wednesday? Trick question: the answer is WHO CARES. Tuesday and Wednesday are the same now. Calendars are purely decorative.

I usually feel, at the start of a new year, like I'm walking into a framed building, like my job is to add the walls and windows and drywall. Paint it, decorate it, live in it. This year I'm just like, where are we building this thing? What, exactly, are we building? 

...Are we building something? 

2021 has no tent poles, no structure. I have arrived at the construction site, and the foreman is taking a nap in a wheelbarrow. 

I've been seeing people all over instagram today "setting their intentions" and "choosing their word for 2021" and I'm one part Good for you!, one part I should do that!, and three parts LOL no.

Set intentions? For 2021? That's like going on a road trip through an uncharted wasteland and saying, "On our way through this uncharted wasteland, we're going to stop at McDonald's for Egg McMuffins." You don't know there'll be a McDonald's. Why set yourself up for disappointment? 

Then again, maybe a trip through an uncharted wasteland is easier if you have something to look forward to, even if that thing may never actually materialize. Maybe that's the trick in a nutshell—to hope for a McDonald's as opposed to, say, a locally-owned coffee shop that roasts their own beans and has a nice, clean bathroom for you to use.

Or maybe you just go all out, set your expectations up by the moon, and practice being flexible. 

So, okay, sure. I'll set some...intentions. (Goals, resolutions, whatever. People are very anti-resolution/goal these days, very precious about the exact wording here, but I don't get it and I don't care.) I'll make a few plans. Somewhere between McDonald's and the moon. 

1. I would like to blog a lot more. 

(I have completely forgotten how to write for fun, and this is making it very hard to write for work. Blogging is what made me love writing in the first place, so I'm going to cross my fingers that putting words down here, where it doesn't matter at all, will rekindle something in my brain. They say that's how it works. I hope they're right.)

2. I would like to finish this book I've been working on for two and a half million years. 

(Item 1 should beget item 2, if they're right and if I'm lucky.)

3. I would like to pick up some other random hobby or skill, OR pick up an old one. 

(Just something creative that isn't writing. I would like to make time for it and work hard at it. Maybe something I could include the kids in.)

4. I would like to read more books than I read this year. 

(Barclay has become a major book worm this year and he read more books than me and I feel insecure about it. This year: IT IS WAR—I mean, IT IS A CHANCE TO SPEND SOME COZY EVENINGS ON THE COUCH WITH A BLANKET AND A DECAF LATTE AND A GOOD BOOK.)

5. I would like to emerge from this pandemic once and for all and go...I don't know...to Winnipeg! Saskatoon! Calgary! I don't even CARE I just want to stay in a hotel and eat at a restaurant. Maybe hop on an airplane! I COULD GO TO TORONTO! I COULD RIDE THE SUBWAY. That's the dream, right there. I sincerely miss riding the subway.

(This feels closer to the moon than McDonald's.)

6. I want to use the caps lock key a lot less. I need to chill out.

7. Oof. That reminds me: I would like to spend a lot less time on Twitter feeling irritated at people. This morning, I saw a lady on there Tweeting about how she went up to a stranger in a bookstore and shamed them in front of their kids for the book they were buying and everyone on Twitter was like, "GOOD FOR YOU THAT BOOK IS STUPID AND THAT PERSON IS STUPID"  and then someone was like, "Maybe you shouldn't shame people in bookstores for buying books you don't like" and she blocked that person, even though the person in the bookstore didn't have the option to block her when she shamed them for buying a book in a bookstore and I felt so upset about all of it even though it had nothing to do with me. But really, people are just going to be ridiculous on Twitter and I just need to learn to not go over there. Also, there I go with that caps lock key again.

8. Same as 7, but Facebook.

9. I want to learn how to do a mirror glaze on a cake. 

(Watch out, all of my friends. You're going to start receiving so many crappily-mirror-glazed cakes from me in the coming months.)

10. I would like to drink less coffee and more water.

I could go on, but wow this is getting long. And, like, I'm not even taking breaks in between numbers; these are just flying out of me. This is either a sign that I have SO MUCH IMPROVING TO DO THIS YEAR, or that the whole blogging-to-remember-how-to-write-for-fun-again thing is already working.

Either way, happy new year, and talk to you soon.