Last night in Vienna

...A wonderful city

...More Christmas markets...

...We toured and toured and toured...

Then we took the train to Budapest...

...And Christmas markets in Vienna

...Art...

...Saw a LOT of stuff...

...With my son...

I went to Vienna...

The to-do list

I have spent several days already poking around in my backyard to see what's there and what I want to do with it. The previous owner did a lot of planting and then left it for a few years before I came along. So some stuff has probably disappeared, other things are outrageously overgrown, and still more has survived and spread amazingly. There are some mysterious bits as well, odd placement of rocks that weren't there before.

There are tonnes and tonnes of tulips and various other spring bulb-type flowers. Some of which I can identify---crocuses and hyacinth---and others I recognize but don't know the names of. Lots of hosta too. I am not much of a flower gardener, I don't have an easy familiarity with the flower world. And not much of a vegetable gardener either, I have not had access to a good-sized bit of land in a very long time. In fact not since I last lived here 25 years ago.

A friend has been helping me poke around, she is a frustrated gardener living in an apartment in the next town. She keeps gardening tools in her car trunk, in case she happens upon a gardening opportunity. Right now I am one of her gardening opportunities. She has identified some of the plants and tried to tackle pruning various shrubs.

Another friend has offered me a sustainable source of free horse manure and a book on Lasagna Gardening. She suggests that rather than dig up my backyard that I simply lay down cardboard and spread some of her horse manure on top with various other things to create a garden without digging. The avoidance of digging sounds good to me.

But to start a garden I have to build some frames to hold all this manure and figure out best locations for these frames that will get the most sunlight. I have too many trees strategically placed to block the sunshine and don't care to cut them down. The local sawmill is closed this weekend so I have to wait until after the Easter holiday to get the lumber to build the frames.

Then I have to get containers to hold the horse manure in my truck. My friend suggests plastic tubs from Home Depot, but another friend insists that I should not buy tubs but rather get ahold of free plastic pails with lids. However she cannot suggest a good source for free plastic pails. Then she suggests feed bags from the farm where I buy eggs. She is all about free stuff. Meanwhile I am thinking that tracking down all this free stuff will take so much time, I just want to get the garden started.

While my son was visiting here the other week he pointed out that the basement toilet seal needs replacing. He said it was a fairly simple job but messy. I dutifully went off to the hardware store and bought the stuff I'd need to do the job but have put off doing it because of aforesaid messiness.

A couple of months ago I bought a new faucet for the kitchen sink, and initially had it sitting in a prominent location as a reminder to actually install it, but after a month I finally moved it to a shelf behind the furnace in the basement because I obviously was ignoring it anyway. One of these days the existing faucet will give out altogether and then maybe I'll be motivated to install the new one.

My free-stuff friend told me when I first moved in that I needed a gate on the basement stairs so that she wouldn't fall down them (she's blind). I have designed a gate and bought the lumber and cut it up but not yet assembled or installed it. Not being blind I don't fall down the stairs, and I stand in the way when my friend is visiting.

I visited a local weaver and she showed me around her studio and introduced me to her sheep, she proposed a deal to get me started weaving on my loom which I am very interested in but so far I have not acted on it.

I have a banjo under my bed that I want to learn to play and yet another friend pointed out that a very able banjo teacher lives just across the street from me. I have not contacted him.

Are you starting to get the picture? I have all these things I need or want to do and none of them are getting done! For no good reason other than laziness, procrastination and not knowing where to start.

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg, the most blatant unstarted projects. I can list off at least a half-dozen other projects without thinking, and probably a dozen more if you give me a little time to think about it. I try to list things but my lists are always incomplete, and often I only remember the stuff that I need to do when I can least do them, or even round up pen and paper to write them down.

People ask me how it feels to be back in the house that I sold so many years ago. I shrug my shoulders and say it doesn't feel like anything. I guess this house is so familiar to me that I don't have any unusual feelings about being here so what can I say? It doesn't feel odd or right or anything at all.

I think the closest I can come to identifying what it feels like is that I lived here, I went away and travelled a bit, and then I came back. I'd like to think I am here for good now, but I have learned never to say never. I might never leave again, or not.

But I must say that this is the first spring in a very long time that I have not felt a sustained deep and irresistable urge to be on the road. I get flashes of it occasionally, but nothing to get me planning for it.

I almost feel like writing emails of apology to farflung friends that I won't be visiting any time soon, except that this is one more thing to add to the list above and is being treated in much the same way.

I remember that when I left this place I was lonely and frustrated, I couldn't wait to go someplace different and start over. Loneliness continued to be a constant issue, it was always hard to create a social life for myself. I lived in several different cities over the years and came up with a rule of thumb that it generally took two years to create a social life that worked for me.

Returning here has been quite shocking in that my rule of thumb has been trashed, it is as if my social life hit the ground running. I can't keep up with it. Half the reason I don't do all the things I talk about doing is because I am wallowing in movies and concerts and dinners out and trips to the city with friends, not to mention choir and yoga. I crave downtime, and when I get it I feel guilty that I am not taking care of all the things I should be taking care of.

I started this blog living in Toronto and ironically one of my first postings was "So, having no social life I read" (also, "My so-called social life" and "January blues"). I did quite a bit of writing then. Ah those were the days...

Now I am lucky if I get to it every couple of weeks. Faced with the choice of writing a blog post or writing the damn list of things that I should be doing, the list wins. Not that it does me any good. Too many friends, too much music, too much fun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Things I have accomplished this week: hung some pictures on the walls, assembled and setup a composter and transferred winter's accumulation of compost into it, got the computer fixed (thanks Kurt!!!).

Stories of Ruthe and Bill

I went to Barrie and Bobcageon over the weekend to visit Tim, Lori, Ruthe, Bill and Corrine. I returned home Sunday afternoon, quite exhausted. Since we didn't really do a lot, I think it was as much emotional exhaustion as it was physical.

Ruthe and Bill are my aunt and uncle, the last of my Dad's family. They are both in nursing homes in Bobcageon. Ruthe has kidney failure and has refused dialysis, we thought she would not survive the summer but she's still kicking along. Bill had a stroke a number of years ago and his physical care requires a lot more than his wife Corrine could handle at home. Both of them are otherwise bright and communicative.

I drove up to Barrie on Friday to stay overnight at my brother and sister-in-law Tim and Lori's place, and then on Saturday Tim and I drove to Bobcageon, a couple of hours further away. Although very cold (-25C overnight), the roads were all bare and dry so the driving was good.

We went early to catch Ruthe in the morning while she was still feeling pretty good, she fades in the afternoon. She said this was not one of her better days but still she seemed pretty good. I think we were with her for almost an hour and by the end she was reluctant to let us go but barely able to keep her eyes open. She said she spent a lot of time remembering the old days, especially her very young days at Balsam Lake. She said as she got closer to death her memories were more vivid and alive for her. Tim told her that Mum had said that just before he died, Dad (Ruthe's older brother) had had a conversation with Jess, their oldest but then dead brother. Ruthe reiterated that she did not believe in God or an afterlife, but still, she felt very close now to her parents. Ruthe is a confirmed atheist, no amount of tribulation will sway her conviction.

Ruthe and Bill are in different nursing homes in the same small town. Bill's wife Corrine lives just outside of Bobcageon. Our timing was such that we just had time for a brief visit with Bill before he went to lunch, so we did that and then when Bill went for lunch we also went for lunch with Corrine, at a local restaurant called MacGoo's. We had All-day breakfasts for about $5.00 each. Then we went back to Bill's nursing home for a second visit with him. Bill is in better shape than Ruthe but he also tires after awhile.

Corrine got Bill talking about the old days and about our Dad, she got him to tell a couple of stories and then we asked him questions about his family memories and about some of his own life stories. Our Dad was eleven years older than Bill, who was the youngest in that family. I remember Bill babysitting for Tim and I and mentioned that to Bill, and he said, Yeah, your Mom and Dad were probably out dancing.

Bill remembered Dad riding a horse that was kept in a field near the old Mills place on Long Point, Dad would have made a bridle for the horse and mounted it by leading it to a fence and climbing on from there. Bill would have been just a little kid who looked up to his two older brothers, Ted and Jess. Their Dad was very musical and very handy, Bill remembers Grandad playing the cello, well enough that he played for money and also practiced with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. One time he brought home an accordion, and Jess learned in the space of a weekend how to play it better than Grandad could. Our Dad played fiddle, the three of them often played together, fiddle, accordion and cello.

Jess and Grandad built a kind of mini-railway to put their boat in and out of the water. They got the tracks from an old railway that used to be out on Toronto Island. Grandad made a fiddle out of an old wooden cigar box, a broomstick and some wire. He used his cello bow to play it.

Dad signed up in the Army and went off to War in 1939 when he was twenty. He came back about six years later, a very different man. Bill said he was older and kind of stressed. Because of his service in the war Grandad gave Dad the family sailboat. Unfortunately, Bill would have been around 15 at the time and he was becoming an excellent sailor, having won a race or two with that boat. He was not so keen on having Dad take the boat away. Dad was moving north to Fraserdale and of course took the boat with him. Just before he did, Grandad and Jesse had made a keel for the boat and bolted it on, changing it from a centreboard boat to a keelboat. It was a pretty good job that they did, but the boat leaked ever after, probably because of the bolts. Anyway, Dad had to make special arrangements to take the boat to Fraserdale as there were no roads there, they had to build a cradle for it and put it on the train. A few years later Mum and Dad returned from Fraserdale, but he did not bring the boat back with them, apparently because it leaked so much that he didn't see the point. Bill is still kind of annoyed with Dad about that. If you take it away, you should bring it back!

I can see that this would have been very upsetting for Bill, he was a young man who had his boat taken away from him just at what would have been the start of his sailing career. As a teenager and the youngest kid in the family, he had no say in the matter.

Something interesting, Bill said that Dad wanted to learn to sail (he woke Bill up very early one morning to get him to teach Dad to sail) in order to impress our mother, Anne. Bill said Anne was an excellent sailor, always was and still is a better sailor than Dad. Which surprised Tim and me, as kids we remember Dad being the sailor, not Mum. We also have no memories of Dad playing any kind of musical instrument, so it was surprising to hear how musical he was before the War. A lot of things changed with the War.

The other regret Bill had was over Grandad selling the cottage at Long Point. He loved that place. Grandad sold it because he just couldn't keep up with the maintenance.

Grandad ran away from home at age 14 to join the circus. He travelled to Chicago and other places, he learned to play the cello and he learned a trade, something to do with printing. He met Grandma in Montreal just as she was arriving from Edinburgh. They settled in Toronto where Grandad grew up but relations with his family were strained. I guess they never really forgave him for running away. Or maybe he had good reason to run away? Bill didn't have any memories of his grandfather, he didn't know why they didn't see much of the grandparents, he just knows that they didn't. Grandad went to Jesse Ketchum Elementary as a kid. Grandad was a very hard worker who was careful with his money and took care of his family, but one time he co-signed a loan for someone and that person defaulted on the loan so Grandad got stuck with it. He impressed on his kids never to co-sign on a loan for anybody, no matter what.

Bill was pretty handy too, I remember him building a sea flea (a little speedboat) and when I told him about building the kayak last summer, he told us about building a canvas and plywood kayak. His description of it sounded awfully like Mike's baidarka! For a long time he flew airplanes for a living, he still is intensely interested in airplanes. By his bed he had a lot of photos, including one of the Avro Arrow which was on display at a museum recently. I was surprised at the photo, I thought all the Arrows had been destroyed, but Bill said there were models that they tested and sank over Lake Ontario; someone went and pulled them out of the Lake. I would like to find out where that model is now, I would love to see it.

Both nursing homes are big and modern, clean and bright. Being in a small town they are surrounded by trees and nice views. Bill's nursing home has more common spaces for residents to gather in, Ruthe's doesn't have common rooms except for the dining room and instead residents gather in the wider hallways in front of the elevator. Corrine thought that Bill was better off sharing a room, she thought that Ruthe got lonely being in a room by herself. She knew a lot of the residents and we said Hi to several people that she knew there. So in many ways it seemed more sociable than Ruthe's home, but it's hard to say from just a short visit. However I think seeing so many very old people like that makes one very conscious of one's mortality; these are among the nicer places to end up, but still...

It was wrenching to leave them, if they had had the energy I would have loved to stay longer. I know Ruthe's days are numbered, I hope I see her again.