The weave of memory & rag rugs

My Gran

At times during this Covid year, I have been so content just to be in my small world – quieting down and sorting out things that have had little time to breath – both inside and outside my body. We have been through something, for sure – all the political tension and turmoil, too many divisions between us all. The common ground is there, however – too often breached by some large crevice – talking heads screaming back and forth across a canyon. I too am guilty of this, even if shouting in my own head or a scream vibrating off our walls. We’re tired. We’re so tired of these times. And yet, I also continue to ask: How can I use this time that might serve me, and my close others, well.

I have talked to my mom more in the past year than maybe I have in the past decade – talking on most days, which is a great gift, considering she is almost 86 and I have not seen her now for four years. Two trips to the U.S. have fallen through, and another is about to hit the solidifying border between us. The days I have felt punchy – boxing against my windows and doors – wanting some distraction, a definite escape – I have had to stop, and I can’t say that’s been a bad thing. My yoga and meditation practices are on the rise, as well as my writing. I have found more time to read, to learn. My partner and I have time for more long walks and talks, and this is bringing us closer. We have had time to grieve the loss of our second dog, our beloved Mika, which has left a void, but also, a space to walk into as we heal.

We are going through the pictures of all of our days – starting with our separate childhood photos into the various phases of our togetherness – New Mexico, Minnesota, Ontario, spatterings of India, and now British Columbia. Time passes. So many life experiences. So much change and loss – letting go only to open again like spring. Somehow, this process is making me aware of exactly where I stand, well on the other side of 50 – how much has passed and how much I still want to live. I find myself thinking of the “old days” as we are locked into our homes and small towns. I wonder: How did my grandparents find such contentment, even joy, in the small and repetitious windmill of their days?

As we feel locked in and unable to travel, I think of my grandparents who took one trip in their entire life! From their small farm in Wisconsin, they hopped a bus to Graceland, where Elvis did all that gyrating and shakin’. A curious choice as I look back on that now. I looked onto their pictures and remember it being a very big deal – them tugging a suitcase in their best suit and dress, smiling as they stood in front of such a large bus! During their weeks, my granny sang in the church choir each Sunday and grandpa belonged to the Knights of Columbus. This used to scare me: Knights? Does my gentle grandpa carry a sword? Round and round, the circle of their week.  

The house garden and farm fields, the heifers and milk cows, the milk barn and milk trucks, the silo to fill. Lilacs blooming along their long drive each spring. Seeds planted into the ground, the weeding and flowering, the harvest to can or freeze. From season to season round. Tired in the afternoon, my granny would spread out on the couch with the Twin’s game blaring overhead. Always predictable: she would soon start to snore. Sometimes, my grandpa fell asleep in a sturdy wooden chair. I was terrified he would tip off the edge. I’ll never forget the time his false teeth fell out of his mouth into his lap!

My grandmother baked heaps of bread each week – rye and wheat, white buns and loaves, her banana nut bread made her famous in her community. She was also one link in the small circle of women who made rag rugs. From tattered clothes to cut rags, from her sewing machine to Carrie Inze’s loom. Rug after rug, cycling through women – round and round. On Saturday mornings, she’d gather up all that bread and those rugs, any extra pickles her family may not eat – and set up her table at the Flea Market to sell her weekly goods. Why flea, I wondered? Doesn’t a dog have fleas? (As I look it up now, a flea market “specialized in shabby second-hand goods of the kind that might contain fleas”1). Okay, so I wasn’t that far off!

When I walked through the porch door, greeted my grandma in her kitchen – she would light up, golden as the orbs of fresh baked bread lined up on her counter. My grandma, golden – always, bread. I miss her smile and joy, her rough and crackling voice. I miss the way her whole body jiggled as she laughed. But mostly, I miss what is unpindownable, what is hard to come by these days: I miss being wrapped in her warmth every time I walked through her door, greeted by such joy, her laughter and soft skin.

Below, a tribute poem to my gran – I hope you enjoy!

The Rise of Bread

                 for Grandma Henrietta

The soles of my feet ride the ripples

of your pink rag rug as my hand glides

over a plate, pulls a spoon from silky soap

water. Out my kitchen window, I see you –

not the trees or the forest, not the squirrel

tearing            [and then startled to a stop]  

at the end of a branch, nor the black cat’s

tender paws as she walks over dead leaves.

Women in Centuria walked country roads

to arrive at your home, carried their husband’s

torn jeans, their babies frayed blanket, the girls’

Sunday dress handed down too many times.

Her family’s old clothes wrapped into a tattered

sheet that used to blossom with flowers. They

breathe in the lilacs along your drive, wrap

their knuckles on your rattling screen door.

I see you in the light of a flickering fire, black-fat-

belly breathing heat onto your skin as you rock

and rock. Plump fingers looped into scissors,

you cut the neighbors’ clothes into strips, sew

the strips into a community of cloth. Now,

wound-up into one large ball. You will drive

to Carrie Inze who will rev up her loom, who

will weave the rug now on my kitchen floor.

As I bake bread – mix 2 cakes (1 package) dry yeast,

1 egg, 6 cups of flour – the award-winning bread

baked in your steamy kitchen, all lined up to sell

at the flea market on Saturday morning. Now,

I knead the flour and water, place balls of dough

into your dented bread pans. Each mark could

tell a story; but they don’t. They sit & listen –

silent as you, quiet as your rising bread loaf. 

1 Lexico: https://www.lexico.com

Fire & Rage

Dark Night — Vancouver

Amidst changing storms – both inside my own skin and outside our home – the focus and first lines of this blog have shifted many times over the past few weeks:

• What is it about baking bread?  Bringing back the old, simple and grounding traditions & reflections on my grandma Henrietta.

• Close the door and go inside (or the varied gifts of COVID): I didn’t know I was going so fast & the connection and quiet creativity of a closed door.

• The Walls of COVID  – longing & heartbreak: Separated from loved ones in sickness and in health – those dying alone and those that watch them & the now solid borders between us.

• The already poor and vulnerable hit hard:

• Okay, we’re tired of this now:

When I think about the overall focus of my so far sporadic blog, I don’t know. I only know what charges my heart and spurs me to write. Just when I thought some COVID outcome would be the theme, or just as we were embarking on our “COVID commitments,” those things we don’t want to lose once this invisible and eager virus goes away. And just when I couldn’t imagine more heartbreak, gifts and surprises and pain, a worse tragedy erupted – the strangling of a black man under the force of a white police officer’s knee.

Over twenty-years ago, not far from the epicentre of the current rage and fire, I taught writing courses at the University of Minnesota focused on “Racism & Human Rights in America.” The obvious goal of these courses was to teach writing, but equally important to me, was to coax students into questioning and understanding the deep injustices based purely on the colour of one’s skin, or someone’s varying [dis]abilities, or the desire of one’s love. I wanted to do for my students what my education had done for me – give me eyes, and a heart, to see.

I still vividly recall my bike ride out to Tanner’s Lake Beach back in my early twenties. To take the straight road there, I needed to head through East St. Paul, at the time – a neighborhood dense with visible minorities and dilapidated houses. I pedalled past folks perched on porches to escape the heat of their house, or leaning against a 7-11, having a smoke and seemingly stalled in time. I also recall stopping roadside to tip my head towards the curb, to release the confusion and rage tight in my chest. Raised in small-town white-America, I could not believe what I saw. How in this rich and abundant city does this poverty exist? And why is everyone here black or brown?

In the past month, flashbacks of pictures have occupied my mind – from the 1960s, to 1965 and the year I was born – of stand-offs between white cops and black people fighting for their rights. Recent videos roll through my mind like a horror film in the middle of the night:

I watch a father and son team in a white pick-up truck chase down and hunt a young black man on a tree-lined street in Georgia. Ahmaud Arbery, who was out for a jog, tries to dodge the truck as the white son jumps out – boom, boom, boom – three shots, dead.

And George Floyd, a man laid off from his bouncer job, suspected of passing a counterfeit bill at a grocery store – knee on neck, “can’t breathe” – cold and gone.

What if it would have been one of my brothers running in that white neighborhood or pushing a counterfeit bill on Lake Street? It is impossible to imagine the same outcome. Was I in danger when I was biking down that street in East St. Paul, now so many years ago – not likely. White is a colour. White is the colour of my skin. We are white and the colour of our skin has impacted us, in positives ways filled with advantages – seen and unseen, known and unknown – in the same way George Floyd’s skin impacted him in repetitively negative ways. The final violent and hostile negative took his life. There is no going back. Too many times. Fire and rage.

Right now: A family and friends have to live with that final scene that I can no longer watch – the last eight-plus minutes of George Floyd’s life – with a white’s man’s knee stealing his last breath. The wife of the white officer (who has since filed for divorce), and her children, must try to make sense of this man with whom they shared their life. Other visible minorities who struggled to build-up their businesses, now walk numb through char and shattered glass. We have a white-man hiding out in the White House who refuses to show compassion nor understanding – tear gassing peaceful protestors to stand in front of a church holding a Bible. Whose god is that?

And yet. For me, there is always: and yet. I cannot stop believing in a better day. We see more white people pounding the streets, furious alongside blacks and all visible minorities, demanding change. I have watched a white police officer hold the head of a young black man, who was crying uncontrollably, and then hug him like a son. I see more male and female black leaders – intelligent, reasoned, compassionate and impassioned – leading us clear and strong, showing us the way.  I have watched white churchgoers gather in Houston on George Floyd’s childhood basketball court, where he played but also reached out to others. They took a knee in front of Floyd’s family and community, and with tears streaming down their white cheeks, asked for forgiveness, promising to keep up the good fight right along with them.

I didn’t expect to go political here, in this blog, but I could not write anything before writing about this. Too many hearts ache on all sides of this racial divide. However, there is no doubt that white privilege and advantage has gone on for far too long. We are indebted to make this right. No hierarchy to human beings; no one better than another. Let us all get down on at least one knee, everyday – to pray, to imagine; but most importantly, to work for our common humanity – always breathing at the centre of all this fire and rage.

The Pull of Light

Light Through Pine

I have been keenly aware this season – of the subtle shift of light – from light into further darkness, and now, that slow move from dark back into the light. My insides seem to have slowly shifted, along with this balance of light and dark. I have somehow felt the veil between the two to be very thin. More balanced.  Not one without the other. The way I sometimes feel when a presence of someone who has died is with me as I walk, as if still alive in this world. Maybe these veils – between the seasons, from young into middle-age, between the living and the dead – are thinner than we know.

As a child, I remember getting shaken out of bed by my mom or dad – scooted outside into the dark – so we could cover the tomatoes before the first frost. If we didn’t, the tomatoes would not make it through that cold night. We needed to put them to sleep, keep them warm during that first frost. Similar to how my parents must have put us to sleep ­– a sheet nudged under our chin, a light blanket tucked in by the earth. What I remember most is my dad driving across the lawn in his old truck, pulling up in front of the garden and shining headlights on his wife and four kids (the 5th yet to come) ­– pyjamas peeking out under our coats, dancing above our boots, as we leapt over tomato plants like garden faeries.

The only thing that has ever made sense to me is to tune into the seasons – the snow melt and buds popping out of tree branches, the hot sun bringing the dormant back to life. If there is a God, for me She is the energy that perpetuates these seasons and cycles. I’m sure my bones are infused with this knowing from my German and Irish agrarian ancestors. Their lives depended on paying attention to these subtle shifts in nature for a good harvest come fall. They hadn’t forgotten how their lives intertwine with the land, dependent on her for abundance.

I met my first grandnephew, baby Grey – who is the first to bring in the next generation of the Doege family. As we do in this day, our first meeting was over FaceTime – us in a British Columbia, him swimming in my sister’s pool in Venice, Florida. I sat in awe, asserting that we must use the iPad so we could see everyone more clearly on the “bigger” screen.  The camera scanned from my mom, now 84 and looking very much like my grandpa Sinon (her father) in his later years, to my brother Gerry (a shout out: “hey grandpa!”), as he walked me outside to meet baby Grey. There he was – carried back and forth on the surface of the water by his beaming parents, my niece and her partner. Hold this moment. In seeing him, I want more for our world.

While I’ve been writing this musing this week, bombs have been flying through the skies of Iraq and Iran, killing those targeted, or attempting to. I have just learned that the plane that crashed and killed 176 people (57 Canadians) just outside of Tehran was likely shot down by an Iranian missile. We have yet to know if this was intentional or an accident.  Does it really matter? What to do with this tragic news? Before this event, I decided to tune out of the news in the coming weeks but was pulled back in by these missiles shooting through the sky.

Recently, I have noticed many of us desperate to reach back into the world of the small, the immediate world of our friends, families and communities. We are too exhausted, overwhelmed by the darkness of the big – tired of learning of tragedies and pain we can do nothing about. We are also starved for good, for the energy of light – for kindness and connection and generosity that is also around us, always. We move through our days in this balancing act – no light without the dark. This year, I am committed to focusing on and feeding the light – like my dad’s headlights shining on those garden faeries – just trying to warm one cold night.

Our Web of Stories

Kito, Tofino — June 2018

When we brought Kito home to us fifteen years ago, we had no idea what we were doing.  Maybe in the end, we still didn’t. I scolded him for peeing on our floor no more than ten minutes after he entered our home. My wife Vindu needed him to sleep in a crate in another room as he howled through the night.  Thankfully, it only took a few days to get his crate into the corner of our bedroom.

Off leash, his little fluff-ball self ran behind us to keep up on the trails of Gatineau Park. On our first trip to Algonquin, I threw him in the lake like bait on a line to see if he could swim – “Oh good, YES, he can!” Kito – our little Buddha boy – always calm and steady, solid, a grounding force at the center of our life. Poised with some air of French-ness about him, and joy.  I would often shout enthusiastically: “wave your flag, buddy, wave your flag!” – as his tail whipped in wild circles on his bulky behind.

At home during my lunch hour, one day after I launched my website and posted my first “musing,” I received a call from our vet that Kito’s blood results were off the charts – like arrows shooting up into the sky, no longer pointed to this earth. Kito was definitely slowing down, but he was still healthy and agile in most ways. This picture was taken in Tofino last summer, our last trip as a “pack of four” – Kito still sweet and strong, Mika’s four little legs never far from her brother.

As I shared our story of Kito, other dog lovers openly spoke of their heartbreak and loss of their beloved pets. Friends and strangers told details of their dog collapsing and bleeding on the stairs; their dog’s sudden inability to walk; carrying a pet lovingly to the grass, only to hold them in their lap as they died; a year of seizures that neither pet nor owner could endure any longer. Phones came out of pockets to show pictures. While petting our now solo-dog Mika, a sales clerk at Red Top told the story of the loss of her two dogs within a year, now six years ago.  No matter how much she loves dogs, she can’t bear to get another, to go through that pain again.  Her husband, she says, is worse.  

When we were sure Kito could leave us in a few weeks, I kept saying: “I just want to bottle up his energy; that’s all I want. I don’t want to live without his energy in my life.”  I have been with Kito, more hours in his lifetime, than I have been in the presence of my wife of now twenty-three years.  Any dog owner knows, they follow us around like a shadow of light. Kito permeated the car as he rode on Vindu’s lap like a hood-ornament, or rode shotgun with me alone, or on our long walks and swims at the lake. Mostly, I feel him in my writing space – the hours he sat perched by my side, fixed in my peripheral vision, or in the chair at my back – looking on, beaming, as I dreamingly gazed out the window or created a collage of words.

Several friends that I consider stronger and bolder than me said they cried everyday for a year after losing their dog, or felt strangely disoriented for a year, or needed to run out and get another dog to fill the gap. This terrified me – a whole year?! At Fintry Provincial Park last week, we walked the labyrinth for Kito, in gratitude for his life, and our time as a “pack-of-four.” We also walked the labyrinth with a willingness to move on and honour our new life, wholeheartedly, in our now smaller “pack-of-three” – for at least as long as we are gifted with each other.

As we held Kito’s seriously sedated body, limp on our laps, I kissed his nose for the last time. I still wanted a bottle – I still want his precious spirit alive, here in this room. Hang on, hold tight, but not too tight – we’ve always got to let go of what we love. This much I know.

It was the shared and common stories that helped us the most during this time of heartbreak and loss. I also know we keep alive the spirit, the best parts of whoever we love – human or animal – that somehow, radiate out from inside us as we bring them into our minds and hearts.

Especially, on this round anyway, our beloved Kito. 💜

Flash of blue

Bangalore, India

Over these past holidays, three close friends lost their mothers. We are now at that age, I guess, when our mothers are falling from the earth. In another good friendship, the light has been turned off, at least for now. This past year brought family members pushed to the edge of their mental illness. I faced a challenging conflict at work. Winding out the year, a friend had a lamp fall on, and break, her big toe. Maybe an appropriate ending to a challenging year.

This image, taken many years ago in India, flashed into my mind as I dreamed up this musing at 2 a.m. Maybe feeling like the bold woman in blue trying to make my way through the rubble of 2018. When we are forced to sit with death, to hold someone’s hand as they leave this earth – we will likely find that we, and they, hold more grace and beauty than we ever imagined. So many are circumstances out of our control – my good friend needing space, an attempted suicide as a wake-up call, to speak what feels true and right amidst conflict. As far as my friend’s toe, well, I guess she’ll have to slow down for awhile.

When we face loss, rejection, walls (real or imagined), we take that blow to the gut and often try to find a way to move on – to turn right, or yield. This seems to be the nature of life – a tree falls, then moss and dropped seeds.  As a writer, I’ve been sending out poems and a manuscript to potential publishers, waiting for some interest. So far, I wait. I have had to buoy myself up (and rely on others to help buoy me), amidst the myriad of rejection letters. Strangely, after I absorb the sting of each one, my determination flares and my creative energy runs wild. I get off the floor fiercer than before – to stay on my one true path of writing and poetry.

Amidst the uncertainty of publishing, I sent out a poem to a good friend and visual artist, asking if she would sketch me a phoenix to accompany my “Tonewood” poem.  She agreed and got to work sketching and painting all weekend. I was thrilled that my poem could spark creation; I was even more thrilled when I saw what she created! Our collaboration turned into our poetry broadside, “Tonewood,” posted on my Book Arts page. I also dreamed up a poetry workshop to offer in my community and felt a sudden urge to complete this website and release it into the world. All creative nudgings. To me, all flashes of blue pulling me into this new year. 

At every gathering we went to over this holiday season, there was music. It started with a friend’s recorder performance to a small group of us in her living room, followed by me reading of a few of my poems. At our Christmas Eve gathering, our friend played guitar and sang in varied combinations with her daughter, her partner, and myself. At another friend’s family gathering on Christmas Day, we played music from around the world — and stomped, and danced, and sang — around their circular coffee table. It is as if we needed music, and song, and dance – it is as if we needed to stomp something into (or out of) our bodies.

The other night, we had our neighbors over for the grand finale to our holiday season. One of our neighbors is also from the U.S., and surprisingly, we share the same Canada Day birthday. We were talking of the political obsession, and just how bad things are in “our other country.” But also, we talked of how this heavy obsession seems to be removing our attention from the small details of goodness in our everyday lives. Our neighbor still generously shovels our snow, or the butcher remembers our name, with a smile. We still gather around food and friendship; we paint and we write. We sing and dance and stomp around tables – all flashes of blue on a backdrop of rubble and dust.