Recuperation/Recovery #6: Heart and Hearth

What have heart and hearth got to do with each other except that they share the same first five letters?  I have often thought that there should be a connection, though etymologically there is none that is apparent to me, each one coming quite directly from a different early Germanic root word.  For me the connection is approximately this: each one is central to some sense of house or home, and here I mean literally as well as metaphorically central. 

The heart is housed in the body centrally and pumps its blood to our extremities, including that bonebox of a skull protecting our brains, without which my forefinger would not be able to hunt and peck its way through the writing of this post, and without which there would of course be no post to posit, no etymological proposition to explore. 

A few years ago I watched an ultrasound image of my own heart beating and was struck by the profundity of it all, since I was observing the central pump of my own life system, realizing that it had been faithfully doing its work since months before I was born and would keep going until the end of my life.  It was, both literally and metaphorically, getting to the heart of the matter.

In our house we don’t have a hearth, which is actually the floor of a fireplace, but our woodstove provides a good approximation of one, as it is central to our sense of home and an important source of warmth, again both literally and metaphorically.  Both the hearth and the heart are central to my idea of recuperation, which is the restoration of health and balance to my body system.

When I was recovering/recuperating in Foothills Medical Centre in the early stages of this illness journey, we had some notes on the whiteboard in my hospital room.  One was the following poem by Li Po that our son JE put there:

Long is the journey,

Long is the journey,

So many turnings

And now where am I?

And where was I?  I was in a hospital bed where people who cared were looking after me, working in every way they could to facilitate my body’s recuperation.  It was not, however, where I wanted to be, though I understood the necessities that kept me there; I wanted to be home.  After all, home is where the heart/hearth is.  So the other messages on the whiteboard, besides the list of questions to ask the doctors on their early morning rounds, were reminders of home: my own bed, a place where I could see Halifax Harbour, a place to sleep with the window open.

Now I am here, in our house, in a comfortable bed, and the rainbow of recovery is still working.  Alleluia, I say, let the recuperation continue!

Recuperation/Recovery # 5, including A Celebration Breakfast

Background to this post:

I woke up this morning at 5:06.  I had slept since something after three.  For me this was a good stretch of sleep.  I didn’t turn on CNN, or CBCNW, or CTVNC and actually wondered about putting my head back down to sleep some more; after all, I had already watched the stiff little marionette figure of Paul Ryan address the predominantly blond female and mostly pudgy and nondescript male inhabitants of/participants in the 3-day RNC infomercial and listened to the commentaries of the insipid Piers Morgan with his assortment of beer drinkers at the CNN Grill as they analysed Ryan’s lies (like accusing Obama of closing the Janesville GM plant when it  was actually the Bush-monkey who did), his half-truths, empty platitudes, and assorted pandering to whatever the party strategists figured was needed last night.

I decided to snuggle down, and let my own mind and body decide whether more sleep was the answer.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I had things on my mind and that I could do some more sleeping later before E. came over for EFT so I sat up, slid my feet into my sandals, noted the brightening bluish light to the east, collected the debris from my 3 a.m. snack, and headed downstairs to prepare a new picnic for this new morning, the second last day of August, with its touch of summer’s end in the air.

Before I ate anything I thought of the deck of cards in a drawer and played a game of Patience on the dining room table.  The game was taught to me by my grandmother and I played it in her memory (she died in 1970 the same week Lorraine and I were married, during the October Crisis), and in memory of her daughter, my mother, who died on August 27 of last year (see RECUPERATION #3).  If you understand the game at all, you will recognize that I had one move left to make (in column 2), but after that the game was finished, four diamonds up.  Then I was free to eat.

It is now 6:43.  The sun has risen and illuminated our bedroom, shining on my Egyptian fabric piece and Lorraine’s Tunisian desert photo, and on the chakra garden that has been with me more than two months now.

Actually it is now 2:22 p.m. ADT, an auspicious sounding time, and I have just woken up, after a morning when  I have eaten some, slept some, drunk some, and been treated to a celebration breakfast (see Recuperation #6, not yet written, on the amazing and immediate effects of vemurafenib, a new drug for treatment of metastatic melanoma  like mine, produced by Roche and provided/sold as Zelboraf).

 

I have just looked at my sitemeter, which reads 482 visits this month (you are reading a non-viral blog here!), noted that our son JE was one of two visitors to the site today, read Fareed and Saleha’s kind e-mail from Kabul, signed on to an Avaaz petition, and photographed a message of love from my 5-year old granddaughter. 

And now it’s time to get to the post:

RECUPERATION #5 – Remembering who you are:

I believe it is important to remember who you are and to understand the continuity of self from as far back as you can trace it to the present moment in order to be more present in the world, whether it is the recuperative journey I am travelling in/on at the present or any other activity/focus/perceptual awareness I am engaged in (if I am starting to sound prescriptive or tendentious or proselytizing here, please forgive – or, at the least, humour – me for the moment).

In my EFT session with E. this morning, she finished the session with” “Backward visualize to a time when you were at optimum health, and bring that forward to now.”  I did what she suggested, going back to a summer 30 years ago when she was just three, and felt a stream of energy move through my body from my feet to my head, and it was a good thing.

I have not been reading a lot on this journey (other than Al Jazeera online and The New Yorker), but I have been exploring over the last few days some areas of my bookshelf for some treasures from my past and present that help remind me who I am and have been. 

Although the list is long, I’ll try to keep the entries precise, and please remember that these entries are descriptive of my recuperation/recovery process and not prescriptive – you don’t actually have to look at any of them.

Here’s the list:

THE LINES OF MY HAND by Robert Frank (1989) – look in the section “IN NOVA SCOTIA Canada” for “words”, “for my daughter Andrea who died…”, “POUR LA FILLE” on the following page, “sick of goodby’s”, “4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME   4AM MAKE LOVE TO ME”, and “HOSPITAL” that includes this message: “THE WIND WILL BLOW THE FIRE OF PAIN ACROSS EVERYONE IN TIME”.  Go there if you like.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT by Michael Ondaatje (1992).

.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED by Anne Carson (1998), another great novel, this one in verse.

UNDER THE ICE by Alden Nowlan (1961), inscribed in blue marker, “For my son, Johnnie, with love Alden Nowlan”, and I wonder where is Johnnie now and think of Frank’s works about Andrea (mentioned above) and any works he made about his son Pablo (both of Frank's children were young when they died).  I also remember finding the section in the Dalhousie University stacks in 1964 where Nowlan’s books were lined up and I remember living inside them for days.  This book is from my late father’s collection and I do wonder if he bought it with me in mind.

DANCE OF THE HAPPY SHADES by Alice Munro (1968), a wonderful bunch of very short novels.

PLAINWATER by Anne Carson (2000), a gift of poetry and prose given to me by my old friend Udo (a small prescriptive note: read “Water Margins: An Essay on Swimming by My Brother – pp. 245-260 – before reading NOX).

NOX by Anne Carson (2010), a book of loss housed in a box.

THE COLOUR OF THE TIMES: THE COLLECTED POEMS OF RAYMOND SOUSTER by Raymond Souster (1964) found down the stacks shelf from Nowlan, another place to live for a few days.

THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald M. Allen (1960).

THE POETICS OF THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY, edited by Donald Allen& Warren Tallman (1973).  A companion piece to the one above.  It was edited by Warren, who was on my thesis committee and who organized a memorial service at UBC for Charles Olson at which I wrote a short poem involving the moon that night, the constellation Orion, and The Aspy Fault which is a connecting earth line between northern Cape Breton and Gloucester and read as part of the service.  I never met Olson.

THE BROKEN ARK: a book of beasts, poems chosen by MichaelOndaatje/drawings by Tony Urquhart (1971).

HIS IDEA by Robert Creeley, photographs by Elsa Dorfman (publication date is shown as 2 March 1973, my 28^th birthday), includes the following: 

"Note read re
letter of Lawrence’s

to Mrs. Aldous/Huxley? That
films are obscene

if when the young
man and woman come home,

they masturbate one by one.

Not so --
if they make love.”  

I did meet Creeley.

LETTERS FROM THE SAVAGE MIND by Patrick Lane, “a loon/without wings/wanting to fly/recording letters/from the savage mind”, “This book is for Red Lane/The/Carnival/Man” (1966).

MEXICO CITY BLUES (242 CHORUSES) by Jack Kerouac (1959).

And there are two additional books not included in the image:

FIRST VOICE by J. E. Field (1991), with the following dedication:
"TO ROGER
MY DEAR FATHER
WHO SHOWED ME THE WAY"
It also included a longer personal inscription in blue ballpoint.

THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927 – 1979 by Elizabeth Bishop (1995) with “At the Fish Houses” (pp. 64-66), “Cape Breton” (pp.67-68), “First Death in Nova Scotia” (pp. 125-126), and “The Moose (for Grace Bulmer Bowers)” (pp. 169-173), as well, of course, as “One Art” (p. 178).

  

Boiling the Sap: A Cautionary Tale

If you read yesterday’s post (you can scroll down to find it, since A Story of Sap Flowing is a necessary precedent to boiling the sap), you will know that I built a fire and started to boil the sap I had collected.  If you are wondering about the cautionary aspect of this tale, we are all right so far – the rocks were piled high enough around the fire, and even with a pretty good wind blowing (east the first day, west the second) I wasn’t worried about the fire getting out of control.

It was a good fire, and I was able to burn a fair bit of the pine that was around to keep the pot on the boil, and midway through the second day I was down from 20 litres of sap in my containers to 10 litres in the pot.  And it was a great fire, as you can see, for cooking Smokies on a skewer and then eating them on the deck.  We even went away for an hour to photograph crows and got our neighbor, who was outside anyway, to keep an eye on the fire while we were gone so there was no danger from that. 

I switched from pine to maple, which burned longer and gave a good heat, and you could have seen me at ten that night still tending my fire and still checking the boil of my sap, and by the time I turned in we were down under 5 litres, developing a good colour, and giving off a sweet smoky maple syrup smell.  I went to sleep happy.

The next morning I made the first serious error: I put the boiled down sap into our large Paderno pot, brought it in, and turned on the stove.  I was, however, properly cautious.  I put the stovetop vent on high, and because it was a warm enough day, I opened a couple of doors to keep a good breeze through the kitchen.  So far, so good.  I looked up the instructions again right here (you will note if you check it out that the site is named, somewhat ironically in my case, greatdreams), and then got out my candy thermometer and checked the temperature.  Still OK.

The sap boiled down and I reduced the heat.  It was looking good.  I had my bottles out with a funnel and a cloth to pour my syrup through.  I checked the temperature again, and it was still fine.  Then I made my first big mistake – I went upstairs to send a fax.

This is a tricky operation in our house because you have to disconnect the phone, pull the printer stand as far across the room as the power cord will let it, pull the phone line over to connect to the printer, dial the number, and let it go.  It was busy the first time.  I tried again, and it connected.  I waited for the transmission to finish.  Then I waited for my transmission report.  Finally I went back downstairs.

My second big mistake had been not to turn the heat right down when I left the pot.  I had spent two days outdoors working to keep the thing boiling over the fire, and it never occurred to me to turn it down now.  So I came into a kitchen filled with smoke.  My sap had turned to syrup, then boiled over, then burned.  There was a blackened sticky mess all around the burner, and the pot was filled with carbon ash, like burned marshmallow.

I turned off the burner, took the smoke alarm and the pot outside, and scooped about three tablespoons of maple syrup from the stove top and put it in a tiny jar.  It tasted really good, and over the next couple of days as I worked for hours to clean up my messes and the smell of burnt sugar grew fainter in the kitchen, I gave myself a tiny taste now and again to remind me of what might have been.

So if you read a news story like this one about the coming maple syrup shortage, you will know that besides the weather, I too am part of the problem.  And the caution is this: stay close to your pot and pay close attention, because that critical maple syrup moment  can come and go pretty quickly, and there's no going back if you miss it.

A Story of Sap Flowing

It is the end of March and the sap has pretty much stopped flowing, but earlier in the month it was abundant.  In fact, on March 8, when it was 10 degrees and sunny after a solidly cold night, I collected about eight litres from the two maples I tapped this year, better than the 2 degrees and half a litre I collected the day before.

The trees are really two separate trunks of a substantial maple clump that grows next to the small stream that flows from the pond next to our branch of Stanbrae Road (though it is a pond only some of the time – as A., the eldest of my granddaughters, wisely informed me one day at the age of five, “It’s a swamp, Rogie.”).  One of the trees has a thick yellow nylon rope with a thumb knot in the end of it hanging down over the stream, and A. has always enjoyed grabbing it and swinging over the water (or the rocks, when my “pond” is once again a swamp). At any rate, it has been spring throughout March, the stream has been flowing from the pond, I have worn my Bogs to step across to the trees, and the sap has been flowing fairly well.

I drilled the trees, hammered in the two spiles, and hung up my President’s Choice cranberry juice containers to catch the sap.  On a good day I might empty them several times into the 10-litre container I kept there, and sometimes there was even an overflow of my precious sap running down the maple trunk.  On a not so good day, I might not get much more than a few flies in the containers checking out the sweetness in there.

I didn’t have permission to boil my sap down inside the house and didn’t want to use the propane cylinders for the little Coleman (like I did two years ago), so I bought a big pot at the Sally Ann and built up my outdoor fireplace to accommodate a grille for the boiling.

The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1, so the 20 litres of sap I had collected should be good for half a litre of my own Stanbrae Road maple syrup.  They say it takes 15 hours to boil your sap down, so I got my fire started and kept on feeding it, getting myself, my jacket, and my jeans pretty smoky in the process.

The sap started to boil, and I kept topping up the pot, feeling a pleasant satisfaction as my sap supply reduced and what was in the pot was beginning to show some colour.

I will stop there in the telling of this ultimately cautionary tale to inform you that the sharply bright first quarter moon is high in our black sky tonight, reflecting pinpoints of white light on the car’s roof and hood.  And I will continue the tale in my next post.

The Last Day of our Brief Interlude of Summer

This is an image of the harbour today.  The wind is NNW 45 km/h, gusting to 58.  The temperature is 10 degrees.  Tonight it will go down to minus 5, and the high tomorrow is 7.  On Tuesday of next week, the forecast high is zero and we may have snow flurries.  All of that is appropriate because it is, after all, still March here in Ferguson’s Cove.  Spring did arrive last Tuesday, but we all know that that just means equal amounts of day and night and no promises of anything more.  So a clear and not too cold day with strong winds out of the north is pretty much par for the course for us right about now.

Today is not a bad day to be outdoors, especially if you are in the sun and out of the wind, but it’s nothing like yesterday, the last day of our brief interlude of summer.  Environment Canada will tell you that yesterday was not normal.  If you care to check there, you will see that our normal maximum for March 22 is 5 degrees, and the normal minimum is -4.  And if you check yesterday’s actual readings, you will see a maximum of 27.2 degrees and a minimum (last night up until midnight) of 11.5 degrees (if you’re still stuck in Fahrenheit readings, that means it was 81 at the hottest part of the day and dropped to 53 at night).  It was indeed an interlude of summer.

I don’t have images of yesterday because a camera cannot tell you what the air feels like, and it does still look like early spring here, with a slight reddening of the ends of the birch branches, the beginning bulges of red maple flowers, and the lawn doing its level best to show its true colours.  The only sure sign of that summer warm you can see today is the sudden growth of green shoots in the chives, as if they were waiting for just a hint of encouragement from the weather, and the tulips and daffodils pushing up, but that couldn’t tell you what yesterday, and the two days before, felt like.

Here are some words to help you imagine our brief interlude of summer:

• lunch and supper on the back deck, me in a t-shirt and shorts and still finding it hot;  
• walking in bare feet in the evening and feeling the radiant heat from the stones in our walkway;   
• driving with the car windows wide open; 
• seeing my students in last night’s class in their short shorts, legs still white from winter;   
• noticing the air conditioning on in the Superstore; 
• opening our doors and windows to cool the house off; 
• seeing a guy walking on Herring Cove Road with no shirt on and a newly sunburnt back;   
• driving by the little waterfall coming out of Chocolate Lake and thinking we could maybe swim there; 
• walking out to the car under black night sky and bright stars and being reminded of summer nights in Greece.

The list could go on because the interlude of summer was crazy, but now it’s over.  We’re dropping back towards normal, which is good.  As Lol said, If we keep on having weather like this, we’ll be sure to have bad forest fires.  And it doesn’t have to be up in the twenties for me to love the warmth of the sun in the blue skies of March; those hotter, whiter skies of high summer will come, but I’m content to wait for them and to savour these interludes, long or short, whenever they do happen.

Carpe diem, and don't forget your sunscreen!

and the snow melts even as it falls

First thing yesterday morning, Monday, there was light snow that had fallen in the night covering the ground and resting on the top edges of twigs and branches and evergreen needles (though none of these really have edges) because there was no wind to speak of.  I like the old-fashioned, perhaps rural, feel of that last phrase.  “To speak of” is more lyrical to my mind and ear than “worth mentioning” or some equivalent phrase; in fact, “no wind” is something that we do often speak of, because wind is something that is very often part of our landscape and seascape here.  So there was no wind to speak of, which is worth mentioning, and the snow lay gently, even delicately, balanced on twigs and branches and needles and covering the ground.  It was a pretty sight.

About mid-morning it started to snow again, lightly but steadily, with just enough breeze to make it drift across the window at an attractive angle before it landed.  It was a wintry wonderland scene, even though I knew the temperature would rise and the snow would likely melt pretty soon. 

It reminded me of a long poem I wrote decades ago that contains the following lines:

and the snow melts even as it falls.

A friend, who was much older than I,

told me, It is always thus.

My good older friend always spoke that way, a relic perhaps of the home in the Edwardian English countryside she grew up in, or perhaps of her years of study at the Sorbonne, or both.  She was usually right, and we didn’t often disagree, certainly not when she said that.  I like that writing about the snowfall made me think of her, especially on this late winter night.

I also like to think of another “old good friend”, though I never did meet him; in fact, he died on March 4, 1963, two days after my 18^th birthday, and though his name was on my horizon back then, I had no real knowledge at that point of the profound impact he would have on my life and my writing.  He was, of course, the good physician, Dr. Williams, whose work I ended up exploring in some considerable detail and end up revisiting every now and again, such as when this showed up as yesterday’s Poem-A-Day.

Spring Storm
by William Carlos Williams

The sky has given over
its bitterness.
Out of the dark change
all day long
rain falls and falls
as if it would never end.
Still the snow keeps
its hold on the ground.
But water, water
from a thousand runnels!
It collects swiftly,
dappled with black
cuts a way for itself
through green ice in the gutters.
Drop after drop it falls
from the withered grass-stems
of the overhanging embankment.

I love the way he always attended to the physical details of the ordinary and that an early spring storm could bring his attention and his craft to the making of that fine small poem.

And then there was his friend Kreymborg’s tribute, which arrived in my inbox the day before, on the anniversary of Williams' death:

To W.C.W. M.D.
by Alfred Kreymborg

There has been
Another death.
This time
I bring it to you.
You are kind,
Brutal,
You know
How to lower
Bodies.
I ask only
That the rope
Isn't silk,
(Silk doesn't break)
Nor thread,
(Thread does.)
If it lifts
And lowers
Common things,
It will do.

That’s all really – we had a gentle snowfall, I was reminded of my good friend Anne as I wrote this post, and while I was getting ready to tap a couple of maple trees this afternoon, I took a photo of the small brook, running after our last “spring storm”. 

And, of course, there was a lovely pair of poems.