Fire!

Dear Vi,

It’s foggy this morning. Outside my window, wisps of fog stream past like smoke from a chimney. Wait… maybe it really is smoke.  I get up to check. Nope, it’s fog. Relieved, I take another sip of coffee. And then I burst into tears.

A couple of months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of sirens.  The urgent wail came closer, then faded as it passed.  I got out of bed and wandered through the house toward the bathroom as one does in the wee hours. But something was wrong. It took my sleep-addled brain a second to figure it out.

The kitchen wall was lit with a strange orange light. And it was flickering. I could hear a distant roaring sound. I turned around and looked out the window.  Less than 100 feet away, the big fir tree on the edge of our yard was engulfed by flame!

My heart stopped for a moment before I realized the trees were not actually on fire. They were backlit by fire. On the street behind us, my backyard-neighbour’s house was a raging inferno. Totally engulfed.

“Fire! Kelly, wake up, there’s a fire!”

I called 9-1-1. They had already received the call. The emergency crew was already on site.  More sirens came screaming in the distance.

Were we in danger? Did we need to leave? We were running on adrenaline, barely breathing. Everything was happening fast and slow at the same time.

Kelly opened the patio doors and stepped outside. I put on a jacket and followed. As soon as the door opened, we could hear the roar of the fire, so loud. It crackled and popped. We could hear the thrumming engine of the water truck, see great arcs of water shooting from the hoses.

We could also see that it wasn’t the house immediately below us. The house engulfed by fire was on the far side of it. Empty, its elderly owner had passed away less than a month previous.

We got dressed and walked down the street to join the huddle of neighbours watching the firefighters. The sky slowly lightened. Dawn came. The fire burned down, was drowned and washed away.

The next day it snowed.

It was as if Mother Nature wanted to cover all the ugly fright with a shroud. Take it away. Make it better.

Except you can’t cover up a fright like that.

Fight or flee? Huddle or bolt?  This is the kind of fear that lives in the depths of your bowel and in the stem of your brain.  It shares a very old room with fear of the dark and of falling from a great height and of unnamed monsters under the bed.

For weeks afterward, I got up two or three or four times every night…every single night to wander the house. Going from room to room, I’d look out all the windows, looking for the tell-tale flickering orange glow.

Several months have passed since that horrible awakening, and I’ve lost the worst of the urgency. I only check for fire once each night, now. I get up to use the bathroom as I have always done. But instead of going directly back to bed, I take a tour of the house, checking out the windows. And I always check before going to bed in the first place.  I can’t help myself. A whiff of smoke sends my heart racing.

A week ago I woke up at 3am with a terrible sense of urgency. I’d dreamed of fire, of course. In my dream, Kelly was shouting. “Fire! There’s Fire!” His voice ringing in my ears, I got up.  I checked all the windows. Nothing. I put my coat on, shoved my bare feet into boots and went outside. Nothing. I walked out the driveway and stood in the middle of the street. Nothing.

The hulk of my backyard-neighbour’s house is still there. Melting snow reveals charred beams, twisted metal, the blackened refrigerator.

And I’m here in my own house, like the rhinoceros racing by instinct to stomp out flames. Even when there aren’t any.

A letter to my grade 8 Home Economics teacher

Dear Mrs. Rudd,

I hope this letter finds you well and still sewing.

You won’t remember me, but I was one of the fourteen-year-olds in your eight grade home economics class at Keithley Junior High in the fall of 1974. That was the year after girls were first allowed to wear dress slacks and pant suits to school instead of skirts and dresses. No jeans…those came a year or two later. That was also the first year that a boy was allowed to take home-economics and a girl was allowed to take shop.

14 years old

You taught me how to follow a recipe and plan a menu. I still have my recipe box from the cooking portion of the class.  It’s crammed to capacity now, full of 42 year’s worth of recipes, including cards in my mother’s and my grandmother’s handwriting.

recipe box

You taught me how to iron. And by the way, I am the only person I know who actually loves to iron. I will happily spend a Sunday listening to Cross Country Checkup on CBC radio while ironing everything in the house…cloth napkins, tea towels, pillow cases, every shirt my husband owns.

You taught me how to use a sewing machine and read a pattern. And for that alone, I will be forever grateful.

I remember that we had to choose a pattern and actually sew an item of clothing. My mother took me to the fabric store and we browsed the pattern books together. I decided on Butterick 4265. It was an ambitious project, and I remember my mother trying to talk me into something a bit more simple. You and my mother were both concerned because I was adamant that I didn’t want to sew an apron or a simple pajama bottom. But no…I wanted to sew a pant suit.

In the end, I agreed to just sew the top and leave the pants for later. It was my first ever attempt at sewing anything. Ever. Complete with set-in sleeves, patch pockets, top stitching and a zipper. I don’t think I actually wore it anywhere…I hadn’t done a very good job, really. But it didn’t matter to me…I was so proud of myself!

I remember my mother coming into the home-ec classroom for a parent/teacher conference. I remember how you discussed my completed project with my mother, your finger tracing a line along my uneven top-stitching as the two of you remarked with pride on how I had tackled and completed such a big project.

I also remember that I did not feel discouraged by your critique, which tells me that it was delivered in a careful and loving way, the way a valuable teaching experience should be.

You taught me that putting in a zipper properly and stitching a straight line were things that one can improve upon. Things that can be mastered.

What I learned went so far beyond learning to follow a recipe for a casserole, how to sew a patch pocket and balance a checkbook. No…what I took from your class was a fearless belief in myself.

I’d like to say that again: A Fearless Belief in Myself.

Thank you for that, Mrs. Rudd.

Now…that pant suit pattern. I was in the thrift store the other day and you’re not going to believe this, but staring up at me from the bin of patterns for .25 was the exact one that I made in your class.

And guess what…it’s in my current size. I might even sew it up for old time’s sake.

butterick pattern

I wanted to tell you that I have been thinking of you almost every day these past couple of weeks as I embark on re-learning those skills you introduced me to more than 40 years ago. I feel you leaning over my shoulder, your finger tracing the line of the zipper, reminding me to line up the notches, showing me how to tie off the threads at the end of a dart by hand.

When I think about the women who influenced me in my life, you’re up there in the top ten.

I know you’ll probably never read this letter, but I wanted to say thank you.

Mrs. Rudd, 1974.
Mrs. Rudd, 1974.

 

 

The Mother who Saved the Mothers from the Black Bear

Dear Vi,

Today I’m going to share a very sweet little story that I wrote it for my mother on Mother’s Day, 1971, misspellings and grammatical errors included. I hope your laughter is full of delight. Mine was!

One day Jane was in school sitting in her desk waiting egrley for the surprise Mis Cod had promesed them the day before. So now Jane and the rest of the clas were waiting for Mis Cod to tell them.

Finally Mrs. Cod came into the room. As usual Mis Cod had them sing good morning. After they had finished singing good morning, Mis Cod told them the surprise. Now was the time Jane had been waiting for.

Now Mis Cod began, “now Sunday is mothers Day so we are going to have a mothers day play. It will be called, Mother I Love You. It will be a story on mothers. Now Bob you will be the bear. Sue you will be one of the mothers. Sally, Misty, Karen, and Colleen will be mothers and Jane will be the mother who saves the mothers and their babies from the black bear.  Bob, Joe, Jim and Mike and Terri (a boy), will be the animals who lead Jane to the mothers.

[next week: play begins]

Jane was surprised when she did her lines right.  Now the play was over. Everyone was talking at once. After everyone quited down, Janes mother said “O, what a wonderful mothers day,” she said, almost crying.

The End

By Nita Luton, age 9

grade 4 pointer

Every Good Cowboy Needs a Dolphin

I don’t remember what I wanted to be when I grew up, but when M was very small, he knew exactly what he was going to do.

He was going to be a cowboy.

M1

But not just any cowboy…

Nope!

My imagination-filled son was going to be the cowboy at Sea Land.

You know the one…

The cool dude who rides the dolphins.

M2

 

Which segues very nicely into today’s yoga pose:

DDolphin Plank

Dolphin Plank is plank on your elbows. If you have wrist pain, Dolphin Plank is the one for you. It’s a great workout for your entire body.

It’s also a great measuring stick for how much stronger you’re getting!

If you can’t hold yourself up on your toes, it is absolutely 100% okay to put your knees down. You can do it! Yes, you can! 🙂

The Worst Job I Ever Had was Pulling the Heads off Dead Chickens

After I graduated from high school, and after all the cap-throwing and after-grad partying was finished (about 3 days later), my parents decided that I needed a summer job. After all, I’d be heading off to university in the fall; it wasn’t unreasonable to expect me to make a financial contribution. I had a student loan and my parents were chipping in what they could, but they were right when they said I needed to earn some money of my own.

Apparently my babysitting career was not adequate to the task, and so my parents announced that they had done me the marvelous favour of finding me a job. A real job. A job in a chicken processing plant.

So much for the wonderful freedom of adulthood.

To be fair, I doubt my mother realized exactly what the job would entail when she found it for me, and I never held the awfulness of it against her. Just sayin’ so there aren’t any hurt feelings, okay? Anyway, there were to be no lazy summer days for me! No sipping tea and yakking on the phone with Sally, no taking off for the lake. Nope! The summer between high school graduation and first year university was to be spent pulling the heads off dead chickens.

Now, what does one wear to work in a chicken processing plant? And what exactly is a chicken processing plant, anyway? I had absolutely no idea, so I dressed fairly nicely in a new pair of bell-bottom jeans (it was 1979) and a peasant blouse. I think it was rust and orange, and it had little ties at the neck with bells on the ends. And embroidery. I do recall it had some embroidery on it. Because, you know, it was a job! A real, grown-up job.

When I got there, I was led into a room containing several long tables and lockers – the staff lounge, apparently. Not only did I have a real, grown up job, I had a job with a staff lounge! How bad could it be? There, I was issued a largish white apron and a hair net. Suitably outfitted, I was escorted across a muddy parking lot to the plant.

Just as we reached the plant, a large truck drove up to the far end of the building. A truck full of…chickens. Live chickens packed neck to claw in boxes, so tightly together that the truck literally bristled, like a giant chicken pincushion. I don’t know what my face looked like, but I expect I must have looked very alarmed, because the manager – a man – assured me that I would not be killing the chickens myself. Someone else did that part.

And so we went into the part of the plant where I would be working. to my horror, I was given the job of tossing the headless, featherless, dead-but-still-warm bodies into a giant dumpster of ice.

The room was set up in an assembly line. At the far right-hand side of the room, an overhead belt of dangling meat hooks emerged from a wall of hanging plastic strips, circled the room, and disappeared back into the wall again; an endless twirling loop. Chickens were unloaded from the truck, killed (I don’t know how), then gaffed (or whatever you call it – my memory is a bit selective) and sent through some sort of furnace where the feathers were burned off. When they emerged onto my side of the plastic strip wall, they were met by a small army of immigrant workers who performed a variety of indignities upon the corpses. When the poor birds finally arrived at my station, they’d been gutted, de-feathered and were sans head. All I had to do was take them down and toss them into the dumpster.

Pretty simple, right?

Anyway, I wasn’t fast enough, and chickens were whizzing past my head and returning back through the plastic curtain faster than I could snag them down. (Years later, a bellydance teacher taught us how to swoop our veils by imagining that were plucking potato chips off of an overhead line, dipping them in yummy sour cream and chive dip and then putting them back on the overhead line. She called it the chips & dip maneuver, and it was a useful metaphor for most people. When I taught it to my own students, I never mentioned the chickens.) Anyway, I probably managed two out of three, but it wasn’t good enough. After a while, one of the immigrant workers came and got me, much to my relief. Maybe I’d be sent in to do office work, instead. After all, I’d gotten an A in typing, could manage an electronic typewriter like the best of them. I could file, too – in alphabetical order and by subject.

But no such luck. She led me to the front of the line, where the chickens were emerging, fresh from the feather-burner-thingy. She handed me a knife and then demonstrated with a quick flick of her wrist how I was to slice a circle through the skin, all around the neck. Sort of a garrote, I guess. I actually don’t remember even trying, I was so horrified just by the experience of being in the room at all. This is what a chicken processing plant was? I’d had no idea. I must have proved completely inept at chicken-garroting, because she gave up and led me down the line a bit further. Here, I was shown how to grasp the skin above the cut, and then…pull the head right off. It came off inside out when she did it. She must have thought that part of the job was easier, I don’t know.

Now, she didn’t actually explain anything to me in words that I could understand. She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak whatever language she spoke. She demonstrated and then expected me to repeat the action. I stood there in front of the chicken dangling on its hook and I understood exactly I was supposed to do. I did! And I couldn’t do it.

I was a good girl, and this job felt like such an awful punishment to me. It wasn’t that I thought I was better or more special than those immigrant women I was working beside, not at all. I was just a very naive 17 year-old girl who hadn’t even known where chicken in the grocery store came from. What can I say?

Being pretty much useless at everything else, I was eventually sent back to tossing the corpses into the dumpster of ice.

Back then I was a pretty militant born-again Christian. You know the girls with long flowy hair that used to raise up their hands and sing Kumbaya O Lord in public parks? The ones always pushing pamphlets into your hand when all you wanted to do was get to your bus stop? Yeah, that was me. So there I was, tears soaking my pretty blouse under my by now not-so-clean white apron, keeping it all together by sheer willpower and by reciting the Lord’s Prayer under my breath the entire time. I think I got my chicken count up to 2 per recitation. Pretty good, actually.

After what felt like forever, it was time for lunch, and I followed the women outside and across the muddy parking lot to the staff lounge break room. The women sat in groups, drinking coffee, eating food from paper sacks, having a smoke. They looked at me out of the corners of their eyes and laughed. I took off my apron and hung it on a hook. Then I went into the office, and with all the dignity I could muster, I quit.

I drove my mother’s car to the mall where I hung out until it was time to go home. I knew I was going to get into big trouble, and I did. But later on I found a babysitting job. I earned $850 that summer, which was about one semester’s tuition, so it was all okay in the end.

Those 4 hours changed me. I’m not a vegetarian, though I’ve dabbled at it. I don’t eat a lot of flesh, and I don’t eat pork at all because pigs are too freakin’ smart for me to feel comfortable eating one. I have a tremendous amount of respect for life and the lives of the animals that are raised and slaughtered to feed us. I also have a great respect for migrant workers and those who do the jobs nobody else wants to do.

I don’t know what possessed me to write this story today, but there you go.   What was the worst job you ever did? And did you end up a better person because of it?

Trifle Dish Quilt

You must have guessed that I did some quilting during my recent 2 months visit in the Yukon, right?

Robinson Road House 3Well, of course I did…and I took some pictures, too. Enjoy!

bicycle I know what food will taste like when I get to heaven…it will taste like Dee’s trifle. So when the Moda Trifle Dish sew-along happened, I knew who I was going to make this for.

fox lake 2Each row was designed by a different Moda Bakeshop guest blogger. I found that to be a bit of a challenge…

robinson road house 4…because I had trouble getting them to all go together smoothly. I ended up adding or subtracting spacers between blocks, jigging things to get them to fit. But in the end, they did fit and I was pleased with the result.

ice cream shop 2Trifle is a sweet, old-fashioned dessert, so I decided to use sweet, old-fashioned 1930’s reproduction print fabrics, along with a variety of whites and a little bit of grey for the background. Everything came from my stash.

truck 2And speaking of sweet, old-fashioned, this truck belonged to Dee’s grandfather-in-law. Yes, this truck – the one right here in the picture! I think she’ll be surprised when she sees this photo, don’t you?

truckI added a row of decorator trim to the top edge to simulate whipped cream. Because, you know…trifle.

fox lake 3The backing is adorable! Look, it’s all baking items in lime green and bright pink! Dee is going to looooove it!!!

067Trifle Dish was hand quilted with a #10 John James needle and 40-weight ecru-coloured hand-quilting thread in a shell pattern. I did actually start to do it by machine, but then picked it all out and did it by hand instead. Crazy. I know.

train tracksI wanted the photos of this quilt to be meaningful to Dee, so some of the pictures were taken in Carcross, Yukon, where Dee’s in-laws hail from (Hi George! Hi Millie! Hi Donna & Heather!)

tutshiAnd guess what…so do mine! (Hi Cal & Norma!). Now you know it’s a small world when your good friend’s in-laws and your in-laws all come from the same place that has a population of under 300.

tiny cabinCarcross is the sweetest little teeny tiny town about an hour from Whitehorse, on the shore of the spectacular Bennett Lake. Keep going further down the South Klondike Highway and you’ll find yourself in Skagway, Alaska in about an hour.

mathew watson general storeI had some help, of course.

helpersOther pictures were taken at the Robinson Roadhouse…a historic site on the South Klondike Highway, half-way between Whitehorse and Carcross. A convenient place to stop and use the outhouse (because I take pride in knowing where all the outhouses are… Hello! Yukoner!)

Robinson Road House 2Pictures were also taken at our cabin on Fox Lake, because that is where Dee’s and my friendship takes place.

Fox LakeI mean, we’re friends wherever we are, of course. But here at Fox Lake is where the magic happens for us. Back in the day when we were full-time Yukoners, she and George used to come out on a Saturday afternoon. Dee would always bring her knitting or her sewing along, and would sit on the deck and have a good old-fashioned stitch & bitch while our guys fished off the dock or did whatever guys do together when they’re at the lake.

wild roseAll those good times were stitched into this quilt along with every delicious yummy bite of Dee’s trifle I ever ate.

hand quiltingThere ya go, Darling Dee. She’s all yours. 🙂