Not an Iron-Maiden

I am a writer & an artist. I am a scrapbooker, an interior designer & decorator, an architect. I am innovative, creative & resourceful.

I am also a wife & a mother. A mother who is doing the best for her children whether they think so or not. I break quarrels, I make meals, I break more quarrels. I attempt the impossible- not climbing Everest, but working towards peace amongst siblings. Amongst all of us. I am both judge & jury. I bake & cook & clean. I launder everyones’ dirty underwear, stinky socks &- yes I have to touch them.

I analyze aches & pains, & determine which need a doctor & which need a bandaid. I pamper broken limbs. I defy & banish viruses & I attempt to dry tears & make everything all right again whether it is or not. I straighten out misunderstanding. I try to teach mutual respect. I try to channel my kids, not change them. To teach them how to think for themselves, figure things out, make decisions.

I know the importance of being a good listener. I learn about pokemon, bionicles, hermit crabs, sports. Then I know & understand my children & their hobbies. I root for their team games, whether I can be there or not. I keep an open & inviting house for all their collective friends, who feel at home here, welcome.

I try always to see the other side of the story & also to teach my children to do this. I love them & cry when they are hurt physically or emotionally. I mourn over their acne troubles, their bad hair days, their teacher issues, their stupid homework assignments. I would keep them from suffering if it were possible. From the troubles with ‘friends’, siblings, etc.

I am also a dog keeper & trainer. I chase them out of neighbors yards, out of the horse pastures with manure. I lose sleep whelping pups. I wipe up cat barf & dog pee. I clean fish & newt tanks. I allow jars of frogs & tadpoles on my kitchen counters. I rid the house of spiders & flies, squish ants & beetles. And I don’t freak out when the garter snake gets loose never to be found again.

I am a go between. From daughters to husband & back again, trying to unite (or at least remove explosives) from two foreign objects. The one can’t imagine that Dad was ever a kid- he ‘doesn’t know about anything’. The other doesn’t get that teen daughters can’t be responsible for every word they utter. I tell Dad to read between the lines. Or I attempt to translate for him the things his daughters & sometimes his sons say.

And at the same time, I do not want to burden them with my feelings of inadequacy, or the fact that I have feelings too. Feelings that get hurt. Days that are difficult. I am not an ironmaiden standing strong and immobile, & yet I feel I should be.

I try to be an example, but I am not infallible. I have the same flesh as anyone, the same foibles. But my bottom-of-the-heart desire is to do the best for my family, in spite of that & health issues. Even if they don’t see it. Or remember it.

And no matter what I always love them to absolute bits & pieces—my family, my life. In everything, out of everything, I like them & I love them for who they are.

Do You See as a Writer?

I took this photo last week when I went around town taking architectural photos. An eyesore if ever. But something made me snap this. Then planning Monday’s post I was thinking of seeing as a writer sees: seeing the things that are and aren’t there, the hidden stories in scenes, the things that make Story. I like to do image prompts, a daily writing exercise from whatever springs to mind from an image. This picture is as good as any to start with. What do you see in this picture? I’ll list what I see. A gaudy paint job in the midst of a neutrals only neighbourhood, paint discolouring from the sun and weather, graffiti on the side. An overgrown front yard, with a few stray cottage garden perennials still bravely growing fenced in blue picket. Missing soffits and a big black splotch on the canopy that now reads ‘taurant gallery.’ This much is obvious to any viewer.

Closer in is a door nailed shut and unreadable letters scratched in the yellow  near a peach doughnut shaped peephole. And top left–what’s that? A man cage near that other window? It’s too big to be a light fixture. What  is hiding behind those foggy windows? In those roof top gables? The neighborhood wild man? Does Frankenstein hang him in the cage at night to give the neighbours nightmares? And that canopy is a great hang out for bats that buzz around the wild man at night and make him frantic with hunger. He zapps them like a mosquito zapper if they get too close.

What else might a writer see in this place. Perhaps it’s an eccentric fellow’s paint factory. He’s trying to make eco-friendly paints with all natural dyes that don’t fade in the sun. He tests them himself on his own house. Every batch of new paint has to spend the night in the cage to cure in the moonlight.

Personally, I think its a free daycare. It’s painted bright sunny colours to show that children will receive bright sunny care, from a bright sunny lady. She lets bright sunny flowers grow randomly over a strange mound in the front garden, that gets higher every year. Occasionally bones poke out of it and in the dead of night she adds soil and seeds to it while humming bright sunny songs. And that  cage, once in a while it’s covered with a thick tarp and muffled noises come from there. But no one asks any questions.

Challenge: Take one of the following pictures and see what all you can see in it. Make a story or list it point form and remember, writing exercises are for fun–don’t take yourself too seriously or you’ll never fly!

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Winnipeg Window Dressing

All I can say is think of the work and artistry that went into these old buildings. And they’re still standing tall and proud. (We won’t, however, discuss their plumbing.)

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Lids of Winnipeg

More from my stroll through Winnipeg, Canada, last week. Lids. Some of the downtown buildings, I discovered, have beautiful lids, which is more than can be said of some of its people. 😉 😉 😉

I had a “foreigner” stop me as I strolled the streets with my camera, big floppy hat on my head, looking for all the world like a typical tourist. His head tilted he asked, “Are you from Winnipeg?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Born and raised?”

“Yes,” I answered again. Seeing his perplexity I added, “I just decided to take a closer look at my city.”

He smiled broadly, and wished me a very sincere, “Have a wonderful day then.”

St Boniface Cathedral

St Boniface University

Hotel Fort Garry

Golden Boy and compatriots atop the Legislative building

Land Titles Building

Law Courts Building

Government House

Next week: Winnipeg architectural details. It’s a beautiful city!

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A Silence Full of Stories

Our 3 acre yard consists of this: the house and yard, a stretch of prairie grass, then the bush.The bush has seen forts built, trees climbed, and paint ball madness from behind wood and tire barricades. It has heard giggles and gossip and war cries. It has grown a fully roofed hide-out and lured an old trailer into its mosquito-rich depths. It has yielded for our 6 kids and their friends wood ticks, scrapes and natural treasures. Queer sticks, odd stones and hours of imagination run riot.And whenever I mowed our lawn, I mowed a path through the prairie grass to the bush  for the kids.

Recently I had cause to comb the depths of the bush for some sticks for a craft and I discovered a world gone silent yet bursting with story.

Our youngest is nearly 17, the only one still living at home. The bush is quiet now except for the birds and frogs.

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And yet I still mow that path.

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In the Details

It’s said good writing is in the details. Here are a few “details” from our writer’s weekend. (photos © cmalbig)

Story’s Little White Lies

It’s funny how as a writer I find myself becoming, at times, a better oral story teller. I just caught myself retelling a small scenario from church to my husband and simplifying some of the details to make a better verbal impact and a greater punchline.

Huh. Did I just lie? Did I just go against everything I’ve been taught all my life and tell a Lie?

Interesting. And all the more so because it’s becoming a bit of a habit.

There’s nothing worse than listening to someone tell a story and having them use a lot of “sort-of’s” and “kind-of’s,” or “a little bit’s.” Or describing something as “like a this thing–well, no, maybe it was more like a that–” They try to get the details just so and for many things, like telling how father’s iridectomy went, the details count. After all you don’t want Aunt Bertha passing the story to Uncle Curt and suddenly father’s iridectomy becomes a triple bypass complicated by a plantar’s wart and his body odor and he had an out of body experience in the midst of it.

If your child’s teacher calls to tell you your child spit on the janitor’s head, you better hope she’s not fiddling the truth, when your child only sneezed on the water fountain.

Nooo, we don’t want that sort of false retelling. And when the boss says you’re getting a $10 an hour raise and you open your next paycheck to find a 10 cents a day decrease— well there’s h— oops, certainly something to pay.

So how do we tell a story for the sake of a good story? Cause I know I’m not alone.

Because I’ve caught myself altering the strict truth of story simply for love of telling it well. I doubt I’m the only one. Let’s hope I’m not heading for perdition. Story gets into ones blood. It’s been part of civilization ever since—ever. Like since the first cave-men with no language, spoken or written, played charades to tell each other what happened out in the fields that day. of course they’re gonna swap the details to out-do one another.

What does fiddling the facts comes from? Perhaps some of us get tired of listening to stories from people who have to reclaim every detail, important  or not, that slow down the story and cause you to lose interest. The tension is stretched to uselessness by constant correcting themselves or telling too much back-story in a backwards manner, whether it pertains or not.

Or it’s because, as of we writers, the editing of the written word, the maximizing of each phrase to carry the story, the careful choosing of words to say more than they do at face value, has taught us to edit more carefully the spoken story too.

It’s the essence that counts. The overall effect. The end result. Carried only by choice details, not all and sundry.

So what if the little boy in church today actually hummed a different tune than the Star Wars Theme song? If not, it was certainly a lot like it and created the same impact–a wave of tittering in the rows nearest him. So later when I told my husband, it would have lost the giggle factor if I’d out loud speculated if that’s what song it really was. The acoustic quality of the tale would have failed entirely, thus vetoing the point of the tale.

And it was funny. The little guy belted out that tune right during a pause.♫ ♯♪  Dun da da DUN dun, dunta da Daaaa…♫ ♯♪

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