Category Archives: mother

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Juxtaposition

The photograph in my Quimper Family Medicine home clinic and guest room is of my grandmother and my daughter, in 1988. I took the picture. My grandmother is Evelyn Ottaway. The other picture is one of my mother/baby or parent/child pictures. I like the juxtaposition.

It’s not just parent/child that is important. It is parent/child, grandparent/child, great grandparent/child.

I am reading a book that appeared in my little free library box, about grandmothering skills. It’s got some very interesting ideas and I am enjoying it! Radical, man.

My grandmother had amazing organizational skills. I think that my daughter got them from her.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Radical.

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Mother/child art

The photograph is me and my younger sister on our mother’s lap.

I have a collection of mother/child art. I think it’s because I was born in a tuberculosis sanatorium, because my mother coughed blood at eight months pregnant, and I had to be passed around while she got well. I went back to her at nine months. I acted pretty independent at that point and was not very trusting of adults.

I am taking photographs of the mother/child art for this part of my blog.

I can’t attribute this photograph. I don’t know who took it. Both of my parents and my sister are dead, so I cannot ask.

It might have been my grandfather, but I don’t know.

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Music for jellyfish

Since I am still out with post pneumonia tachycardia, my daughter and I went down to the beach yesterday.

I can sit, no problem. I can walk too, but only very very slowly. I am getting annoyed about it which means I am starting convalescence. Knowing that does not make me any less impatient.

We found two beached jellyfish. Not entirely sure if they were alive, but maybe. Do not touch.

Pink jellyfish floating in shallow water.

Anyhow, my daughter got a stick and pushed each one back out.

Which makes my heart sing.

For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: music.

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kitchen window with cat

In the early morning before dawn
the orchids keep me company
cat and computer as I sit and write

I tried a desk but the sky doesn’t lighten
windows on three sides, the orchids and I
await the sun, cat now on my lap

this table was my grandmother’s
my mother loved flowers
my daughter says “The laptop’s in the way.”

Thank you orchids, cat and table
Thank you laptop, teacup, dawn
Thank you grandmother, mother, daughter

kitchen window blessing


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yep, yep, yep

My daughter and two friends and schoolmates at Mount Saint Helens at the end of eighth grade. And what do you think is happening? Present, facing the speaker, yep, it’s a teacher going over the rules. Let’s get on with it. We know the rules. Face forward, mind might be elsewhere.

Setting up camp.

picnic table in the woods with containers to set up camp
Group camp at St. Helen’s
shelters tied over tents for rain protection.
rain preparation
Teachers and annoying parent chaperones with cameras
Teachers and annoying parent chaperones with cameras
8th grade audience at park
audience for each other
Seven 8th grade girls performing a song they made up.
group song

All taken in 2012 on the end of the year 8th grade trip to Mount St. Helens, to get the students together before starting high school. Huge thanks again to the teachers, the parents and the teens too.

Mount St Helen's
Mount St Helens
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kitchen window

My mother had plants all over a shelf running the length of their kitchen. She did a pen and ink drawing of the riot of flowers and pots and leaves. She then did a second one but this time the snapdragons were dragons and there were elves and fairies and monsters in all the plants.

My orchid is blooming riotously right now, with abandon, to the point where the pot barely stays upright. I love orchids, how long the blooms last, and how they would rather not be watered too much, and a flower that perches up on tree branches in jungles: how delightful and romantic is that? This one is in my kitchen window and makes me think of my mother.

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cottage

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: cottage.

My family has cabins on Lake Matinenda in Ontario, currently in a trust and jointly owned.

In 2012 my sister died in March. In August my daughter and I went to the lake. No one could bear to stay in the cabin that she had used the most the last few years. My daughter and I spent a day facing the mice and clearing. The mice had made nests in anything they could use.

Mouse nest in an ankle brace.
In Chris’s cabin


Empties.
Recycling.


Shoe nest.
Fabric with potential mouse nests. We had to go through the containers.

My daughter helped me and bless her. I was still feeling paralyzed with grief. We garbaged bagged the mouse nests, went through all the fabric, loaded the trash, recycling and empties into the boat and took them to the dump and to town. Then we bought half a dozen plastic containers and put every fabric thing and shoe that didn’t have a mouse nest into containers.

I went back this summer and a friend and I worked on the roof. The books and the glass containers are sad now, not doing well as no one has used that cabin since 2010. I didn’t think to box up the books, except for the log that my mother started.

Books and canned and bottled supplies.

This summer my daughter and I took four large containers in the boat and then by car to the laundromat. We washed everything and donated most of it to a local second hand shop. I put a wool blanket back in a container and moved some of the dishes my mother made in another container to a cabin that is in better shape.

Our cottages are full of memories.

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painted sky

I took this on Friday morning. The sky was so glorious and changing, a water color in transition. My mother painted watercolors and when I see a sky like this, I wonder if she is up there with a brush. Sending love in this season for everyone who is missing someone.