A holiday trip to Jamaica

We are home now, having arrived as snow was falling Friday night into Saturday and, after ten days of sleeping under a single sheet as fans chased air around our 26-degree room, we embraced our beds, heavy with covers, in our night-chilled rooms. Here is a little summary of our 10 day stay in Port Antonio, with Christian’s brother Michel at the Oratorians.

First, this is a view of the house on a peninsula that welcomed us:

This is the view from the kitchen, into the backyard and beyond that, onto Port Antonio’s harbour.

And this was our room:

The boys were quickly used to jumping into the pool after breakfast.

Separating the backyard from the port is the Errol Flynn Marina.

Cruises dock here,

…as one did on a rainy day at the end of December:

Which, seen from the upstairs of the house, still looked imposing.

The Marina has a small beach, which we happily took advantage of, often feeling like it was a private one.

A little past the beach, the view rounded a bend and you could see the lighthouse in the distance.

On one of our sight-seeing expeditions, we visited the lighthouse:

Marie-Helene took this picture of it:

And she took a picture of us taking a selfie:

Nearby was Folly Ruins.

We climbed them and took more pictures…

Admired the view…

And climbed down again…

Sightseeing lead to more views…

And spotting the parish’s church from a distance:

The house had four guard dogs who lounged around the yard between their guard-dog duties to which they readily rallied at the least sound with a salvo of barking for anyone walking past in the street.

Above is Franco and Bernedetta, the oldest dog’s name is Zoé, but the kids had a soft spot for Davidé, whose birth defect, a slightly smaller lower jaw, often caused his tongue to stick out a little…

After 10 days with these giants, the kids find Enzo to be puppy-sized and have taken to calling him Tiny.

We spent time at Frenchman’s Cove, where a chilly river flows into a warm ocean bay.

We were guests at a parishioner’s whose house in San San, up on the side of the mountain, offered a stunning view of limitless ocean.

Now, Errol Flynn, besides having a marina, apparently “popularized trips down rivers on bamboo rafts” (Wikipedia) and we took such a trip, which was a pleasant three hours, on one of the many Spanish-named rivers in Jamaica, the Rio Grande.

Christian even took a turn being Captain for awhile…

It rained while we were visiting, but only three days of the ten had dampened plans. One day we ventured out for lunch and hustled to find shelter to eat our KFC. A stray dog found us and we fed it scraps…

On another sight-seeing expedition, Michel took us into the mountains to visit a church and school in Avocat:

And then we visited one of the many places that grows famous Blue Mountain coffee… This one, Devon’s Coffee Ranch (website), gave us a tour and we learned a lot about coffee and drank a delicious cup.

The coffee was for adults, but the kids were offered fresh oranges, so sweet and succulent that we took some too, and this was the view:

We had lunch, higher up the mountain, at a place called Blue Patio.

And Michel took us even higher into the mountain until the view became greenery and clouds…

And since they would not part, we came back down.

Another day, we went looking for souvenirs and found them at the Craft Market.

The day before leaving, Michel took us to Boston Beach…

…where the highlight was the waves:

And Cedric built a castle.

Then it was evening and we took a group picture, had supper and went to bed for the next day’s early start of driving and flights back home.

Jamaica, it was a treat!

A photo essay on the occasion of my Aunt Carole's death

On October 10th 2023, my Aunt Carole passed away. She was 75, and as her brother writes, “her cancer returned with complications.” She was predeceased by her parents (my grandparents) Leopold Buteau (1918-1999) and Philippine Maillet (1922-2007) and her brother, Gaetan (1949-2022). She was married to Joe Finella.

I have lots of fond memories of Aunt Carole, who was also my godmother. Looking back at photos from our childhood, there’s a record of our visits over the years, the times we travelled the thousands of miles between Saskatchewan and Ontario.

For a few years, as the oldest and only grandchild on my mom’s side of the family, I was showered with attention. When I was a baby, Grandma, Grandpa, Aunt Carole and Uncle Joe came to Saskatoon. A little older, Mom, Pa and I went to Ontario.

I was showered with attention… and gifts…

When my siblings came along, there was still just as much attention, just as many gifts. As the holidays approached, we would get these giant boxes full of gifts for under the tree, and baked goodies. Mom didn’t bake cookies, but Grandma and Aunt Carole made it completely unnecessary for her to do so… I remember Whipped Shortbread Cookies, Peanut Butter Rice Crispie Squares, Fruitcake Cookies, Jam Thumbprints, Peanut Butter Cookies, Molasses Cookies, Snowball Cookies, and Pecan Loaf.

Aunt Carole, and Uncle Joe with her, was a welcoming host. Here, recently moved into a new home, she sent my mom this polaroid with the caption in her signature handwriting:

And we came!

And we stayed in Aunt Carole’s impeccably decorated house:

I can so easily recall Aunt Carole’s voice, her cheerfulness with us kids and her self-deprecating humor. This polaroid is a little example… it is one of a series of polaroids showing my parents Uncle Joe’s new building. She didn’t take the shot since she’s inadvertently in it…

Aunt Carole and Uncle Joe welcomed me again, in 2004 when, on my way to Manitoba from Quebec, I stayed awhile at their place in Grimsby. During my stay, she taught me how to crochet and read crochet patterns, a skill I still practice and one that helped me pass the time during the pandemic when the kids were doing school online. Looking at photos, I spy my Aunt’s handiwork throughout our childhood home… My bedroom, pictured here when I was in grade 6, (my little brother is the cute intruder) features FOUR crochet blankets!

Aunt Carole was a charming, cozifying presence as I was growing up and it was a privilege to be able to attend her funeral on the 16th. The 24 hours I spent in Niagara Falls, visiting the horseshoe falls, meeting Uncle Joe’s side of the family, and hurrying home to be back at my post for my own kids, felt like an appropriate way of paying homage to my Aunt who admired what was beautiful and showed a faithful devotion to family. If I could say one thing to my Aunt Carole, it would be Thank-you!

Birthday party notes

Planning a birthday party is fun. First, some decoration… “What’s the theme?” I asked the birthday boy. “Water fight!” he said. So here’s his age, making a splash:

And here’s a watermelon whale, which doubles as decoration, and optional healthy snack:

And then, if the party guests don’t eat all that much watermelon, you can take it and throw it in the blender and make watermelonade, one batch for kids, and one, with Prosecco, for the adults:

And here’s what Enzo thinks of having to be tied up while his domain is invaded by elementary-school children:

Party favours included these fun erasable pens from Toad Hall toys:

But most of all, it’s just keeping things simple and letting the kids have fun!

A weekend at Riding Mountain

This summer, we booked a weekend away at a small cabin near Riding Mountain National Park. Riding Mountain draws campers, resort-goers, and people with boats. Cabins come in all varieties… ours had pretty sunsets over a lake, and foggy still mornings.

Visiting Wasagaming with its population of tourists made us feel touristy too. We stopped in shops, spent time at the visitor center and made allowance for treats: ice cream and beavertails in the evening; cinnamon buns from The Whitehouse at lunch.

We stopped at picturesque spots and at a Wishing Well, a stranger offered to take our family’s picture.

We spent a warm afternoon at Frith Beach with our chairs perched on a narrow strip of pretty pebbles, while the lake’s clear water made it especially fun for the boys to wear their goggles. Cedric even caught a crayfish!

Have you noticed Enzo? He was with us all the time…

I liked the evening walks along the lakeshore, the lake-life vibe, the little unit we make.

This is how much

A friend, on a trip to Belgium, sent me a picture of greenery. My brother-in-law on a visit to Toronto sent us a snapshot of an icing-sugar-dusting of snow. The other evening a supper-delivery person asked our kid who was standing atop a pile of snow, what he was building. “A mountain!” our son answered.

I came home from a walk Sunday and could hear the kids’ voices from the street. We have so much snow, the garage roof is our kids’ playground.

Friday report

The end of the week always feels celebratory even when it is mundane. Newsletters come in to my e-mail with roundups and I sit in the glow of my desk lamp to read through a few. So far, Ann Friedman had me read an essay by Nereya Otieno and Otieno had me listen to a song titled “Too Many Birds”.

I texted Christian earlier today, before running errands and asked if he preferred Waffles with Roasted Applesauce or Pasta with Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. “Pasta!” he answered. These meals are simple and we love them.

Christian is laying sod, the kids will be put to bed, the laundry taken out of the dryer, the dog put in his crate, a drink poured and then we’ll settle and watch Netflix and go to bed.

Weekend away

Darling,

Remember that time I spontaneously booked us a weekend at whatever chalet was affordable in Manitoba? And remember looking at the pictures and finding that it felt clean and springing for the expense that was just under what the kids’ piano lessons cost in a month?

I don’t know if you felt this way too, but the week before leaving my thoughts would go to this booking I’d made and wonder why I did it… Wasn’t it just changing scenery to do the same things as at home, with the additional job of packing and unpacking?

But then, remember? We arrived on a rainy Friday afternoon and just being somewhere else seemed to trick the brain into feeling a sort of freedom. Being somewhere else was leaving behind all the things around you that remind you what to do next. The quiet and the farms around and the distant lowing cows... The list of things to do shrinks down to food and entertainment. Exploration is the new form of passing time: the country lanes, the nearby town, the pebbled beach.

Remember how the dog kept us awake the first night? The little beagle made us feel like new parents again. The kind that, smiling with tired eyes, made us catch the other’s gaze and say, “we’re in this together, eh?”

The weekend, short as it was, time distended as it was, was one of those that cemented this growing feeling I get when we’re all together and we move about like a unit, like a little cell with its mitochondria and nucleus and all those other little pieces I once memorized in grade 11 biology class.

Just thought I’d write to say thanks. And, love.

Backyard

We recently walked through a new neighbourhood where backyards lined a large reedy pond and landscapers had only recently finished with brick hardscaping and young plants. The new development and the size of the houses is impressive, but I still come home and count myself supremely content tending to the changes we’ve made in our own small yard.

Before, we had a raised garden and an apple tree. We took apart the raised bed, moved the garden and cut down the apple tree.

With some of the wood from the raised bed, sanded and painted, we made a larger sandbox. On hot days, we can top the sandbox with an inflatable pool.

La friperie

The other day I took my son to the children’s thrift store. In French, it’s called a “friperie” and somehow, that letter arrangement sounds more delightful to my ear than does “thrift store”. But this isn’t about linguistics, rather, it’s about how that unassuming place is so often a secret source of happiness. I shopped an hour and a half, arms raised, going through tight racks while my son played the store monkey, filling a cart with options. When my son swung by, I’d tell him to separate the shirts hanging on the cart handle into yesses and nos. First I select things I like, then my son selects what he prefers, then we try on the shirts, working as if crunched for time in the store’s only bathroom. It’s a sort of dance really; removing the clothes from their hangers, putting it on the boy, pause for mirror-appraisal, taking it off, readying the next item, and making a triage of the clothes tried on: yes, no, maybe. All while keeping up cheerful banter.

The effort, even when I put it off, is usually worth the savings… I left the store with 34 items and paid a little over 150$. Once Upon A Child, even if the name is long, does organize their clothes nicely by size, gender, type and colour. I suppose the thing that makes me happy is how the boys’ closet can contain, after one of these trips, such a colourful variety of styles and brands. In one place I’ve gathered a collection of pants, shorts, t-shirts, and dress shirts, some from labels that don’t even have stores here in Winnipeg. The other thing is that while I like everything we select, if an accident happens, I don’t feel precious about the item, the way I sometimes do when paying for new things. I don’t condone recklessness, but the pang of regret felt when the puppy made a hole in a 4$ shirt compared to a 12$ shirt doesn’t have the recourse to imagining that money-with-the-wings emoji.

This is just to say that I’m grateful for thrift stores. Not all the kids’ clothes are sourced there, and it would be an unsustainable model if there weren’t parents buying new clothes. Nonetheless, when I do go, I’m usually really happy for having done so.

Friday!

It’s Friday… kids hang from hammocks, laundry gets folded, adults eat quiche while the kids have cheese-stuffed tortellini.

The lawn is in poor shape, but the installation of fibre-optics underneath it has made it a lawnmower maze of flags and even the dandelions feel outdone by the spray-painted lines everywhere. The Badger truck spent a day around our place, humming noisily. The men gave stickers to the boys and we googled the website written on their truck door. We looked at pictures of badgers and compared them to the logo. The lawn will wait for quieter days.

I crave the ability to draw and since this seems like as futile as wanting to be a sea urchin, I’ve taken to googling the benefits of art. So far, the results have only been gentle persuasions and not gale-force arguments. Perhaps that is the nature of art… it is gentle and it transforms slowly.

Cookies

I used to come home from an office job, and consider the week productive only if I managed to bake a dessert. Dessert signified a form of self-care and indulgence and generosity too towards my husband. Now, I bake cookies for the kids and these Apple-Spice Cookies from The Pollan Family Table are a favourite. I like the almost ginger-bread-like spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves), the simple icing on top, but I especially like their cake-like texture.

Yard work

Since last Saturday we moved our vegetable garden from one side of the backyard to the other and filled the new fenced-off section of earth full of potato sprouts, tomato plants, peppers, herbs, beets, carrots, beans, zucchini and cucumber. Children and a puppy have made for the change in landscape design and this flexibility… this thing where Christian and I, lying in bed at night just before turning off the light, considering this season’s garden, the dry summers, the kid’s fun with the inflatable pool, the sandbox, the dog’s muddy paws when it rains… It’s a leisurely back and forth of thoughts and ideas. I enjoy this. I love how we can up and decide that play space wins over deck privacy and mediocre apples, and Christian, next weekend cuts down the apple tree. I like how we can see that the yard plan we started out with needs modification and both of us are game to do it.

Solving for x

Interior decorators Hollister and Porter Hovey were featured on Cup of Jo with an apartment makeover and helpful tips to boot, one of which reads: “People often neglect hallways but it’s a great opportunity for a fun experience.”

Now, if we take that sentence and pretend it’s math, and say, “people often neglect x, but x is a great opportunity for a fun experience.” Then, using a crude expression you could “plug in” anything for x, to solve for fun. Maybe x is running errands. Maybe x is spending time running errands with someone else. Maybe x is running someone else’s errands. No matter, you can solve for fun.

Take my mother-in-law: game for adventure, disdainful of Covid-induced paranoia. Subtract the generational gap, the minor things that run the risk of grating on each other’s nerves, like a bit of hearing loss and someone else’s soft voice, and, with a dramatic sweep of the arm, create a vacuum of space on the imaginary whiteboard filled with scribbled sums and plop in a recurring Thursday afternoon visit. Let the things that are on her mind gush in and settle in the container of your calm availability. And then, as if by magic, Thursday afternoons become little short stories of their own: sweatpants shopping for her husband, stove browsing at furniture and appliance stores, watch-hunting high and low, wig querying in a nostalgic revisit to the sixties, replacement shirt shopping for a newly liquidated favourite brand, shampoo selecting for volume at Wal-Mart and a surprise black-out. And always, finding a treat: muffins at Tim Horton’s, McDonalds after lockdown, an introduction to Orange Julius, cinnamon buns from Tall Grass Prairie.

Don’t neglect the hallways!

Swimming lessons

Sometimes, a thing from childhood will bubble up, like gas in a swamp. It happened to me recently when I was talking to a trained lifeguard and joking about how my younger brother is a certified lifeguard and how, in contrast to him, I can’t swim. I think this family paradox is funny. I also think that it perfectly reflects the kind of contradictory mother I had. Telling people about this, turning it into a joke, is a kind of way of relieving aggrieved feelings - wasn’t I owed swimming lessons?

Writing about childhood is hard. John le Carré hinted at this in his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel, in the chapter about his father near the end of the book. He tried writing at length about it when he was young, but the efforts “dripped with self-pity”.

I recognize in my comments that compensatory ruefulness my dad also had when he talked about my mother. It’s unsatisfying, and more often than not, it’s unfair to the person listening. Rather than being an amusing anecdote, it’s an escaped journal entry, one of those as Mason Currey writes in a newsletter that “can be relentlessly inward-looking and personal-grievance-focused, which is always a pleasure for the writer (and almost never a pleasure for the reader).”

On an episode of Conversations, George Saunders describes how a character in a story has to have more than one dimension:

What you find yourself doing as a writer, is, you have a bad character; if he’s simply bad section after section, you’re gonna be boring. So you have to complicate him, which means you have to look closer at him, just as in real life, you know (…) the person who pushes you aside getting on to the subway, at first he’s a terrible person. If you could follow him home, you know, and ask him some questions, you’d see him assuming dimensionality. So that happens to me in stories all the time.

And so, since good writing demands it, and since I am still learning, allow me to edit my clumsy attempt at humour. You see, my mother was an aesthete, descended from a woman, my Grandmother, who praised good looks and fine clothes. It was out of aesthetic concern that my mother enrolled my brother for swim class after swim class so that he would cut a fine figure. For years and years I mistook this as a more practical concern for health and for the ability to not drown in water. How much did she pay, I wondered, for all those lessons and the swimming pool membership? And it was only when attempting to tally an amount (was it hundreds? did it stretch to thousands?) that I realized she had spent a similar sum on me… not so that I would cut a fine figure, but so that I could show all of my teeth when I smiled. While my brother swam laps, I sat through appointment after appointment in the orthodontist’s chair for braces. This, in my mother’s mind, was fair; I had straight teeth and my brother had a swimmer’s physique.

Children's books

When my daughter was still tiny, long before she could read, I felt overwhelmed by all the possibilities the world contained for her burgeoning existence. Decorating her room, picking out clothes, selecting toys, finding books… all these things felt big and important because they would mould her childhood memories. If she liked one thing over another, that thing could be the beginning of a collection… I hoped I was making the right investments…

Now, as two brothers have joined her under our roof, childhood things multiply more easily, collections are apparent and decisions feel less weighty. It pleases me especially to see the wear of a well-loved book, and a row of shiny spines from the “Mes Années Pourquoi” series.

Aunt Marcia

This month, one year ago, my aunt came to visit. She’s since deceased. 

I felt like I was just starting to get to know my aunt Marcia. In my dad’s family, there were ten children. My dad was the third oldest and Marcia was the youngest. When I was born, she was only 11. Because my mom didn’t really care for her husband’s giant Irish family’s shenanigans, I didn’t see much of them growing up. When I was a teenager my dad took to sneaking visits with his family, and sworn to secrecy, we could join him on those lazy Sunday afternoons. He’d be my grandma’s handyman sometimes. Or he’d feel comfortable and fall asleep in the upholstered lazy boy in the living room corner of the city bungalow she shared with Marcia. But those sporadic visits, of which I’d only witnessed the beginning before leaving home, weren’t enough for me to get to know my aunt. 

My dad died in 2014 and so, when she accepted my invitation to Winnipeg last summer it felt like the chance for a more pleasant reunion. My interactions with my dad’s family were an inheritance; in many ways, I was merely benefitting from his mostly good relationships and one generation’s remove from the contentiousness. Nonetheless, time spent with Marcia over the course of a few days was tinged with familiar comfort. There were qualities, like thrift, or a kind of humour, that I could find in Marcia and she could find in me. There were mannerisms we had that were reminders of the person we missed in common. 

And there were ways that we were different. One of the Winnipeg attractions I advertised was a visit to Thermëa, a self-guided Nordic spa experience. We were at the front desk when something I did while taking out my wallet made me drop a tampon on the floor. Marcia laughed and so did I when I bent down to scoop it up. When I popped back up I excused myself to the receptionist, and then told Marcia, out of the woman’s earshot, that I didn’t want that woman to think we were laughing at her. Marcia’s answer was, “Who cares?” She might have been right; I’m agreeable to a fault. But it was her refrain. She would often say it. “Who cares!” I suspect, though, that she did care. That maybe the expression was just a wishful anthem against normal, human vulnerability. Because most of all, she cared about trustworthiness. If you betrayed it, her decision was categorical. Either way, it meant that she had spent some time thinking about it. If it was harsh, there always seemed to be a chance to salvage a spot on her good side. If her sincerity had a rough edge, gaining her friendship felt like a priviledge. 

While we had a nice time together that summer and were planning to see each other again the next, she died unexpectedly. Her death lead me to go through family albums with a kind of avidity. But photographs, for getting to know someone more, are unsatisfactory, even maddening. It’s like Susan Sontag writes: “Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” The pictures with their subjects, their views as records, couldn’t give me any more of Marcia than a catalogue of things she thought worth photographing. 

Her funeral highlighted qualities that defined her life: the work ethic that drove her success as a retail manager and the dedication she had for her mother’s care. It felt fateful to me that she had just organized and celebrated her mother’s 90thbirthday. The Sunday before her own quiet death, nurses had gathered at her mother’s table decked with flowers in the nursing home dining room and sang as my white-haired Grandma smiled and Marcia recorded. That was most of what she recorded: her mother and nature scenes. There wasn’t much art to it. Then again, “to photograph is to confer importance.” (Susan Sontag)  

Literature allows us to imagine that people are full of complexity. When I think of my dad, a person I knew quite well, I see how that applies. If I were to talk about him, if I were to try to describe him to you, I might cut the effort short. I want to preserve him in all completeness. But it’s not the same with my aunt. My aunt, because of the nature of our short relationship, can live in my memory within a very neat container. 

A writer named Jonas Hassen Khemiri once talked about a death in his family. He explained how people’s memories of the deceased were a way of defending a version of the person they knew. My version entails the goodness of her care, the respectability of her work, and the surprise of her death.