I arrived safely in France yesterday

I have so much to tell but, first of all, I would like to wish a wonderful man, a happy happy birthday. 

(Tomorrow when I am so under the influence of jet lag, I will write about my journey here.)

Remember to click on picture...

Have I told you lately?

A song for my mother.

So tired, tired of waiting

Last week I sat down and cried. The house is being shown often, sometimes two times in a day, and yet we have had only one insultingly low offer. Although all house prices have slipped and we have lowered our price accordingly to the point where we are now lower than land value, no one wants our sweet cottage. I look around me. All is spotlessly clean - I'm sick of cleaning - so now all I can blame is the flaws - poor layout, scratched floors from 25 years of living, small crack on kitchen countertop, and on it goes until I feel as if I am tearing apart an old friend who has been good to me. 

I keep thinking of an image from Marion Woodman's "Bone" where she is stroking her stomach and apologizing to it for being so critical when it has served her well, despite her abuse. How can I compare a house to a body? When one dreams of a house, according to Jungian thought, one is dreaming of self. I transfer this to strangers walking through our personal space, turning on every light, opening drawers and closets and it almost feels as if I am standing naked in Grand Central Station. 

You should be tougher I tell myself. To hell with those who don't like what they see. 

Rob says that I shouldn't take the lack of interest personally, and yet I know he too is becoming anxious. Someone once described us as "old hippies" in reference to our life style and our lack of need to fancify our house. Oh we would have liked to buy better stuff and even, at one time, a bigger house but the desire was never strong enough. Besides we don't like being in debt except for travel and computers.

So why did I cry? I was sitting in my little house in the garden, reading a soppy novel, nearing the end, when one of the main characters dies of cancer. Earlier in the day, I had been sorting my filing cabinet and rereading old letters from Leslie, my friend who died half a dozen years ago. Were the tears, tears of grief compounded with tears of frustration? Both Rob and I want to move on, start a new adventure, but without the sell of our house, we are stuck in a waiting room. 

Or should I look at the situation differently? Our accountant says sell and Rob and I snap to attention and put the house on the market. What if he's the idiot? What if we wait a couple of years, rent the house out to make a few bucks, and find the housing market is back on track? We could be one or two hundred thousand dollars better off than if we sold right now. 

Of course, no one knows how long it will take real estate to come into its own again, but why not wait it out? At the moment with interest rates so low, it isn't difficult to carry our debt. 

I look around me. Vancouver is especially beautiful in the spring, especially when the sun is shining. Rob and I went to an art show yesterday and met a young Russian woman who moved here a couple of years ago. She reminds us of just how lovely our home territory is, and says that next to two cities in Switzerland, Vancouver is the third most desirable place to live in all the world. 

Why, I ask myself, am I making such a fuss? Where is my business head, my animus? If we have to wait this recession out would it be so terrible? 

As I am sitting writing, wading through these thoughts, Rob calls. Strangely or perhaps not so strangely, he is asking himself the same questions. Perhaps we can give this no-decent-offer situation a positive spin. Perhaps, in the end, if we can find the patience, we will be richer (not only monetarily) and less indecisive several years from now. 

The House is Alive

Champagne Friend

Yesterday Helen and I dropped in at Maura's home to wish her happy birthday. Her husband and daughter were there waiting for her. Maura has had no time to relax and enjoy her day. Her dining room table is set with sewing machine, patterns, and frothy tutus. Behind the table is an industrial clothing rack, lined with assorted dancing costumes. She is out doing costume fittings. 

When Maura returns, she tells us that she'll celebrate her 60th in June when all the costumes are finished and the dances have been danced.

This woman accomplishes so much and all she does is beautiful, I think, as I look out the window and see her garden full to bursting with opening flowers in all the colours of the rainbow.

Her house is a mess. She has no time to clean the surface of things.  And although I could not live like this, I am envious. 

Salsa Sister

We are just about to take off to Cathy's birthday party. This week has been unusually busy and there's so much I'd like to say, including a promised continuation of a blog an entry back. I will try to be more diligent this coming week. 

Though a lot of people have been viewing the house, peeping in our closets, no one has made an offer so I continue to clean, to spruce up the garden, and whine. Silly really... but the waiting is getting me down. I thought reducing the price would entice a buyer but nothing seems to work - even baking banana bread for an agent's open though all commented about how good the house smelt. 

I must learn to have more patience. 

growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional

When she's writing her blog link 

when we were young

(Click on picture to see full size.)

It is hard to believe that it has been 40 years since I met Rob, 30 years since I became a mother, and varying numbers of years since I struck up friendships with such strong women as Penelope right through to Kate and Marlene (and most recently, Mary.) Once when I was feeling particularly pathetic, my oldest son said "Just look at who your friends are. Do you think they'd stick by you if you were pathetic?"

 It's hard to believe that I began this blog April 3rd, 2003, over a year before Gill began hers. 

So I have been a blogger for six years. I began originally when Gill and I were in Northern Ireland and I wanted family and friends back home to know what we were up to. In those early years, I often wrote every day. There have been times when I spilled my guts onto these pages and times when I haven't been able to say anything - either because I have been too fearful or too bored with myself. Every time I've wanted to stop blogging, someone (usually Kate) says no and so I have continued though not as often.

So much has changed for Gill. She's lived in Northern Ireland and Vancouver for her last two years of high school,  then Paris and Toronto for five years. Soon she will receive her BA. I only received mine when she was kicking inside my belly. 

I did try to enter the graduate program in Art History at UBC but the prof (a Frenchman) who I wanted to work with didn't want me - "a West Vancouver housewife" - despite my A average. The director of the program told me to take more courses which I did until I flew off to France with my children for a year. 

France changed everything.

to be continued

Music to My Ears

I forgot to mention the flowers I received for my birthday. Bev decorated the house with 60 tulips. Sonia gave me this beautiful orchid I keep by my bed. Gill and her love gave me a bouquet of exotic blooms. Mary sent pink tulips. Heidi and Maura presented me with fragrant roses and Sarah, a pot of white Easter lilies. The day before my birthday, Helen came over with a bouquet of passionate red flowers. Our house looks amazing. (Now why won't someone buy it?)

Here's a link to the poetry I received. 

Robert Bly says that you have to hear a poem twice to understand it but sometimes I need more than twice. There's also poems that people were too shy to read and several from friends who could not be present. 

How it feels to be loved by you

Extraordinary. 

Last Sunday I left my fifties.  Thanks to the efforts of Rob, Helen, Bev, and Maggie, I entered my sixties with a celebration. I asked for an afternoon and evening of poetry and music, good friends, wine, and a feast. I received so much more. 

In a day or two, I will post a link to the poetry and music, I received. 

I am so very very grateful.  Thank you everyone. 

March 29th was a day of magic. I felt beautiful and (yes, Gill) sexy, and loved. 

When I had a minute this past week - for some reason, it was very busy, good busy with visitors and dinners out, and some work - I wrote in my journal, trying to figure out (once again) what work I want to do, what gives me pleasure, what excites me... "When it's over, I don't want to wonder/ if I have made of my life something particular, and real./ I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened/ or full of argument./ I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

 

I am a woman sixty years old

I am a woman sixty years old and of no special courage...

Everyday - I have work to do:

I feel my body rising through the water

not much more than a leaf;

and I feel like the child, crazed by beauty

or filled to bursting with woe;

and I am the snail in the universe of the leaves

trudging upwards... 

Marlene spent hours trying to find this poem for me (by Mary Oliver.)

It is understandable why, like so many,

I find pleasure

in your acts of language...

What the heart endures

is difficult to order in vowels

and consonants... 

Helen included this poem by Gloria Oden in a beautiful handmade book she gave me yesterday.

My daughter, my friends, call me sexy at sixty. So many lush loving descriptions of a woman who is a little like me but much more vibrant, less fearful.  

And I sit in my little house in the garden, thinking I'm sixty now - a senior. If I wanted to I could collect an old age pension... 

I am a woman of sixty, I tell myself over and over, and I am still not quite ready to accept it though I have little choice. 

Rob calls out that my father is on the phone. I return to the big house and talk to both my parents who wish me well, and are as astonished as I am that I have reached this age. "I remember the day you were born," my father says.

When I hang up, Rob hands me two gifts but asks me to wait a minute while he plays this song.

While the music is playing, I open the first slim wrapped parcel. It is a guide book to Marrakech along with a promissory note. We shall visit this exotic city in the fall. The second parcel is my favourite perfume. I am stunned by these presents. I wanted to give you something special, he tells me, and when I asked your friends what you would like, all said travel. 

As if that weren't enough, my nephew and his wife come back from a walk with 2 bottles of champagne. And then my daughter (a surprise gift from my sister who paid her flight) comes in with a friend and a huge bouquet of exotic flowers and a second one of lovely pink tulips from Mary who visited last week. And I receive a gift certificate for Amazon from my son Michael and his fiancee - and a beautiful poem by e.e. cummings and a kaiku Michael wrote himself. 

if there are any heavens my mother will (all by herself) have

one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor

a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but

it will be a heaven of blackred roses...

Gill and her friend prepare a breakfast feast of spicy potatoes, eggs, and chorizo sausage. My nephew serves Mimosas. Gill tells me that when she was at the flower shop, the woman who wrapped the flowers told her that when she turned sixty, her life got better and better. 

I hope so. I imagine, after this morning, that this could happen. 

There's Something about Mary

Last week, Rob and I welcomed Mary S-T into our home with the same generosity of spirit as Mary showed when she welcomed Gill into her home months ago. There's something about Mary that is impossible not to love. Every time she appears in a room I want to hug her. And do. 

What is it about Mary that inspires warmth, trust, and laughter? What is it about her that calls forth my most mischievous self? Why do I feel comfortable spelling out her initials with fallen tulip petals? 

Mary is one of the most loving generous woman I've ever met. She walked into our house (with her equally gorgeous brother) laughing, embraced me as if we were old friends, and the entire evening was full of laughter and stories. As was the next day and the next. She didn't even complain when we served her the same thing for dinner that we had for lunch. 

 

Mary is the wife of Patrick, Rob's mentor who died last fall. Mary says their relationship was a 27 year romance. Understandably, she misses her crazy wonderful poetry-quoting man, especially the cuddles. She has her "Patrick moments" when the tears start to fall but still she feels his presence everywhere. 

There is something about Mary that is quite extraordinary. In just a few days, we befriended each other for life. I once again feel blessed. 

Pen and I

Pen and her daughter flew into Vancouver at 5:30 am on Thursday. I met them at the airport. Several hours later, after we had dropped Isobel at her home, Pen and I were on our way to Whistler where we spent several quiet days at my sister Bev's cabin (an understatement). Though I moaned and groaned when Pen made me walk to the village and back, several times, I enjoyed myself. I love the quiet of the area and being with this woman whom I've know longer than any other, who dropped in after five months travelling so we could celebrate our 60th birthdays together. We decided at 65, we will be much more adventurous.

In the early morning of the day we were to return, it snowed wildly - 10 beautiful, treacherous inches - and, after shoveling the driveway, I climbed behind the wheel of my VW Jetta, without snow tires, and cautiously drove home. (I was terrified for the first half of the drive.)

We made it in time to attend the matinee performance of "Blackbird" by Scottish playwright, David Harrower. Thank goodness. It was a potent piece of theatre - the reunion of a middle-aged man and a young woman, with whom he had an affair when she was twelve - precociously twelve, I'd say, as she had pursued him. Love? Who sets the rules? It's a curious tale, creepy at times, and the ending stung me. I didn't like it though I think Pen and Rob did which led to some interesting dialogue later on. 

Sunday, after a trip to Ikea, Pen flew home. Since then I've been lost in paperwork for the government.

Same mother, same father

I've spent the last five days with my sisters thanks to Gael who flew in from Ontario for a conference at the Empress in Victoria and shared her harbour view room with two of us before returning to the mainland and adding another sister to the equation. As our oldest sister couldn't join us, I was the eldest but my giggly siblings did not treat me as if I were older and wiser, they just wanted to have fun and so we did in true Wetherall fashion - luxuriating at the fancy hotel, swimming morning and evening at the hotel's health spa, shopping (buying little),  dining well, drinking too well one evening, and laughing - so much laughter. "How many lovers have you had," asked one? "That many?" "No fair," said another. (And being the oldest, I didn't bother counting - too easy. I lie and love the incredulous looks they all give me.)

There were also moments of serious discussion, asking the other or others for advice on aging, children, and career.  Although we are different ages (I am 15 years older than my youngest sister) and are in different financial positions with differing tastes and desires, we are comfortable discussing most things with each other.  We accept that one sister will spend $10,000 on a fridge and another the same on a vacation. (One frets about the cost. The other doesn't. For two of us, neither is an option or a priority though the discussion interests me.) 

It's easy to see our differences. Our similarities, beyond looks, are less obvious and I need some time to reflect on this but there is something special about blood ties. What? I'm not sure but I trust them to love me, no matter what. As I love them. 

On Saturday evening, our last two together, Rob and a sister-in-law join us at the Red Door for a farewell feast.  

Beautiful boy

A song for Michael 

 

A Guilty Conscience Gets Me in Trouble

Rob arrived home Saturday. Hurrah. 

Sunday was the Academy Awards. We went to Helen's for an Oscar party - our first really if you don't count attending the Governor's Ball in 1993. Helen and I decided no elaborate dishes that require knives and forks and so we bought olives and cheese, cold meats, bread and crackers, vegetables and fruit. Gill and a friend made fresh crab cakes with a mango topping. The rich desserts, in honour of the Oscars, were chocolate eclairs, made by a pastry chef friend of Helen's and an apple, blueberry crisp by Marlene.

Rob and I were the first to arrive. While I helped Helen arrange platters, Rob pressed the button on the remote and began to watch stars walk the red carpet. Marlene, Steve, and Lael arrived soon after. In my best hostess voice, I asked them and Rob what they would like to drink and poured and served. Except I forgot Rob. 

This bugged me. How could I forget him of all people? We had only been re-united the day before... and so, as I watched the opening scenes of the show - pleasantly surprised at its entertainment value - I looked across the room at Rob and lambasted myself for forgetting him. Part way through the evening, thinking I must make it up to him in some way, I left the room, slipped into the kitchen, and back into the living room, behind him and began to massage his shoulders and stroke his hair. He turned around, looked up, and lo and behold the man I was touching wasn't Rob. Everyone thought it a joke, including Rob, but I felt like an idiot. 

I can laugh now but I wasn't laughing at the time.

The past week has been crazy busy. I did finish the accounting at around midnight Friday night and I was able to create a flyer and a menu, and keep the house clean for around half a dozen potential buyers... 

I paused here and thought of Shirley whose father is dying. She has been writing more than usual so I went to her blog to learn that her dad died yesterday. Again death startles me. Frightens me. It has been happening too often. 

Happy Birthday, Penelope

My Two Valentines

Our Lovely 5 Bedroom Cottage for Sale in Dundarave, West Vancouver

I imagine that there is a family out there who would like to buy our cottage and raise their children here. It's a short walk to three schools, the beach, and Dundarave Village where there's restaurants, coffee shops, grocery store, and assorted boutiques. There's a young family next door and another across the street. 

The house is rather special. We have lived here 25 years and raised three children under its roof (which we replaced three years ago.) Before us, the Clarks lived in the house - also for 25 years and raised their two children here who have returned to visit - once the boy/now man to show his daughters where he grew up and once the girl/now woman to cut ivy for her wedding bouquet. 

Both Rob and I loved the house from 

the moment we saw it. It's wasn't pretentious, had many book shelves, and it felt...  I don't know what you call a place that feels good to you the moment you walk in....  It felt like us - casual, comfortable, quiet.  

With only Rob and me living in the house now - and often we're in France -  it's feels too big and not necessary anymore. Admittedly too, it is expensive to maintain two houses; not to mention, a lot of work. 

I had to have a tooth pulled today and some bone shaved in my mouth so if my descriptive powers are lacking, please visit Faith Wilson's realty site  where there is a movie, showing every room and all the details. I'm hoping some person or family soon will discover its charms so I can stop my incessant cleaning and gardening and move on... though Gill arrives in several days so I will ease up and enjoy her company. Rob returns a week Saturday. 

Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh

My brother-in-law Bill's party on Ground Hog Day reminds me of a Danny Kaye song. Around 30 or so guests were willing to make fools of themselves for a laugh and although I felt like a little old lady in the bright yellow wig my sister gave me, I wore it most of the evening - for a laugh or two. 

Earlier in the day, as I was slaving over the lavish cakes for the celebration, I thought of another man who was celebrating his 62nd birthday on Ground Hog Day. Strange as it may seem, every year on this day, I think of my first true love - the beautiful dancer I met when I was 15 years and send him a silent message. This year I sent him a real one... and he responded, noting that "so many life ingredients were added to the mix in impetuous youth." I continue to think on this... am I the same person today who I was then? Is Malcolm? Is Bill with his subdued afro? 

One of my favourite movies is "Ground Hog Day". I love the idea of doing the same thing over and over until I have it right. And also the idea that there's time to do anything I want - like learn how to play the piano and impress the one you love.

I am feeling a little breathless these days, feel that the world is spinning faster and faster, and there's no time to catch my breath, no time to do everything right, and I'm trying, in the pause between breaths, to sort of out priorities. What must I do and what is unimportant in the business of selling a house? 

I had an email from another friend who noted something that she felt was profoundly true: "You always give up what you love." This tore at my heart. As I look around the house that I have lived and loved in for 25 years and try and cover its flaws so someone else will want it, while at the same time, knowing that the flaws give it character, and whoever walks in and loves the place, will accept its imperfections; and I think also about the business accounts that our accountant is asking for (and which I haven't begun), and all the things that one must do each day, each week, to keep body and soul together, I feel inadequate and not up to the task. 

"You always give up what you love." I remember a scene from a movie - can't remember which one -  where a nuclear bomb is about to explode and the husband tries to urge his wife into the bomb shelter, and she won't leave until the dishes are done.... Priorities. I have said that I want to write a book before I die and I'm scared that I will never find the time to do what I love... though saying this I do a lot of little things that I love - like baking and decorating a beautiful cake and donning a hideous wig, like sitting in a cold restaurant, wearing my coat, and sharing a meal with good friends, like standing in an empty square in a little village in France with a bottle of champagne in one hand and a flute in the other, bringing in the New Year with two loved ones... 

And sometimes, I catch a glimpse of a solution to my battle against time... but at the moment it eludes me.