{ blog deja vu }

I've blogged this before, but it is just as appropriate for this "confused winter's spring" as it was when I wrote it several years ago. Last week we had summer temperatures followed by a five day blizzard. We went from long, dry grasses to three and a half feet of snow in my backyard again. It is just starting to melt, and today Derek and I ventured out with Kona to the dog park, our hoods raised to combat the wind that licked away the snow drifts. Enjoy the poem, whether winter or spring in your neck of the woods!



poem for today


if i could make today my own--
dive into confused winter's spring--
i would pack two blankets, one for
underneath my sitting self and one
for my back.

i would let my hair down, would
prepare myself for wind and
sunny squinting, would pack a book
heavy enough for the day,
pack foods inviting enough
for fingertips.

with my camera i could (not) capture
the mystery of today--all
sun and silhouette, with nothing
in between but
wind. can you see the photo now,
all brightly dark, held steady in
a blur, all sun spots and streaks--
can you see today?

can you embrace today? i would embrace it,
caught up in its blinding light,
unseeing all around me, wind licking my ears,
howling me here and there, eyes closed,
down whatever path chosen for my today's feet.

{ little ditty for today }

I'd like to take this piece of life
and save it for tomorrow
that when I face a day of strife
I'll have some joy to borrow.

Just a little ditty I composed today in quick, contented silence.

The talent show yesterday went amazingly well--it brought tears to my shadow-hidden eyes as I shook my head with pride over my little demons turned darlings. Students that most normally love to (endearingly) crawl all over my last nerve really pulled it together and strutted their stuff, not to mention did everything in their earthly power to please me. There are no words for the preciousness of the nervous grins that my favorite Moe kept shooting me from off-stage as I cued him up with hand gestures from below the stage in my front row audience seat.

The tone of the school was altogether different today at K-School, the day after the show; even the principal and my colleagues noticed it. We were all floating on a sort of high, taking a new pride in ourselves and our own. In the midst of a sixteen year old being stabbed half a block away this week and a pedophile attempting to lure three of my students (on three different occasions) into his truck (yes, that all happened this week), we emerged as a sort of new breed of conquerors in this confusing big city life.

I face the fresh weekend with a deep satisfaction and joy with my life and the beautiful teens that are a part of it. At this point, I'm looking forward to Monday morning on a Friday night, and I say that's a good place to be in! Thought I'd share a slice of zealous joy with you as it still has me floored at 1:25 am! Good night!



P.S. a poem i found and liked at mole via slow reads.

{ Who's got talent? }

This is a ridiculously funny and cute photo I snapped of Kona over spring break when we played with her on the beach at Whiterock, BC. She was shivering cold from the damp and the wind, but she couldn't get enough of chasing her frisbees through the tidepools, silly girl. She definitely has got that knack--or talent, if you will, to be fitting to my title--to win you over! We played frisbee for well over an hour, me with my ridiculously tight hood up over my head!

Speaking of talent, tomorrow is the first-in-a-long time Talent Show at K-School. My favorite student, Mohammed, wrangled me into setting up this crazy scheme sometime around Christmas. I never thought the day to do it all would actually come. I've been running auditions like a madwoman (American Idol style with golden tickets and everything!), learning how to work soundboards, ripping peoples' backtracks, and having dress rehearsals. Everyone told me that a talent show at K-School would not work; in fact, they said they have tried in the past (although quite some time ago) and that they have always failed.

It must be said, however, that things are going terrifically well, if I do say so myself. We had more people audition than we could allow in, which was the first unexpected item. Secondly, the people who were auditioning were surprisingly hiding these amazing talents! Take this tiny grade 7er I teach, for instance. He can't be more than four feet tall, he is just a tiny Lebanese boy, and yet he secretly has a brown belt in tae kwon do! He got up there and went through these perfectly controlled moves that I swear could kill a full grown man. I was very impressed. We have some amazing singers and dancers as well.

Today we put the finishing touches on a huge banner we've made for the gym, and tomorrow's the big day. Parents and guests from the community will be there to see how we do. I'm super excited, but a little nervous at the unpredictability of adolescents.

Wish us luck!!

{ diptych }

"Footprints in the Sand" -- just like that cheesy poem, but animal style ;)

Taken from our spring break trip to B.C. when we played on the beach at Whiterock with our dogs.

{ and the writing continues }

Here is my take to a prompt on an experience that changed my life. Enjoy!

Two years ago I discovered just how small and accessible the world actually is in this twenty first century. The night before I was to start my two day journey from Canada to Africa via England and the United Arab Emirates, I perched nervously in my favorite seat on our couch. Our tiny condominium’s living room glowed with a familiar light as my husband, Derek, and I racked our minds for any last-minute items that we would have to pack. I was a nervous and neurotic mess, although excited to go. I had very little experience with traveling, and the experience that I had already had was less than ideal; in fact, I would have to say it was quite negative, involving homesickness and physical sickness in general. Even my honeymoon had left me hospitalized with a form of dysentery that to this day I do not know how I acquired.

Nevertheless, this trip to Africa, planned ten months in advance, was now imminent, and I was working to convert all my jitters into nothing but positive stomach butterflies. As I sat in my favorite couch seat, I took in all the pleasures of home, all my things in exactly their right places, where I liked them. To leave the comforts of home seemed against my nature, and yet I had signed up to do it. I flipped vaguely through a magazine I had received in a pile of junk mail, then tossed it on my ottoman, where it landed, splayed half open. I left it there, then went to bed to catch a few hours of sleep before our early morning trip to the airport.

Once in Africa, my cautious nature ruled me for the first few days—possibly even weeks. And yet, I managed to loosen up and play in the wintery ocean on the coast of Jeffreys Bay, donning a wetsuit and doing some bodyboarding (I never could master the surfboard), while some local Africans looked at us like we were crazy hooligans as they sported their winter fur-lined. I took a six hour trek to sand dunes nine storeys tall, barefoot all the way (suffice to say, my feet were hardened and swollen the next day, but it was well worth it). I went on a safari and was less than a few arm spans from a male lion, leader of its pride. I slept in a grass hut and did everything possible to keep mosquitos—and their malaria—away from me. I continued to sleep in said hut one night even after we killed a spider double the size of my hand-span in my bedroom earlier that same afternoon. I ate grilled crocodile meat from Lake Kariba in Zambia as we dined on the lake’s edge and were carefully on the lookout for poisonous snakes in the long grass of the yard. I saw a killed black mamba snake, shot dead by a young schoolboy, its carcass stretched out long and thin in the dust. I photographed Derek as he lied beside it, dwarfed by its length. I hugged orphaned children, many with HIV themselves, I’m sure, and helped raise a roof on the orphanage that they or their cousins might one day live in. I played jump rope with village kids while the men tarred beams for the roof of the new clinic we worked on. And then, twenty seven days later, I was back in Pretoria, South Africa, in a mall more modern and flashy than many I’ve seen in Canada, surrounded by elegant restaurants, internet cafes, electronics boutiques, and designer clothing stores. The culture shock may have been greater coming back to what I felt familiar with than going away from it.

Fourteen hours past that, I was in a plane flying over the deserts outside Dubai, the world-class airplane touching down just past midnight in a temperature of more than forty degrees celcius. In the Dubai airport, I was due for a twelve hour layover in the middle of the night. I visited a McDonalds in which the menu was written in Arabic, and I ordered the same chicken nuggets that I could have had anywhere. There was a comfort in these familiar morsels. I wandered past a Starbucks kiosk and wondered to myself whether the milk they were using was cows’ or some other animal’s. I caught a cat nap lying under a bench, as I saw other weary travelers doing. I didn’t mind the floor as the world-class airport’s carpet was immaculate. Curry smells and other exotic fragrances drifted out of travelers’ lounges where, for a few dollars, you could have a cushioned sofa to nap on, and a middle eastern breakfast buffet when you awoke. The floor seemed to be enough for me as I dozed for a few solid hours amidst the hubbub, woken only as the imam gave the public call to prayer, chanting in a foreign tongue as the majority of travelers—men clad in long white robes and women in black burkas and head scarves—laid themselves low before their god.

Within thirty hours more, I was long past the coasts of Africa, past also the deserts of Dubai, and just past the islands of the U.K. I was back to Canada, to my home on the prairies. In an exhausted stupor I hugged and kissed loved ones who greeted us. We were whisked home, helped with our luggage, jetlagged to the max. I dropped off our foul-smelling luggage in the front hallway of our condo, resolving to tackle the stench of our thirty-day soiled clothes later, after a sleep in my own soft bed. As Derek used the shower, I allowed myself to rest a moment on the couch. Without thinking of it, I sat in my favorite seat as I always did, to the far left, stretching out my legs to the ottoman. I had to kick aside a splayed out magazine that was in my way. I inched it forward with my toes, remembering suddenly, in a sort of time warp, that it had been a long thirty days ago that I had tossed that same magazine there, by my own hand. In those thirty days I had been a changed person, had had countless experiences that seemed nothing more than surrealist dreams as I sat in this unchanged space of our condo, a space locked in a month’s old time frame. Without trying to, it was then that I marveled at the smallness of our world, at its accessibility, and at our newfound human ability to jump cultures and span worlds in such a small amount of time.

And where, a month before, nerves and neuroticism had dominated me, now it was nostalgia that flooded my senses. With all the comforts of home at my fingertips, I found it was the uncertainty and the novelty of my adventure that I craved, instead. Luckily, there would be plenty more world, near and far, left for me to explore.

{ rebirth of a writer }

I used to write all the time. When I was young I wanted to grow up to be a writer--a novelist, more precisely. I started novels left right and center (never finished any, unfortunately) about just about any topic--pesky little brothers, leprechaun villages, and unsung medieval heroes. As I moved into my high school years, I started very thoughtful journals, with observational articles and emotive poetry. The poetry continued through university as it was just about all I could find time to write--I would jot a little ditty as I rode the bus to school, or create some unique similes or metaphors in the margins of my notebooks in a lecture hall. My life as a teacher has seen all but a little of my writing taper off and die. It is ironic that as an English language arts teacher I should not have the time to do any of the reading and writing that I profess to my students has changed and enriched my life. When they say, "Show us some of your poems, Mrs. E!", I realize that I have to delve into a notebook from five years ago to find any of the "good stuff".

Well, I am pleased to announce that I am taking steps to change that!! I have joined Karel's writing club with several other very busy ladies, and we are endeavoring to write weekly even though our lives are horribly busy. The prompt this week was to create a short story containing these three elements: forbidden love, an elephant, and green onions. I am so far at page 11 after only a day and a half (mainly of late weekend nights) of working on my spontaneously thought up story, and I am honestly loving it. I am loving the process, and loving how my characters begin to speak on their own accord, which was a phenomenon I forgot about when writing engaging fiction.

To be honest, I am struggling with the climax and ending right now--which is where I have always had trouble. I explained to Karel that I was always the kid who ended stories with "and then they woke up" so that I didn't have to provide a logical tying together of loose ends. However, none of that cheater's business this time; I will do the thing justice. And so, while Derek sleeps off his exhausting night shift, I will sit with little puppy Kona at my feet and attempt to finish this thing. The deadline is tomorrow anyways.

It feels good and validating to dig up a part of myself that I used to love so much. Perhaps I'll share a teaser with you sometime.

{ homeward bound }

Well, our little spring break is over, and here's what we're leaving. This is a photo from a day this week when we walked the dogs along a rural canal.

I'm back to school on Monday morning, but this little vacation has done me a world of good!

See you back in Alberta!



(click photo to see a bigger version)

{ a distant wave }

Hello from British Columbia! I am at my in-laws' house taking a much, much needed spring break. As you might be able to tell from my lack of blog posts, school life has gotten the best of me once again. The general drama of K-School seems enough to suck the life out of anyone on a day-to-day basis, but I have managed to escape to the sunny(ish) reaches of Abbotsford and Vancouver! Today I head to the big city (Van) to do some market perusal and shopping. I will drink my favorite Bellini tonight at the Macaroni Grill and can't wait (it's been awhile!).

Tomorrow Derek and I drive to Seattle to spend one or maybe two nights there. We will take in our favorite sights (Pike Place Market, Claimjumpers restaurant) and hopefully some new ones.

Will post again soon!