Post-it Notes from Hades

 

Strange where misery can lead you.Among the missives was a quote attributed to the late Joan Didion: "We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be."

The sinking September sun is shining directly into my eyes, as I head to call in on Demeter for the evening. That's why I initially think I'm imagining the spheres floating towards me.

Squinting, I can make out the silhouettes of a mother and two tiny girls, who are hurrying along the sidewalk away from me, living trails of bubbles.  Both girls have enormous wands, which they wave imperiously, but they are heading away so briskly, that they don't really see the full effect.  That gift is given to me, as each iridescent orb drifts past me, catching the golden light of early autumn, and turning it into bright pinks, greens and blues.

The trio vanish into the blinding aura, and I spare a glance at the last doomed globe.  It vanishes without a sound.

For our wedding anniversary this year, I bit the bullet and purchased an air purifier, the one most recommended on CBC's Marketplace, because summer smoke seems to be an annual menace in this benighted century.

It's something like this that really makes me miss my sense of smell. This was along my route home this morning. It used to be a bed-and-breakfast, which was bordered with many different roses, but there are a few left. The ones this colour usually had a glorious fragrance. I breathed in through my eyes instead.

I took this picture exactly eight years ago, by the Rideau River.

I have a Victoria story to tell. It involves turtles. A bit. It will have to wait until tomorrow.

Oh. A Victorian September after an absence of nineteen years.

The last full September I spent in Victoria was in 1999.

And it's green, with hints of gold and red. (I mean the leaves, not the riots of gold and red coming from the flowers in this photo. But that, too.)

The air is fresh and cool, even in the sunlight, which is warm but not oppressive.

If I could smell, I'd breathe in the wet pavement and damp leaves between showers that dampen, but do not soak.

I'd forgotten this.

On my morning descent, I notice that someone has dangled an ornament beneath the large gnarly branch of an ancient Garry Oak. It's the sort of quirky thing you'd expect to see in this part of the city, a tiny rendition of a birdhouse.

An older gentleman in stretchy light-grey pants notices that I have stopped to snap a picture and falls in step with me briefly, remarking on the neighbourhood, and how amazed he is that a family with small children lives in an enormous old house on the corner.

"Grandparents with money, I'll bet," I sigh. I can't think of many young families in the past couple of decades who could afford a large house within the old city limits without parental help.

"They've got a dog, too," I add. "They let him out in the yard by himself, I wish they wouldn't."

A friendly city worker cheerfully directs us to the other side of the street to avoid a cherry-picker, which is trimming back another Garry Oak from the lines and wires.

My stretchy-panted friend takes his leave and continues southward in his flip-flops.

Later in the day, the blessed rain finally falls.

Everyone talks about summer being over, even when it doesn't officially end for at least another three weeks.

This is the time when Ottawans steadfastly put on their autumn clothes, despite the humidex -- just as they don open-toed shoes in late March to walk through the slush.

However, we're in Victoria, which never was that clothes-conscious, probably because we're not that seasonal.

I've been inside with a miserable cold for two days, but there are lovely views out the window, but not this one, which is a few blocks away.

I was walking the Accent Snob on the dirt pathway in New Edinburgh Park this evening when I shoulder-checked the flaming bronze platter disappearing around the bend of the Rideau River.  It occurred to me that this was the last sunset of September, so in order to get a last unimpeded view of the departing sun,  I took a firmer hold on the poop bag and dog-leash in my left hand and, using my right hand as a brace, made a series of jumps down three boulders that lead to a favourite fishing perch.  The momentum sent me skidding on the dirt at the bottom and damn near over the edge into the water.  Another last for me, I think.

The autumn colours are coming to Hades early this year.
You never know where they'll turn up.

Technically, this is the last weekend of the summer isn't it?

This morning, I watched bemusedly as a young child accompanied his mother to school in a parka with the hood up. I mean, it was chilly, but I found a fleece jacket over a summer top was adequate.

I saw a dead bird at the base of the tree on our front lawn and it looked frozen -- until I noticed its head was missing, the work, no doubt of one of the many felines who wander our neighbourhood before strolling home to get dinner from their unsuspecting owners.

When I got off the bus to go to a family history workshop, the girl ahead of me was wearing a toque.
After the workshop, it was a beautiful, temperate afternoon, and I decided to take the twenty-five minute walk down Bay Street to reserve a rental commode for Demeter at the Red Cross. (She's unsure of her bladder control while waiting for the Resident Fan Boy [a Virgo] to emerge from the bathroom.)
I realized that I am totally unfamiliar with the stretch of Bay south of Laurier. At this time of year, it's a leafy parade of houses and townhouses featuring a dizzying variety architecture ranging from beat-up semi-detached to elegant Mission Style (though I can't say I care for the colour of the latter).
The neighbourhood seemed peopled with older men in baseball caps puttering in their front gardens.
I felt I was walking through a very old part of Ottawa which was totally new to me.
Pretty cool.

But not cold.

It has been established that I hate and dread the after-school buses of September.  I hate and dread the buses before school as well, but younger daughter has been getting lifts in the morning for the past three years, so I'm mostly spared them.

If we're truly unlucky, younger daughter and I are forced to catch the #150 Lincoln Fields which rounds the corner on to Iris and picks up a plethora of JH Putman students who are middle-school students, therefore 12 and 13-year-olds, and by definition loud and self-involved.  They crowd aboard, wrestling, turning suddenly with over-sized back-packs whacking the seated passengers, and pitching their voices so as to be heard throughout the bus.

Our agony is, mercifully, short-lived.  We get off at Queensway Station -- only to board Transitway buses crammed with Algonquin College students who are older, and slightly less obnoxious, usually hooked into their phones and earbuds. We are joined at Lincoln Fields by Woodruff High students, who vary in their loudness and obnoxiousness, and we climb off with some relief at Bank Street to await a #7 -- which is crammed with Glashan students, another blessed middle school. I use the term "blessed" ironically; elder daughter survived her early adolescence there.  Barely.

Two lovely girls see younger daughter and I struggling to the back and offer their seats.  I accept gratefully, but younger daughter has already sat down and when I point out the available seat by the window, she pushes past the astonished girls, shoving me aside with a "Move, Mum!"  I thank the girls again and see others in surrounding seats turning to stare.  I pull out my newspaper, turn to the Suduko, and bury my embarrassment in the squares, deciding to skip a treat at the coffee shop today.

Many passengers get out at Rideau Centre, but they are more than replaced by a parade of Lisgar students, and to my despair, more than a dozen De La Salle students troop on the bus near St Patrick, as the driver attempts to bully them to the rear.  Soon, my ears are being assaulted by teenaged angst and loose back-packs.  Two girls are hanging (well, swinging) from the railing and looking over my shoulder as I attempt to focus on my Sudoku.  One of them points at a square:  "That one's a five, you know."

I gaze up into her laughing eyes.

"Thank-you," I say, meaningfully.  Returning to my puzzle, I'm thinking grumpily: The merry face of Grindelwald….

When the last wave of kids board at Beechwood (gawd only knows from which school), I'm beyond caring, although I do curse under my breath. Our stop is next.

Usually, by October, the after-school activities kick in; some students will find lifts; others will drop out. Eventually, there will be a little more room on the buses.  I'm hanging on to that.

This is our fifteenth September in Ottawa, but only our fourteenth September in our house.  When we arrived on August 31st, 2000, our semi-detached was still occupied, and we took up residence for five weeks in a hotel on Cooper Street.  The windows faced north, and in the morning, we could see the high school students arriving at Lisgar Collegiate, from which elder daughter would graduate ten years later.  We didn't know that then.

Elder daughter was entering Grade Three, so mornings soon featured a scramble with younger daughter in her stroller to the elevator, then to Elgin Street to catch a bus to New Edinburgh, followed by the fifteen minute climb up the hill and past our future residence with all others who weren't school-bussed or driven.  One of elder daughter's classmates made the climb with his mother reading aloud from the latest Harry Potter as they walked.

I thought about those things as I waited out in front of our house for younger daughter's lift to arrive this morning. I thought about neighbours who have moved and the changes in the neighbours who have stayed.  Across the street in a house that was renovated over four years from a tiny bungalow to a two-storey house four times larger is the home to three platinum-haired children who squabble as they tumble and leap from their porch to the tank-like car which is one of the family vehicles.  I think the eldest must  have graduated to middle school; she often leaves separately with her mother now.

Next door, the tiny children who peered out curiously at the Accent Snob and me last winter are now escorted to the school bus by their father.  The little boy waves at me when prompted, trying to drag his eyes from the dog standing next to me.

I consider the changes I see in the cars bearing toddlers to teenagers up the road to two private schools, one Catholic school, and one public school.  It's alarming how many parents I see on cellphones with their children strapped in expensive carseats in the back.  I've even seen a mother holding her phone at arm's length as she proceeded slowly through the intersection at our corner. Checking a text?  Taking a selfie?  The mind boggles.

Across the street, a new neighbour is bringing in the garbage and recycling bins, talking to what appears to be a largish squirrel.  It's a dog which he picks up with one hand and tucks under his wrist.
As that first of the fifteen Septembers we've spent in Ottawa drew to a close fourteen years ago, Pierre Elliot Trudeau died.  His funeral was televised the day we moved into this house.  His eldest son, then a twenty-something, spoke eloquently at the service.  He now has three kids and lives up the hill, the leader of the Liberal Party. Last September, we ended up sharing a table with him, his pregnant wife and two tiny kids at the restaurant down the block which features "family dinners" (set menu, shared platters) on Mondays.  It was a bit awkward, really.

In 2000, I had an eight-year-old and a four-year-old.  One has graduated from university; the other will graduate from high school by the time the next September rolls around.

No, I wouldn't call those Septembers back.  I watch them flow by me like the nearby river.

Five years ago, I wrote a post for every day of September.  It was the first September younger daughter began attending her current school  and I was struggling with the adjustment of the long hours of transit.  I started composing the Writes of Passage, because I was obsessed with buses and so damn tired of riding them.

This month, I'm once again trying to write a post every day.  It's the last September younger daughter will be attending this school.  She gets a lift most mornings and over the years, I've found ways to make the long round trip to bring her home bearable.

This evening was the annual barbecue, one of thousands of similar events held across the country in schools everywhere, the first parent-teacher meeting of the school year.  I figure it's the twentieth of such first-month-of-school events I've attended, given the overlap of two daughters.  I've had it up to here with them. (The events, not the daughters.) But it's the last one, I told myself consolingly as the bus came to a halt, far away from home late in the afternoon.

As I clambered down, I remembered how much more difficult it is to alight (with a heavy thud, in my case) when the sidewalk is icy, especially when the bus hasn't quite pulled in to the curb.  Then I thought of the coming winter and the required circumnavigation of the school building, gingerly penguin-stepping the slick parking lot, because the surrounding park is shin-deep in snow, and because the upstairs daycare no longer permits us to use the main entrance due to so-called "safety requirements".  (Evidently, teenagers and their parents entering by the front door put the toddlers at risk.  We're obliged to be buzzed in at the side entrance by the other daycare which is in the basement.)   My heart sank, but I reminded myself that this is the last winter I'll have to do this.

The barbecue was set up outside, but we ate inside because the temperature had dropped from a humidex of 30 in the morning to 14 degrees Celsius by five o' clock.  Then the teachers called us into another room for a presentation, something that hasn't happened before.

It turns out the school is moving in early October.  To Bell's Corners.  Bell's Corners is five miles further west.  The school will have a building to itself.  It's a four-minute walk from the bus stop where we can catch a Transitway bus.  Unlike the old building shared with two daycares, the new building is close to coffee shops and stores, and has air conditioning and two bathrooms.  (The daycare will no longer let us use the bathrooms in the far hall, even though it's technically shared space.)

 But it's in bloody Kanata.

We were lucky with the buses home this evening, and I watched the sun set into the Ottawa River and considered that I would have the pleasure of riding beside the river every day until next June.  When I got home, I checked the bus times between our house in New Edinburgh and bloody Kanata, and, given that most of the route is on the Transitway, the bus trip shouldn't take much longer than it currently does.  And we'll not be picking our way around a flash-frozen parking lot, nor along a sidewalk that has flooded, frozen and half-thawed.

At the end of another long winter, we'll know how it's going to be.  But it also will be the last time.

I've been leafing through my journals for a glimpse of past Septembers as my days on NaBloPoMo draw to a close, particularly appropriate as the NaBloPoMo "theme" for October is "haunted". I've discovered the hard way that I shouldn't do this before bedtime; the past of John Mortimer, even the slaughter of the Romanovs, is a good prelude to sleep while my own past keeps me awake.

The last time I did this exercise (both NaBloPoMo and journal-review) was in February, that frozen little limbo in the dead of winter that seems to go on forever. September is different, a inexorable engine of transition, being in many ways the true beginning of the year. Fluttering back into my own past, I found my daughters plunging into the unknowns of new schools, the struggle of adjusting to new homes, new neighbourhoods, new cities. I relived the starts of my pregnancies (both confirmed in September), and the first hospitalization that led to my father-in-law's final slide into death. I remembered other crises: an abortion in the family, and my own marriage trembling precariously on the brink. It isn't all Sturm und Drang, but September never has been a month for eager anticipation; it's more a gauntlet to be got through, so one can lick one's wounds in October.

Since my mind is on ghosts and September, let me keep a promise I made in August. At that time, I wrote about elder daughter's encounters with her paternal grandmother who died three years before elder daughter was born. I was inclined to believe my daughter's story and here's why: Less than twenty-four hours after my mother-in-law died, the Resident Fan Boy had a vivid dream in the early hours of a September morning. His mother came to his bedside, as she used to do when he was a small boy in the rectory, except this time her breathing was laboured as it had been in the hospital during her final week.
"I'll be dead in three days," she told him, "but I'll be out in the living room if you need me."

The Resident Fan Boy woke with a start, desperately needing to go to the bathroom, but terrified of passing by the living room in our small apartment...

Three hundred and sixty-four days later, on the eve of the anniversary of my mother-in-law's death, I too was awoken in the wee sma' hours -- by a very large moth which "strafed" me, zooming from one ceiling corner of our bedroom, down right past my ear so I could hear the small motor sound of its wings, then up to the other side of the ceiling. It did this about four or five times until I wailed in terror, waking the Resident Fan Boy. I peeped out from my refuge under the covers and noted uneasily that the time on the alarm clock was the exact hour of my mother-in-law's passing. Then I mused over the coincidence of "moth" and "mother" beginning with the same letters. She never liked me much....

Well. So much for September. As I've said before, my comfort level is really about two posts per week, so I'll be leaving NaBloPoMo for now, and see if I actually accomplish those things I've neglected while posting daily. Seeing as I've been working with short months first, I plan to "NaBloPoMo" it again in April 2010.

Try to remember a kind of September/ When life was slow and oh so mellow

Listen, does this describe any one's September? Even if you're out on the farm, aren't you madly harvesting? Furthermore, I think most of us, with or without children, in school or long since graduated, are still bound inextricably to the rhythm of the school year. September means a re-shouldering of burdens, and, at our house, a few false starts at getting the hang of the new schedule.

Younger daughter and I have resumed the daily pilgrimage up the hill to school. We join the parade of parents-determined-to-not-drive-children-to-school (at least until the first big rain or snow, not an option for us, not having a car in the first place); parents-determined-to-bike-with-their-tykes-to-school (usually with parent on road and tyke on sidewalk; parent reminding tyke to ring his bell to signal you to leap out of his way); and dogs accompanying both aforementioned categories, much to younger daughter's delight.

After leaving younger daughter to the tender mercies of the staff and her schoolmates (please, dear God, some kindness this year), I make my way down the suddenly much emptier streets, encountering later rising dog walkers and large, sidewalk-encompassing strollers containing blond children pushed by Caribbean or Philippina ladies. It's that kind of neighbourhood. Occasionally a line of black SUV's with tinted windows slips by me. It's not a funeral cortege; it's the Prime Minister, off to work after dropping his vote-winning children off at school. (Gosh, I hope he loses this election, but I'm not holding my breath.)

When you were a tender and callow fellow...

Mid-afternoon, and I climb the hill again. Occasionally, I encounter the principal for some cheerful words about the weather or a spot of micro-managing: "It's looking pretty good for (younger daughter)," he informs me. "Has she told you that (Dutch Girl) has moved? No? Well, (Guardian Angel) is still here, so that's good..." I don't tell him that Dutch Girl actively snubbed younger daughter and Guardian Angel for the second half of the last school year when she took up with Unkind Russian Prodigy who besides instigating the snubbing, thought filling younger daughter's boots with snow was a huge joke and is the prime suspect for the Case of the Disappearing Indoor Shoes of last winter. What would be the point?

...When no one wept except the willow

And each afternoon, younger daughter and I descend the hill, being narrowly missed by sidewalk cyclists (fully helmeted of course, although we're not). Sometimes we're witness to after-school mini-dramas: 1) Two young boys sprint past us, slowing now and then to scan the horizon behind them with wide eyes. Not long after this, another young boy, clad in a camouflage tee-shirt with a huge red back-pack, trots by us, not exactly like Pepé Le Pew, but with a relaxed sort of speed. He catches up with the fleeing duo about half-a-block ahead of us; cuffs one and yanks the ear of the other, before almost serenely resuming his trot down the hill. Anxious duo (one rubbing his cheek, the other gingerly fingering his ear) balances on the curb of the street which is busier than usual with after-school pickups and school buses, before crossing to hurry down the other side. They vanish around the next corner. Seconds later, Pepé Le Pew emerges from around the other corner where he has evidently been lying in wait, and trots after them...

Without a hurt, the heart is hollow...

Or: 2) As the sky turns a greenish sort of grey, various clusters of homeward bound kids and families hurry past us. I glance down the hill and see the storm moving toward us, heralded by leafs whirling like protons and neutrons. Beyond, I can see the horizontal rain, a gift from the tail end of Hurricane Ivan which is now exhausting itself over Eastern Canada. I push younger daughter into a driveway to search out and hoist our umbrellas, out of the way of rushing pedestrians, and a large dog indignantly barks at us while a lady restrains him and calls an unheard reassurance over the howling wind. Younger daughter shrieks in delight as our umbrellas twist in our hands. Some of the family groups who had passed us earlier are taking shelter against fences and under trees. The wind changes directions and ambushes us from behind. My blouse is clinging icily to my back when we make the haven of the front porch. Even our underwear needs changing. Our heads, however, are dry....

Although you know the snow will follow...

Nice song, that. From the musical The Fantasticks. However, I have to wonder what Messrs Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones were on about. The September they describe is like no September I've ever remembered...