Tree Stories High

Trees tell stories. Every morning, rain or shine, you will find me on my deck with a mug of honey coffee in hand, staring at my "sentinels". The sentinels are seven very tall cedar trees, not on my property, but on the one adjacent. One of the great trees is the grandfather and he is the highest. Within his huge fronds, since the last wind storm, I see that long ago, his trunk split and left him with three stout arms that continued to become taller and taller as the decades went by. I can see a space there, and it's where, in my deckdreams, I build a tree house, a place in my mind,  I can go to find peace and see the ocean below. The other sentinels are younger and learning as they lean with the sea winds and snows if we get some, and tolerate man who comes and cuts off their lower limbs because they hinder the lawn mowers. When there are high winds, the sentinels protect each other and think how foolish man is to "thin" trees that need to  hold each other up, and then man wonders why they fall. Their roots are shallow and reach far around but not deeply. When I sit on my deck sipping strong coffee, they don't see me, but I watch them and learn every day. Some days, they shine in the sun. On dull days, they sigh. Their sighing doesn't make a sound, it is seen only in the movement of their needles, as breezes wander. The tightly woven fronds wave up and down gently as together, their branches of meshed needles say hello and good-bye to the invisible air passing. This is the sigh of the cedars. When there is a storm, it whips the branches and their small cones and old used, dry twigs snap off and fly. They make crow nests one day. Their tree dance is not angry, but a chorus of sound and fury, exciting and telling a story of nature's controlled violence that is, and needs to be. If you have seen a tree enveloped by fire in a forest, it blasts into a terrible flame, the same dance but it changes the great growth and it doesn't come back the same. Until later. Fires are something a tree knows of. Some throw cones or re-live or stands and fall to feed the earth and what is to come. Trees understand. But my sentinels have friends. A little further away there are two fir trees, a different but welcome breed to them, as all trees, and these are what I call the scouts. They see a different angle of my sea side town. Their needles are spiked and shiny, their cones fat and full. There were three scouts once, but no more. Someone built a concrete tower much like the others rising into the sky here, but not as beautiful and living as the trees. The one gone was cut down. The fir scouts are taller than the sentinels and they remember that they are trees of wood. Their brother was sawn and sold for lumber. The trees tell me it's okay, because that means the tree doesn't die but only changes. It makes an even closer relationship with Man as his shelter called a house or furniture or warmth. Trees bear no hatred or envy or scorn. They can't, though they are alive like us. They simply grow and accept. They are without curiosity or ambition. Today, the sentinels told me a short story about youth. The end two sentinels are young and reaching up and up, not thick and secure as the chief sentinel, but slim and flexing in the winds and making a happy dance to welcome birds who want to find a perch where they can look all around and check out where to find the best people garbage where today they can feast. Birds use thin, young sentinels to scope out their enemies: rivals, small hawks or large eagles or perhaps to dance and  charm one of their own in a song or pretty furling of wings and tail. But the eldest cedar standing silently by, shows, not tells, that to grow old and stay tall, you need the protection of your own branches to fend off the rare but possible storms whose imposed dances, whip you around and around until you cannot stop the snap of the center of your being, and your stem breaks you to be, not one, but two forks or more to the sky. The old sentinel says nothing, it stands and shows the way as all trees, to tell tales.

Geog Lesson

 Geography never appealed to me in school, therefore, I opted for History.  Neither, in my day, connected the Whys over the Whens and Whats. It was a matter of memorizing dates and major wars. Now after the schooling days are over,  we see the flaws in the lessons. The flaws are relatively harmless. The dates we memorized faded when we left school and we recall little about our years of cumbersome lessons. The fault is that the lessons didn't go further than mere names and numbers, times and locations.  Geography school lessons, when later, you travel the world, become the reality that was needed originally. Travel is the true geography lesson because it puts you in an actual place and lets you  feel and absorb  the environment of a place. It's the true geography. The "geography" of a people, nurtures those within its sphere. Where you are in the world, holds the people who live there, literally off the land. You experience what they eat, what the land and water produce according to the weather of the area, and how the people work on its "skin" or under it. You breathe their air and drink their water and sense everything that their surroundings permit, according to its use. We learn that people are so close to their geography that they are it. When they are taken from it, they are never comfortable and yearn to return. They may want to escape the politics of their country but they love their land. The land is not little lines and blobs of water that must be coloured blue as in school lessons. It is not about the dots to memorize, that are cities and towns and the black dotted or wiggly or straight lines that are rails and roads. The actual places live, they move, they have scent and sensation. They crawl with the humanity that made their histories whether denoted as good or bad. Places or land,  can't be erased like the lines on paper we worked on in our books, that determine  boundaries. We learned in school that as wars came and went, boundaries changed but the geography remained. If somehow when we are "educated" we could see more than numbers and name, but the ways of life, the work and the culture, we would perhaps love more of what we learn and hunger for more. I think that teachers who do this for their students, are truly teaching something that matters in forming our young to see and make the world a closer place. Why we are so wrapped up in dates and names and memorizing them to receive good marks, is ridiculous when what the people were like and why they were so, matters most. You can easily carry around with you a historical time line that shows you the numerical data. We all forget most of the dates of our essays at school anyway. I recall seeing checked off in the margins, test points toward getting an A the more dates you could drum up. They were soon forgotten.  What did impress us was when a teacher, if we were lucky, showed us the importance of the times and events that occurred on the land, to the people who lived on it and why they did what they did, in creating their histories. To hone in on what life was like as a serf or a king or a slave or an aborigine and what the true meaning of that lifestyle was to those who lived there is what is most interesting.  Until movies came along that portrayed the truths we didn't touch in schools about those who lived on the lands, we drew maps of or took notes on and memorized numbers, we didn't truly realize what it was like to be oppressed or ruled or regaled. The best entertainment films later, brought us right into the lives of those who went about in their lands and made history. From them we learned that the people grew out of the very soil. It formed them as they were forming their lands. The people are the lesson.

Ignore The Snore?

 Ignoring snoring is impossible. Millions, nay billions, would support me in that. Maybe the snore sufferers wouldn't publicly admit how much they abhor the night din, but if you stepped into bedrooms or those next to bedrooms in which this offensive noise occurred, you would find the harsh truth of the infliction. The truth about snoring is that it is however much hidden, a very real hazard. The hazard is to marriage, friendship and groups of people who share sleeping spaces. As a young married, I used to wonder why my older aunts and uncles had separate bedrooms in their homes. These were often called "the guest room" even though it was usually the place where the lady of the house went when the night noise became too much to tolerate. We all need our eight to ten hours. I would say that most people snore whether they admit it or not. The way the human body changes in the aging process if not before, makes snoring as natural as dental decay and about as ugly.  There are all sorts of gimmicks that are supposed to stop the annoying sound but few of them, if any, work for very long. Surgeries of the laser kind or otherwise might help but most of the world simply either tolerates the racket or finds a way to escape it nightly. Most of the snorers are male but I happen to know of a female who outdid any male snore I have encountered. She flatly refused to believe she snored but her volume was enormous and although she accused her husband of making loud snores and even taped him, hers beat his any day. Or night. I know because they slept at our house occasionally and our sleep was impossible as the two did their duet down the hall. Where I live in a concrete building, and I live alone, we have a snorer. I have yet to learn from which unit the chorus is coming from but it is not too far off. When I sat on my deck during the summer and Covid kept us all at home, this individual evidently slept during the day. Not only did the horror of the noise dominate the day at times, it also happened at night. I like my window open at night but now, it's open only a crack because of Mr. or Ms. Snore. To end snoring when sleeping with a partner, the starting method of making the noise stop is to jiggle the bed and say sweetly "you are snoring". When that doesn't work the bed is bounced and the words are the same but louder. Poking or other physical efforts come third, but should be employed only if the first two don't work. Physical moves can lead to "I am not snoring" which is legendary, or some sort of retaliation later in the day such as being victim to great loud sneezing or nose blowing or interesting words. The final and best solution is for the offended to move out of range of the snoring offender. Like off to the guest room, for example. Why no medical experts have addressed this common abhorrence is beyond me since it affects everyone regardless of colour, race, religion, age, socio/economic or any other standing, and causes grief and consternation amongst all. My sun deck snorer used to drive me from enjoying the day until I brought my speaker onto the deck and found it soothed my desire to go down or up or across and bang on the noise-maker's door to awaken  Sleeping Beauty and stop the ado. That method is not ethical so I invested in a head set and music and that works well. I tell myself, the snorer might decide to move out and that comforts me in some small way. In the meantime there is always music.

The Other Country

 The other country runs along our border and we are said to be "friends". For a very long time, we thought it was just like us but as simply another piece of ground to the south of us. This other country, is larger in many ways and older. We found it exciting in their history and learned with great interest about them. Theirs and our history is of course, a new one because both original peoples and their history has superior honour and worth. Those to the south knew little about us other than thinking we were always found under piles of snow and ice. It didn't matter that their states right next to our provinces, directly across the border, shared exactly the same weather. The theory remains generally along the border. We seemed to them to be, if noticed at all, amusingly backward and less fashionable or interesting. In lots of ways we were "backward" in that the nature of the citizens in our country is and was, more conservative and thoughtful. We admire their verve and showiness, their gum chewing and Hollywood colourful ways and fashions and yes, even their government's systems that were largely two party as most generally are: liberal thinking and conservative thinking but played out in different ways. We felt they were big brothers and sisters to us. When I was a teen, because we lived so close to the "American" border (this term to be discussed a bit later), I went shopping for certain kinds of fashions to wear to high school. Some of my better off friends, did all of their shopping in the States as we called it, and emulated the garb of the young stars as much as possible. Their music and art and design was  admired and emulated,  their behaviours and music and style. It remains so today. We looked up to the "Americans". The term "American" bothers me because anyone residing in the Americas: North, South and Central, is American. The folks to the south of us adopted the term "American" as theirs, and refer to themselves in that almost-misnomer as "American". They are those of the United States in North America, they are not the only Americans. But that's my take on the subject. Furthermore, it appears that everything the "Americans" do, we here in Canada, admire and often copy. Gradually, we are developing confidence in our own large, beautiful country from sea to sea to sea and are very proud of that uniqueness. We learn from those in The States just as we do from all those on every other continent. And while we may look like Americans and in many ways behave similarly, we see ourselves, not as clones of those to the south of us, but as a people of  special character just as all other countries do of their own good people.  We are friends, but as equals, not as those a step behind the "Americans". More and more we take pride in our country. Our identity is proudly Canadian and solely so. We appreciate the foreign people to the south in their special ways, too. We two countries with all of our differences live peaceably side by side, and cooperate in most ways. Neither side of the border brags to be better in our differences. We are much alike and much different, but it works. The latest election was of great interest to Canadians and we hoped that however it turns out, it will be something to please and benefit the "Americans" to the south. Of course, we care about the results, but we are not of that country. What we or they do in our interactions, is important and even though what happens may have some effect on us, we have our own systems and ways. We are not about to change merely because of what happens in other countries, but we are interested in their changes and will decide our actions for our Canadian systems. The world is one, as are we all.

Garbage Now and Then

 When you've lived a long time, you have dumped a lot of garbage in your day. There was a time when garbage went into a kitchen bin taken out by Dad when it got beyond Mom's tolerance for odor. Dad put it into the "can". Those were the days of yore. We didn't call it trash then.  It was simply The Garbage. Mysterious folks came along in the early hours, absconded with it and left the empty bins at the side of the road. The local dog who collected can lids often took ours, but eventually the lid found its way back. Perhaps it was run over and misshapen but it remained able to pretend as a lid. The lid, although flattened, continued in its use but was now ineffective in keeping out the raccoons. Putting a large rock on the tin meant only that the raccoons would tip it over and the world could then see everything about your secret life. Everyone passing knew what you ate and everything else at a glance. The only way to discourage the raccoons was to keep your cans in the garage until garbage day or get a large vicious dog. Garbage day was loudly obvious every week in times when the men who collected it shouted to each other even though they stood inches apart. They reveled in making the biggest noises they could possibly muster. Today's garbage men seldom set foot on the outside pavement what with dumpsters that do a better job but certainly make twice as much noise on their own. When we lived on the waterfront long ago, the method for dumping garbage, since we didn't have such luxuries, was to row your ten footer out from shore and empty the garbage into the ocean. Most of it was dug into the garden but the rest went on a boating trip and I am not sure even today, if it weren't a better method. There weren't a lot of us where we lived and we made sure that to be fair, we filled the bottles and cans with water before watching them descend down into the inky blackness. The water was so deep we didn't know where that was. No one seemed to think it was wrong. The water system hadn't "come in" yet and every one had wells. When the water did "come in", we all began filling our wells with the garbage. Everything went into the old wells which hadn't provided very good water in the first place. It didn't take long to fill up wells because everything including small pieces of furniture and other household detritus went in with the wet garbage. If someone dug the wells up today, they would be the middens of our times. Garbage now has become a rather exclusive commodity. Where I live, the trash is a vital matter and everyone must do long division. The wets, the paper, the glass and plastic and anything else has  the correct bins. The regular garbage whatever that is, goes into the dumpster. The dumpster lid is so heavy that only Charles Atlas could manage to open it, therefore, it is propped up precariously with an old tree branch.  It has become a social event putting the garbage into the various basement bins. The composting bin smells very strong, the paper one is pregnant with on-line purchasing cardboard, while the bottle boxes have are the most interesting scents. Condo status is determined largely by their liquor and wine bottles. Not everyone is very ambitious about rinsing cans and bottles and the alcohol fumes can be rather overwhelming in that area by the time the trash men come along. On a designated day, early in the morning some invisible people come and thunderously roll the bins out to the street along with all of the other invisibles up and down the street who line them up at the curb. Occasionally, the infamous black Mercedes Benz woman comes along with her bottle grabber and goes upside down in the bins taking out with what she can to stuff her nice black vehicle before driving off. She isn't supposed to do this, but so far she remains elusive. I guess it helps her with the luxury car payments. The other day, I bought a cute little pink garbage container for my kitchen. The lid opens when I come near and when I shut the under sink cupboard door presumably it closes. It's a bit like the fridge fairy that turns the lights off and on therefore, I have not been able to catch the closing of the lid. It happens only when the door closes. I guess. Garbage has come a long way.