Incommunicado

It seems more like a grand illusion than major progress on a grand design.  

Just when I had decided that some balance was returning to my Life, it seems that Fate, the Universe and all that, decided to deliver me major systems' failure. And how odd - except that it is the nature of coincidence - that when equipment goes wrong, it goes wrong in more ways than one at the same time.

A telephone crackles into its death throes. That's okay. We have another new one tucked away (everything you could ever need is secreted somewhere here). Oh. No. It's dead before it's alive. Aha, what about that trusty old Pert phone sitting lonely in an empty room down at the Skudder House? 

It works there, seducing tea time salesmen with its listed number and then ignoring them. But it won't perform in my kitchen, which is helpful - sort of - because now I know it's not the original phone (well it is, though that's a different matter). But the internet is still working? I don't understand this stuff. I just use it.

I have to stand out on the road to get a signal with my cellphone (that's what comes of living in a Secret Garden). The young man from Telecom wants to give me instructions for an equipment check. I'll lose him if I go inside, but a helpful visitor has already done the check, so what's next? 

A technician. He comes next day - four hours before the appointed time. Good job it's Sunday morning. Nice man; he finds the problem and fixes it. The problem goes back to a water pipe that burst just before Christmas.  No, actually, it goes back to when someone (Elwin, was that you?) damaged the wiring while installing underfloor insulation  Water must have flowed between floor and insulating layer and found entry into damaged wiring, affecting only the telephone signal, not Broadband.

Nice to have the phone line working again...

By Tuesday I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not receiving emails (though I am online). My subscription has been suspended!  A call to the Yahoo help number - it's Telecom really that I talk to - reveals that I have had two notices alerting me to the fact that my account has seen no activity for some time and it will be discontinued unless I respond.

This is where computers need a human brain - to notice that the secondary account operates as a primary account. Only because when I changed email addresses after Elwin died, I wanted to retain access to our old account. Over time I stopped checking it as eventually personal mail stopped coming through on it, and when I bought my new computer I didn't even have a tab open for it any more. Which is why I missed those crucial alerts (I have to say they look just look so many scam alerts). I was offered a new account but that means changing my email address. I was asked for money to set things right. Red rag to a bull, that last one. "Fix it," I demanded, "and ring me back when you have."  They did.

So maybe now I can get on with the rather pressing business of organising the 2013 Lammas Tour of NZ Morris Dancers to England. I can focus my thoughts and allot my time...

If only the sparkly new phone, which worked after the damaged line was fixed on Sunday, hadn't started disconnecting when calls come in. The old phone really is worn out so I can't re-commission that. The new phone was a free gift - a bribe no less - for changing power companies. What do I expect?  Time for more standing on the road with my cellphone, and waiting for a resolution... or maybe I should just install that lonely Pert phone.

Some of you will have noticed that what I have actually been doing with my time is playing around with my camera, and writing inane prose. Just tentatively, I am wondering whether my photo upload facility is back for good. I'll make the most of it while I can. 

New Beginnings

At the beginning of this week my youngest child became a fully-fledged secondary school student at Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti. For the school, now entirely sited at the College of Education campus at Canterbury University, this is a beginning or at least a moving forward, as the whole school regroups on one site - the Wairarapa Campus - until the Wairarapa Stream leads us metaphorically to the Avon River and back into the central city.

It seemed ironical on Monday morning to be back in a demolition zone even though the school had moved well away from the city centre after the February 2011 earthquake. The building behind Kitty is part of the old Teacher's College and deemed unsafe, it will make way for a grassed area for the school student's use. 

The week ends with the incredible lightness of being of having my earthquake repairs and re-decorating completed. After two years, I can begin to reclaim our personal space! If my January photo upload problem hadn't returned, since I set the photo of Kitty up, I would post another progress photo... 

Back to Blogging

Tonight I'm celebrating - with a large bag of double chocolate fudge - the return of the Upload facility for photographs to my blog. Ah joy. Picking a single photo to celebrate with (not being prepared for a post) I offer you a progress shot of the lounge room. Since the room is finished now I am very happy. This has been a busy, not to mention sweltering month. There has been a lot going on in many different ways and right now all of it feels good!

Reflection on Recovery

So much for good intentions.
I plan an apt post for New Year.
I visualise the photos I want to use in a reflective essay.
I scour my files for them and note their vital statistics.
I'll get this started on Christmas Day and give myself plenty of time, I think to myself, knowing how the last few busy months have made regular blogging almost impossible.

As I gather in the events and feelings that have made this year memorable for me, I realise that far from treading water - as it feels in the passing - I have met challenges and progressed through emotional healing, while getting on with the quite ordinary business of Life.

This time last year I was celebrating New Year in the jet stream, somewhere high above the Indian Ocean after a month spent in England and Northern Ireland. In a post I wrote on  arrival home - Leaving - I mentioned the sense of having re-set my emotional clock. 

How much did that matter? Did it make a difference in the grand scheme of things? Whatever, 2012 has certainly been a better year for me than 2011 was.  The gradual process of redevelopment associated with Canterbury's Earthquake rebuild feels like a metaphor for my own recovery from Bereavement. Some processes speed ahead while others stall after promising beginnings, and others make no apparent advances at all.  But overall, there is a feeling that the deep grief, the incapacity to function normally, the urge to pack up and leave, is behind us - and me.

I have noticed that over the past three months the fog that impaired my mental function has lifted. I realise how little I had been taking in - not just people's names but people's faces and identities; how I shied away from accountability - hoping someone else would know what needed doing better than me; how technical detail was too much to understand - hampering learning about any new equipment; how lethargy, tiredness and lack of motivation made three acres and two high maintenance old houses more than I could cope with. Around the second anniversary of Elwin's death in November, I noticed a return of interest in managing and planning projects. This was such a relief especially as I actually started working in the garden. I also noticed that I no longer felt 'widowed' which isn't to say that I didn't feel the loss because the yearning for Elwin's company seemed stronger than ever as I was able to gradually remember what life had been like before Death.

In spite of that fog though, there has been plenty to be pleased about throughout this year. My children, acknowledging their own growth through adversity and continuing to shine in their Drama activities. Opening my online Etsy shop - Dunedin Street - and making international sales! Making myself a new personal space in a re-vamped bedroom, and making landscaping improvements around the Secret Garden. 

Right now though as the Midnight stroke draws near I am cursing both my computer and Blogger, knowing that there are reasons for and answers to annoying glitches (a little screen that disables my text while it asks me if I want to log in again - over and over again) and after all that preparation with photos a week ago, I still cannot post them.   So this is a wordy essay not just about the past year, but a continuing chapter in recording my passage through bereavement. 

Time now to let the Old Year out of the back door and the New Year in at the Front with a glass of something to toast you all.

Happy New Year! 

Midsummer Harvest cont.

Be Good

“Behave yourselves, you kids,” said Dad carrying an oven tray full of jam jars to the kitchen bench.  They were hot, straight out of the coal range, sterile and ready to swallow jam.  Dad didn’t want to burn a child and he didn’t want to drop the jars.

“Shoo, get out of the kitchen now.  You can fill the wood bin up if you like.”

It was called a coal range but they burnt wood on it, because they grew their own.  But that meant it needed a lot of attention to get the temperature up and to keep it at a steady heat.  Only Dad could drive the range evenly enough to make sponges; only Dad could drive it hot enough to bake scones. Mum cooked dinner on it - or in it, every day.

The kids fetched the firewood, making a hut in the woodpile for a bit, before they remembered to load the wheel barrow.  Then they heaved the lid off the box where it nestled beside the chimney piece, and started throwing in the wood.  Dad was pouring jam into jars, using a jug to scoop the plummy pulp from the jam pan. The first block of wood hit the inside of the wood box, which was also a little door into the kitchen, and the jam ran down the outside of the jar as Dad jumped out of his skin.

            That night Mum served roast mutton and new potatoes, and the plum jam spoke with cellophane crackles in ruby jars along the kitchen dresser. 

“Did you take the stones out,” asked Malcolm.

“No, I didn’t,” said Dad. “They are just the little plums, it wasn’t worth it.”

“I probably won’t eat that jam then,” Malcolm said. He was six and knew his own mind.  Mum said, “You behave yourself or else…”

“But I think I will,” said Malcolm remembering why he should eat jam with plum stones in it. “Can we have some on our custard?”

“Tomorrow I’ll do the gooseberries.” Dad was planning ahead.  He could see the pantry already; reaching past Christmas and into autumn, filling week by week, with berried treasure, crimson kings and golden queens, black boys and bon cretians; pears by halves and quinces reduced to jelly; stowed and glowing in juicy shades of red and green and yellow.

            They all picked the gooseberries, even Mum, who kept saying she was too busy for preserving.  Susan and Phillip were old enough to know the ripe ones; red and stripy, but Malcolm bit into green ones and threw them down in disgust. 

            “Hey, I need the green ones.  And the red ones.  Behave yourselves.” And Dad pouted at the kids. “Or else.”  He had to remind them again when they topped and tailed the stalks and dead flowers back into the bowl with the gooseberries.

Then it was blackcurrant time.  The days were getting hotter and so was the kitchen, and the tempers that lived in it.  Mum kept out of the way.  She was too busy sewing in her sewing room.  Dad didn’t want to top and tail all the blackcurrants himself.  It made his big fingers sore plucking away at tiny stalks.  “Many hands make light work,” he hoped..

            “Ooh there’s a red spider on my hand,” wailed Susan. She flapped her hand and knocked her bowl of currants over. Currants and spider mites ran away under the furniture.

            “They smell funny,” moaned Phillip. 

            Malcolm found out how to get blackcurrants off their stalks all at once. He picked them off in bunches with his teeth and spat them back into the bowl.

            “Can we go swimming Dad,” No, no, no, he thought.  “Yes,” He said, “I’ll just put some more wood on the fire.”

            Dad spread the towels on the warm stones and lay down to bask.  Long feathers of cloud stroked the hot sky and he thought it was nice to have a break from the kitchen.  Mum would have some peace and quiet too to get a few things done at home.  Children’s voices, river running, stones creaking underfoot…  Malcolm crying, “Daddy, Phillip’s splashing me.”

            “Phillip.  Behave yourself.”  Phillip was ten, and good at splashing.  But he remembered that he’d much rather be building a dam.

            Mum had so much peace and quiet that she got on with the blackcurrants and they were simmering on the hob when the swimmers came home. That night there was bacon and egg pie and lettuce and peas for dinner, and pints of black pearls cooling on the dresser.  Some escaped their jar and turned red over rice pudding.

            Early next morning Dad cleaned the coal range. Out to the garden with the ashes, then off with the hob plates and the chimney plate too; into dark passages; rattle, rattle with his rake, which was just a little slice of iron on a long handle;  soot gathered with tenderness into the ash pan… Dad was stirring the porridge when his children got up.

            Mum moved the preserves off the dresser and put them away in the pantry. Then she took a chook out of the freezer and put it to thaw on a dish where the currants had been.

            “I’ll take the kids to fetch the milk,” Dad told Mum.

            “Ah good,” and she smiled the smile of conspiracy.

Malcolm thought it was a long way to the milk. He wondered why they couldn’t just pick it up at the end of the road the way Mummy usually did. Or why Daddy didn’t go and get it in the car, which is what he did every weekend.

“It’s a nice day for a walk,” said Dad, and showed them a real cave inside a fallen-over willow tree.  “We can have a cuppa here,” he said. Let’s put the jug on.  Phillip giggled when Dad plugged the jug in, but Susan found a cloth in a drawer and laid the table.  They all sat down and drank tea from the finest Royal Albert cups and saucers, which Dad found on a shelf in the cave. 

“Ah,” said Dad, “Broken orange pekoe.  It doesn’t need milk at all.”  Which was a good job.

The milk lady had milked her cows while Dad was cleaning the coal range, but she took them to see Daisy and Buttercup.  Malcolm thought that maybe buttercups should be called cowcups because the cows were standing up to their knees in them.

Dad gave the milk lady empty plastic bottles and money and she gave him bottlefuls of milk. He put them in his old rucksack and looked for the children.  They were all on the top rung of the dairy fence looking out at the cows in the milk meadow, and chattering like starlings with the excitement of the day.

“Hey, get off that fence.  Behave yourselves.”  Silence fell, and wide-eyed they dropped all together and ran to him.  The milk lady dipped into her apron pocket for three striped candy canes and grinned at Dad.

“Or Father Christmas won’t come tonight, will he kids.”

Midsummer Harvest

Father Jack

Father Jack Witbrock would have been 76 today. He died a month ago on Saturday 3rd November, from a tired heart and blocked arteries. 

His full title was: The Very Reverend Father Jack, Dean Emeritus of the Antiochan Orthodox Church in New Zealand. 

I had missed his celebration of 40 years of ordination - the first ten as an Anglican minister - on 21st October, so I'm glad that I made the effort to pop in to the Deanery late on the Ashley Church's saints' day after I had set off borer bombs in the church - 28th October is the Feast of St Simon and St Jude, but also my mental marker for woodworm treatment.

Father Jack was saintly material himself. He and his family came to live in the village about thirty years ago, adopting the neighbouring inter-denominational church as the seat of worship for a far-flung Eastern Orthodox congregation. Father Jack and Julia, his wife, developed a community garden and hosted many young people who were floundering in life. This work was tireless and selfless and quite often it seemed to me thankless. Father Jack was as devout as he was practical and the arcane business of daily offices, complete with robes, chants, bells and censer not only fascinated me but gave life to a little country church that would otherwise have been an empty shell.  I almost take for granted the icons and bright altar cloths but how remarkable to walk into the vaulted  Anglican architecture of Benjamin Mountfort and find Christ the Pantokrator, and his attendant images, basking in the afternoon sunbeams, or to spot Father Jack swishing through hip-high cocksfoot along the country roadside, in black robes, purple satin and his stovepipe hat.

Of course he would have loved me to join his flock, but although I probably exasperated him, he treated my personal brand of atheism with good humour and once when there was no congregation about, I stopped mowing, kicked off my gumboots and read the refrains for him.  He didn't appreciate being interrupted mid-office however, and I remember slipping away once rather than disturbing him, only to find that he had been saying a Requiem Mass for Elwin. I wish I had been bolder that day. 

Father Jack was a scholar and when I asked him to say a final committal in Latin for Elwin's otherwise secular funeral, he asked me whether I wanted German pronunciation or not. He could have come up with any dialect I thought of, I'm sure. I rather envied him his scholarship since I used to fancy myself translating ancient texts in my own ivory tower, which I never imagined could be here in rural North Canterbury.  In recent years he worked on translating the Monastic Office, aquiring texts dating back to 1703 in order to translate the reference into current idiom, so that modern priests might no longer "be tied to the innovations of the 1925 edition."  More prosaically Father Jack compiled an extensive history of the Ashley Church of St Simon and St Jude, which is a valuable addition to local archives.  

His departure also means the loss of the Orthodox tenancy, but there is no hurry to remove its presence. As this door closes another will open when the time is right. In the meantime I remember that I had my first lesson in dressing the altar at Father Jack's funeral. I learnt in no uncertain terms that one should "never cover the tabernacle with black," and I think the priest who did, will never forget that!
But Advent is here and maybe Julia and I can dress the altar in violet.

Father Jack's was the most elaborately religious funeral I have ever been to, proscribed and full of ritual. It was also the truest religious funeral I have been to. It was Father Jack.
There was nothing false at all about him and his eulogy which likened him to Tolkien's Niggle from Leaf by Niggle summed up his character perfectly. I will miss him.