The weekend Rohan and I ran away to Lutsen ...

on our way to dinner

I had no idea how important it would be, there was no plan - we had decided the night before, after weeks of tension and sadness, and booked our room on a whim. I've never even been down the road to the Lutsen Resort, I've only ever gone up the road to the ski hills. When we arrived I was certain I was in paradise.

The beginning of May is always going to be difficult, it will always remind me of loss. Every May from now until forever I am going to run away to this place, because what I found there was more healing than I could have ever imagined.

where the Poplar River
meets Lake Superior
and the Lutsen Resort beach

Back in our room Rohan slept.., he slept when we arrived, was early to bed, late to rise..., slept most of the next day after our hike; it was probably the first time since we lost Finn that he really slept. At home he's too busy distracting himself, fighting the sadness, and nearly killing himself in the process. He's worn out, skinny, and consumed by a very private grief. I hate seeing what it's doing to him. I didn't realise until we were there in paradise that maybe he needed this even more than I did.

If there was ever a time we needed help, a little hope, anything ... this was it. We're beat. Grief for our child is so much more powerful than us.

Our one full day away was reserved for a river walk along the Cascade River. Of all the trails in the area we could have chose, we found the one with protected White Pines, and for the first time in years I felt my father. Some might think that sounds ridiculous, but I don't.. I truly believe the people we lose stay with us. I used to sense my father around Hannah's crib - nowhere else, just at the foot of her crib. I can't explain the feeling, it's peaceful, and just ..there.. I felt him that day in the forest. As if he read my post from the week before missing our walks along the Current River counting the White Pines along the way. For the first time since we lost Finn I felt peaceful...the churning stopped - briefly, but it stopped. I didn't feel as weighted and the tightness in my chest released..., just enough.

While Rohan carefully chose subjects for his photos, I ran around the forest like a kid in a candy store grabbing shots of every step along the way. I tried a few times to get a full circle perspective of my camera on the ground, waterfall before me, and trees towering over, but it didn't really work. The sun kept hiding behind clouds and no matter how long I held my breath and waited it still screwed up the exposure - and of course my panos were wonky because I haven't mastered that down/up thing yet.
I have mastered the foot selfie. I'm not a selfie headshot kind of person. I prefer my face behind the lens, but my feet - they show where I'm standing, and to me that's all that matters.

although I didn't know it at the time
this is the first foot and "belly shot"
of my pregnancy
with Hannah and Finn's
new baby brother or sister

I photographed my feet in the forest, in Lake Superior, on the wood floors of the resort, and in the best bathtub I've ever floated in. I watched the moon rise and listened to the waves slosh up against the shore below our cabin. I felt calm, and I think Rohan did too (all the sleeping helped..) ..and maybe that's what was needed for a miracle. I was already pregnant - just, ...this baby started growing in peace among the giant pines and on the shore. This baby was with me when I wrote Finn's name with rocks.

We have a long way to go together, but with all this powerful energy brought to me on this trip I have faith in a way I'm sure wouldn't be had we not run away. With new visualisations for meditation, and the memories of this beautiful place now charged with new meaning it will always be a very special paradise.

Thanks Dad.

eight months without you

On our way home from Lutsen, 

on the shore of Lake Superior 

I wrote his name in lake stones. 

My love and grief are so powerful

and so entwined around my heart

it takes my breath away.

I can wish for things to be different all I want, plead for this to not be our reality, for him to be returned to us..., but it will never happen. I took all his rocks home with me, not knowing exactly what I'll do with them yet..., but it's things like this that keep him close. It's all I have - create for him, grasp on to it, bring him with us wherever we go.

window bird

sunset
18 April 2014

sunrise

sunrise

Sleeping Giant sunrise

window bird

The house is too quiet today, well... was..    I'm now playing Regina Spektor's Don't Leave Me (Ne me quitte pas) on repeat hoping to kill the nasty earworms that echo so loudly though my head. From the time Finn died I've hear the worst songs in my head - like Bryan Adams' When a Man Loves a Woman over and over and over ..and I don't even like the song, would never listen to it. I've never understood - why that song? It plays like I'm sitting long in a gymnasium and it's playing on a record player in a far away corner. Creepy. I've tried everything to get rid of it - playing songs on repeat until I think I've absorbed enough of something else..., but the next day while I shower (always in the shower... why?!) there he is again, Bryan fucking Adams and that cheeseball song. I hate it. And I.Don't.Understand.It. 

Story of my life now..I don't understand much of anything anymore. I don't feel like the same person I was before Finn while at the same time feel like myself amplified - if that makes any sense. I feel bizarrely creative, full of ideas (mostly of things to "make for Finn" ...which I haven't yet decided is something unhealthy or just a natural need to keep "doing things for him"... ) so I've ordered a odd assortment of paper dragonflies, felting wool, and fabric (among other bits) ("Etsy" is our new word for "mail") and we'll just see what comes of it.

So far I've been completely useless at the things I used to do naturally - camera controls are still foreign to me; completely lost it the other morning when I couldn't get the shot of the tug leading in one of the last salties of the season. When 'the shot' appeared of the front page of the paper the next morning I lost it again. Something tells me I should just put down my camera for a while.

Watching the harbour activity has been a saving grace - I think both R and I agree. I can't deny the beauty I see all around me. As much as I miss Pearl I am grateful for this view, the light in this house, and the distraction of a constantly changing window view.

In the few days I had with Finn, in the few times we sat in our chair in his room I would talk to him while he nursed, tell him all about what I could see - all the boats in the harbour, tugs leading them around, the trains we see shuffling back and forth, planes coming in, all the activity in the park... I couldn't wait to play I Spy with him. Even the snow ploughs are interesting to watch as they clear High Street in a choreographed street dance early in the morning. A little boy would love watching this I think to myself as I stand alone in the window.

Weather Hypochondriacs

 Oh dear, here we go again. The Chronicle Journal spent Monday contradicting itself from one page to another. A regular victim of the 'global warming alarmist syndrome', our local newspaper should spend a little more time researching their trivia, and possibly do a little bit of unbiased investigative research.

On page A2:

"Today's Trivia

1932: A day of Muggy heat

(28.3C) spawned an electrical storm with heavy rain in

the Chaplin area of Saskatchewan. It flung utility poles across roads, blew down barns, coal sheds, and chicken coops (oh no!)...and overturned wagons. In Chaplin, the Alberta Pacific Elevator Company'soil house was lifted and carried several metres, and a building filled with barrels was left in the middle of the road.

World Environmental Day

Courtesy of the David Phillips, 2012 Weather Trivia Calendar"

...must have been "climate change" that caused that storm in 1932 - they just didn't have a fashionable name for it yet.

Two pages over, the CJ tells us that "climate change is very much upon us" because the East End flooded after some heavy rain. Obviously my heart goes out to all those who lost so much, but flooding shouldn't be unexpected in a place that was once, not long ago - geologically speaking, at the bottom of a Great Lake.

Our house here in Port Arthur was also once at the bottom of our Lake. Maybe someday it will be again. My first UofG hort course years ago had me running all over town tasting testing soil (yeah, I ate some...in the name of science!)... anyway, it gave me a great appreciation for our geological history from a garden soil perspective - most of which was once under water. This should be the perspective we view our City in, and respect that.

The alarmist perspective doesn't help. "Weather over the northwest is getting more erratic all the time." No it's not. It's always been erratic, changing - for about 4.5 billion years. Locally, I can point directly to the thoughtless and environmentally careless clear cutting around the Dog Lake area for changing the wind patterns in the City. ...just an observation from an observant gardener and greenhouse worker. It broke my heart when I saw what they did out there, just as it is over that ridiculous clover leaf at Hodder Avenue and 11/17. Do you not think that by changing that landscape we're not going to notice a change in the City of some sort? Some gardener somewhere will notice - or a cyclist riding along a bike lane - a new wind, a different water run-off...
This is not "global warming" that's changing anything in Thunder Bay - it's us. Stupid humans who think that they know more that mother nature, that a few trees here, and a little bit of the oldest rock on the planet won't be noticed if taken away and destroyed.

Winter and summer have been noticeably warmer and cooler many other times in the long & changing climate history here on the Canadian Shield. This is not something new and alarming CJ.., this is poorly researched, incorrect "journalism." It's interesting: I've been reading more and more about Medieval gardens - after my mother gave me a great historical gardening book for my birthday (Even from palliative care, she's still ordering books from Amazon using her iPad - which is hilarious, and so her. Love.) We are growing very similar gardens these days to those found in medieval England for similar social and cultural reasons (backyard veggies & self sustainability), and in a very similar climate. For years I've been intrigued by Shakespeare's flowers - all the same plant name I read on tags in greenhouses, in seed catalogues. It was some time last summer, we were driving - and on the radio they were talking about how so many medieval & renaissance still life paintings - or any painting that included vegetables, or meals featured this crazy looking purple carrots - just like we're seeing again now ...on the radio they were marvelling at this as if we should all be surprised. That surprised us, as we drove around.

Hannah's reading 1984 & Animal Farm and she thinks they're weird. (My mother ordered those books also - in a sweet hardcover that includes both books.) We've been trying to tell her that there are some good lessons in history - even more interesting when that history is looking into a future we've already passed. (Hey, where's my Tardis?!) If Thunder Bay is Manor Farm, I'd like to know when the pigs are going to take over...because maybe that's what it will have to take to stop the human's poor behaviour. Call it an environmental revolution, and look at it through eyes that have read how damaging ignorance and indifference can be.

If you want to know why our Lake is warming, infested, filthy, becoming increasingly unhealthy - take a look at your street, look at the run off water - and the cigarette butts that are in it. Even with our early spring, snow free roads, it took our Stupid Human City too long to get around to cleaning the streets this year - so much garbage everywhere, so much that could have been swept, ran off into our urban streams, into our Lake, on to cause problems that someday will be reported as shockingly alarming "climate change."

We put asphalt at the bottom of a Great Lake, buried the mineral rich soil beneath, we let garbage blow around on it, oil spill on it, waste fuel on it; we've taken away trees who have the roots to hold it all together - more than we stupid humans will ever have - real roots, a real connection from the sky to the soil. We've been so greedy in north-western Ontario - and continue to be, then we cry "climate change," rally, plant new trees, a garden, and think we're making a difference. But are we? Really? How can we justify that stupid clover leaf or what they're doing to the Lake Superior landscape with that highway expansion? This is not a global issue or the El Nino, or because we used too much aerosol hairspray in the eighties damaging the ozone - this is local - local stupidity and greed. Ignorance is bliss, isn't it.

How about a change in leadership. A new pig. Maybe we don't need councillors who doesn't think bike lanes are dangerous, waste time & money at the cost of our environment, and destroy our history (buildings, parks & landscape) for the sake of a parking lot for lazy people who think four blocks is the Boston Marathon.

::::deep breath::::

I wish we would see more informed articles like this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/05/29/global-warming-alarmism-when-science-is-fiction/