Celebrating My Accomplishments Pandemic Clean-Up: Post 5

After a near-drowning at age 5, I was always a little fearful of water as a child. Canadian summers are hot, though, and my mother – likely glad to have us out of her hair for awhile – always encouraged my sister and I to head over to the local outdoor swimming pool with our friends. I was not a very good swimmer, but I spent many happy summer days paddling around that little pool with my friends. Just thinking about those days brings back to mind the sharp reek of chlorine, the delicious feel of sun on our skin and the muted din of dozens of kids shrieking, laughing and simultaneously calling out to their friends.

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Saying Farewell, Once and For All (Pandemic Clean Up: Post 3)

I was blessed – in more ways than I can count – to give birth first to a boy and then to a girl. It wouldn’t have mattered to me what their gender was, but it was a gift to have both in my life, and to observe, from the very subjective vantage point of a mother, how very different little boys and little girls can be.

Being Stuck With My Mother’s Stuff: Pandemic Clean-Up Post 1

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about my mother’s stuff before – I could effortlessly write a whole book about my mother’s stuff, truth be told. She is one of those annoying women who keeps everything; who places a priceless value on each item she owns (and which she has dubbed, her ‘treasures’), from little notes my sister and I wrote to her as children, to every single card we ever gave her, to her collection of rocks, her collection of doilies, her collection of linen table cloths, her baskets, my Grammy’s sewing scissors (that no longer work), a whole bunch of carved wooden acorns (?), a unique lamp that is pretty but is no longer safe to plug in (vintage 1949), old cassettes I can no longer play but suspect include the voices of now-diseased loved ones.