Bruce's Banter: SPRING FEVER

SPRING FEVER

I am loving the longer days and the buds getting fat on the trees and shrubs surrounding our little cottage. I am pulling salal and blackberry out by the roots. It’s a lot of bloody work. The lot here was pretty much a salal patch. Most of it got scraped clean for the septic field and then buried in what Mark termed a biomass berm. A hole was dug deep enough to house the scraped vegetation and then it ws buried at the far end of out lot. Sort of a mass grave for the plants. But we’ve kept all our biomass on the property and avoided land fill fees.

Wherever I want to plant something or clear around the few remaining shrubs and bulbs, I have to pull the plants that survived last year’s back hoe work. Blackberries are like pulling old bad teeth from the earth. Several runners usually come from the same bulb-like “tooth” that sits securly fastened to the very strong root system. Big ones take a pick axe. When I delt with the unwanted-blackberry-pulling on our U.S. property, I friggin hated them. Now that I am back in Canada I find them a rather annoying nusiance.

Deb and I have matching wool hats. It’s not on purpose. I found one in a second hand store in Sechelt. It’s natural whitish wool and it was in better shape than Deb’s natural whitish wool hat....so we traded because I didn’t care that it had a darned hole. I just wanted a wool hat. In Canada we call them toques. Last week it was blowing cold and wet so we donned our toques and headed down the road to the beach for a walk. On the way back up the hill, our neighbor’s car came crawling up behind us. They pulled along side and with a fit of glee declared us a couple of “Lawn Gnomes.”

All my life I have been taken aback by couples who wore matching “outfits” of any kind. Usually the “in your face” polyester sports wear with a stripe or two somewhere. I just could never get over imagining the process of decision making that brought two fully adult people to happily agree to wear matching stuff. Now I’m one of two matching Lawn Gnomes. Screw it, I’m not giving up the hat.

Recently I wondered if senility was simply a process of letting go of a sense of being responsible for things, especially thoughts, daily habits.....and keys. Too much effort to remember so......I don’t. To say “I can’t” would be irresponsible. I certainly find myself failing enough at times to make me wonder. Recently my sister Nancy and brother in law Peter invited Deb and I to go up country to their big cozy log cabin in the ice and snow. First off was a couple of days in a suite my sister secured in their apartment complex in New Westminster. We usually stay with them, but our cousin Jim was visiting, so we got the sweet suite. (larger than our cottage) .....Here’s the senile tie -in.....We all had a nice visit and a great Sushi dinner. The next day Jim flew back to Nova Scotia and then we shopped for the trip to the snow. Our departure was the next morning. The plan was to bring the key to the suite back to Nancy and Pete so they could drop it off at the manager’s office. I lost the key. We used it to get into the place that night and then it disappeared off the face of the earth. I sheepishly reported the loss, amid hushed howls of disbelief then notes of apology to the manager (It was Sunday... he gone).

Poor Pete had to make several phone calls from the snowy cabin to the suite manager with assurances that we would do what was necessary to replace the key and possibly change the locks. I’m not really sure, I was busy not being responsible for things. That’s when I found the key in my jacket pocket. In retrospect, I think I was much happier about this than anyone else. The only confusing thing about my recent revelation regarding senility is, I have been exhibiting forms of this behavior for as long as I can remember.

The episodes are just a little closer together.