And in comes spring

Apparently spring isn’t the annual event I considered it to be.
As it happens, spring, which comes regularly enough in other parts of British Columbia, has never trod upon Maple Ridge.
Tucked along the Fraser River, nestled quaintly between Mission to the east, and other, larger cities to the west, this community has quietly and uncomplainingly gone without spring.
But in 2007 spring came knocking, and the citizens of this fair community were more than willing to answer the door.
This is the only possible scenario I can come up with to explain the phone calls that have been pouring in through the editor’s desk this week.
On Wednesday morning, I ambled into the office, and as like any morning, the first task is to drink coffee. The second? Check the voicemail.
No. 1 on the voicemail was a sweet sounding man who called with breaking news: “I’ve got a beautiful azalea bush blooming right against the side of my house. It’s just gorgeous. Someone ought to get here quick to take a photo,” he said, listing his address, phone number and name.
The following day, a Thursday and production day here at the paper another kindly sounding man called up.
This time it was a wisteria bush. And golly was it amazing.
“Come and see for yourself,” he urged, further warning that it might be difficult to shoot the brilliant petals, not because they’re bashful, but because they’re mauve. Mauve, the gentleman warned, is probably a difficult colour to capture on film.
Hmmm, never thought about it.
When I asked him to take the photo and send it in he declined. This one, he said, was better left to a professional.
Finally, on a brilliant Friday morning, I ambled in to the desk once more and this time opted to check the email prior to checking the voicemail. A girl’s got to switch things up.
There, staring back at me was a lovely picture (above), submitted by a very nice looking woman who is, as she ought to be, intensely proud of her bush.
Spring has sprung folks, and I can’t wait for harvest season, when the giant potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons and sunflowers will be pouring in.
Now if only a sow could deliver a two-aheaded piglet, my life would be complete.

Hey Brother

Brothers are gross.
It’s true.
All brothers must agree, that, indeed, they are gross.
A large portion of their lives has been devoted to perfecting their foulness. They’ve mastered the art of burping and blowing it into the faces of little girls.
At the dinner table.
When nobody’s looking.
They’ve mastered the art of farting on their little sister’s pillow. Perhaps not at the dinner table, but just as she’s set to go to bed, bear clutched in her shaking and useless fist.
Again, he does this when nobody looks on but the frustrated child who will forever remember the brother’s cruelty and wait, patiently, until she can use it against him as he grows older.
Being a sister I am familiar with the grossness of brothers. Comparing notes with friends, I realized I had it pretty good, all things considered.
While gross, my brother was also a fraidy cat. Petrified of the wrath of the father, he would torment, certainly, but with one shriek from the little sister, one cry of alarm or frustration, the parentals would come running to the defense.
He plotted his torture carefully.
He’d go for weeks without being gross at all, and would change up his tactics so as to drive one mad rather than make one physically ill.
For weeks he’d subsist on hovering over the sister, standing before her on the couch and daring her to stand up.
When she’d try, he’d push her back down. Try again, back down she goes. Having no patience for homework or mowing the lawn, this brother would stand before his sister for what seemed like days. Pleading with him never worked, nor did bribes. He stood with a menacing grin over her — his shadow making her shiver — but he would not budge. Up she stands, back down she goes.
Until dad came home.
For one whole summer the brother took up a new torture. Every time his sister would walk past, he would jab at her sides, right up in that tender spot right above the pelvic bone.
The sister became so conditioned to expect the abuse that, by summer’s end she was jerking away before even being accosted. To this day, she takes a wide berth from her brother, and jumps back whenever her husband stretches out his hands in the direction of her waist.
On comparing gross notes with a friend, however, it could have been worse.
Not only was this friend someone’s sister, but she had TWO brothers. And the oldest wasn’t afraid of anything.
She recalls being pinned down on the basement floor while her brother launched loogies out of his putrid mouth, dangling his snotty saliva milimetres from her upturned face. If she struggled too much she ran the risk of that pendulum of goo landing square on her forehead — or worse. He’d dangle it there, then suck it back up. Dangle it some more, suck it up.
It never ended well.
The same brother spent half an afternoon chasing his little sister around and around the house with a salamander skewered on a nail, threatening to make her eat it.
And, as a child, there’s really no differentiating between levels of gross — dead salamander or dripping gob of mucus. It’s all one and the same.
Another friend, another sister, recounted her story of a sweaty teenaged brother who trapped her in a sticky headlock for what seemed like hours.
Stuck there, years younger and several dozen pounds lighter, she had to endure his stench. The scars carry forward to this day.
Fact is, brothers are gross, and they don’t become any less so as they age. Sure, they stop blowing burp breath into people’s faces, and they begin farting at more appropriate times and in more appropriate places.
But memories of their grossness remain carefully chiseled into their sister’s minds.
So, when a woman steps up and says she plans to marry this aforementioned brother, willingly commits to living with him, farts and all, it seems bizarre, somewhat sad and not a little bit crazy.
This sister is befuddled. When the announcement was made, she shook her head in disbelief, and asked the sweet-mannered woman “Why?”
“You know he smells bad, right?”
While I’m happy for the loving couple, I’m still confused. Skeptical.
But then again, someone married the loogie brother. God help her.

Time to stop looking away

We’ve all seen them. And we’ve all walked away, given a wide berth, crossed the street.
We’ve all shut our eyes.
Sometimes they’re smelly, and passing by would offend our senses. Sometimes they’re loud, loquacious, offending our sense of propriety.
Sometimes they do nothing but sit, looking vacantly ahead. We know something is wrong with them, so we turn our gaze, glance beyond them, and then forget about it, forget about them.
Or at least, that’s usually how it works.
Sometimes, however, one grabs your attention
The other morning a colleague walked in, mentioning that she had seen one of them. She hadn’t turned her head away from the sight, she’d looked straight on.
And what she saw upset her.
On her way to work, traveling east on the Lougheed Highway this colleague saw a woman who had planted herself in the dirt, in the boulevard outside the Salvation Army’s Caring Place shelter.
That woman looked to be about 40, but she could have been so much younger — it’s not always easy to gauge, as life comes and goes rather quickly for some, and the years mark themselves on their faces more readily than it does on yours and mine.
Planted there, in this boulevard, rather than sink into the muck, the woman riled against it. Grabbing handfuls of soil, she chucked it heartily toward the roadway, cursing it, giving it hell.
There was no one on the sidewalk to bear the brunt of the attack. The only ones to see were those held safe inside the confines of their vehicles, stopped at the nearby traffic light. There was no one listening to her cry out, no one to take offense to her mudslinging.
But she threw on regardless of a lack of audience. And nobody noticed, perhaps, save one.
And that one who saw came to work feeling heavier, one would think, feeling upset by the incident. She did not look away as so many others had, and as a result she couldn’t help but feel sad.
If she hadn’t seen, if she hadn’t heard, she might still be ignorant to the woman’s plight, and she’d feel better.
But feeling better comes at such a cost.
Was this woman throwing dirt a drug addict?
Maybe.
Are drugs — meth, crack — her biggest challenges?
Hardly.
This woman is mentally ill. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to make this diagnosis. Watching her rail against an invisible enemy, toss dirt into the street in disgust — there’s really no other explanation.
Is this mental illness a result of drug use? Could be.
Did this woman turn to illegal drugs to escape her mental illness? Possibly.
Does it matter why she sits here, what brought her to this place?
I don’t think so.
There are so many in this community from whom it is easier to turn away, and we assuage our own guilt in doing so by making excuses; that’s if we notice at all, if we even take a moment to register the fact that one of our own suffers.
I am just as guilty as the next person. I drove past this woman and remembered spotting her only when a colleague pointed it out.
I walk past a man who, when it rains, uses the awning at this very newspaper office as his temporary shelter. I watch out the window as he picks up the garbage in the parking lot — garbage dropped not by himself, but by those who look through him, those who don’t even honour him with a glance.
He cleans up after people like me, and I can't even spare him a glance, a "good morning," or a couple of bucks — not that he's ever asked.
It's just so much easier to avert the eyes.
It’s just so much easier to make the excuses.
Druggie.