Sometimes it takes a newcomer to the Island to remind us how awesome our community really is. When we live here long enough our island paradise can be taken for granted and we can all too easily forget the Oooh Ahhh factor. You know, like when we were kids at the fireworks and we would look up and collectively go Oooh, Ahhh. Is this taken-for-granted phenomenon wrapped up in familiarity or are we simply too busy to stop and appreciate our surroundings?

I’ve been here for 28 years and I really don’t understand the cabin fever type comments of having to get off the island once in a while. It must be the Welsh in me, the homebody instinct but I love it as much as I ever did. I must admit though I had forgotten just how good we have it. When I take a step back to reflect on my own Oooh Ahhh factor, I take in the expansive view from atop the Malahat: Oooh … Ahhh! The scent of an arbutus tree in flower after a May rainfall, and taking photographs with my husband as the summer sun rises over Fisherman’s Wharf in Sidney’s harbour.  And then, I took my revelry a step farther and started asking colleges and friends what brought them here and what was there Oooh Ahhh factor. Here is what Wilf Krahe, a proud Canadian citizen whose origins are Germany said.

Wilf’s first experience of this area came in 1975 when he was asked by a friend to travel with him to an uncle’s home in Canada. The result was a life long love affair with this Peninsula we inhabit. This trip long ago led to his immigration and desire to take out Canadian citizenship. Wilf’s Oooh Ahhh factor is the sense of space, the feeling of freedom and the friendly people. He still loves the slow pace and the fact that there is a space in the world with a park-like setting and few fences.

Another long time resident, Kim Erb, was fortunate enough to be brought here because of her husbands work. Like Wilf, Kim loves the slow unhurried pace, and the fact that geography saves us from urban sprawl. We will never suffer from the fungus of metropolis mushroom. What she loves most of all, her Oooh Ahhh factor, is that old country sense of community; the fact that when Kim is out and about she will meet and be greeted by the many people she has come to know is part of paradise. To quote her on contentment: “We have made our little nest here and we are cozy and comfortable.”

People still laugh when I tell them my husband and I came out here to retire, because at the time we were in our twenties and newly married. We had been watching our parents’ friends retire, move to there dream home away from all they had known most of there lives, only to find out they had left their friends and family behind. They had stopped looking at their particular paradise and, after much debating, wringing of hands and financial losses, they moved back to their original community, which had its own Oooh Ahhh factor. Taking our cue from their experience, we came to a place we wished to retire and here we are still. We have been able to make the dream a reality, having raised our kids and will be moving on into retirement, maybe not with ease but we are still afloat and will be here for the duration.

Thanks to newcomers, I now take longer looks at that summer sunrise that we photographed and hung on our wall; a welcome to all you new comers.
To the readers: are you, like me, taking our incredible community for granted? Do you remember why you came to the island? Or, if you’re from here, do you appreciate what we have? What’s your Oooh Ahhh factor?

First published in Seaside Times -February 2010, pg. 27 under the pen name Jesse Williamson

Photo Credit

©Jim Gardener

The Oooh Ahhh Factor is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

To do two things at once is to do neither.
Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C.

Don’t look now, but there’s something else you need to do.

The problem is there is always one more thing to do, one more task to add to the endless list of tasks to be completed in any one given life span. Are we really meant to do so much in a progressively smaller and smaller window of time?

This week I read an intriguing article in The New Atlantis by Christine Rosen entitled “The Myth of Multitasking.” It was written a few years ago, but I can’t help feeling that the urgency of its message is more profound today than ever before. I know myself that I have proudly boasted my multitasking prowess at every job interview for the last couple of decades and I seriously thought I was accomplishing more than one thing at a time as I answered phone calls, typed email messages and passed off pantomime instructions to nearby co-workers.

Truth be told, there’s no such thing as multitasking. Really. It’s physically and psychologically impossible. Attempts at multitasking carry with them their own litany of risks. Driving while using a cell phone is one. Mounting stress to do more and more is another. The constant shifting from one activity to another has fostered a new condition called “attention deficit trait”. One writer believes multitasking is leading us into an attention deficit recession  and in a 2005 research study funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, it was found that “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

When I first drafted this article I included 10 steps to aid in unplugging ourselves from the Machiavellian multitasking machine. For better or worse its turns out I’m not a 10 steps kind of woman. I just don’t think life’s answers are that easy. I don’t have a checklist of the perfect mate or the ideal job or what will make me happy. I suppose that goes back to my Buddhist leanings, realizing that there will always be something else beyond the list to be craved, to be yearned for, something in the future that is pushing its way into the present.

With that in mind and shifting our view of multitasking as a myriad of future tasks vying for our present attention, try to treat them as a buffet of choices. If there are too many things screaming for your immediate attention then stop, take a few breaths and sort them by time-lines and priorities. If 12 things must be completed today, which of those tasks need to be done before lunch, before 10am, and so on. Can something be delegated to someone else or wait until tomorrow? Is there a way to combine the tasks or even eliminate a few? Some things, after all, don’t really even need to be done. Many are leftover from the “we’ve always done it that way”closet and they just don’t fit anymore. Wish them well and send them to the appropriate refuse container.

More than anything, be gentle on yourself. Make space in your day for a good heartfelt chat with a friend, a replenishing walk in nature or time spent in reflection and meditation. And never forget the power of a long, relaxing bath. It will set multitasking on its ear, and that’s not such a bad thing.

Additional Reading & References:

The Myth of Multitasking by Christine Rosen, The New Atlantis, Spring 2008.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers by Walter Kirn, The Atlantic, November 2007.

Study funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London – source BBC News, April 22, 2005.

Definition of “human multitasking from Wikipedia.

Photo Credit

Hands of Worker by Victor Bezrukov

You Really Can’t Do It All is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

While sorting through the accumulated clutter in her house, Julia McLean sifts through memories.

With age we have upsized – same weight but different distribution so although Laura Ashley style dresses are ‘in’ again and I am sure wide-legged patchwork jeans won’t be far behind, we just can’t get the fat butts into them any more. I am going to have to throw them out, after all these years of careful hoarding and moving them around the world with us.

With age we have also down-sized, our house that is, and so the usual problem of what to do with our precious collections has become paramount. Cleaning the old seventeenth century house had got beyond me – all full of old world furniture needing kilos of wax and gallons of elbow grease. We had renovated a tiny old farm building into a bijou residence. The original idea was to use this charming little cottage for summer rentals and much needed cash but we did such a good job that we couldn’t bear not to live there ourselves.

We moved 4 beds and one sofa and the rest was to be moved by us as needed. We had – well, I, as principal hoarder – had three double wardrobes of clothes; original Laura Ashley outfits from 1968, plus tights bought in France in 1960, all ‘sir’s’ business suits, sailing gear and my Casa Loma cocktail/Charity ball outfits plus London film premiere dresses. These all necessitated matching shoes and bags, of course. I have one ensemble I wore when flirting with James Bond (aka Timothy Dalton) at a film Premiere. I have menus from super nova dinners at famous restaurants in Paris plus a Duck Card from ‘La Tour d’Argent’. For the uninitiated, this is a numbered card telling you what number duck you ate since the inauguration of the Duck Rouennais dish in 1890. I have theatre programmes galore– one signed by Richard Burton which is definitely un-throw-outable.

I have had to give away books, prints, old paintings of mine but am at a loss about what to do with old family photos of all those Irish cousins who emigrated to the US, my Mum’s 100th birthday cards, my dad’s pewter beer tankard Golf trophies, my brother’s school reports and letter from his headmaster accusing him of holding up a train! My mother-in-law’s crochet throws she made us when we were first married went to a Canadian lad who is running a Rickshaw service in Amsterdam and he was thrilled to have blankets to cover his passengers!

Most of my copper pots and pans are still in the other house as I now have a dream kitchen with an induction top, black granite work-tops, black sink and hand-made tiles with the names of our apples on – tres chic but no room for creative cooking. I have no room for my jams and chutneys so haven’t made any this year. I have a tiny under the counter fridge and a big one in the store room with the heating tanks.

My sets of matching porcelain, clothes and napkins, with the obligatory three glasses and arsenal of cutlery, pewter serving platters, my hand-made pottery plates and cups, candle-holders and table decorations, are all languishing in the old house unneeded and unloved. There is a moral in there somewhere.

We haven’t had a full winter here yet as the heating system broke down as soon as bad weather hit last winter so we had to move back again to the old house. Unlike the old house, where we had gas heating and electrical back-up, this one didn’t have reliable emergency heating systems. We had installed a Franklin stove but it wasn’t as efficient as a big Inglenook at throwing out the heat.

So it is back to basics – hot water bottles, double duvets and sleeping socks. Think Polar and you’ve got it!

 Photo Credits:

“Duck card from La Tour d’Argent in Paris.” © Julia McLean 

“Postcard from Los Caracoles in Barcelona.” © Julia McLean 

“My penfriend and me at 14-15 with Mum and my elder sister.” © Julia McLean 

“My pen friend at 21 getting married.” © Julia McLean 

Back to basics: A Moving Experience is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Paige-Jennan Andrew reminds us that happiness is not out there somewhere in the future but that if we pay attention, we can find it in every passing moment of our lives.

As we grow older our lives tend to change drastically. Life becomes complicated and full of things we feel like we aren’t equipped mentally, emotionally or spiritually to deal with. Whether it is family issues, failure in exams, diseases, complications with friends or death, as life progresses it just seems to hand us more pain than we can ever begin to deal with. As we grow older the things that make us happy seem to decrease, while stress and worries await us at every street corner. As we grow older we forget all the things that made us happy when we were younger. We forget to appreciate the little things in life that made our childhood great.

For some reason we believe that these things can no longer make us happy and instead of appreciating little things that happen every day, we strive to achieve happiness in the future. If things are not great when we leave school, we believe that if we can get into a great university we will be happy. When that happens and we still are not totally happy we think if we graduate with honors maybe happiness will come. Three years down the road if we are still unhappy, we convince ourselves that if we could just get that perfect job with the huge salary and great benefits happiness must be part of the package and when happiness still does not come, we are absolutely, positively sure that marriage will mean happiness. Some people go through years searching for happiness and just holding on to the hope that it is really close, instead of realizing that pure happiness and contentment only come with acceptance of the present.

If we are able to truly accept our lives for whatever they are and appreciate the little things around us every day, happiness would not be something we have to work for but something we can already find in our lives. Loyal friends, having a job, being able to go to school, or having parents with whom we have a good relationship are big things that we take for granted in life. When we are young, we are much more optimistic and we find happiness in the simplest of things, but as we grow older and life gets very complicated, it is extremely easy for us to forget about the things that we have in our lives and instead focus on what we don’t have.

Today, after a pretty long and stressful day I was so happy to be home. Life hasn’t exactly been a box of chocolates lately and like the average person instead of focusing on what I do have, I’ve been focusing on what I don’t. As I walked into my house my grandmother and her brother sat in the gallery enjoying the breeze. Her brother is having surgery in two days and I can’t even begin to think of how they feel, as they both recently lost their sister to the same disease which he has. My granny asked me if I had anything nice to eat and I offered her chocolates. When I brought them the chocolates, their faces literally lit up. They both sat there quite content as they unwrapped and ate their chocolates. As I walked away hearing them opening the chocolate packs, I couldn’t help but feel happy. Hearing the crinkling of the packs reminded me of little kids opening their favourite snacks, in pure excitement and anticipation.

My mind went back to when we were children and regardless of what was happening that day in preschool, if someone gave us a chocolate or our favourite type of candy, it would have definitely made our day and we would have been more than grateful for it. It didn’t mean that all our trivial issues would be gone, but that chocolate would have helped us get through the day and happily too. As we got older, all the ‘chocolates’ in our lives didn’t disappear; what happened was that instead of us allowing these ‘chocolates’ to make us happy, we just put them back in their box and focussed on the negative and all the things that were going wrong in our lives. However, as we cross retirement age and realise the value and meaning of life, we again embrace those chocolates and like my granny and her brother, regardless of what is going on, whether it be surgery or death, all we need is a chocolate to make our day. Wouldn’t it be great if regardless of our age and position we could appreciate the little things that happen in life and be grateful for them?

We should really try to appreciate life for what it is and not wait for it to ‘get better’ in order to be happy. Everything that is happening in our lives at this very moment is happening with reason; nothing happens by chance, so we might as well accept it. When things get hard we have to learn to suck it up, put on our big kid underwear and deal with it. Also, life always dishes out chocolates, regardless of how small, when things are hard. It would do us well to eat those chocolates and appreciate their taste rather than stuffing them back into the box. Sometimes these little chocolates go a long way and help us to feel better regardless of whatever we are struggling with. Once we have an appreciation for these little chocolates and a lot of prayers, life will be much easier and we as individuals will be much happier.

Photo Credits
Bio Pic © Paige-Jennan Andrew

All Other Images from the Microsoft Clip Art Collection

First Posted At Paiges Of Life – September 12, 2011

Guest Author Bio

Paige-Jennan Andrew
I’m way too excited about life … I can’t exist without paper, pen and God. Writing is my passion … changing my world one day at a time

I believe in making a difference and leaving your mark everywhere you go!

Don’t Complain … Don’t Compare … Don’t Worry
Live!          Love!

Blog / Website: http://pgsoflife.blogspot.com/

Chocolates Anyone? is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

A simple cleaning out of a garden shed can give you insights into your personality and place in history.

It was the final frontier. The last outpost.

This summer we have been clearing out our home of almost 25 years, preparing to put it on the market. While we are not hoarders, over that many years things accumulate. What took years to gather around us has been largely dispersed in about three weeks.

The house looks great. Even the garage is swept, organized and spacious-feeling.

We left the shed till the last, on two assumptions. One, potential buyers care less about sheds. And two, it would be nasty.

I know we were right on the second point. On a recent day I got to it. I slid the doors open wide – or attempted to.

One was actually braced by a heavy ladder from inside and never meant to move. The other slides but has no handle. So my first challenge was to figure out how to rig these doors so that they might work for a potential buyer.

I failed at that and went to plan B: I plastered large notes on the doors apologizing for their dysfunctionality. So lesson one is that we forget what we know. Especially when it’s inconvenient and broken.

Next, everything came out onto the lawn. Planters, gardening tools, potions to make things grow and potions to stop them from growing. Parts from a long-abondoned water fountain. Planting soil. Some motor oil for a gas mower (we now have electric). Mesh to keep things from growing up through rockery. Mesh to keep birds from eating all the berries. More flower pots – clay ones, plastic ones, styrocrete (heavy looking but light) ones.

A broken hoe, its truncated wooden handle painted orange, that I had kept purely for nostalgia. One year my dad had painted all his garden implements orange because he had some extra house paint. OK, there it is: a short, orange memory.

Snow shovels. You know you live in a northern climate when you pull out six shovels and one industrial looking ice chipper.

The sundry items were then sorted into four piles: stuff for a friend who is heavily into urban gardening, stuff he didn’t want that would be donated elsewhere, stuff for the landfill, and a very small pile of items to go back in the shed.

That last category leads to learning number two: what one actually needs (in a shed, in a home, in life) is always a very small subset of what one accumulates. Later, when I had put these items back, the shed looked positively cavernous. The shed itself, I realized, was way too big. Learning number three: stuff will accumulate to fill the available spaces, so build / own / rent smaller spaces.

Lesson four was a personal one. I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you. But I was embarrassed, in surveying my piles on the lawn, by my lazy disorganization. You see, among the piles were three different little bags of lawn seed, one of which I had bought just days before (not having actually gone out to the shed to see if I already had seed). Similarly with those small hand shovels and unopened containers of fertilizer. So lesson four: waste not. Look before you buy.

Before re-equipping the shed, I needed to clean it. Lesson five: we are not the only critters on the planet. Many small beings can find a shed quite cozy, evidence the cob webs, the little piles of dirt, the nibbled garden gloves, the cocoons and indistinguishable (to me) nests.

When I saw all the lively activity that had been going on in the dark, forgotten shed, I thought of Lorna Crozier’s wonderful book of poems, The Garden Going On Without Us. Perhaps this is lesson six: life goes on, whether we are paying attention, or even there, or not.

And the final lesson: a garden shed ain’t a bad metaphor for the way our lives accumulate layers of meaning through the years.

Photo Credit

“Shadows on the Shed” egefan – Suzan Almond @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.

The Garden Shed of Life is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

After dinner at a friend’s home here on Roatan, as the table was being cleared, I was asked, “What do you do with leftover salad?”

I glanced in the bowl, where wilted greens clung to the sides and bottom, sharing space with an assortment of soggy tomato chunks, tidbits of sweet peppers, and slivers of garlic, swimming in a puddle of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and spices that had escaped being grabbed by the salad tongs during the meal.

Now, it wasn’t a complicated question, but I did pause before answering, considering that some sort of a punchline would follow. Or perhaps it was a trick question? Why would anyone ask that? I do the same thing with leftover salad that everyone does…I throw it in the garbage.

“Isn’t that what you do?” I asked.

“No, I flush it down the toilet.”

Another guest joined in and added, “I save it in the fridge and eat it the next day. I don’t mind soggy salad and won’t let food go to waste.”

An interesting debate ensued. Each of us defended our choice of what to do with leftover salad. Each of us referenced what our parents did with leftover salad. I was fascinated to realize that our decisions on how to proceed with even the simplest of tasks was determined more by the culture we were raised in and what we had been taught to do than something tweaking our senses to do it.

And defend our choices we did! There were certainly no angry words or fist fights of any sort, but we all felt compelled to stick up for our ways. Our very identities were at risk. What belonged to each of us was being challenged.

I recently wrote a story commemorating the anniversary of the earthquake that “hit” Roatan. I put the word hit in quotations because a similar debate ensued when I used that word to describe the event. Someone who wasn’t on Roatan the day of the earthquake corrected my reference, stating that from a scholastic point of view, Roatan was not hit by an earthquake. Many of the people on the Island that earthshaking day joined in to verbally defend the description of the experience, as a hit. Through a simple grammatical correction, what we had gone through was being denied.

So what the heck does that have to do with leftover salad or life on a tropical Island in the Caribbean Sea? (I used to call it the Caribbean ocean; that too was corrected by the same person. I grew up in Canada, we have oceans around us, not seas…it’s what I’m use to saying.)

I have come to call Roatan home. I brought my traditions, my cultural background (I’m a Heinz 57 so it would be impossible to pin it down to anything specific) and my learned behaviours. Once here, I encountered ways of doing things and ways of living that are foreign to me. But what I do is foreign to them too.

Instead of rushing to defend my point of view, or feeling threatened by someone else’s, I think I’ll work on appreciating hearing and seeing different way of doing things, and be grateful that there are some things I might want to adopt to enhance my life, my daily existence.

Maybe, I’ll even become more…worldly.

As for the earthquake, it was an experience I hope to never repeat. But it did give those of us who were on Roatan when it hit a special connection to each other, a common thread, a bond.

So what do you do with leftover salad?

Photo Credit

“Roatan” Genny Ross-Barons

First Posted On Aug 9, 2010 at The Rotan Vortex

What Do You Do With Leftover Salad? is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

On a hot August day in 1997, Arla Johnson leaves her home in Fort Myers, Florida, and heads north. Tuckered out from her job as a school counselor, she yearns for a spot by the sea where she can wind down. Reaching the border crossing into New Brunswick, she asks, “How far is PEI?”

“About four or five hours,” is the reply.

By days end she’s “down East” (as islanders say) at a campsite overlooking the Gulf of St. Lawrence. By week’s end she’s decided to buy a big hunk of land on the coast in Hermanville. Only she’ll have to convince her partner, Julie Shore, a dental hygienist, to pull up stakes and move to PEI. It wasn’t a hard sell. Sixteen months later, Arla and Julie opened the newly constructed Johnson Shore Inn—a four-star accommodation overlooking the ocean.

But the tourist season is short, and the income from the inn wasn’t enough to carry them 12 months. So for a few years they sallied back to Florida for the winter, returning in the spring. “It was a lot of work to close everything up, pack, drive, find a job then turn around and come back,” Arla says. Then the penny dropped. PEI was their home; it’s where they wanted to be all year. They decided to find a way to stay.

Julie’s thoughts turned to her relatives, makers of corn whiskey in the early 1900’s who operated I.C. Shore & Co. in North Carolina. “During the prohibition they raced ahead of the law from state to state—likely spawning future generations of NASCAR drivers,” Julie surmises. Recalling these stories, an idea started to ferment. What if she, too, could make whisky? She said to her partner, “Why don’t we open a distillery? Why don’t we distill the agriculture of PEI?”

Although it took some convincing, once Arla agreed, in less time than it takes to guzzle a glass of water Julie plunged into planning. She signed up for distilling courses, built a building to house the still and found second-hand stainless steel dairy tanks to ferment the mash.

But there’s one thing Julie would not compromise on: the still. She found the best in the market (in Markdorf Germany) and ordered one. When the crates carrying hundreds of pounds of shiny tubes and columns arrived, the manual was missing. Julie called the company.

“You forgot to put the manual in the crates.”

“The what?”

“The manual. You know—Step 1, Step 2…”

“Sorry, no manual.”

After that sank in, she inquired about the torque.

“The what?”

“The torque. How much torque should I put on the fittings?”

“Tight, but not too tight,” was the reply.

Mercifully the person on the other end of the line agreed to send a photo of what the still should look like. Over the next eight days, with some head scratching and lots of help from friends and neighbors, everything came together.

Once all the bits and pieces were in place, Julie decided to do a test run with water. Alas, it squirted and sprayed every which way. But, before long, they were bottling Canada’s first potato vodka. They also added a second line, wild blueberry vodka.

Since then, international awards have been rolling in. Their spirits are sold at several local restaurants, bars and pubs. They also give tours and sell what they make on site.

While Julie heads the operations at Prince Edward Distillery, Arla runs the Inn. For breakfasts, she serves her guests home-smoked bacon and sausages—from the pigs they raise. These pigs are fed scraps from the inn and mash from the distillery and without a doubt, are the happiest pigs in PEI. And very much in demand at high end restaurants.

Don’t you love stories like this? Sure is inspiring.

Photo Credits

All photos Sandra Phinney

One potato, two potato, three potato … VODKA! is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

According to Wanda Lambeth, for girls from the Prairies, food and friendship rank high on the list of what’s most important in life.

Just what is that special thing about farm girls who are born and raised on the prairies? It’s as if we were programmed at conception for the purpose of being molded into human conveyor belts to the masses, forking in massive quantities of food and insisting on homemade take-out plates as our waddling dinner guests squeeze their departure with expanded bellies through the front door.

Yes, another family and friends dinner artfully created and ingested, where gravy is treated as a beverage and stuffing becomes a question of “who can eat more than two helpings?” Dinner is a success when you glance around the table and observe the conflicting facial expressions of content and discomfort as your guests try to discreetly pop open the top button of their pants under the disguise of the overhanging tablecloth.

But it isn’t just about the food — although the first question to guests as they come into our homes is “Have you eaten yet?” But once that subject has been dealt with, then comes the other most important part of being a girl from the prairies — it’s about being genuine and a true friend.

Susan and I have been friends since we met in the military, me right out of high school and her with a year of army life already under her belt. We immediately hit it off as we had the common connection of being farm girls from Saskatchewan, but we also had a common passion for being trouble makers. Being military girls seemed, at the time, a little easier for us as we already had the tough physical conditioning from pitching hay bales, and we needed that edge.

In those days, we trained alongside the infantry boys and needed to be able to fend for ourselves. Today’s protectors of the fair treatment campaign would have had a heyday with what we were subjected to – unending and brutal push-ups in our dress uniforms which consisted of tight fitting jackets and skirts, constant name-calling with uncomplimentary gender references, being verbally and physically driven just that little bit harder to try and break us. It was tough at times but we proved we were tougher and once we graduated from basic training, we were accepted, respected and placed on our very own pedestals for having survived. Those were the best days of our lives.

Thirty-three years later, four children later and we won’t disclose how many husbands later, here I was — duke-ing it out with my best friend Susan over the kitchen counter about who was going to be a grandmother first. She always seemed to beat me or one-up me on the major life events, but we were neck and neck on being partners in cheating at crib, cheating at badminton and having each other’s backs when someone tried to rock the boat of happiness in which either one of us was rowing at the time. And this was the first time in 30 years that we had been able to sit down over a home-cooked meal with both our families and laugh about the old times, plan for the new, and genuinely enjoy sharing the duty of over-stuffing our husbands and grown-up kids with food and hilarious stories.We shared the kitchen alone for a few minutes after dinner and I glanced over at Susan attacking the dirty dishes while I was attempting to find enough containers to put the massive quantities of leftovers in the fridge. We were both groaning and complaining about eating too much as usual when I recalled what her son had said at the dinner table about his mom and me being prairie girls. Did he mean that because of the truckloads of food putting a “wow” in the middle of the table or was he picking up on the personalities of the people sitting there?

Susan and I have amazing families. Our husbands are without a doubt the greatest — who else could so good-naturedly put up with our colourful history, crazy stories and the shrill, ear-piercing shrieks of our crow-inspired caws of laughter? And our kids, now all in their 20s and 30s, are a delightful mix of artistic, funny, down-to-earth and hardworking societal contributors. We are the first to admit, as their mothers, we were a bit wild when we were younger and maybe not all that responsible at times, but we still took the best from our own parents and somehow managed to pass it on to our own offspring.

As we grow older and kid each other about not being much wiser, Susan and I can be proud of what we have achieved. For girls who seemed to have constantly tripped on our faces through life, we have come this far still hanging on to our prairie roots and not too jaded by life. What negative experiences we have had, we usually brought on ourselves. And we have learned to laugh about those as well.

We can still successfully cheat at cards with no guilt, argue over whose right and whose wrong, grieve together over the loss of a loved one, high-five each other on career achievements and maintain that prairie connection of being true, genuine friends—not just to each other but to all around us. We will envelope you in our arms, offer support and guidance with the experience we gained through our lives of occasional hard knocks, give comfort in times of grief or sadness, care deeply about you and we can also royally kick your ass when you need that as well.

So what makes a prairie girl special? Genuineness, someone you can trust, someone who can make you laugh and make you cry all in the same conversation, but most of all, someone who will invite you into her home, fill you full of gravy and goodness and still make you think you need to take some leftovers home in case a snowstorm leaves you stranded in your car for awhile. And then you can’t wait to come back for more. By the way, have you eaten yet?

Photo Credits

“Prairie Girls/Aprons” Debra McClinton Photographs. www.countryliving.com

“Vintage Prairie Woman Cooking” Illustration by Ryan McCondach, commissioned by Wanda Lambeth

Prairie Girls is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Julia McLean writes of the rites of spring on her farm in Normandy where lambing season is happening and Pascal the Ram is keeping Julia on her toes.

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where my lambies is…. Yeah, yeah, you’ve guessed it. It’s lambing time again. However, as the winter was very hard for the ewes and they weren’t looking too hale and hearty, I have been more than a bit concerned for the progress of the lambing.

Ghent Altarpiece: Adoration of the Lamb

The rams had started the beginning of October by fighting each other over who was to get the glittering prizes.  Taffy, my old and friendly ram came limping up to the fence dangling a front paw or hock or whatever ones calls them, blood dripping down his forehead. I scratched his head comfortingly and, murmuring few words of sympathy, told him to get on with it. Taliesin, his Great to the power of X Grandson, stood smirking in the background as only Super-ram can.

I had therefore expected a rush of lambs. They usually arrive a few days apart. The first to arrive made it into the big wide world about the ninth of March (is that the Ides? Does it signify?). Then there was a two-week gap. I speculated that some of the ewes may have aborted the foetus when the winter cold went on for so long, but then I thought the lengthy gap was probably due to the time when the two sturdy fellas were busy battling it out for female favours. After the two weeks we had a steady trickle of lambs, so to speak.

Meantime, in the other field, the unnamed (and extra to reproduction requirement) four rams edged hopefully towards the fencing awaiting their turn in love’s arena and getting more restive. So I called in some help and we managed to bundle them into the back of the cider van at 6 am and drove them off to the abattoir.

I am only allowed to sell them “on the hoof”, or I can slaughter then myself. If I had a suitable building I would probably do that and then I could keep the skins. Friends in the UK manage to recover the skins from the abattoir but here it is illegal. So, one of my cunning plans to sell matted black sheep skin rugs has fallen foul of the law. I picked up the butchered carcasses a week later – all nicely wrapped and ready for the freezer. How I am going to chomp 120 or so lamb chops or so I don’t know, but I daresay I’ll manage.

By this time, tragedy had struck our little community. I took my eye off the ewes for a millisecond, while I got my hair done, and came back to find a Mommy dying in the field and her baby skeeking and yelling. I called the vet but by the time he arrived an hour later she had been called to the Great Sheepfold in the Sky. She still had milk in her teats so I left her for a while until her progeny had tanked up. I went off to the vet’s to buy powdered milk for the baby and came back to try and catch her. No way. She wandered around bleating for most of the day and then chose a ewe, which had not dropped a lamb, as her mother. The ewe was not pleased but the lamb had someone to lean on.

The Exploits of Pascal

The next day, we rounded up the whole herd (all eight of them plus babes) and I picked up the little lamb with rubber gloved hands and managed to get five gulps of milk down its neck. Then it took off like a bat out of hell and I haven’t been able to feed it since. I gave up and put the milk in the trough. The milk duly disappears but I suspect the very self-satisfied looking ewes and some neighbourhood fat cats. Anyway, three weeks into life, the little lamb is learning to fend for itself and has integrated with the group.

Not so Pascal.

I became aware, while puttering in my herb garden, of an insistent bleating and greeting. All the ewes gazed at me tranquilly with that wide-eyed innocence for which sheep are renowned, and they watched indifferently as I tromped around the field, wellies (gumboots) squelching, until I came across a furious little ram, body still encased in his birth sac, trying to struggle to his feet and shouting for help and his Mom. Well, here I was. I peeled off his sac, pulled off the bits of his navel attachment, wiped his bum and took him over to the house for his first feed, all the while shaking my fingers reproachfully at the innocent looking ewes who had abandoned him.

Pascal the lamb

It was quite cold the first night so I carried the wet bundle of wool back to the house, dried him off with the hairdryer and put him in my bathroom over night. Baby bleating awoke me in the morning. So, it was feeding time. I could tell he had appreciated the previous food from the state of my bathroom floor. The next night I put plastic down but he managed to find the one uncovered corner and made even more mess. Plus, he doesn’t have a Mommy’s tongue so lick him clean so, as the Brits say, “he don’ arf smell”. Tonight, he can fend for himself because my dressing gown and pullovers are acquiring that particular acrid aroma of sheepfold and midden.

Pascal the Ram on day two

Now, you might find that heartless but if he can’t make it outside overnight, he ain’t gonna get past the crucial three-month stage.I don’t know why it happens but it seems to be a fairly usual occurrence. Bottle fed lambs rarely get beyond three months. (I know it’s true because there was a letter in The Times).

Sheep, in any case get very stressed and, like any child without family support, a lamb will be in difficulty. I have learnt over the years not to interfere with nature. Sometimes, ewes (like dogs or cats) may abandon the young or even actively kill them if they feel the little one is not viable. In addition, bottle-fed lambs are not accepted by the group – even by the other lambs. This little lad, whom I named Pascal because we are so near Easter, was making such a fuss about living I thought I had better give him a chance. So I’ll keep an eye on him but unless he is really strong, he will not survive even with my help. I don’t fancy eating him though but I might use him to replace Taliesin.

Pascal, growing as big as a daffodil

I didn’t mention this before but I think Taliesin “did” for Pascal’s Mum. He is a bit of a young thug, as you can tell by the way he treated his venerable Great to the power of X Grandfather. I think he hadn’t finished sowing his oats and was trying to “reap” (countryside expression) his young wife. I had seen him pursuing her around the field and trying to mount her just after the birth so I figured he had stressed her out and she died. He is not the only male to behave thus according to what one reads in the scandal sheets (but not in The Times).

Anyway, we are going to have a roast leg of lamb for Easter Sunday lunch and I am going to cook it French Style – Gigot a la Bretonne. Here’s the recipe.

French Style Roast Leg of Lamb – Gigot a la Bretonne

1 Leg of Lamb – enough for 6 people
500grs of dried flageolet or haricot beans – soaked overnight with two changes of water.
4 tomatoes (about 500grs), roughly chopped
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
4-6 large cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Cook the beans in plenty of lightly salted water with thyme, peppercorns and half a chopped carrot– takes 2 hours or so –until they are cooked but retain their shape.

With a sharp knife make incisions in the leg of lamb and place in them thin slices of peeled garlic. Place the leg, wrapped in foil, in your roasting pan and put in the middle of a pre-heated oven at 200 or Gas Mark 7. Roast for 45-50 minutes. Open the foil for the last half an hour of cooking.

Meanwhile, fry the onions and extra garlic gently in butter and when soft, add the tomatoes. Allow to simmer gently.

When the beans are soft enough to eat, drain them. Keep the cooking water but discard all the vegetable bits. Add the beans and enough liquid to the tomatoe and onion mixture to keep the beans moist. Simmer for 10 minutes. Season to taste. Keep warm.

Remove the roast from the oven and let it rest for ten minutes. This is important as it allows the blood, driven in towards the bone by the high heat to re-seep to the surface giving an overall pinkness to the roast.

Remove the roast from the pan and carve it into slices. Put it back in the oven to cook more if you need to.

Deglaze the roasting pan with a glass of white wine and enough water or stock to make a gravy. Heat the mixture briskly and if need be, thicken with cornflour mixed with a little white wine.

Serve the leg with the cut slices surrounded by the beans lavishly garnished with chopped parsley. Serve the gravy apart.

Enjoy. This is a traditional French Paschal lamb. My Pascal ram is bleating for his next meal so I’m off to prepare his bottle.

Lambing Season in Normandy is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN

Darcy Rhyno suggests we need a new way of thinking about cruelty to animals that provide us with food.

When I read Andrea K. Paterson’s article “How To Save a Cow” published on April 14, 2011 on Life As A Human, about avoiding factory farmed meat, it hit close to home… literally. As the parent of a daughter who aspires to vegetarianism, I’m well acquainted with the arguments for going meatless. In her article, Andrea makes a very good point that going eggless and milkless makes as much ethical sense when it comes to the animal cruelty that’s part of so much factory farming. But I’d like to take her argument one step further and consider what it means to be cruel to the animals we eat.

One day when she was 14, my daughter came home from school and declared she was a vegetarian. Just like that. No warning. No discussion. When we asked her why she’d made this sudden decision, she cited cruelty to animals as the reason and some internet videos about factory farming as the proof. In an echo of Andrea’s argument, I asked her if she was going to stop eating eggs since those animals were often treated just as badly on factory farms. I asked her to consider giving up most fish, especially tuna, if she was worried about the effects of her diet on animals.

Once plentiful, tuna are overfished and in danger of extinction.

As Andrea says, taking meat out of their diets seems to be the first action people take when they become concerned about animal welfare. The trouble is, that decision is a simplistic reaction to a very complex set of issues. Take tuna, for example. The tuna fishing industry barely ridded itself of the serious charge that many other species such as turtles and dolphins were dying in huge numbers as a result of poorly designed fishing gear when a new charge was levelled – over fishing.

Now, many groups such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace are predicting that at current catch rates, tuna will go extinct within a few years. And that’s just one species. Certain salmon, swordfish and cod populations, to name a few, are in trouble as well. Scientists having been raising the spectre of empty oceans for decades.

Industry points to aquaculture as the answer. In my own community, a battle is now raging between Atlantic Canada’s largest fish farming company and citizens opposed to a huge expansion planned for the local salmon farms. Even in the midst of that battle, I’ve heard no one suggest that fish farming by its very nature is cruel to the animals that are forced to live in the disease and parasite ridden pens so crowded with fish, the waste can be considered pollution. I see little difference between a pen full of salmon and a barn full of chickens.

There’s a further complication to the decision to go meatless as an answer to animal cruelty. Crops are grown on land that was once the home of countless wild species. Think of the prairies. Where buffalo, prairie chickens and foxes once roamed in great numbers, we now grow wheat and other major crops to feed a human population that continues to grow. Some argue that just the annual planting and harvesting of crops kills millions of wild birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals.

So, what do I tell my daughter? She wants to do the right thing, but what’s the right thing? It’s not to replace her hamburger with a tuna sandwich. That would be putting the welfare of a domestic animal – one created by and dependent for its very existence upon humans – with the likely extinction of a wild species. It might not even be to go vegan as that would increase the already enormous pressure on farmland.

The answer might be that we have to rethink what we mean by animal cruelty. Yes, we can be cruel to animals one at a time, even one herd or flock at a time, particularly in a factory setting, but we can also be cruel to animals one species at a time and even one ecosystem at a time. A healthy ecosystem might be one in which a variety of plants and animals thrive, some of which are used or taken out entirely for food. There are healthy wild ecosystems and there are healthy domestic ecosystems. Many small farms fit this description. Animals feed on plants grown on the farm that are fertilized with manure from those animals. The animals are kept in small numbers and treated well. The plants are varied and some areas of the farm might be left fallow or completely unused to keep the soil healthy and to provide habitat for wild species.

Factory Farm Chickens

The problem is most people live in cities and can’t find affordable what my daughter calls happy meat from small, local farms. They have to rely on factory farms where huge numbers of animals can be raised either for by-products like eggs and milk or for meat. While there are community gardens and bulk buying co-ops and farmers markets, there is no easy answer for most of the world’s city dwellers.

My daughter is lucky. We live in a place where we can easily buy fresh, affordable, sustainable haddock, smelt, lobster, clams, mussels and other fish while supporting the people who make it possible to do so. I grow a big vegetable garden to provide us with as much organic, local produce as possible for as many months of the year as possible.

For several years, I raised chickens for meat, that is until I couldn’t take the killing anymore. I kept hens for eggs until the wild animals killed all of them in a couple of horrific midnight episodes. We buy locally grown happy meat when we can afford it, we’ve cut out things like canned tuna entirely and we’ve cut down on factory farmed meat. In other words, we do what we can. But we won’t be cutting milk or eggs any time soon, not because we’re unaware of their links to animal cruelty – although where we live, not many farms can be considered factory farms – but because we have no way to replace them. And because animal cruelty is about much more than factory farms anyway.

Photo Credit

“Tuna”

“Factory Farm Chickens”

How to Save a Tuna (and Other Thoughts About the Food We Choose) is a post from: LIFE AS A HUMAN