Tag Archives: Mothers Day

NOT THE MOTHER’S DAY CALL I EXPECTED

POSTED: JUNE 1, 2024

Mother’s Day is a special time. We pull out the emotions we don’t show often enough and share them with the ones we love, or respect. Any regular readers of my posts will know I am not a dad and don’t have a partner or siblings. My Mothers Day experiences historically have been with my own mom and my grandmother. Both sadly passed many years ago. In recent times I have taken to calling those friends of mine I respect as moms just to tell wish them well and tell them I am thinking about them. I will often do it the day before, partially because of the time difference of my location Malta and many of them being in North America. It is also a day before the busy time of Mothers Day, and if the timing doesn’t work they call me back on their time and we can have a good chat. This was the case with my friend Janice who actually called me back the day after Mothers Day when she had more free time.

 

I know Janice pretty well, given she is the partner of my buddy Jim. Her Mothers Days always involve Jade and Jason over for the day, and often Jim makes a nice dinner and they do some things together. They do this every second Sunday so the significance of Mother’s Day is just that it is more focused on Janice than usual. This year, like others Jade always posts on social media an image of her and her mom doing something from when she was a kid. I always like that kind of remembrance as it brings to life the historical depth of the relationship. Also like some previous years Jade and Jason brought a number of flowers they thought their mom would like for the garden, perennials I think, and spent some time with their mom choosing the location and planting them.

 

 

 

But what was really on her mind, were some events that had happened during the week, largely involving Jim. I felt compelled to use the often-referenced quote of our high school principal when Jims name would come up “Oh, what has he done now?”

A few days before Mother’s Day he was planning his day around an outing to see his dental hygienist. He and Janice have a good relationship with Faye. She does a great job, and works in a very large and very good dental practice and they have been with for some time. It is a small world it seems as her grandfather started a major company making short helpful guides on various subjects for high school students. I used these guides myself.  Faye has a daughter and who is about nine and she and her partner are now expecting another baby. This is of particular interest to Jim has a sister who is nine years older than him and my other buddy Jim H. has a couple brothers, the youngest of which is also nine years older.  The dynamic of these siblings is always interesting to watch. There isn’t much competitiveness, as the age spread is so large its almost like having an aunt or uncle more than a sister or brother. Where there is jealousy its because by the time the younger one comes along the parents are now more mature and able to let the little stuff slide and they almost always are in a much better financial position so the family trips aren’t inexpensive camping trips in the car, but expensive trips to exotic locations and the meagre allowance has now become much more sizable.

Like me, Janice and Jim are getting older so need to have their teeth “detailed” as Jim says, about every four months so Jim had seen Faye just after she went public with her pregnancy and had a booking with her on her last day before her scheduled time for stopping work. While he was never really happy about his trips to the dental office this one he was looking forward to because he could get the final update on how things were progressing and the plans and wish her well.

It is with these thoughts that Jim was more than a bit put off when an event happened earlier in the day that put his dental outing at risk. Over breakfast he and Janice had watched a racoon come out from a patio table in their back garden that had not been uncovered from the winter and climb over a fence they share with a neighbour and head off to the neighbour’s yard. They were relieved to see she had left as it was Jims plan to uncover the table that day and start to do the spring yard work before his dental visit. He had just made his coffee and saw her return with a baby racoon in her mouth. Before he could collect his thoughts, she had crawled under the table cover with the little one. He called to Janice to come to see this but before Janice was out the mother racoon was off and over the fence again. This was not good. She was obviously relocating from where they had been born. Hopefully that was the entire family. Nope. The process continued for three more trips.

Janice is a very resourceful person and was on the phone with the municipal wildlife control people. They assured her that this was not their problem and that she should call a private wildlife control company. The answer there was not a very good one. Two different places she called were very clear that they could come and trap the mother and her kits, but that once they were released at a park the mother would bolt, the kits would be left on their own and either starve to death or be eaten by other animals. What the hell kind of mess had they fallen into here, they thought.

But one of the private wildlife people had made a good suggestion to encourage them to relocate to someplace in the yard that would not be so intrusive but still provide shelter and that would lead to the best possible outcome.

So once Jim saw the mom head out to get another one or to get food Jim took some gear and built them a little house in a corner of their yard.  It was an aluminum step ladder covered with a tarp and with a cardboard box below with little walls so the kits wouldn’t wander out. The next part I imagine was a bit scary. With some gloves on Jim gingerly opened the table cover to reveal the nest of babies and carried one of the little guys to the new home and went back for the next one. Once the cover on the existing nest under the patio table was exposed it was obvious there were six of them! One at time Jim did the gentle walk to their new home and placed them in the box. I was at number four when mom came back and hear the squealing from the new location and went under the tarp at the ladder house. There was no turning back now so Jim got the next one and brought it to within a few meters of their new home and set it down and went back for another. Thankfully mom heard its squealing and after making sure Jim had left came out and picked it up with her mouth and took it to the new nest. They repeated this routine until the job was done. On one of Jims trips to the drop point Janice snapped this photo. Their little eyes were not even open at that point!

 

While the drama of this was all pretty interesting Jim was at a terrible risk of not making his dental detailing appointment and called to tell the clinic he was on his way and would not be characteristically early but might even be a few minutes late. Apparently, someone had forgotten to call him to say that the appointment would need to be rescheduled with another hygienist at a future time as Faye had gone into labour and been rushed to the hospital. She and her baby boy were doing fine he was told.

Other than caring for their elderly dog Tuli, Janice and Jim have a life these days that is quite quiet and does not have big events, or even little events to liven it up much so this had been quite the day. The new nest was quite a novelty for the next few days but then there was no action around it at all. They were getting a bit stressed that she might have abandoned the nest altogether and on Mother’s Day morning gingerly pulled back part of the tarp hoping to not see a number of dead baby racoons. Nope. Nothing. Mom had relocated them to somewhere safer.

That night having a nice mothers day dinner they could hear the mom and her kits making noise from their new nest in a nearby park.

It was not the Mother’s Day conversation I thought I would have but it made my day.

Love you mom.

Django

MOTHERS DAY 2018

Posted: Sunday, May 13, 2018

So what is special about mothers day- you have to ask? We may not all have had fathers but we all have had mothers. They are the ones who traditionally made the family a unit, and in bad families were the ones who held it together.

The notion of “Mothers Day” I have always found a bit strange, however. There should be an acknowledgment of these wonderful creatures but it almost cheapens it to make it just one day.

I am not going to go on about my mom. She was a good mom and I loved her and I regret that for too many years I was just thinking about my own life, not coming home to visit. I think about this a fair bit, but I can’t change it, I can only remember her and my dad and try to learn from my experience of not being a better kid.

What I am going to do is tell you about a poem Jim wrote. He is not the best poet as you know but I particularly like this one. It’s about his Nana. Like me, he had a great relationship with his paternal grandmother. Her real name was Hannah but Nana is what he called her. During those years in high school when most of us were somewhat alienated from our parents and vice/versa the relationship we had with an aunt or uncle, grandparent or even an older cousin is what got some of us through. They can bring a perspective that may not be the same as ours but might be somewhat different than our parents – and they bring it with love and no expectations.

So during his late years in elementary school and through high school, Jim and his dad would drive up the Ottawa valley from their home in Ottawa one evening a week to a little village where his Nanas house was. This hadn’t been her lifetime house or even a place she had lived in for a substantial time. It was a house that she had bought in later life just to get back to living in a smaller community, having a garden and being out with nature. It would be followed by the reality of having to move into an apartment in Ottawa closer to Jim’s parents but for about a decade, she enjoyed her small-town life in her little place, where she could walk to the village shops for groceries, or the post office or to get her hair done.

So on Tuesday nights from May until September Jim and his dad would drive there. Jim’s dad would usually work on repairs of some kind, while Jim would cut the grass, and do some weeding in the garden. They would all then have dinner together and before it was too late in the evening (as Jim would have to go to school the next day to fail Math, Science or French) Jim and his dad would drive back to Ottawa.  Sometimes he would complain about it as he would miss something that a bunch of us were doing, or a TV show he wanted to see but for the most part he looked forward to his Tuesday nights both for seeing his Nana and for having some time with his dad that was not focused on how badly he was doing in school or what mischief he had gotten into that week.

This is his poem and as I said above I do like this one as it reminds me of times with my grandmother. Jim has really been opening up over the last few years and I think he is better for it.

 

NANA’S TUESDAY NIGHT

Every Tuesday night,

My dad and I would drive

To the country to see my Nana.

 

I would cut the grass,

Dad would repair something

Or weed the garden.

 

Nana would make us dinner

Of fresh vegetables and meat,

Roast potatoes and pie.

 

I never liked

Beets, green beans or brussels sprouts,

Except at my Nanas.

 

My Nana is gone, my dad is gone,

But as often as I can

I eat beets, Green beans, and brussels sprouts.

 

So that’s the poem. He is getting better at this poetry business I think.  I don’t yet have a picture of Jim with his Nana but I am trying to track one down.  I do have her recipe for apple pie and a picture of Janice and the first pie she made for Jim when they were living at their first apartment in Kingston. Janice had finished her program in fashion design and was working as a fashion designer at that point and Jim was doing graduate work in Urban Planning and Development.

 

 

NANAS CLASSIC APPLE PIE RECIPE

Jim’s Nana seemed to like to work with really big pie plates – about 30cm so almost one foot. For some of us, that is just one big unwieldy pie, especially if you are working in a small space like the galley of an old boat like mine so I have scaled the recipe he gave me down to a 23 cm size (9 inches) pie.  Even when I am making a pie for a larger group I prefer to make two smaller ones and then do one as a bit of a variation in look or taste or to make one as a pie and a few tarts as well.

Ingredient list: Pastry – 2 pieces as its double crust for the 9-inch pie if you are buying pastry.

Of course nothing duplicates a pastry you make yourself. If you have not done so before this adds quite a bit to the exercise so for the first time I would just buy the dough. Once you are comfortable with making pies move on to making the pastry yourself. Most recipes for dough don’t really tell the story  of the tricks or rules to make a good pie crust but one that I really like is https://www.canadianliving.com/food/food-tips/article/pie-crust-101

 

Pie Filling

Peeled & sliced apples 5 cups            (1.25L)

Sugar *                             3/4  cup       (175 ml)

Flour                                 1 tbsp           (15 ml)

Cinnamon                        1/2 tsp          ( 2 ml)

Lemon Juice                    1 tbsp           (15 ml)

Butter (unsalted)           1 tbsp           (15 ml) cut cold butter into little pieces to distribute

Egg                                    1 egg                      for eggwash

*  Now I have tried to make this faithfully to the original recipe but Jim tells me that pretty regularly his Nana would claim to be low in sugar and would “substitute” with some rum or with a fruit liqueur or with maple syrup. His recollection, however, is that there actually was no substitution just “supplement” of these items at times. I have experimented with each of the products and found that up to a half tablespoon of rum or up to a full tablespoon of maple syrup or liqueur such as  Grand Marnier can add some sweetness and depth to the flavour.

 

To make the pie:

1. Preheat the oven to 220C (425f)

2. Line the pie plate with the lower pastry piece

3. mix the cut apple slices, flour and sugar*, lemon juice and cinnamon then gently pour the mixture onto the                   pastry

4. put the little butter pieces around the top of the mixture

5. drizzle the rum/ liqueur etc. around the mixture if substituting/ supplementing

6. cover with the top crust, then seal and pinch (flute) the edges

7. You need to put in a few slits for the steam to be released. Jim would chatter on about how his Nana would not just cut little slits for the pie to release steam but instead would do a little shape – a few slits to look like a conifer tree or a little rabbit or acorn.

8. a little brushing of an egg wash and a bit of a sugar sprinkle and its ready for the oven for 30 minutes then watch it for the next five to ten minutes after that to take the crust to the way you like it.

 

While some weeks Jims Nana would do cookies or cake, most weeks it would be a pie dessert and Jim, who has a whole mouthful of sweet teeth would tell me about the one that week – Wild Blueberry Pie, Maple Syrup Pie, Buttertart Pie, Fresh Rasberry Pie ….

Come to think of it, on the vegetable front today he does eat a lot of brussels sprouts, and green beans and even more beets than the average person.

And I would be remiss to not wish Janice a happy mothers day. She got cheated out of experiencing her mother during her adult years as her mom passed when Janice was in her early twenties.  I think she is making up for that missing experience by being so good a mom to Jade and Jason.