Two new poems: "Climate" and "On finding a stone..."

 

 I have been fortunate enough to have two poems published this week. Oddly enough, they were both accepted during the same week back in February, and they appeared in publication only two days apart.

The first one, "Climate,"  appears in Stone Circle Review, a lovely new journal run single-handedly by editor Lee Potts.

I started writing this poem during one of the many gloomy, rainy days we had this past winter. (Did you know this was Ontario's darkest winter in over 80 years?) It began as more of a gripe than anything else, but the process of writing it really got me thinking about the bigger picture of what is happening to our planet.

Here's the first bit of the poem:

I hate winter rain, how it soaks
dirty snow heavy, sluices beneath ice
dams at the curb, how it seeps,
weighs....

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

  image courtesy of Stone Circle Review

 

The second of the two is called "On finding a stone to put in your father's casket" and appears in River Mouth Review. It's very fitting that it was published so close to the one-year anniversary of Dad's death. My brother Errol and I were the ones tasked with the stone-finding mission the morning of Dad's funeral; it's something I will never forget.

Here are the first few lines:

Morning of the funeral, you drive out
to the farm. Best not to disturb

the new owners, also the lane
is muddy and rutted, so you pull in

off the road...

(read the whole poem HERE)

 

image courtesy of River Mouth Review
(this is not the stone we picked up at the farm)

Five Minute Friday: STORY

 

I'm linking up with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week's word is STORY.

I haven't been writing much in 2023 so far. The main reason is that my mother-in-law became ill with cancer in the fall and died early last week. At her funeral last Saturday, my brother-in-law and nephew got up and spoke about her devotion to her family, her deep faith, and her independent, adventurous spirit.

They also shared stories of her funny ways -- such as the time she went to a thrift store and unwittingly bought back the same pair of white pants she had donated months earlier. 

That anecdote got quite a laugh. I particularly appreciate that my mother-in-law actually told us about that in the first place. Some people would be too embarrassed to have anyone else know they'd done something like that. Not her. 

Telling someone else's story is a big responsibility, especially when they're not there to defend themselves or raise their hand and say, "Wait, that's not right -- they were black pants!" (They weren't. They were definitely white.)

I've been talked about in another person's publicly told story, and I have found it hard, painful work to separate their need to tell their own story in their own way from my desire to be depicted accurately and fairly. As Barbara Brown Taylor says in An Altar in the World,

"...encountering another human being is as close to God as I may ever get -- in the eye-to-eye thing, the person-to-person thing -- which is where God's Beloved has promised to show up.... The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead."

Ultimately we can't control what others say. We can only live our own story with as much honesty and integrity as possible and try to respect that "unsolved mystery" in everyone else we meet. My mother-in-law was not perfect, but she loved us and we loved her. She can never be replaced, but we honoured her as best we could as we commemorated the end of her earthly story.

me with my mother-in-law, Audrey, on March 1, 2023 (six days before she died)

Merry Christmas from our home to yours - 2022

 

Christmas 2022

As 2022 winds down, I thought I'd take a few minutes to reflect on our family's year and share a little of what's been going on in the Prinsen household.

Richard and Jonathan - photo by Jeannie, August 2022

 Jonathan turned 20 in September and is now in his last year of school. It is hard to see this phase of his life coming to an end because school has been such a happy place for him ever since he was a little kindergartener at Rideau Public School. But I'm sure he will adjust to the changes just as he always has -- and I guess we will too. Organizations like Extend-a-Family, whose camps and Saturday programs Jonathan has attended for many years, offer adult day programming, so we'll consider whether a setting like that is appropriate for him come September of 2023. There is still time to work some of these things out. Jonathan had another bout of more frequent seizures this summer and had to have some more medication dose adjustments; at the moment he is four months seizure-free. His neurologist sees him every six months, so with her direction we just stay the course when things are going well and adjust medications as needed. Jonathan continues his unwavering interest in all things related to garbage and recycling, brooms, shovels, dustpans, windmills, and seagulls -- and he shouts "Good job!" encouragingly to people when he sees them walking their dogs or shoveling their driveways.

 Allison and Jeannie - photo by Naomi De Jonge, June 2022

Allison is 24 and is continuing her studies in Linguistics at Queen's. This past semester was the first one in which she attended all of her classes in person on campus, and it went very well. She made the Dean's Honours List with Distinction (GPA 3.9 or above), so we are pretty proud of her for that achievement. She is still living at home, which is a good arrangement while she's at university.

Richard's year started off in a way he didn't intend and wouldn't have planned: in January he fell on ice while out for a run and broke his fibula (the thinner bone in the lower leg). He required surgery and spent the winter convalescing and healing. By April he was able to weight-bear and go back to work; then over the spring and summer he eventually got back to running and even a little soccer. This fall he started back as a volunteer at the Run & Read program at Molly Brant Public School; this program had not run in person since pre-Covid.

I (Jeannie) retired from my online course work at Queen's at the end of the winter 2022 semester, and that's been a good change. I always enjoyed connecting with the students, but I was ready for a break from the constant marking and putting-out of fires. I'm working a few hours a week as a copy editor for Kingstonist News, a local online news site; the people are great to work with, and I enjoy working away behind the scenes, tidying up punctuation and grammar and checking details. As for my writing, I've had three publications this year, all poems: if interested, you can read those at the top of the "My Writing" page of this blog.

All four of us succumbed to Covid-19 in August after avoiding it for 2-1/2 years. Jonathan probably picked it up at summer camp, though we can't be sure of that. The kids recovered pretty quickly, but Richard and I were knocked out with fatigue for nearly two weeks.

 The biggest and hardest piece of news from this past year is that my dad died in April. (See his obituary here: Arnold MacEachern. It will appear as a pop-up; just wait for it.) He had lived in Whisperwood Villa, a Charlottetown nursing home, since the fall of 2019, and I had only seen him once since Covid began. In March of this year the nursing home had a Covid outbreak, and Dad got it; though he was not all that sick with it, it may simply have been too hard for him to bounce back, especially when he was already quite weak with advanced kidney failure. My brother Alan was with him when he died, and he just slipped away peacefully. We had a funeral for him in late April; I and my brothers Lincoln, Alan, and Errol were all able to be there (my brother Scott, who lives and works in China, could not make it). The four of us spoke and/or sang at the service and tried to honour Dad as best we could -- which honestly was not difficult. Dad was such a wonderful person: patient, hard-working, faithful, interested in people, true salt of the earth. The world doesn't seem the same without him, particularly with Mom also gone. At the funeral my brother Lincoln sang Rodney Crowell's song "Love Is All I Need," and this is the final verse:

I had a dream last night: I saw my mom and dad
They were happy now, and I was glad.
They had a brand new house; they'd just moved in
And when I awoke, they were gone again...

I know love is all I need
I know love is all I need
I know love is all I need
That's all I know

Drawing of Dad and Mom by my niece, Meredith Mac Eachern

Those seem like fitting words with which to draw this letter to a close. As 2022 nears its end we have extended family members with health concerns, and these things have a way of distilling life down to what really matters: love, family, and friendship. The small acts of caring and kindness often turn out to be the most significant; as my favourite quote from The Fellowship of the Ring puts it, "Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."

This describes the story of Christmas as well: how the greatest event, the Incarnation, was embodied in the smallest package -- a tiny baby, weak and vulnerable, born while the eyes of the world looked elsewhere. 

This Christmas, may your celebrations and observances -- religious or otherwise -- be filled with love, and may the New Year bring you peace and joy. 

Jeannie, Richard, Allison, and Jonathan

 

20 years of Jonathan

 

It's Jonathan's birthday today; he is 20 years old.  

 

Can you believe that cheerful butterball (who actually did have a neck, despite appearances to the contrary) has turned into this tall young man?

 Jonathan Sept. 8, 2022 - photo Jeannie Prinsen

Having Jonathan in our lives has given us a different perspective on life than we might otherwise have had. Garbage trucks, geese and seagulls, brooms and shovels, lines of laundry all have greater significance because of Jonathan's interest in these things. Everyone he meets is a friend, and the simplest pleasures give his life meaning and joy.

 Jonathan 2017 - photo Jeannie Prinsen

I wrote the following poem, "Lakeside, with Jonathan" about five years ago and was honoured to have it published in the literary journal Relief. I think it describes Jonathan better than almost anything else could. Happy birthday, Jonathan.

 

Lakeside, with Jonathan

 To the waterfront at Lake Ontario Park we go,
you leading the way to your favourite place: down,

down stone steps to the little cobble beach, where a shelf
of flat rocks stretches into the water. Cross-legged

on a rock, you gaze at the lake, its wind-ruffled surface
dancing with a million bright diamonds. You call out

to the gulls that wheel across the sky, and watch
a half-dozen geese skim the water then swoop

swiftly up and away. You look around
with a smile and say Happy.

This is as abstract as you get, you whose mind anchors
firmly in the tangibles: supper, school, garbage truck.

No bedtime confidences for you, no heartfelt talks
of dreams or hopes, just the familiar, daily repetition.

I could choose to grieve what’s not, or let you teach me
that peace abides in the way water swells and breaks

again and again on the shore, that the seabirds speak
to you as they cry overhead, that the windmills

over on the island are your friends, tall and steady
in the sunlight, their long arms waving hello.