oh, traitorous nose!

Close your eyes and sniff:

Photo by Marisa DeMeglio | CC-BY-2.0

On second thought, don't close your eyes. Just gaze upon the pretty lilacs and let your olfactory memory go to work.

For many people, the image alone will be enough to trigger a vivid scent memory, a scent likely to conjure thoughts of springtime, sunshine, warm breezes and gentle rain.

I should be so lucky.

Oh, the lilac image does trigger a scent memory for me, no doubt about that. But no sweetly perfumed breezes come to mind. Instead, my traitorous nose conjures a dank and earthy funk.

It all began on a warm spring afternoon in 1986. Friends and family had been invited to the farm for a celebration of my parents' wedding anniversary. After days of intense preparation, the feast was ready. Our little house looked bright and fresh as could be. Even our three rambunctious sons had been scrubbed clean. As party hour drew near, I took a moment alone to admire the table. Set with grandma May's treasured Limoges china and our special occasion crystal glassware, it sparkled, ready for company.

"Mom!" The screen door slammed and middle son bounded into the house looking slightly less scrubbed than I remembered. "Dad wants to know if—"

He fell suddenly silent, his smile fading away and his nose wrinkling. Before I could ask what was wrong, he took a giant step back and said, in a horrified tone, "It smells bad in here, Mom."

As I moved to join him in the hallway, I caught a whiff of it, too. And there was no mistaking that smell. Dead mouse.

Mice are an inescapable fact of country life and, for the most part, we chose to live and let live, as long as the mice chose wisely and stayed outside. Inside, they were rodent non grata and definitely not welcome at our party, dead or alive.

Middle son rounded up his brothers and we organized a search. The odour was strongest in the front hall and near the cellar stairs but despite poking, prodding, and sniffing in every possible nook and cranny we had no luck finding the stinky culprit. Our guests were due to arrive in less than an hour. The smell was growing stronger by the minute. What to do?

The day was warm, with a gentle, steady breeze, so my first step was to open all the windows. That's when middle son remembered what he'd been sent to ask me. "Do you want Dad to cut some lilacs for the house?"

Yes! Our lilac hedge had some of the most aromatic flowers I'd ever encountered. Their sweet, long-lasting fragrance was exactly what we needed to disguise the presence of a not-so-dearly departed mouse. While I pulled out every vase I could find, plus a few big mason jars for good measure, the boys helped their dad cut lilacs. Masses and masses of lilacs. We placed them in the front hallway, beside the cellar door, in the living room and sunroom—even in the bathroom. They looked lovely and, more important, they smelled lovely… like springtime.

The party was a success—great company, good food, happy times. Everyone loved the lilacs. We even sent bunches home with a few people. Only later, with windows closed against the cool evening air, did the scent of mouse begin to insinuate itself again, mingling with the fragrance of cut lilacs until the two smells became one.

Days passed. As the flowers faded, so did their fragrance. The smell of death faded, too, and we never did find the mouse. Its dry bones remain entombed forever inside the walls of that old house.

Liam Moloney | CC-BY-SA-2.0

The following year when the first lovely lilacs burst into bloom in our garden, I was eager to visit them, to bury my face in the pale purple flowers and revel in the scent of springtime. That's when I first discovered the awful olfactory truth. And thirty years later, that truth still applies. For me, the sweet, heady perfume of lilacs will always carry a base note of mouse.

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Mouse image by George Shuklin | CC-BY-SA-1.0

stillpoint is the blog of Canadian author Cheryl Cooke Harrington

easy wind and downy flake...

Toronto hasn't seen much snow this winter – yet. But the monster blizzard that battered the east coast this past weekend has me reminiscing about past winters and life in simpler times.

Not that there was ever anything "simple" about enduring massive snowfalls, ice storms, and power outages. But I can't help wondering if our always-connected, always turned on twenty-first century life means we have a harder time coping when the inevitable happens. And then I wonder . . . what if the grid goes down and stays down? Zombie apocalypse, anyone?

Back in my hippy-back-to-the-land days of the 1970s and 80s, my husband and I and our three young sons lived in a rented farm house with several acres of land and a ramshackle barn. We moved to our farm on a snowy day at the end of December in 1975. I'll never forget arriving there with our overloaded camper van, and several carloads of city-folk friends to find the long gravel driveway completely drifted in. Hubby made a run at it with the van and, by some miracle, managed to stay on the track. After a few more runs, he'd cleared enough of a path for the rest of the convoy to follow. Our friends unloaded their vehicles in record fast time and beat a hasty retreat to the city, no doubt convinced we'd lost our minds. There were times, during that first challenging winter, when I wondered if they might be right.

A cranky old octopus of an oil furnace lurked in the cellar where it struggled to deliver heat to the first floor. Upstairs bedrooms were always cold but we piled on extra blankets and told ourselves the bracingly fresh air that gusted through our ancient sash windows made for healthy sleeping. (In fact, it probably saved our lives. I'm sure that furnace was pumping out clouds of carbon monoxide along with its meagre heat.)

We installed a massive cast-iron stove before our second winter on the farm, partly for the ambiance of a wood fire but mostly because we weren't sure the old furnace would see us through another season. We were right about that. For the next sixteen years, we relied on a Fisher stove like this one to keep us warm – hard work, sometimes, but worth it.

In late summer, a truck would deliver seven bush cords of wood, dumping it unceremoniously at the end of the driveway. We (and by "we" I mean mostly hubby) became skilled at splitting logs into manageable chunks, obsessive about hunting down kindling – fallen cedar branches from the neighbour's woodlot were best – and expert at stacking the split cords in neat, shoulder-high rows to dry. Our sons still grumble about the brutal Two Load Rule: each boy had to carry two big armloads of firewood into the house before settling down to their after school snacks. The rule applied equally to me and their Dad, of course, but the child labour angle makes for better stories, all of them starting, "Why, when I was a boy . . ." The care and feeding of that wood stove became the stuff of family legends.

First person up on a winter's morning (again, almost always hubby) would hustle down to poke the embers and get a fire going to warm things up for the rest of us. The kids would huddle around the stove while they waited for breakfast. Unfortunately, eldest son had a habit of presenting his backside to the stove. There were a few times he got a bit too close. We teased him that we didn't need marks on the wall to tell us how much he'd grown in a year, we could just check the red stripes on his behind.

One particularly cold morning, with the boys off to school and the main floor feeling toasty warm, I decided to treat myself to a hot, relaxing bath. We always kept the plug in the bathroom drain because the tap had an intermittent drip and the drain had a habit of freezing. Sure enough, that morning there was a shallow puddle trapped in the tub. When I reached for the plug to release the water, my fingers skated across a solid sheet of ice. I changed my mind about the bath.

The following summer, with our landlord's blessing, we knocked that old tub room off the back of the house and built a new, well-insulated bathroom and a lovely big sun room in its place. Not only was that sun room the best reading spot I've ever had, it was perfect for starting seedlings in the spring and made a glorious heat trap on sunny winter days.

It's possible I'm seeing those long ago winters through the rose coloured glasses of fond memory, but I'm positive snow was deeper – and fell more often – in those early days on the farm. Corn stubble in the surrounding fields disappeared under a blanket of white in November and wasn't seen again until April. We could step out the back door, strap on our cross country skis, and take off for a trek through the woods. The kids loved the adventure of it, learning how to start a fire in the snow and savouring a picnic lunch in the wild.

These days, we're all city dwellers, but a recently acquired plot of land has us dreaming and scheming. Far from the city lights and off the grid, the property has fertile fields, a scrap of forest, and a tiny cold water lake. We're in no rush to give full time back-to-the-landing another try; we like our internet and city comforts a bit too much. But I have to admit, there's also comfort in knowing we've done it before and, if we need to, we know how to do it again. Hopefully without zombies.

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Wondering where you've heard that before? The title of this post is a quote from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost:

"The only other sound’s the sweep

of easy wind and downy flake."

stillpoint is the blog of Canadian author Cheryl Cooke Harrington

  

sneaky peekers

Temptation. That's the trouble with this time of year. Too many temptations. And it's not just the chocolate and shortbread and all the other delectable holiday goodies on offer. No. I'm talking about surprises. All those hidden gifts, lurking in closets or squirrelled away in somebody's sock drawer. If you think about it, presents are not very good at keeping themselves secret. You can almost hear them whispering as they wait for the Big Day. "Look at me! Look at me!"

Of course, now that I'm a proper grown-up, I use my proper grown-up willpower to avoid closets, sock drawers, and other hidey-holes in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Even so, I'm always relieved when the last gift is bound up in shiny paper, tied with bright ribbon, and nestled safely under the tree. It's so much easier, then, to resist the temptation to peek. Okay, I might try to catch a glimpse of a hand-written tag, or maybe move a few packages around. You know, just to make room for more, not to shake or sniff or weigh a box with my name on it or anything. Ah-hem. Certainly not! It's all about the surprise, right? But…

Once upon a very long time ago, "willpower" was just a word grown-ups used when what they really meant was, "stop having all that fun!"

It was December, 1959, two weeks before Christmas. I was nine and a half years old. Mom was out for the afternoon, Dad was busy in his basement workshop, and I was hearing gift-whispers all over the house. With Cookie the dog as my trusty lookout, I tiptoed from room to room. Like a young Nancy Drew with her Togo, we were hot on the trail of a Christmas mystery. First, we checked the hall closet, rummaging through a box of scarves and mittens, behind the winter coats and under the boot rack – nothing. Upstairs, we rooted through the linen closet, opened Mom's lingerie drawer, and peered under beds – still nothing. My gift had to be somewhere in the house, I could definitely hear it whispering. In fact, by then, I was pretty sure I could hear it singing and giggling, too. "Tee-hee-hee and ho-ho-ho, you won't find me, no matter where you go." Cookie's tail seemed to keep time with a jolly thump-thump-thump on the floor. Whose side was she on, anyway?

Back in the kitchen, I pondered the situation while staring out the window at our snow-covered backyard. Birds fluttered and squabbled at the feeder. A cold wind rattled bare branches against the frosted windowpane. Downstairs, Dad whistled as he swept his workshop floor. Beside me, Cookie yawned and huffed, turning lazy circles before settling onto her mat for a nap. And the whispering gift had grown so quiet I could barely hear it any more. Ah-ha! What do you do when you're hiding and the seeker comes close? Hold your breath. Stay quiet. Don't whisper. I turned to study the kitchen. Where would I hide? Not in the cupboards or cutlery drawers – too much traffic – but what about the junk drawer?

Dry wood squealed a warning as I pulled it open. I froze. Cookie snored. Dad whistled. I held my breath and eased the drawer wide. There, tucked into a corner and poorly camouflaged by a jumble of elastic bands, playing cards, envelopes and postage stamps, was a neatly folded piece of crisp, white paper. The whispering stopped. I reached for the paper, carefully unfolded it, and read. This was it! Not the gift itself, but a receipt dated three days before, for "one transistor radio, pink."

Dad's footsteps sounded on the basement stairs. Cookie scrambled to her feet and ran to meet him at the kitchen door. I must have re-folded the paper and closed the drawer but I don't remember doing so. I managed to forget about the whispers and my afternoon of sleuthing, too. Until, gathered around our tree on Christmas morning, my parents put that perfect little gift in my hands. I looked up at their happy faces, so eager to see my surprise and delight, and all I could think of was "one transistor radio, pink."

Smile, I told myself. Act surprised. Don't let them know. I pulled on the ribbon, peeled back the paper, opened the box… and burst into tears.

I'd like to think that Mom and Dad never suspected I'd peeked, that they believed my tears were tears of happiness, that I hadn't disappointed them. But I have a feeling they both knew exactly why I was crying. I loved that pink transistor radio and made sure they knew it. But my sneaky peeking had, in some small way, spoiled the celebration – not only for me, but for the people who loved me best.

So, take it from me. No matter how many gift whispers you might think you hear this holiday season, don't become a sneaky peeker. Get yourself some proper grown-up willpower and savour the surprise.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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stillpoint is the blog of Canadian author Cheryl Cooke Harrington

  

Here there be nightmares...

Over the years, I've played mom, best friend, and nursemaid to a variety of critters both barnyard (chickens, ducks, rabbits, pigs), and household (dogs, cats, fish, birds). I was even the designated alternate caregiver for a white rat named Dweezil (with apologies to Mr. Zappa). But I drew my line in the sand when Elder Son showed up one evening with his best friend in tow. They were carrying a glass-covered terrarium and wearing suspiciously nervous grins.

"We're sharing a pet," said Elder Son. "He's really cute and furry and I won the coin toss, so I get to keep him this week. His name is..."

Unfortunately, I can't remember the creature's name. Maybe I've blocked the memory as too traumatic or maybe I just shrieked so loudly I drowned out Elder Son's voice.  As he spoke, he had reached into the terrarium, picked up the cute and furry new pet and turned, extending his hand in my direction. A hand almost completely covered by the hairy legs and pulsating body of a gigantic brown tarantula.

Now, spiders are not my favourite creatures but I try to maintain a live and let live philosophy. That is to say, live and let live BUT NOT IN MY HOUSE!  Coin toss or not, friend Gil was awarded spider-keeper status and Elder Son had to content himself with visiting rights.

Fast forward twenty-something years and Elder Son is now a parent himself. His family menagerie currently includes 2 cats, a dog, a chinchilla, a bearded dragon, and a White's tree frog. (And in recent memory a hedgehog, numerous fish, gerbils, and a guinea pig). So I had a good laugh when I read his recent Facebook update about my grandson: "Ty has decided to lobby for a snake...not just a corn snake either, a PYTHON. Note to self: never allow him to enter a pet store again."

What goes around comes around, son.  I'm just sayin'.