'Twas The Night Before Christmas...

It's just a few days before Christmas and as I stand on my snowy beach looking out on an almost frozen lake, I can't help but reflect back on Christmas a few years past where we found ourselves on the verge of a big house move and celebrating Christmas amongst a giant maze of packing boxes.

I didn't know then that as the Clovelly door closed on us, another door was slowly opening and would direct us down a magical path to a very different way of life. The sale and consequential move from our Clovelly house a few Christmases ago has given way to the birth of our Vaseux Lake house. We've since been on a transitional flight path that has taken us from suburbia to rural lake life.

The move into the lake house has been a dream come true and every day I am grateful to call this lake my home and the people of Oliver my neighbours. So on that note, I am looking back to a time when this all began and revisiting a poem I wrote on December 22, 2011 for my old blog Running with a View:

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
was a maze of packing boxes, no room for a mouse.
No stockings were hung by the fire with care,
no tree, no lights; had the Grinch moved in here?


The movers would come in just a few weeks
so Christmas had taken a gloomy back seat.
As I lay in my bed, attempting to sleep
I suddenly sprang up and leapt to my feet.


I would go for a run and work this thing out,
I couldn’t let the Grinch fill me with doubt.
As my husband lay nestled all snug in our bed,
I pulled on my runners, grabbed a cap for my head.


Outside the moon shone lustrous and bright
and it lit up my way on this cold Christmas night.
I ran all the way down to the cove by the sea
and I couldn’t believe the view I did see.


Out on the bluff a strange sight did appear,
a jolly old elf with eight sturdy reindeer.
And nearby a sleigh, piled high with new toys
was ready to deliver to good girls and boys.

 

I shook my head slowly, wiped sleep from my eyes
but the vision remained, I’m telling no lies.
The jolly old elf was so lively and quick
and I thought to myself, could this be St. Nick?


He was chubby and plump, just like in the story
and I laughed when I saw him in all of his glory.
His eyes--how they twinkled! His nose like a cherry!
And he winked as he waved at me, gleeful and merry.


Then he chuckled and shouted, called his reindeer by name
and more fleeter than eagles on the wing they came.
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle
and I was left dumbstruck as they flew like a thistle.


I still was in wonder as I made my way back
to my house which now stood with the moon at its back.
And way up above me, I heard a merry “ho ho ho!”
and in a blink of an eye, it started to snow.


Renewed with the spirit of Christmas and hope
I skipped back to my home, there was no time to mope.
And as I tiptoed back in to my mess of a hall
I knew this would be the merriest Christmas of all!

Wishing you all a magical Christmas!

THE VOICE IN THE ICE

With just one week to go before the winter solstice, and the frantic holiday pitch building to a frenzied crescendo, November is now nothing but a blur to me. The winter wind continues to etch itself indelibly into my daily routine and is one of the few sounds to break the silence of winter along with the occasional great horned owl and coyote call.

But yesterday, in a very unlikely place, I encountered another voice of winter: the lake. After a bone-numbing cold spell marked by daytime temperatures that barely reached -10 Celsius and nighttime temperatures that plummeted to -15 Celsius, the lake froze over. 

Yesterday, late afternoon, the temperature rose to a balmy 4 degrees-Celsius, the air was still and it was perfect conditions for happy hour on the beach with a bonfire. As usual, I was first at the fire with my glass and bottle of wine. I settled myself in front of the roaring fire and as I listened to the snap and crackle of the burning wood and sipped my wine, I heard something else--a long, slow, rumbling groan resonating from somewhere nearby. 

Unsure what the sound was, or where it was coming from, I looked around me, but there was nobody or anything remotely near to where I was sitting. Over the ensuing 10 minutes I heard the incredibly loud sounds over and over. The sounds ranged from a low, belly-aching groan to a high, fast-paced swoosh. At this point, Mark joined me and as he sat down a giant boom and swoosh enveloped us. Mark, looking as a child would who had just discovered the magic of Christmas, exclaimed “It’s the lake, making noises”. 

Bev and Lanny joined us and we sat and listened to the lake stretch and yawn as the waxing moon rose in the sky above us. As darkness descended, a band of coyotes on the fringe of the lake joined in and the lake chorus sang loudly all around us.

Geologists have a name for this acoustic phenomenon: ice yowling. Yowling is described as low, drawn out moans that are very reminiscent of whale calls. A YouTube search on “ice sounds” turns up a dizzying array of recordings, though none of the recordings sounded exactly like our lake.

Our neighbor Bev has been at the lake for many years and is most familiar with the voice of the ice. As ice expands and contracts, it causes stresses through its depth and across its breadth. These stresses cause the ice to crack and refreeze. The sounds of this cracking and refreezing are transmitted through the ice and can get exuberantly loud. The colder the temperature, the faster the ice grows and the more frequent the stress cracks develop.

The lake does not grumble and groan every evening, and there’s no telling when to expect its eerie yowl. But just hearing its hauntingly beautiful voice confirms what I already know, this lake is alive with a spiritual energy and I am blessed to live here.

On A Good Day...

On a good day I can run for miles.

On a good day trumpets sound across the lake,

and I can see my reflection in the glass.

On a good day the breeze is gentle.

On a good day my garden spilleth over,

and my spade is light.

On a good day I can hear tapping at my door.

On a good day I feel alive,

and the sun's energy permeates me.

And on a bad day...well there are none here,

only different shades of a good day.

AUTUMN SPLENDOR

My first autumn at the lake began with just a subtle change in the light, with skies a deeper blue, with a sharp chillness in the air which could be felt in the shade, and the disappearance of migrant birds. 

Each day merged easily into the next without structure, meaning I never actually knew what day it really was. Every day felt the same, neither a Monday, nor a Saturday, or any other day for that matter. October was reminiscent of summer in so many ways.

The acoustics of fall are dramatically different though than summer—autumn’s voice can be heard as sharply as the air is crisp. But still I endured constant tormenting by the scolding Stellar's Jay and the mischievous “yak yak yak” of the Magpie. At night now I can still hear the “hoo-hoo-hooooo’ing” of the Great Horned Owl, accompanied by the eerie yelping and howling cries of coyotes across the lake.

Fall is so bright and intense and beautiful. It is as if nature is trying to fill me up with fiery color, to saturate me before winter turns everything stark and grey and cold.

Then came November—the wild month tinged with melancholy and the promise of shortened days, dull and dark. Just barely a day old it brought the long awaited rattle of rain on my tin roof and then later that week a hard frost which finally decimated my summer Begonias. I can remember watching in awe as a mad rush of snow birds headed south in their heavyweight RV’s. And none too soon as just a day later winter made an early debut with a premature snowfall, delicate as lace but rapidly melting.

My stripped and beautiful Birches, grieving the loss of their dearly departed leaves, creak and groan in the wind. A sobering reminder that we will soon be plunged into the cold shadows of winter where the bone structure of the landscape can be felt from every angle, where bitter blasts bite at exposed hands and faces, and hard frosts extinguish what’s left of the year. We will return once again to a plain sense of things.

“Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow, for which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning-go?  -John B. Tabb

The Ghost of Me

It’s almost All Hallows’ Eve and the possibility of a spectacularly spooky ghost story from the lake was more than I could bare. So I did a little research and talked to a few elders on the street but came up completely empty handed. It seems there is nothing creepy or scary about this lake whatsoever.

So instead of a lake ghost story, I’m going to tell my own true ghost story. This is the story of the Ghost of Me.

I’m not exactly sure where her origins are from, it’s likely she came into existence from certain horror movies past and a young girl’s over-stimulated imagination. Regardless, she has haunted me for what seems like my entire life. 

As a young child she hid in the closet of my bedroom in the form of a “boogeyman” and often I would hear her clumsy footsteps on the creaky floorboards upstairs, especially when I was home alone. Sometimes she took the form of an evil witch, identical to the wicked one in the Wizard of Oz. In this form she would lie in wait for me under my bed, tormenting my sleep and sending me shrieking to my parent’s bed on a nightly basis.

 My auntie Madge, who I spent most weekends with, fed my love of demons, witches, and the paranormal. She was a devout movie fan who kept me up until the wee hours to watch 'The Brides of Dracula’, ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, ‘The Haunting’, and the ‘Village of the Damned’ to name a few.

As a teenager she took the form of a poltergeist, flinging objects across my bedroom in the dark of the night and on the odd harrowing occasion even shaking my bed. During this time she loved gadgets such as washing machines and hair dryers and would delight in terrorizing me by turning them on when I was home alone. At the time, I was told I was under a lot of duress as my mother was very sick with cancer and the stress was likely the cause of the disturbances.

During my years as a young mother she took on another form, that of a shadowy entity that hovered just below the ceiling in my bedroom. Her evil motive then was to guide my soul from my body while I slept with the intent of taking it with her or making it her own. During this period she regularly opened doors for me and made several visual appearances (much to the delight of visitors) dressed in a wedding gown. 

My thirties were a period of low activity, her presence only made known occasionally in dreams maybe once a month or so. During this time, I thought I could actually see the light at the end of the tunnel and a time when I would be free of her.

Then I hit my forties.  Her presence came back with a vengeance in the form of night terrors and sleep paralysis. During this time she took the form of a deranged woman possessed with unearthly strength. She would come to my bedroom, always around 3 a.m., with the intentions of dragging me physically from my bed to take me to God knows where.

Then something interesting happened. I found myself alone, and oddly enough this is where I began to gain some understanding of her. I took this time to get inside myself and to analyze my life to that point and the ghost that had followed me.

I looked back at my adolescence; at the premature death of my mother and its effect on me; I got deep inside the head of the girl I used to be. I went all the way back to what seemed like before time itself—to another life. I discovered that something had gone seriously amiss when my adolescence was snatched abruptly away and the stark realities of real life was thrust full force upon me. I should have gained confidence through this period, but in reality the scars of puberty ran much deeper than they should have, painfully sitting beneath the surface of my new-found adulthood. 

I always thought if I just appeared confident enough, my shortcomings and insecurities would magically disappear. To some degree it worked—the old “fake it ‘til you make it” trick. But faking it is not enough in itself. Fixing the surface of you does nothing for your foundation. It’s not that I didn’t feel valued for my intelligence, or respected by my peers, I did, but there was always the hollowness deep inside me where self-confidence, amongst other things, was supposed to be.

  

The eventual truth didn’t come quickly, or easily, but it did sting when it eventually slapped me in the face—insecurity (in one form or another) will always be present in my life, so deal with it.

I learned to exorcise the things that plague me—my insecurities, shortcomings, and the sneaking suspicion that maybe I'm not as good a person as I make myself out to be. Taking stock of myself, so to speak, was not easy but not such a bad thing either. I learned that to be really happy, I needed to become more self-aware...to know what exactly makes me happy inside, what really makes me tick, otherwise my existence would remain meaningless. 


The real problem with modern society is that it puts too much of a premium on perfection. This more often than not keeps us from delving too deep, for fear of uncovering something bad or ugly down below. So instead, we keep our heads in the sand, never dealing with the things that keep us down.

I know now I can’t hide who I am, or was. And the good truth is I have looked myself in the eye and uncovered my demon, my ghost. Quite simply, she is me and I am her; nothing more, nothing less. Regardless of the missing sum of my parts, my life has value and I am finally able to give myself credit for the gift that I am.

She still comes around once in a while when the opportunity strikes—when I’m alone, or feeling particularly vulnerable. But for the most part I’m done with her, tired of her, bored even of her old tricks. But still, she can be persistent—scratching at the door and clawing at the window.