Day One
September 1, 2009
A Rocha Canada BC Centre – White Lake (Salmon Arm)
Today, if we had been on Bowen Island Noah would have started 1st grade and Aidan 3rd grade. Instead, much to everyone’s satisfaction, we started our journey east.
Some highlights:
v Receiving the gift of so much help from friends on Bowen Island this past week: Thank you Riaan and Matthew for patching drywall, Saskia for soup and cleaning, Sylvia for amazing manicotti, Carol and Frankie for scrubbing walls, the men’s group for lifting furniture and many others for offers of help and well wishes. We were reminded of the tremendous blessing a true community is.
v Receiving the gift of several books on CD which our friend Rhonda made for us as a care package. Not only did Rhonda care for our kids the last two days while we frantically patched drywall and scoured bathtubs in the hope of getting our damage deposit back; she has also ensured some healthy entertainment along our way. More on that in a moment…
v Picking garden fresh veggies at A Rocha this morning with the help of Paul Neufeld, gardener extraordinaire. We ate snap peas, carrots and purple beans all the way to Hope, and ate a yellow watermelon under pressure when it was dropped en route from garden to trailer. Delicious! All accidents should turn out so well.
v Listening to the first 1/3 of JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’. What a gift to the imagination! When Bilbo and company were captured by goblins under the Misty Mountains we were driving through the rocky canyons of the interior mountains. When Gandalf was stuck up a tree evading the Wargs and smelling the encroaching fire below we were driving through Sorrento which was choked with the smoke of forest fires up north. Noah, overcome with concern for Gandalf suddenly cried out, “I can smell the smoke. Mom, I can smell fire!”
v A quote from ‘The Hobbit’ that stuck out. “Bilbo began to become frightened, which is never a good thing for thinking.”
Some lows:
v Billboards. I was trying to think of a metaphor to describe them off and on throughout the afternoon. For the time being I’m working with pimples. Yup, zits!.They’re unsightly blemishes upon a perfectly lovely landscape that are greasy, and often the result of overindulgence. And, if we didn’t have them anymore, no one would miss ‘em.
v Tim Horton’s – now, I like the food as much as the next guy and the kids were understandably awestruck at the choices of dips, sprinkles, fillings and glazes. The low was simply the stark contrast between the garden produce we ate that morning and the sight of our post Tim’s tray. The garden: healthy, tasted great, involved conversation and laughter, produced only wee nubs of carrot tops and snap pea vine bits which are lightly dropped underfoot and out of window. TH: health a step up from McDonalds but not sky high, tasted pretty good if you like sugar (which we all do, come on!), conversation was monosyllabic with the counter folk, laughter was confined to watching Noah try to scale the glass enclosure housing the Maple Dips and the waste produced at the end was considerable. Where do plastic knives go? We throw them away, but where is away, it’s somewhere. ‘Away’ is a place with dirt and trees and neighbours. And now ‘away’ has a few more knives, a bunch of napkins and a whole lotta crinkly brown little bags with sugar remnants in the bottom. I’m no soil scientist, and one doesn’t need to be one to conclude the obvious, which is that such materials don’t add anything helpful to earth and actually add a bunch of compounds which don’t break down readily; whereas our carrot nubs and snap pea bits felt downright charitable as deposits – bits of vegetable road kill scattered down Hwy 1 and 5.
Now we’re in White Lake, just outside Salmon Arm with my Mom and Dad. It’s beautiful and thanks to a swiftly passing thunder shower, smells clean – like God’s done His laundry and we get to bury our faces in deep and inhale. Tonight is our first time actually sleeping all five of us inside our 20 foot trailer, here’s hoping…
