A Weekend To Go To The Cottage

The road we live on is the direct route from Oxford and Springhill to the beach so it was busy yesterday afternoon once everyone returned home from church and taking Mother to lunch. One pick-up truck went by with two new lawn chairs in the back along with a trailer carrying a lawn mower - a common sight.
Our two "pet" rabbits spend the winter inside the coop and although it has two windows, not a lot of sunshine reaches their pen. When I went in last week and found Rosie, the grey rabbit, sitting on top of the wooden enclosure inside their pen in the tiny pool of morning sun coming in the north-east-facing window, I realized it was time to take them to their cottage.
Every so often we see fox prints on top of this outdoor pen (that must make for a terrifying night) but they've been safe for three summers and they seem to enjoy it. Hopefully this summer, we get around to converting an old shed into their own indoor/outdoor home. Although I kind of like their little cottage...

Mow, Mow, Mow Your Lawn

Hubby is mowing the lawn today before it becomes a hayfield. I feel so sorry for him: because we enjoy such a large lot (too big to call a yard), he spends six months of the year on the lawn mower, cutting grass. I wonder what he thinks about for all those hours?
If I mowed lawn, I'd be stopping every 15 minutes to write down ideas. I suspect mowing a lawn, particularly one as sprawling as ours, would be one of those activities like washing dishes or shaving legs that allows your mind to drop into a peaceful, non-thinking mode. Once that happens, once you stop actively pursuing certain paths of thoughts, the really good ones, the elusive ones, the truly creative ones that are suppressed by the bullies of every day living (To Do lists and conflicts) are able to float quietly to the surface of the pond of the mind where they gently *pop*, rippling your brain until you pause in whatever mindless activity in which you're engaged and say, "I have to write that down."
(Which is why I keep special crayons in the bathtub! I once experience the horror of a wonderful thought going down the drain as I toweled off. It was almost as if the thought physically existed, it disappeared from my head so thoroughly out of my mind as I stepped out of the tub. There: insight into one writer's brain.)
For my husband, who is not a writer, I suppose these three or four hours on the lawn mower, with that god-awful roar a constant sound in his ears, is his quiet time. Perhaps he isn't thinking. He's resting from the To Do lists and the conflicts, from my endless conversations, from having to work. Perhaps this is why we have such a large lawn after all.

In Conversation With...Nicole Rushton

First published in The Oxford Journal on April 25, 2012, by Sara Mattinson.

When I knock on the front door of the neat mini-home tucked away on a back road in Mount Pleasant, the curtains in the front window move and a pair of hands holding yellow rubber gloves appear against the glass but no one calls out, “Mom! Someone’s at the door.”  As Nicole Rushton brings me inside, her 10-year-old son Bryson waggles the rubber gloves at me. He’s vocalizing, a steady stream of sounds but none are words.  

Bryson has autism. 

“He was a very quickly developing baby,” Nicole recalls. “At six months, he probably had six to eight words that he said on his own without prompting. Nine months, if you helped him stand on his feet, he could walk all day long. He couldn’t crawl until he was a year and a half but he walked.”

When it was time to return to work, Nicole found a babysitter for Bryson. It was the babysitter  who noticed that the 18-month-old boy ignored the commotion around him. 

“She thought Bryson was hard of hearing,” says Nicole so she followed the babysitter’s suggestion that she have his hearing tested. The person who performed the test told Nicole she should contact Cumberland Early Intervention Program because the hearing tests were normal. 

An assessment by program staff resulted in the diagnosis of autism. 

“He had lack of eye contact,” Nicole says. “Even the words he already had seemed to shut off, and he had very repetitive behaviour. He wouldn’t respond to his name at all. He’d been progressing so quickly and it was like a switch went off.”

It wasn’t easy for Nicole to accept that her son had autism. 

“I was quite upset. My little boy was perfect in every way and I didn’t know anything about autism. All I heard was that something was wrong. They were telling me that my little boy was very special but I was in a totally different direction.”

Nicole pauses, takes a deep breath. Since then, her outlook has changed profoundly.

“He is special,” Nicole says of Bryson. “He’s happy, he’s healthy. He shows emotion. We’d hoped his language would come back but it never did. He makes a lot of sounds but he does not communicate with his words.”

Understanding what Bryson wants and needs is the greatest challenge, then. Bryson assumes that his mother already knows what he wants so when Nicole doesn’t understand, he gets frustrated. On a good day, when she asks him to “show Mommy”, he will but she says on an overwhelming day, he might not have the patience; he just wants what he wants. 

“But the most frustrating is when he is sick,” Nicole says. “You don’t know what hurts. When he is sick, I constantly watch him to pick up on his non-verbal cues, like holding his stomach or holding his head. It’s a helpless feeling.”

Bryson is not as self-sufficient as other 10-year- olds but he is able to do things on his own, like brush his teeth, if his mother asks him to. One evening, when she suggested it was time for a bath, he went and ran the water by himself.

“I’m creating opportunities for him to be independent,” says Nicole. “For instance, walking from our house to my mom’s house.” (Her parents live about 150 yards away on this empty gravel road.) “I’ll call my mother and tell her I’m sending him over. She stands on her front step while I stand on mind and I can see him all the way over.”

These are the moments that remind her that there is more to Bryson than autism.

“Sometimes he is like a typical kid in every sense, except for the speaking. I have to remind myself that certain things that he does are not because he is autistic but because he’s a kid. Like if I open the door, he’ll close it and want to open it himself. That’s not necessarily an autistic thing. I know he’s labelled autistic but not everything he does is.” 

Nicole, who was 24 when Bryson was born, says the past ten years have taught her not to take the small things for granted. And sometimes, those small things come with a big jump in understanding. 

“We went down the back road for a walk,” Nicole says, “and I saw an apple tree. ‘Look, apples,’ I said, trying to get Bryson’s attention. I picked him up, this was when he was smaller, and said ‘Look, apple,’ and touched it but he was looking all around, making his noises, couldn’t care less. I put him back down and grabbed a couple of apples to see if he’d carry them but he showed no interest. We walked down to the pond because he likes water and I threw the apples into the pond. They’d splash and he liked that so I gave him one and he threw it. Two weeks later,” she continues, “we took the same walk but I was just walking, not paying attention, and Bryson was behind me. I looked and he was staring at the apple tree. The same tree that I didn’t think he’d seen. I lifted him up and he was grabbing for apples. He carried them down to the pond and he threw all the apples he had in his hands into the water.”

For most of us,  that would be one moment out of a thousand. For Nicole, “It was amazing. He does stuff like that all the time that blows me away.”

Which is what makes Bryson special. 

Everyone's A Winner

The Atlantic Journalism Awards were held on Saturday night in Fredericton and stories from Cumberland County were big winners.
Carol Moreira was the gold winner in our category of Atlantic Magazine Article for a story she wrote about Cyrus Eaton and the Thinkers Lodge in Pugwash. My nominated article about the ospreys nesting along the River Philip was a silver winner.

Along with my silver win for Saltscapes magazine, Jack MacAndrew was the gold winner for Saltscapes in the Atlantic Magazine Profile for a story he wrote about singer-songwriter Catherine MacLellan.  This is Jack's fourth win. He's from PEI.

It was a great night. Lovely to share the evening with Saltscapes publishers Jim and Linda Gourlay. Guest speaker, CBC News anchor Ian Hanomansing, who hails from Sackville, NB, was riveting; he spoke eloquently for 20 minutes without notes which made me want to throw my dinner roll at him in envy. It was inspiring to see others' work (every nomination was previewed on the big screens before the winner was announced) and to see so many young (and young-ish) journalists not only present but winning.
Definitely an evening to celebrate excellence in Atlantic journalism.

Same Mother, Definitely Not The Same Egg

Since Dad died three years ago, my mother has divided her time between winters in Georgia with my sister, who has four children, and Nova Scotia, where she now lives with Dwayne and me. 
This weekend, my mother is staying home to look after the dogs and cat and chickens while we head to Fredericton to the Atlantic Journalism Awards gala. The whole time, she'll be thinking about her other daughter, who is flying to Ethiopia with her whole family in order to bring her newly-adopted daughter back home.
"It's rather interesting," Mum said this morning, "that this is a very big weekend for both my daughters but for two completely different reasons."

Me, my sister and my mother

June 2011, at my mother's 70th birthday party

You Can't Be Gloomy When Daffodils Are Blooming

First published in The Oxford Journal on  Wednesday, April 18, 2012 by Sara Mattinson.

Rick Bass, in his book The Wild Marsh, writes about April: “Consider again, please, the notion of sight, odor, taste, and touch as a kind of music: as all lesser complements to this astounding movement of April. It is like nothing if not a symphony out there...Everywhere you look, in April, you see music and movement...” 

Bass writes in Montana where, like Nova Scotia, spring teases for several months (27 degrees, big snowstorm, 14 degrees, freezing rain, 20 degrees, rain for a week). Regardless of the tricks Nature plays on us, there are definite signs of spring that the weather will not deter.

Robins. Always the robins.  Usually, there is the scout that gets us excited about the return of the robins but this year, they seemed to turn up all at once (a seat sale at Migration Air?). 

For my husband and me, another bird is the harbinger of spring: the arrival of the ospreys back to the nest near our home. Around the first of April, my husband says once a day, “I wonder when the ospreys will arrival,” and they are arriving earlier every year. Two springs ago, they arrived on April 20 and last year, it was the 13th but this year, we saw their distinctive shape in the nest on the 10th. We forget how in tune we are with their presence until our eyes and ears are filled with their music and movement. 

That’s how my friend Patti feels about spring peepers. About hearing them for the first time this year, she says, “My heart started to beat faster. You’re listening for them but it creeps up on you. You can be talking to someone and the sound will draw you away from your conversation until you realize what you are hearing.”

We have met over coffee at the café in Pugwash and she’s brought a cluster of mayflowers with her, stems soaking in water inside a clear baggie.

“The scruffy little flowers grow at the side of the road,” she explains, “and all you see are these grubby leaves.” 

The leaves indeed appear ragged and worn out. 

“Then within them,” Patti continues, “are these jewels.” 

She holds the bunch of tiny mayflowers to my nose. They are so small yet their wild, sweet scent is distinct and lovely. 

What are the other signs of spring? Opening day of fishing season. Men standing around watching ditches burn. The first hot sunny day at the beach. 

That was March 17 this year because while walking our dogs at Heather Beach on that afternoon, my friend Jane and I witnessed a woman in a blue bathing suit walk into the water and dip her body under the surface. Someone took her picture then she dashed back to shore. 

It’s the music that cues a striptease. When we hear the symphony of spring tuning up, we peel away our inhibitions like layers of wool and fleece and flannel. Spring makes us daring, fills us with hope and excitement. The first swim, the first hatless walk into a north wind, the first sockless day. Imagine living in a place where there are no seasons, no summer or winter, no fall, but worst of all, no peepers or young men walking along the side of the road carrying fishing poles or a crazy lady at the beach covered in goose bumps, her laughter a concerto of audacity. 

 

The Circle Of Life

That's the name of my article that is nominated for an Atlantic Journalism Award, to be given out this weekend in Fredericton.
I finally found a link to the article:

http://ajasonline.org//resources/uploads/538-1328048522-299557.pdf