Today was a slow day—a run along Abbott Street with the blue-green water thrashing along the shore. The dogwoods are out, so beautiful, my breath catches in my throat; I can’t decide which I like better, the pink ones or the cream colored ones.

It would seem I have forgotten how to dial down—15 months of full-time school with touring and recording crammed into the cracks. Then moving houses again. It’s as though that long string of constant going-goin-going has put me on edge, unable to settle into a rhythm, into writing, or into letting my mind just wander. I find myself buzzing, a part of me always looking for the next task to complete, as though my body has been rewired for production.

My youngest is in all-day school now, something I didn’t fully absorb last year when I was in school myself and homework deadlines loomed. Now that my school is done, and the dust of moving has settled, I’m taking a few days to relearn how to be myself finally—to read for a whole afternoon (Words Get in the Way—a compulsive purchase in the grocery store last week), to hike up to the canyon like I did all last summer (only this time I don’t have to hurry back for a class) and to scribble things in notebooks. I have a banjo lesson scheduled for next week and then the rest of it is for filling jars full with lilacs and slow walks down to the water and THAT. IS. IT. Maybe a song will find me or a poem or a story. But for now, I’m just going to remember how to be empty again.

I’m in another house on another street, just blocks down from the last one.  Our second move in six months, you’d think I’d be frustrated and tired of it.  And I am tired of it.  But it’s okay; this house is closer to the lake—I can see one tiny strip of blue water down at the bottom of the road from our front yard.  Our backyard is like a small forest—trees on all sides, birds that dart across the space in between.  Birds on windowsills, pecking at the grass.  We have a wide porch and a small vegetable garden along one side of the house.

After a full week of playing music, I returned home yesterday to the news that a former classmate had died of a drug overdose.  Sadness seeps into everything.  I’m familiar with this; it takes a few days to regain my equilibrium.

This morning, I read this line by St. Augustine on a poetry blog and cried:

‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You’.

I felt the bottom falling out again, that lovely dropping into something more real and grounded and authentic.

Despite the fact that I have felt a little screwed-up by religion, I GET that.  Call it whatever you like.  We all KNOW that feeling of rest when it hits us.

Today it poured rain all day and I took my tea out onto the porch and sat for a long time on a chair and just listened to the sound of the rain on the metal roof.  There is a big tree in the next yard full of fluffy white blossoms.

~

A few weeks back, I mailed copies of my new record to CBC stations across Canada, and now I’m getting emails that say:  How do you pronounce your last name?

It’s so nice of them to write and ask this, don’t you think?  One more reason to love CBC Radio.

So just for the record, it’s:  Mick-meck-in. 

In other news:  If you’re in the Okanagan area, I’ll be doing a teeny tiny tour in late April with my duo Good Gardeners.  First stop:  opening for Blackie and the Rodeo Kings at the Skookum Barn Dance on April 20th.  Yeehaw.

Please check out more stops on the SHOWS page.

I have always likened my creativity to a sea; sometimes the tide is up and sometimes it’s down. Up means I’m producing work with ease, images and phrases are flowing easily, almost effortlessly, and my inner critic has been sufficiently silenced. Down means I’m tired, or empty of words and pictures, have been putting too much on my plate, or the critic is having a heyday with me, telling me that whatever I do will never amount to anything important and suggesting that perhaps I should have gone to school to be a veterinarian or a botanist or a landscaper.

I’ve learned that if I stop fighting that tide, it eventually rises again. If it’s down, it’s down. I don’t protest. I just try to sit still and listen, try to fill up with good books and long walks and naps. Then, when the tide rises again, I’m available. I’m there to get some work done. But this year’s been different. I haven’t written many songs since the summer; music has been far from me this past fall and winter. I could say I’m not sure why, but I absolutely know why; I’ve been in school, and despite the fantasy I had of juggling many balls in the air at once, my energy has been splattering every which way, and when I do have time to sit, I just want to watch the trees blow in the wind or write something without a tune, or make lists of all the things I’ll do once I graduate in March.

I want to work in a garden.
I want to finish some poems.
I want to practice my banjo.
I want to take the train across Canada.
I want to ride my bicycle along the water as far as it’ll take me.

I’ve hardly written about school here at all because I’ve had so much of it, I didn’t want to spend more time writing about it. I’ve had almost 20 hours of classes weekly for 15 months straight, give or take a few weeks off (and a few skipped). I’ve taken thousands of photographs, learned several tedious digital programs and have studied both branding and business. It’s been glorious and wretched and inspiring and humbling.

But I’m in the home stretch now.

Today the trees are blowing and the snow is thawing and the sun keeps peering out from behind the clouds to stream through my living room window. And in this few minutes of pause, I thought I would pop in and say hello, and thank you for reading this blog and for listening to my tunes. For the next few weeks, my head will be down and I’ll be all hunched over and pushing through this last month of school. And somewhere near the end of March, I’ll emerge and I’ll probably take a few really long naps and go for a few really long walks and then I’ll pop over here and say hello again.

Chicken Volleyball.  It sounded fun enough and we were running out of things to do.

I was twenty, and spending a few weeks of my summer volunteering with a Christian outreach organization that put on programs in small communities.  We did skits and bad street dances and held sports nights in rec centers and church basements.

I was co-leading a group in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with my friend Marty Nish.  With us, were seven or eight  fourteen to seventeen-year-olds who helped us run the program.  Most of the kids who came to our program were rowdies from the local juvenile detention centre and seemed to need high energy things to do.  They didn’t have the attention span to sit around watching cheesy skits.  Marty and I  were getting a little desperate.

I had a book called “Fun Things To Do:  101 Activities for Youth Group Events.”  It listed things like scavenger hunts, progressive dinners, car wash fundraisers.  We didn’t have time for those, but Chicken Volleyball looked do-able.

Here’s how it worked:

You were supposed to buy a raw chicken—no need for grade A…the cheapest chicken would do, since you weren’t going to be eating it, after all.

It was helpful, the book said, to keep the chicken a little bit frozen.

You were supposed to get a large bed sheet (fortunately there was a Value Village close-by) and cut the bed sheet into strips about two feet wide and three feet long.

You were supposed to set up the volleyball game as usual, except participants were asked to get a partner and a strip of bed sheet.  Instead of a ball, each set of partners were supposed to hold the cloth strip between them and use it as a slingshot to catapult the chicken over the net.

And of course the rest of the game was supposed to carry on in this same way, with each team volleying back the raw chicken  with their piece of bed sheet.  Back and forth, back and forth.

Only it didn’t really work like that.

Maybe we didn’t have the most highly co-ordinated bunch of kids, but mostly, the chicken just landed with a splat on the gymnasium floor. The kids laughed, and lugged the chicken back onto their bed sheet, which had begun to get rather damp with melted chicken juice.

After a while, as the chicken got warmer and floppier, pieces started to fall off. We chucked the stray chicken parts in the garbage and kept playing with the carcass until the little bag of gizzards fell out and someone stepped on one of the kidneys and got it all over the bottom of their shoe, at which point Marty and I looked at each other and realized this had been a terrible idea.

I’m not sure why Salmonella had not, until then, occured to me.  I’m pretty sure it was because the game idea had come from a book—a real, actual book—and surely the publishers would not have published something that had the potential to make someone (never mind an entire group of kids) sick.

But right at that moment, as that kid stood there wiping raw kidney off the bottom of his shoe, little bits of chicken flesh strewn across the floor, I realized this could have possible fatal consequences.

We made all the kids go to the bathroom and wash with soap and water and then sent them home to change their clothes with strict orders not to put their hands in their mouths.

Marty and I found the bottle of lemon disinfectant in the cleaning closet and our whole group set to washing every spot the chicken had touched.  We threw away all the wet, pink-stained bed sheets and, of course, the mangled chicken.

And then Marty and I sat slumped against the gymnasium wall, trying to figure out what we’d do the next day.