Tiny stories: hospital visits

If hospital stays can’t be avoided, and if you are the person visiting the patient, parking the car, walking over and getting directions to the room, it’s good to take in the view.

There’s the labyrinthine detours that construction can offer, in which unheard-of departments with stencilled windows might be found, and cavernous after-hour hallways too.

If you’re lucky, there is the leftover cotton-candy glow of a sunset just passed.

And maybe the walk between the car and the hospital offers a sentinel-like tree, whose sculptural effect can be admired in daylight and in twilight.

There are the rumpled sheets with stripes that can be caught too, in a picture of headphones taken for the right cord to be retrieved from home.

And sometimes, it’s the Sacred Heart that you might catch presiding a sunset before a crowd of marigolds, their yellow heads gazing upward.

And if your patient is on a higher floor, and you get the chance, do take a moment to catch the view. It can feel, for a second or two, that you’re gazing at unexpected art in a museum of suffering.

Come walk a loop with me

My walk begins at Henteleff Park, not far from our house. For the past year, I’ve walked through it every day, and less consistently but still frequently in the years before. I’ve taken pictures of pretty skies, pretty grass, strange trees, and geese within its boundary. Walks have inspired colour palettes, landscaping ideas, and blog posts. The routine of has favoured the appreciation of seasonal change and small things. It refines a sense of noticing over time, rather than the vibrant impact of new.

Since the creation of the Henteleff Foundation in 2002, an interpretive center was added, a bathroom, a parking lot, a bulletin board and summer time employees. The bulletin board featured birds this year, and the announcement of hectares added to the park.

If you leave the wood chip trail you can find, near the dried-up Normand Creek, remnants of the park’s past inhabitants. The feeling that the park once hosted a family, and probably Métis before that, before the surge of its present-day organisation and volunteer efficiency, gives me a frisson of delight. It reminds me of one of my favourite parts of the book Treed by Ariel Gordon, in which she traces the history of the trees planted in Winnipeg and along her street and concludes: “This essay isn’t my answer; it’s an attempt to think through what it means to hold land on this scale, to shape it and change it. This essay is a windbreak - like those trees outside Alverna’s kitchen window, it is a gesture, an attempt to protect something. But make no mistake, the Arksey farm is on Indigenous land. And telling the stories of this piece of land is maybe only a gesture at reconciliation.” (p 225)

In spite of the organisation, the rallying of good efforts, the park still distinguishes itself as a wild area compared to the manicured properties of the condominiums that neighbour it on either side.

This year, the presence of summer workers is revealed with a crop of new signs, the steady work of invasive plant control and new trees and shrubs that have to be watered and protected with wire until established.

You know that you have left Henteleff Park when the wood-chip path becomes the small-gravel path and those giants from the new development of Normand Park come into view. There’s this lookout, a little apart from the path, that provides a clear view of the river. I’ve taken so many pictures from this spot…

The Normand Park trail features two playgrounds: a new one and an old one. The kids have played at both and it would take very little for me to tip into nostalgia.

The near-end of its trail snakes through a small forest that was so filled with cankerworms this spring, I once left the path to forge a new one along the less-treed river bank and almost ended up worse-off, sneaking through unfenced private-properties to find the trail again. The cankerworms then became quivering white butterflies who, for a short period, transformed this section of the path into a scintillating sight.

The Normand Park path ends here, or begins here, if you want. As an entry though, it is so discreet that I wasn’t surprised one day, when a woman walking her puppy told me that in the 30 years she’d been living in the neighbourhood, it was only in the past months that she and her husband discovered the trail.

Leaving it behind, the sound of traffic rushes to your ears, and you are back in the city. You know this because of the sidewalk, with its cracks and its weeds. And then, with a view of Tim Hortons, and maybe too the smell of its coffee and sugary pastries, it’s the almost-end of your loop.

Texture

Today, all I have to offer are the things I took from the morning’s walk… the textures of tree bark, the patterns made by the melt and freezing of snow, the shape of branches, the colour of dogwood…

Today's walk

It feels extra-adventurous when the dog and I slip away from the usual pathways to walk instead along the riverbank. The mud looks shiny-wet in the morning, but it’s still frozen from the overnight lows.

Crevices make the dirt look rock-like. Rain ran here in rivulets anxious to regain the river.

Winter’s palette is full of blues and grays, browns and golds.

Across the river, the University campus has finished its second phase of riverbank stabilization. The rocks are huge and grate against the metal of the heavy equipment, cumbersome to move into place, their sound ricocheting through the air.

And then we’re home! The dog insists on bringing back a stick almost too big for him to handle.

Taking notes at a meeting in Carman; a photo-essay

Carman is just under an hour's drive from Winnipeg. I left early Saturday morning when it was bright and sunny and drove alongside fields still drying, just about ready to wake up. The Catholic Church in Carman is a pretty triangle-shaped green building. 

The sacristy lantern is very ornate. It reminded me of a fancy hairstyle.

There are pretty stained-glass windows throughout the church.

I worked here, listening and taking notes. When I didn't need to take notes, I read Roz Chast's book Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? It's a memoir about her parents getting old and dying, and more than once it made me chuckle (quietly, to myself) while the meeting was going on. When her dad died, I felt like crying.  

When there were group discussions, I was free to leave, and so I took a little walk around the area.

The sound of ice floating down the Boyne river and colliding with low hanging branches was a moment of contemplation until a woodchuck came scurrying through the dead leaves. It was a shy woodchuck, but more than anything my presence seemed to be an inconvenience to its busy work.

I stopped in at a thrift store to look around. It was nice and neat. A customer and a cashier were having a lighthearted exchange about the Jets and the street party in Winnipeg from the night before. Both agreed about just how much better it was to be living in the small town rather than the big city. It made me smile. I returned to my station for lunch.

People in these meetings seem to really like pastries. There was no end of donuts, muffins, danishes, pies, and cake. 

I very virtuously avoided it all.