Rural Routes, Blog Version

UH-OH….

Coming round the bend of this pleasant walkway one evening, the dog and I chanced upon a skunk.
All three of us were startled and the skunk raised its tail.
“Sorry for disturbing you,” I said under my breath and turned to go back the way we had come.
About two weeks later, we were on another evening walk, this time on a paved walking/bike path that runs alongside the dedicated bus route for the Winnipeg Stadium. It was later than usual and almost dark and it was raining.
Suddenly the dog dashed into the weed filled space between the two. Just in time I saw the skunk’s tail go up. The rest of its body was hidden in the weeds and the darkness. We changed courses again.
We got home wet and muddy, but we did not stink like skunk.
I lived on a farm most of my life. I have many skunk stories. We had to have a dog put down after an encounter with a rabid skunk. Our cattle herd was quarantined after an encounter with a rabid skunk. We had skunks in the hen house, skunks under the granaries, skunks on the doorstep and once a skunk in the dog house.
I naively never thought about getting up close and personal with a skunk in the city.

EG HEITI OLAVIA

I retired at the end of June and, after a summer spent transitioning from one life to another, went back to school in September to audit a course in introductory Icelandic at the University of Manitoba.
I do have a smattering of the language – ja and nei, elskun and bless, for example. Three out of four grandparents were of Icelandic descent and my mother spoke the language with all of them.
Part of me wants to learn something new; Icelandic may be just the beginning. Another part wants to return to the language of my childhood, the soft cadence that surrounded all of us then.
Our instructor told us that we would use Icelandic names in class. We could select our own or he would find one for us in the database of Icelandic names.
I knew immediately what my name would be. My middle name is my maternal grandmother’s middle name Olavia. It would be easy to remember.
I have always known that I was named after Amma S (we had two Ammas and differentiated between them by appending their last names, “Amma S” and “Amma W”). Olavia appears on my baptismal certificate, my school diplomas, my SIN card and my marriage certificate. I was registered to vote in the recent provincial election as Sharron Olavia. My birth certificate, however, says Olivia.
I am not sure how that happened. Did someone in the registry office think a spelling error had been made and decide to correct it themselves? Who knows? It adds a little mystery to the story of my middle name.
The first sentence I learned in Icelandic class: Eg heiti Olavia.

ROLLING MY R’S
The instructor also told us that we would need to learn how to roll our r’s, if we didn’t already have the skill.
I do not.
I went online and found plenty of websites that were there to assist me and I have been practising, with limited success so far. There are people who unable to roll an r for physiological reasons.
But I have a different obstacle.
Every time I attempt a rolled ‘r’, our dog howls. It seems to serve as a dog whistle of sorts.
I am hoping that as I improve, the dog will get quieter. Otherwise, I may be forced to spend my practice time outdoors.

SONS
It was strange to accidentally see my adult son in the halls of the university I am attending. University envelops me in the days of my youth long before a husband and children. Yet there he was, departing from a class of his own in the same building.
He came to say hi to me, this son who is much taller than I am, and patted me on the head.
“Have a good time at school,” he said.

FORTY PLUS ONE
There is no traditional gift for forty-one years of marriage. Forty-one is ruby plus one year and gold minus nine years.
But I discovered on the Internet that the modern gift for a forty-first anniversary is land.
They don’t specify how much land and we’re no longer interested in acres and acres of it. “How about some soil in a pot?” I thought, and bought myself a potted plant.
If K asks me about the new plant in the house, I shall tell him it was his anniversary gift to me.
It’s the kind of plant that thrives in conditions of benign neglect and that’s the best kind of plant for me.

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