Nancy Love’s Weblog

I found this in the drafts section. Written two years ago. If this dream had come true I would be a published author of a new book. But it didn’t. It’s ironic that I should find this now. The world has changed so much and so little. COVID-19 changed our lives for sure but I am once again leaving Parks and heading out into the world of writing and publishing. The possibilities I dreamt of then still lay before me. The world is awakening from the deep sleep of Covid. Let’s see if I can catch them this time.

Written but not published April 1st, 2019 ….

April 1st 2019 will be the beginning of a new adventure for me.  For a week or so I will no longer be a public servant.  I will become a member of the public.  Two years and three months of working full time with Parks Canada will come to an end.  I have enjoyed it so much, learned so much and have appreciated the people I worked with so much for the work they do maintaining our national park system.  The honour it has been to travel to remote areas and view our country, my country, in a glorious light and the awe that has been inspired by the scientist and archeologists and highwaymen and accountants who preserve and protect out natural and historic treasures has left me richer and wiser and for that I am extremely grateful.

April 1 will be no joke for me this year.  I step out into the a new world with a swirl of possibilities.  I have been a full time employee since my dad passed away and I am grateful for the opportunity of steady work while I processed loss. Now I will likely continue to teach and learn through conflict interventions with the friends and colleagues I knew and worked along side before the Parks contract but at a slower pace and with spaces set aside to write again.

So many projects dance in my head.  I can complete the manuscript for the Mapping the Space book and get back to regular blogging.  I can go for a walk by the river everyday at noon and make coffee and lunch dates.  I can read the text books that have arrived for my latest adventure.  I have been accepted into a program at Kings College at Dalhousie University.  I will be working toward an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction.  Over the next two years I will be learning to write and publish true stories well told.  I am extremely excited and just a little worried.  My classmates will likely be journalists and storytellers. I am only a teacher.  I want to learn to use the good story to teach the lessons that people need to find their way to common ground.  My goal remains peaceful and productive relationships and organizations … one conversation after another.

I look forward to the challenges and to the opportunities ahead.  I will continue to work as an intervener in conflict situations and to take the lessons life gives me with the grain of salt that lets me laugh at myself and with others.  My hope is that with the right mix of good humour and real situations something good will come of this.

Wish me luck.

People call it the year that wasn’t. Most are hoping we get a do over. It has been tough. Rereading my January 2020 post helped me realize just how much disappointment this year has brought … to everyone. This is the year that was. Tomorrow it will be gone but the effects will linger for sure. I am cautiously optimistic although I am very aware that the fallout from this bad news year on the planet and in each of our lives will undoubtedly linger. Hope resides in the plans we make, in the image we create for more and better. Parts of my plan from last year came to fruition and some I abandoned. I am not really sure why except that I couldn’t figure out a way forward with those plans in our ‘new reality.’ Today I am in St Albert reviewing this 2020 phenomenon and its impact. I spent 7 months in Halifax and the last 3 here. Those 10 months have felt like a decade for me. There have been wonderful connections with friends and family in both places. My golf game and my piano playing have improved. Tomorrow is another day, another year with a new title – 2021. As John Lennon would say “Let’s hope it’s a good one …”

What you are about to read was written in January 2020..

In August I wrote a blog called Untethered describing a thought I had to spend time over the next couple of years in Halifax where I was born and spent my childhood. Control your thoughts. Thoughts become ideas. Ideas become actions and actions eventually become habits. I read that once on a Chinese tea label.

Well, you know how things go when you set an intention and then lean into it? Thanksgiving Day I looked at a condo in downtown Halifax and February 19th I take possession. Just like that.

It sounds so easy and as if no thought or planning has gone into this move. Sometimes life is like that. You have an idea and it becomes reality. It is like the curio cabinet I ordered from Wayfair that now houses my good glasses in my living room in St Albert. I knew I was going to have to move the stuff I valued to my home condo and rent out my second apartment. Intent on consolidating valuables and keepsakes I saw a need for extra storage/ display space. I figured out where there was a space that could accept another piece of furniture and measured it. Then I spent time online looking for just the right piece. When it arrived in pieces, I put it together and then filled it with my precious hand painted Romanian stem ware. Just like that problem solved.

The decision to purchase and fill the new space with furniture now occupying the downstairs apartment took some time. A million little decisions have influenced the thought that became the idea that is now becoming action. A renter appeared who wanted to rent my downstairs apartment for two years. Check. The condo in Halifax appeared. Check. My casual employment supported the move. Check. My program at Kings University College … walking distance from the new condo … accept me as a deferred student from last year’s program. Check. Other thoughts on financing and travel and real estate and furnishing and and and …. and POOF, just like that, I have a plan.

So, with the help of good friends, and with the support of my family, I will be in Halifax April 1st to start yet another adventure, returning to be a part time Haligonian after 50 years away.

Stay tuned as the adventure continues.

Most of you will know that my first name is Charlotte and get the reference in the title. On line, on the WEB, I usually know my way around but now that we are all spending more time and using the WEB to make purchases we used to make in person, it is becoming more of a tangled WEB.

More and more I find myself on-line, lost and confused. I find myself looking for signposts or directions to find my way back to a familiar place so that I can regroup, recalculate and find my way to the place where I can do what I had expected to do… post a blog.

It is complicated. Life is complicated but there are so many rabbit holes and detours and winding roads that come to dead ends on the internet that the webness of it, once a positive connector, serves only to confuse when you are tangled in it.

I need to stick to the beaten paths and stay away from anything unfamiliar. Confusion leads to horrible mistakes and you end up in scary places without a pasport or a way out.

I think I have finally found a way back to all of you, a way to post. Merry Christmas everyone. This new year is likely the most anticipated one in our life times. See you there.

I read an article by Jackie Torrens where she talks about being an orphan and how, as an orphan, she has always felt “untethered”. I like the work and the sentiment and sensation it creates in me. Since my fols have passed away I feel different. I feel like I am missing a piece, like there are few people who have known me since my birth. Reading Jackie’s article, an address to the summer residency students of the Creative Non Fiction Program at UKings here in Halifax, I got to thinking about becoming an orphan and how it “untethers” you once your parents are gone.

I have been in Halifax for almost a month. Halifax is home. It has been a fabulous opportunity for rebirth or reinvention in the place where I was born. There is a freedom here. The ocean sooths me. The sunshine warms me. I feel different and alive. A sail boat moves across the water out my window and it calms me. I have had opportunities to spend time with family and old friends, to write and to meet people who are involved in the King’s College Program I am registered for for 2020.

I know that the weather is influencing my euphoria. It has been magnificent. And I also know that it is not always like this. I have loved through cold miserable winters here in the past. Still I feel the pull of the ocean’s tides and wonder how I can leave here and return to the Alberta landscape and find the same kind of fulfillment, the same sense of wonder and ease that I have found here.

I have wonderful people in St Albert. I love them dearly. That thought keeps me from staying … for the time being. I am toying with visiting them and living here. TOYING. So many things to consider and yet…. It is a wonderful dream to spend the next year or maybe two living on the waterfront, enjoying the place where there are people who know my roots, my family and me.

Saturday I go back. I will let you know how this goes. I have felt untethered there for a while. Here there is a safe harbour for a short stay while I am still young enough to enjoy it. There are like minded individuals working at writing like me. It is a fleeting idea based on blue skies and the call of the North Atlantic? Maybe. Or is this the seed of an idea, a plan I might be able to pull off? I don’t know. Stay tuned.

It is interesting to me that although I have lived here in Alberta ALL of my adult life, close to 50 years, I still home when I go to Nova Scotia. What I miss Alberta has none of … big bodies of salt water. I remember how unfamiliar the landscape was when I arrived here all those years ago. The difference was stark. The mountains are majestic and the fields in full bloom are a sight to behold but I am so looking forward to spending the whole month of August on the waterfront in Halifax. I hope to reconnect with childhood friends and my wonderful cousins and enjoy the awesome surroundings of salt air, wind in sails and music and song that are rarely heard away from the shore. I want to walk that shore line and feel the mist on my face. The sea draws me back.

I think the place of your birth influences you even if you leave it when you are young. I also think that you settle where your children are born or where they settle. I love my life here. My children and grandchildren are everything to me. So it is also wonderful that Mandy and Kassidy will join me for the later part of the trip. We will introduce Kassidy to Halifax and other parts of Nova Scotia, to the cousins she will immediately fall in love with and they with her. Then we will spend a few days in St John’s to visit more relatives and more geography that has influenced our family’s history.

Time and place.

Sitting at home on a windy Labour Day with thoughts and ideas flying by I thought I would try to catch a few and see where they take me.

Saturday night and Sunday afternoon were glorious occasions for me this weekend. Both involved friends, music, and people watching, three of my favourite things. Saturday night music was a concert at a local hangout with Brian Maxwell, my new favourite Cape Brettoner and guitar player. Along with his friend Steve and his lovely wife Laura Despres, they provided a wonderful evening of song and story Capped off by a rousing version of “Farwell to Nova Scotia.” Sunday afternoon was a stark contrast of musical performance when the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra delighted the crowds under the skies in a beautiful park setting. I am so lucky and so grateful for both of these opportunities.

Earlier in the week, I was traveling in Southern Alberta and had an opportunity to reconnect with people I had not seen in about 15 years. During the time that I had served as an instructor at the U of L Summer Leadership Academy, I had an added advantage of getting to know not only Carol Steen but many of her friends as well. Meeting up with them again for five o’clock Friday drinks was such a delightful trip into a shared past and a hopeful future.

Then back through Calgary where I was able to catch up with family … a dear cousin visiting from Ontario and her daughters, both transplanted from the east, one visiting from Saskatchewan, and the other living in Calgary, each successful and happy in their own way. It was a happy reunion all too rare when families are spread across the country the way ours is. I am fortunate to have Sue’s daughter, Amanda and my cousin, Dawn, and my brother and his family in Calgary and I do get to see them from time to time and I, of course, have my own daughters and their families here with me in the Edmonton area. Sometimes it seems that it is the ‘distance’ that creates distant cousins and it can be work to keep those ties strong. It is always worth the effort.

Reconnecting with relatives and friends and colleagues in Calgary was great and I always look forward to that. Back home and moving quickly into a fall with piano lessons that start tomorrow and dancing and curling to look forward later in the month, a new book club and a trainer that I get to work with twice a week I will be wonderfully occupied. AND did I mention I had an opportunity to talk to an agent about the BOOK? If any of you are interested in reading the first 10,000 words of Version 2 of the manuscript please let me know. I will send you the file for your feedback.

So it is a ‘capture and release’ day because the thoughts and ideas are scattered like the clouds. I can hold on to one for a few moments before the others grab my attention and send me chasing their tail … or my own.

Lots of LOVE.

And so it begins …. I find myself in the Calgary airport. I’ll be boarding a flight to Ottawa soon. Lots has happened since my last post. My lake property is for sale and I am firmly settling in to my condo in St Albert.

It has been a good year. I have steady work with the Federal Government. My children and their children are close by and I love being present in their lives and having them in mine. It is wonderful to witness the way everyone is maturing and changing. With all three generations ranging in age from 14 to 64 you get to see the phases of life we all go through in those 50 years. It’s interesting, heartwarming and fun. Being the matriarch, the oldest, has its rewards and its responsibilities both of which I am embracing with love and enthusiasm.

I am still working for the wonderful people in the Virgin Islands. It was heartbreaking to watch and listen to what was happening their in September and not be able to help. The stories of devastation were followed by stories of courage and renewal. I hope to visit soon to hug my friends and lend a hand. Recovery has been slow. Please keep them in your thoughts.

I love curling. My team’s expectations of each other and ourselves are to do the best we can. There is a sense of support and camaraderie that I enjoy so much that I hate to miss a game. Likewise my dance classmates are all wonderful human beings that are easy to be around. We learn and laugh and share each other’s joys and sorrow every Wednesday.

So now you are update. I have great friends, family close by, meaningful work … what more could one ask for? Maybe someone special to share it all with???? Maybe. Maybe not.