Janit Bianic
Readers' Forum
Click Here!

Part 3

She wants to visit with a special friend so she can brag about her excitement and jump into tomorrow without tending to all those details enroute. Today seems too painful in her right arm, her neck is sore from sitting so purposefully at her work. She wants to rest but is not tired, eat but she’s not at all hungry for any of the groceries she brought home yesterday. Wants to dig up the soil for the next plot in her garden, find the berries but there is work here and she is committed with every fiber of her being.

Walks away from her station and fills a cardboard box filled with empty plastic water bottles. Puts on her sandals without doing them up and heads to the neighbors where the filtration system is more fun.

She hears the visitor’s hum behind the van on the farmhouse porch. Reading her poems aloud to her self. Somehow she feels peaceful knowing another person struggles with words and their formation on the page. Makes sense. She glances back to her 3-ring binder. The storyguide inside her head screams to not stop now. Props herself up and eats one of those Hornby Island muffins, made with spelt flour. Hopes she’ll really emerge and take off. Someone watching would hear no words. See a human anchor for those who flow in the same stream of consciousness.

The airplanes are busy this Monday afternoon. She wonders where people are flying and suddenly remembers the flight to Borneo. Compares the economics of paying for her own flight and the memories of the company-paid meetings. Waited till the course had left Edmonton or Calgary and picked a place a lot further away – like Atlanta, or LA. Misses that privilege and saves dimes. A dime a week was her allowance as a child. And the dimes paid for movies, pop, and Wrigley’s chewing gum.

How will she trust her communication arts speak for themselves? Design work that led her back to the insights of the four changing seasons. Business class feels so pretentious now. Is she confident enough in her ability to select the right messages to remember to carry with her at all times. As a storyteller, the Eastern view of the planet has added a new dimension to selling relationships rather than advertising and marketing.

Takes a humble moment to bless her long ago privilege of walking on the 300,000,000 year old tar sands in Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Asks the Goddesses present in her workspace to charm her once more. Send me some Harry Potter magic.

In Harv’s Warrior Camp, she learned to expect a certain air to flow around her whenever she asked for what she wanted. Awareness is the first key to change. Careful. Pay attention to you choice of words, she tells herself. Michael would be helping her do it right, if he was around.

Now she’s found herself inside the greenhouse, empty of any plants at all. Lots of resource books, holes in the plastic that once covered the windows to keep the air in, wild red poppy seeds still hanging upside down in that brown paper bag. Jimmy Smith told them to pick them from a ditch in front of his place on Denman Island.

The creek bed is quiet with the shadows of the late night sun. Peels down from the top of the hemlock to her right. Her visitor experiments with the flavors of chickpeas and rice noodles, seaweed and basil to form a base for the cream of broccoli soup in the frying pan. Keeps the vow of 3-days of silence and asks no questions.

The writer is quick to want to be tasting life’s next page, not lost in the handwritten message of where to be and with who - but inside the joy of this moment that feels so far away with the deadline looming. She feels crazy at the thought of keeping going and saying very little except telling herself she’d completely capable of sticking to a commitment and being trusted.

Whatever possessed her to be a human, writing in the moment? Actually she doesn’t believe in the way of this story as she flips and flops and wishes she had clay in her hand and a dozen bowls to copy and paint with beautiful green paint. Cups and saucers and teapots would come to life in the pounding of the clay. And she’d make another Grandmother Bear. She realizes the greenhouse could easily be her pottery studio and follows the story she made up along the way.

Found a home made kick wheel that needs a spill tray – even stayed on the stranger’s land on Denman while he was away. Trusted without even a physical meeting. He wants to join the monastery again. Leave the oyster farming and be a monk . Built a house his Queen mid wife girlfriend. Quietly contemplating life. Oh, the joy of living in the country.

The moment is still again, filled with wrestling of pages looking to be a new character, a more famous one.

Wants to get up and make the hot dogs with yellow French’s mustard dripping down her so she can lick it off. Drink iced mint tea but there’s no sun. Feels lazy and delighted with her disciplined self, scared by the incompleteness of her writing, aware of the danger of stopping now without a focus for the next fifteen pages.

She is laboring now like she did on a 63.5 km. walk up the mountain from Gold River and down the other side to arrive in Tahsis.

Has so much practising to do when people ask her to do something and she wants to say no and says yes instead. Her Father would say No so loud the hay loft shook. Maybe she had a bit to learn.

Softens her voice to heal from the tragedy of such little leadership and fathering. "No – you can’t visit. Someone else will be sharing my space for 3 weeks. And I’m in a flap already. I don’t even know what I expect. No. Just plain and simple No. Ask me later.”

Must not concern her self with unattended email messages and voice mail messages. Calls unanswered. Pleased now that she has a friend visiting while she’s undertaking such a shift in the way she sees her ability to do what she says she’ll do. Amazing comfort with Cath experiencing a similar self-imposed deadline. A crime to use time and wish it away in each moment. This moment rises - then falls as quickly at it arrived - across her page.

Aluminum pan clanks in the sink as her visitor patiently waits for human contact.

The deal is they both have to find the time to empty that seemingly vacant mind. Feels so foreign and familiar at the same time. In this instant she hears yet another small winged aircraft. Must be heading in towards the city and she wants to be above her self looking down in a new way with the truth of writer’s cramp a long distant memory. She wants her neck to shift itself. Her back to sit straight against a hard-back chair she bought at a garage sale. Hiked 16 km. to Garity Point and back preparing for the Great Walk. Never knew what possessed her to walk to that particular garage sale and return in the pouring rain.

She can’t believe she has words that fit each page as the blank pages still turn. Each line reminiscent of the morning pages she did everyday for three months once a long time ago when it was fashionable to be seen in a café brushing up on your English.

She misses human contact and is so grateful the visitor is patient as the writer drifts in and out of monologue. How could she speak to another human? Begs the craft to leave her side.

She wants ice cream because that means walking to Critters Café and catching a glimpse of today’s news. She wants a shower but doesn’t want to soil her aura and clean up too much before she finishes this leg of the journey. She wants to hop on her bicycle and she knows how much fun it is to cycle to Royston and back. She wants a sunset stroll along the seawall away from the people, just her and the sea slapping the rocks to get her to pay attention. She wants the phone to ring telling her brother Al is well and happy and will live long into his trips to Hawaii and Alberta next spring.

Al talks about re-connecting with his younger brother who’s raising hay for 160 live stock and 1000 acres of land. Lives near where the parents are buried. All by himself. Wife left him. Refuses to pay child support for his 10-year old daughter. She wants to be scooped by a magazine that needs story tellers who speak of the hazards of sitting down for too long a spell.

Deadlines don’t go away, she knows this now. Knows her self-confidence is flat. As she sees the page number on the top she feels expectant of a new set of instructions, trusts her hands to take her to the center of a rather long story. Others must experience this too, she consoles her self. When they birth a new story, idea, turn the sod. Cover the canvas with color. That seems to be the first step. Get rid of the page, a tough task for a writer using lead and words and more words.

Feels in big trouble. Empty now of the desire to keep going. Remembers her school years when 52% seemed enough without even ever opening her books to study under the lamp light. She is skittish. Please no repeat. Brought her to dislike academia and all the ways the famous bell curve showed her that she is below average. Everyone measured from different privilege. Unfair grounds, and unequal footing.

She remains true to her self - unable to recall what story anyone will read – except, perhaps her preoccupation with living in the unfolding truth inside her closed mind. She wants to open the lid and pour in, refresh the place where story lives. Suddenly recalls watching The Flintstones as she ate her chicken noodle soup. The bird garbage can. Squawking open under Fred’s big foot.

Simple life is what she misses. Instead she’s placed herself smack dab in the middle of yesterday and tomorrow - the past mistakes and the future she makes up as she goes along. Sleep will take her to another chapter of love and hate and all things in between, so she can continue to meet the exact right people over and over.

She is truth and love and easy to read as she heads into her self. Looks up and smiles in disbelief at being capable of having such a rare monologue - uninterrupted. There’s plenty of time to say those words that need to be coaxed out of her hungry mind. She is surprised she knows so many words – even though the variety is simple. She trusts the way they fill the page. Content that her mother and her mother’s mother faced a similar fate – "the tongue the cat got." Remarkable follow through, she congratulates her self.

Inside her mind slaps a no-see-um on the Fort McMurray Golf & Country Club. A pat on the back is long over due. Lets her mind reminisce to the sound of the childhood creek, her favorite place where no one dared to join her without an invitation.

The three “little ones” were out living their own lives. Not playing with the cousins in the flooding creek. The place where she cut her big toe so bad she couldn’t tell her father until two days later when it really hurt.

He sat still as he unwrapped the poultice put on by the neighbor across the road. Told her about the time when he owned his own steam engine and caught steam inside his wool boot and couldn’t unlace the rubber one fast enough to take the felt off. Couldn’t get it off until the heat had died down. Still remembers, still feels him in his quiet uneducated way – lonely and haunting today.

Janit Bianic is a creative conglomeration of writer, storyteller, documentor, and enthusiast. 250-331-3335
email: janitb@mars.ark.com