The gravity of pancakes.

I'm so shiny with validity now, and so glad that the words and pictures and thoughts that spin around my head resound with you. The comments here always support, encourage, understand. Thank you so much for that. You are all radiant. I would be a guarantor for all of you, too, if I could.

And now... pancakes!

Looking at this picture, I first of all notice that Leafy's hands are huge! Sigh. They are all so big. Why is it so surprising? Like my new freckles and wrinkles always surprise me when I look in the mirror.

Speaking of surprises, I'm always taken aback by how simple pleasing my kids can be. I mean, sometimes they feel like little endless wells of need, pushing for the next fun thing, the next treat. Kids aren't notorious for being frugal. But in some ways, their pleasure in family things, in tradition, is so, so simple.

We started doing pancakes on Sunday mornings years ago. The way I work in the kitchen is that I need to be well prepared, thinking about things ahead of time. Fully aware of how much time I'm going to spend standing over the stove. And everyone loves pancakes, so it was simple to make a pancake day.

And they LOVE it. It means the world to them. It stays the same, whether or not our location changes. It is the same, it is constant. It means a lot more than food on Sunday to them. It means, This is our family. This is the way we do things. This is what our mom made.

I hear all of this in their voices when they tell people about it.

We have a few things like this. All simple. All cherished more than I would have imagined when I began them.

~Nutella on pancakes for birthday breakfasts. Nutella is ubiquitous worldwide. It's one thing I know I'll always be able to find. If I wanted to, I'm pretty sure I could find Pringles anywhere, also.

~Scavenger hunts for birthday presents. This one is a big one, because we often can't predict where birthdays will take place. A scavenger hunt takes me twenty minutes or so to set up- they get clues, they hunt for presents, they bring them back and open them. Older kids help younger kids read the clues. Clues are easy for little ones, harder for big ones. And they LOVE it. I couldn't stop if I wanted to. I'm stuck now, I'll be making clues until they're thirty.

~Speaking of birthdays, there are certain games we always play. Stop dancing when the music stops, musical chairs- always to our live Chinua music, which can be anything you want. Blues, gospel, turkish music, celtic, country. Whatever, really.

There were so many things I couldn't fathom when I first became a mother. The wilderness of family life seemed overwhelming to me. But I love tradition myself, it helps me to know what to expect, to know what is expected of me. How can I give them something special? Sometimes it's just by doing the same simple thing, over and over again. The repetition means I love you. I remembered. I always remember and I think of you every Sunday morning, when I'm mixing the batter, or you're mixing the batter, and I'm flipping the pancakes or you are.

This is so much of what practice is. I see it in all areas of my life: spiritual, family, friends, art-- how doing the same thing again and again doesn't need to be stagnant. It gives weight to love, especially when you show up with your whole heart, but even sometimes when you can't quite bring all of you. The part of you that remembers not to forget is still there, still in motion, still building something that will be lovely in the end.

On birth certificates and cross-stitched portraits of dead kings.

Sometimes the well of feeling is unexpected. Hidden in the grass.

I was filling out a form online to order a copy of my birth certificate from the Ontario government, and I got hung up on one of the questions. It's that old guarantor question that always gets me. A guarantor is something the Canadian government wants, a person who vouches for you, who says, "She is who she says she is. She exists."

I was already emotional, filling out the form. Brampton, Ontario, I filled out. 1980. The words are old words, they touch a sore place inside of me that always wants to belong somewhere. I wrote my father's name. My mother's name. I wrote their ages when I was born. My heart hurt.

I'm already frustrated with myself because I didn't bring the birth certificates when we last left, and I should have. And I can't locate them, and I need them now. The difficulty and expense of getting them here is dragging me down. And then... a guarantor. A guarantor must be in a certain profession. A lawyer. A doctor. A chiropractor... the list goes on, but I couldn't place anyone. Who do I know like that? I drew a blank. I could think of one or two possibilities, but didn't know their work addresses, and it wasn't such a big deal really, except that I couldn't save the online form, and I'll need to begin all over again and the great distance between me and my homeland gets bigger. I don't know any lawyers. Or any dentists.

Just like that I'm almost crying, because I'm so in-valid, and I want to stick up for myself. I know I haven't lived there in a long time! But I really am Canadian, I am, and I was born somewhere, in a small town hospital, and people were glad to have me, and I come from you, great big country, and I love you and brag about you all across Asia.

Who can be my guarantor? Who can guarantee my existance? Maybe the litchi lady, who delivers litchis from her motorbike each day. She sits in front of the house and calls until we notice her, and we never turn her down because her litchis are the best and the season won't last forever.

On a bus ride to Chiang Mai a few weeks ago, I met an American tourist who told me, "Aw, you're practically American, you've got American kids, an American husband. You're American, I'll buy you a shirt with an American flag on it." And I was all, "No!" And he got insulted, but it's nothing against him, it's nothing against the place that I learned to love. It's about something that never goes away, the first seeds in your garden, the beginning of your life, I don't want to lose it, I don't want it taken from me by a glib tourist who has the bad habit of putting Canada down, like so many other ignorant people I've met. And besides, if you ask my youngest son where he's from, he sometimes says "Bangkok," sometimes, "The India," and sometimes "Sam Francisco," depending on his mood. I'm not sure how "American" that makes him.

That pang in my heart is the same feeling I got in the sewing shop the other day, looking at tape measures and pins and scissors. My heart was going thud thud thud and I got that hot feeling in my face, like I was going to cry. I half grew up in the fabric and sewing shop that my grandparents owned, and who can imagine the feelings you can pull out of a rack of buttons? It's gone, is what I think. And then, she's gone. And that still hurts so much, that my grandmother is gone and I still really really want her. I don't want her to be gone, I want her voice again, her self that doesn't match anyone else's self.

All those Edmonton dark mornings, getting in Grandma and Grandpa's car and going to the store on freezing days, when it was thirty below and we could hear the tired hum of the heaters coming to life. My sister and I counted zippers, buttons, for hours. We were the helpers, taking inventory in January. The store smelled amazing, like cloth everywhere, and my grandma often hummed while she worked, and she made us these sandwiches with thick slices of bread, and Grandpa teased us under the fluorescent lights, and then years later, I disappeared, I moved away.

My kids complain if it's 20 degress (celcius) outside. "It's COooLLLD!" they say. We're so far from there, yet this is what we've become, and still, somehow we're that, but how to keep track of it all? How to keep the threads from fraying?

At the Thai sewing shop, I was able to keep the tears back because I spotted a six foot tall cross-stitched picture of one of Thailand's prior kings. There are humongous pictures of the King and his ancestors everywhere in Thailand, but never have I seen one done by needlepoint.  It literally knocked me speechless and made me realize, no, this isn't Canada, it can never be, but here there are different things, things that revolve around their own memories, and things that carve out stories for everyone to believe and honor. I have my grandmother and her scissors making a snap snap across a bolt of fabric. Here there is the King and the Queen, and I'm sure Thai people love Durian (which people sometimes call stink fruit because of the smell) mostly because it's a smell of their childhoods and it marks something: the child who never goes away, the story that can't die! It can't, it can't.

Even if the telling is as soft as falling leaves, it has to land somewhere in the snow or in the jungle. It sleeps inside me, roused only by birth certificate applications and the smell of bobbins bright as the sun.

But who can be my guarantor? The tomato farmers? The man at the shop where I buy my bread? I'm neither here nor there. I'm somewhere in between.

We will have somewhere to sit.

I am a superhero, flying around Chiang Mai and surrounding villages on my scooter to furnish our house on a budget. It's a dreamy and challenging place to do it. There is a whole wood village where they sell furniture, but this is no Ikea. For three days I have compared prices and styles of dining room tables in shops around the village, I have trekked around in the scorching midday sun. I'm a bit sunburned, but I'm doing it! I drank the water of three coconuts. Coconut water is a secret that I have discovered about shopping in hot, outdoor Asian markets. Drink a coconut. You'll feel much better.

There is a truck headed for Pai with our table, benches, rattan love seat and chairs, and desks on it. Success!

Today I pick up my new sewing machine, shop for fabric, (another story) and get back on the bus for the three hour drive to Pai. Today I will be a fabric shopping superhero!

My mother....

...reads my blog and comments. Always with love.

...supports me even though I live far away, which is hard for her (and for me).

...is generous and loving.

...is a wonderful grandma. The other day, Leafy found a frangipani flower. It was a large white one, very fragrant, and it captivated him.

"This reminds me of Grandma and Grandpa," he said.

"Yeah, because there are flowers near Grandma and Grandpa's house!" YaYa said.

"No, not of their house. It reminds me of Grandma and Grandpa. Because it's so nice."

They are very high on the list of favorite flowers for me, and I thought it was so special that it brought him back to them. But I digress.

...tells me kind and loving things constantly.

...has always loved me, even when I was a teenager who had difficulty controlling my emotions.

I love you, Mom. Thanks for being you.

Tomato Sorting Day

Yesterday was a tomato sorting day. Our landlord is the middle man between farmers in the mountains and sellers in Bangkok. So a couple of farmers came down from the mountains and brought their tomato harvest with them. The garage door beside our kitchen was rolled up and the courtyard and this little room were filled with tomatoes. That's our landlord in the pink shirt. He's a very kind person.

The tomato farmers were a couple. They looked very, very young and they brought this little delight.

So I had fun photographing him and trying to make him smile. He was very serious with me, but he smiled for YaYa. Of course. She's such a winner with babies and animals.

I asked my landlord what hill tribe the couple was from, and they discussed it amongst themselves for a while. They were trying to think of what the English word for Hmong was, but I picked it out of what they were saying in Thai, and came to the rescue. "Hmong?" I asked. And my landlord said, "Oh! Same in English!"

Our landlord says that he speaks a few words of a lot of hilltribe languages. I'm kind of excited for more tomato days, because I want to meet more people from the mountains around here. There are many Shan people in Pai, and Lahu, and Lisu as well. These were the first Hmong people I've met since we moved here.

Our neighbor from across the street came and played, and everyone oohed and aahed at the baby boy.

 And I oohed and aahed at the baby wrap that his mother made for him. Oooohhh. Aaaaahh.