Going Inkless

Cielle is not the name my mother gave me, at least not directly.  What's more, nobody calls me by that name when speaking to me, and it's not even my outgrown childhood nickname.  It does link back to those times, however.  My sisters and I were all given names that start with "C", and since our last names were all the same, the only difference in our initials came with the middle names.  When we needed them for property marking or to distinguish our scores for a game, we were always C.A, C.L, C.B, C.F, and C.M.  Mine was just the only combination that sounded like a name of it's own, a sort of feminized version of the French word for heavens, le ciel .  Ever since that time, it has been my all-purpose nom-de-plume and secret identity; so, when I had to establish a user name for this blog years ago, it seemed a natural choice.  This was to be a collection of personal meditations and a way to reach out beyond street-level interactions.  It wasn't a...

     We had a big dictionary when I was a child.  It was a magnificent book full of words I hadn't learned yet, with a glossy section in the centre that displayed various bits of interesting categorical information - planets, birthstones, zodiac signs.  This hefty tome was just one of a small reference library we kept.  My parents loved books as much as I do.  The ones I remember best were the mythology, the series on plant, animal and mineral identification, and a heavily illustrated book of World War I airplanes (Snoopy's Sopwith Camel and the Red Baron's Fokker were in there.)  And of course, the set of encyclopedias was a particular treasure.  Everything you wanted to know about was in there, at least to some degree, and we used them often.  Whenever we asked Mom a question she couldn't answer, she'd take us to the encyclopedia and look it up with us.  It was like Mom's spare brain.  I suppose that habit empowered us to bec...

     It's approaching a month since I last posted on this blog.  There are reasons.  As I've mentioned before, where there is silence, there is still activity you're not seeing...yet.      Among all of the usual summer things to do, I've been working at building the website that will display some of the short stories we (my husband and I) have been writing.  It's slow going, and every little piece is a puzzle I have to solve.  There has been frustration and discovery, and enormous satisfaction in the simplest accomplishments like getting the title to show up or getting a menu to work right.  I still feel a little like a fraud, not really knowing what I'm doing, but jumping in and making it work anyway.  The good news is that it shouldn't be much longer before I have the framework ready and can start managing the site instead of just building it.  So, please be patient while my attention is elsewhere.  I'm hoping it ...

     I haven't really ridden a bicycle in almost twenty years.  The qualifier is in that statement because there have been a couple of opportunities to spend some insignificant time pedalling.  A few years ago, my husband joined me on some long walks in the state park, me on foot and him on his bicycle.  The bike was gentler on feet and joints, and I did take a turn in order to demonstrate that I am too short to use his bicycle. But that sort of thing is not what I would consider really riding.      Despite the lull, there was a time when being on a bike was as much a part of my life as swimming, running barefoot up and down the lakeshore, or sitting in the branches of a mulberry tree.  Before that phase, there are memories of learning to ride, of standing in the driveway with tear-streaked cheeks, kicking my bike.  My knees and palms were bloody and crusted with dirt and tiny stones.  Our home at that time offered only grass...

     When I applied to be an exchange student, it was at the suggestion of my French teacher.  Mme. LaFrancis (and with that name, how could she have been anything but a French teacher) was one of the people in my life who believed in me enough to make me think that the world could be open for me in spite of the hurdles.  I was in my third year of French at the time.  The first year had been a normal classroom experience, but the second and third were independent study.  Mme. LaFrancis saw enough promise in me that she arranged for me to continue in French despite schedule conflicts.  We would meet for 15 minutes of each 30 minute lunch period for me to turn in assignments, ask questions or take tests.  The rest was all on my own time.  I was no expert, but I was comfortable with the language at that point.  I wrote to a pen pal in French, entertained myself by taking notes for other classes in French, and even read an untranslated ...

a short trip...      In the course of planning and designing a website, I've started to wonder how the internet became a place.  It's a fairly new concept as a whole, and somewhere along the way as it has grown, we gradually decided to think of it as a place.  We chose terminology appropriate to that idea.  There are sites you find at an address.  You can go into a chat room or go to a page.  You can view a gallery or library.  You start out  and return to a home.  Every mailbox has a place it's @.  Yet all this real estate is in your head.  It's imaginary.  Of course, the information that makes up this imaginary landscape is kept somewhere.  Even the airy "cloud" you picture is a heavy, earthbound mass of silicon and wiring somewhere in the physical world, or rather several masses.  But that information is what constitutes the internet, not the machines it's stored on.  The internet is really an id...

     Mom's favourite colour is green.  It has been for as long as I can remember.  There was never a question about which colour to pick when choosing or making a gift for her or which sheet of construction paper to transform into her birthday card.  It was very helpful for us kids when we wanted to make something special even more so.  Grandma was more of a mystery.  When asked to declare it, she'd say her favourite was "sky blue-pink with purple polka dots."  Although that sounds a lot like lavender to someone learning to mix colours, I'm sure it was just her way of saying any colour we chose would be just right.  I still have no idea if she really preferred one colour over another or if, like me, she tended to love what suited the moment.  Then again, her car, the one she had for the 17 years I knew her, was a deep forest green.      Mom's love of green was sometimes puzzling to me as a child.  It seemed lik...