Hey Canada, our birthdays are in the same month!

Happy Canada Day!  It's July 1, formerly Dominion Day, now Canada Day, celebrating the birth of the country now known as Canada (from the Iroquois word "Kanata", meaning: village).  Though I need another year of residency and good (pro forma) citizenship before I qualify to apply, I spent a good part of today's day off from work reading "Discover Canada", the official guidebook for persons hoping to become Canadian citizens.  All questions on the recently-revised citizenship test are based on information in this book.

Here at home in E.L., other than it being Canada Day, it is also the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the city.  Various days since last weekend have been earmarked for activities relating to the history of the city, including the Uranium Festival (uranium mining was the whole reason for the first birth of the town), now named the Homecoming parade, since the mines closed more than a decade ago and took with them the boom and bust cycle of resource mining.  The big celebration will happen this weekend, with a street dance showcasing Canadian artists as the main attraction.  I am hoping to swing the budget in favour of G and I attending, The Roadhammers will be performing and my first Canadian concert was watching their front man Jason McCoy in concert around Christmas 2013.

June was a significant month, marking as it did the half of the year.  It also marked our fifth wedding anniversary.  Wow, five years.  When we were getting married and watching a lot of wedding shows on The Learning Channel together, we joked that for our fifth anniversary we wanted to go to Hoboken, New Jersey, to meet Buddy of "The Cake Boss" fame and challenge him to make a cake that used the colours of our national flags: red and white for G, black, green, and gold for me.  We didn't make it to Hoboken, but in secret we both made plans to do something along the same lines: I commissioned a wreath from his sister's shop Wreathamania by Aiesha that would incorporate those colours and themed items significant to our relationship.  He ordered a beautiful bouquet with red roses, white and yellow carnations, ferns, and a black bow.  We both laughed at ourselves, being so secretive and doing the same thing.

In June, I only managed 75% of the $98 I needed to save for the 52 Week Money Challenge.  The fault lies entirely with my planning: I based it off the expected income from my seasonal job, completely forgetting that I would be working only 3 weeks there, not 4, so I needed to have split the required amount into thirds and not quarters.  Salient lesson there.

I completed my goal of 180 days straight meditating with Headspace.  In essence, the roughly 30 minutes each morning when I do a short yoga  session (less than 10 minutes), then sit in silence for 15 minutes with Headspace, is now inseparable from my morning ritual.  It's how I begin my days, and I can't have it any other way.

During the month, I also entertained friends I met through the immigration forum G and I went to for information and advice when we planned my emigration to Canada.  By the time the Canadian wife and I first communicated, I was already gaining a reputation for having some answers when it came to Family Class issues, which is why she reached out to me.  Eventually, what started as a plea for help became a friendship, we met in Toronto when I first came to Canada and G took me there, and since then have communicated through a successful appeal of the denial of her husband's visa.  He landed last year after a 4-year process, and finally I got to meet him in person as well.

We shared the joys and tribulations of settling in for the long haul, and introduced each other to our cultures, mostly via food.  I cooked a full Jamaican lunch of ackee and saltfish (Jamaica's national dish), fried plantain, callaloo (Jamaican leafy green, resembles spinach and prepared in a similar fashion), and fried dumplings.  Nearly all the ingredients were had thanks to my friends' living in Scarborough, with its Jamaican and Jamaican-descent population, having access to grocery stores carrying these items.  In turn, they prepared a Sri Lankan dinner for us of dahl, puri, and coconut sambal.  On the second day of their visit, G prepared a Canadian dinner of barbequed chicken, salad with a homemade vinaigrette, and I fried a breadfruit he roasted in a fire outside.  (Yes, my Caucasian husband knows how to roast a breadfruit, he paid attention when he lived in Jamaica!)

The moon is full and high as I type this up, and I can hear the fireworks starting as dusk deepens outside.  I am due at work tomorrow, so I will call it a night for now.  Later this month, around my birthday, I will try to look back on the half year that has gone by, and see how far I have come with the goals I set and where I am going for the last half of 2015, and the beginning of the 40th year of my life.

180 days of Headspace

With my friend's help, I wore a saree for the first time

All the coconut on hand called for coconut drops!

My friends brought me a gift of tea

Loss, and my first Canada Day

When you live in or are from a small town, you get used to no-one except the people living there or from there having much to say about the place.  Your focus narrows to the daily doings of your small town, and you expect that the world at large will mostly ignore you and these daily doings, as they are neither earth-shaking nor very important, to the way of most people's thinking.

I was born in a small town, for even though it is the parish capital of Westmoreland and a town of venerable age (established by the Spaniards prior to the English conquest in 1655, hence the name of the town, which means "grassland by the sea"), and in spite of its recent building boom in the last decade or so, Savanna-la-Mar remains very much a small town.  I received all my primary and secondary education in this small town, so I am very much a small town girl.  In spite of almost six and a half years in Kingston, I still identify with small town people, small town ways and small town thinking.

As a consequence of my upbringing, or perhaps as an advantage of it, I am very much at home in E.L.  I don't mind that there's only one mall, that selections and options are limited so far as restaurants, activities or entertainment, I grew up with that.  I am very good at amusing myself, as a consequence, and have a high tolerance for what most people would describe as boredom.  More to the point, all the "necessary" modern conveniences are here, especially the internet, so I feel like I lack nothing.

What I have not built up a tolerance for, is loss.  And loss came to E.L. with a vengeance 8 days ago, and took with it some of the security, and a great deal of the anonymity, that is treasured in small towns.  You don't wake up and expect that by the end of the day your small city, barely a dot on the map to most, will be all over the national news because a building fell apart and took with it some of your fellow townspeople.  Yet, that is exactly what happened on Saturday, June 22nd, to E.L.

Now, just over a week later, there are families grieving their loved ones, as two lives were lost, and the mall itself is now lost to the community, taking with it the employment of almost three hundred people.  For awhile, as the questions linger, our anonymity is lost, as news crews try to get opinions, as government officials search for answers, and both publish these to the wider community.  

As a consequence of the mall tragedy, there is a pall over my first Canada Day.  Or perhaps, not so much a pall, as a solemnity is cast over the day that is not associated with such celebrations of nationhood.  The sense of patriotism and national pride usually felt on these days is dampened by the knowledge that there are families among us mourning, feeling the loss of loved ones not present to share in yet another memorable day.  Events in town have been cancelled, rightly so to my mind, and persons are left to their own devices insofar as how they will mark the occasion.

In time, the questions will be answered, and E.L. will go back to being a small city, and of not much notice to anyone who doesn't live here or isn't from the town so as to be familiar with its ways and doings.  Until then, a sad something lingers in the air, and a day of national joy comes with tears.