Coping...

 July 15, 2026

When I was a child there was one thing that I learned, very early on, not to say to my mother. Two simple words that now, as a fully grown adult I understand are words spoken, at one time or another by every child who ever lived. But at the time, the shock of some of the outcomes of expressing those words left a scar on my psyche that is still there.

Those two words? I’m bored.

Yes, if I ever said them within my mother’s hearing, you could bet your cute little tushy she would find me something to do. And it wasn’t a fun something to do, either. I learned as much about parenting from my mother’s successes as from her mistakes (though she would never admit to having made any mistakes, not ever). She was as stoic bordering on ungiving, when it came to anything emotional, as I believe it was possible for a person to be. One of the outcomes of her demeanor was that, growing up, I felt unloved. My answer to that experience was that my children grew up suffering my hugs and words of love and affirmation every day.

Now friends, I can tell you here and now that when my children said those two words to me, my response was to suggest they find something to do. To play and use their imaginations. Not that I didn’t expect chores from them. I certainly did. But I didn’t look at them as a source of free labour. They were children. They had the right of free speech as well as the responsibility that comes from being a part of a family. They had a right to say they were bored if that was how they felt. I wasn’t going to punish them for that.

I do credit my mother’s influence for my attitude toward boring jobs. Not just jobs around the house, either. When I worked outside the home, it was office work I performed, mostly in the field of accounting. Talk about boring? Hundreds of invoices to process every month, very little that was unique; all the long tasks of clerical work required to produce financial statements…that can be boring, let me tell you. So, I would play mental guessing games. How many invoices could I process in the next half hour? How many would be in this category of expense, as opposed to that one? Re-reading those last few lines, I may have to split the credit for my reaction to boring tasks. Half for mother, and half for Mary Poppins and her spoonful of sugar.

I still use that tactic today whenever I’m faced with something to do that requires attention but little thinking. When I’m preparing the laundry, there are literally piles of things to be sorted, sprayed with pre-treatment solutions, separated into actual baskets. You get the idea. I don’t need to use any sort of mind games to get the dishes done. I simply was them (by hand as I have never had a working dishwasher). Doesn’t take long at all.

It took more than my mother’s influence for me to master the art of waiting for appointments—or during them. It also took the wisdom that comes with age. Here, I can tell you my cell phone helps. I do have three games on my phone, and when I am waiting, I tend to turn to that little device for diversion.

From the menu of life, sitting and doing nothing is not a combo I order—unless I’m under the weather. And then, like it said on that old poster one used to be able to buy and hang, if I sits, I falls asleep. Hopefully that sleeping happens at home and not out in the wider world.

Apparently, I snore.

The whole point of today’s essay is this: Growing up, one learned coping mechanisms, because life didn’t always go as planned—and few children were allowed to believe it ever would. Crap happening is as eternal as the sun rising in the east. The person with the best chance of getting to old aged relatively unscathed was the one who not only learned that lesson but mastered it.

And now that I am older, I know something I never even considered until very recently. The person who doesn’t learn how to cope with the dross of life not only guarantees themselves a miserable life experience; they tend to spread it around so that they don’t suffer alone.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer adventures...

 July 8, 2026

I don’t often take the time to think back to the summer days of my childhood. Those glorious days of playing outside all day, not a television or cell phone in sight. I was seven, the last summer in the little house on the paved road (all the crossroads were gravel). The next year, we moved across the field into the “big house”, and yes, comparatively it was big. The little house had only two actual bedrooms (and a kitchen with an eating nook, a living room, and a bathroom). When my paternal grandmother moved in with us, she had one bedroom, and my brother used a make-shift space just big enough for a bed jammed into the front entrance of the house, in what we called the vestibule. While it was his room, of course, that front door wasn’t in use.

I can’t recall if we used that door much after my grandmother passed. I can tell you that it was my brother who took over her bedroom. And the other bedroom? Mom and Dad, my sister and I. I was moved out of my crib and into the three-quarter bed with my sister when I was five.

The big house had four bedrooms. Three upstairs, one for each of us kids, and the larger one downstairs for mom and dad.

A whole bed, a whole bedroom, to myself! That, my friends, was a very big deal. Outside our bedrooms was a common area, about eight-foot square that we dubbed the hallway. It held a bookcase, and a couple of chairs, had its own window, and of course the protective railing surrounding the stairs.

Our houses—both the small and the big—were situated in a rural area, not even a named community, within our township. There were, on our stretch of the paved road, eleven houses along about a mile of road, between the two concessions. Some of the houses had a tree of two in their yards, but most of the trees extended behind the houses and away from the road. The bushland hid a couple of old trash dumps and one small structure that might have been either a hen house or a rabbit hutch at one time. It didn’t carry any signs of past animal habitation. But there were neither glass nor signs of glass in or around the two small windows, and neither was there a door—just the three openings.

I recall at least one occasion when we sheltered there during a sudden cloud burst. The roof kept the rain off us. Walking farther away from the road through the trees and such, one eventually encountered a privately owned stone quarry. The same one where, some decade and a half later my husband would be employed for nearly forty years.

There were five or six of us kids who would trek around together and make our own fun, back in the day. We even tried our hand at building a fort out of twigs and small branches. Someone would bring a couple of towels, and so we would have a roof, of sorts. Just country kids out playing in the woods, yet close enough to home that we could hear our parents call “supper”.

Wintertime didn’t bring an end to outdoor fun. The land on the other side of the paved road, all during my early years, was marshy at best, and sometimes sported an actual, large pond. Skating fun was ours, and it was a learning curve to avoid those places where a few mostly dead yet stubborn weed stalks pushed out above the ice.

David and I spent our first year of married life in a large city. But I’d been a country kid all my life and didn’t feel well near the end of that year breathing in the industrial pollution. Mom still owned both houses. When her tenant left, she rented the little one to us. Then, a couple years later when she died unexpectedly from a heart attack (just thirteen years after my father died), David and I “swapped” houses with my sister so we could have the “big house”.

My kids’ version of being kids in the country was playing in the field between our house and my sister’s. And in the winter, since our marshy pond on the other side of the road was long gone, I would make an ice rink in that field. One year, especially, I got it in mind to build as good an ice rink as they would ever see. That year, they were still skating on it in early April.

All good memories, except of course for the loss of my parents.

Those days seem so very far away.

Our children didn’t get to repeat our free-roaming experiences. Each summer we would take them on a few picnics to the “lakes”—we had two conservation areas with man-made lakes not far from us, as well as both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie within an hour or two drive.

But they didn’t get to form their own memories of just heading out each morning and adventuring the way we did (David steered a similar path to mine in his youth).

The rhythm of life changed from the days of my youth to those of my children’s. Our lived experiences became a part of who we were, and who we grew up to be. As our children grew from their own summers.

I do wonder about today’s children. They don’t seem to get a whole lot of outdoor time. And I think they have more screen time than can possibly be good for them. As for making their own fun? I have the sense that’s something they’ve never had the chance to do.

And maybe it’s not as strange as I at first thought when I realized that I don’t envy the kids of today at all.

I pity them. And I worry, a little, about what their lack of daring and imagination will mean to them as adults.

More rhythm of life changes, and not necessarily in a good way.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury

National birthdays...

 July 1, 2026

To all my friends and family north of the forty-ninth, Happy Canada Day! And for my American friends, whose holiday is this weekend, Happy Independence Day!

We celebrate our national birthday here in Canada on July 1st much the same way as y’all in the Untied States celebrate yours three days later, on July 4th. This year, Canada turns 159 years old. I’ll concede, since this year is America’s semiquincentennial, that the celebrations you’ll be having will be more robust than our own.

Here we have parades, large and small community parties, and food cooked on outdoor grills. There’s not as much beach activity up here on July 1^st as one might find in warmer climes on this day. But there are flags, and patriotism, and that wonderful and necessary sense of being a part of something bigger than oneself.

When I was a child, this day held another significant aspect for me. This was my brother’s birthday. My mother’s was on July 5th and we would often get together to celebrate both milestones at the same time. We made a point of this especially after my brother married and moved about thirty-five miles to the west. To the same small town that we also now call home and have for more than thirty years.

It was a wonderful kind of sentimental coincidence that the year after my mother passed away, our second child, our late son Anthony, was born on her birthday.

I can’t separate this day from thoughts of my brother. When I was much younger, this holiday was called Dominion Day. Then, we were officially known as the Dominion of Canada. We were and still are a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations. There was a huge parade in the large city close to us and my brother had me convinced that the parade was in his honour.

Canada dropped Dominion in 1982 when we repatriated our constitution from Great Britain.  

We here in the Ashbury household haven’t participated in any events this year, mainly because the weather is just too darn hot for any of us. David was invited by one of our grandsons to a small, nine-hole golf course. It was his first game of golf is several years. He came home happy if hot. A bit annoyed with himself at how much effort the game had involved. But pleased to have gone and to have spent son with his grandson.

For myself, I was the anxiety therapist for our two dogs, and a puppy bed for my two of my daughter’s dogs (daughter was at work). This duty I happily performed in air-conditioned comfort.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this essay, a thunderstorm approached. With the heat we’ve had the last few days, that’s no great surprise. The power flickered as the storm hit, and so I waited the weather out before completing my work.

So far this summer—well certainly since the tomato plants went in—we’ve had an abundance of rain. We’ve only had to water the veggie gardens a couple of times. I do recall, that a few years ago, we had another such summer. And all that rain resulted in the most lush and plentiful tomato harvest we had ever seen. That was in 2023.

I have my fingers crossed that we experience an encore of that miraculous outcome. There’s nothing more beautiful or tasty than a fat, juicy beefsteak tomato.

I have hope that the rain that is beginning to taper down to a nice steady patter will do us a favor and kill the humidity. But I know that doesn’t always happen.

My best wishes to you all, Canadians and Americans alike, for a safe and joyful national celebration. May it be a holiday to remember!

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury