Rutting buck sees red. Challenges approaching scooter.

There's a blacktail buck on Saltspring this morning with a roaring headache and there's a fellow with a story to tell his grandchildren. Picture a ferry worker riding his red scooter along a peaceful wooded road on his way to an early morning shift on the Queen of Nanaimo. His headlight is on, his windscreen is up, his gloved hands grip the outstretched handlebars, the motor is roaring gently. Out of the woods trots a buck who, seeing the oncoming challenger lowers his antlers and stands his ground. Ferry worker flies head over buck ending up sprawled on the road with a badly broken ankle. Blacktail buck collapses for a moment, gives his head a shake, gets up and trots back into the woods. Another rival vanquished.

LABELING IN-LAWS

Listening to Margaret Visser this morning and she mentioned that marriages were a way of joining two families ... either for the purpose of expanding the family wealth or of making or keeping peace. I got to thinking about what a friend told me yesterday about her daughter's husband's parents. Several months ago they moved to the town where she lived and didn't once get in touch. So much for the joining of families.

All that aside, I want you to look at how I have described the conection of those folk to her. I could have said "her son-in-law's parents" but it is still cumbersome. Why, in our western culture, have we never developed a relationship term that describes the connection between two sets of parents whose children marry one another?

Equally as uninformative are the terms "brother-in-law" or "sister-in-law". Why don't we have special terms that delineate their exact relationship to us? Is my sister-in-law my brother's wife? Or is she my husband's brother's wife? Other cultures have exact labels that tell the hearer whether a cousin is male or female and whether the connection is through the mother or the father. Similarly with uncles and aunts and even grandparents. I suppose we can make do with "maternal aunt, cousin, grandparent" etc., but it seems awfully casual for a culture for whom family is, and historically was, supposed to be paramount.

I wonder how she did it?

Reading AS Byatt's Still Life. In it she has written a description of giving birth that is so precisely accurate that my aged innards squirmed in recollection. Most of us who have had children were blessed with amnesia following the ordeal. Good thing too or we would never have gone forth and multiplied! But that's the subject of a possible future musing that will depend on how irked I am feeling with humankind. Meantime, this wonderer wants to know how Byatt was able to recall so vividly those sensations I so completely and gratefully had forgotten.