Dear Students of Ms. B., Gibson’s Elementary, North Delta,

I spent about 10 weeks working with you in your class, as a student teacher in the late months of 2008, and extensively in the spring of 2009. Then I mysteriously vanished. I came in to say “goodbye” but I don’t believe much of an explanation was ever offered to you. So I’m going to offer one–my side, at least–now.

I remember one of you–J., I’ll call him–put his hand up to ask me if I’d “failed.” (This, in the midst of my ‘goodbye,’ standing in front of the class, teacher watching from her desk.) I was a bit stymied by the question, as the “F” word doesn’t seem to be a part of the education system vernacular now. We’ve worked so hard to get away from that, haven’t we? As I stumbled around with an answer of sorts, Sponsor Teacher, a veteran of five long years, nodded encouragingly to J. and told him that was a good question.

Really? How was that a “good question?” Once again, as I felt increasingly in those last days of practicum #1, I felt as if there was some answer that, even on a good day, on a planet that allowed me to feel the sun at every moment, I could not possibly begin to know the Award Winning Answer. Because, if nothing else, I learned in our education system (elementary and, I’ll guess, secondary) that there is–really–only One Answer. Grades of A are given for this Answer. An answer that is Mysterious for many of us.

I also learned the bullying that thrives in our schools. Not because “children are mean.” That’s a lie that when mixed with water spreads thinly and evenly, and most of us have completely forgotten that children are NOT mean. Children are honest. Children can be blunt. But they are not inherently mean. (Not including the very low numbers of truly psychopathic.)

No, the worst bullying I have ever experienced was in the office of that elementary school, alone with my sponsor teacher and the school principal, a neat triangle. Within 2 minutes I–44 years of age, and thinking I was beyond such–was in tears. I was in a corner of the room where I’d been told to take a seat, and farthest from the door. I was handed a box of kleenex as they stood over me. And then they analyzed me for 45 more minutes. In the end, I was told to “go home and think about the rest of your life.” Wise words, from two wise women.

Now, this coming spring, all of you will be graduating. I am aware of this because my middle son is your same age (how I tested all my assignments on him…! Does this “pass”? Is this interesting? Or will it make them have a collective headache or yawn?) He is graduating, and this means that I think of you often. Where are you all going? Some of you were headed  in a direction already–but others seemed so lost…and in a system that doesn’t recognize your strengths and so doesn’t allow for any weakness. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s “work with your strengths” Seems so obvious and positive, doesn’t it? But–ironically–I’ve learned far more from my failure/s. If one is brave enough to work from one’s weak points, should they be supported in that? What does that look like? Can it be done in ways that holds and nurtures dignity?

What do I hope for all of you?

I hope you know yourselves.

That should be the primary goal of all education. That way, even if you don’t know what you “want to do with the rest of your life” (how we fixate on that), you should have the means to follow the breadcrumbs of gut feeling… those crumbs that allow you to find a path no matter what.

So J., did I fail? Yes, I failed to understand how to take 30 young people, place them in a relatively small space, the classroom, and give them a set amount of time to do a particular task, in a particular way, and be judged by…guess what…a particular “rubric.”

I’d taught for so many years, before ever learning the word “rubric.” What a word. A time-saving means of judging. A corner-shearing, one size fits no-one deal.

I failed to understand the raised voice. “You need to learn how to raise your voice,” I was told repeatedly. Would I have “passed” if I’d raised my voice? Finally, a year later, practicum #2, I raised my voice. And dropped something, and almost vomited. And was told to command a child with a badly broken thumb to write…

And we are to wear pink shirts one day of the year. As if it will change things, when these are the undercurrents with which learners are swept along.

I failed to understand the education system.

In a small office in the university in which I had taught and was was now studying “education,” in the section dedicated to that study, the fellow whose job it was to assign practicum placement told me that I really didn’t understand the task of an elementary teacher. He told me what it was about, slowly and condescendingly, keeping in his mind that I had taught only post-secondary to that point. “Teaching children is all about making them feel, throughout the day, that they are running out of time.” That sentence, verbatim, etched into my mind.

I managed to exit his office without vomiting on his desk. Though in hindsight, I rather regret that. Perhaps he would have a glimpse of how such words and thought make others feel as he cleaned the mess.

Last I heard, Ms. B was the principal of the school two of my sons attended in Ladner.

It’s taken me years to post this.

This was fun! Thank you to an amazing librarian, Mr. Chang, for the photo.

Imagine! A school with a FULL-TIME, capital L, Librarian. To celebrate!

Here I’m sharing the genesis of so many stories… using a journal, even a visual journal. In this case, I’ve created one with a home-made “flip book.”

When I was young, every school had a full-time librarian. They tended to stay at the school for a long time, enough to know the learners, and to know what books would meet their needs and surprise them in the best ways. We took this for granted then. (THANK YOU, Mrs. Campbell! And for letting me be a library monitor!)

I shared this day with grades 6 and 7s. I read from my now-old The Half-pipe Kidd. It’s so dated now, with not a cell phone in sight, but I enjoyed it, and the kids seemed to as well–even better.

A number of the boys came up afterward to show me the graphic novels they’re working on, some projects now a year’s worth of work, with a special kit so they can work outside…

Love it!

• How to make a flip-book:

Fold a large piece of paper into 16 squares. Then cut like this:

So 16 squares, with the cuts, 3/4 of the way through, up, down, and up.

Then fold, turning corners as you go. If you write and draw on both sides of the 16 squares, you have 32. Which creates a “journal” for a month–31 days and a cover to fold over.

Have fun!

Life had something else in store

Here is me, pulling a face with a gorilla, on the occasion of my 50th birthday, over nine years ago. That day, my spouse and I drove to nearby Harrison Hot Springs to spend the weekend and celebrate.

The decade leading to that point had been one of change. I’d attempted to reincarnate from a contract academic to a grade-school teacher, but had been failed twice from the program (old dogs are not allowed to do new tricks!)

I’d also gained substantial weight, lost it slowly and healthily, traversed through a rather early menopause, and finally returned to academic work with renewed energy for students and a new work supervisor.

I felt it all to be culminating; I’d landed on my feet and arrived. Did I mention my marriage of decades had renewed in the last few years…? What a wonder that was after three children and almost as many decades.

Like so many women, my 30s were filled with the adventures of childbirth and wakeful nights, school starts, and that busyness that eats us up.

So this —this decade, my 50s — was going to be mine. Things were sorted. All was On Track.

Fifty weeks into that first year, our family doctor gave my spouse a preliminarydiagnosis of ALS — the only way he could account for the loss of strength in arms and fingers, and the emotional sprawl and overwhelm he’d been experiencing, too.

And the next year, from just before my 51st birthday, was one of 24/7 caregiving, and the years after that, grieving and loss with their waves and fluctuations.

Since then, I’ve lived with the aftermath of caregiving. And it does have “after-math” — physical evidence. I broke my elbow, slipping on ice some months after my husband passed, and it didn’t heal well. I think grief takes its toll on the body in ways that are tricky to recognize. It altered my pain threshold. I ground a molar to bits. I could go on… but enough.

Living with the realities of one’s children also grieving is its own challenge. And I chose to move and downsize. A positive, yes, but change, change, change became too constant. I left my academic job two years ago as, once again, it became a drama zone.

I’m back to self-employed writer-hood, and long work hours. But coupled with freedom.

Drama! Up or down…

I remember meeting a neighbourhood friend sometime before my spouse’s diagnosis. We knew each other mostly from our sons being on the same ball team, and our evenings sitting together on bleachers watching. I always enjoyed conversing with her, another teacher.

But at that meeting, she shared how she felt about her life at the time, in her forties. She had a solid marriage with a #1 spouse; two children with no serious issues; the same house for years; same job in the same school. Once in a while, she and her spouse would take a vacation somewhere different just to shake things up.

She said that the years and days all felt similar, and to be passing by. She was not ungrateful for the general calm — which was a good thing, I recall thinking. If one has a life without ruptures and spinning corners, it’s not to be taken for granted. Why drama-up a thing if you don’t need to?

I remember feeling a little envy. But more so I felt her quiet wonder that — up to that moment at least — her life had yielded few storms. And the wonder for me was that, standing with her in the early morning sun at the side of the road, I could feel a peace emanating from her, and shared.

Nice. I’ll take it from wherever I can get it, I’ve learned. Even by osmosis. Drink it up.

So now I’m 59

This decade is coming to an end. And it doesn’t feel like an “end.” It feels like an eve — the eve of my 60s.

And now I have absolutely no thought that my 60s will be a decade of “me,” or of being “settled,” or of any respite. I fully expect turbulence and upheaval. I fully expect there will be lessons gleaned — on the daily! When the rug gets pulled, DANCE! And there’ll be sadness too — there’s always that. I’m not going to think ahead to the possibility of an unbearable; I’ve learned the significant steps to not thinking ahead — not too much.

My hope is that I have time to write — also on the daily — and time with my sons. My mother is still alive and active, and I enjoy every minute with her, and value that time. I know that she will not be with me forever.

I know that there will be happenings that I cannot begin to imagine now — I know that.

The books I write, and the stories I will tell, are all pieces that I might have begun to imagine, but more likely not. My memoir of caregiving, Dance Me to the End, was not in any way in my mind or heart that Sunday nine years ago when I packed my little suitcase for the weekend, thrilled to be going away with my spouse to celebrate my birthday, my new beginning.

I accept that. I know too that there will be moments and times of stillness, and I will revel in those — I will— however fleeting. There will be laughter and love and friendship, and I will recognize these, and take pleasure in them.

Life is full. It’s taken 59 years to learn all I have; I cannot forget.

~~~

This essay was first posted in Middle Pause, on Medium, October 2023

Technology is not my strength. I’ve mucked about with facebook, trying to create some way to share info and news with family and my brother Lorne’s friends. Then I thought perhaps I should “just” put together a dedicated website.

And now here I am, deciding that perhaps the simplest solution is to post about where he’s at here, and share this site with those who want to know.

Of course, since the first of May, I’ve been promoting my new novel, Blue Hours. If you came here looking for that, scroll down for writerly-posts.

Sometimes, Life happens, and we’re reminded of what really matters. And turns out it’s not selling a book!

A week ago today, my youngest brother was in hospital, and I drove down with Yvonne, my sister-in-law, from Nanaimo Hospital to Victoria. At one point I took this pic of the two of them.

We are truly fortunate that Lorne can speak, and be understood. He can walk. As of last night, Friday, August 22, he’s at home, albeit with strict instructions not to be over stimulated, and have no visitors. Peace and quiet are the orders of the day! For awhile to come.

But he is struggling to use his right hand and arm. Eating is a challenge! Balance and coordination are issues. He has some months ahead of him, during which he needs to focus on his own self–a task he is unused to!

I spent last weekend in the Island, with Yvonne and I staying at the home of their friends–generous and caring people! This friend has put together a go-fund-me with a goal that should give them the gift of being able to focus on healing!

I’ve gone through caregiving, and know what such a gift means. It really does feel odd to receive funds in this way–often even from people you don’t know! People who know what it means when life seems to sideline you.

Truth is, as we age–we don’t even have to be particularly old to know this!–but as we move into some decades of life, we know the value of community. We give and at times, we have to receive. Life is a beautifully circuitous thing though! And we will always have many opportunities to give back. Money, a pot of soup, an errand run, a hug. Every day has opportunities.

Here’s the go-fund-me link: (I wish it would embed, but it doesn’t. Simply click on it, though and it opens easily enough.)

https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-acheson-family?attribution_id=sl:d70cde3f-0cb5-4fb7-96da-5093b222e724&ts=1755782289&utm_campaign=pd_ss_icons&utm_content=amp13_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link

Do check back to read about updates. And if you want to pass along messages, or have questions please write to me: alison at alison acheson dot com, and I will do my best! We’re trying hard to ease Yvonne’s workload at this point! So PLEASE don’t send questions to her!

I’ve put together a wee sign to post on their front (and back) door:

One sleeping, healing Dude lives here!
ZERO stimulation!
No visitors!
by DOC’S ORDER!

I wish I could set up a comment section. I wish I understood tech more. But I understand the power of love in family, friendship, and community and prayer. And all the hard work of healing.

We pray Lord for strength to do our good work, and for healing peace.

Amen.

For those of you who have helped in all the myriad ways to do so, huge thanks from all the corners of our hearts!

Do check back here for updates–and I’ll post updates to FB. “Friend” me if you want! Or the easiest is to click on the little “mail” symbol, and you’ll receive updates–that easy!

Today is May 1, 2025, book birthday for Blue Hours.

After decades of writing for young people, and publishing short fiction and memoir for adult readers, I’ve published a novel for adults with the wonderful publishing house Freehand Books.

Those two figures on the cover, on a beach in the evening, mountains in background, in the blue hour of the day, are father and son. You can see the motion in the boy, running. The uprightness of the father, even though he’s about to be knocked flat by life.

He’ll get up again, I promise.

I have two launching events, one in Ladner, BC, in the town in which I raised my boys, close to the beach on which we did our own running. And another event on Powell Street at a wonderful place called Lanalou’s. Both in May.

The ISBN of the book is 978-1-990601-89-7. That number makes it really easy to order from your favourite local book-seller. ‘Cus Jeff Bezos doesn’t need your money.

Check out the places you can find PUT ONE ON THE MOON

books2read.com/u/m2Bnyj

In Put One on the Moon, Joe and Henry explore the hidden corners of a small town named Bend.

Joe begins the process of putting together courage to question the meaning of family. His mother and little brother, Ben, seem both able to fit in to small town life. His father, who they left in Boston, is about to have a second family, and Joe envisions this new family as replacing the old, one by one. He feels not at home, neither here nor there.

In this work of growing up, he meets Memphis, the veteran who lives in a trailer that can’t go anywhere. And Morley Hudson, volunteer at the town museum, keeper of historical stories. And Tabitha, who has created a home in an abandoned church, surrounded by garden and sacred words. Tabitha, aging daughter of a minister, says, “I’m not at all sure that my kind of faith is something to ring bells about.” Indeed, the bell tower of her home is boarded up and locked.

What starts out as an innocent tagging quest in an innocuous place—a movie-set town—takes an ugly turn as Henry questions life itself. Joe has to act—with friendship and with new and raw faith.

Put One on the Moon is a story of “going deep,” of making time to pause, to challenge our fears, and to allow for change—maybe even exploration of our very soul. Someday a Kilroy was Here will be on the moon. Meanwhile, here on earth, our own backyard is more likely to be in need of what the old World War II symbol “Kilroy” represents: seeking out, acknowledging, and tagging the unknown.

previously published in Medium

Vancouver Expo, 1986. I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent for my small studio apartment, and was still owing for half of the month before. The building manager lived upstairs in the building — as was the way then — and was not much older than I. He advocated for me. He seemed to believe I was good for the rent; the owner did not. The manager was told to give me notice to move as quickly as possible.

Uno

To soften the blow, he invited me to his apartment: “Friends are having a little game of Uno,” he said, his face open and kindly. “Join us.” Uno, the kid card game. I’d never learned to play big-people cards; how did he know?

I met a table full of friendly people, played the game, and returned to my — could I still call it “my”? — apartment with a pocket full of coins and those one and two dollar bills we used to have. Altogether enough to buy food for a week if I stretched it.

A couch

A friend offered the couch at the apartment she shared with a room-mate. They’d been thinking to leave. Maybe I could keep it, she suggested. Their rent was absurdly low: two hundred and fifty per month, for upper-floor, two large bedrooms, yard access, in a more-than-comfortable neighbourhood. The problem, she said, was the landlord. He tended to hover and ask too many questions. He’d never “done anything,” she added quickly. But you never knew; she wanted to warn me.

I moved in to sleep on the couch, and they moved out shortly afterward, leaving the place to me. I locked my doors, but exchanged hellos with both the landlord, ageing, tall, and too stooped and fragile to be threatening,, to my mind, and his wife, a woman whose dresses hung loosely. She’d not had a new one for a long time, I guessed.

I was a neophyte hairdresser, in early days of building clientele, spending too many hours at the shop waiting to fill appointments hours, then cutting and styling while contorting to be therapist, stand-up comedian, or wedding-planner as needed — things people ask of a hairdresser. Income trickled in, I paid my rent, and managed to save.

The landlord

The landlord and wife lived on the middle-floor, and a young couple with equally low rent were in the basement suite. The landlord said, with heavy Eastern European accent, that he believed young people should not be burdened with debt; they needed to put together a home, a career, maybe a business. I used my savings to return to school, ten years after dropping out of high school, determined not to be a hairdresser forever. I wanted to write.

I was studying for an exam in European history, and I’d registered in first year Latin. My landlord asked about my studies, invited me into his reading space, the little room his front door opened into, with two chairs, a reading lamp, bookshelves. Had my former room-mates seen this space?

He moved as an old man who had lived with bone cancer for a time longer than anyone would have expected. He shared that with me. And he went to pluck a couple ancient volumes from his shelf, spines coming to pieces, showing threads of fabric covers, faded teal and gold. Latin I and Latin II, they were titled. He handed them to me. “Here, take these. They’ll be useful.” Those old pages were filled with photos and drawings and ancient words, and the way they were set up, as high school texts, was easy to follow. Decades later, my youngest son used them to learn Latin in his time as a homeschooler.

But that day, my landlord also invited me to sit in the second chair. “What are you studying?” he asked, curious, eyes pale blue and keen. We talked about what started World War II, about what were those years, what was it to come to Canada after it was over. How he loved university campuses, the hum of learning. In his country he was an electrical engineer; in Canada he was a University of British Columbia janitor, who walked halls listening to lecturers drone.

His wife’s story

Just weeks after his sharing his WWII years, when he was out in the yard on a ladder, clipping dead blossoms off the fifty-year-old rhododendrons in the yard, his wife told me how he’d been a POW. How she could not find him. How she managed to get her hands on some American cigarettes, and she would stand on the platform of the train station, waving the cigarettes and a large photo of him, and asking soldiers in the train cars if anyone had seen him, exchanging cigarettes for information.

She also told me about the infant son they’d lost in that time, when there was no penicillin left at home. All it would have taken to save their child was a little of the new miracle medicine, but it was on the front-lines. The baby died while his father was away. While she was alone.

Saving and shoveling

I lived in that house for almost five years, making an effort to save the money not spent in rent, and pulling together a deposit for a townhouse. The young couple moved out of the basement after buying a fixer-upper down the street. I visited them for tea and a show around; we talked about how we’d not be able to do what we were doing without the living philosophy and practice of our landlord, who believed young people should not be quashed by high rent. Not only had they bought a house, but they had a small and growing business manufacturing collapsible kayaks. I was thrilled to be going to school; we had much to look forward to and to celebrate.

Both landlord and wife spent time in hospital now and then. By then my fiancé had moved in and we made soup or picked their berries for them, shoveled walks when it snowed. We painted the interior. There were months when the landlord would waive the rent because we did such things. But at that point, we made soup and shoveled because we considered them friends, and the house to be our home.

The landlord’s bone cancer was finally worsening. He’d been on experimental medication for more than a decade. He attributed living for the past decade to these drugs; I saw this as part of his thinking to give to others, to do what he could.

Blackberry trellis

One of their happiest days was the day they pulled two lawn chairs onto their back deck to watch our exchange of marriage vows under the pear tree in their backyard. Guests sat under the canopy of blackberry vines on a trellis, an invention of the landlord’s; I’d never seen support like that for the spiky tendrils, fruit hanging over guests with wafts of end-of-summer ripening, and just a hint of fall red to the leaves.

A year later the landlord was too ill to leave the hospital, and it was time for grandchildren to take over both the basement and our suite. They’d been promised housing for when they attended the university where he’d worked. I was grateful for my time in the house, and prepared to move.

A lifetime of atonement

We’d packed and were ready to leave the next morning. I went to the backyard, having a memory-filled roam and moment. One of the grandchildren’s partners was busy watering. We talked. I shared how grateful I was, how kind were his grandparents-in-law, what they meant to us. He listened. He asked if I knew what had brought about the thinking to help others. I offered thoughts: war years, tough times. Yes, and yes, he said. Then he added that the landlord had been in the SS. Followed by a lifetime of feeling a need to atone.

I tried to absorb that, and struggled. I thought of our times sharing history lessons, the old man and me. I thought of their lost child, and of his time as a POW, with his wife desperate and seeking him. I thought about their moving to a new continent, giving up vocations, language, family, friends. And possibly whatever ideas he’d held close about what it meant to be an adult, a man, a father. How he’d come to be a landlord, a neighbour, and grown as a human.

What was asked?

What was asked of him in service and what might he have done? I would have liked to ask him about the other years, too, between life as a young military man, and life as an old man in his backyard garden. I thought of the questions and stories we’d shared; all I knew was what he did do, the evidence of his choices in the short years I knew him. I remember how he would stand out in his raspberry canes in the evening, how he was thankful for small things. They did not go unnoticed.

His choices meant that I have been able to be the writer I dreamed back then, returning to school, reading the books he loaned me. My income has been small for the most part, with my decision to live as an artist, but I’ve managed to own a home: those five years of saving when I was still young and going to school without accumulating debt, set my life in a certain direction.

Thorns and offerings

When I finally grew vegetable and fruit in my yard, a front yard garden after digging up the lawn, I found blackberry vines and transplanted them. My mother said I was crazy, that they would grow out of control. But I remembered the landlord’s ways, and built a trellis as he had, a loose fence-like piece, with a fan-shaped piece that would spread out from its top, rising so that one could walk under it to pick the berries, supported by posts; altogether it allowed the vines their full growth cycle each year.

Just as he’d done, I cut those barbed vines right back to the ground in the middle of the fall. Cut to the point of looking dead and gone… until the next spring, when it would start all over. When I pluck sun-ripened and -warmed berries, and when I cut those thorns each fall, I thought of the landlord.

I think of him even now: while he was an early lesson in choices, in what is thrust upon us, in how we fight or don’t, how we see ourselves and others, they’re not easy lessons. I still don’t have answers. That’s as it should be. I wonder at myself even thinking answers might be possible.

I learned from him — maybe mostly about quick judgement and slow reparation. And how history tells us so little, but we study it nonetheless, and we study those around us, too, and plumb our souls. Would we? we ask.

I’ve moved away now. But sometimes when I was tending that front yard garden in the evening a neighbour would walk by, and I’d offer some berries, a tomato still warm from afternoon sun. Some offering. Hoping they’d take it, enjoy it.

I am so excited to share my new middle-grade mystery series with you

I spent many hours (outdoors in the summer!) reading mysteries as a kid—Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls, but also Judy Bolton—who I particularly loved–and Trixie Belden and many more.

Feenie Bailey lives in a community that fascinates me: in a floathome on the banks of the Fraser River just before it reaches the Pacific Ocean.

It’s an odd river—in that it’s salty and tidal. The floathomes go up and down accordingly, and each has a walkway that can withstand such movement.

I lived for a couple dozen years in Ladner, British Columbia, before moving back to the city… but that part of Ladner—the set of floathomes—has a special place in my heart. This is my way of living there vicariously—one of the perks of being a writer! Multiple lives lived simultaneously!

This opener for the series is set in the heat of summer and involves some wee dogs disappearing. Feenie and her friend Trixa are determined to find these dogs.

I’ve been long working on further ideas for other titles in the series—one about an historical bank heist in the now-museum in the town, another about the beloved neighbourhood island in the middle of the river, another about the town heron…

The book will be released the 30th of August, and is available for pre-order! Here’s the link:

https://books2read.com/u/m2eOpo