Patty Everson thinks deeply about her involvement in her community whether in her role as mother, musician, volunteer or nurse.

PATTY’S HOME – SIOUX LOOKOUT . . . 6:00 p.m.

Homemade Pizza and Green Salad with Homemade Dressing

THE CONVERSATION

Patty has lived outdoors with her family for fifteen summers. The snow falling outside is a reminder that it is winter so the family has returned to one of the floors of the rambling log building her partner Mike built.

Their eldest son is living away pursuing his passion for hockey, a sport the entire family enjoys. Patty will leave tomorrow, just as Mike returns. Their youngest son joins us for dinner, but is exhausted from being away for the day at a volleyball tournament.

Patty sees the comings and goings as “part of a maturing process. A lot of times in life you have to go through these changes and you’re not sure how they’re going to affect you and you feel strange in yourself. And you have to go through it. Eventually, things fall into place.”

Patty says, “Most of the things in my life that ended up being the best are not planned. I just responded.” The experiences the family shared home schooling the boys when they were younger is full of examples of the learning and fun that can happen in an instant.

They began home schooling in the first place because they realized, “we weren’t ready to stop spending time with our kids. The hardest part was second-guessing what I was doing. As they get older they really see through you. You have to have faith in who you are to have your kids around you.”

Just who Patty is cannot be encapsulated in a sentence or even a song, but she can appreciate “the right words, falling the right way on the page” when she writes. She says, “so far the songwriting has been playing around the surface of things. I think this summer I really expressed something true to me. I really had something to share.”

Of the resulting foray into performing as a solo musician, Patty says, “Sometimes it’s easier to play by yourself because you can just hum for a bit and pick it back up. No one is falling apart because you made a mistake.”

The music she says, “always comes and goes. I’ve learned just to relax about that. I know for now the real inspired time comes in the spring and summer. It’s like integration time, winter. It’s not really obvious what’s happening, but stuff’s happening.”

No matter the season, Patty has many things happening, both through her work and as a volunteer in the community. She and a friend have a foot care business that involves seeing clients in Sioux Lookout and training people in Northern communities. The course they have developed is “10 days and 3 parts so there’s a chance for practice and for toenails to grow.” She laughs. “That idea of apprenticeship and practice works well in the North. It doesn’t really work to stand and lecture.”

Patty’s love of the North is clear in her mixed feelings about her role as Home and Community Care Nurse in Sachigo Lake. She says, “I really love working with the old people up North. They are a dying perspective. Most of them grew up literally living in the bush so they are pretty independent and industrious.”

She adds, “I don’t believe in the medical model of compartmentalizing people. When Aboriginal people talk about their bodies, it seems like they talk in that holistic way about what they feel and how they feel.”

The last thing she wants to be doing is pushing pills. She sees the issues with oxycotin addiction as “so symbolic of a system that has failed.” She notes that even after the apology for the abuse that occurred in the residential schools, “we seem to be continuing in the same patriarchal way.” She is constantly asking herself, “Am I part of the solution or part of the problem?”

Patty is less conflicted about some of her volunteer commitments. One of her present projects is working with the Katimavik youth volunteer service program. She says, “The next step is to sit down with the community players to plan their 1 month project. The conversation alone is a great thing to do. If we had ten people here to work for free, what would we do?”

Patty admits that she loves process and she expects honest dialogue to be an important part of any meaningful process. She explains “you don’t know where it leads. It’s that envisioning thing. It’s also a challenge to herd those cats and to have to choose.”

Sometimes it can be hard for Patty to choose between the many things that excite her. She says, “I don’t really want to be this busy. Certainly as I am getting older, I’m really trying to watch where I put my energy and trying to maximize happiness and contentment.”

And nothing makes her happier than “bringing two people together that wouldn’t normally be together. I love things like that. When you see people that you wouldn’t normally see together having fun.”

In all of the things she is doing, Patty is noticing that she is “finally feeling like the ego is dissolving a bit more. The evolution is moving towards doing it for the meaning.”

“Sometimes I really find lots of reason to be really hopeful. Then I think oh my god, what have we done and I get frightened. You try to do so much and you’re falling behind, then something opens up.”

In Patty’s case that something might be a season, a song, or a conversation. And you can be sure it will mean something.

STILL DIGESTING

It seems to be getting harder, not easier, to try to do justice to the people that I am meeting. You might think that a dinner is only enough time to scratch the surface and I agree that I cannot pretend to know someone because I spoke to them for a few hours.

But there is something special about sharing food and stories that connects people in ways that mean more than you might think. I am talking with real people about the most real things they are willing to share. I always learn much more than I can possibly convey in the writing I do here. And of course the people I meet are even more interesting than I can help you imagine through my brief sketches.

It has nothing to do with figuring people out and everything to do with recognizing a moment in time. The fact is that we are all learning about ourselves and our place in the world.

If we have nothing else in common, we share a desire to make meaning out of who we are and what we have experienced. That is a process. And I have a feeling that even as our questions and answers change, our stories endure. It is all a part of the conversation. And when we lose our ability to make that connection, we lose a little bit of ourselves.