A week on Sunday (no. 29)

Intro

Life's little upheavals that take me away from the finely-honed desk routine, that - granted permission in the name of flexibility - impinge on otherwise "ruthlessly managed" spare time, leave me sometimes in a restless craving for creativity. In fact, I think that's an understatement. 

When I can't sit and write, the air suddenly feels thinner. 

The strange thing is that at a remove from this practice, I get a little delusional... I start having doubts, like, "Surely, this writing is frivolous!" But then I start feeling ill and joyless and I have to rush myself back into this practice. The very thing you're reading is my cure against narcissism; it is an inherently humble way of sharing what I’m doing and thinking about.

Daytrip

Upheavals in my life aren't bad... summers in Manitoba are amazing and to be taken full advantage of. We joined friends for a little excursion to Steep Rock

where we ate lunch

borrowed a paddleboard

and watched the sun set.

And various other things...

Our godson made the local French-community newspaper La Liberté and I sent him pictures of us reading the article, as well as this little spoof:

Normally Christian plants a cherry tomato plant beside the garage door, but this year, the tomato size turned out to be unexpectedly small. They're a candy-tomato variety that are eaten like tomato-flavoured blueberries.

Leave them out on the counter to dry, and your son might rearrange them like so:

Enjoyed

This Canadaland episode on the Hudson's Bay history, apparently now for sale, had Taylor Noakes on as a guest, and at one point, commenting on Canada's history, he said: “I personally think that [...] a lot of Canadians, unfortunately, are really not comfortable with the complexity of Canada's history. I mean, this idea has practically been hammered into our own heads for decades that our history is not interesting.” 

That “not interesting” bit is kindling to the fire of any historical research I do!

In the latest episode of What It's Like to Be... Dan Heath interviews a speechwriter. I liked the whole episode, but I especially liked how the guest, Stephen Krupin, in answer to what “aspect [he] consistently savors” says:

I love in the writing process when you feel a puzzle piece clicking into place. Either a narrative device that through trial and error you discover and it holds the whole speech together, or a detail in the research or from history that vividly tells a story or an anecdote that serves as a perfect metaphor or maybe a counterintuitive twist that surprises the audience. When you find those and you think “this is something I can build everything else around”, or, “I can nail an ending, or nail the end of a section”, that feels really good.

Eating

For the longest time, my lunch has revolved around two eggs.

But recently, to follow in my fibre-preaching husband's footsteps, to not let this bag of Red River Cereal linger in the pantry and expire, I switched the main component, and now lunch looks more like this.

It feels healthful.

While I feel the same as Adam Roberts does about people's dietary restrictions... that they can be viewed “as fun, creative challenges,” I like to think that the attitude can be expanded to encompass my own family's food preferences. A recent win in favour of this point is Christian's comment that the only recipe in his whole life in which he actually likes black beans, is Deb Perelman's Swiss Chard Enchiladas. (You can have a peek on Amazon). (And yes, I've mentionned them before!)

Postcards

At the end of summer, plants look a little discheveled. The green has faded, and weeds, having claimed a space in the sun, stand about as tree leaves gather along the path they border.

The berries are abundant and colourful this year.

And some mornings this week have been so calm that the river was transformed to glass.

Trees are turning yellow, and geese are arriving…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 28)

Lowly (Earthworm-Inspired thoughts)

Memories are a funny thing… a link from Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter Curious About Everything to an article about earthworms vividly reminded me of having seen a (Canadian? National?) Geographic Issue with night-time earthworm-catchers on the cover. I’m sure of it! So sure of it that I feel old, and that the link in Ettenberg’s newsletter is like déjà vu, and has me tut-tutting young journalists for covering the same ground. The fact that I am given to that impulse, however light-hearted, makes me regret losing the enthusiasm I could summon when I felt like the world was full of possibility for any story idea that could pop into my head. All this to say that, here I sit in my comfortable mid-life teetering between that kind of can-do energy that lit straw-thoughts on fire, and a growing appreciation for something like lived experience… the glowing embers of steady heat. 

I don’t particularly care about earthworms. Why would that supposed (Canadian? National?) Geographic cover from when I was young struck such an impression on my imagination? “The worm hunters of Ontario’s” author Inori Roy does mention the spices and their having been imported from Europe… something I hadn’t known before until I read Candace Savage’s book Prairie (previously mentionned). On the prairie, ants are the dirt-moving stars: “So, despite everything we've heard to the contrary, the presence of earthworms in the soil is not always a mark of good health. Across much of the Great Plains, it is a prime indicator of disturbance. In arid regions, the work of digesting organic matter is assigned by nature not to tender worms but to the invincible legions of drought-hardy microorganisms. (...) Given their impact on prairie soil, it could almost be said that ants are the earthworms of the Great Plains Grasslands.” (p 93)

(This local artist made really cute worms a few years ago… See here.)

Attempting to find that cover in the archives, I came across this recent article titled “The silent migration beneath our feet” and felt, after having read it, a little bit of that old enthusiasm flicker. It ignites when the world feels big and unknown again.

Reading

I’m almost 200 pages into A Place of Greater Safety and rarely share books mid-read. However I couldn’t restrain myself from making a few observations. First, I find Hilary Mantel’s writing so funny. Take her depiction of Robespierre, who, from what I remember, became some kind of fanatic in the French Revolution, but here, is introduced to the reader as a young man with a careful diet and a demanding dog: 

…he eats some fruit, takes a cup of coffee and a little red wine well diluted. How can they do it, tumble out of court roaring and backslapping, after a morning shouting each other down? Then back to their houses to drink and tine, to address themselves to slabs of red meat? He has never learned the trick.

After his meal he takes a walk, whether it is fine or not, because dog Brount does not care about the weather and makes trouble with his loping about if he is kept indoors. He lets Brount tow him through the streets, the woods, the fields; they come home looking not nearly so respectable as when they went out. Sister Charlotte says, “Don’t bring that muddy dog in here.” (p 99-100)

The examples are too numerous really… Heading out on a little family road trip to the beach and chuckling over this paragraph obliges me to read it out loud:

The next year he caught smallpox. So did the girls; as it happened, none of them died. His mother did not think that the marks detracted from him. If you are going to be ugly it is as well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads. (p 11)

Incidentally, this book set against a view of Lake Winnipeg, is very pretty.

It’s very entertaining, but I catch myself wondering, a little suspiciously, if I want to trust this author? What an amazing talent, to tell me this story, as if she’s beside me, confiding all these details to me with a sly smile, delighting in my disbelief.

I broke away from the book to try and find her in “real-life”. I listened to a lecture. I thought I might catch a nap, but was instead fully awakened to subjects I love: writing, and the differences between historians and novelists who write historical fiction. She talks as I imagine she writes: smilingly. 

Eating

We pulled up some potatoes from the garden, mashed them and served them alongside Julia Turshen’s Rascal House Cabbage Rolls from Simply Julia, and these have been declared the best version of cabbage roll so far. Hooray for good recipes and Jardins St. Léon that sells Savoy cabbage! For dessert we served Panna Cotta with Rhubarb Compote (à la Catherine Newman), following the original, smaller amount recipe from Splendid Table.  It was a nice meal!

Decisions, decisions

I liked Elspeth Kirkman’s tips on making decisions on TikTok and have often used them myself. I’m not sure if I’m more decisive, but at least I don’t dither so long.

Postcard

A week ago we spent time at Albert Beach. As we were leaving, the sky looked like this:

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 27)

Reading

Last month I picked up Peter Taylor’s A Summons To Memphis to read in spare moments during our road trip West. Taylor’s writing floats the reader along a lazy river of attenuated events, such that the book was done before the visit was over. It begins genially enough but soon, as Francine Prose writes: “discord [in the family] will turn out to have less to do with property and real estate than with resentment, revenge, power, the inability to love, and the impulse to control and destroy one another’s lives.” (p 102) (Maybe that’s why I felt a little let down at the end? I get duped by seemingly-optimistic tones at the beginning of things.)

A passage I liked from the book reads:

During the days and weeks that followed Holly and I talked of almost nothing by our two families and of the problems of looking after old people - of looking after aged parents in particular. Holly was meanwhile receiving letters about her father’s discontent with the ‘retirement home’ that he had been moved to. Any my sisters begin writing me about the new onset of Father’s neuropathy and his senile diabetes. In both cases - mine and Holly’s - we were urged to come home, if only to help cheer the patients. We neither of us considered going, but we went on talking about our fathers. If one could not bear to be with them, if only because of temperament, then how was one to offer protection and care? We were like a couple that finds itself bringing up children when there is no natural liking for children in either parent. (p 156)

Another book from the reading list done!

Emotional intelligence

Previous to watching this short video, I’m not sure I could have explained what co-dependency meant. Having watched it now more than once, and recognizing that it is a tendency I often had in the past, I’m relieved to see that age and maturity have, first, given me the awareness to notice it, and second, the security to move away from it.

In her latest newsletter, Mckinley Valentine writes about a distinction between use of the words “trauma” and “conditioning” that I really liked. It can be found under the heading “Unsolicited Advice” and I would be doing it a disservice to copy and paste only a part of the (already fairly short) section.

Relatable

Sometimes you hear someone else say something you yourself have felt but never expressed. It’s like that person got in your head and delivered your opinion for you. This week, it happened while reading Leandra Medine Cohen’s substack The Cereal Aisle. She writes:

I think the greatest insight from this vantage is that I max out at like, ten days of not doing anything. 5-6 days is the sweet spot for a recharge. Day 10 is when the direction of the slope changes — like the peak turns towards valley. You know what though? While in the past I’ve convinced myself that this difficulty bathing in the blankness has meant that I am addicted to productivity like it is a Very Bad Thing — the function of my free mind’s possession by a culture gone terribly awry, I am more convinced now that it more likely reinforces the idea that purpose gives us meaning. Getting up everyday and having something to do is a blessing in and of itself. Loving what you do is practically euphoria.

There’s a freedom in recognizing this, even more in actually articulating it because now I know: every time that lazy voice comes out to be like, “But I don’t wanna!,” there is another voice to challenge it from right around the corner being like, “Lol, yes you do.”

And indeed, making supper for the family after a four-day hiatus, getting to sit at my desk and resume mundane projects make me happy!

Celebrating a birthday

We celebrated our newly 11-year old’s birthday this week with a first-time visit to Winnipeg’s Vertical Adventures.

We all stepped into a harness and after a brief demonstration, attempted climbs according to difficulty. It was a relaxed, novel way to spend an hour or so together.

Being on the opposite end of the city was a little like being a tourist and we stopped at Buffet Square for supper and visited Young’s Market in search of an ice-cream treat I’d seen described on TikTok.

(They were out! But it was ok… everyone was still full from the buffet!)

Eating

This week we tried the latest from Deb Perelman’s website, a Grilled Chicken Salad with Cilantro-Lime Dressing, and wow! A real weeknight treat: easy to make, unexpectedly delicious, and, if you lay it out “composed” style (i.e. each ingredient piled separately), the kids can choose what they like. In fact, Christian suggested we make it a second time for his family on Sunday.  

Guest Adam Roberts on the podcast “The Dinner Plan” has three rules for hosting: 1. Never let them see you sweat. 2. Pace it out so that it’s not rushed. 3. Don’t skimp on dessert. While I’m still working on rules 1 and 2, I must say the third has never once been a problem for me. I love dessert. Sometimes it’s the first thing I think about. My son requested brownies, and so I went all in with a classic; Ina Garten’s Outrageous Brownies. And they were perfect!

Postcards

I’ve been taking walks in the evening, and am loathe to bring my phone along on hot days when I’d prefer to make my way as lightly as possible. I think it’s one of the aspects of summer that is so enjoyable… you can up and go with pants and a t-shirt and little else. Scenic pictures are therefore lacking. Should we do the dog instead, in a funny stair-case posture? 

Or our friends’ cat, that is a breed called Ragdoll? (So soft!)

Or my favourite penguin, since spotting it at the Calgary zoo? (It’s called macaroni penguin!)

(Thanks to MH and Anna for sharing Enzo and penguin pictures!)

Wishing you a lovely week ahead!

A week on Sunday (no. 26)

OOTD

Christian and I were invited to attend the wedding of a couple from Congo who settled and raised a family in Winnipeg. My wardrobe felt inadequate to provide the colour I was searching for for this joyful occasion and so I left my outfit fate with the thrift store gods and took myself browsing on Monday. Thrifting with such conditions isn’t easy… I checked dresses, skirts and blouses and was hours into this hunt when I started on pants, before landing on these, Diane von Furstenburg, my size, for 12$. I paired it with a blouse I had seen earlier and considered the hunt a success.

Reading

I finished a massive 1261-page book of William Trevor’s Collected Stories, begun months ago when the weather was cold and the skies were clear. (The book is so big that when my 87 year-old mother-in-law spotted it on my lap, she asked if it was a dictionary.)

Collected stories have a chocolate-box-like quality to them, and I find that I often forget a story after a little while, despite enjoying the experience of dipping in and letting my mind settle into a scenario. One story that does stand out in its entirety is titled “Her Mother’s Daughter” - its ending so perfect in its poignancy. Or perhaps I just found the themes relevant. 

But more often than not, it’s sentence here or there that I particularly like… Like, in “The Teddy-bears’ Picnic” where Trevor writes, “Their choice of decor and furniture was the choice of newlyweds who hadn’t yet discovered a confidence of their own.” Or, in “In Isfahan”: “Normanton wandered away from it, through dusty crowded lanes, into market-places where letter-writers slept on their stools, waiting for illiterates with troubles.” Another book off the list, done!

Satisfying

TikTok is full of satisfying videos… like the lawn-mower owners who clean up an overgrown yard (SB Mowing), gift wrappers (Bee and Blooms) furniture flippers (Build it like Becker) and sometimes the unexpected wedding dress restoration… 

Perhaps I find them pleasing because the hands-on-ness of their subject is in contrast to research. This (it’s kind of long…) Youtube titled “Why Are Movies About Research So Addictive” in Patrick Willems’ dissection of how Hollywood has found a way of portraying an almost un-portrayable job. (Via) 

Postcard

In lieu of the usual horizontal format, a nice vertical view of Albert Beach at the end of a nice afternoon, courtesy of Christian!

A week on Sunday (no. 25)

Roadtrip tricks

Sitting in a car, watching scenery go by feels like something both familiar and conditional to living on the prairies. Getting to anywhere outside of Winnipeg, you get familiar with the handful of highways that connect it to the direction you’re going. But crossing three provinces is an all-day affair… 

Making it slightly less tiresome for the driver was the audiobook Into Thin Air, an adventure so gripping, our 10-year-old was captivated. (It can however be a little anxiety-inducing if you have a sensitive stomach.) It was a subject that touched on the object of our destination… a bit of time in the mountains, where, from a safe distance we could imagine the adventures of mountain climbers as we were surrounded by peaks that loomed. 

Another thing we enjoyed: a podcast recommendation by Catherine Newman titled This Is Actually Happening. Because, as previously mentioned, we were sharing the car with our kids, I downloaded only two episodes ahead of time… but just that, and we wanted to listen to more.

Also… always bring bags for garbage. Don’t ever not bring bags! 

Prairie

On this road trip, I finished Candace Savage’s book Prairie. (It’s hard not to be immediately endeared to the book’s subject when the author writes in the introduction: “It's time to drop out of the fast lane and give the prairies, our prairies, a second, loving look.”)

The book leant itself well to reading excerpts out loud to Christian. There’s a brief history of wild bison for example; or the usefulness of ants… Christian and I both have farming roots and what Savage writes on the subject felt especially pertinent:

The acceptance of conservation as an everyday aspect of farming practice has been halting. On the plus side, thanks to the object lessons of the Dirty Thirties and subsequent periods of drought, the importance of soil conservation is now well established and has been widely translated into both policy and action. On the debit side, however, conservation of wildlife habitat is often a hard sell. Sometimes producers resist as a matter of principle. Having devoted their efforts to maximizing yields to feed a hungry world, they argue that leaving space "idle" for wildlife is a misuse of productive potential. But while this position might have been irresistible in the 1960s, when an exploding human population faced a net shortage of food, it is not so convincing today. In the intervening decades, a complex suite of developments, some of them halfway around the world, have opened up new and more hopeful options for prairie agriculture.

The achievements of the world's farmers since World War II have been stunning. Between 1950 and 1992, for example, world grain production increased by 170 percent, with only a 1 percent expansion of the area under cultivation. Although many people still go hungry, there is still more than enough food available to feed everyone on Earth. This triumph has come about as the result of a no-holds-barred commitment to maximizing production, known colloquially as the Green Revolution. Sparked by an Iowa-born scientist named Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work, the revolution was based on the development of high-yield varieties of wheat and corn. And yield they certainly do, provided that they are supplied with ample stores of nitrogen, from artificial fertilizer, and abundant water, typically from irrigation.

Unfortunately, the environmental costs of this high-tech fix are becoming inescapably obvious. On the Great Plains, in particular, the damage has included the depletion of aquifers through irrigation, the poisoning of groundwater and wetlands with agricultural chemicals, and the overfertilization of entire river systems. (p 261-2)

As I was reading Prairie, a high school classmate, Alexis Normand, was advocating for Savage’s 2019 book Strangers in the House in the “Combat national des livres 2025”. This clip (in French) features the high school I attended.  The convergence of person, places I know, subjects I like, and an author at the center of it all is a delightful affirmation of writing!

The art of short videos

To better capture the feeling and events of our days on holiday, I started making little video summaries, sans narration, on CapCut. It was a fun exercise, but about three days into it, I realized the novelty had worn off, and that I was meant for self-expression in a slower mode. It was nonetheless fun trying to capture introductory seconds of video to establish the day’s weather for example. I was thrilled when one morning, having set up my camera on the patio, a jack rabbit hopped by…

Soap

In the course of our visit West, we picked up good-smelling hand soap. It was just the excuse to upgrade our hand soap dispensers.

Cooking

This week we made Suzanne Goin’s “Wild Salmon Salad with Beets, Potato, Egg, and Mustard Vinaigrette” from her cookbook Sunday Suppers at Lucques and it tasted like an exciting twist on the usual Niçoise salad we have at this time of year. Thanks to a meat thermometer, we pulled off perfectly cooked fish!

Ice cream

We live close to Lick’s and BDI is a well-known destination, but sometimes it’s worth exploring other areas of the city. On Friday made a trip to Sub-Zero for a little taste test, and the place no bigger than a house with a cheerfully-painted pink interior, was worth the ride! The menu has lots of variety and the ice cream is nice and creamy. 

Postcard

Here… our garden in the evening…

Happy Sunday!

Roadtrip to Alberta

Our family took a little road trip in July and we took so many pictures, a photo summary is in order… Part of the trip looked like this:

On the way to Alberta, we stopped in Regina and visited Wascana Park for the first time… 

Among the activities was a visit to iFly. It is a wind tunnel… it can be described as indoor skydiving. The setup makes it safe for kids.

There was the Calgary Zoo, which dwarfs Winnipeg’s, and our favourite animal enclosures included the penguins, the hippos, the gorillas and gibbons, and the lemurs who chased each other right past our legs.

We ate out one night at a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant - our first experience as a family having food cooked “on a hot steel plate” that is “the center of the dining table”. Our cook made us laugh, pulled gags on our kids and scared them with flames that practically jumped to the ceiling. 

We took a hike in Kananaskis to a waterfall and back... 

… and a dip in the lake it bordered.

We visited West Edmonton Mall… more specifically its Lego store and waterslides.

We took a leisurely hike at Sunshine Meadows…

… and had a picnic at a spot normally crowded by skiers in winter…

It was the kids’ first experience of riding a chair lift. The Meadows made for a stunning background.

We embraced the touristy feeling in Banff, stopped in a few shops (Wildly was my favourite), and left the crowd for nachos at Magpie and Stump. 

Back at home base, the boys tested spray painting for the first time. 

And there was the novelty of riding e-scooters in a city that permitted them.

When we were in Banff, it’s library was a quiet nook discovered amid the hubbub - it had accessible washrooms, while the ones at the end of Bear Street were closed for cleaning. 

By contrast, the Calgary library is a destination in itself. It’s new and fancy and I told the kids that we were visiting to admire the architecture. 

Big expanses, lighted bookshelves, quiet reading areas, and quote-filled museum-like nooks… it was impressive.

One evening we stopped at an Italian market called Lina’s and their balsamic vinegar selection overwhelmed me.

Another evening we ordered sushi.

It was a pretty fun change of scenery.

Anna and Luke, we miss you already!

A week on Sunday No. 24

Decluttered

I was about to write how good it felt when I recently decluttered my closet. But something made this “does it bring me joy”-type session particularly satisfying… I think it’s this layered excuse - I hadn’t decluttered in years, because I’d been avoiding shopping (going months without buying a piece of apparel) because there was no time (shopping is intimidating, thrifting is a fun if laborious hunt) because there was no use (I was intermittently on some draft or other of my thesis, or research, down in the basement, hardly venturing out for anything more than strictly practical…). But this week some mysterious tipping point was reached, and I flushed my closet free of two bags of clothing.

When I look at the closet now, the image that comes to mind is of the basement in my childhood home that had an access to a pipe that would regularly get clogged. Mom would lay down newspapers for when the plumber would come, and invariably, the plumber was a man with big boots, hoisting a giant drain snake on his shoulder that rattled as he marched down the stairs. He would leave, blaming the epic willow tree in our yard for creeping its roots into the drain. 

My closet feels like a pipe that’s been unclogged. New energy runs through it.

20th anniversary

July 9th was the occasion for flowers, for lunch at a fancy place, and an afternoon at Thermea. Still spoiled 20 years on!

Baking

These are Tahini Chocolate Chip cookies from the KISMET cookbook, and they are soft and delicious. Zero complaints from the household members.

Informative

Sometimes I think back to my aging Grandmother, I’m struck by how little I understood, how little I could sympathize with the Aunt who took care of her. Adria Thompson’s TikToks at BeLightCare are a really nice resource I’ve been pleased to come across. There are things in life you have to live to appreciate.

Postcard

We are breathing the effects of climate change in the North, and a picture taken on Friday shows the smoke-fogged skies…

This milkweed is pretty cute though, with its pair of ants…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 23)

A week in pictures

It’s often the case that when a week fills the photos app with colour, my desk has been conversely empty of desky activity. So, I’ve bravely dusted off my keyboard to show you some of the week here…

There was MH’s birthday which occasioned an outing at The Leaf; and aren’t they pretty, the smiling family seen through a water fall? This butterfly agreed to pose.

Then it was Canada Day and we joined a crowd of people at Assiniboia Downs. A thunderstorm broke shortly after we arrived, delaying the horse racing until it was cancelled. But we got to watch the clouds and lightning from our seats in the stand, sheltered from the rain and cooled by the breeze.

The fireworks, begun just before 10:30 were impressive: close, loud, and choreographed to last 20 minutes. Far quieter, but just as pretty, the rose a friend cut for us:

And one of the linden trees in our front yard bloomed this year. It smells so nice!

We went strawberry picking yesterday…

So many summers in a row, it’s a tradition now.

Four baskets were transformed into 19 and 3/4 jars of freezer jam, a quart of strawberry lemonade, a strawberry summer cake and strawberry-rhubarb popsicles, with more strawberries leftover for a strawberry milkshake for the kids, and maybe… a daiquiri for the adults. (But I’ve written about strawberries before… more than once!) So here… let’s end on a furry note.

Listening

Advertised on another podcast, I started listening to Outlaw Ocean, beginning with S2, episode 4: “The Repo Man” then went back and listened to everything available from the series. Episodes like “Waves of Extraction” and “The Magic Pipe” from Season 1 recall Toms River (mentioned a few weeks ago in No. 18) for our world’s continuing problem with pollution. And the latest episode in Season 2, “The Shrimp Factory Whistleblower” makes me think of themes in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I really appreciated the more personal take on this work by Ian Urbina himself, in Season 1, Episode 7: “The Spell of the Sea”. All in all, a podcast series that I both learned so much from and enjoyed listening to, even if some of its topics were especially heavy.

Postcard

A quick phone capture of a meadow spied on a Friday night bike ride with Christian.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 22)

Reading - Pauline Boutal

I like my bookshelves to contain books that smile back at me with the smug satisfaction of having been read and not the opposite… the furrowed-brow sigh of waiting-to-be-read. But it happens. Sometimes I pick up a book second-hand and put it on a shelf for awhile. Pauline Boutal’s biography, written by Louise Duguay, was such a book. The delay is unexplainable, except that maybe the familiar suffers at the expense of the exotic…

But Pauline’s life was romantic! And from so far in the past, it was a little exotic too…

Her family, like my husband’s ancestors, immigrated from Brittany. Her father made stained glass windows. She worked as a typesetter for a small local newspaper at age 15. The paper’s editor recommended she take drawing classes. They both liked theatre. Over time, she and the editor fell in love. They married in 1916. For many years Pauline was an illustrator for the Eaton’s catalogue. She honed her talent for drawing and produced pastel portraits, took more courses and painted landscapes. She helped her husband produce plays for the theatre group he directed - le Cercle Molière - and Pauline not only acted, she did a lot of the related artwork. They were friends with Gabrielle Roy. And then suddenly Pauline’s beloved husband died, age 54.

Pauline grieved and filled the second half of her life with the direction of the theatre, more classes, more travel, more art. As she aged, she let go of theatre direction, travelled a little less, painted buildings in St. Boniface and mourned changes in the landscape. (In particular, she mentions buildings pictured on pages 8, 27 and 29 of this PDF about St. Boniface.) She died in 1992, at 96.

(Above: one of my favourite paintings of hers from the book, titled Le Prunier.)

The biography contains many photos and paintings, but you can get a little idea of her life on the Radio-Canada website here.

Eating

For company this week, I made a reliable pasta recipe, but changed things up a bit for the salad, loosely following Nigella’s salad recipe in Cook Eat Repeat.

She writes:

For 2 romain hearts and 1 iceberg lettuce ([…] or indeed any lettuce you want), you will need, well in advance, to peel a large shallot and slice into 1/3 cup of fine half-moons. Put these in a jar or a bowl, and pour over 3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Push the curls of shallot down with a teaspoon so that they’re submerged, and replace the lid on the jar, or cover the bowl with food wrap, and leave to steep for at least 6 hours.

When you’re ready to go on the night itself, tear the lettuces into bite-sized pieces and drop them into the largest mixing bowl in the house. Stir 3 tablespoons of finely chopped chives into the vinegar-steeping shallots, followed by 1/3 cup of extra-virgin olive oil, 1/2 teaspoon of Dijon mustard and an amber drop of honey or maple syrup. Put the lid back on the jar and shake to mix, or whisk if the dressing’s in a bowl, and add salt to taste. Pour half of it over the leaves and toss gently but thoroughly for twice as long as you think it needs, then add as much of the rest as required, going slowly all the time. Turn into a very large salad bowl, or divide between two bowls, and sprinkle a couple more tablespoons of finely chopped chives over the top.

It was perfect!

Enjoying

When well-written, obituaries can provide excellent perspective, and this one, read on the TikTok account “Tips From Dead People”, did just that.

The latest episode from the podcast People I Mostly Admire titled “How to Help Kids Succeed” focused a lot on adult’s attitudes toward teenagers (like enforcer, protector, mentor) and it felt like an affirming listen.

Postcard

Milkweed is growing abundantly in the grassy parts of Henteleff Park. Recently I read this from Candace Savage’s book Prairie: A Natural History of the Heart of North America:

Some plants - like the big, bold butterfly milweed of the tall-grass prairies - vanish from the range the second they appear because the cows enjoy eating them. Out in the pasture, grizzled rangemen shove their Stetsons back off their brows and lean against their pickups to discuss the status of these “ice-cream plants” in their pastures. (p 106)

I’m so happy to think of them with this image in mind!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 21)

Behind the beautiful forevers

I’d feel a little deflated every time I finished reading a chapter from this book, but never dissuaded from picking it back up the next day. The low feeling had the effect of an unexpected take-off at the end… a kind of moral that sparkled like a discovery dissimulated from view until the final chapter. I therefore appreciated this quote, taken from one of the book’s subjects: “For some time I tried to keep the ice inside me from melting. […] But now I’m just becoming dirty water, like everyone else. I tell Allah I love Him immensely, immensely. But I tell Him I cannot be better, because of how the world is.” (p 241).

In her author’s note, Katherine Boo writes:

In the age of globalization - an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age - hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

The effect of corruption I find most under acknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset. Children have little power to act on those imaginations, and by the time they grow up, they may have become the adults who keep walking as a bleeding waste-picker slowly dies on the roadside, who turn away when a burned woman writhes, whose first reaction when a vibrant teenager drinks rat poison is a shrug. How does that happen? How - to use Abdul’s formulation - do children intent on being ice become water? A cliché about India holds that the loss of life matters less here than in other countries, because of the Hindu faith in reincarnation, and because of the vast scale of the population. In my reporting, I found that young people felt the loss of life acutely. What appeared to be indifference to other people’s suffering had little to do with reincarnation, and less to do with being born brutish. I believe it had a good deal to do with conditions that had sabotaged their innate capacity for moral action.” (253-54)

The above set up a kind of intellectual precondition for reading every word of this whole long substack article by Edward Zitron who writes at one point : “Everything is dominance, acquisition, growth and possession over any lived experience, because their world is one where the journey doesn’t matter, because their journeys are riddled with privilege and the persecution of others in the pursuit of success.”

Recently, at the Munk Debates, Ezra Klein relayed a quote from Charles Mann. Klein narrates:

The writer Charles Mann tells a story. He’s at a wedding in the Pacific Northwest […], he’s at a table with all these 20 somethings who want to make the world better, who see the ways in which it currently falls short. And it’s not that they’re wrong, he writes, but he says, ‘the heroic systems required to bring all the elements of their diner to these tables by the sea were invisible to them. Despite their fine education, they knew little about the mechanisms of today’s food, water, energy, and public health systems. They wanted a better world, but they didn’t know how this one worked.’

Mann’s quote is eloquent, and I would argue that both are writing in parallel on the issue of morality… Zitron writes in the same article:

We train people — from a young age! — to generalize and distance oneself from actual tasks, to aspire to doing managerial work, because managers are well-paid and "know what's going on," even if they haven't actually known what was going on for years, if they ever did so. This phenomenon has led to the stigmatization of blue-collar work (and the subsequent evisceration of practical trade and technical education across most of the developed world) in favor of universities. Society respects an MBA more than a plumber, even though the latter benefits society more — though I concede that both roles involve, on some level, shit, with the plumber unblocking it and the MBA spewing it. 

He, like Mann, like Boo, is pointing to similar symptoms of a societal ill. 

Food

Last week I had friends over for lunch and made a sweet little windowsill bouquet for the occasion.

But even more fun was building a little menu inspired by KISMET cookbook recipes. The idea was to serve a bunch of things to nibble on, as they featured on Instagram

or written about here. I’m so pleased that in Winnipeg, you can find ingredients for Marinated Feta with Dates + Rose Water Onions and Kale Tahini with Pomegranate Molasses and Garlicky Bean Dip that has an alluringly salty olive topping made with oil-cured Moroccan olives by stopping by De Luca’s for fresh bay leaves, Blady Middle Eastern for good tahini, rose water, and oil-cured Moroccan olives and Vita Health for lacinato kale. Were it not for cookbooks that show readers how to use ingredients and treat their taste buds, I wouldn’t feel encouraged to visit these smaller stores.

Lazy dog

As summer hits, bringing warm weather and sunny days, Enzo leaves fur behind and chooses air-conditioned interiors.

Postcards

This week features a little collection of bugs… The first, my sister informed me, is a fly that looks like a bee. To the left, slightly out of focus are two stink bugs, lumbering about, like heavily-armoured plunderers!

I suspect this second one, inert and cozy, is a napping bee. I love the beautiful white anemones, and always check the centres of their pretty five-petalled flowers to see what they invite. This one had two visitors at once!

The third is a mayfly, a dramatic silhouette for a dramatically short life…

Wishing you nice week ahead!

A Week on Sunday (no. 20)

Father’s Day

It would be rude not to acknowledge the fine theme of the day, considering how my own dad is dead, and rather than tell you about him, how he had thick salt and pepper hair, how he loved working in concrete, and how he answered my questions about the politics of the day; I prefer to insert a quote here, from another daughter’s reflection about her dead dad. Thus does Janet Malcolm write in Still Pictures:

He loved opera, birds, mushrooms, wildflowers, poetry, baseball. I am flooded with things I want to say about him. He left more traces of his existence than most people do, because he was always writing things down, on little cards, on onion-skin paper (his poems), in diaries, even on the walls of the cabin on a lake where he and my mother spent weekends and summer holidays. My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of him. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography, which gives it its vitality if not its raison d’être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification - and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them. “Who asked you to tarnish my image with your miserable little hurts?” the dead person might reasonably ask. Since my father was not concerned with his image, he would probably not object to the recitation of my wounded-child’s grievances. But I do not wish to make it. He was a wonderful father. I know he dearly loved my sister and me. (p 32)

An ode

I couldn’t quite figure how to title this section… One of the things I like about how our household runs, something I hadn’t expected to feel when first marrying Christian and setting up house, is the ongoing physical transformation of its spaces. Our house feels like a boat that we helm, functional and cozy, the interior adjusted as needs change. This last little while has yielded the perfect example in the case of our desk downstairs.

Before our boys came along and became toddlers, we had this two-desk set up, which can be glimpsed here…

There was a computer desk, and a kind of large-table desk, both from IKEA.

I wanted a better use of space downstairs, seeing as these two desks divided the living room. I wanted something solid. Kijiji yielded this 100$ engineering-student project. We brought it home in the winter of 2015 by renting a van from Home Depot and Christian re-assembled the jigsaw-like sections.

Do you notice the boys as toddlers also feature here? Christian is the kind of dad that likes working with kids around him. 

It’s kind of special how he doesn’t get agitated as they mill about. But back to the desk…

The desk was long enough to provide working spaces for the both of us. I sat at the left end, close to the wall we painted navy blue, and to which we affixed shelving Christian had made to match the desk; and he sat at the right end. At night, I had only to glance over to see him there, doing schoolwork corrections.

It held up to all kinds of abuse…

… all sorts of craft project.

During the pandemic, I asked for a studio space in the garage, and Christian made it. (I talked about it here.)

How spaces transform seems to come from incremental banalities, glacier-like. I started working from the guest room… the backyard pool warranted a change-room. The desk in the downstairs living room was suddenly too long, given how little I used my side of it and so, with its disassembly in mind, we re-designed the studio and now call it by a fancy French name… le vestiaire. Its a small thing that makes us feel incredibly pleased with the use of space.

HAMBURGERS

This is a still life of our counter on a smoky Saturday two weeks ago… thankfully, we’ve since had rain. Other than the orange glow, this is the scene most Saturdays when Christian makes hamburgers. This is our hamburger recipe, based on one from Lisa Gay on the website Food.com:

1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon seasoning salt
12 Ritz crackers, crushed
2 tablespoons oatmeal
500g extra lean ground beef
1 large egg, beaten

Mix the dry ingredients together roughly, by hand. Mix into the ground beef, add egg, mix again and shape into burgers. Grill until done.

Podcast quote

I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s interview with Kathryn Schultz, in the course of which she reflects:

I think that in our worst moments, the thing that can sustain us is serving others. […] And it’s really powerful to remember that there are other needs in the world, that other people have needs, and that actually you can help meet them and ameliorate them in whatever small ways. There’s no community on earth that does not need your help. And it is good to get outside of your head and outside of your own misery. So if duty is part of your sense of happiness, you will never have to look far to replenish it.

Postcard

My dad was a truck driver, and he’d note spotting an eagle in the countryside on his routes throughout the province. “I saw an eagle today,” he’d say. So now, when I see an eagle, I think of it as a good omen, because it reminds me of him.

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 19)

Documentaries

Finishing one project and before heading into another I rewarded myself with two documentaries I’d bookmarked… Turn Every Page featuring Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb and directed by Lizzie Gottlieb. I liked seeing footage of things I’ve only heard on podcasts or read in articles. The documentary adds another layer of visual stimulation… No Other Land an entirely different subject. It felt well-edited. The other day I was thinking of a small injustice I’d felt recently, a detail really, and my mind travelled to scenes from this film. In the overwhelm of one’s personal inability to stand against a torrent of suffering in this world, it feels right to imagine that an act of love, the sacrificial acceptance of what is difficult in one’s own experience, can be a not insignificant action that carries in its offering an invisible but true counterbalance to what is wrong right now. 

Food

Really liked reading Sophie Mulgrew’s “The Weight of Pasta Water” on her Substack Notes to No One. It reminds me of several women I’ve known. 

This week, I made a giant Challah, served half fresh with Deb Perelman’s Spring Asparagus [Bacon] Hash, and reserved the other half for decadent French Toast the next day, alongside a [Frittata] Maraîchère adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Quiche Maraîchère. 

Labels

I know that applying labels to behaviour, and clumsily, applying labels to people by extension, is wrong if it is done uncaringly. I know that it can be hurtful to reduce a person to a label. I know some people are more sensitive to using labels than others. But I’ve also found labels to be extremely helpful for understanding behaviour, moving past frustration and accessing a more robust empathy. I therefore find Annabel Fenwick Elliott’s Tiktok about understanding her own labels really heartening to hear. “[Instead of feeling] punished by them, I study them.”  

Treat

This isn’t some fancy premium chocolate, but we like it and treat it as if it is, taking only a rectangles at a time instead of a snack or dessert.

Postcard

If I were to make a calendar for the year, I think it would entirely feature the seasonal transformation of the milkweed plant.

Have a great week!

A week on Sunday (no. 18)

Reading

I just finished reading Toms River, a book by Dan Fagin about a community that suffered the consequences of a chemical company’s environmental malpractices. It is a case not unlike one my mother told me about when I was in elementary called Love Canal. And it is not unrelated to the disaster in Bhopal, which I read about in Dominique Lapierre’s book Il était minuit cinq à Bhopal. 

From Dan Fagin’s book, I especially appreciated the history that eventually lead to the building of the chemical plant… a story that stretches all the way back to the 1800’s when

coal gas and solid coke had replaced candles, animal oils, and wood as the most important sources of light, heat, and cooking fuel in many European and American cities. Both coal gas and coke were derived from burning coal at high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, a process that left behind a thick, smelly brown liquid that was called coal tar because it resembled the pine tar used to waterproof wooden ships. But undistilled coal tar was not a very good sealant and was noxious, too, and thus very difficult to get rid of. Burning it produced hazardous black smoke, and burying it killed any nearby vegetation. The two most common disposal practices for coal tar, dumping it into open pits or waterways, were obviously unsavory. But Hofmann, a Hessian expatriate who was an endlessly patient experimenter, was convinced that coal tar could be turned into something useful.

In the course of his experiments, a chemist named William Henry Perkin made the accidental discovery of a dye that would be named anilin purple. Fagin writes:

Perkin had stumbled upon the molecular magic of aniline. [...] The young chemist did not know why the resulting color was so vivid; the ability of molecules to absorb photons at specific wavelengths based on the structure of their shared electron bonds would not be worked out for another fifty years. He did not even know exactly what he had created; the precise molecular structure of his new chemical would not be deduced until the 1990s.

Much as I appreciate the history, it’s the fact that it took so many decades to understand the chemical properties that made the dye possible that feels like a larger metaphor for all kinds of experiences that are only explained after their occurrence.

Enjoying

Jodi Ettenberg just published the 50th edition of her newsletter “Curious About Everything” and it is one I alway look forward to reading.

A friend of hers wrote a lovely appraisal of her work here.  

Food

This week I made a supper so colourful, I took a picture…

Alsatian Pan Pizza from Don’t Worry Just Cook by Bonnie Stern and Anna Rupert, and a cucumber and strawberry salad.

The Bay

Closing sales continue at the Bay, the models have congregated.

Pool

The weather was so warm earlier this week, the boys took full advantage of the pool’s early set up this year.

Postcard

And just like that, everything is green…

Have a great week!

A week on Sunday (No. 16)

The scene is joyfully warm…

Outings, food, Enzo’s birthday… the week is a celebration in pictures! The crocuses in our front yard are blooming…

Enzo turned 5 in human years, but is significantly more mature in dog years. He’s pretty good… we’re happy to have him around. He got a big dog cookie shaped like a cake, and a toy and some treats he had to unwrap. He’s good at unwrapping…

I made falafel this week and fried it perfectly golden, a success in my non-expert frying experience. And were it not for the “shaping into balls and frying” bit, which is slightly effortful, I consider falafel to be an almost perfect meal… satisfying, vegetarian, interesting, customizable… Here, on our sun-drenched table, it is served with cucumbers, tomatoes, mango and pita, and (not-pictured) tahini sauce. Recipe here.

Thursday’s outing with my mother-in-law was a chance to document The Bay’s closing.

A friend and I visited the greenhouses for her garden. Such pretty places in spring!

This geranium caught my eye… It’s called “Starry Pure White” and I went back later and bought a few for our flower bed. Its petals are serrated instead of smooth and round.

Reading

Larger questions around childhood education usually piques my interest, and this week, Austin Kleon’s newsletter lead to the appraisal of a list of books,  which lead to Josh Brake disputing a comment by Harari (“Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in twenty years.”) with “Education is not primarily about the acquisition of skills like learning how to code, designing an engineering system, analyzing a business plan, or critiquing an essay. It's about learning to think, to ask questions, and to foster virtue.” (“Foster virtue”! A noble ideal it seems almost strange to admit…) which lead to his link to John Warner’s substack “What is the Purpose of Education?” refuting marketing around Sal Kahn’s upcoming book (titled Brave New Word) and Warner’s writing “I think education should be a process through which individuals become their best selves, which definitely includes finding their way to an economically productive life that provides material security, but is also much more than that.” All of which I found interesting.

Wobble

Sohla El-Waylly revealed her spring must-have items on Instagram, which included something that looks like these wedges, because “you don’t want to sit at a wobbly table when you eat out.” And I thought “clearly, I don’t eat out enough.” But it made me smile because my dad was always keen to fix wobbly tables with whatever cardboard or paper was at hand. Then my friend and I ate out at lunch on Friday and…

Postcard

This week a view toward the river, from beside a great big poplar and its buds. The green is just beginning to show!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 15)

An almost poem

I was struck earlier this week by how when I go about making a new habit, I'm uncomfortably clumsy at first. The scene: I'm tying the dog to the playground structure so I can hang from the monkey bars. It's all awkward and I don't feel good hanging from the bars yet. But in this as in anything, it takes a little while before you develop a deftness that looks like grace.

Another moment, that afternoon: As I cross Marion Street, a delivery man has hefted a box over his shoulder and steps down from the back of his truck as his other hand catches the strap that pulls down the door as he steps down from the platform and traces an arc from the street to the curb to the reception desk.

An exchange: My mother-in-law is sitting as a passenger as I drive down the tree-lined street to our house. She says: “ceux qui sont nés pour un petit pain, ça vaut rien… elle avait raison ma mère quand elle disait ça!”
“Aimes-tu des gros pains?” I ask.
“Oui!” She says.
“Moi aussi!” I say.

Later that evening: I'm driving home from having dropped her off. The sun is setting. Its rays reflect on the power lines that swoop over the road, making them shiny pink against the dark mauve clouds.

Quote

John Green is talking about the good feeling of cheering on a team, and yet his concluding line strikes an oddly spiritual note: "But hope is still correct because things might get better, especially when we all orient our love in the same direction.”

Courage

I'm inspired by high ideals - like seeing the medical staff on “The Pitt” or reading about nurses in the oncology ward at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in the book Toms River. The author writes:

Many parents practically lived in the ward and went home only to shower and change clothes before rushing back. The nurses worked under the unforgiving gaze of mothers and fathers driven half-mad by lack of sleep and the sight of their children enduring a pitiless cycle of excruciating needle sticks, nausea attacks, and dressing changes. Parents would frequently take out their anger on the nurses, and the nurses who lasted on the ward learned to respond without rancor or condescension. (p 252 - emphasis mine)

What an amazing skill!

Granola

I have been making granola for myself as a snack for years, one batch lasting about a month. I first used a recipe from Orangette's blog and then switched to Joshua McFadden's in Six Seasons because it is very similar and omits the pecans. Consider this an ode to something simple I am grateful for.

National Geographic

This week I finished watching a National Geographic series titled "Photographer"  It reminded me of Chef's Table... you get to feel like you're living in someone else's life for a little bit and you get to admire people who have great talent. 

Episode 1, featuring Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier had these concluding remarks: "I have no desire to go live in a fricken' glass bubble. We are living in heaven, to think that there's been four billion years of evolution to arrive at this moment of perfection where, you know, this place is just beautiful. Where we can swim in crystal-clean water and you're surrounded by grizzly bears and black bears and there's whales that come up to you. And it's here and now." I like being reminded of the beauty of the earth!

Creative work

And I really appreciated a moment in Episode 2, from the above series, featuring Anand Varma, when he's recalling the first story he pitched to the magazine: "I had just pitched an idea that I did not know how to execute." He generously shares how challenging it was to translate an interesting subject (parasites) into an intriguing picture, that was not copying another photographer's style, that was intentional and new and that ended up making the front cover of the magazine. But it had been a struggle. At one point Varma says "None of it was working and I took over 5,000 pictures. I felt stuck. It was completely paralyzing." 

It's similar to a frustration Hattie Crisell identifies with writing. She quotes, in her Substack, from a book titled Art and Fear by David Bayles… “The artist’s life is frustrating not because the passage is slow, but because he imagines it to be fast.” Crisell comments: “Ugh - so true. I write every day, but it takes me so long for an idea to crystallize and become substantial.” I so agree!

Enjoyed

An interview with Samin Nosrat on Song Exploder.  

Postcard

This week's snapshot captures this year's first pelican! What a beautiful big bird!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 14)

Motto

Since hearing it on the season finale of White Lotus, I've found the fake Buddhist monk's phrase "There is no resolution" a comfort. Sometimes it's nice to just acknowledge that trying to reason through a thing is a weight that can be sloughed off. 

Reading

I enjoyed reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner's article "This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write” and these two quotes stood out:

I realized, suddenly, that there was no future in which I would know enough Holocaust to move on from it. What the education was asking of me was to not move on. Not ever.

So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway.

Donald Knuth

This interview was linked somewhere else for the productivity advice provided: "my scheduling principle is to do the thing I hate most on my to-do list. By week’s end, I’m very happy." But I also like Knuth's other observations:

A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

My life would not be complete if it was all about cut and dried things. The mystical things I don’t understand give me humility. There are things beyond my understanding.

In mathematics, I know when a theorem is correct. I like that. But I wouldn’t have much of a life if everything were doable. This knowledge doesn’t tear me apart. Rather, it ensures I don’t get stuck in a rut. 

Cooking

Ever since coming across Dead Greg's recipes on TikTok, I've been wanting to try the Gourmet Grilled Cheese with Christian and the kids. This week I finally did, and it was as good as they said! Really charming story here. 

Postcards

This week, no more snow, the lawn is raked, the green is coming up. But just last Saturday, the evening walk looked like this:

The still stunning milkweed.

And this was captured at a moment when a cloud shadow fell across the trees on the other side of the river and highlighted the gold tones in the grass nearby. 

A Week on Sunday (no. 13)

Intro

I feel a little like the whole news situation involving our neighbours is akin to being in the vicinity of an argument. There’s tension in the air, therapist-like suggestions on social media, and people who go about willfully business-as-usual. I’m fine, but I’m a little distracted? 

Pot-pourri

In the midst of Spring Break, there is still time to read, thank goodness. Reading from all kinds of books yields a collage of quotes… There’s William Trevor’s short story “Broken Homes” in which the main character is 81 years old:

The dread of having to leave Catherine Street ordered her life. With all her visitors she was careful, constantly on the lookout for signs in their eyes which might mean they were diagnosing her as senile. It was for this reason that she listened so intently to all that was said to her, that she concentrated, determined to let nothing slip by. It was for this reason that she smiled and endeavoured to appear agreeable and cooperative at all times. She as well aware that it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came.

In Goodbye to Clocks Ticking, Joseph Monninger catches himself feeling annoyed because cancer is forcing him to accept letting go of control.

What I rejected was the possibility, the absolute likelihood, that I needed help. That I needed guidance. […] As a former English professor, it reminded me of Regan’s statement to her father and liege, King Lear, when she points out that he needs governance.

Regan. O, sir, you are old!
Nature in you stands on the very verge
Of her confine. You should be rul’d, and led
By some discretion that discerns your state
Better than you yourself.

In Olivia Laing’s book Funny Weather, I met Derek Jarman, and find his last creative project, his garden, so arresting. 

If this all seems a little bleak so far, all a little too old age and dying, there’s this curious incongruity in what Canadians consider their “back yard” and what the British consider their “garden”. I found this while reading A History of Domestic Space by Peter Ward:

A pair of French doors led outdoors from the dining room at the back of the dwelling and, as we stepped outside, I mentioned what an attractive back yard they had. 'Garden,' he corrected me, one of the endless small cultural confusions that bedevil Canadians in Britain. Two words had betrayed my rough postcolonial origins. In his world a garden was a tranquil enclave of lawns and flowers. In mine a garden might be a plot of worthy vegetables or a handsome floral border, but it formed part of something larger and rather more crude - a yard.

This, he writes, comes from the farm where our farming ancestors had yards

taken up by kitchen gardens, chicken coops, animal pens, storage sheds, and the like. In any case, the grassy swards and floral bowers found in occasional farmyards did little more than decorate utilitarian spaces.

And should we push the fun of contrasts just a little further? This week, I was listening to Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall and this made me smile:

(Have you heard of Harry Belafonte? I’m pretty sure that prior to this 1000 Recordings adventure, I had not. Which isn’t the point… I’m young, he’s dead, my musical knowledge is only beginning to expand. But what a delight to listen to his voice! This album was really nice.)

Good advice

I came across this woman’s point of view that felt both kind and mature.

A good meal

This week we had this Creamy Chickpea Pasta With Spinach and Rosemary and it was delicious!

Postcards

The remaining snow is ice and slush slumped in shadows. The colours are pretty blond and deep blues…

A Week on Sunday (no. 12)

Thoughts on Thrifting

I took time last weekend and this one to visit thrift stores in Winnipeg, which I hadn’t all last year. First I get overwhelmed. Then I remind myself that it’s fun. 

And it really is! I make a game of quickly going through each piece of clothing on a rack, testing feel and design and checking the label to see if I’ve guessed the quality right. 

I have rules: an aversion for some brands, an exception for cheaper fabric or un-fancy brands if the item looks brand new, an aim for classic cuts (no shoulder holes), colours (I don’t care for purple), materials (is that wool?), and a dismissal of store categories (I browse across size, gender and type of clothing).

I now have more 5 more pairs of pants I didn’t a month ago… I found a belt making me retroactively happy I didn’t buy the one at the Bay - the store that is now closing, that has sprung a slew of pink and white 15%-off sale signs like a field of clover in spring. 

Thrifting takes the weight off of shopping for new clothes, and quirky accessories, like this scarf I could unwind from my neck and read if I was ever bored, let me be playful without feeling frivolous.

Thrifting is a pastime. As I comb the racks, I feel people around me. I’m conscious of picking through items that unknown others have dropped off, I’m spending time considering what I could wear, what I like enough, really enough to try, to buy, what others would think of my choice, what my choice says about my style… What is my style… Is everything all vanity… 

The counterpoint is this: that by taking time to examine clothing, I’m learning… I’m not only teaching myself brands, materials, quality, I’m noticing what people donate; I’m looking at items that have been assembled an ocean away, advertised in a store, purchased at some point, worn or stored before being passed along and processed and hung on these squeaky hangers for my benefit. Sometimes, the thought of all that inspires a kind of gentle reverence for clothing, for the journey it took to land in this neutral wall, bright fluorescents building. Mentally, I bless the people who were part of that journey… the lowly workers in particular. More often than not, I leave feeling grateful for the experience.

Baking

This week, I got compliments on the Banana Bread Blondies from King Arthur Baking Company. They have a generous list of free recipes and this one is a keeper. Not only is it easy to make, but it uses bananas in an unusual way…

Cooking

In other news, I made Smitten Kitchen’s “Meatballs Marsala with Egg Noodles” this week. I had a craving. But also, I keep notes and record the meals we’ve had week to week, year after year. I’d tried the recipe for the first time last year and noted “kids don’t care for the sauce.” But I made it anyway, and curiously, the kids’ opinion has changed from a year ago. They could not recall disliking the sauce. I take this as tastebud maturation!

Writing (for a Blog)

This series of blog posts by Tracy Durnell, titled “Mindset of More”, has been gently thought-provoking and I enjoyed reading through them… This other post by James Horton, “The Non-Writer’s Guide to Writing A Lot” could seem to contradict Durnell by its title, but in fact it aligns well, since Horton says “Write for joy” and Durnell writes “it is more rewarding to treat writing as atelic, meaningful in itself.” I think Matthew Gallaway expresses this in a way I relate to when he writes:

blogs in my mind are still the best means of subjectively capturing the world around us in a manner that's best suited for the internet

and

I still like to blog, and I have no plans to quit. It's a place where I can write a few words and share some pictures that for whatever reason mean or meant something to me. It's not about making money or even trying to, which is itself an act of #resistance in our sadly money-obsessed culture. And while I sometimes question the meaningfulness of my work, I never question the meaningfulness of others who are doing the same thing, which would dictate that (if you took my neurotic insecurity out of the equation) the work is meaningful to someone, even if (stay with me here) that someone is me, or a past version of me.

(Also, I liked this post of his about opera.)

Postcards

Spring, while it is greenery and asparagus for people south of us, is fields of frozen half-melt and quiet hopeful plants.

As it moves along, inch by inch, snow turns to puddles that freeze.

Can you spy a fox?

It drove Enzo crazy. He howled wildly as I pulled him along and the fox watched, as if amused, sitting down even, as we passed.

Then, a new snowy landscape on Friday morning…

A Week on Sunday (no. 11)

Dream

This week I dreamt I was in Concours oratoire (a public-speaking  contest at school). My chosen subject was how great it was to be a parent. I realized my audience was a little young. I thought to myself afterward that I should have framed the subject as: “doing hard things is worthwhile.” 

I remembered the dream the next morning when I was blow-drying my hair. 

Quote

Dan Winters in the National Geographic documentary series “Photographer” quoted Henri Cartier-Bresson’s expression: “Life is once forever”. It’s so poetic in that way that poetry is a small container for deep meanings.

Confused

I thought bemused was a variation on amused… I thought it meant a lower key amusement, like the affect of a person observing a thing happening, in which they’re involved, but not too much, so that everything is just mild… In fact, bemused means confused. There is no amusement.

Country music

This week I checked off the last on the list of country albums from Tom Moon’s 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. Having listened through folk music before this, I think I might prefer it. Some of the albums are Celtic, one was Acadian, and those sounds from my cultural background are immediately familiar. But country music makes me laugh… From “Don’t Think it Ain’t Been Fun” Lefty Frizzell sings about his heart: “it’s in so many pieces I’ve run out of glue”. Or when Hank Williams sings in “I’ll never get out of this world alive” that he’s so poor, 

These shabby shoes I'm wearin' all the time
Are full of holes and nails
And brother, if I stepped on a worn out dime
I bet a nickel I could tell you
if it was heads or tails.

Others, like Tammy Wynette’s “I Don’t Want to Play House” make me sad.

Postcards

The weather has varied this week. I am still wearing crampons.

The number of geese on the river has increased. When it is warmer, they walk about and swim out on the water.

When it is cold, they group together. If this was their postcard, they’d write: “Wish you were here. We could use the body heat.”

Trees are still skeletal.

A week on Sunday (no. 10)

Quotes

Reading Barbarian Days by William Finnigan taught me so much about surfing.

1. The history! 

In old Hawaii, before the arrival of Europeans, surfing had religious import. After prayers and offerings, master craftsmen made boards from sacred koa or wiliwili trees. Priests blessed swells, lashed the water with vines to raise swells, and some breaks had heiaus (temples) on the beach where devotees could pray for waves. This spiritual awareness did not preclude raucous competition, even large-scale gambling. (p 27)

This was not what the Calvinist missionaries who began arriving in Hawaii in 1820 had in mind for the islanders as a way of life. Hiram Bingham who led the first missionary party, which found itself in a crowd of surfers before it had even landed (...) 

Twenty-seven years later, Bingham wrote, "They decline and discontinuance of the surfboard, as civilization advances, may be accounted for by the increase in modesty, industry or religion." He was not wrong about the decline of surfing. Hawaiian culture had been destroyed, and the people decimated by European diseases; between 1778 and 1893, the Hawaiian population shrank from an estimated eight hundred thousand to forty thousand, and by the end of the nineteenth century surfing had all but disappeared. Westwick and Neushul count Hawaiian surfing less a victim of successful missionary zeal, however, than of extreme demographic collapse, dispossession, and a series of extractive industries - sandalwood, whaling, sugar - that forced the surviving islanders into a cash economy and stripped them of free time.

2. The skill!

The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell - a longitudinal study, through season after season - is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break. Getting a spot wired - truly understanding it - can take years. At very complex breaks, it's a lifetime's work, never completed. This is probably not what most people see, glancing seaward, noting surfers in the water, but it's the first-order problem that we're out there trying to solve: what are these waves doing exactly, and what are they likely to do next? Before we can ride them, we have to read them, or at least make a credible start on the job. (p 75)

3. The motivation

(…) surfing became an excellent refuge from the conflict - a consuming, physically exhausting, joy-drenched reason to live. It also, in its vaguely outlaw uselessness, its disengagement from productive labor, neatly expressed one's disaffection. (p 91)

Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement. (p 96)

4. The paradox

For me, and not only for me, surfing harbors this paradox: a desire to be alone with waves fused to an equal desire to be watched, to perform. (p 314)

5. The growing popularity

Surfing blew up, I'm not sure when. It was always too popular, in my narrow view. Crowds were always a problem at well-known breaks. But this was different. The number of people surfing doubled and doubled again - five million estimated worldwide in 2002, twenty million in 2010 - with kids taking it up in practically every country with a coastline, even if it was only a big lake. (p 418) 

One memoir, and I’ve learned so much about surfing…

crafty

These things are called oak galls and people make ink from them.

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Cooking

If cooking is a hobby, inspiration can be taken everywhere. A post from Tess on TikTok made me feel like I should try homemade lasagna. 

Pasta recipes have opinions on type of flour, whether two types should be mixed, in what percentage, with spinach or not...

Asking your teenager to take a few pictures yields dramatic angles…

The thing about trying a new recipe, a 10 hour lasagna if you count babysitting the bolognese for 6 hours, the dough resting for 1, homemade ricotta draining for 1 and assembly for 2, is that it makes it a little daunting to do-over if there are things to tweak. Still, I find Suzanne Goin's words in Sunday Suppers at Lucques inspiring:

To be a great cook you must be an interactive cook. Using all of your senses throughout the entire process is key. Watch, smell, listen to, and most of all taste the dish as you go along. Cooking isn't an assembly line or a chemistry project - adding A to B to C and then stirring 10 minutes. When food is cooking properly it's "happy" and "dancing" in the pan, glistening and sizzling along the way. (p 6)

And I think trying new things lets you get past the nervous first stage, and closer to the feeling Goin describes.

Postcard

I spy a goose!