Welcome to this week’s edition, which happens to bring you five interesting bits loosely related to weather! Let’s jump in!
1. Good advice
The sun is shining, there's an afternoon at the beach planned, Audiomachine's "The Big Smoke" is playing in my ears while far away, the news tells me, a chart-topping amount of forest hectares are burning. Transcending weather and anxieties there is good advice, and I especially appreciated The Marginalian's overview of Kevin Kelly's most recent book. Maria Popova does a great job of offering readers a website full of these gems of reflection.
2. Don't talk about the weather
Currently, I'm reading Pierre Berton's The Promised Land: Settling the West 1896-1914, in which he describes Manitoba's premier, Clifford Sifton's efforts to "dispel the image of the West as a snow-covered desert". Berton writes:
One of Sifton's first moves was to try to ban the daily publication of Manitoba temperatures, but since that might prove even more alarming, he dropped the idea. Nevertheless, snow was never mentioned in the blizzard of pamphlets his department issued. (p 15)
Get it? Snow mentioned and blizzard of pamphlets? Berton made me laugh. He continues:
“Cold” was another taboo word. The accepted adjectives were “bracing” and “invigorating.” (...) “The kindest thing to say about it is that the literature was a little on the optimistic side,” one British immigrant recalled. “Canada was said to have a healthy climate guaranteed to be free of malaria. One has to admit that this was true. It was said that while the prairie summers were hot, the heat was delightfully invigorating and while it got cold in the winter the cold was dry and not unpleasant. I used to recall those glowing words as I pirched sheaves with the temperature at 95 in the shade, and as I ran behind the slight at 30 below to keep from freezing.” (p 16-17).
This week, working at the historical society, I would eat lunch in my car to warm up from their excellently air-conditioned rooms. But modern conveniences and jobs that don't require manual labour do not make weather any less of a topic of conversation.
3. In praise of summer produce
I would like to defy expectations here and avoid superlatives around seasonal tomatoes in order to highlight the luscious bunch of red swiss chard I picked up at the market for 2.70$. It was the main vegetable for Deb Perelman's "Swiss Chard Enchiladas" from Keepers. They were delicious, but more importantly, this is a recipe that makes it easy to consume a vegetable I would otherwise not buy.
4. The solution to environmental change
This quote from an article by Charles Eisenstein, highlighted in the wonderful newsletter Dense Discovery, feels true.
No one calculates their way into love. And the changes that we will need to make to restore earth’s aliveness from its current depletion will require a degree of courage and sacrifice that comes only from love.
5. A mini tour of our backyard
Welcome to our yard where we have collected perennials and shrubs and cedars and filled in their gaps with colourful annuals.
I don’t really plan which annuals I plant from year to year and so the flowerbed can offer serendipitous surprises from one season to the next…
A patch of violets that look especially whimsical hidden among the fronds of big lilies. Or the unexpected colour and texture combination here…
Rain and days of cooler temperatures make these petunias and begonias look especially luscious this year…
There aren’t just flowers in the yard though…
Happy Friday!