A Week on Sunday (no. 40)

Teaching myself to swim

Friday was the tenth time I put on a bathing suit, cap and goggles and slid myself into a city pool with the firm intention of getting over my fear of water. As an experiment, it has been going well. My goal is to be able to swim laps with Christian. Meantime, I stay in the shallow end, learning buoyancy, while he goes back and forth and tests ever higher diving boards. I think that an account is due, a little summary of the impressions I have of the experience so far, before I forget what learning to swim felt like.

An unexpected feeling. I’ve learned that there’s a distinction between feeling “enthusiasm” for something and feeling “invigorated” by something. An idea can create enthusiasm, but it can be temporary. Its definition associates it to speech: “she enthused” or “she spoke enthusiastically”. By contrast “invigorate” feels more stable and less superficial. It is “to impart vigour to; to fill with life and energy; to strengthen, animate”. I’ve had ideas for projects in the past, talked about them, felt enthusiastic, and fed myself on other peoples’ reaction. But it quickly wears out. Having a practice, like writing or drawing, has taught me persistence beyond the idea-phase because I can see that incremental improvement happens over time, despite feelings of impatience. 

One of the first instructor’s advice I followed was Kaitlin Frehling’s video. It begins by teaching buoyancy. I wasn’t able to follow her instructions until the third visit to a pool, but finally being able to gather myself into a ball while gently exhaling under water and feeling my back bob to the surface was a brand new sensation I was thrilled to repeat and repeat. My brain forgot to be okay with this feeling by the next visit, but picked it up again fairly quickly. Feeling this happen and observing the brain learn was very invigorating!

Learning technique. Swimming is so technical that breaking it down into steps is a little puzzle on its own. There is theory and application… but a big part of learning how to apply something is learning how to digest it in pieces that don’t lead to overwhelm. When I told my sister I was teaching myself to swim, she asked me why I didn’t just take lessons. The thing is, a big part of learning to swim is just getting over my own fear of the water… I understand technique quite well, and there’s a plethora of Youtube videos for every kind of technique. 

Videos that don’t break down technique are instructive in their own way. Take “Learn to Swim as an Adult” which compresses into three episodes Harry getting over fear of water in the first, learning front crawl in the second, and going at it in the deep end in the third; all within a month. The instructor is encouraging, and Harry is a good sport, but there looms over this production a feeling of “Ugh, why won’t this just come together?” expressed in Harry’s comment “it is frustrating…”. The technique is there, but really, what Harry needs, and what the Youtube channel doesn’t specialize in showing, is a whole bunch of time dedicated to getting comfortable with being in the water. I suspect that actual footage of an adult learning to swim is boring. More fun for the viewer is the exciting montage you tend to find in movies. More useful for the adult learner are the techniques that can be applied visit to visit. The two objectives are at odds in the above example, but there are other instructors who target their audience well by giving them very small steps to try on their own.

Pausing here to acknowledge fear. I want to take a minute to appreciate various sources of encouragement… Articles like Alexandra Hansen’s “Learning to swim as an adult is terrifying, embarrassing and wonderful” for The Guardian or videos like Dan Swim Coach’s “How to Overcome Fear of Water” and Sikana’s “Overcome a fear of water” treat this feeling seriously. They also emphasize the key to overcoming it by exposure. Exposing myself to water again and again and again is a small doable step and I’m happy after every time I take it.

Breaking down technique into small and smaller steps. I’ve mentioned Kaitlin Frehling above, and have used the PDF “Beginner Swim Resource” illustrating routines you can do to learn to swim, as a guide. But I do have a slower pace… For example: week 5 workouts introduce a swimmer’s snorkel. I’d never tried a snorkel before, and I had to confront the sensation of water in my nose. I’d been avoiding this by gently breathing out of my nose underwater and not just holding my breath. The first attempt - my 7th visit to the pool - I had to get past the panicky feeling. Between weeks 7 and 8 I watched Youtube tutorials (this one and this one) on snorkel use. Pool visits then included time gradually getting used to breathing with a snorkel for 2, then 4 then 6 lengths, with flippers and then without. But I don’t begrudge the extra time I’m taking, because there’s no one to impress but myself. 

Supporting local We visit our favourite city pool Friday evenings and it feels nice to be connected in this way to a service we now support. We’re starting to recognize regulars, becoming ones ourselves… And I found swimming gear I needed from a local business called Swimming Matters. All these things are motives for gratitude!

Reading

I think the book 1177 B.C. by Eric H. Cline was recommended by a podcast guest for its final chapter detailing the collapse of civilisations and the end of the Bronze Age, because of the “eerily prescient” (in Adam Gopnick’s words) conditions it highlights.

Personally, I liked the difference between then and now that the author highlights in this passage: 

I should hasten to add that, although it’s clear that climate change and such factors as pandemics have caused instability in the past, there is at least one major difference between then and now - concurrent knowledge of events unfolding. The ancient Hittites probably had no idea what was happening to them. They didn’t know how to stop a drought. Maybe they prayed to the gods; perhaps they made some sacrifices. But in the end, they were essentially powerless to do anything about it.

In contrast, we are now much more technologically advanced. We also have the advantage of hindsight. History has a lot to teach us, but only we are willing to listen and learn. If we see the same sort of things taking place now that happened in the past, including drought and famine, earthquakes and tsunamis, then I ask again, might it not be a good idea to look at the ancient world and learn from what happened to them? Even if the various problems at the end of the Late Bronze Age were “black swan” events, as Magnus Nordenman has suggested, the mere fact that we have so many similar problems at the present time should be cause for concern.

Enjoying

This definition of taste in a substack by Henry Oliver, written two years ago, is so clear, I’ll likely go back and reread it again.

Baking aspiration

There’s nothing like a baking project to inspire confidence in pulling off your own roundup of cookies at this time of year, and I’ve been enjoying Justine Doiron’s cookie advent-calendar she made over four (!) days. (On Instagram here.)

Postcard

This week: snow on the river!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 38)

Reading

Another book done from the reading list! This one a tiny book of short stories, titled Escapes, by Joy Williams. Reading her, the sensation of the short unexpected sentences in my brain is like eating popping candy... The writing seems to fizz.

From a story titled "Rot": "The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children." (p. 17)

"Health" so acutely described a tanning salon that I was jolted into the memory of having gone to one with Christian, some weeks prior to our wedding so we'd look attractively tanned for the pictures... "Aurora leads her to one of the rooms at the rear of the building. The room has a mirror, a sink, a small stool, a white rotating fan and the bed, a long bronze coffinlike apparatus with a lid. Pammy is always startled when she sees the bed with its frosted ultraviolet tubes, its black vinyl headrest." (p 115)

Perhaps my favourite passage is a character's thought about overheard conversation: "Pammy coughs. She doesn't want to hear other people's voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word were as good as another." (p. 119).

A fun read!

A poem

This is a beautiful poem: "Miss You. Would like to take a walk with you". It is by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. Here on the Poetry Foundation website.

Part of me wants to leave the poem like a gift on a doorstep with the secret anticipation of the recipient enjoying it. Another part of me wants to confess that until reading it, a poem had never made me cry. I didn't believe, till now, that poems could contain this power. It's like a little gift that arrived, that proved Patti Smith's description of a poem to be true: "… it can distill everything like a teardrop. If you’re thirsty and you get that drop of water, it suddenly becomes like a liter of water. Then you’re satisfied." (Quote taken from Patti Smith's interview here.)

AI and history

I've held the misguided belief that AI couldn't do much for the archival work inherent to the field of history, but a recent interview on Hard Fork with Professor Mark Humphries is proving that AI might become very helpful. Humphries has a substack on the subject here.

Eating

Sometimes a meal is less about the recipe and more about the pairing. This week, we tried Deb Perelman's Skillet Macaroni and Cheese - liberally messing around with the quantities of pasta vs sauce because we're not a creamy-sauce-loving family - and paired it with an almost virtuous broccoli salad by Jamie Oliver.  (See here.)

For dessert, I made these Pink Party Cookies, per my daughter's request... "Could you make a sandwich cookie, but with icing in between?" It was subsequently so fun to come upon Carla Lalli Music's recipe.  The thing with her cookbook picture, is that I suspect the saturation is heightened. If you "bake until there's a barely perceptible tint of light golden around edge, 8 minutes. Do not overbake." it yeilds a pale cookie. Mine looked anemic by comparison. But still delicious!

Postcards

This week... a look upwards, to the pretty leaf outlines of a willow tree.

The lovely golds and browns and reds…

And the dog…

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 36)

I love history

When I was 20, I didn’t know that I loved history. When I was 30, I had minored in history. Now, past 40, I’m developing opinions about history. Sometimes I wonder whether I should gather all these history-related ideas together into one blog post, but I think not. I’m thinking as I go… isn’t it better to be invited on a hike and admire the view as you go along than to have a friend present you with with an album of their souvenirs? Blogging is like inviting you along…

I like it when I find myself nodding along with what a podcast guest is saying. This week it was to Paul Kingsnorth on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss (here). To establish your values, he argues, you need  “people, place, prayer, and the past”. About the past, you can ask yourself: “What’s your sense of the past, your sense of history? How can you live that? How can you honour your ancestors, pass things on to your children?” I think about this often and enjoy the challenge it presents.

What kind of challenge does thinking about history present? The first one is relevance. When I say relevance, it makes me think of people who say that history is boring and I so I think about the things that make history boring (like cliché) and the things that make it interesting (story) and I glow incandescent when I hear academics broach these themes exactly. I thoroughly enjoyed stumbling upon this interview between Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin on Youtube (here).  

Cercle Molière

Last weekend we attended a play at the French theatre, the subject of which was Pauline Boutal’s life. (I read her biography earlier this year and I’m so happy I did - I doubly enjoyed the play!)

Going to plays in French was my husband’s idea, and this one was the first of this season… I don’t know why or how I managed to have such low expectations of theatre, but my gosh, I found myself discreetly crying actual tears. The actors disappear after we applaud at the end, and in the emotion of the moment, applause felt too little, too small an act… they deserved hugs! A round of drinks on the house! Cheers to their talent, more cheers for health and a long life!

Reading 

I finished Art Work by Sally Mann. It contains lots of quotes. Lots of lovely-long sentences. Advice given as if she suspected her reader might roll their eyes, but also as if she knew she had the authority to give it (that is, sometimes the tone felt self-deprecating, sometimes haughtily impatient). I liked her stories… the terrible renter fiasco, the incredible trip to Qatar. Dear Mrs. Mann: more stories please? 

The thing is, I really enjoyed reading Hold Still (mentioned here in 2018). The image of a person’s death being like a library burned to the ground has often come to mind, and it’s from the end of that book. She writes:

I have long been afflicted with the metaphysical question of death: What does remain? What becomes of us, of our being? 

Remember that song by Laurie Anderson in which she says something about how when her father died it was as though a library burned to the ground? Where does the self actually go? All the accumulation of memory - the mist rising from the river and the birth of children and the flying tails of the Arabians in the field - and all the arcane formulas, the passwords, the police recipes, the Latin names of trees, the location of the safe deposit key, the complex skills to repair and build and grow and harvest - when someone dies, where does it all go?

Proust has his answer, and it’s the one I take most comfort in - it ultimately resides in the loving and in the making and in the leaving of every present day. It’s in my family, our farm, and in the pictures I’ve made and loved making. It’s in this book. “What thou loves well remains.” […]

Love! The world needs Love!

In the kitchen

This week, I made Zaynab Issa’s “Ultimate tuna melt” from her cookbook Third Culture Cooking and the kids told me not to lose the recipe. Very high praise!  

For dessert: Apple Pudding Cake. Delicious!

Enjoying

Freakonomics podcast is doing another series and I’ve been delightedly pulled-in. All Stephen Dubner’s research into horses has reminded me of when I was young… I read Black Beauty and wanted a horse. I was a child in the middle of Saskatoon with no concept of what horse-ownership entailed. My dad discouraged the idea. He said horses could have a temperament. I figured he’d not read Black Beauty. 

My mom also liked horses, but from a distance. Her brother had worked with horses. We watched National Velvet together… I knew about the Triple Crown and Secretariat and nothing about The Adams Family. In teenager-hood, I read Monty Roberts’ book The Man Who Listens to Horses (which, in my flawed memory, was titled “The Horse Whisperer” but Google refutes me). Mom and I were fans of people who could perform feats in animal behaviour. Then I grew up and horses left my mind. These podcasts are a nice (current!) revisit to that world!

Writing

Really liked this substack post by Gen Zero titled “Everyone is a strategist and No One is a Writer” (via) especially this concluding bit:

As we focus on how marketing is done, substantive questions of the world itself get sidelined.

Implicit in this focus on marketing is a focus on everyone but oneself.

I’ve noticed oak galls in the past and even mentioned them here but never gave them any further thought. But woah! Wasps are involved! What a lovely substack post! (Via) 

Christmas approacheth

I admire a person who can make craft projects feel almost un-craft-like. I’m not sure how to explain it except that Naomi Vizcaino - with her references to the past and the originality of her ideas - makes her project ideas feel especially artistic. (TikTok)

Postcards

Here is my dog, not barking at another dog.

Here is milkweed with floss so soft I think of a grandmother’s hair.

Here is a view of the fallen tree across the river.

Here, through a tangle of trees, I spy some that seem almost decorated in the sunlight… red berries, leaves that shimmer…

And behold! Captured here is the first snow!

Happy Sunday!

A Week on Sunday (no. 35)

Perfectionism

So I was listening to this podcast (The Good Ship Illustration) because it featured an interview with an artist I follow on Youtube, Sandi Hester. In the course of the interview, Hester put her finger on why I enjoy watching her Youtube videos so much… She says:

You just get to be a fly on the wall over the years that I’ve been a professional artist, just working through [negative self-talk] and working on muscles to think rightly about my creative process. It’s not as draining anymore. I don’t feel like every single piece I create has to be a masterpiece.

I think negative self-talk and perfectionism are two sides to a coin, but each one reminds me of people who’ve discussed these two aspects on two different podcasts. The first is Stephen Dubner on Design Matters back in September (I mentioned it here) when he was reflecting on having worked with Angela Duckworth: 

The very basic thing that I came away with is that […] I know the brain is a muscle. I know that. But I never treat it like a muscle. I treat it more like a trampoline, that things will bounce off it and send you into some other direction, right? Someone will say something or do something. You will have an involuntary emotional response. And all of a sudden, you say or do something that is far from the thing that you really wish you had said or done. 

But in fact, your mind or brain is a muscle and you can control it. And I can say, you know what? I recognize what’s happening right now. I just hit a bad shot. I just gave a bad talk. I just embarrassed myself. I was just unkind to someone. And you can say, okay, that’s done. What am I going to do now? I’m going to process that for a minute, see why I did it, try to figure out how to not do that very thing again. And then I’m going to direct my mind, my brain, back to what I want to be working on. […] 

And I think that being a little bit more intentional with your brain as a muscle is a huge, easy win for just about all of us, whether it’s a cognitive thing we’re doing, physical thing, whatever. But you know, the fact that it took me 50-some years to learn that, tells me, at least for me, it’s pretty hard. 

The second is an interview on the Longform podcast from 2018 with another artist, Liana Finck. In it, she describes having evolved her drawing style, from slow and careful, to fast. The podcast host, Evan Ratliff, asks why. She answers:

[…] I decided that I didn’t want to redo things a million times anymore. It’s just, it’s a sin, I think. And so I started drawing very fast. So what people think of as my style is me drawing really fast, and it’s a way to combat the perfectionism. 

Ratliff asks why she calls it a sin. Finck says that a preoccupation with perfectionism is like circular thinking…

It’s this very, very minor thing that’s not even like a real bad thing that’s just getting in the way of you being a person. And it’s kind of a way of incapacitating yourself so that you don’t contribute to the world at all. And I think it’s a way certain people are kept down. And if you indulge in it, you’re collaborating with the people who want to keep you down or the forces that want to keep you down.

I find these thoughts so instructive.

Drawing

I find drawing from memory a challenge. It can lead me to think I have a terrible memory, and to give up (still at the stage of what Martin Salisbury calls “the inevitably demoralizing early results” in Drawing for Illustration). But Andrew Tan’s recent Youtube captures an encouraging tip.

Holiday card tip

I 100% agree with Caroline Chambers advice, having adopted the practice of asking a friend to take our picture for many of our Christmas cards in the past.  

Lamp posts (or one thing leads to another)

I liked this video spotted a few weeks ago shared online… Then Dense Discovery  shared a link to Thomas Moes’ project “52 Weeks of Obsessions” which lead to “Why did we stop building places we want to live in?” which summarizes an article by Nathan J. Robinson. 

I think that’s why I’m especially happy to notice that the improvements being made on the University of Manitoba campus are looking pretty. Look at these lamp-posts! 

Eating

This week I made “Roasted Salmon with Lentils” from Dorie Greenspan’s Around my French Table, satisfying a craving for the “hominess” of this meal, which is simple and tasty. The recipe can be found here.

Postcards 

Winnipeg has been getting lots of rain this fall… I’m happy for the trees. This autumnal humidity brings no mosquitoes with it, only saturated scenes and maybe more mushrooms.

And although I should restrain myself and stick to just one postcard, I can’t help but include these willow trees… Their slender silvery leaves almost make them look soft from a distance. But their trunks? Their strangely wavy branches? It looks like they caught cotton candy clouds in their net.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 34)

Death by execution

I finished reading A Place of Greater Safety this week and transcribed a dozen passages. The book is very long, and having to edit my own thesis makes me reflect on how much of a labour it must have been for Mantel to edit some 800 pages. Nonetheless, there are two lengthier quotes I really liked on the subject of the guillotine. Mantel neatly describes the first execution in 1762 for which the guillotine is used:

April 25, 1762 - Scientific and Democratic Execution of Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, highway robber.

There are bigger crowds than for any ordinary execution, and an air of anticipation. The executioners, of course, have been practising with dummies; they look quite buoyant, and they are nodding to each other, putting each other on their honour not to make a blunder. Yet there’s nothing to fear, the machine does everything. It is mounted on a scaffold, a big frame with a heavy blade. The criminal ascends with his guards. He is not to suffer, because in France the age of barbarism is over, superseded by a machine, approved by a committee.

Moving quickly, the executioners surround the man, bind him to a plank, and slide it forward; swoop of the blade, a soft thud, and a sudden carpet of blood. The crowd sighs, its members look at each other in disbelief. It is all over so soon, there is no spectacle. They cannot see that the man can be dead. One of Sanson’s assistants looks up at him, and the master executioner nods. The young man lifts the leather bag into which the head has fallen, and picks out the dripping contents. He holds the head up to the crowd, turning slowly to each quarter to show the empty, expressionless face. Good enough. They are placated. A few women pick up their children so that they can see better. The dead man’s trunk is cut free and rolled into a big wicker basket to be taken away; the severed head is placed between the feet.

All in all, including holding up the head (which will not always be necessary), it has taken just five minutes. The master executioner estimates that the time could be cut almost by half, if time were ever important. He and his assistants and apprentices are divided over the new device. It is convenient, true, and humane; you cannot believe that the man feels any pain. But it looks so easy; people will be thinking that there is no skill in it, that anyone can be an executioner. The profession feels itself undermined. Only the previous year, the Assembly had debated the question of capital punishment, and the popular deputy Robespierre had actually pleaded for it to be abolished. They said he still felt strongly about the question, was hopeful of success. But that deep-thinking man, M. Sanson, feels that M. Robespierre is out of step with public opinion, on this point. (p 416-7)

Then, 300 pages later, we, the reader, are in 1793 and Mantel enters the head of the executioner and delivers his point of view. It's not neat anymore.

His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. The kind of money he can offer doesn’t attract people to the work. He has to pay for his own cord for binding the clients, and for the big wicker baskets to take the corpses away afterwards. A first they’d thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there were problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes. People down there don’t realize, but he sometimes gets splashed right up to his knees.

It’s heavy work. If you get someone who’s tried to do away with himself beforehand, he can be in a mess, maybe collapsed through poison or loss of blood, and you can strain your back trying to drag him into position under the blade. Recently Citizen Fouquier insisted they guillotine a corpse, which everybody thought was a lot of unnecessary work. Again, take someone who’s crippled or deformed; they can’t be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can’t see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he’d have fewer problems, but it’s surprising how few of them fall into all those categories. The citizens who live nearby complain that he doesn’t put down enough sawdust to soak up the blood, and the smell becomes offensive. The machine itself is quiet, efficient, reliable; but of course he has to pay the man who sharpens the knife.

He’s trying to make the operation as efficient as he can, get the speed up. Fouquier shouldn’t complain. Take the Brissotins; twenty-one, plus the corpse, in thirty-six minutes flat. He couldn’t spare a skilled man to time it, but he’d got a friendly spectator to stand by with his watch: just in case he heard any complaints.

In the old days the executioner was esteemed; he was looked up to. There was a special lady to prevent people calling him rude names. He had a regular audience who came to see skilled work, and they appreciated any little troubles he took. People came to executions because they wanted to; but some of these old women, knitting for the war effort, you can see they’ve been paid to sit there, and they can’t wait to get away and drink up the proceeds; and the National Guardsmen, who have to attend, are sickened off after a few days of it.

Once the executioner had a special Mass said for the soul of the condemned; but you couldn’t do that now. They’re numbers on a list now. You feel that before this death had distinction; for your clients it was a special, individual end. For them you had risen early and prayed and dressed in scarlet, composed a marmoreal face and cut a flower for your coat. But now they come in carts like calves, mouths sagging like calves’ and their eyes dull, stunned into passivity by the speed with which they’ve been herded from their judgement to their deaths; it is not an art any longer, it is more like working in a slaughterhouse. (p 724-5)

The idea of capital punishment, and the use of a guillotine, can feel distant, but the latest season of Revisionist History and the discussion of capital punishment by lethal injection seems to be showing that the idea of having "improved" it is illusory. 

Mr Enzo

Our dog sits tall and dignified, and places his paws so neatly between his front legs. See our collection of decorative gourds on the table? But wait... is that a freely roaming cat outside? Is that terrier wearing A RAINCOAT? Forget the pose! Forget the neatly placed paws! It's time to howl with indignation!

He is the dog who thinks we buy pillows from IKEA just for him.

Overheard

On People I Mostly Admire, guest Frances Arnold describes when she became interested in chemistry:

I think I got a D in Chemistry when I was at Princeton, and I wasn't at all interested in it, so I didn't spend any time with it. But then when I was a graduate student and I loved enzymes, Chemistry suddenly became fascinating. So it was the context. We don't give young people enough context for them to become fascinated about getting into the nitty gritty.

Feeling vs Acting

On a rebroadcast episode of Freakonomics, titled “Can We Break Our Addiction to Contempt”, guest Arthur Brooks describes what he means by love:

What I'm talking about is the love that we manage, that we make metacognitive. So love is a verb. It is to will the good of the other as other. What is love not? It's not a feeling. And this is incredibly important to remember because in our modern culture, we tend to [...] over valorize feelings, which tends to throw us like bits of jetsum on the surf. And we're getting thrown around a lot, but it makes our lives have less quality, quite frankly, and it makes us bitter and angry and it makes us suffer a lot more than we need to.

Sometimes, to break loose of a bout of procrastination, I google for help. This Harvard Business Review article had the reminder I needed... I shouldn’t take myself seriously when I don't “feel” like doing something... I should just do it. Just like Kate Bingaman-Burt writes, “You don't need to feel creative to be creative”. (Here)

Food

Two weeks ago, we celebrated Thanksgiving (on Sunday October 12th!) and 10 minutes before our guests arrived with their well-wishes and bottle of wine, the power went out in our neighbourhood. We were surprisingly well-prepared (stuffing made the night before, pie chilling in the fridge since the morning, scalloped potatoes assembled, chickens buttered and stuffed with onions) so that all we did was transport everything to Christian's mom's condo and cook it there. And good thing... the power was out from 3:50 to 6:20.

Here we are each with our own set of headphones, listening to our own thing, as blithely unaware cooks prepping the components of a meal ahead of time. (Christian is assembling a lasagna for the next day.)

For dessert, we had A Pumpkin Chiffon Pie from Canal House Cooks Everyday, made with a regular pie crust (rather than the ginger snap one suggested). Our family and guests prefer it to the traditional pie that calls for cream cheese in the filling, because this version, made with gelatin and egg whites, feels much lighter. (Recipe here, thanks to The Splendid Table.) 

In the spirit of Halloween

The pop-up store by the same name contains not even a glimmer of the delight I feel watching this short video (Instagram) of Jessica Lowe’s creation of an armadillo costume for her 7-year-old.

Postcards

It's such a pretty time of year at Henteleff Park...

Condo-building progresses with The Banks at 1918 St. Mary's Road and 1920 SMR apartments right beside. 

Frost has fringed these flowers so prettily!

The milkweed looks lovely in its decay.

Happy Sunday!

P.S. A little thought for my brother-in-law who's hunkered-down in Port Antonio as the island faces hurricane Melissa. (We visited in 2024.)

A week on Sunday (no. 33)

Grace

Recently, listening to the latest season of Revisionist History (The Alabama Murders) Malcolm Gladwell describes a particular group of Protestants (Church of Christ) as being especially strict. One of the words he uses, in making his point, is “grace”. He uses it in contrast to shame, or rather, he says that when you feel a lot of shame, it can sometimes be because there is a lack of grace:

When you’re in a context of overwhelming shame, it can do terrifying things to the psyche.

In the absence of any sort of constructive grace, and I don’t mean by that, some flabby sense of, oh, everything’s-ok-grace, but some sort of constructive sense of grace, […] it can quickly lead you to all sorts of madness. […]

What [Lee C. Camp] was saying, and what many others in the Church of Christ came to believe, was that their church, particularly their church in that era, 40, 50 years ago, did not understand grace.

[…] Because in the absence of grace, there is no relief from transgression.

But grace is greater than just “relief from transgression”. It reminded me of the end of an episode of This is Actually Happening… A doctor named Tony Dajer talked about a patient he helped on the day of the Twin Tower attack. The patient had been transferred to another hospital and Dajer decided to visit him, to “have a face, to know of somebody that we had taken care of that I could get to know a little more.” The patient had been rendered paraplegic, and Dajer feared that the patient’s wife would be distraught… Instead,

the wife shows up, and it was probably the most unexpected moment of grace in my whole life. She was just, “look, you saved him. Whatever time I had with him, without you, he wouldn’t even be here” and just left us speechless. She was radiant with gratitude and love and “oh, my God, what you guys must have gone through on 9-11,” and “thank you for saving my husband.”

The husband died a few months later, but the doctor and that woman kept in touch. Dajer says:

she visits every now and then, and it’s a touchstone that keeps me connected and forgiven and understanding of what happened. […] What she showed me was that even in the depths of her grief, that somehow her love for him spilled over to us was almost a miracle. That sense of her taking care of us when it’s supposed to be completely the other way around was what was so powerful.

I have never seen another human being so represent what grace means. It’s a human standard that because she can do it, means it can be done, and it is possible to be that way.

The definition of grace in the OED starts with its theological origin. It is “benevolence […], bestowed freely and without regard to merit”. And benevolence is the “disposition to do good, […] to promote the happiness of others”. Grace can also be the expression of gratitude (Thanksgiving is “action de grâce” in French, a literal “giving grace”!). Considering all this, grace feels like an especially potent word and something to aspire to. Grace heals… not just the person who receives it, but the person who chooses to bestow it.

Whereas that doctor found that it stopped him in his tracks, an experience which he gifts listeners of the podcast with the words to translate the intensity of the feeling, I think we aren’t granted such profundity every day… Most days, I suspect, grace flows, if it is unobstructed, like a little stream. I think it can look as mundane as a man taking care of his father with Alzheimer’s, a strength hidden in the willingness of his care for his family despite the merit of his freedom having been unfairly judged. That’s what came to mind listening to In the Dark’s season 2 update, here.

(Grace, previously mentioned.)  

Keeping a diary

I liked what Peter Elbow writes about keeping a diary in his book Writing Without Teachers:

One of the functions of a diary is to create the interaction between you and symbols on paper. If you have strong feelings and then write them down freely, it gives you on the one hand some distance and control, but on the other hand it often makes you feel those feelings more. For you can often allow yourself to feel something more if you are not so helpless and lost in the middle of it. So the writing helps you feel the feeling and then go on to feel the next feelings. Not be stuck. (p. 56)

(I also like how the colour of my sticky notes perfectly matches the pages in this book!)

Food (the subject)

Sometimes, things connect in a delightful way… First, there’s the mild curiosity over the old recipes you can come across while browsing newspaper archives. You kind of wonder, half in passing, if that dish, whose black and white picture is rendered in ink blots, would actually taste good today. 

This recipe, featured in July 1956, is a frozen dessert. It has a crust made of pulverized sugary cereal and butter. The filling is milk, cream, almond extract and instant pudding whipped together for a minute and then set to freeze for 4 hours. It is called a Frozen Royal Pie. Who knows? Maybe it’s delicious! (This is also the newspaper edition that features Christian’s grandpa’s death on page 4.)

Then second, by chance, a podcast asks the same question, going further into the past, and answering with a bit more academic rigour. (At one point in the podcast, the guest, Marieke Hendricksen, muses about one of their experiments, “it also brought home to me that because people ate so many fermented foods, they must have had a higher histamine tolerance than we had.”)

But wait! There’s a third link! There’s this story of Rosie Grant (This is Taste podcast) who collected recipes carved into gravestones and lovingly gathered them into a cookbook titled To Die For: A Cookbook of Gravestone Recipes. She’s been documenting her discoveries (Instagram: Ghostly Archive) and when asked about any changes of perspective she had since beginning the project, she answered:

Oh my gosh, so much appreciation for our home cooks. […] On the flip side [of professional chefs] there are people who are just like everyday cooks who really love food. 

They use food to show love. They use it to celebrate someone’s birthday or to celebrate a holiday and bring people together. And there’s a real, like a labor side and gift side to it as well. […] 

Every day I just feel like I have so much appreciation for even my own family members who use food to not only nourish me, but give me some of my best childhood memories to connect me with others. 

I like food best when I’m with a loved one or friend and we’re having dinner or we’re cooking. It’s just given me a lot more of a sense of how it connects us together.”

Eating 

Would you like to see this Nutella croissant from Le Croissant, where I was invited for lunch earlier this week? I was one bite in to my half before my (kind, less voracious) lunch partner suggested a picture of our meal. It was too late for the muffuletta sandwich… But the table decorations were cute!

This week, I made Tikka Masala from The Huckle and Goose Cookbook, a recipe filed away for occasions when I’d need to use up garden tomatoes that were all together ripening, ripening, ripening.  

The boys tried one of their uncles’ favourite desserts… a slice of Wafer Pie from Salisbury House (Instagram). It might not win top spot in their heart, but they didn’t detest it either.

And, in the spirit of the season, I picked up this cookie mix from the Bruxelles General Store last week, made it and served the cookies with a cinnamon glaze to the kids gathered at our house for a playdate. 

PostcardS

Fall is advertised for its colour, but pictures from walks this week advertise its texture instead… the silver pearls of a heavy dew, the ragged cutout shape of maple leaves on the ground, and the fuzzy softness of a plant going to seed…

Happy Sunday! Happy Thanksgiving!

A week on Sunday (no. 32)

Quote

Listening to an interview with Arundhati Roy lead me to reading her short essay titled “The End of Imagination”. Published in 1998, she wrote it in response to India's testing of nuclear weapons. 

I liked these two paragraphs in particular:

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It's over and done with. All we can do is to change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don't. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn't matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way. (...)

The nuclear bomb is the most anti-democratic, anti-national, anti-human, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is four billion, six hundred million year old. 

It could end in an afternoon.

Picturesque

I remember a university class in English literature that featured poetry by Wordsworth and Byron and the idea of their seeking "the picturesque". On Tuesday, we went on a similar quest and visited Bruxelles, a town with a church resembling Aubigny's, and a small grocery store. We found the rock indicating the town's original location, climbed the hill where the town began and commented on the view.

(This was following the footsteps a friend and I traced together last year.) We visited Cardinal too, where the little church is maintained, just like it was when we visited 21 years ago as a couple.

And then we struggled a little to find St. Lupicin, eventually did, and then went up and down the scenic, sunken, winding Snow Valley Road. Along it we discovered Leary's Brickworks, obeyed the sign and looked it up later. It's a long defunct brickmaking business that nonetheless has some attractive ruins. (The chimney seen from the road could be mistaken for a piece of modern art.)   

Happiness

It's easier to be annoyed and grim and dissatisfied and worried and blue and verklempt than it is to be happy and hopeful. I think that's why I so appreciated this bit from the Blackbird Spyplane newsletter that quotes an article (from May of 2020) on P.G. Wodehouse, whose author, Rivka Galchen, writes: “Wodehouse had a rarer trait, too: a capacity for remaining interested and curious, even in a setting of deprivation. His resilient happiness, to me, remains heroic, and more essentially who he was.”

Blackbird Spyplane authors Jonah and Erin agree with Galchen. In thinking about happiness they write:

[…] there are different forms of happiness, aren’t there?

In the same way that extravagance isn’t inherently immoral, neither is happiness inherently moral. And it feels reasonable to suggest that, in order for happiness to count as moral — which is to say, for happiness to count as truly nourishing — it must have a pro-social component. It’s got to be based in an awareness, rather than an avoidance, of how much we owe to others.

Their reflection makes me think about another example Galchen offers of Wodehouse in her article... In the diary he kept while interned in a German-run camp in 1940, he writes “Met cook and congratulated him on today’s soup. [...] He was grateful, because his professional pride had been wounded by grumblers saying there wasn’t enough. He said he could have made it more by adding water, which would have spoiled it.” 

It's that tiny act of gratitude, the example of going above what I could imagine my own natural inclination to grumble, or be quiet, how that lead to a moment of... what? Beauty? Kinship? Surprise? However it might be defined, it contains a bit of delight that would otherwise have been absent... would have been denied the chance to exist. 

TV watching

We started watching Friday Night Lights in May of this year, and could reliably count on feeling relaxed with this series "that centered itself completely on decency" as Glen Weldon says here. Having finished (appropriately) on Friday, we started The Eternaut and some minutes into this sci-fi that begins with mysterious atmospheric conditions, a storm broke over Winnipeg with thunder and lightning, making it feel particularly eerie.

Baking

I'm always willing to try a new recipe if it leads to more effectively tackling garden produce, and Deb Perelman recently published a chocolate version of her Ultimate Zucchini Bread. I baked it on Wednesday and served it on Thursday and took a poll on Friday and the family agrees... it did not beat the UZB! But hey... it's not like they're complaining about the leftovers... 

Postcard

It's the time of year when the trees de-leaf and reveal... the river beyond.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 31)

I don’t have much to list this week, except the the simple things gathered on the daily morning walks… Like milkweed seeds, once dried after a rain, that show such silky softness:

Or, a landscape transformed by fog…

Suddenly, in the moistened air, strands of spider webs are revealed everywhere…

Now it’s the wild field that is aflame, and the river behind it has disappeared:

The sun’s rays become a gentle softness…

The next day, walking the same path, you can gaze up, startled by the contrast of yellow and blue, and find the sky cleaved in two, and seagulls so high that in the camera viewfinder you can mistake the glints of sunlight on their wings for leaves being blown off the trees…

These are the little things that, being so anodyne, are what soothe the soul.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 30)

Intro

The past week was a busy one, and on weeks like that, it's less about enumerating the things that leant it weight, than about gathering the moments of light that peeped through.

Listening

My podcast feed has been full of inspiring interviews...

First, there was Stephen Dubner on Debbie Millman's “Design Matters” podcast who said:

Some things are abundant that are bad. But then there's one thing that I think is rare, is too rare, that's a good thing, and that thing is courage. I just think people need to understand that they need to give themselves permission to be courageous about everything, about who they are, about what they make, about what they think." [...] "I think courage is the precursor to confidence.

He also talked about using the brain as a muscle and choosing not to ruminate. 

Second, I've been enjoying seeing Samin Nosrat's return to the public eye with the publication of a second recipe book. Even more, I've appreciated how kindly she's shared pertinent bits of her biography with hosts. Recently, there was an episode on Milk Street Radio for example. 

The third interview encapsulates the gratitude I have for podcasts. Life can be so busy as to prevent me from reading for fun, but podcasts such as the ones mentioned are a gift... just like Terry Gross says on Sam Fragoso’s podcast “Talk Easy”, when she thinks back to radio shows she enjoyed:

I also realized when you're doing something that isn't really engaging your mind, how wonderful it is to have something to listen to, that your eyes aren't required for, but you can feed yourself on it. It keeps you emotionally and mentally fed. 

Floral

Fall bouquets can be vibrantly filled with orange and red... or they can take on more muted tones, like this one, with ornamental kale and cabbage.

Eating Out

There are many good lunch spots in Winnipeg, and most of the fun is in getting around to experience for yourself a random TikTok recommendation. This week friends and I went to Next Door at 116 Sherbrook for the first time. It was a 10/10 for atmosphere, kind staff and delicious mango jam!

At the opposite end of “lunch out with friends in an artsy part of town” is an old establishment uniquely favoured by my mother-in-law... It’s Red Top on St. Mary’s Road, where she is such a loyal customer that they will fry up a plate of eggs and sausage for her at 6:45 in the evening. It was a surprisingly cozy feeling to be sitting in a booth while darkness descended and the skies continued to rain down on us. (The sausage btw was my favourite ever served in a restaurant so far...)

Postcard

Isn't fall pretty here?

Hope you are well. Happy Sunday!

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. 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. 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!