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.

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!

A week on Sunday (No. 7)

Thoughts

I like the word resentment. I like how it is defined in the OED as “a sense of grievance” and I like the word “grievance” because it expresses a “state of things which is felt to be oppressive”. I never really thought of resentment before, and thinking about it now feels like the discovery of a unique blend, when before I’d been only thinking of varietals. (I like the comparison to wine.) (I also like the comparison to wine because wine takes time and resentment seems to be uniquely tied up with time.) When I google resentment, it assumes it’s a feeling I have in my marriage. When I try to add time, it assumes I’m a resentful caregiver. Maybe sometimes I am. Mostly, I wish an old person wasn’t resentful about aging. But there’s lots of things that are hard about aging that I should take into consideration, before being annoyed by their complaining. They complain. I wish they didn’t. It makes me feel ineffective. But feeling ineffective, argues Flannery O’Connor, is the nature of a kind of suffering. And that kind of suffering has merit. “We help overcome this lack of effectiveness simply by suffering on account of it.” So, I suppose that getting old and complaining about it should not be so harshly judged, because Flannery O’Connor says as much in a letter about another old person: “The harshness with which you speak of Caroline is not justified. She may be basically irreligious but we are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord, nor gracefulness. She tries and tries violently and has a great deal to struggle against and to overcome.” So there. If I don’t like an old person’s grievances, that’s too bad. They should be allowed to have them. And I should hold my peace.

Food

This week, we had Caroline Chambers’ Sweet Potato and Beef Flautas and they were delicious!

Enjoying

How this poem, Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye is like a short story.

Postcards

In the spirit of amateur photographers from the Golden Age of mail by post, here are two pictures  from my walks this week… Enzo, when startled, deploys himself like a four-legged tripod, limbs rigid, nose pointed at the offending thing…. In this case, it’s a Christmas tree thrown onto the river, and this beagle doesn’t know what to make of it.



This is the progress of a condo called The Banks. Two and a half years ago (July 30, 2022) it was a recently cleared lot and the fences had not yet gone up so that Christian and I could take a bike ride and look at the view sitting on a giant log, imagining the ghosty presence of families who once lived there.

Orange

One thing leads to another…

I thought I’d go walking without bringing along a camera. Who cares? I thought… I’m not a photographer.

But I kind of missed it. 

Then I thought that really, a camera is only there to assist my writing. I’m not shooting for the sake of a picture. I’m shooting for the sake of a story. 

I like seeing things over time… But accruing the observations takes a lot of time. 

Right now? 

This week I photographed trees that have been marked for removal, likely  because of Dutch Elm Disease… 

Once on a walk, I came across a plume of black smoke to discover a city worker supervising the gasoline-fed fire on the riverbank of a pile of newly cut wood from an infected tree. 

The numbers nailed to these trunks suggest these trees are inventoried on a list somewhere… a unique distinction among their tree peers of being singled out because they’re sick.

They stand out against blue skies, the white ground and the brown in between. No monarch butterfly wings, no dazzle of fall leaves. Orange is hidden away under jackets unless you’re hunting, in imported seasonal citrus protected indoors; some navel oranges set aside, if you want to bake, for a nice loaf.  

Friday Five

1

Podcast I loved this week's episode of This American Life... These are short paragraphs-long stories, Ira Glass says… and yet how powerful the humble paragraph! As a tutor, I often encourage students to look at paragraph-construction tips, because, in academic writing, they can follow a pattern: make a point, have examples to develop the point, conclude the thought and lead to the next point. On This American Life, guest Etgar Keret shared pieces of his mother's character and turned paragraphs about her into art.

2

Music Tom Allen's CBC programme "About Time" featured "Oqiton" by Jeremy Dutcher. The song is based on a wax cylinder recording of a Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik) song, in a language that had (then) long been outlawed. It's beautiful and haunting.

3

Deodorant Megababe has a slew of products and I'm two weeks into daily application of "The Smoothie Deo" post "Space Bar Underarm Soap" lathering, rinsing, drying. I smell good, even at the end of a busy day wearing heat-tech turtlenecks. Natural products make one feel extra lady-like when they work because they exude environmentalist virtue perhaps... Wearing something that smells like a chocolate filling (coconut, lime and bilberry) feels lighter than applying men's extra-strength antiperspirant, even though, to be clear, aluminium is fine and detoxing one's armpits is a dubious exercise. 

4

Food I made Refrigerator Bran Muffins, the idea of this recipe being that the batter can be safely kept in the refrigerator for weeks so that, for weeks, you can treat yourself to freshly-made muffins with little prep. For my mother-in-law, I baked them all at once. The recipe made 44 muffins, and I learned you don't need to fill the empty wells of a muffin tin with water.

5

Winnipeg Scenery This week's weather brought nice temperatures and cloudy-grey mornings. Enzo and I tramp through the well-tramped Henteleff trail along the river. Wildlife makes itself scarce, but everywhere, there are traces of its presence... An abandoned nest in the bleached strands of grass;

Enzo's fox-like conviction that field mice are running tunnels under the snow;

a coyote, small as a dot that crosses the river behind us

and snowmen that freeze, mid-exercise as we pass by…

Happy Friday!

This is how much

A friend, on a trip to Belgium, sent me a picture of greenery. My brother-in-law on a visit to Toronto sent us a snapshot of an icing-sugar-dusting of snow. The other evening a supper-delivery person asked our kid who was standing atop a pile of snow, what he was building. “A mountain!” our son answered.

I came home from a walk Sunday and could hear the kids’ voices from the street. We have so much snow, the garage roof is our kids’ playground.

Urban observer

I’m not any good at observing nature, and if it wasn’t for my husband’s weather-watching hobby, I’d wear sweaters in summer, and uselessly carry around an umbrella when it was cloudy. But there is a thing I can observe that moves slow enough and stays large enough to follow… that is the state of urban shopping centres.

Here in the southern-most tip of Winnipeg I am five minutes from St. Vital mall which took one of its largest hits (in my subjective observation) even before the pandemic when Sears shuttered its doors and the mall eventually filled the vacancy with three new tenants: a gym, a Marshall’s and a Home Sense. I recently walked through the mall, my errands too diverse to avoid doing so, and noted the vacancies like missing teeth in a smile: no more La Senza, Thyme Maternity, Build-a-Bear or pretzel place. Gymboree has long since given up its spot to Petland.

Within less than four kilometres of my house there are two Dollarama’s - reminding me a the grim article I read a few years ago on just this subject. (It might have been this one, in Bloomberg.) The ones here replaced Pier 1 Imports and a local grocer.

Maybe less than ten years ago, a new outlet strip mall was set up on Kensaton with stores like Tommy Hilfiger, Reitman’s, and Danier. Storefronts have changed. Just recently one switched from clothing to skin care. But this string of outlet stores face their own extinction since the appearance of the Outlet Collection on Sterling Lyon Parkway. I’m not sure how retailers managed to conclude that this was a wonderful idea, two decades into the 2000’s. I tend to be of the pessimistic opinion that malls are dying or dead, but somehow developers in Winnipeg have declared otherwise. A beautiful mall with sky-high ceilings and aisles that anticipated social distancing before a single bat ever coughed, opened and became part of the landscape like a giant mushroom. It does feel like the final stages of retail, described here as a kind of canabalization.

There’s a time warp though, and I’m not sure what to think of it. You can find articles that say that retail is dying from years ago, and yet things are still being built and bought and sold here. Are we slow? Are the people who note the trend mistaken in their conclusion? Is it a kind of pessimism, or is it that old capitalist ideas are still being clung to? I don’t know… Hence the observations.

Week 1 of Covid-19 - the plan

The kids were in school this last week, all the way until the end, as numbers dwindled and class time became more like fun. Manitoba’s numbers are exceptionally low right now for some reason, and so there is an odd sense of feeling safe while still practicing social distancing and having a week to adjust to the idea of living in isolation.

There is, I realize, a wealth of ideas online, of things to do with children at home. I’m grateful for that, of course, but for now, I’m trying to strike a balance between early-days optimism and a begrudging dutifulness. The only way I know how to do this is by having a plan. Part of the plan includes a modified schedule, and while schedules have popped up everywhere, and the school our children attend has emailed one for each child, ours is a modified routine. It feels silly to talk about this when it is THE solution everyone else has either discovered, shared or bucked. But our household has always run with a routine in place. Not having to negotiate bedtime, piano practice, or the end of tv-watching is one thing, but mostly it allows me to bank on small oases of quiet; early-morning, time in the afternoon, an evening of peace.  A schedule here is less about having something to do and more about managing expectations, both mine and the kids’.

Like I said, there is an abundance of creative ideas online already. Against that great wave of potential endless stimulation, I have erected what I imagine is a kind of mental breakwater. There are warnings everywhere that this isolation is not a matter of a few weeks, but more likely months, and so I’m arming myself by storing up the ideas and staggering their appearance. Unlike creative writing and made-for-television stories, where the modus operandi is to spend out, my impulse with the kids is about spacing the fun and deploying a variety of tactics.

J&O-609-DSC_8093-Edit_websize.jpg

So this is the plan… Our family is comprised of two adults: one grade-six teacher, one university student with part-time tutoring and administrative jobs, and three kids; one in grade five, one in grade one, one in kindergarten. Mornings will be for school-type work. Fortunately the school division is doing a brilliant job of getting organized and will be providing revisions, lessons and work. I picked up supplementary school books at Librarie à la Page. Naturally, there will be a difference in workloads between the three, but we’re keeping it studious in the morning, and I have improvised a teacher’s desk for myself, for you know, parallel work, in theory. Not only is the school-division enabling this approach, but we re-arranged areas in our house to mean business. I covered the dining room table with thick plastic, added decorative colour-swatches underneath and made territorial delimitations with a fair 26 inches allotted to each child. I’ve sharpened pencils, pencil-crayons, and bought fresh markers so that the ‘tools’ feel inviting, even though the aquamarine is inexplicably chewed-up.

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There’ll be recess in our yard and a free-period before lunch for reading, or play, or hobbies like crochet. I have a medium-sized pile of books I scrounged up from the library before it closed and will dose their appearance carefully, carefully. I do hope the libraries will come up with some acceptable way to lend out books because our little family of bookworms (Christian excepted) worries more about lack of reading material than about three-ply.

Permit me a little word on activity books? I made a few last year for our weeks-long road trip to BC and they were a very successful effort. I made them using sketchbooks that lay flat when opened. I then took apart already-made activity books and split them, by interests and difficulty-levels, between the three. You might think that taping pages into a scrapbook diminishes the number of activities that can be done, and while this is true and sometimes there are choices that have to be made between pages, there is something about customizing a book to a child that makes it especially effective. Without a word from me, colouring-pages were more carefully filled-in and stickers placed next to their respective activities were properly applied. Their appreciation was an encouragement and so, at the St-Vital book sale in September, I picked up a pile of barely-used activity and colouring books in anticipation of the next road trip. There will be no road trip this summer, and instead there is a pandemic to get through and so, the books have come out of their storage and I’ve been at work assembling new ones with new sketchbooks and a box of double-sided photo squares. I admit that it’s something I like to do. I like picking activities, organizing mini-themes across pages, and decluttering (sometimes) cheap page layouts. I like making the sketchbook all fat with possibility. This time, the covers are identified not with their names but with their favourite colours. They were assembled over a few days this last week and do still contain some blank pages.

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But back to the plan, for lunch. I’m pretty sure I’ll continue to prepare lunches the night before as if they were still going to school and leave the nicer non-packed lunches for weekends and holidays when Christian is home. I imagine it will be more efficient this way, and there will be more time for proper hour-long walks.

There will be cookies made, as usual, and muffins too. Maybe my daughter and I will crochet side-by-side, maybe she’ll learn to type. The evening will be looser, Christian will be home and the usual things will happen… piano and television, screens until supper, and clamour while things cook. So that’s the plan, in part… we’ll see how it goes!