A week on Sunday, no 41

Welcome to this weekly edition, where I’ll jump straight to things I’ve appreciated this last week… 

Enjoying

• A board game: The artwork on Transmissions was what drew my son’s attention to the box, and what lead us to buying the game as a birthday present. We finally pulled it out, watched the Youtube tutorials, and spent an evening immersed in play. The game’s design didn’t feel like anything we’d tried before - points are tallied once a resource runs out - and the objective isn’t the kind that has you mentally calculating your points and comparing yourself to your opponents as in Catan for example. I liked reading this interview with its designer, Adam West, here.  

• Make your art. This is the title of John Green’s YouTube video, and, just like the little essays in The Anthropocene Reviewed (the podcast he hosted from 2018 to 2020 - here) I appreciate the reminder. (here) 

• Uncertainty. In the same vein is this blog post from The Marginalian, which I found comforting to read… It is titled “The Creative Power of Uncertainty”. I like the phrase “a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”

• Home remedy: I caught a cold last week. I ate a cookie one afternoon and then my throat was sore. In the evening I made Julia Turshen’s “Cold Elixir” (a recipe here) and discovered its warming effect on my dulled sinuses. 

• Back spasm: Muscle-relaxing pills are great for getting to sleep when I get a back spasm, but what helps me recover are short daily yoga sessions like those offered by Adriene Mishler. (This one in particular is a frequent repeat.) It doesn’t only stretch my muscles, it reminds me how to move in a way that protects my back. 

• Gratitude for the small things: A perfect poem as an oblique nod to the Thanksgiving holiday here in Canada. It’s titled “Love Like Salt” by Lisel Mueller. 

Walking the dog

Leaves have turned and are falling. The last bit of colour on display until everything goes bare…

Scenery is a jumble of tall grass, untrimmed brush, and trees, but here I spotted a new bird house!

And on an overcast day, a calm river backdrop to highlight the silhouettes.

Happy Sunday!

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.