Tuna on peaches

Seated on the plush leather couch in her yellow living room, where a rubber plant has grown past its stakes to the ceiling, we discuss food: what was eaten for supper, what pre-packaged find was a success, what in her country of origin is a staple meal-snack-appetizer: “You take tuna and mix it with some mayonnaise and spoon it in the centre of a sliced canned peach. Pêches-au-thon! It’s familiar to everyone in Belgium!”

As I walked the dog over leaves cast to the ground, still and dampened from an earlier light rain, the air smells good and the feeling of coziness makes me want to plan supper; maybe lentil soup with home-made broth and a plate towered high with grilled cheese…

Doggy daycare

I brought Enzo to the doggy daycare under coral pastel skies, leaving filled-out forms with the woman who remembers him from when I last chanced the experiment a near year ago. Underneath the deodorizers is such a concentrated dog smell that even if I stay only moments in the building’s lobby, I am, hours later self-consciously sniffing my hair to see if this phantom-limb of a smell finds its source somewhere on me, surreptitiously having seeped-in the way a short-haired middle-aged woman once described it when a few high school friends and I were awarded a trip to a pig farm and had to strip and shower before entering and before leaving: “The smell, you cannot wash it away, you just get used to it.”

Contact-tracing A-Z

I had a particularly sociable day yesterday. It began with a funeral.

Greeters A+B, seated at a table with a list of names, took ours. Person C ushered us to a hall where chairs were spread out in pairs like little islands on a sea of blue tile. We chatted with friends S+T and S(2) came and found us, in his suit. It was his dad’s death we were helping mourn so hugs were exchanged.

After the powerpoint of pictures to music, there was the funeral mass. At the exchange of peace, we waved gentle hand motions to strangers E, F, H. After the songs sung through masks, we exchanged happy hellos with Christian’s retired colleague, G.

We went home to get to eating lunch, where, having been locked out of the house and having been forced to spend time outside in the serendipitous weather, we reunited with our children and our daughter’s two friends, M + V.

Plans were drawn up for the afternoon. I took the girls back to V’s house and chatted with V’s mom, M(2). I dropped off a glass cake pan at J’s house where she made me a turmeric latte, where we drank it outside in the warmth of the sun-soaked deck on cool wicker chairs while her kids L+M(3) played around us in the yard. Her husband, D, came home. More chitchatting ensued before I left to bring my youngest to a birthday party.

Since I missed the turn onto a street called Beaverhill, I was four minutes late and only rushed greetings were exchanged with the organizing mom L(2). Then I went to pick up my daughter at her friend’s house where her dad, J and I talked about dog-ownership. If dogs counted in contact tracing, there would have been two to add to this list, besides my own… Midnight had a cone, Piper sniffed at my pant legs and purse.

When it was time to pick up the youngest from his festive activities at an indoor gym, I exchanged a few words with waiting mothers W and X and crinkle-eyes that now passes for a smile with Y.

Tuesday, barring any surprises, my contacts will extend only to people as they live on paper.

Over-preparing

I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.

I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)

She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.

Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”

So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!

Collecting

Let’s gather a collection of trees, shall we? On my daily walks, they are landscape markers, so familiar as to be near-friends.

Here are the curved-trunk ones:

And here is this one, with circles in its bark and a bridge between its branches.

Here are trees that lean toward each other and cross and I walk under, like a dancer under a bridging of hands :

Here are trees that grow mushrooms and something mysterious under their coat of bark:

Here is a tree that has succumbed to the beavers’ months-long project.

And here are trees that make me think of lovers.

Here is a tree festooned with a vine, like a garland, or a scarf…

Steps to a cement sidewalk

Getting a new cement sidewalk is an investment that requires proportional dissatisfaction with the existing state of walking surface and perhaps this is best summarized by the following picture:

If some detail were to be added it would be this: once upon a time, it used to rain in Winnipeg to the extent that the city had a certain reputation for mosquitoes. All this rain made the little circle paving stones a somewhat romantic path to and from the garage, even if, come winter, they were impossible to shovel. The rain ceased, and grass retreated like a receding hairline so that the circular paving stones seemed to float like forlorn islands in a sea of dirt… occasionally mud. So, this year, fed up entirely, we called a cement company for a quote and penciled-in the end of August for the beginning of work. We subsequently learned that getting a cement sidewalk involves a number of steps, the first of which is the digging.

After the digging come the forms.

Sometimes the plan needs modification because the little island of grass that Enzo likes sleeping on has too tight a curve for the form builder. Besides, he thinks it looks weird.

Once that little snafu gets cleared up, gravel is laid, packed and watered.

Then comes rebar, like artwork. In the course of all this, the dog escapes a handful of times.

Then, the glorious day of cement-pouring arrives and your son, who loves construction and imagines himself growing up to be a construction worker, comes home and asks you to tell him all about it. “There’s not much to say…” you apologetically reply… The truck was on the street and the crew brought in cement a wheel-barrow-full at a time, while you hid out in the basement doing work and staying out of the way, mostly because you’re shy.

A day later, lines are cut and the day after that, the forms are taken off.

Then Christian makes a run to the greenhouse for dirt and sod and the sidewalk is made to look like it was always there.

We both congratulate ourselves for hiring professionals.

Friday report

The end of the week always feels celebratory even when it is mundane. Newsletters come in to my e-mail with roundups and I sit in the glow of my desk lamp to read through a few. So far, Ann Friedman had me read an essay by Nereya Otieno and Otieno had me listen to a song titled “Too Many Birds”.

I texted Christian earlier today, before running errands and asked if he preferred Waffles with Roasted Applesauce or Pasta with Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter. “Pasta!” he answered. These meals are simple and we love them.

Christian is laying sod, the kids will be put to bed, the laundry taken out of the dryer, the dog put in his crate, a drink poured and then we’ll settle and watch Netflix and go to bed.

History

It’s funny how we talk about events… My mother-in-law, who turns 84 this week, will say “Never have I seen this before in all my 84 years” or “Never have I heard of this before, and I’m 84 years old!” and we’ll laugh and marvel at the marvellous, or sigh and bemoan the unpleasant.

I always feel a little depressed when someone says that history repeats itself… I take issue with the generalization, because I’m halfway to being an accredited historian and historians, you know, talk about nuance, and parse details, and debate causes of things.

This exchange on the most recent episode of Terrible Thanks for Asking, felt heartening. The podcast host, Nora, talked about Covid-19:  “And I think back to like, March 2020, how absolutely freaked out the kids were. We're doing all these things for the first time and we believe that there's no precedent. We kept saying “unprecedented times.” And one of the most soothing slash reassuring parts of the book, too, was that nothing is truly unprecedented, even while it is new to us, if that makes sense. Everything's a repeat of a repeat, even when we're like, “I've never seen it before. I've never seen it before.”

To which John Green answered:

“Yeah. And we've never seen it before. And I think that's important to acknowledge. But humanity has seen it before, especially when it comes to infectious disease. And I wanted to write about that, I mean, partly because I'm obsessed with infectious disease, but partly like even before the pandemic. But I wanted to write about infectious disease, in part because I wanted to look at the ways that people have responded to it in the past as a way of understanding how we're responding to it now. How did people respond to cholera in the 19th century? Well, they responded by marginalizing the already marginalized. They responded by blaming outsiders. They responded by getting angry about public health measures and quarantines. But they also responded with extraordinary generosity and real deep, profound solidarity. And seeing both those narratives be able to coexist in history helped me feel like both those narratives can also coexist for me now. Like, I can be upset with the way that we've responded to COVID-19 and the way that the pandemic is much worse than it had to be, while also really celebrating and and feeling the solidarity that people have expressed and the ways that we've understood ourselves to be bound up in each other, even when we're forced to be apart.”

(I love how TTFA offers transcripts of their podcasts!)

It reminds me of this line I read in Claire Messud’s book Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write: “It’s all already happened, somewhere, in some way. It’s all there to be retrieved. Each generation is unique, to be sure, as is each individual: and our concatenation of challenges is new in its particular configuration and in its intensity. But if we pause and listen to history and literature, we’ll find, as Louise Glück puts it in “October”, ‘you are not alone, / the poem said / in the dark tunnel.‘”

Reading list: Two books by Henry Green

How to begin: From an article in The New Yorker, “The Henry Green novel—typically portraying failures of love and understanding, and noisy with the vernacular of industrialists and Cockneys, landowners and servants—was terse, intimate, full of accident and unnerving comedy, exquisite though still exuberant, sensual and whimsical, reflexively figurative yet always surprising, preoccupied with social nuance, generational discord, and sensory phenomena while maintaining an air of abstraction, as reflected in those flighty gerund titles.”

Favourite quotes from Loving:

“So it came about next afternoon that Charley and Edith had drawn up deep leather armchairs of purple in the Red Library. A ledge of more purple leather on the fender supported Raunce’s heels next his you-and-me in a gold Worcester cup and saucer. Pointed French windows were open onto the lawn about which peacocks stood pat in the dry as though enchanted. A light summer air played in from over massed geraniums, toyed with Edith’s curls a trifle. Between the books and walls were covered cool in green silk. But she seemed to have no thought of the draught.” (p 141)

“It’s so hard for my generation to talk to yours about the things one really feels.” (p 203)

Favourite quotes from Doting:

“… a juggler walked on the small stage.
”The man started with three billiard balls. He flung one up and caught it. He flung it up again then sent a second ball to chase the first. In no time he had three, fountaining from out his hands. And he did not stop at that. He introduced, he insinuated one at a time, one more after another, and threw the exact inches higher each time to give six, seven balls room until, to no applause, he had a dozen chasing themselves up then down into his two lazy-seeming hands, each ball so precisely placed that it could be thought to follow grooves in violet air.” (p 7)

“‘The fact is’ he explained with calm ‘the minute one begins a discussion of mutual troubles or miseries, it invariably becomes a kind of fierce competition as to who, in effect, is the worse off.’” (p 52)

Reading and writing (forever!)

I must constantly trick myself into writing here, as if it were a high-wire act I was only performing for myself. I like getting to the end, having spent time fully concentrated in the act of balancing vague feelings and concrete words. I also like finding how other writers manage… top of list is Craig Mod’s recent interview for Every.to in which he says of his newsletters: “I think of them as my public sketchbooks.” Fantastic! Welcome now, to this here post, on this here blog, which happens to be, “my public sketchbook”!

Shall we discuss reading fiction? Lets! because recently, two books have mentioned it. There’s Claire Messud in Kant’s Little Prussian Heand and Other Reasons Why I Write (2020):

“We must struggle to change our institutions, but our resistance to the depravity and depletion of these times must go beyond that. It must also occur in our souls.” (p 108)

and

“Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility - immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now.” (p 109)

And there’s George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021):

“There’s a certain way of talking about stories that treats them as a kind of salvation, the answer to every problem; they are ‘what we live by,’ and so on. And, to an extent, as you can see by this book, I agree. But I also believe, especially as I get older, that we should keep our expectations humble. We shouldn’t overestimate or unduly glorify what fiction does. And actually, we should be wary of insisting that it do anything in particular.
(…)
“So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
”Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know - it really does it. That change is finite but real.
”And that’s not nothing.
”It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.” (p 382-3)

Then, to this end, Saunders makes a little list of fiction-reading benefits:

“I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.
”I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.
”I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.
”My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.
”I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).
”I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.
”I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.
”So that’s all pretty good.” (p 387-8)

Ah… Saunders… this description is delectable. I’m sorry… my appreciation for this book borders on fandom, but I can’t help it. It’s like ordering a meal at a restaurant and being so perfectly satisfied, you’d kiss your fingers, because the chef was married and because this is an acceptable form of flattery in Europe, even if you’re Canadian.

But food is also fortifying. So let’s end on writing advice. There is plenty in Saunders’ book, but this one is at the end. Saunders quotes Robert Frost, who, after listening to a long and complicated question about writing, answered “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

Saunders writes: “I love this advice. It’s exactly true to my experience. We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.
”So, don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.” (p 387)

Transitions

I don’t especially like transitions. One day it’s summer and then 
Were you expecting me to write “and then the next day…”?
Well I wasn’t going to.

In fact, the whole point of this is to say that even though 
Well
You know
One day is one thing and the next day is another thing
When it comes to the first day of school,
The preceding days are a collection of little adjustments
Like
For example,
Buying school supplies
And shoes
Additionally,
Fall jackets.

Indeed,
Besides, 
My husband goes to school ahead of the students
Of course
To prepare the class
As it happens
To buy bookcases this year
And containers to fit in their shelf spaces.
Furthermore
He goes to have meetings with other teachers
While
Apart from
Us, at home. 

And so,
To sum up
Evidently
There are days when there is no school
And there are days when there is school
But also
There are days that aren’t school days but are still filled with school preoccupations
In my opinion,
In my view
As far as I know.

"What are you reading?"

Last time I talked to my mom she asked, “what are you reading?” twice during our conversation. Here’s the complete list, now, as I sit at my desk, having ridden my bike as dark came over Winnipeg…

I just finished Motherland by Elissa Altman. This evening I’ve been scrolling through the author’s Instagram, combing it for evidence of I don’t know what… love? survival?

I’m just about done A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, having cast aside (temporarily) Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution.

I picked up Wow No Thank You because I’d like to be funnier, but I’m not sure it’s working because serious books are taking over my desk, my time… Things like Homeland to Hinterland; The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century or The Genealogy of the First Metis or Canada Post Offices 1755-1895, I mean, take your pick, they’re all very serious.

Motherland has this quote by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Weekend away

Darling,

Remember that time I spontaneously booked us a weekend at whatever chalet was affordable in Manitoba? And remember looking at the pictures and finding that it felt clean and springing for the expense that was just under what the kids’ piano lessons cost in a month?

I don’t know if you felt this way too, but the week before leaving my thoughts would go to this booking I’d made and wonder why I did it… Wasn’t it just changing scenery to do the same things as at home, with the additional job of packing and unpacking?

But then, remember? We arrived on a rainy Friday afternoon and just being somewhere else seemed to trick the brain into feeling a sort of freedom. Being somewhere else was leaving behind all the things around you that remind you what to do next. The quiet and the farms around and the distant lowing cows... The list of things to do shrinks down to food and entertainment. Exploration is the new form of passing time: the country lanes, the nearby town, the pebbled beach.

Remember how the dog kept us awake the first night? The little beagle made us feel like new parents again. The kind that, smiling with tired eyes, made us catch the other’s gaze and say, “we’re in this together, eh?”

The weekend, short as it was, time distended as it was, was one of those that cemented this growing feeling I get when we’re all together and we move about like a unit, like a little cell with its mitochondria and nucleus and all those other little pieces I once memorized in grade 11 biology class.

Just thought I’d write to say thanks. And, love.

A final word on conspiracy theories

I really like this quote… it is lifted from the conclusion of a podcast mini-series by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “Wind of Change”. I wrote it down a year ago and came across it while looking for something else. I wrote it down before I could have guessed how many new conspiracy theories I would hear. It expresses why I feel so impatient with them.

That’s the nature of a conspiracy theory, it’s impossible to prove, but also impossible to disprove, so if you have the temperament and the time you can devote yourself to solving it for the rest of your life. But if you’re a person whose livelihood depends on the slow and steady accretion of provable facts then there’s a madness in chasing a story like this. And there’s something about the moment we’re living in when everyday the nature of truth is called into question that make me feel like the stakes of solving this slightly ridiculous story are greater somehow than the story itself. (…) The rabbit hole is beautiful but it is deep.

Come walk a loop with me

My walk begins at Henteleff Park, not far from our house. For the past year, I’ve walked through it every day, and less consistently but still frequently in the years before. I’ve taken pictures of pretty skies, pretty grass, strange trees, and geese within its boundary. Walks have inspired colour palettes, landscaping ideas, and blog posts. The routine of has favoured the appreciation of seasonal change and small things. It refines a sense of noticing over time, rather than the vibrant impact of new.

Since the creation of the Henteleff Foundation in 2002, an interpretive center was added, a bathroom, a parking lot, a bulletin board and summer time employees. The bulletin board featured birds this year, and the announcement of hectares added to the park.

If you leave the wood chip trail you can find, near the dried-up Normand Creek, remnants of the park’s past inhabitants. The feeling that the park once hosted a family, and probably Métis before that, before the surge of its present-day organisation and volunteer efficiency, gives me a frisson of delight. It reminds me of one of my favourite parts of the book Treed by Ariel Gordon, in which she traces the history of the trees planted in Winnipeg and along her street and concludes: “This essay isn’t my answer; it’s an attempt to think through what it means to hold land on this scale, to shape it and change it. This essay is a windbreak - like those trees outside Alverna’s kitchen window, it is a gesture, an attempt to protect something. But make no mistake, the Arksey farm is on Indigenous land. And telling the stories of this piece of land is maybe only a gesture at reconciliation.” (p 225)

In spite of the organisation, the rallying of good efforts, the park still distinguishes itself as a wild area compared to the manicured properties of the condominiums that neighbour it on either side.

This year, the presence of summer workers is revealed with a crop of new signs, the steady work of invasive plant control and new trees and shrubs that have to be watered and protected with wire until established.

You know that you have left Henteleff Park when the wood-chip path becomes the small-gravel path and those giants from the new development of Normand Park come into view. There’s this lookout, a little apart from the path, that provides a clear view of the river. I’ve taken so many pictures from this spot…

The Normand Park trail features two playgrounds: a new one and an old one. The kids have played at both and it would take very little for me to tip into nostalgia.

The near-end of its trail snakes through a small forest that was so filled with cankerworms this spring, I once left the path to forge a new one along the less-treed river bank and almost ended up worse-off, sneaking through unfenced private-properties to find the trail again. The cankerworms then became quivering white butterflies who, for a short period, transformed this section of the path into a scintillating sight.

The Normand Park path ends here, or begins here, if you want. As an entry though, it is so discreet that I wasn’t surprised one day, when a woman walking her puppy told me that in the 30 years she’d been living in the neighbourhood, it was only in the past months that she and her husband discovered the trail.

Leaving it behind, the sound of traffic rushes to your ears, and you are back in the city. You know this because of the sidewalk, with its cracks and its weeds. And then, with a view of Tim Hortons, and maybe too the smell of its coffee and sugary pastries, it’s the almost-end of your loop.

Imperfect blog posts are defiance and joy

It’s too easy for me to be serious. Named after a saint whose portrait at nine featured a furrowed brow, I’m prone to pondering. It’s an affliction that holds me back from writing here, bogged down too quickly with a preoccupation about meaning. I’m like a beaver, constantly building dams that impeded the flow of water. But then, along comes someone like George Saunders with A Swim in a Pond in The Rain and I rediscover how refreshing the movement of water is. Right from the start, I am soothed with a line that reads: “the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.” Defiance and joy!

This morning, listening to Terrible Thanks for Asking, Anne Lamott described how our desire to help can keep someone from finding the solution for themselves. Describing something she’s learned for herself, she says “I try not to get my goodness all over people because it just keeps them shut down from the only thing that ever got anybody to wake up or get sober or get therapy or learn to eat in a healthy way which is; the willingness comes from the pain and if I’m medicating their pain for them out of my own disease of co-dependence I’m keeping them from the one thing that might help them find a much much better life.”

Years ago, our friends’ baby was born into the Neo-natal intensive care unit and, being myself young at the time, my life changed and adopted a frenzied mission to help. I drove too fast on an icy road and hit a car that cut me off, I rushed every second of my lunch hour to deliver fresh scones made the night before and all this to prove I could help (nay, improve!) the lives of my friends.

Now, in my thirties, I catch myself not rushing in to help so much as needing to provide for myself and others a satisfactory explanation, only to be stumped by the futility of the exercise. Turning to art, reminding myself what art is, is a huge comfort when faced with Life Events. Borrowing from Anne Lamott, I still need to learn how “not to get my explanations all over people” and cure myself of wanting to control the discomfort. The discomfort becomes so large in my mind that I lose the ability to find joy and consequently, the ability to write freely, for fun, for no reason. I guess that is where I need the defiance: I should not pretend to myself that I can improve anything by giving up the dutiful practice of writing imperfect blog posts.

I highly recommend A Swim in a Pond in The Rain.

Squirrelling away

I’m busy reading - dissertations and books and letters from the archive, but sometimes my mind starts to wander and I begin to feel restless and the only thing to do is to go outside and deadhead flowers, find weeds to weed, or in this case, a squirrel’s thirty-some nut cache to dig up. I wouldn’t mind the nut caches if the squirrel didn’t forget them completely and leave them to sprout into what becomes a miniature oak forest.

Summer projects

Some people go camping. We change the view by taking up landscape-modification projects. These projects start innocently, a whisper of an idea, a comment in passing… I gather inspiration, we trace lines over the grass using butcher’s twine, or rope that once served as a clothesline on a camping trip West. And then Christian gets to work…

We converted an expanse of lawn into a rock garden, as it seems to be the fashion in these hot, dry years.

I organized my pantry too, and this time, I swear, it’s “once and for all”. Has that ever happened to you, where the system you put into place, which makes you glow with satisfaction, slowly gets overtaken by the creep, creep, creep of store-bought bags? Here, (I’ll proudly point) here are my newly organized spices! But then, a week or so into the pretty jars from IKEA, (labelled too!) I realize that the tablespoon doesn’t fit into the mouth of the jar, and then six months later, cinnamon stands on its own, and I’ve started a little collection of spices in bags that I’ve not emptied into their appropriate container. When bay-leaves risk falling into your pot of boiling pasta again, it’s time to consider assuaging the nagging need to do. When you can’t find whether or not you have unsweetened coconut for making granola, and each time you make couscous the items you have to remove to get to it pool on the counter, it’s time to take the ennui seriously. To this end, I’m using canning jars: large ones and small ones. If it works for sad_papi, it works for me!

Reading list: Hope Against Hope by Nadezhda Mandelstam

How to start: This is a memoir written by Osip Mandelstam’s wife, from the period of his arrest in 1934, to his release, and his imprisonment with descriptions of life in the USSR under the communist regime.

Favourite quotes: We never asked, on hearing about the latest arrest, “What was he arrested for?” but we were exceptional. Most people, crazed by fear, asked this question just to give themselves a little hope: if others were arrested for some reason, then they wouldn’t be arrested, because they hadn’t done anything wrong. (p. 10)

In periods of violence and terror people retreat into themselves and hide their feelings, but their feelings are ineradicable and cannot be destroyed by any amount of indoctrination. Even if they are wiped out in one generation, as happened here to a considerable extent, they will burst forth again in the next one. We have seen this several times. The idea of good seems really to be inborn, and those who sin against the laws of humanity always see their error in the end - or their children do. (p. 24)

People always clutch at straws, nobody wants to part with his illusions, and it is very difficult to look life in the face. To see things as they are demands a superhuman effort. There are those who want to be blind, but even among those who think they are not, how many are left who can really see see? Or rather, who do not slightly distort what they see to keep their illusions and hopes alive? (p. 63)

The loss of mutual trust is the first sign of the atomization of society in dictatorships of our type, and this was just what our leaders wanted. (p. 95)

Kindness is not, after all, an inborn quality - it has to be cultivated, and this only happens when it is in demand. For our generation, kindness was an old-fashioned, vanished quality, and its exponents were as extinct as the mammoth. Everything we have seen in our times - the dispossession of the kulaks, class warfare, the constant “unmasking” of people, the search for an ulterior motive behind every action - all this has taught us to be anything you like except kind. (p. 134)

Tangential: The Poetry Foundation has the poet’s biography and some of his poetry online.

Statue

This is the story of how we housed a statue of Ste Thérèse for 15 years.

Fifteen years ago, my husband’s grandmother, Alice, was alive. She was a solid lady with thin white hair who pushed a walker with the determination of a person with hip-replacements who would not slow down. She befriended a lady forever referred to as Mrs. Teece. I don’t know how the name is spelled, but that is how it sounded. Mrs. Teece came into possession of a statue of Ste Thérèse. Having come from a church, the statue was four feet tall and weighed 80 pounds. At some point, maybe at Mrs Teece’s death, the statue was passed along to Alice who put it in her bedroom, or had it installed there, among other religious articles and porcelain dolls. And then one day, when one of Alice’s great grand-daughters was visiting, she noticed her effusive love of Ste Thérèse and decided that the statue should go to this great-granddaughter in Quebec next.

Death didn’t come immediately of course, not even sneakily in the night for Alice. It loitered a bit, sending her to a care home for a few months and then catching up with her in the hospital. The statue being what it was, heavy, and made of plaster, could not accompany Alice to her final bedrooms, and so found a stay in our house, being that my husband was this great-granddaughter’s uncle. We put the statue in a corner of our dining room. It felt like having a visitor, since our dining room was reserved for visitors and we normally ate in the kitchen. Seeing a giant statue in someone else’s home tour pushed me to consider Ste Thérèse a bit of unique decor.

I dusted her black veil and the crevasses in her dress folds and the creases of the roses that clustered around the crucifix she held. A visiting priest once took interest in the statue and appraised its solidity by examining the paint for hairline cracks. Meantime, she popped into pictures. Meantime we repainted the walls and changed the decor. We moved Ste Thérèse downstairs. We stopped paying attention to the angles of our picture-taking.

And then, just the other day, it was arranged that these people from Quebec, coming to Manitoba by air to pick up a vehicle bought here, could bring Ste Thérèse with them, to have her, as it was intended 15 years ago, given to this great-granddaughter. The internet recommends bubble wrap and tape. I found videos on lashing packages. Double boxing can be done for delicate things, but seemed like a step too far. Christian bought bubble wrap. He brought up the 80 pound plaster statue from downstairs. I wrapped and taped the Ste Thérèse and tied a mask to her face as a Covid precaution. Her life-size realism sometimes made us think of her as a character in our house. Would she rather stay here? Could divine events make it so that her story ended with us? Could she crumble into pieces as protest?

Christian loaded her into the car and I added bubble wrap to her base. After supper, I drove to St Boniface and found the Quebec visitors talking around the cleared dinner-table of their friendly hosts. I sat with them. As the sky darkened we eventually left the chairs, eventually also the apartment and the building for the parking lot and the statue was taken from my car to their van as rain wet the asphalt. She was seat-belted into place and I took a picture that was nothing but a blur under street-lights.