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Pickle Me This

December 4, 2023

Clark Griswold: Not a Good Guy

“Well, that’s an hour and forty minutes I’m never going to get back,” said my eldest child as the credits rolled for National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, beloved holiday flick of my youth. And she wasn’t wrong—it was terrible. (I’ve never seen the two earlier films in the franchise, and upon perusing the trailers, I wonder if “not terrible” was never actually the point.) Clark Griswold is an awful person, and while I remember spending earlier viewings rolling my eyes at his idiot neighbours, senile aunt, miserable teenage daughter, and dumbass cousin, now I’m not sure how any of them managed to stand him. Not to mention his wife, the longest suffering of all of them. Can you imagine if YOUR husband invited your entire family for Christmas, and then spent the holiday stapling twinkling lights to your roof because he couldn’t actually stand their presence? And apart from nicer clothes, how different is Clark from Cousin Eddie, really? It made me think a lot about the tropes and stories we took for granted in the 1980s and 1990s, be glad that there is been some progress since in terms of what we expect from men/husbands/fathers—and especially that my kids are wise enough to see it.

September 14, 2023

September

We pay the price of summer’s end, but look at this beautiful golden light (back-lighting a cosmos. which is an object that exists to be shone on and through). The sun came into my kitchen today for the first time in months, golden light across the floor and then the table. A gift.

June 19, 2023

Invincible

You can’t go chasing summer, is the thing I keep thinking, but instead you just have to wait, and it comes on like a wave, a wave of green overtaking the garden, and of heat, and crowds, and traffic, and too-muchness, extremes. In summer I get to head out of town and reset my equilibrium, days away from city and noise and the online world, when everything I read is printed on paper, and I’m longing for that peace right now, but not the way I was a year ago, when I felt like I’d come so far, but I still was so broken. Like I’d never be able to withstand too-muchness again. Six months of recovery after my brain broke, and I thought it would always be like that, struggle and hard. So it was especially a relief to ease into summer in 2022, to find peace and stillness after so many months (and years) of tumult. Though, of course, as an anxious person, I was worried about that, asking my therapist what she thought of the fact that I was doing so well, almost like riding a bike with no hands, like, wasn’t this reckless. “I’m not using any of my tools,” I told her. “I haven’t picked up Pema Chodran in weeks. Like, what if I forget everything that I’ve learned?”

And in response she told me the very best thing, which was just to steep myself in this moment, to close my eyes and breathe it in deep and absorb everything about it, imagine myself wholly immersed, which wasn’t so hard, because I spent so much of the summer immersed anyway, literally, which meant something really profound to me, to be deep in the water, at eye level, and a part of the world in such a fundamental way. There was something about pickles, preserves, about bottling summer, and I decided to lean in and do that. The photo accompanying this post like talisman of all that, and I had it printed as an 8’11 and framed up on the wall, and it’s my phone’s wallpaper too, summer summer, deep summer. And it worked—in the fall I was still marvelling at how I was carrying summer with me, that ease, that inner warmth—maybe this was what Camus was talking about? I was carrying it still through the winter, and then the spring, that peace, a sense of being steady, okay. Even as the seasons were shifting all around me, as seasons do, and the ground was moving too, and there were floods and fires and earthquakes and plagues, not to mention school fun fairs and silent auctions and elections and travel and my health card and drivers’ license were about to expire, and everyone kept getting pinkeye, and it lasted for weeks, I was still steady. I’ve never known anything like it.

And now here we are again on the cusp of another summer, which has arrived almost like pinkeye, “You again?”. And I keep tracing the distance from there to here, which hasn’t been an uphill climb at all, just a gorgeous, steady walk, so much easier than those first six months, which felt impossible. You can’t go chasing summer is what I mean, but you can live in it, and let it carry you and give you faith, and help you float. It is possible to float.

December 22, 2022

A Box of Cloud

A year ago, a box arrived, a big box that was so light that it felt like we’d just had a cloud delivered to our doorstep, and at this point I was really suffering in a mental health crisis, and a cloud in a box felt like the gift of lightness. Even though we’d sent it to ourselves, eight big balls of wool because I’d determined that our family would spend the holiday break knitting scarves, such a calming and restorative occupation. And we did! And it was! By the new year we had four gorgeous scarves that attracted admiring comments from strangers when we wore them out and about (but not in a weird way). A great skill for our kids (and their dad!) to learn and we enjoyed the holiday knitting so much, we’re doing it again, this time to be donated to a shelter. I’m excited to get started. The wool was just delivered so it looks like the holidays are nearly here.

December 9, 2022

Reason to Believe

“I still love this song, but I no longer live in it,” is something I texted my friend Marissa this morning about the Counting Crows song “A Long December,” usually on constant rotation for me around this time of year. But last night I’d realized I’d made it eight days into December without listening to it once, and it occurred to me even that this is the first December in a very long time in which I’ve not been desperate to believe that “maybe this year will be better than the last.” That I’m not listening to those lyrics with the same sense of abject sense of loss and longing that characterizes every Counting Crows song, but this one in particular. And the feeling that it’s all a lot of oysters, but no pearls

I’ve written before about how my mental health was at a breaking point a year ago, and I entered 2022 resolving to do things differently, to learn to be okay even when things weren’t okay, which was a perfect resolution for 2022, really, a year of a lot of not-okayness. And I’m not saying I’ve managed it with aplomb—the first six months of this year were really hard for me and I struggled a lot, and still do here and there—but I certainly have learned a thing or two about how to manage this, how to be okay in the midst of uncertainty, how to keep myself steady when the world’s falling apart, when “the winter makes you laugh a little slower/ Makes you talk a little lower about the things you could not show her.”

What I have learned is that value judgements such as “worse” or “better” are ideas, and that reality is reality no matter how you frame it, and that leaning in closer to that reality and how it makes me feel instead of my ideas about it—what’s good and bad, worse or better—is how to live more fully and with less anxiety. That a year is a year, and also a year is a lot of things running a spectrum from wondrous to horrible, and this one—while far from easy—has been better than the last mostly because I’m finally figuring all this out.

The reason I thought about “A Long December” last night was because Christa Couture re-shared a link to her New Year’s song “To Us” last night, a song that started off my new year, and whose message was what I needed instead of Adam Duritz’s maudlin tones:

No I’m not one to tell you, hon, “we’re in the clear”
Of course we might be, but here’s the rub:
Probably not this year

So happy new year to resentment, to enjoyment, disappointment
To all the best laid plans we won’t pull off
Happy new year to the weary, to fury, and recovery
To that which doesn’t kill us that makes us soft…

December 1, 2022

Holiday (Good) Burdens

We can pick and choose our seasonal (good) burdens. Halloween, for instance, for me, is barely a blip on the calendar, except for the week or so afterwards replete with tiny chocolate bars. No seasonal decorations at my house, I don’t dress up, my children dress up just barely—this year my youngest put an old shade on her head and went out as a lamp. I’m just not that invested in the rituals, which is not to say that they’re not meaningful, but just that they don’t hold meaning for me, and that’s fine. (I return once again to the ancient pre-internet art of not liking something without it being a manifesto.)

Christmas, on the other hand, I’m big into, in a secular fashion, but still I’m picking and choosing where my energy goes, and it doesn’t go as far as, say, homemade advent calendars. I actually aspire to be a creator of homemade advent calendars, but I’ve accepted that I’d need to be a different human for that to happen, someone more fond of shopping and crafting than I am. And speaking of crafting, homemade gifts are another item that won’t be ticked off my list anytime soon. I’ve accepted my limits, the realities of ROI, and—as Christina Cook writes in her book Good Burdens, which I think about a lot—deciding not to do certain things (JOMO—the Joy of Missing Out!) leaves room for those other things that really matter.

Which, for me, include writing and sending Christmas cards, something that’s particularly important to me as we live far from so many friends and family. I’ve been writing Christmas cards for 20 years now, since the very first Christmas I spent away from home, and I continue to see these cards—even with their notes rather hastily scrawled!—as a way to show people near and far to us that they matter. (It also means that we get a lot of Christmas cards in return, though I also completely understand when other people don’t reciprocate, in fact I respect those who’ve made deliberate choices and peace with Christmas cards being on their JOMO list.)

I also love Christmas baking, and creating a homemade gingerbread house, and reading Christmas stories with my kids, and the coziness of winter knitting projects, and fashioning the leftovers of a roasted turkey into every kind of leftover imaginable. These are the kinds of jobs I like to be doing.

One further thing that’s important to me during the holidays is small tokens of appreciation for members of our community, my kids’ teachers, and piano teachers, and crossing guards, and girl guide leaders, and sometimes I drive myself a little bit crazy trying to cross everything off on this list and something I adore about my husband (on a very long list of things) is how he saw that I was finding this good burden a little overwhelming but didn’t use my overwhelm as an excuse to devalue this labour. Instead of saying, “If it’s stressing you out so much, why do you do it?” (a too familiar pattern in heterosexual partnerships, I think?) he supported me in finding ways to make the job easier, which is why, for the past three years, I’ve purchased holiday gift bundles from local fave Carolina’s Brownies, and my husband has shrugged and said, “Yes, of course, you’re spending hundreds of dollars on gourmet brownies for the crossing guard.” (He also made the address labels for my Christmas cards. He’s truly the best, and goes out of the way to help me with my good burdens, even when they’re not as important to him, but, you see, *I* am important to him.)

“Let’s make this a season of humble gestures that light up the world,” is a thought that occurred to me this morning as I photographed a green Christmas bauble fastened to a twiggy tree, someone else’s gesture that added sparkle to my morning.

There can be meaning in all these things if we choose to be deliberate in our choices.

How wonderful that we get to pick and choose our seasonal (good) burdens.

October 31, 2022

Spooky Read(athon)

Happy Halloween! Yesterday was the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, which raised over $75,000 for Rethink Cancer, improving outcomes for people living with Metastatic Breast Cancer. I raised over $2500 for Team Melanie, in memory of our friend Melanie Masterson, who died in December (on the solstice!) and had the best time reading four spooky books which were fitting for the season. You’re going to be reading more about a few of these picks soon. All in all, a wonderful reading day for the very best cause.

September 13, 2022

Big Flex

September is a new season, a new year, in many ways (and this September marks three years since I started Blog School!). For me, it’s always been a time for reflection and renewal, especially having come off such a restorative, restful summer with the goal of bringing that some of that softness with me as I go back to the “grind.” (I also would like to aim to not ground down to dust, less grind in my grind, please!)

“I think this fall,” I said to my husband, “I would like to have a kind of structure for my days, but one where you can move things around, everything not rigidly fixed in place.”

“You mean, like a calendar,” he said patiently.

“OMG, yes!” (Or maybe I finally need a bullet journal after all?)

But what I’m really saying is that I want a framework with a bit of slack, where my days have different shapes and things can be moved around to accommodate whatever else might be going on. My tendency is to be so unyielding in my approach to my days, partly because you have to be protective when you are self-employed and work from home, because everybody always things you’re just sitting around waiting to have coffee all the time, and also because I’m worried that if I’m not disciplined, the whole structure will fall apart.

But the thing is that sometimes I actually do want to go and have coffee, and also that often I actually can!

And I know that for some people, none of this is complicated, and also that adaptable calendars might not even be a revelation, but it’s too easy for me to become inflexible in my approach to my schedule, to do the same thing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, for one to be this day, and one to be another. I keep envisioning a structure that’s less a grid than a hammock, one of those knotted ones that are full of holes, but not so large that everything just falls through. Just that there’s give, and it’s easy, it stretches wide and low when it has to.

Is this the beginning of me FINALLY becoming laid back?

Don’t bet on it.

But maybe I can be me with more room to breathe.

September 1, 2022

Sweet Spot

I’ve written before about the too-muchness of summer, and also about what the last two summers of less than optimal circumstances have taught me about “enough,”and somehow, miraculously, summer 2022 has found that sweet spot right in the middle, a perfect balance. Some of which I deserve credit for, because staying within my limits has been important for me this season (in June I didn’t, and it was not a great time), and so I’ve been seeking so much rest and moderation, healthy things to restore me after the first six months of this year during which I’d periodically compare my mental health to a fraying thread. I feel so much stronger now, and grateful for this reprieve from struggling, and grateful to summer for being such a gift, for being so soft and gentle when I needed it most.

I’m still not about to say goodbye to summer—we haven’t even been to the CNE yet. But I’m still afloat on the memories of our camping trips, days on the beach, drives up north, leaps into lakes, the card games and the board games, and the books I read, and the tarts we ate, and the friends we saw, and patio meals, and ice cream cones, Shakespeare in the park, tending my garden, farmers’ markets, bike rides, campfires, and the songs we sang, and the times I laughed until I cried.

Oh, how I’m satisfied. So very satisfied.

January 17, 2022

Snow Day

My intentions for the next while are all about open-heartedness, about meeting what the world delivers instead of imagining that I might manage to out-maneuvre it somehow. Especially since…I was never really in control of anything anyway and imagining that I was just made me crazy.

And I think that there is nothing better than a wild walloping of a snowstorm to drive that point home. To remind me that sometimes just submitting is beautiful, to call all bets off, the usual rules not applying, the landscape rearranged. No school today. There’s been not a lot of work getting done.

We walk on the road and periodically sit down on the sidewalks, and embrace what the day has handed us.

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