February 17, 2021
Gleanings
- Where I live, people wake up and start burning things.
- So by the time I’m through reading Maxine, I’m ugly crying and I’ve woken up Gilles and read to him and said but I like just asked for a sign and he’s like, well you got one, that’s a good letter so don’t cry, go to sleep now and I said they are happy tears and he said it’s still a crying baby beside me and so I simmered down and slept.
- Think of a hug. Think of fancy fabric you want to touch and shiny jewelry you want to wear. Think of a vacation. Think of ice cream and pizza. Think of romance, a date, meeting someone who will love you. It’s heroic.
- This is the problem with patriarchy, where the lens and experiences of men are viewed as the penultimate. Everyone else disappears.
- I don’t own this apartment, I steward it.
- If I was an ancient, ineffable being (and who says I’m not), you might be able to summon me with some well-whispered devotions and offerings.
- It’s pretentious to start a blog post off with a quotation, but then it’s probably a bit precious sounding to write about fountain pens in the first place.
- I’ve been picking up old recipe books from the op shops in my travels and those $1 and $2 scores have been inspiring my cooking and helping me to feel more grounded.
- My new favourite pastime is noticing the ways of kindness, what it is, how it becomes, the way people find or make their own versions of it, the sheer, sweet miracle of how the pandemic has inspired so much goodness and despite how tired everyone is there seems to be no wearying of being kind in extraordinary ways.
- I tell myself that everything I have experienced, everything I have learned, has contributed, in some way, to my ability to be a caregiver.
- But what I would have given last night to hear a knock at the door, to open it to see the faces of my children as they were 30 years ago, or longer, looking up in the porch light, wanting in.
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