May 27, 2026

Some Updates

These are not urgent updates. Possibly updates have never been less urgent than these ones, but I feel like I’m in an odd place right now, recalibrating, taking stock, and so this is what I want to share today.

1. We have a funny room in our apartment dedicated to storing camping equipment and Christmas decorations, and it’s also my bedroom closet, as well as a repository for all the things we’d put down in the basement if we had a basement, and lately the situation there had become untenable. Too much stuff I possibly didn’t need, like the exercise bike that hadn’t been used for the last five years, my vast collection of padded envelopes, the outfits we wore at a Thai elephant camp in 2004, boxes I was keeping because they were good boxes, as well as hand-me-downs saved for my youngest child. A giant plastic bin full of dress-up clothes, and then this weird box full of hideous clothes from Honest Eds (a long brown paisley skirt and a polyester blouse with a snakeskin print, and a bra branded Bob Barker [not the “come on down” guy; it turns out there were two of them?]) that no one can recall ever having seen before. And this weekend we finally tackled the challenge and returned the room to rights, getting rid of bags and bags of stuff and clothes. And suddenly there is room in that room, and my life feels a little bit right lighter.
2. My children are four years apart, which has meant that hand-me-downing was a serious commitment in terms of organization and storage—we had a lot of stuff put away for when the youngest would grow into it. But she is now 13 and has a vastly different body than her sister had at that age, not to mention more discerning tastes—we’re all a bit disturbed (and some of us feel guilty) about how often floral pants appeared in our eldest’s wardrobe, and the youngest was having none of it. And then the fact that my 17 yo has stopped growing, which means she wears her own clothes out rather than passing them along for someone else to do so. So our hand-me-down years have ended, the floral pants put out to pasture, and the youngest will now be able to pick out her own clothes, instead of turning up her nose at other people’s tastes, and this is contributing to the room in that room, and my life feeling a little bit lighter.
3. On Monday morning, we booked a car and drove to Value Village to offload all that bagged up freight. The new Value Village location in our area has no parking or unloading area, which I suspect is part of the plan—it doesn’t always work out so well when families pack up bag and bags of random crap and drop them off for Value Village to deal with. But that’s what we were doing, and so I pulled into somebody’s laneway so my husband could take the bags and bags out of the trunk and carry them to the store entrance. But of course I was blocking in somebody’s car, and that somebody turned out to be H., who’s in my singing group, and it’s just weird to encounter somebody at the end of an alley and it turns out to be someone I know.
4. But this has been happening to me often this week. Last Monday we were in the east end and walked past a crowded park where we’d often met up with friends before, and there they were, almost as though I’d conjured them. On Saturday, my best friend sent me a text message that said “Everybody in Toronto is in the Eaton Centre Indigo today,” completely unaware that I too was in the Eaton Centre Indigo, and so she was not wrong. I enjoy that in this city of nearly 3 million people, things like this can happen.
5. It’s been an odd kind of spring for me, as I’ve been operating on my own momentum, not fully engaged with the season, instead running parallel to it. We were travelling in April and so I didn’t start seeds early. I’ve felt like I’ve been playing catch-up with getting my container garden into shape, fixing up my porch after winter. But my schedule has eased and the seeds I’ve sown are finally sprouting. Every year, every single year, I doubt it’s going to happen, find it impossible to believe (although seeds are a miracle; can you blame me?). But maybe I prefer not taking it all for granted. There’s something to being bowled over by it every single time.