November 20, 2024

Gleanings

• I’m enamoured with the language of small repair and I think that there’s instruction embedded in it from the “how-to” and right-to-repair world in how to live a life. I think of all the tiny repairs to my household just in the last year. I think of the still lifes I’ve made and used scotch tape and sticky tack to hold them in place. I think of the ways things fall into disrepair, that language, too: things fray, give up the ghost, they buckle, collapse, blow, crack, are torn, lose surface tension, become weathered, they fold, sour, unravel. They might fall (a cake, a bridge, a gate). There are kinds of repair: alterations, mending, rebuilding, filling, patching, re-wiring, re-jigging. We overhaul, darn, stitch, refurbish, fix, freshen. We can repair, and repair again.
• Because your house is the home of a quiltmaker and woodcutter, there are warm quilts for the bed and a woodshed full of dry fir and cedar for the fire. You keep replenishing both.
• Window display is still very much advent calendars because we’ll be selling those until the end of the month at which point we’ll fashion all the leftovers into a giant advent paper man and ceremonially burn him with a mince pie inside as an offering to the festive god (Santa) in exchange for good trade throughout December.
• It’s all real—the depravity and the life-affirmation, the distrust and the ride-or-die-ness, the shallowness and the deepness. Don’t let the Internet and all its tentacles (headlines, polls, social media, streaming, algorithms etc.) pull you out of your real, beautiful life and make you feel homeless. You are home among your people and your dreams, no matter what the “state of the world.” And the only way I know to make the “state of the world” less heinous is to trust what deserves trust, to ground on solid, relational ground, to start from there and then move outward.
• It’s when two swimmers move in tandem, like a choreographed dance that I am most amazed. Stroke on stroke, breath on breath; two perfectly synced flip turns. I leave feeling a small bit awestruck by what the human body can do.
• No amount of moving to the country and ignoring the news is going to make any of this change, so it’s everyone’s responsibility to work towards the world we want.
• A short book gives me the chance to travel to another place, be inside the mind of another person, or to learn about something new, but all from the comfort of my couch.
• There are dozens of fucked up things happening globally right now and this issue is not the most pressing, I know—not even close. But if I see another ChatCPT prompt presented as art, news or media, I will probably snap.
• You know that thing, when people ask if you were an animal, which animal would you be? Well, after much strenuous, existential, and deep thought (aka not that much thought at all), I decided if I were an animal, I would be a penguin. An Emperor penguin, to be specific. You wanna know how I came to that conclusion?
• When she opened the door to the fridge repairman, she didn’t foresee all the doors on the other side.
• I eventually decided that I just wasn’t cut out to be a novelist and focused on writing non-fiction pieces, usually about music. But then during the early lockdown days of 2020 I found myself daydreaming all the time, telling myself stories that I ended up thinking I could turn into a romance novel. I’d been reading romance novels for years; I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me to try to write one. It took being stuck at home with my two young kids in that stressful, uncertain situation for weeks on end for me to think, ‘What’s the opposite of this?” And the answer to that question turned out to be a romance story about young cute people living in New York. I ended up kind of desperately throwing myself into writing a book and sending out one chapter per week to a group of friends. That was the book that eventually got me my agent, but it didn’t get picked up by any publishers. 
• In this world where mostly what I’ve been thinking and wondering and feeling lately is, pardon me, but “what the hell is going on?” again and again, I’m always so surprised when I remember … it’s always just the moments, isn’t it?

November 7, 2024

Words that Are Getting Me Through

• They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.
• And standing in my yard, soil under my fingers, unseasonably warm breeze on my skin, sun beaming warm light through the mulberry tree, I felt, suddenly, other emotions enter the chat: responsibility, tenderness, love, capability.
• It is true that people have lived through worse times, but they had to pass through something like this to get there. We have to look out for each other.
• This election was never going to save us, and so I have to believe that it was never going to doom us either.
• The US election didn’t go the way you hoped it would? Here’s what you control…and what you don’t.
• There are as many ways of helping and making change as there are people.
• It was an act of complete despair; a necessary one. It was December, and freezing cold, and we didn’t care. People stopped on the shore to stare at us, three women bobbing around like corks on the angry sea. My god, the impotent rage; the disbelief. We thought we might just be sunk. 
• I want it to be that I tried, cried, fought and rejoiced with my communities. And the only way to do that is to make sure I seek out joy as much as possible.

October 9, 2024

Gleanings

• In 1967, my mother was 22 and worked at a college library in Michigan. She took a payday loan to travel to Juarez, Mexico. That was very much my mother and how she took care of things. She was like Mrs. Dalloway in that way—she would buy the abortion herself.  
• I like my hands. They’re weathered from the sun and from washing dishes and bathing babies and dipping sponges in clay water. They’re weathered from planting marigolds in the summer (to keep away the squirrels) and forgetting to wear gloves in the winter.
• I have been staring at these wounds for some time, these repairs, the way things hold together.
• I would like to be librarian again for another year if you can pay more.
• Watch for weirdness.
• But I had to cut them to get to the heart of the story. I called it “the lean edit” and most of it took place over a two-week period when I was watching a friend’s house and cat in Portland in July of 2023. I just sat down and looked at the book and envisioned the core story and went from there. But I also said to myself, “If I miss these characters when they’re gone I’ll put them back in,” but I didn’t. I really like my books to feel tightly crafted. I give the reader exactly the information they need.
• But the other day, I walked like a freak – with nothing plugged into my ears! Imagine. And wow, I realized I missed listening to my own thoughts. I listen to my thoughts all the time, while doing chores etc. But internal thoughts take a different shape when you’re out walking, especially in nature. I don’t know why that is, but it is.
• I am fascinated by all things miniature, especially handmade tiny food or tiny furniture. I remember yearning desperately for a dollhouse when I was a child, but we couldn’t afford one. Now I’d rather look at OTHER people’s dollhouses because we don’t have the space in our house, plus I’m leery about falling down the rabbit hole of making my own miniature furniture.
• And as an aside, it’s funny that we associate the novel, the Count, the bats, the entire thing with Halloween, with the dark seasons yet the story itself begins in May. The majority of the book’s action takes place in spring and summer—the seasons of new life and budding blossoms, warm evenings and dazzling sunlight—and only concludes in early November. A lot happens in a mere six months!
• Maybe I’m intrigued by East Germany because it represents, in nation format, what is true for all of us. We can’t return to the world we grew up in; it doesn’t exist anymore. We’re always in the present, moving forward, and always trying to hold on, in various ways, to parts of the past.
• I could tell you how I long for elder mentors in my life, and how the other day when I heard a peer lament, “I’m getting old and fat,” I found myself thinking about my Grandma who was old and fat, and her mom who was old and fat and her Mom’s Mom who was, well you get the picture, and how I thought that we really could use some more old and fat Grandmas around here.
• I’m not old, white, or rich. I don’t think I fit anyone’s expectations of a sailor, as evidenced by the looks of surprise I get when I bring it up to family, friends, and fellow writers. Their assumptions exhaust me, and I don’t always have the energy to explain how I began racing, how active the sport of sailing is on the Great Lakes, or the special atmosphere at Queen City. As a result, some people have known me for years and not known that I’ve sailed. In the mirror is a petite Asian woman with a round, serious face who looks like she spends more time in the library than doing rigorous physical activity. Peering closer, I see the bruises on my shins and my foul-weather gear hanging on hooks. But on occasion, someone corners me with their curiosity. “I hear that you sail,” they say, and the words spill out of me.
• Draw history through the eye of the longest needle in your basket, the twined thread—flax stem, inner bark of a pine, pounded nettle, strands of a coarse-haired sheep—and make the seam to hold the bag together. In it, the story of the blood clot, the blue lane of the pool, the tiny merganser chicks light as the air itself. This is yours, to give away or to keep.
• And so this weekend, I will think about that man who, on Oct 15, 2009, 10 days after his 58th birthday, met me when he fixed my fridge, changing his trajectory for the rest of his life. And mine with it.
• I guess all of this is to say—this house has been a place of love and accompaniment, heartbreak and endurance, transformation and steadfastness. We wish you all those things in this next season of its stewardship, and whatever more you would like it to be. Change is hard and constant and oh-so-beautiful. We hope this one wraps you in its arms and makes you feel cozy and known and nourished. We couldn’t imagine better people to pass on this little glowing box of light.

September 11, 2024

Gleanings

• We all know the answers, but we need to hear them again and again. We need to listen to the work, our life’s work, most of all, because it tells us what we’re required to do.
• I’m half Pakistani, and occasionally I wonder if it’s odd that this expresses itself almost exclusively through food. Is it odd? Is it enough? Is it okay to only express part of who you are in a highly specific way?
• I know, some of us are the gatherers. The ones who reach out and invite and create the space. And some of us are the gathered. The ones that say yes, that show up, that ask, that listen, that learn. Our tables need to be filled with both. Maybe we need to try the one that’s harder for us … or not.
• In the breaks between death defying formation stunts; modern fighter jets screeching across the sky; the stately elegance of the Lancaster bomber; and lifesaving waterbombers scooping Lake Ontario and regurgitating it back, we discussed this weird fascination we share and how at odds it is with our environmental and political views.
• Nearly 100 years after Mrs. Dalloway was published, I sat on a bench and felt chills all over my body. What is this terror, what is this ecstasy. What was it? Something had happened to me beyond what was intellectual, and beyond what was emotional. It was, I concluded, so spiritual I could not put words to it.
• When my mom finally sold the house and the smell became very rare, I finally became able to smell it—there’s a few items and areas in my mom’s current place that contain it, certain cupboards I stick my head in and sniff and remember.
• This morning, at the beginning of my swim, a little silver trout jumped out of the water just beyond where I was heading, the curve of its body an opening parenthesis to my thinking.
• The cold, hard, truth about enjoying a spectacularly good day is that it is, simultaneously, someone else’s very worst day.  Life’s Yin and Yang, our shared burden – knowing that the houses of joy and anguish both have revolving doors.  Understanding that as we are born, someone is dying; that as we rise, someone is falling; that as we laugh, someone is crying and that, despite clinging to hope, we cannot end or even pause that cycle – we are all constantly trading places.  
• I’m a very clumsy, generally inactive person but when I’m on the ice, I feel fast and light and strong. Let’s be clear: I’m a terrible skater! I haven’t figured out how to stop yet. But the feeling of being on skates is paralleled only when I’m in the water: where I suddenly understand the strength of my body and the joy in movement.
• Parents understand that the real New Year begins in September, and my mindset has shifted accordingly over the past week. My kids are back in school! The sun is setting earlier each day! What am I doing with my life?!
• What are the values we’ve internalized along the way? We are all part of our varied pasts and upbringing, but there are some values we all (or most of us) subscribe to and which are non-negotiable in our friendships and relationships. Apart from the Dream Big and Laugh out Loud type of superficial exhortations, I think the underlying message on the placard is: Be someone who others can respect and trust. Be considerate. Be genuine and kind. Be a person of integrity.

• Will ‘we’ tolerate not having bananas? Will i be able to grow bananas in New England?

July 18, 2024

Olivetti, by Allie Millington

“Who uses typewriters anyway?” so once posed The Bard, though it is a different kind of antique typewriter nostalgia that drew me to Allie Millington’s middle grade novel, Olivetti—I bought it for my daughter, who loved it and implored me to read it too. And let me tell you, there was no such thing as antique typewriter nostalgia during my childhood, when my dad worked for Olivetti and sold typewriters all over southern Ontario. Nobody, including me, realized just how hipster cool that was, and we had antique typewriters all over the house, and I have such visceral memories of their tactility, the feel of the keys, how the key arms would get all gummed up, the smoothness of the roller, how strange it was to see the alphabet disordered, the freedom of unrolling a ribbon, the spool leftover with a hole just perfect for sticking my finger, the mess of ink. I don’t think it’s such a leap that the daughter of an Olivetti salesman becomes a writer, born with the tools of the trade at her disposal—but when I was little “Olivetti” was just my dad’s work, a name to which my friends responded with blank faces when I told them what he did, and so it’s strange now to realize it has resonance, that Olivetti has meant something to an awful lot of people.

In Millington’s novel, Olivetti is a sentient typewriter who (as keeper of the stories) holds the key to the mystery when Beatrice Brindle goes missing. Her troubled youngest son Ernest is the one who has to figure out where his mother has gone, aided by the savvy daughter of a pawn shop owner whom Beatrice has sold Olivetti to before she fled to who-knows-where. This is a novel about heavy stuff—the family has finally come through Beatrice’s cancer treatment, and they’re still not over the stress and anxiety, and all our expectations about narrative and how a life proceeds suggest that everything should be happy and easy now, but it isn’t because life is not a book (even within this book), all tidy endings.

Millington strikes a careful balance between comfort and reality—my kid who still finds sad stories upsetting thought this story (which ends on an uplifting note) was really compelling. I really loved it too, and was so happy that she shared it with me.

July 17, 2024

Gleanings

• Because parenting when everything is terrible IS THE REASON FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING SEASON. Because breaking the news that life is painful and beautiful and will break your fucking heart so we have to love each other as fiercely as possible while we canis the most important thing a parent can teach, model and personify for their child. I say this because it is perhaps the only thing I know to be true.
• I had heard A Month in the Country referred to so often, with such admiration, that I avoided it, rather cynically, for years, doubting it could live up to the hype. Now I wish I hadn’t.
• All to say, be weird, be exact, make your masterpieces, create good energy, inspire, uplift, conduct your magical weird operations, you know? Because maybe that is doing one other person some good in this world.
• Sometimes you think you’ve lost something and then you realize you still have it in another form. Another shape. A warm grassy slope, trees laden with fruit, wild violets and strawberries scattered in the grass like a medieval embroidery: gone. But what you have now is a close and domestic beauty, smaller, still with its own sweet promise.
• If I’m ever feeling stuck, either in my writing or in life, I just need to go for a walk; to feel the sunshine on my skin, to see the world in the light. I always come back from those walks with an answer.
• Opinions are not bad things to have, they make for interesting conversation, as long as one is open to discussion. But, do we need to have one on every single thing? Is it so out of vogue in today’s world to say: I don’t know enough about that to have a strong opinion on it? To admit that we lack the knowledge and facts to make an intelligent statement or comment?
• By which I mean I would so love for them to sit and watch raindrops.
• By 2019, I felt like a real camper! I, Margaret Lawrence Wizenberg, know how to camp. Every time we load up, I wish we had less gear, and every time we unload at the end of a trip, it was exactly the right amount.
• Our Carolinian Forest is just such a cathedral, only much more hallowed and sacrosanct.  After being housebound for a full week, standing in the shelter and comfort of this forest luxuriance, I felt my mind slow and my heart expand, knowing I crave no other architrave. 
• It’s reckoning with the possibility that all of our lives, no matter how long or how deep, how wise or purposeful, how clean or messy, big or small, how much we do or get right, say or don’t say, will always be perfectly unfinished, completely incomplete.
• As with any meaningful recovery, it took time for the orange tree to heal from the trauma of being moved outside –– to a weekend of thunderstorms and scorching sun –– with no warning. Acid yellow leaves turned a verdant green, and within six months, half a dozen plump oranges sprang from its robust branches.
• But in 2024, with abortion bans and trad wives and men’s rights activists and the racial disparity in maternal mortality rates and oh, did you hear it’s trendy to be skinny again? it is absolutely jarring to hear Perry telling us that it’s a woman’s world and we’re lucky to be living in it. Is it? And are we?
• When my children were very young, I was prone to joining cults. I use the word “cults” loosely, and what I mean is that I was very vulnerable to answers to the only question I was asking: how is one supposed to live?
• “With a growing family, we need a bigger house.” Can’t tell you how many times I hear this from mid-career professionals, occupying renovated three + bedroom houses in my suburban community of Weston.
• I’m pleased to report it’s raining. It started last night and it’s still going, on and off. The garden is that sort of luminous green you get only when a decent amount of rain falls. It’s very beautiful in the small pockets that I’ve been able to plant out. The existing grass is positively glowing.
• One of the distinct pleasures of interviews after publishing a book is the chance to chat with someone who’s read the book and asks questions about these imaginary friends you’re missing. 
• Not all fiction with a romance in it is romance fiction, just as not all fiction that includes a crime is crime fiction: maybe that’s really all that’s at stake here, that Nicholls has written about a romance, he hasn’t written a romance.

June 19, 2024

Gleanings

• Pity is only possible, it seems to me, when you see yourself as apart from the worst thing that happened to someone else.
• The song is timeless, but the video is not. Not for the grimy 1980s Britain it shows – though that too. And, to be honest, not because what happens in the video, a boy being beaten up because he’s looked, ever so tentatively, at the wrong, super-defensive, I’m-not-gay guy, isn’t something that happens today. But, maybe, because this was kind of a depressing but not unfamiliar story at the time, in a video played over and over again on all the top hit shows of the era. Watching it with 2024 eyes, it’s just brutal.
• It wasn’t until the 1970s that crossword-constructing started to become a job for male “boffins”. But it didn’t take long for them to displace women almost entirely, and their dominance has continued into the 21st century: today around 80 percent of crossword constructors are men.
• She says it isn’t the work or sending the work out or seeing it published or reading it to an audience or seeing it on a bestseller list or seeing it win a prize. Instead, she asks, “Isn’t the really good time when you are just getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has always been wandering around in your head?” She says, “It’s not the story—it’s more like the spirit, the centre, of the story, something there’s no word for, that can only come into life, a public sort of life, when words are wrapped around it.”
• I guess my taste in break up albums rests in the tough-ladies-of-country-music genre because the only other time I remember having a full, start-to-finish album that I associated with a break up was when I left an awful boyfriend in 1999 and listened only to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams for months on end.
• What is it about June, the month where the shift to full-on summer and outdoor living beckons. Am I standing on the threshold, a buffet of options in front of me, unable to fathom if I’m making choices because I really want to, or because the season somehow demands that I change gears?
• Did you know that similar to tree roots, our veins are defined by the same fractals? In fact, blood vessels are one of the most impressive examples of a fractal branching pattern. Every cell in the body must be close to a blood vessel to receive oxygen and nutrients. And this is only possible through a fractal branching network where blood vessels branch and branch ever smaller.
• I’ve had these dresses for twenty years, some even longer, and up until recently I’ve looked to that portion of my wardrobe as a place that I’ll return to when …. When what? When I feel the verve to wear the kind of outfit that turns heads, the kind of outfit that pairs well with dancing and witty repartee. Someone draw me a bath –– I’m tired just thinking about it.
• Time and time again I expect life to be like the movies, people to think in a way that’s similar to me, events to unfold logically. And they don’t. And how could I know that? When was I supposed to learn this? I can’t even manage life’s most basic things well. Add other people and reader, it’s a gosh darned mess. Things don’t turn out the way you expect. Leaps of faith don’t always pay off and people don’t behave the way you think they will. 
• I’ve been thinking about fractals lately. Thinking about how rivers look from the air, as a plane crosses the Rockies or the prairies or as I flew from Madrid to Granada in March and looked down at what was both unknown and also kind of familiar: the s-shaped curves, the smaller bends echoing the larger ones. Thinking about them in relation to family relationships too. And trying–that old word, the one at the heart of essay itself–to write about the patterns of our relationships to others. The Y of the maple branch that grows into air and breaks into another Y and another and another. The rivers meandering and bending and curving.
• I feel fortunate that I came across this definition of what a poet might be early on in my writing career. It’s expansive; it’s spacious. We’re all in this art dream together, using life as a time of approaching.

June 5, 2024

Gleanings

• A while ago I had some of that Aesop hand soap that is something like forty dollars a bottle. Used it up. Refilled the bottle (it’s a nice bottle, not forty dollars nice, but nice enough) with plain old fragrance-free Seventh Generation and did not really think much about doing that, except just now I was like I wonder if there should be a note in the bathroom for guests to not get too excited about the soap.
• Yet, it does make sense, too. I just take one step and another. I text one friend and another. I cook one meal and another. I read one book and another. I write one sentence and another. I hang one item of laundry on the line and another. I’m seeking coherence to this grand brief project called life.
• It’s been brought to my attention that I talk a lot about the weather, which I’m assuming is partly because I’m Canadian, but mostly because I’ve loved clouds and snow and thunder for as long as I can remember loving anything.
• In this case, I’d say: “Faulkner is dead. Let’s get A/C.”
• Having been housebound for five days, our walk was neither long nor far, but perfect for my wants and needs – a healthy dose of nature’s serenity. Surrounded by nature, I feel engulfed by calmness and the result is always a sense of renewal and replenishment. It’s my personal reboot — equilibrium restored, peace in my soul, joy in my heart.  Corny?  Undoubtedly, but true nonetheless.
• And then, another turn, and you’re out in the sunlight again. Birds are singing, flowers are springing, war is still raging, and those young people you’d set your hopes on for the future, are mindlessly gunning their motorcycles down the street.
• I actually don’t know how I got to it, but in the spring of 1989, as I was graduating with a honours BA in poli sci and was planning my move to Toronto to do a Masters at York, I made the difficult and life-altering decision to stop weighing myself. And I haven’t weighed myself since. 
• 48 Things I love today on my birthday
• The goal is not to stop helping or abandon my core way of gazing out at the world—with wonder and love for my people and passion for the possibilities of more beauty and justice. The goal is to become ever more attuned to when help is connected, or when it is a compulsion, when it is consensual, or when it is controlling, when it is diving deeper into the marrow of life, and when it is a subconscious effort to escape life’s inevitable and sometimes gorgeous and sometimes cruel chaos.
• The first time Anna made and brought me a cup of tea, I said that was all I needed from her. Her familial obligations had been met. But then she made me a carrot cake with cream cheese icing for my birthday this year, which seemed like more than anyone could want. More recently, she saw that someone she followed on social media was posting about heaps of morels in Assiniboine Forest, which is one of my favourite places on earth and where I’d only ever found one or two morels. So she screencapped/sent me the info, but at the same time remarked: “I can’t believe I just brought you local mushroom news.” I responded: “You’ve reached your final form.” Like she was a Pokémon.
• I just planted the last of the dahlias. Saving something over the winter to plant again and have hopes for, is possibly my pride moment of the year, aside from the guitar thing and the fact that my daughter is a flaming badass.
• Life is difficult, and navigating it is difficult. I believe in triggers, though I can’t always predict what might affect me. Despite the hurricane, I’m not scared of wind storms. The other day, however, a cookbook fell open at one of Doug’s favourite recipes and I blinked away tears. His handwriting. A shoe store window displaying the red running shoes he yearned for (he asked for so little) that we couldn’t find when we were shopping for sneakers. And this weekend, a tent full of butterflies.
• Yesterday, waiting for a break in the weather to swim, I finally went anyway, a light rain brushing my shoulders, the water cold, the sky turning above me in its otherworld of clouds. I don’t why I waited for so many years to swim daily in cold water, held in its generous buoyancy, the sun, when it comes, lighting pools of green so clear the tiny fish show up, glittering. I loved the way my footprints in the grey sand disappeared underwater almost as soon as I’d walked out, erased by waves, just like that. And how the hoofprints of the deer who’d come to the shore, earlier than me, to drink were imprinted deep in the sand like petroglyphs.
• I love that the pancakes were the ruse.

May 8, 2024

Gleanings

• I do believe in love and humility and that we all deserve a transcendent life. I believe that we are all trying our best and that we are all artichokes, with our myriad glorious fucking wings.
• Which oceans did the textiles traverse, and how did they get to me?
• It’s distance from that phase of motherhood that allows me such a full and free and visceral connection to it.
• She didn’t find a book she wanted, but typically I found four. Perhaps I will be more restrained in 20 years time, like Margaret? We said goodbye and that we hoped we’d run into each other again, at Saver’s or at Vinnies or somewhere in between.
• What might become possible if we said hello because we are surprised and delighted by one another’s precious beingness, and because by doing so we call attention, our attention, Life’s attention – to your being, to our being, to my being. We acknowledge and are present to the miracle that we get to be alive together on this mysterious planet at the same time? What might become possible if we saw each other? If we slowed down enough to see… and be seen?
• “Trillium are propagated by ANTS. Not bees, the wind, or birds. The seeds are covered by a sweet coating which entices the ants to carry seeds underground into their colonies. After eating the coating, the seed germinates in the perfect subterranean environment.”
• Bonds of colour, bonds of affection: I work towards these. Sometimes the results break my heart.
• Words become buzz words and then after a while some tire of them and begin to sneer and speak of them with ‘air-quotes’.
• I read this book at a fast clip…which more and more I think is the best way for me to read–then I live inside the book, carried along with the characters, and even if I don’t like the book that much I’m inclined to finish it because it has in some way become my life.
• I’ve always had an eye for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy – plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537. 

April 17, 2024

Gleanings

• You will find me in the book aisle. In the book shop. At the book stall. By the book sale. My books are my favourite non-living things. There’s something about collecting a library of books that feels sturdy … like I’m shoring up my house for whatever may come,
• he photos that families didn’t want, all the “mistakes” that at 20×24 were too expensive to just throw away. That’s the gold, I’m realizing. The raw, clumsy, beautiful and unpredictable moments that glue a family together, that make them who they are. That’s what we hold on to. That’s what we stick to our fridge. That’s what we’ll leave behind long after we’re gone.
• But in light of new research I’ve recently learned about, I’m wondering if gratitude might also have the power to push us in the direction of a healthier democracy.
• Are my passions really my passions or have they been just a band-aid for this ache? It’s time to find out what she likes to eat and make a feast.
• Why give yourself away? The question lands differently in my ear now—I hear giving as ongoing life-affirming generosity that returns to you a thousand fold, because now I believe that my self is formed of a deep well, a source that is infinite, and that source is love.
• I seem to return to wanting to paint a rainy day, a lone woman with an umbrella, walking away from the viewer, towards something, purposeful in her stride. She knows where she is heading.
• With the privilege of the financial security that comes with middle age, I have the stage where my involvement can be targeted more towards social good. And that feels good. There is no question. 
• But these are days of light. I’m finally open to them after weeks of wondering how to move into a new season, the news grim, some personal issues keeping me awake at night, and no way to find joy in my daily work.  Days of beauty. In our old abandoned orchard, a cherry tree is blooming; a plum by the cucumber boxes is about to flower, its scent of sandalwood and honey held in each tiny bud.
• Sometimes our souls are in good shape, and sometimes not so great. If we can roll our eyes at our suffering, we’re probably going to be okay. So I tell myself.
• What I’m trying to say with this is that my heart bursts and breaks, daily. Sometimes I don’t know what to make of it all, of this, of us, and mostly I don’t know how to write about it.
• So then to my blog: a way to make visible the invisible and to bear witness.