August 16, 2024
Good Time
Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?
The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)
I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)
(This post was a Free Post on my Substack this week! Sign up to receive Pickle Me This directly to your inbox.)
May 17, 2024
First Bloom
Every year, the peony show down the street from my house never disappoints, and I was excited—on Wednesday—to see that it had begun.
May 6, 2024
A Novel for All Seasons—But Maybe Especially This One…
My third novel, Asking for a Friend, is also my first novel that’s set over a long span of time, and ever since it was published, I’ve been reflecting on its seasons. That summery book cover and that it was published on the cusp of fall, and that it opens in December with snow falling outside at the end of an academic term. How sad Jess was during that first February, when she (not unrelated) wouldn’t stop listening to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” on repeat. The changingness of March when Jess and Clara drag their mattresses outside and wake up dusted with snow, signs of spring ranging from crocuses to frat boys on St. George Street dragging their shitty leather couches outside to drink beer out of red plastic cups. And now that we’re long past crocuses and lilacs are coming into bloom here in downtown Toronto, I’m finally thinking about summer, and what a summer book this is, the rituals these friends return to over and over as the years change everything, and bring them together, push them apart, and back again. That first summer after university when they discover that they both have an affinity for swimming after four years spent in a city that’s easy to forget is on a lake. When Clara returns from abroad and both their lives have changed so changed so much, each with so much to prove to the other, as demonstrated by their eventual blow-up on a weekend getaway. And then the final summer scene, two friends floating, finally, easy together after so many years of pushing against the currents and tides in an effort to become themselves, which is what it feels like to me with my friends in our forties. How I love that scene, and this entire book, and I’m excited to think of readers who’ll be reading it on the dock.
March 20, 2024
First Day of Spring
How to begin? I think I’ll start with my bona fides, even though its kind of obnoxious. I don’t own a car, I use public transit, I wash and reuse plastic bags, I hang my laundry to dry, I’ve banished serviettes in favour of secondhand cloth napkins, I make monthly charitable donations to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, I’m not a jet-setter, all my clothes are secondhand or from local designers, I’ve been refilling the same dish soap container for half a decade now, I only vote for politicians with climate plans, I eat meat just once a week if that, save veggie scraps for soup stock, I buy specialty toothbrush heads and mail them to be recycled, for heaven’s sake. I could go on, but I won’t. I know that climate change is real and I do a lot within my limited sphere of influence to do what I can to make a difference. I think this matters.
I think it’s also worth noting that I have anxiety, something I’ve probably always lived with, but which became untenable not long after the period in which people were marching around in the streets with signs that said, “WE WANT YOU TO PANIC!” Just following orders, and so I did, and eventually learned that years of panicking does a number on one’s psyche. At the end of 2022, I had a breakdown, the perpetual alarm bells going off in my head apparently serving no one, least of all me, and the natural world was certainly no better off for any of it.
Can we also talk about the weird Puritanicalism that people have always had about the weather? They’re either complaining about rain, or saying we’ll pay for it later. As though there is a ledger, and if anyone ever dare enjoy anything too much (at all?), we’ll all end up with the wrath of God. I remember a comment from the podcast Offline about how at some point about a decade ago on Twitter, it became established that maybe everybody should just be feeling bad all the time. Sometimes living in the year of our lord 2024 feels a little bit like living in the town from Footloose.
This time we’re living in right now is really tough for all kinds of reasons, and so many people are going about making it even harder by insisting that all of us need to feel guilty and anxious about sunshine on our shoulders, that we ought to read ominousness into unseasonable warmth in mid-March. (And when it snows a week later, no one even sends up a follow-up note telling us it’s fine to take a day off from existential dread!)
I get that most of those people are simply working through their own climate anxiety. I also have come to understand that other people’s anxiety is a huge trigger for me, that I feel compelled to manage and control it, and so I’m trying to step away from writing posts that are thinly veiled attempts at that. This is not what this. Instead, this post is an assertion about how I refuse to feel about a beautiful day. You only get so many beautiful days in a lifetime, and I’m taking every one.
Because feeling bad about a beautiful day makes nothing better, and, even worse, I fear that it acts to further disconnect people from the natural world. And yes, it’s discombobulating and upsetting to see the natural world offset from its natural rhythms. I’m going to tell you that I haven’t photographed a single snowdrop this year, because they emerged in mid-February, there’s been scarcely snow at all, and something about that wrongness is heartbreaking, but the snowdrops being too sad is not the way to approach all this. We owe the snowdrops better.
The caveat, of course, is the bonafides I started with. The status-quo is not sustainable. But also can we note the resilience of nature? The way that living things find a way, these tender shoots that emerge in spring, but which aren’t tender at all, and have always survived through snowstorms and ice-storms, and warm Februaries too? Faith and hope can’t be the only things—again, see my bona fides. Action is necessary, but if you’re already taking action, faith and hope are far from nothing, and you’re allowed to enjoy a sunny day.
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.
