January 26, 2026

The Snow Arrived

The snow arrived, and made everything new. It cancelled plans, turned our houses into caves, the cars parked on the road became marshmallows, and everywhere was quiet. When we ventured outside, we were grateful for the paths of others, and where there were no paths, we made our own, and we spoke to the strangers we passed, took in the miracle together of the world transformed, the force that is nature, how small and helpless we all are. How much we need each other. And the snow was a blanket that absorbed some of the sadness and rage at the world’s brokenness, at the violence inflicted by the world’s broken people, and the abject quiet was a reminder of goodness, courage, and justice of ordinary people who can be so incredibly brave. The snow was a blanket that made it harder than usual to deny that we’re blessed with a beautiful world, such a miracle of a world, and that it’s important to stay open to all its wondrous possibilities.

January 2, 2026

Welcome, 2026

I have resisted the urge for old year reflections over the last few days, and not because the old year is one that I would rather forget. On the contrary, I’ve had a really nice year in 2025, but perhaps what was nicest about it was how much I’d learned how to be present in the moment, instead of flinging myself into the unknown future that hasn’t arrived yet or desperately trying to hold onto the past. Or instead of trying to quantify my worth via lists of accomplishments, successes, experiences, etc. I am ever-learning that my own self-worth has nothing to do with any of that, and also that time is a river and life is easiest when I let it flow, instead of trying to hold it all. I’m facing forward instead of looking back, and welcoming whatever comes with curiosity, gratitude, humility, and wonder. Three-cheers for not being an anxiety-fuelled lunatic, could NOT recommend enough.

*Our one concession to old year reflections was once again partaking in my favourite New Year ritual, which is getting 2025 photos printed and working together to order them into an album. It really is the nicest thing.

October 31, 2025

Monster Reads for Halloween

I read Frankenstein with my family this year, and we liked it a lot (unlike, say, The Iliad, which you might recall we ditched for Anastasia Krupnik, by Lois Lowry, which went over much better). And because the only biography of Mary Shelley I’d read until now has been the picture book Mary Who Wrote Frankenstein, by Linda Bailey, gorgeously illustrated by Julia Sarda, I was excited to find a copy of a Mary Shelley bio by none other than Muriel Spark at the Victoria College book sale last month to fill in the gaps in my Mary Shelley knowledge—although Spark’s book was a source for Bailey’s and you’d be surprised at how much she managed to cover with a pretty minimal word count.

Bailey didn’t include what a rat bastard Lord Byron was, however—impregnating Mary’s stepsister and then stealing the child away to live in a convent because he didn’t want his child raised by athiests, and then the baby died. Oh my god, so many babies died, Mary losing three of her children. And Percy Shelley died in a shipwreck. Meanwhile, Lord Byron was telling everybody that Shelley had knocked up their maid, which wasn’t even true, and Byron fought against Mary’s attempts to clear her husband’s name because those attempts would have outed him a vicious gossip. 200 year old scandal is more fascinating than I thought it would be, and reading it as filtered through Spark’s lens (she doesn’t think much of these people’s godless ways!)

The biography is divided into two parts, and I’m near the end of the biographical details. The next part is a critical assessment of her literary work. Maybe it’s time I read something by Mary Shelley other than Frankenstein…

September 17, 2025

Heads Up

Summer’s on its way out the door, but the sunshine is returning to my south-facing kitchen table. And the snapdragons continue to bloom.

September 1, 2025

This Summer…

This summer was just the best. I was blessed with so many swims, good friends, great reads, fun road trips, fresh peaches, antihistamines, long days, cool nights, swift bike rides, plays, movies, even a baseball game (what?), gorgeous blooms in my garden, and corn for sale by the side of the highway. This summer was a work of art, and I’m a little bit proud of it, because I planned/booked everything back of January/February, when such a thing as summer was hard to believe in, and now it’s just in the rear-view, and oh, I loved it all. And now? Ready for the August-to-Cardigan transition…

July 23, 2025

Last Week’s Summer Reads

Once again, summer reads stacked up like a dream, this time on last week’s trip to the Lanaudiere region of Quebec, where we fell in love with the cleanest lake, shared a lawn with a fat groundhog, went swimming every day, and had fires almost every evening in the company of wonderful friends, the very best time. And the books were just as book, eclectic, fun, sparkling and magical.

I began with Jess Walter’s SO FAR GONE, which I picked up at Spark Books in Perth en-route (actually on the recommendation of David Worsley from Words Worth Books in Waterloo). I read and adored Walter’s BEAUTIFUL RUINS on a summer holiday years ago, and this very different kind of story proved just as rich and satisfying. It’s about a man who has retreated to a secluded property in Washington State after his long career in journalism fizzled out with the industry and after he punched his conspiracy nut son-in-law in the face during Thanksgiving in 2016. And then all these years, there are two children on his doorstep whom he fails to recognize as his grandchildren, and SO FAR GONE is the story of his wobbly redemption as he is forced to return to to the world and save his grandkids from the dangerous militia their dad has become embroiled with. Funny, thoughtful, twisty, and absorbing, this one is definitely a highlight of the summer.

Next up I read KAKIGORI SUMMER, by Emily Itami (who is Japanese, but writes in English, and whose text engages with Japanese kanji in the most interesting way), which I bought at Words Worth in Waterloo the week before, and which is going to be a highlight of the year. I’d previously read Itami’s novel FAULT LINES, and liked it very much, but this one is even better, the story of three Japanese sisters (their mother is dead, their father is barely known to them, living with a new family in his native England) whose lives are far apart but who come together again when the youngest—a pop star—becomes embroiled in a national scandal. Together, along with the middle sister’s young son, they all return to their childhood home, and the company of their prickly great grandmother, and are forced to make sense of their history, the possibilities for their future, all the promises of a beautiful, imperfect world, and the fragility of life itself.

I read Mick Herron’s DEAD LIONS after that, the second book in the SLOW HORSES series. I’ve not seen the TV show, but am enjoying the books a lot, and my husband who is two books ahead of me claims that the series continues to be great. It’s a spy thriller that subverts expectations at every turn, such a fresh take on a familiar genre, so that it continues to be cozy and surprising at once, and also so prescient—this one’s about the Russian threat lying dormant after the fall of the USSR and just waiting to spring up again.

And then I read THREE SUMMERS, by Margarita Liberaki, a recommendation with Teri Vlassopoulos via Julia Zarankin, an English translation of a Greek classic published in 1946, another book about three sisters coming of age in a bucolic idyll that feels worlds away from where Greece actually was at the time of publication. Dreamlike, steeped in heat and atmosphere, the story is strange and surprising, secrets and hidden strengths and weaknesses revealed, the story itself ever changing amidst a world where so much stays the same.

Next up was LANDLINES, by Rainbow Rowell, which came out in 2014 and I recall readers feeling let down by, and so I didn’t have any expectations. I fell in love with Rowell’s work when I finally read ATTACHMENTS, and then ELEANOR & PARK, and her most recent books, SLOW DANCE (which I loved SO MUCH). Perhaps fans of her super-hit FAN GIRL weren’t as interesting in LANDLINES, a time-bending story about a long marriage, and motherhood, the middle-agedness of it all, but that’s what SLOW DANCE is all about, and it’s right up my street. I loved it, and now keep listening to “Leather and Lace” and not even ironically.

And then finally, HERE ONE MOMENT, by Liane Moriarty, whose books I LOVE, but I didn’t rush after this one when it came out because the premise was so odd (it’s about a plane full of people to whom a mysterious passenger delivers each of their precise dates and causes of death) and PREMISEY. I didn’t love Moriarty’s novel NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, and while I appreciate her urge to spread her creative wings and not simply rewrite BIG LITTLE LIES over and over, I felt her latest might be more of the same. But it really surprised me, and I enjoyed it so much, especially Moriarty’s beautiful talent for investing difficult characters with the most human and sympathetic edges. The story had me GRIPPED, but I had to put it down unfinished on our last night away, and throughout the six hour drive home, I was so looking forward to finally getting to the end, the most delicious anticipation.

April 28, 2025

Magnolia

Every year since my children started school, which is 13 years now, I’ve spent the winter walking past this magnolia tree with the line from Barbara Reid’s Picture a Tree running through my head: “Every winter tree holds spring sleeping like a baby.” Every year, the people with the gift of this tree in their garden decorate the tree with baubles at Christmas, and leave the decorations up long after the holidays are over, which I don’t mind a bit, because there’s something about silver reflecting a rare sunbeam against a blue sky amidst February’s gloom, which the kind of thing that gets me through winter. The buds on this tree are a promise, one I’m counting on, and every year it happens. I remember going out of our way during the two springs my children’s schools were closed on account of the pandemic just so we wouldn’t miss it, en-route to pick up take-out, which was pretty much life’s highlight at that point. In addition to spring.

Things bloom, which has never stopped being a miracle. What a thing to share the world with trees that make flowers like this, how extravagant and just wild.

March 20, 2025

I Don’t Believe in Seeds

I don’t believe in seeds. I just can’t fathom the fact of what happens when you plant them, no matter how many times I’ve watched the miracle happen, which it always does, and it’s still never not blown my mind. That new life is possible*, how this can turn into that, the ordinary miracle. I still don’t believe it, I can’t. I mean, not so much that I don’t sow seeds every single spring, because I do, the most hopeful gesture I ever enact. I remember how counter-intuitive it felt to sow seeds in the darkness of March and April 2020, how beside-the-point, and even pointless, but I did it anyway, which felt daring and subversive in the depths of my anxiety, to imagine such a thing as a future. I like the hope and the promise therein, but I still don’t believe it, I never do.

Which means that when I do plant seeds, I go overboard. What are the odds, I consider, that a single seed is ever going to sprout? It’s a gamble, so I might as well sow five of them, maybe ten. What kind of magic is this, from a fairy tale, it seems like, spinning straw into gold, growing a single speck into a snapdragon, a gangling plant whose blooms I’ll be clipping until into November. To sow seeds is to take the long view, to have vision, to have faith, except I don’t, as we’ve established. Not really. Not enough that I can simply trust, instead hedging my bets, an entire handful of snapdragon seeds flung into the soil, because what if I was measured about it and then nothing happened?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about faith, about notions of A faith, and about how useful and comforting it would be to have such a thing at this moment. To have a sense of the world and in justice and progress that had not completely been turned upside down and inside out, leaving me wondering if I really know the world at all, what I ever knew about people, and progress, and what the project of these lives we’re weaving together. I watch the world through my news feeds with terror and dread, so much grief and sadness, and I long for something firm to hold onto. I want to keep believing in people, and possibility, in this beautiful world and for our little place in it, and good things being possible.

But I guess that’s what faith is, when it’s hard to believe, but you do it anyway. When we sow those seeds, even when it seems impossible that they’ll ever turn into anything. And what if any doubt we have is a reason to chuck in a handful of seeds, instead of permission to give up sowing altogether?What if sowing seeds shows us that miracles happen all the time?

I woke up this morning, the first day of spring, to find that the seeds I’d planted on Sunday evening had already begun. After a beautiful morning singing songs of peace and joy, I came home and dove into edits on my fourth novel, which will be coming your way in a year less three days.**

I still don’t believe in seeds, and yet. Here we are.

*Not unrelated: I also can’t believe that my children exist. Like, what even is up with that? Where did they come from and how do they just keep getting more and more magnificent all the time?

**Which is exactly five years TO THE DAY after I first wrote about the project: “Making: A new novel that’s inspired by Barbara Pym’s books, and I just hit 10,000 words. It might not be good, it might never be published, but my goodness, am I having a good time.”

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.