April 18, 2012

Don't pick the flowers

“Don’t pick the flowers” is a cardinal rule at our house (along with “Don’t chase the pigeons”). It is so important to me that Harriet learn to engage with and appreciate nature without torturing or destroying it. Not every experience needs to be hands-on. And so what she’s come to understand about the flowers we encounter in our neighbourhood (and gloriously, there are so so many) is that they’re still growing. When she touches them, she has to be gentle. “They’re still growing?” she asks me, looking back over her shoulder, and when I nod, she seems to get it. But we’ve made an exception for the dandelions. Not because they’re lesser flowers, but because they’re a flower of abundance. She seems to get this too. And so we gathered a bouquet on Monday morning on our way home from the library, and it’s been decades since I did this. It’s been decades since I sat at a  table with a dandelion centrepiece. I’d forgotten there had even been such centrepieces, but there were so many, and as we picked our flowers, it all came back to me. The “this was why I had a child” moment I didn’t even know that I was waiting for. And the lesson too about exceptions– as important as the lesson about still growing. How important it is for our children to grasp that we live in a bendy and beautiful world.

March 25, 2012

Ice cream

The ice cream shop at the top of our road has opened for the season! They remarked upon how enormous Harriet has grown, and they were kind enough to refrain from mentioning that she was also very filthy (and do note, she has since been bathed). In other local news, yesterday I went to the movies for the first time in nearly three years. We saw Friends With Kids, and I really liked it (its portrayal of breastfeeding in particular, which goes a long, long way). We also bought tickets for a train journey to Ottawa, served clafoutis to friends at brunch yesterday, started reading Tales from Moominvalley, finished watching Downton Abbey Season 1, and are having to wait for Mad Men Season 5 to come out on DVD because we do not have a TV. Which is sad, but also nice to know that my dream of continually having Mad Men before me is forever coming true.

March 8, 2012

They're here!

This is the fourth year that I’ve measured spring’s arrival by the crocuses across the street, and I don’t think the ritual will ever get old.

January 31, 2012

Packing snow

Harriet has been lusting after winter for weeks now, but the season really hasn’t delivered. It’s the last day of January, and only now have we received the supply of “packing snow” required for Snow Person construction. But Harriet was ecstatic, and we did have a good time rolling up all the snow in the backyard to make this guy. I explained to Harriet that he would not be long for this world, as our temperatures are tropical today, but I’m not sure that she really understood. “Remember how all the snow melted in Charlie and Lola?” I asked her, but she ignored me, and I really was being a bit of a downer. Though not unnecessarily– I just looked out the window, and our Snow Person is no more. My plan to distract Harriet away from trauma resulting from this situation will involve offering ice cream and chocolate. And it will probably taste better than what I found her eating when I finally dragged her inside (kicking and screaming) for nap time, which was dirty snow out of our garden using a long-abandoned, formerly-buried piece of sidewalk chalk as a spoon.

January 18, 2012

Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik

Winter has always been difficult. When I was 20 years old, and prone to fits of angst and melodrama, my roommate and I copied out an epigraph from Margaret Atwood’s Survival (we were English majors, in addition to being melodramatic) and mounted the paper on our wall: “To find words for what we suffer,/ To enjoy what we must suffer–/ Not to be dumb beasts…/ We shall survive/And we shall walk/ Somehow into summer…” (DG Jones, “Beating the Bushes: Christmas 1963”).

Last winter, I went about survival all wrong. As the winter solstice arrived in December, I kept telling myself that the darkness only meant that spring had never been so close. This thought was consoling, but it utterly ruined things once June came around, and I couldn’t shake my head of the fact it only meant now that winter had never been so close.

So I decided to do better this year, and Adam Gopnik’s Winter: Five Windows on the Season was part of that. My plan was so strategic that when the book came out in October, I couldn’t actually read it because it wasn’t winter yet. In fact, it wasn’t really winter until last Friday when the snow fell, and so that was the day I finally started reading. Winter is this year’s Massey Lectures in book form, written and delivered by Gopnik, of the revered New Yorker columns and wonderful books (I loved Through the Children’s Gate). Gopnik, who gets to start sentences with, “My brother-in-law, the Arctic explorer…”, which underlines something I’ve long suspected: that it’s people with the best stories who get to be the best story-tellers.

The book is divided into five essays, but structurally, these essays are curious. They’re not built from the bottom-up as much as vertically, as a flow, words and ideas flying by in a whirl of pages. They’re more consecutive impressions than a cumulation of ideas, which makes sense for lectures, and I also don’t mean to imply a lack of depth. Sure, breadth is what’s on display here, but there is an underlying structure, but it’s easy to get distracted from it by the essays’ sheer volume of stuff.

You’ll know that I was absorbed in Winter because the whole time I was reading it, I started all my sentences with, “Hey, did you know…?” That there was a mini-Ice Age between 1500 and 1850, for instance, which accounts for all that skating on the Thames. I learned about this in the book’s first section, “Romantic Winter”, in which Gopnik asserts that the Romantics constructed winter as a season to be considered rather than simply borne, and developed notions of winter as both beautiful and sublime. And this is what I love about Gopnik’s writing, and this book. Nothing is ever simplified. Gopnik never misses a chance to classify one thing as two things, and usually those two things are directly opposed. But so it goes. “Doubleness clarifies the world,” said Carol Shields, and Gopnik is smart enough to know this.

In “Romantic Winter”, Gopnik references poetry and artwork (whose images are featured), ideas of winter and nationalism, the advent of central heating, icebergs vs. snowflakes. Section two is “Radical Winter”, considering winter as something to be sought rather than survived. He begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is situated at the North Pole (and yes, I’d forgotten this too), and describes the race for the Pole from both ends (and describes what the Poles where imagined to be before we knew they were cold. Seriously. This stuff is wonderful). “Recuperative Winter” is a celebration of the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, and he writes about holidays in general, how Christmas is extraordinary for its doubleness as a festival of renewal and reversal at once.

In “Recreational Winter”, he’s basically talking about hockey and hockey as born out of Montreal in the late 1800s (and it’s the offspring of rugby and lacrosse, not anything so civilized as soccer or field hockey). And did you know that team sport was not even really a thing until the industrial revolution (and the weekend, and the big company to sponsor and pay for the sweaters). And finally, “Remembering Winter”, picking up the strands of loss and nostalgia that have been winding their way through the entire book. Gopnik celebrates Montreal’s underground city that allows winter to be skirted (and did you know that Dallas’s underground city had same designer? And was a failure because Dallas doesn’t need to escape from itself, and also because there was no subway integrated. Dallas is a car town), but also laments how far we are removed from winter now. This loss underlined by how important winter has been to building great cities. He presents winter as “a labile environment where the imagination can not only project but can construct anew from something given.” Why we take our children outside to build snowmen, angels. Global warming with spiritual consequences beyond the cannibalistic polar bears.

Gopnik comes clean at the end of the book: “I realize that these chapters, in the guise of cultural observations and a kind of amateur’s cultural anthropology, are really a composite list of things that I like and things I don’t… I love Christmas carols, A Christmas Carol, Dickens and Trollope, free-skating and fast-passing Russian and Quebec hockey, and courage of the kind that drove people toward the poles, which I wish I had more of.”

But the thing is that I don’t even like hockey or sports at all, and Gopnik’s hockey chapter had me mesmerized. I am a Canadian who doesn’t know how to skate, but this book made me want to sign up for lessons. The book has had the effect I’d intended, providing my survival with a rich and vivid context, to have me stop a bit and be here now, to throw on another sweater and gaze out the window some more, and maybe even go outside.

December 24, 2011

Blue Christmas

Christmas Eve is my favourite day of the holidays, and with yesterday being a holiday too, it’s like we’ve had two of them. But with Christmas Day nearly upon us, it means it’s time to get down to the holiday reading I’ve been saving. It is by coincidence only that all these books are blue, but I like the connection. I’ll be reading ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, which I bought on clearance ages and ages ago and am finally getting to because I’m at P in my to-be-read pile. And I’ve been looking forward to this one. The Louise Penny book I tried to read in the summer during that time when the temperature was 50 degrees celsius, and it just didn’t work for me. With the cover so wintry looking, I’m thinking now is a better time to try it, and don’t mysteries just seem somehow more December-ish anyway? And finally, I’m going to read A Family of Readers by Roger Sutton and Martha Parravano (in fact, I’m probably going to read it first), which was a gift from Nathalie Foy (and this is the part where you get to envy me for not only having Nathalie as a friend in my online life, but also as a friend in my neighbourhood).

I hope you have a holiday just as lovely. xo

December 20, 2011

The pieces we've chosen

Hattie prepares to roll out the pastry

Someone asked recently what the reasons are that those of us don’t go to church still make a point of celebrating Christmas. To which I answered that it’s about lighting darkness, about remembering all things that are evergreen, and celebrating the miracle of new life. And so there’s a 7 ft tall balsam fir in our living room, stockings by the fire, and we’ve been baking cookies shaped like stars and crooked snowmen. Gifts are very far from the point, and what gifts there are are most often books. Harriet has asked if Santa not come this year, because she doesn’t like him. “I want my stocking empty,” she kept saying, and we’ll listen so not to traumatize.

We sing Christmas carols, traditional ones and ones by Slade, Wizzard and The Pogues, and this year we’ve told Harriet the Christmas story, because these things are of the culture we’ve come from, and we like stories of all kinds– we recently purchased our own copy of Dick Bruna’s The Christmas Book after reading the library’s copy to near-death. We’re also reading A Christmas Carol together, each of us for the first time, and however familiar the story is from popular culture, it’s a joy to be discovering. In particular since we have a gorgeous big edition with illustrations by Quentin Blake, and although I’m not sure how much Harriet is really getting out of it, she’s taken with Tiny Tim. Kristen den Hartog’s most recent blog post has made me interested in making the film version of the book part of our family holiday tradition.

And oh, tradition, isn’t that at the heart of it? These hooks we hang our lives upon. To be without religion is not be rudderless, I insist upon that. I guess some might resent that we pick and choose the pieces with which we build our life, but the pieces we’ve chosen are chosen with care, and held in reverence.

December 18, 2011

Making the season right

From my Christmas post at Canadian Bookshelf, “Books: Help to Make the Season Right”:

“Pictures of this Christmas book tree have been making the rounds online for the last week or two, representing a tangible link between reading and the spirit of the holidays. Though such a link would come as no surprise to anyone for whom gift-giving is a tradition, because there is no object on earth as easy to wrap as a book is. Even the clumsiest thumbs are capable of a present-worthy wrap job, thanks to compact solidity and right-angled symmetry. Further, once the wrapping is shed, the book is ready for reading straightaway, no batteries required, no plugging in to charge… Books have the potential to make everything that’s wrong with Christmas right, to make gift-giving about more than acquisition and stuff.”

Read the whole thing here.

December 12, 2011

A Jolly Old Elf

…and of course I’m talking about Abe the Advent Book Elf, who is facilitating passionate recommendations of new books every single day over at the Advent Book Blog. Check out my recommendation for Maria Meindl’s Outside the Box, which was one of my favourite books of the year. And then grow your Christmas list even longer by checking out all the others, and perhaps you might even submit a recommendation of your own!

July 22, 2011

In search of a cool breeze

Yesterday, when the temperature “felt like” 50 degrees Celsius, I kept thinking about Booky, and her depression-era family, and this one vivid scene I remember in which they had to close the drapes, and everybody slept in the front room where the fans were. We are depression-era in that we don’t have air-conditioning, though this usually isn’t a problem. Our second and third floor apartment is ensconced high up in the branches of several enormous trees that shade us, and a breeze flows through our three big front windows out the wide-opened kitchen doors. No one wants the 50 degree Celsius breeze however, so yesterday I countered all my ideas of common sense and shut all the windows, closed the blinds first thing in the morning, had the fans going in every room. It worked– we came home after lunch yesterday, and our house was much cooler than the outside (though this wasn’t really saying much). It was a bit like living in a dark and windy cave, but not sweltering at least. By bedtime, however, the heat was uncomfortable.

But when Harriet woke up for something at 4:30 this morning, I came down to check on her and then noticed the blinds at the front blowing in a breeze, and I could feel it, and it was lovely. I went into the kitchen and opened up the doors (we don’t have a window in our kitchen. It’s the doors or nothing) and suddenly air was flowing through the house again, and I was in a quandary. I couldn’t possibly close the doors, but I also couldn’t go back to bed and leave them open, though I longed to, but I read someplace once that we’re not meant to leave our doors wide open in the middle of the night. I decided that one would be unlikely to rob us, however, if one arrived at the doors to find me asleep on the kitchen floor, so that’s what I did, with just a pillow for comfort (and the company of several moths).

It was kind of glorious, and from where I lay, I could see the moon. The breeze was nice. I didn’t sleep so soundly, however, as the kitchen floor is as uncomfortable as it is filthy, so once the birds had brought the sun up with their incessant singing, I decided the time from robbery had probably passed, and returned to the comforts of my mattress.