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.

October 31, 2022

Spooky Read(athon)

Happy Halloween! Yesterday was the Turning the Page on Cancer Readathon, which raised over $75,000 for Rethink Cancer, improving outcomes for people living with Metastatic Breast Cancer. I raised over $2500 for Team Melanie, in memory of our friend Melanie Masterson, who died in December (on the solstice!) and had the best time reading four spooky books which were fitting for the season. You’re going to be reading more about a few of these picks soon. All in all, a wonderful reading day for the very best cause.

September 13, 2022

Big Flex

September is a new season, a new year, in many ways (and this September marks three years since I started Blog School!). For me, it’s always been a time for reflection and renewal, especially having come off such a restorative, restful summer with the goal of bringing that some of that softness with me as I go back to the “grind.” (I also would like to aim to not ground down to dust, less grind in my grind, please!)

“I think this fall,” I said to my husband, “I would like to have a kind of structure for my days, but one where you can move things around, everything not rigidly fixed in place.”

“You mean, like a calendar,” he said patiently.

“OMG, yes!” (Or maybe I finally need a bullet journal after all?)

But what I’m really saying is that I want a framework with a bit of slack, where my days have different shapes and things can be moved around to accommodate whatever else might be going on. My tendency is to be so unyielding in my approach to my days, partly because you have to be protective when you are self-employed and work from home, because everybody always things you’re just sitting around waiting to have coffee all the time, and also because I’m worried that if I’m not disciplined, the whole structure will fall apart.

But the thing is that sometimes I actually do want to go and have coffee, and also that often I actually can!

And I know that for some people, none of this is complicated, and also that adaptable calendars might not even be a revelation, but it’s too easy for me to become inflexible in my approach to my schedule, to do the same thing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, for one to be this day, and one to be another. I keep envisioning a structure that’s less a grid than a hammock, one of those knotted ones that are full of holes, but not so large that everything just falls through. Just that there’s give, and it’s easy, it stretches wide and low when it has to.

Is this the beginning of me FINALLY becoming laid back?

Don’t bet on it.

But maybe I can be me with more room to breathe.

September 1, 2022

Sweet Spot

I’ve written before about the too-muchness of summer, and also about what the last two summers of less than optimal circumstances have taught me about “enough,”and somehow, miraculously, summer 2022 has found that sweet spot right in the middle, a perfect balance. Some of which I deserve credit for, because staying within my limits has been important for me this season (in June I didn’t, and it was not a great time), and so I’ve been seeking so much rest and moderation, healthy things to restore me after the first six months of this year during which I’d periodically compare my mental health to a fraying thread. I feel so much stronger now, and grateful for this reprieve from struggling, and grateful to summer for being such a gift, for being so soft and gentle when I needed it most.

I’m still not about to say goodbye to summer—we haven’t even been to the CNE yet. But I’m still afloat on the memories of our camping trips, days on the beach, drives up north, leaps into lakes, the card games and the board games, and the books I read, and the tarts we ate, and the friends we saw, and patio meals, and ice cream cones, Shakespeare in the park, tending my garden, farmers’ markets, bike rides, campfires, and the songs we sang, and the times I laughed until I cried.

Oh, how I’m satisfied. So very satisfied.

January 17, 2022

Snow Day

My intentions for the next while are all about open-heartedness, about meeting what the world delivers instead of imagining that I might manage to out-maneuvre it somehow. Especially since…I was never really in control of anything anyway and imagining that I was just made me crazy.

And I think that there is nothing better than a wild walloping of a snowstorm to drive that point home. To remind me that sometimes just submitting is beautiful, to call all bets off, the usual rules not applying, the landscape rearranged. No school today. There’s been not a lot of work getting done.

We walk on the road and periodically sit down on the sidewalks, and embrace what the day has handed us.

June 1, 2021

May/June

May and June are my favourite months. They’re so much my favourite months that I like April even better for the sole reason that in April, we still have all of May and June before us. May and June encompassing what I like to think of as “Kerry Season,” from Mother’s Day until my birthday a month and a half later, and in between those two auspicious dates, both my daughters have their birthdays, we celebrate our wedding anniversary, and there’s that EPIC FESTIVAL known as Father’s Day, which is like Mother’s Day, but smaller. (Both my mother and my mother-in-law also celebrate their birthdays in June. So did Barbara Pym. How could 30 days contain such wonder?)

We are lucky in our household that anybody’s special day is everybody’s special day—we all get takeout and cake. We’ve been especially lucky this year in Toronto that the weather has been glorious and all the most incredible flowers are in bloom. May and June is the season of having so much to look forward to, even before we roll into summer proper. May/June is the season where sometimes we get tired of cake. May/June is before we start visiting places infested with bugs and before I start getting covered in rashes. Before everything is covered in sand, and beach days are just a delicious fantasy. But it’s not too soon for too much ice cream.

May and June are one of those rare experiences that I love and don’t encounter enough, which manage to be wondrous in themselves, but also on the cusp of everything. May and June are like the most wonderful swan dive off a cliff, gorgeous, in slow motion, and at the end of it all is the clearest, bluest lake you’ve ever seen. SUMMER.

March 11, 2021

Get Outside

I went for a walk with my best friend Jennie this morning, whom I haven’t seen since the summer, even though she doesn’t live so far away. The weather has turned spring-like, and we’ve traded our winter coats for spring ones for the time being, and we marched up past Casa Loma, down into Cedarvale Ravine, spending ninety minutes in each other’s company, and we never stopped talking, although we have been friends since 1992, so we have a lot of touchstones between us. When I got home, I said to Stuart, “Hanging out with friends is fun. I can see why people like it.” It was really lovely, though I will admit that hanging out with friends is not something that I’ve been actively missing. I don’t know that I’ve actually been actively missing anything, it occurs to me, which is kind of weird and seems far from other people’s experiences. Certainly in the early pandemic days, I was completely beset with grief—the vacation we never went on (which Google kept sending me updates about, ghostly reminders of what time to leave for the airport to catch my place), the loss of ordinary life and all those things it had never occurred to us not to count on. But eventually, I kind of found my even keel, and stuck with it. (Not counting, of course, the days in January when I was consumed by anxiety and it all felt so hard, and only exercising while listening to up-tempo Celine Dion delivered me any kind of relief.)

It helps that I spend 24 hours a day with another adult whose company I appreciate, and have no shortage of people around the house to bestow hugs upon, and the children’s schooling gives every day a framework and place for me to be at certain times, and even people to meet there. I’ve always worked from home so that part of my life is just the same as it ever was, and in fact it’s better because Stuart is home and often makes me lunch. And this is not a LOOK HOW GREAT MY PANDEMIC HAS BEEN post, because certainly I’ve been in as much despair as anybody and it’s been a long long road, but I think I’ve dealt with the burden of it all by focusing on what I’ve got instead of what I’m having to do without, and yes, probably lots of denial and a bit of numbness, and faith that there will be plays and book launches eventually so I don’t think about it very much, and yes, maybe I never much liked leaving the house anyway. I just think it’s curious, how everybody has their own coping mechanisms, and none of them are ever one-sized fits all, and sometimes I think my comfort zone has become infinitesimally small, so its a splendid surprise to be taken out of it sometimes, as I was this morning. Especially when I get to discover crocuses in bloom along the way.

March 3, 2021

We Haven’t Been Going Nowhere.

We haven’t been going nowhere. You know that, right?

That while indeed it feels surreal to find ourselves in March again, seemingly right back where we started from, that is to forget or discount the cycles, seasons and emotional roller coasters we’ve travelled in the past year.

And I am NOT saying that there aren’t better ways to spend an annum, that whatever we’ve learned is worth what it has cost us, that there are lessons and takeaways we can tie up prettily with a bow.

THIS IS NOT A SILVER LINING.

But also none of us has been standing still, even those who’ve barely left the house or ventured down the block. Even when it’s seemed like life is on hold, every day has been bringing us closer to a time when it won’t be. We have found a way to render some good days out of these strange days, and to weather the bad ones. We have sat with hardship and uncertainty, anxiety and fears when it seemed like the world was ending—but it didn’t. We have born loss and kept going, and found ways to connect across distance, and we’ve grown things, and made things, and tried things and failed things, and while we might be gazing out at the same view tonight… we’ve all actually come very far.

Unimaginable things have occurred this year, but some of them have been so good that 2020 Me would be envious, switching places in an instant—we have vaccines, rapid tests, treatment options, new technologies. Virtual schooling kind of works. We know how disease is spread and I don’t have to worry much about cleaning my doorknobs or disinfecting my shoes. Plus Evermore and Folklore.

I know now more than I ever did before. I know that I am courageous and brave, that I can rise to the occasion and pick myself up again when I fail to, and that community doesn’t fail us, and other people will be what saves us, and that I really can get through this, and I know that you can too.

February 26, 2021

Wintering, by Katherine May

It’s funny you know, for some reason I was expecting a more literal guide to surviving winter with Katherine May’s Wintering, but she writes about having to wait years for snow to fall where she lives in the south of England. In order to get a handle on winter’s reality, she has to go on field trips. For her, wintering is a metaphor, an idea—one year, her husband becomes very ill, her own health is suffering, her son stops attending school due to anxiety. She and her family are forced to rest and retreat for a while, to observe a different kind of season, but one she feels she has a muscle for after a breakdown she’d experienced as a teenager. Sometimes the best thing is just to submit and acknowledge the season you are in, which is part of a cycle.

Wintering is a fascinating book about reconnecting with cycles, seasons, the rhythms of the natural world. Although it does feel curious to read this book here in Canada, written by a person from a country where people don’t tend to have parkas or even winter boots. May’s winter as metaphor doesn’t always translate here, where the season can go on so long, everything still and frozen, where we’re still digging out long after the vernal equinox. It’s hard to buy that this is a season as rich with life as all the others are. But I suppose that makes the book for me all the more purposeful.

May’s writing is bright and engaging. I kept reading bits aloud to whoever had the good fortune to be in my presence. It made me consider becoming a modern-day Druid, to be honest, and I loved the parts about winter swimming, though I could never dare such a thing.

If you read and enjoyed Wintering, I recommend you read Maria Mutch’s beautiful memoir Know the Night (I reviewed it for the National Post and am still really proud of what I wrote) nominated for a Governor General’s Award in 2014. Definitely the two works are gorgeously complementary.

December 1, 2020

Alfie’s Christmas

I’ve measured out my life by the children in Shirley Hughes’ Alfie books. I remember when we thought of Alfie as a big kid, and when we wondered what Iris would be like when she was as old as Annie Rose, and then my children kept on growing and now we’re looking in the rear view. Alfie and Annie Rose are tiny little relics now, but we’re so fond of them (okay, maybe it’s just me and everybody else is mostly just being indulgent) that we’ll never let them go completely, especially Alfie’s Christmas, which is the first book I’ll be writing about over the next few weeks as we blow the dust off the titles in our Christmas Book Box.

I love Shirley Hughes scenes of domestic life, the jumble of stuff in her illustrations, the clutter and mess of family life. I also love the shading in her illustrations, rich and vivid colour, but just muted enough that it’s sepia-toned. The books themselves are an exercise in nostalgia.

Which is another way of saying that they’re also timeless, in away, because they always appealed to my children, books written exactly from their point of view, and my favourite bits were always the parts in the margins—the pets who wandered into the spread, teapots on the counter, when Dad sits on a bench while Alfie splashes in puddles, and how I’d love to go have a cup of tea with his Mum and get to know her—I feel like we’d get along.

Alfie’s Christmas is a delight—not much of a plot, to be honest, apart from when they realize that Alfie’s new remote control car requires batteries. Alfie gets ready for Christmas, prepares presents for his parents, they put up a tree, carollers come by on Christmas Eve.

In typical baby sister fashion, Annie Rose gets up in the night and rummages through her stocking, and at first, Alfie thinks it’s Father Christmas creeping about his room. And then finally it’s Christmas morning, and the big day begins, and I like too that their family celebration is a bit modest, which our family can relate to. Alfie’s grandmother and her brother (from Australia turn up) and then Uncle Will and Alfie’s Dad get Christmas dinner on while Mum and Grandma head to church (taking along some of Alfie’s Christmas baking “to share with people who had no home to go to”).

Which is to say that these books are not so old fashioned at all, that their coziness is underlined by a progressive sensibility, and while Alfie gets some fun things for Christmas, connection is really what the holiday is truly about. “As they walked home they could see lit Christas trees shining out of all the windows and neighours like the MacNallys and the Santos family with their friends and relations, enjoying themselves, eating nice things, and watching television together.”

And oh, the colour of the sky at dusk! The most majestic ordinary splendour.