March 20, 2023

March Break

I loved our March Break holiday this year, a March Break so normal that I even forgot to find “normal” remarkable. Our kids brought their indoor shoes home, but not because we weren’t sure they might ever go to school again, and that Friday was a blizzard, and if I’m talking about it like it was 187 years ago, it’s because it feels like it, because our holiday was relaxing, a proper reset, but also because a week after that blizzard (which we weathered while eating pizza and watching Newsies [omg, so good, first time I’ve seen it in 30 years!]) there were crocuses in bloom, and it feels like spring. No doubt winter still has a few wallops in store, but spring feels possible now, and getting here feels like an achievement.

I handed in edits for my book just before the holiday and so I had the luxury of working half days in the mornings (after 8 am swims!) and spending the afternoons with my children on local adventures. They loved it too because it was just the right balance of lazing around playing video games until their eyes glazed over, and fun being out in the world (with friends!). And I liked that I genuinely had less to do, so it wasn’t me scrambling to fit everything into a smaller time-frame (which would make me very grumpy). It was a holiday for all of us, even Stuart, who still had to work while we were gadding about, but having no weekday activities in the evening was a break for everybody.

We went swimming at the community centre; went to see Winter Stations at Woodbine beach and went out to lunch with friends; our kids had friends over to help us eat our chocolate pie; we went to Leslieville to meet our pals and for cookies, book buying, and thrifting; our kids got awesome new haircuts; on Friday we went to see The Parent Trap at Paradise Theatre; more community centre swimming; and then we closed off the holiday yesterday with the T. rex Exhibit at the ROM, where I learned why it’s T. rex and not T-Rex, ie why T. rex isn’t J-Lo.

We had lots of time to laze, to rest, to read, to sleep, to visit, to sing, to whiz across town on transit, to snack, to wonder, to climb, to dance, to build, to spin, to dream, to be. I even got my taxes done! It was a very good week.

February 14, 2023

Swimming in Pee

We had the kind of weekend this weekend that hasn’t been possible in such a long time, the kind of weekend that we were wondering if we’d ever have again, even just a year ago, and it felt really good, to be so full of joy, our time full of fun, everything carefree. And something I can write on my blog that I would be less comfortable posting to social media, which is so much more amplified and devoid of context, is that we thoroughly forgot about Covid this weekend. 24 hours in Niagara Falls, staying in a hotel, visiting an indoor water park, and eating in restaurants—the object was enjoying ourselves and beyond packing hand sanitizer, we were going to not worry so much, leave our masks in our pocket for once.

Which I know is something we’re very lucky to be able to experience, but anyone who reads here often also knows what a terrible time I’ve had with anxiety over the last few years and how Covid absolutely fucked with my brain, made me think that keeping our health system functioning was my personal responsibility, and that every single one of my actions was so gravely consequential that I eventually was unable to do anything except walk around weeping at the sadness of it all, crumbling under the weight of this imagined burden of personal responsibility and my own catastrophic thinking. It was really bad, and terribly debilitating, and also really freaking hard for my family, and no doubt my kids will be talking about this in therapy for decades to come.

(I really really hate the way that bad actors hijacked the conversation around the pandemic and mental health right out of the gate so that it became impossible to have good faith conversations about any of this, to acknowledge that Covid is real and threatening, but also that there are dire consequences of having an entire society living under a perpetual emergency for literally years.)

And so it was actually really important, and even healthy, to have this little holiday away from it all, a bit like tearing off a band aid, pushing myself out of a strange uncomfortable comfort zone. If we got sick this weekend, we reasoned, so be it. Which is the kind of gamble that’s always been necessary for a trip to an indoor water park anyway, right? We were pretending that there was no circulating respiratory viruses, just as we were pretending that the wave pool wasn’t populated by people (hopefully mostly just the small ones, which is somehow less disgusting!) who were freely urinating without compunction.

So naturally, my youngest child woke up this morning puking—an inevitable water park aftermath. (She has been well since mid-morning, however, and will likely be returning to school tomorrow.) And then I headed to the hospital for my annual thyroid check, where it was found that one of my nodules had grown larger and so I had to have a biopsy (which I have had fairly often, and they’ve always been benign, thankfully), cystic liquid being sucked out through a needle in my neck.

And in the lab where I was sent for routine bloodwork, the technician was dressed in red for Valentines Day, just like I was, and we remarked on how we matched my blood, which filled four small vials for testing, and it somehow seemed fitting on Valentines Day, it being about hearts and all, my heart and your heart doing the amazing work of keeping our remarkable blood pumping through our gross and awesome bodies, and how all of us are connected, for better or for worse, most irrevocably.

I took the subway to the hospital for my appointment this morning, the first time I can recall riding transit at rush hour in such a long time, and the subway cars were packed, and more people than not with masks on, including me, and far more people with masks on than I ever see at off-peak hours (which makes a lot of sense!), and the subway was also so audibly quiet, people possibly on alert and good behaviour due to recent acts of violence on transit, and maybe that calm and quiet was what made it a little extra easy to feel in love with everybody today. All these people who’d woken up and had their breakfast and gotten dressed, and maybe nursed sick kids, or walked their dogs, or watched the sunrise with a cup of coffee, and now they’re out in the world, surrounded by strangers, following the rules, going through the motions, minding the gap.

It isn’t necessarily how badly our society functions that is remarkable, all of its faults and flaws, as I’ve written many times before, but instead that it functions at all. That most days in this city hundreds of trains take people places, and those people make room for each other, and move over on the stairs to let others pass, and help somebody up who has stumbled and fallen. That lab techs who dress up in red to make someone’s day a little brighter, going to work to poke needles, drawing blood, performing work that just might mean the difference between life or death. The miracle of socialized medicine and that I get the care I need to stay healthy. The miracle of ultrasound. The mask I continue to wear, when it makes sense, in my day-to-day life, and the knowledge that all of us, always, are swimming in pee.

And somehow, this is love.

This is life.

Happy Valentines Day.

January 9, 2023

Holiday Reads

Our holiday break started a day before it was supposed to, as a blizzard raged outside and cancelled school and I curled up with THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS, by William Maxwell, a novel set against the Spanish Flu Pandemic and made me wonder why the word “unprecedented” was used at all in March 2020, because it really wasn’t.

And I read and I read, books I’ve been picking up here and there over the last year and finally time away from work (and social media) gave me time to delve into them. Some new books, others authors I love whose backlists I still get to delight my way through (Sue Miller! Toni Morrison! Natalia Ginzburg!). Barbara Trapido, whose work I’m falling in love with. I read HAPPENING, by Annie Ernaux, 2022 Nobel Prize Winner. OMG, SONG OF SOLOMON! GIOVANNI’S ROOM! Connie Willis’s time travel epic (and I have its conclusion still before me).

What a satisfying stack this is, a stack that’s inspired me to read (even) more off the beaten track in 2023, to pursue my own curious avenues.

Also now my “to be read” shelf is as spare and orderly as it will be for at least another year, and so before the deluge of new releases begins, I want to take a moment and appreciate that.

September 19, 2022

One More Time

For the second year in a row, we went camping in September, the kids taking a day off school before they’re even just two weeks in, just to prove to ourselves that we can, that we’re not fixed in place, that summer doesn’t end with Labour Day, or that it’s even the only season in which freedom is possible. Cozy in warm pants and sweaters, the campfire necessary because it’s cold, and dark by 8pm, so we sit around it, attuned to something primal, the rest of the world gone, and it’s only us, which is also everything.

August 30, 2022

More Vacation Reads

For the second summer in a row, we’ve gotten away for two one-week-holidays at a cottage, and I feel so lucky that this is possible for us and will go out of my way (if necessary) to continue to make it so because it’s just the very best thing, so relaxing and restorative, which has been the theme of my summer in general, and what a gift. And not just because I got nine whole books read!

The first was The Smart One, by Jennifer Close, which I stole from the resort library of the cottage we stayed at in July (though I left two books in its place, so that’s okay, right?). Since reading Marrying the Ketchups in July, I’ve been wanting to launch a Jennifer Close kick, because I enjoyed it so much. The Smart One, her second novel, is similarly a book about adult children coming home again after failures to launch, and it started out fine enough, very typical commercial fiction fare, I thought, but then I started to notice the thread of thoughtfulness that wound the different parts of this story together, and the questions the book asked about what it means to be “the smart one” or “the pretty one,” and the impossibility of any woman making the right choices. Surprise pregnancies, Catholic guilt, people called Cla(i)re and the ties that bind were introduced in this novel, themes that would appear in subsequent books I read.

In Watermelon, by Marian Keyes, the pregnancy is not, in fact, a surprise, but what is a surprise is that Clare’s husband announces he’s leaving her right after their child is born. (He didn’t want to mention it before, because it might have been a risk to her health then.) And so Clare decides to pack up her London life and head home to Dublin, to the house that she grew up in with her legion of sisters, and there she proceeds to drink away her pain and then plot her way toward a better life, so that when her husband finally appears to win her back he’s not really sure what’s happened. I will confess that this is not the best Marian Keyes book I’ve ever read—and I found it in a Little Free Library anyway, so no matter. It was entertaining enough but also utterly implausible—Clare’s newborn baby seems remarkably independent and leaves her mother with plenty of time and space to explore her own needs, which was certainly not my postpartum experience. I also found it very amusing when everyone in this book from 1996 worries that their bum looks big from the vantage point of the 2020s when big bums are all the rage and unflattering jeans are where it’s at. This book was something of a relic but also a perfect diversion for a summer’s day.

Next I read Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, which was the odd man out of these books in many ways (such as, I didn’t find in a Little Free Library), but had more in common with Marian Keyes’ Watermelon than you might imagine (and intersected with Aminatta Forna’s Happiness in interesting ways). It’s true that this is not a novel about ties that bind, instead it’s about being free of those ties, which doesn’t always feel like freedom. Intimacies is a novel about exile, about belonging nowhere, and features a protagonist who’s dating a man whose wife has left their family, inviting some of the parallels to the Keyes. It’s a curious and alienating novel, one just a little too cold and precise for my liking, but that’s not a criticism, just taste.

After that I read Siracusa, by Delia Ephron, who I’ve never read before, and I think I found this book as a secondhand bookshop. It’s a novel, like Intimacies, with an atmosphere that feels oppressive, but far more revealing, and actually intimate. Could be described as a taut thriller, but it’s weirder than that, about two couples who travel to Italy together and whose lives seemingly unravel on the journey with players being played and too many secrets threatening to be revealed. Quick and eerie, I really liked it.

And remained by the Ionian Sea for my next book (or at least it’s beginning), Julia Glass’s Three Junes, which I knew nothing about, except that it won the National Book Award in 2002, and my friend Marissa recommended it to me (and she never steers me wrong). I loved this book, which comprises three distinct sections—the first of Scottish widower Paul on a Greek holiday months after the death of his wife; the second from the perspective of Paul’s son Fenno, a NYC bookseller coming home to Scotland after the death of his father five years later; and the third set five years after that when a character we glimpse in the first section meets Fenno on Long Island where she is accidentally pregnant (and there’s a pro-life activist; curiously, there is not an abortion in any of the books I read in this bunch, truly a holiday indeed) and waiting for her boyfriend to return home from Greece so she can tell him about the baby. This novel is a bit strange, and its connections aren’t always clear, but I found it utterly absorbing.

And then I read Frankie and Stankie, by Barbara Trapido, which blew my mind. I read Trapido’s reissued debut, Brother of the More Famous Jack, when we were in the UK in April, and while I enjoyed it, it was so unlike anything else I’ve read before that I had trouble placing it in my mind. This novel, written more than thirty years later, is helping me do so, however, because it’s brilliant. Ostensibly a coming of age novel set in South Africa during the 1950s and 1960s, it manages to be a fascinating (and hilarious) character study, story of a family, but also the most interesting history of South Africa I’ve ever read at once. (In her notes at the end of the book, Trapido explains that the forty years that she’s spent in the company of her husband, Stanley Trapido, a professor of South African history at Oxford, certainly informed her point of view.) I learned so much from this book, but it was also delightful, and now I am officially Barbara Trapido-obsessed.

All the while we were listening to Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in the car on audiobook—it was so good!! We all kept coming up with reasons to go somewhere just so we could get in the car again and hear what happened next. Truly a delight for the whole family, even Stuart, who had watched the movie recently so had a good idea of what was coming.

And then I read Happiness, by Aminatta Forna, which I purchased at the Toni Morrison event I attended at Luminato in June, and like everything associated with that event, it was just so fantastic. As unfathomable as it seems, a novel about urban foxes in London, coyotes in the northeastern United States, and PTSD from war in Sierra Leone, amongst many other things, the novel becomes a study of wildness, of humanity, of love and goodness. Part of it also spoke directly about my own anxiety, my fear of hardship and suffering, a fear of trauma which is seemingly a condition of white, middle class, privileged people in the West, which might cause us to turn our backs on those for whom trauma is lived experience. And trauma also doesn’t have to be destiny—it changes one, but it doesn’t necessarily leave one damaged, as psychiatrist Attila explains. There’s so much to unpack here, but I’m looking forward to reading it again and getting to work.

And finally, Maine, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which I’d saved for the end, something light and easy, another seaside book with Catholics, accidental pregnancy and someone called Clare, though it was probably the most forgettable of the bunch, so I’ll leave it at that.

Hooray, hooray for holiday reading.

August 25, 2022

There are no edges.

I was reading Katherine May (again; I am nothing if not consistent), a post about how her people are “edge people,” about how she’s drawn to margins as a result of growing up far from the centre, and it made me think about how growing up smack dab in the middle of a continent (I didn’t see the sea until I was 10) might have informed my own tendency to adhere to the status quo, to centre my own experience instead of seeking a broader understanding (though I think a lot of people do that; though isn’t that just what somebody with such tendencies would think?!?), but also how it has truly left me hungry to know the edges of places sometimes, which is why—in my most pivotal moments—I find myself so drawn to the Great Lakes shores, to their infinite horizons.

The lakes more familiar to me, however, provide a very different sense of being in the world, instead of edginess, immersion. (And maybe this is what you love when your people are middle people?) The lakes of Haliburton, ON, in particular, just north of the Kawartha Lakes I grew up with, and different too, more rugged with such rocky shores, self-contained instead of each lake merely a conduit to another place, water instead of a waterway. The cottage we’ve rented there for the past three summers does not have a beach, instead a dock with a ladder at the end, so you’re either in or out, there is no in-between, and when I’m in, I feel like I belong to the world in the most peaceful and meaningful fashion.

There are no edges, the lake a giant rocky basin that turns into trees that turns into sky that turns back into trees again as you trace the shape of the visible universe, everything a circle, leading back to the lake, leading back to me there, buoyant and held, connected to all of it, grateful to be one with these waters, clear, silky and cool.

July 29, 2022

Summer Reading

I would say that time’s gotten away with me since my week in Muskoka earlier this month, but that’s not strictly true. In fact, time has very much been on my side these last two weeks, which means that I’ve not been very busy, had enough time to do the things I need to do, and haven’t pushed myself to accomplish very much extra, such as recapping my holiday reads. But I’m finally going to get it done right now, because the reading was just so excellent.

I started with a reread of Judy Blume’s Summer Sisters, which was published in 1998, and I don’t recall the circumstances under which I read it the first time, except that I think it was a book I enjoyed along with my mom and sister. And when I read it again, I was surprised to find out how much of it was still so familiar to me, even though I probably haven’t read it or even thought about it much in the last twenty years. Such a great summer book, rich and sweeping and just a little bit trashy. Holds up entirely, except for Vix’s reference to that Cherokee ancestor who’d gifted her those cheekbones, because we just don’t do that anymore. Lots of swimming in the pond on Martha’s Vineyard.

And next was Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson, which I found absorbing, even if the storytelling style didn’t really work for me, skimming a (too) broad surface instead of plumbing depths. But it was still really fascinating, first with lots of ideas about food and colonialism and culinary history, and one of the characters is even an ocean scientist—there’s a whole lot going on. My favourite part, though, was the swimming, which I wasn’t expecting, because most Black characters in Caribbean-set books don’t get to swim so much, but swimming is a big part of the storyline here, as well as surfing, and I loved that.

And then I read Ghosted, by Jenn Ashworth, which I bought when we were in the UK because it was shortlisted for the Portico Prize for Northern English writing. I also bought her novel The Friday Gospels, and loved it, so expectations were high—and oh, she delivered. Ghosted is about a woman whose husband disappears, and she doesn’t tell anyone, which is kind of suspicious, plus she leads a pretty isolated life anyway and has a complicated relationship with her ailing father. There are secrets, but just like in Gospels, they’re not what you think they are, and Ashworth has such a gift for crafting suspense and writing sympathetic characters who are heartbreakingly human. No swimming, but scenes set in Morcambe and Brighton mean beaches definitely factor.

Following that, I read Tara Road, by Maeve Binchy, whose books I always dismissed with literary snobbishness, but I’ve come round, though hers is a curious kind of storytelling, very much telling. But what a wondrous tapestry of family and community Binchy weaves here, and I was utterly absorbed in this story which sweeps decades and continents, with women at the centre. Wasn’t expecting much swimming in this one, but there is a scene at the beach which inspired the opening scenes of James Joyce’s Ulysses!

Another Irish novel up next, Love and Summer, by William Trevor, the third novel I’ve read by him, and the least subversive, though it was in its own way, just more subtly so than the others (Miss Gomez and the Brethren and Death in Summer, both of which had evil lurking on its fringes and such wonderful dark humour). I think I love the works of William Trevor, and want to read them all. No swimming here, but there is a lake where Florian Kilderry walks his dog, and this is very much a novel about the pains of restraint and so nobody dives in.

I’ve already written about What Storm, What Thunder, by Myriam J.A. Chancy (SO GOOD!), which is definitely not a swimming novel. The one character who ventures into the sea ends up in a tsunami, so consider that a warning, but oh, what a book.

And finally, Every Summer After, by Carley Fortune, which is a much hyped book of the summer, perhaps too hyped for my liking, but I enjoyed it well enough, and its main character swims across the lake every summer, which is the kind of project I can get behind.

May 5, 2022

Good Things About England

I’ve always lived by the proverb, “Go to England for a week, and you’ll have a nice holiday. Find an English husband, and you’ll be going to England frequently over the course of your lifetime.” But it had been far too long since our last visit, our trip scheduled for March 16, 2020, having been cancelled when the entire world shut down. Sometimes it felt like we might never get to go again….but we did! The long-awaited April 2022 trip happened, and it was incredible, so excellent to be back out in the world again, having adventures, smack dab in the middle of springtime.

Things we loved about our trip to England, in no particular order.

1. The weather. It was sunny every day and we came home with tans and new freckles on our noses.
2. Our flat. We stayed at the most wonderful Air BNB around the corner from Lancaster Castle, with a ten minute walk to the city centre in one direction and a ten minute walk to Stuart’s sister’s house in the other. It was so comfortable and filled with light.
3. Swimming!
4. We drove an electric car and it was so much fun, and I ended up spending a grand total of $45.00 on charging for the entire week.
5. Our family! We got to visit again for the first time in so long, and also meet our three-year-old niece/cousin, who was more than worth the wait and we adore her.
6. Bookshops! Lancaster features a Waterstones AND a wonderful Oxfam bookshop, where I was able to pick up two novels by Barbara Trapido. And one morning we drove to Lytham St. Ann’s for a visit to Storytellers Inc, which I picked up a veritable tower of titles.
7. Special dinner on the canal. We didn’t dine indoors while we were in England, but thankfully were able to enjoy picnics, and other outdoor delights, including a dinner at the Water Witch on the Lancaster Canal, which is where it dawned on me that my children were old enough now that travelling with them was just so thoroughly a delight instead of a chore, and I felt very lucky. Plus the lamb shank was so good, and we had stick toffee pudding for dessert.
8. The blossoms. Bluebells, pink trees, camellias, even an early lilac, and so much more. It was a floral feast.
9. How relaxing it felt to get away…especially from Covid. I read the Saturday Guardian while we were there, and it didn’t mention Covid at all? My jaw didn’t hurt from stress clenching for the first time in two years. Honestly, the fact that we all ended up getting Covid didn’t even damped the moon.
10. To remember that good things are possible. Oh, it felt so wonderful.

September 28, 2021

Getaway

“I can’t believe we’re going camping tomorrow,” Iris kept repeating on Thursday as we moved through the motions of a perfectly ordinary weekday. (A perfectly ordinary weekday. Can you imagine? Getting breakfast on, walking kids to school, greeting friends at the school gate? And can you imagine what a pleasure are these motions, especially after so many months without them?”) And I felt exactly the same as she did, back on the roller coaster of work and school, deadlines and dates on the calendar, even if that roller coaster moves more cautiously than it once did, easier on the twists and turns. Because once we’re stuck in our routine (and I love our routine. For months and months, the familiarity and support of our routine was everything I longed for, but still) it seems impossible to imagine any other way of doing things. But in July, with still no idea what the near future would hold, I’d booked a camping trip, just to keep summer going for a little bit longer, and because I had this suspicion we might find ourselves in need of a getaway.

And so we went, impossibly. On Thursday both children were learning at their desks, and on Friday they were helping us pitch a tent on the shores of Lake Erie where we spent two days offline and in nature, and it was wonderful, and significant for being our first off-season camping venture. Even more significantly: our last outdoor swims of 2021 as well in the churning waters of this great lake (our third Grade Lake in as many months!).

A reminder that sometimes what makes the impossible possible is one simple thing: you just do it.

August 23, 2021

Holiday Reading Part 2

There were no duds in this stack, and even the title I was most intimidated by (hello, novel about the Trojan War!) blew me away. Every single one of these very different books was an absolute stunner, and the connections between them (as always!) were fascinating—see chart below. I was also so happy to reread Turning, which I’d read on vacation three or so years ago, and which I enjoyed but found so SPECIFIC that I wasn’t quite sure it would resonate again, so I gave it away, which I regretted for years. A new copy found its way back into my life this year, however, so I was happy to read it again. By a lake, of course.

I LOVED Malibu Rising—while I liked her previous novel, it didn’t quite live up to the hype for me. This one, however, was amazing. Every Sue Miller book I read is a pleasure. The Laura Lippman book was the most wonderful mindfuck, as was The Other Black Girl, both of which take on writing and publishing. Happy to read my second Marian Keyes—she’s really so good. A Thousand Ships was incredible, and Stuart and Harriet both devoured it after I did. Wild Swims was weird, but neat, and short, which is just the kind of portion I can take my weird in.

And finally Deacon King Kong, which I heard of somewhere, and then found in a Little Free Library shortly thereafter. It was rollicking, kaleidoscopic, huge in its scope, and tragicomic brilliance. Absolutely amazing.