May 27, 2022

Literary Tote Bag Hall of Fame

New series: welcome to my Literary Tote Bag Hall of Fame, in which I celebrate the hold-alls that really hold all, the bags that keep on carrying and play an integral role in my daily life.

Top of the heap is the bag I received from the Huntsville Library when I did an event with them in 2018.

This is a tote bag so useful, *it’s beginning to wear out*. It has pockets for pens, for cards, a pocket for a small water bottle. The side pocket is infinitely useful too—currently contains a toque in case of cold temps, and it’s also handy for a book.

This bag is especially precious to me because it’s my swim bag, ever ready, containing the essentials: suit, towel, hair towel, sandals, goggles, and my locker lock.

Great strap for carryout over my shoulder, but it also fits perfectly into my bike basket.

This literary tote bag is PERFECTION.

Until next week…

May 25, 2022

Thoughts and Prayers

I think a lot about sharing space while I’m swimming in the pool. I try really hard and sometimes fail to be patient. My ire is reserved for the people who wait at the wall until I too arrive at the end, and then they take off, and I have to wait. Or the very fast swimmer in the pool yesterday who was so much faster than everyone else, and kept overtaking me at the end of the lane so that I’d have to wait once they’d taken off again, and I wonder if they’d considered how much they were interrupting my flow. But of course my slower pace was messing with theirs. When I used to swim at the university pool, I was on the slower side of medium, but now that I swim at the community centre with an older demographic, I’m kind of a hotshot. I swim at a very even pace, and it annoys me when other people don’t, which is a metaphor for a lot of things. It’s interesting that I find the idea that everybody swim at a very even pace more than reasonable when the fact is that everyone’s in the pool for a different reason, some people with training regimens, timed swims, swimming sprints. How easy it is to determine what you do is reasonable. I want to question those assumptions. But I also think all of us need to be aware of the other people all around us.

*

The other day I was confessing how disheartened I’d become with politics, and the response I got was, “But you’ve still got to keep fighting.” And I think I can’t. I think my problem is with the verb, “to fight.” I’m looking for a different mode of engagement, I think. Keep going, keep being, keep learning, keep changing. But I can’t fight. It’s not me, and it’s not sustainable. And of course, I’m conflicted about this. Imagine if Rosa Parks had decided not to fight, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes I worry that 70 years ago against the civil rights movement, I would have still be put off fighting and calling for civility, and that idea is shameful to me. But then I think about our abysmal provincial government, the Minister of Education whose Twitter bio has always read, “Fighting for you…” Because he’s fighting too. Which is weird, because he’s the one in power—shouldn’t he have levelled up from fighting now? You’ve got to wonder about the rules of engagement. What if none of this is actually a game? What if the stakes are real and we all have to work together?

*

I am heartbroken and sad. I am tired of being heartbroken and sad. I am lucky that I get to be tired of being heartbroken and sad instead of being so steeped in sadness and heartbreak that other possibilities aren’t available to me. I’ve seen the photos of the children who were murdered, posing with their Honour Roll certificates issued in a ceremony the same day they died, how their moms and dads came to see them, how hard they worked, their teachers. How hard it’s been to be a teacher…forever, but especially in the past two years. I think of my kids’ teachers, I think of my kids, how fragile and precious all of this is. I am heartbroken and sad. And I am so tired of being heartbroken and sad.

May 24, 2022

Gleanings

• I still grieve the loss of those friendships, losses that are almost entirely my own fault. In casting aside those friendships, I discarded love, shared history, a different perspective on me and my life, and the gifts of wisdom, strength, and goodness that those two women gave me.
• But it’s also strangely, a bit perversely, encouraging just knowing there are so many other sad people out there. I don’t imagine that it feels easy to any of them, or that they are “over it” or have “moved on,” but there they all are, carrying on with their lives while also somehow carrying their grief. “How do they do that?” I still wonder, even though I suppose I am now doing the same, however haltingly.
• I liked the idea that I might have been at the forefront of the slow stitching movement! And doesn’t it fit with how I live my life these days? I have so much more time now that I am older; I am no longer running to the finish line. I like walking for the sake of walking, not the destination. I enjoy spending hours cooking in the kitchen with my husband and then savouring a tasty meal with friends as the sun sets and candles burn down. Slow walking, slow food, so why not slow stitching?
• This morning I’ve been thinking about Greece, a place I will probably never travel to again, and I am remembering how I took for granted the long warm days, swimming in a warm ocean, eating ripe tomatoes and cucumbers and salty cheese with glasses of golden retsina at lunch, and lying down in fragrant grass with Agamemnon.
• What better way to dive back into more regular blogging than to start a new series?! The days are so long and short of late, it might feel good to pause and make a wee list of where things are at?
• I firmly believe that the more creative you are, the more creative you are. When you’re a creative person, your default is creativity. Your default is flowering. Your default is fecundity. But. There will be obstacles.
• But I think the most valuable part of women’s friendships is the understanding, the listening, the forgiving, if need be, of lapses in judgment.
• To remember it’s all temporary and fleeting and to still love anyways… to still jump in and risk and engage with it all. To not shut down in anticipation of pending grief, numb or avoid, or for me … live in fear, but to allow and be in relationship with grief , with the sorrows and hardships in and of this world, alongside love and joy … this. This feels sacred, “a holy thing.”

May 20, 2022

Time Machine

We’re in the midst of re-doing our children’s bedroom, which was last painted in 2008, before we even had children, and the new bunk bed has no clearance underneath, which has required a lot of reorganizing, because all their out-of-season clothes had been stored in plastic bins beneath the old bed. And in the midst of the re-storing, I switched the contents of another plastic bin I had into a cardboard box, and found myself going through my diaries.

I kept diaries for years, though then there came a moment about 15 years ago when I got rid of a lot of them, culling them along with my stacks of photos, yearbooks, scrapbooks. All of it just too much to keep, to carry, in a practical sense, as well as a spiritual one, and there are benefits to not having a basement, a place for boxes of this stuff to live forever,

The past is also on my mind because next week is the 20th anniversary of my university graduation, and I’ve been charged with putting together a photo slideshow for our virtual event. And I’m also currently at work on the early chapters of my next novel, many of which are drawn from life, taking place about 19-20 years ago.

And so it was something to discover this specific diary, which I didn’t even know existed. (I had forgotten too just how detailed my entries were—I wrote so much and so often!). This one runs October 2002-May 2003, capturing the beginning of my relationship with my husband, the months I spent living in a backpackers hostel, working as a temp—initially charged with entering the details of thousands of years-old time sheets into a computer system, the most mindless, boring, pointless occupation imaginable.

And I write about this in my novel, a whole scene in which my character goes to the agency and BEGS for a different job, because she’s going insane from the monotony, and what a thing to find it all outlined in my diary—it really happened. And so much more, I was definitely a ridiculous person, young and unformed, but I was also so brave and strong and resilient, and I am so proud of that young woman who these writing gives me such a direct connection to.

There’s so much incredible writing outlining experiences and emotions I no longer have any recollection of. I’d had an abortion only months before all this, and so that whole experience was very much in process as I was writing. Twenty years later, I’ve made sense of it all, fashioned my own narrative, but it was so raw then, and I didn’t know where I was going, what my story might turn out to be.

In October 2002, I went on a date to the movies with someone I’d met, which was fun and exhilarating, and I wrote in my diary afterwards, “If there is anything I’m sure of not wanting in my life right now, it’s a baby.” What had happened to me, I determined, was “sad and beautiful.” Beautiful, because now I got to have my life.

And then later on the following March, reflecting on the one-year anniversaries of so many pivotal things, and the reality that I could have had a baby then in an alternative reality, an impossible reality. What surprised me about these entries was that *I was so angry* about what I’d been through—and not the abortion, because the abortion had ended the terribleness, though it wasn’t a picnic either.

I wrote: “I don’t regret, but I hate. So full of rage that it ever had to happen at all, that I ever felt so much pain. I am past it now but time’s parallels bring it back to me and it’s so unbearable I cannot bear it. It could drive me crazy to be back there again… I remember grieving in the Fall but I am so absolutely angry now. I broke down…but we’re going to Paris, where I should have gone last July. I am arriving late from a different direction…”

I have no recollection of feeling any of that. Those feelings especially visceral and striking in light on threats to abortion access, something that never even occurred to me in 2002 (when we were all post-feminist, ha ha, remember that?). To have ever been that desperate and not had a way out. What an unimaginable cruelty.

So grateful to this little notebook for a reminder of the person I used to be.

May 19, 2022

Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh

I spent a few days last week utterly gripped by Jennifer Haigh’s novel Mercy Street, which I picked up after reading a New York Times review and after someone else had mentioned it to me as being a novel about abortion. A bit like Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, in that it’s a novel about abortion as much as it’s a novel about anything, a story propelled by its own internal engine, which is just what a novel should be, I think.

This one beginning at a Boston abortion clinic during a brutal winter in recent times where a woman called Claudia counsels those arriving for various reasons—unwanted pregnancies, birth control, other health concerns. Haigh’s novel underlining the huge range of situations which bring a person to an abortion clinic, to have an abortion at all, some of them brutal and devastating, desperate and tragic, and others much more mundane. What does it mean for the addict who sits before Claudia, for example, to have to continue with her pregnancy? (Abortion in Massachusetts is legal only until the 24th week of pregnancy.)

Claudia enters the novel with her own story, of course—her mother was a teen-mom, she grew up in a poverty, a background she overcame for success writing for women’s magazines and a brief first marriage. She’s still friends with her ex, but her job in journalism is far behind her, Claudia finding more meaning counselling women who come to the Mercy Street Clinic, but the job is a lot, and there’s a weight on her that’s far heavier than the keys she possesses to her late mother’s single-wide trailer in Maine, a property Claudia has put off doing anything about for a very long time.

Claudia finds solace in smoking cannabis, and in the company of Timmy, her dealer, who’s trying to think of a different way to provide for himself and support his teenaged son who lives in Florida, and the narrative moves from Claudia to him, and then to Anthony, one of Timmy’s clients, who’s been on disability for years, still lives with his mother, attends mass daily at a local church, and takes care of local parishes’ websites. His online dealings putting him in touch with an antiabortion crusader called Vince who, over the past two decades, has been radicalized by the white supremacist undertones (and lately overtones) of talk radio, and is setting out a plan that could have devastating consequences.

This is a novel about a butterfly who flaps its wings, about fate, and agency, and how one thing, for better or for worse, leads to another. Gripping, galvanizing, sympathetic, and infuriating, I enjoyed Mercy Street so much.

May 17, 2022

Gleanings

• I am eternally searching for murder mysteries that scratch a very specific itch.
• When the Cherry Blossoms at Robarts Library are in full bloom I know that winter is well and truly over.
• I’m glad to have recognized, yet again, that it is possible (necessary) to love the imperfect.
• In Dublin I wondered why I’d ever left that western island but it was the beginning of something else, a key, the life I live now, and Dylan somehow knows that and offers his own strange consolation.
• Words and photos never capture the breathtaking beauty of sunrises and sunsets. They are an experience one has to witness.
• And the flowers open in sunshine and close again in the evening and in cloudy weather, which makes me wonder about the mysteries of nature. How it does this. How it knows.
• But I do know what fear feels like, and looks like, and how it shows up in me, and in our world and so what might be possible if love simply is moving away from, or through fear, to a place of openness and spaciousness and being with… to the myriad of possibilities that lie beyond fear?
• If he’d lived, he would be 96 now. If my mother had lived, she would be 99. That would be improbable, for me to have a 96-year-old father, a 99-year-old mother. Am I old, then?
• What I have learned this past while is that it’s very easy to be a buddhist among buddhists. It’s easy to be a good listener among other good listeners. But in the absence, it can be quite ridiculously difficult! Likewise, it’s very easy to be just and fair and kind among same.
• It’s revelatory and delightful to discover (again and again?) that the self is so sturdy.

May 13, 2022

Before the Beginning

My favourite time is before anything happens, when it’s all just possibility, because possibility is something that you might even imagine you can hold in your hands, unlike everything that happens after that. (The force that through the green fuse drives the flower…) My favourite weekend day of Thursday, and my favourite month is April, even though April is horrible (which we managed to escape this year with a week in England and getting Covid after that…), because when it’s April it means you’ve still got May and June before you, which means you’ve still got all of summer. The moment before it all gets started, that upstoppable motion, when the green shoots exploding, go, go, go. And forsythia turns into lilacs turns into cosmos, and weeds start growing up from the cracks in the sidewalks, and it seems impossible that my garden was ever just an assemblage of buckets of dirt. Which it was until last Sunday, when I sowed a whole bunch of flower seeds in the pots all up the stairs, though I can no longer remember into which pot went what, but we’ll find out soon enough. Seedlings arriving yesterday from one of my kids’ school fundraisers—we’ve got lettuce, and basil, two strawberry plants, a sunflower. My one perennial that survived the winter throwing up a bit of green, and it’s all starting to happen, but yes, I love it most (because I love it all) just before anything does.

May 9, 2022

Cambium Blue, by Maureen Brownlee

Oh my gosh, I loved Maureen Brownlee’s Cambium Blue from its first pages, with characters so vivid, sympathetic and familiar that I felt like I was watching a small town TV drama and the story’s spell was never broken. The story moving between the perspectives of Stevie, single mom turned newspaper reporter; her eccentric neighbour Nash, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War; and Maggie, the community newspaper publisher trying to decide whether or not to carry on with her flagging business after the death of her husband. It’s 1995 and changes are already afoot in the rural British Columbia town of Beauty Creek, ever since the sawmill closed down, which has locals are struggling, plus a beetle infestation is threatening the area’s most valued resource and local politicians are determined to add polish and red tape to the way things things have always been done.

A smooth-talking businessman is promising fortune in the form of a luxury resort, but not everybody is convinced he has town’s best interests in mind. Similarly controversial is a crackdown on Nash’s yard full of things he’s scavenged from the town dump, which has Stevie coming to his defence once they’ve developed a prickly connection when she dares to interview him about his history for the paper, but Stevie’s never been an advocate for anybody before, a teen mom who never finished high school, though Maggie sees something in her and has given her a chance to prove herself, the kind of chance Maggie herself might have appreciated once upon a time before her promise had been overwhelmed by that of her husband.

Cambium Blue is a novel about community, and change, its necessity sometimes and other times one must rail against it. It’s also a beautiful ode to community newspapers, situated at a moment just before the advent of the internet made the business seem impossible—though some of defied the odds. (Brownlee’s biography mentions her ten years spent as “variously publisher, editor, reporter, photographer, graphic designer and janitor for a weekly community newspaper.”) There’s a certain amount of small town dynamics that make the story especially compelling, but there’s nothing tawdry about this, Brownlee permitting each of her characters such a fierce dignity and inspiring sense of self that makes the story so alive. Such characterization, along with beautiful prose, resulting in novel that really sings, and reading it was moving, and such a pleasure.

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.

May 4, 2022

New Lane Winslow: Framed in Fire

Being ill last week was not without its advantages, among them: a chance to spend an entire Friday in bed reading the new Lane Winslow. Framed in Fire is the ninth title in this detective series set in and around Nelson, BC, in the late 1940s, and throughout the series, author Iona Whishaw has performed the remarkable feat of tying her plots to so many issues relevant to our present-day experience—racism, xenophobia, domestic violence, rape, ideas about women’s independence, and more. And I suppose it shouldn’t be so remarkable to find such stories in historical fiction, these issues being—unfortunately—timeless. But that Whishaw manages to address them without anachronism is what’s really impressive. And while I’ll admit there might be something just a little too good about the people of King’s Cove—the murderers and dead bodies among them notwithstanding—I am not sure such enlightenment is entirely anachronistic either. Because as much as we excuse egregious deeds and ideas of past figures for being “of their time,” it’s also true that there were always people who knew that all people were deserving of rights, that colonialism was barbaric, the women were people. In Framed By Fire, Lane encounters an Indigenous person for the first time since her arrival in Canada, and has her preconceptions challenged that First Peoples were thoroughly of the past. And while other characters do reinforce the racist and colonial mindsets reflective of the population at large, that Whishaw writes others who challenge such ideas is smart and subversive, and why these stories read as so fresh and fascinating.