Get yourself a little blue blanket.
~
having trouble relaxing?
Author: carin
…the confines of the mediocre
“… At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion of coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don’t matter a bit. I have had plenty of each and they have only encouraged me, but dinginess, the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to a be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really wroth the effort.” —from the Introduction to Oranges are not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.
fancy a cool one?
happy new year from the tropics
—Otherwise known as southern Ontario where, yesterday, I raked leaves, chatted with my niece in the States while sitting on our patio, and wasn’t a bit cold in the backyard in my pjs at midnight listening to neighbourhood fireworks.
Today it’s foggy, tropical temps falling and snowshoes tapping their merry little aluminium toes in the hall. Though no sign of flakes.
Piles of books and magazines and a pot of green tea make the waiting more than bearable.
the year as ‘found’
In the spirit of reflection… (and following a prompt from The Indextrious Reader) I’ve rounded up the first sentences of the first post from *each of the past twelve months to create… uh, well, a document of first sentences, which I then rearranged slightly—in the spirit of amusing myself…
Et Voila!
2010 as Found
Snowing gently this morning as I sit outside with a cup of rooibos tea and watch geese, hundreds of geese, fly over the backyard—so quiet is the world I can almost hear each one of their wings. Over at Front Door Back Door—I note the moment we felt the earthquake, the sismo. I don’t know why Rona Maynard’s post on pilates and writing should make me think of something I read the other day about Marina Abramovic—the performance artist who recently closed what sounded like a most bizarre and amazing show in NYC, and is known for her ‘experiments’ in art through human nature—but it does. Find a lonely tree that needs some love.
“Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.” (Wm. Blake)
Depending on who you listen to—either today, yesterday, or tomorrow is the Feast of St. Mary of Egypt, patron saint of penitent women who formerly lived in sin. Am celebrating the 143rd birthday of our grand beau pays with my favourite things: words and food. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. And I don’t mean cheerio as in ‘goodbye’, but as in cereal…of course.
“Tea should be taken in solitude.” (C.S. Lewis)
Writing from a garret in London, Ontario. Coming along just swimmingly thanks.
~
Hoping everyone has a safe and happy one…
Amusez vous bien!
~
*From whence they came…
January Snowing gently this morning as I sit outside with a cup of rooibos tea and watch geese, hundreds of geese, fly over the backyard—so quiet is the world I can almost hear each one of their wings.
February “Man has no body distinct from his soul, for that called body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses.” (Wm. Blake)
March Over at Front Door Back Door—I note the moment we felt the earthquake, the seismo.
April Depending on who you listen to—either today, yesterday, or tomorrow is the Feast of St. Mary of Egypt, patron saint of penitent women who formerly lived in sin.
May “Tea should be taken in solitude.” (C.S. Lewis)
June I don’t know why Rona Maynard’s post on pilates and writing should make me think of something I read the other day about Marina Abramovic—the performance artist who recently closed what sounded like a most bizarre and amazing show in NYC, and is known for her ‘experiments’ in art through human nature—but it did.
July Am celebrating the 143rd birthday of our grand beau pays with my favourite things: words and food.
August And I don’t mean cheerio as in ‘goodbye’, but as in cereal…of course.
September Coming along just swimmingly thanks.
October Writing from a garret in London, Ontario.
November Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.
December Find a lonely tree that needs some love.
~
this is not a review: comfort me with apples, by joe fiorito
Love.
Go ahead. I dare you. Just try to read Joe Fiorito’s Comfort Me With Apples and see if you don’t end up in love. Because it’s not possible. Chap or chapette, you’ll be in love with him. I guarantee it. (Okay, I don’t guarantee it, but there’s a strong possibility…)
It’s not a new book, just newly discovered—also not exactly a cook book, nor exactly anything else; the man simply writes about food. And in such a way that I haven’t stopped cooking or eating since discovering it.
Yes, alright, another exaggeration. But it’s true that I can no longer cook or eat the same way. I mean, when in a simple essay on oranges he tells you—
“…You can put orange peel into beef stew along with your bouquet garni. You can squeeze a little juice in your fresh tomato soup; add a little orange zest while you’re at it. Or try this…peel two oranges, finely slice the peel, blanche it in boiling water for two minutes, and drain. Sautee a finely chopped onion in four tablespoons of olive oil. Add the drained peel to the oil, along with a cup-and-a-half of pitted black olives. Remove from the heat. Cook a pound of spaghetti in a pot of salted boiling water until it’s al dente. Dress the spaghetti with the olive oil mixture, add four more tablespoons of oil, and be grateful the Moors invaded Italy.”
—how can you not immediately want to put on your coat and walk to the nearest orange purveyor, purchase a dozen, make stew and soup and boil up some spaghetti, and when that just happens to change your outlook on life and entire DNA for the better…well, how can you not fall in love?
In another essay he reveals how a nun’s peculiar answer to his childhood question: What does my soul look like? led him to hate all cereal except oatmeal (and only then in the form of cookies). And then he gives you the instructions to make a batch. No recipes in this book and few precise measurements—mostly he just tells you how to do things the way he would if you were in the kitchen with him, chatting and sipping wine. And somehow things work out beautifully, the way they always do in happy kitchens.
I’ve been waiting for the perfect Sunday morning to make the popovers he describes in ‘Breakfast in Bed’—
“…Wake early one Sunday and smell the person sleeping next to you. Do it. Lean over. The side of the neck will do, just below the ear. Take a deep breath. The knowledge of this scent is lodged in the deepest part of your brain.
“…Now go to the kitchen. Throw two eggs into a bowl…”
And the perfect Friday night to re-enact his piece titled ‘A Plate of Spaghetti’, which begins:
“Today you’re going to eat, drink, sing, read—and act—Italian. I want you to start by going to the film store to rent Fellini’s ‘Nights of Cabiria’…” And ends with: “Whisper the last words of Puccini’s ‘Nessun Dorma’ as you fall asleep…all’alba vincero—at dawn I will win. And you will. You’ll have leftovers. Spaghetti arrabbiata is wonderful for breakfast.”
He writes about sushi and Halloween apples, the importance of the right knife, the woman who hummed while she ate and how he married her, how to make the best potato salad, chicken soup, pork chops (I’ve tried the chops, they’re truly amazing); he compares chili dogs to alligator shoes, discusses food myths and food in movies, considers his last meal, his worst meal, and the piece that confirmed my adoration for this man’s work, ‘Museum Food’—which is too long to transcribe but, trust me, it’s a gorgeous piece of writing and a gorgeous testament to food.
Impossible to read this book and not come away with a deeper appreciation for the connection between what we eat and how we live, between food and people, music, sights, art, books, sound, neighbourhoods, joy, sadness, seasons. (And we all know the connections are there; I can’t rub a piece of thyme between my fingers and not be transported to my mother’s kitchen where a roast is the oven on a Saturday afternoon in winter, juices heavily infused with thyme from her garden, picked fresh from under the snow.)
All of which leaves me deeply in love—okay, maybe just deeply grateful for the reminder that food isn’t so much about eating, but about everything around the eating, everything that precedes it.
And everything that follows.
_______________________________________
—Purchase Comfort Me with Apples online at Blue Heron Books.
happy everything!
—and to all a safe, and good time!
~
happy solstice
trees i have known and loved and some i’ve pined for…
1. Earliest tree memory: pear tree (no partridges), back yard, age seven or so. Rope. One end tied to branch mid-way up, other end tied to bucket in which sits a bowl of mum’s potato salad. The oil and vinegar kind. No mayo. Me climbing enormous tree. (Proof that memories are distorted; pear trees are tiny.) Me sitting in crook of tree, hauling up bucket, eating potato salad while surveying neighbourhood—particularly Mr. Deluca next door, whose garden is full of car parts instead of flowers, which therefore makes him odd in my book. Because eating potato salad from a bucket in a tree and staring at the neighbours isn’t…
2. Living on that tiny island in the Caribbean. No pine, no spruce. We decorate a houseplant. Xmas Eve on the balcony; it’s late and so dark. Ten thousand stars. Then a lone trumpet. Someone’s playing a trumpet down in the valley. Silent Night. Not another sound. Not even wind ruffling palms, not even surf lapping against shore. The whole world has stopped to listen.
3. For years at the tree farm with a handsaw when the kids were small. Crunching through snowy trails, arguing about which one to kill. Tears because someone wants the twelve-inch Charlie Brown and someone else wants the seven-foot so-perfect-you-may-as-well-go-fake specimen. Every time we end up with neither and give it a name: Quasimodo, Shadrack, Prickles. When the holidays are done the tree carcass has become part of the family and so can’t go out on the curb for pick-up with all the other trees. We place it in the yard, out by the compost, chop it up for firewood years later when we can’t remember which one it is—Shadrack, Prickles?—but we burn its fuel with gratitude and a kind of nostalgia nonetheless.
4. Sitting at my desk, working, when a very large truck arrives on the street and men get out and hover about the neighbours’ thirty foot spruces that separate our yard from theirs. The men cut branches from the trees, lower branches only, which opens things up, makes more room on the driveway, makes perfect sense. But then they keep cutting, higher and higher branches until it doesn’t make sense anymore. Too high. It’s getting stupid and ugly. I’ve stopped working, am transfixed, staring out the window as one of the men straps himself into something, a safety belt, climbs trunk with chainsaw. Saws top off tree. Saws top off tree. It falls into the middle of the street with a thud just like death. It feels like death. But then, it is. I want to run outside, scream, cry, ask why? But I can’t move. I’m just stunned that this can even happen, that these trees—there are two—can just be executed because (I find out later) they shed too many pinecones on the driveway and lawn.
5. Alberta spruce. Cute and petite when we moved in. Two feet tall. Eventually got so big you
had to shove it aside to get to the front door. Often covered in snow or rain. Finally got ridiculous. So we cut it down and with a bit of trimming, voila, this year’s specimen is born. Front lovely. No back.
6. “We had Christmas with the usual one-sided tree from the boy scouts. “If you shove the thing up against a wall,” daddy said, “who the hell’s going to notice?”” –excerpt from The Work in Progress
~
bus therapy
Is there a name for a fear of school buses?
Whenever I see one I think of an unfortunate grade five field trip to Martyr’s Shrine in Midland, which involved lunch en route. The details are unimportant—let’s just say it was a long time before I wanted another egg salad sandwich.
I blame it entirely on the bus.
I remember heat and diesel fumes and kids screeching and shouting and black leather seats stuffed with something like concrete and how you could feel every pebble and bump on the three hour road trip.
All of which made it difficult to read.
I hadn’t yet learned that reading in a moving vehicle makes me woozy. Or that the whole point of everyone singing was to ward off the woozy in the first place…
There was much ewwwing in my direction after the egg salad. Mortifying of course, but there was also less general shouting and screeching, which at least improved the ambience a titch.
Yin yang.
I remember almost nothing of Martyr’s Shrine. It may be a big white building, it may be orange stripes. I think there are stairs and flower beds and I do recall a pile of canes somewhere and being told they belonged to people who’d come and been ‘cured’ by saying a prayer. I don’t remember doing so but if I’d been smart I would have taken the opportunity to say a little something for the trip back.
It seemed eons before I saw another school bus—or maybe I was just blocking them out. Then a few months ago, I notice I’m on some kind of Laidlaw route—following, passing, waiting behind, at 
least a dozen school buses each morning—each one a reminder of egg salad gone bad. I braced myself for life in a very uncomfortable world.
Oddly though, as time goes by and, annoying as the bloody things are with their little stop-sign power trips, habit of driving the speed limit, and the way they linger at railway crossings—which is so creepy and only makes everyone else wonder if they know something we don’t—it’s actually turning out to be a good thing, a kind of exposure therapy. The more I see them from the outside the less I think about their butt-numbing acoustically horrible bump bump bumping endlessly stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting diesel spewing nausea tub insides.
So, yeah, the more the merrier, I say.
In fact, I can hardly remember the whole Martyr’s Shrine fiasco. Martyr’s Who? What egg salad?
See?
So nice to be moving on.
~
Matilda Magtree 
