Where I sit and chat with the morning sun, the air is filled with the scent of apples, windfall and other, to be picked and gathered once this sun chatter is done — some for eating, some for juicing, some for a marvellous apple loving boar down the road, a boar named Georgie.
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I’m reminded of the chap who once stopped me on the beach, he was visiting the island, staying at a nearby cottage with his young family and wanting to know WHAT to do and WHERE to go and THINGS to see and all this as we were surrounded by one of the most glorious stretches of coastline, uncrowded, perfect weather, seals breathing deeply on that rock there, blue heron on another, a single tern idly floating in water calm as glass, the occasional kayaker and only a few swimmers in this magical expanse of saltwater where only minutes earlier I’d been floating myself, though not entirely tern-like, eyes to the horizon, thinking how extraordinary to have all this s p a c e to myself… and so I ask the chap, who is the whole time he’s talking, looking at his phone… I ask how long he’s here for and he says a week and I give him some places because he seems so intent on What and Where and Things, but then I add my best advice which is, honestly, for now, just sit down, I say, and in the morning see how you feel and if you Must Go Somewhere, drive in a random direction, don’t plan anything and be surprised by everything or, even better, don’t drive, stay where you are another day, and maybe another… He nodded as if yes, yes, but he could hardly stop fidgeting, scrolling, googling for better ideas while all around him the heron and the tern and the horizon scratched their heads.
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Later in the week, I went back to the beach and there was the guy again… seems time and maybe the absence of finding what he thought he was looking for, had had its effect, turned him into a guy who wears loose clothing, trousers rolled halfway up the shin, hands in pockets and walking sloooowly along the shoreline, stopping frequently to stare at the horizon, walking in a way that looks like he’s in love with walking and you can imagine him walking like that around the world, no sign of a phone and the tween kids are swimming a ways down the beach, his partner walks too, at her own pace, separate but together, like they’ve all found each other by giving each other space, not separation. Walking like someone who noticeably breathes differently than the guy I saw six days earlier. In fact I hardly recognized him.
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My mother’s garden always had a whoosh of zinnias. Surely among the best cut flowers but she never cut them and when I complained about the absence of fresh bouquets in our house she’d say “I think flowers are happier outside.” She wasn’t a fresh bouquet kind of person (preferring to make dried ones out of dead things in the fall) which at the time made no sense to me and felt more like she was being intentionally difficult, denying something that mattered to me just to make a point or exert her mother power. Who doesn’t like cut fresh cut flowers??
Lordy lordy. Seeing my own zinnias this morning, reminded me of all that and made me laugh. I may have over-analyzed her motives, i.e. got it wrong, because… seeing my own zinnias this morning, I thought: I like flowers outside better. And anyway, I have cats that eat bouquets. And to be honest I love those dead dried fall things.
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Every year, the same thing. Starts off all well-paced organization and then come August EVERYTHING is ready at the same time and I forget, every year I forget, how time-consuming it is, this glorious thing called veggie growing, and this year more time-consuming for having to water oftener than I normally would as we’ve had so little rain and the growing is slower and the harvest is less than usual and I swear I can hear the lettuce gasping some days and yet I pick a bowlful and am amazed at the flavour and so I water and weed with gratitude (I hope the lettuce gets the message) and yesterday I picked an armful of beets and today I blanched them for the freezer and picked some beans, which will be turned into salad and pickled and if there’s still extra I’ll make a yellow bean tiara.
Some many years ago I bought a funky old book with a tattered cloth cover called ‘Autobiography of an Elderly Woman’ because a) I like memoirs, and b) I like elderly women. They seem wise. And I suppose I am one now. So, yeah, they’re so damn wise.
Inside the front cover in pencil is written the name Olive Robertson, to whom the book once belonged, I’m assuming. Also in pencil, the price I paid: $4.75. It’s a first edition, published in 1911, with tons of marginalia throughout (presumably thanks to Olive) and likely one reason for the bargain price. Honestly, I would pay MORE for marginalia. I do love a book with notes for me to read and try to figure out the who of who has read it before me and on what scenes and sentences we both land in the same way and where are we different.
Two things surprised me about this cloth-bound, gold-embossed, rather beaten up book:
The title would have you believe it’s an autobiography. Turns out it’s a novel. Though, I daresay the (transparent) kind of fiction that isn’t really. Which is always slightly annoying, when you can tell it’s not quite fiction, but neither is it ‘true’. It’s a fine line.
Also, nowhere in the book does the author’s name appear. Olive, apparently, was perturbed by this and made reference to it as well. I’m guessing that dear Olive read it before it was possible to search such things on the internets (something about the quality of her name in pencil suggests this). But in these modern times, a quick visit to Wikipedia tells me the author is one Mary Heaton Vorse.
Mary Heaton Vorse (October 11, 1874 – June 14, 1966) was an American journalist and novelist with commitments to the labor and feminist movements. She established her reputation as a journalist reporting the labor protests of a largely female and immigrant workforce in the east-coast textile industry. Her later fiction drew on this material profiling the social and domestic struggles of working women. Unwilling to be a disinterested observer, she participated in labor and civil protests. After returning as correspondent from Bolshevik Russia, she was for a period the subject of regular U.S. Justice Department surveillance.
A most notable aspect of the book is how the author describes experiences of women and girls in (1900 era) society as being gobsmackingly similar to today’s experiences. GOBSMACKINGLY SIMILAR> Not the least of which in terms of how women of various ages see each other, and how judgment has been ever present.
“These young women know so definitely what an older woman may and may not say and do and wear!“
“Each generation permits a different type of young girl, but the older woman must not change.“
Which makes this elderly woman (i.e. me) (and maybe Olive too) smile… partly because I so clearly remember being on the dewy-eyed side of the fence of knowing everything yet none too bright about bigger pictures, and certainly nothing about elderly women. But this is the smile-making brilliance of THIS side of the fence… knowing the fence is irrelevant. And a disservice to women on any side and therefore ourselves at every and all ages.
Society will only change its view of women and girls in time with women and girls changing their view of themselves, and each other.
Cleaning out old journals, I come across an entry made during lunch with one of my nieces on a summer patio where we gave each other words to write about and then read our responses to each other over iced tea and fries.
I wrote about yellow and light and a few other things but I don’t know what words I gave her. I wonder if she still has her journal too.
Another thing we did was play off the Joe Brainard riff of “I Remember” where you write fast, never pausing, listing and listing all the things you remember in one or two minutes.
Here is my list from that long ago iced tea and fries patio…
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I remember a cat named Inky.
I remember potato salad in a tree and pop bottles in ditches.
I remember black licorice and how I thought I liked it better than red but didn’t really.
I remember flamingoes.
I remember feeling sad for elephants at the zoo, and polar bears too.
I remember making radish soup which was really just radishes boiled in water and how my mum and dad pretended it was edible.
I remember carving pumpkins.
I remember making snow forts.
I remember shovelling the driveway.
I remember the cottage we used to go to and how I was pretty sure one of the rooms was haunted but how it didn’t really matter.
I remember the National Gallery in Ottawa and excellent lunches in the cafeteria.
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I, of course, don’t remember writing any of this —
— but I do remember every one of the remembers.
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We’re getting close to finishing our harvest of haskaps, the first of the berries to ripen in our berry fields. Today, overcast, and thunder rumbles in the distance and eventually rain falls, through which we continue to pick until we’re done, always leaving a few berries for the birds.
This morning, feathers and pieces of bone and wing around some of the bushes tell a story that probably involves the foxes who were born under the barn in early spring, a couple of them still sleep there and hunt in our meadows and forest. We have become very fond of them, each having a name and as time goes on, we’re able to notice a difference in their behaviours, one from the other. But I’m fond of the crows too, who also have names and behaviours, and it was the crows who were angry yesterday, grack grack gracking madly for ages. I knew something was up and I suspected it had to do with the foxes. When they were just kits, I worried about their safety, worried every time mum went hunting, would she come back with enough for them to eat. I once watched her arrive with a baby raccoon in her mouth, which the kits devoured. A dead baby to feed babies, yet I was glad they had nourishment. My callousness surprised and appalled me. But then, I didn’t know the raccoon family, hadn’t watched them grow up, and I saw the offering only as food for young, not violence.
Looking at today’s feathers, I’m confronted again with the fact of killing as a daily necessity, how very normal it is, and after taking a moment to recognize the lives of both the foxes and the crows and the place they hold in this world I’m privileged to share, I think how so little of this is taught to us as children, how so much is sanitized, Disneyfied, and I find myself grateful to have been raised on Grimms rather than Disney. Some residual memory of those pull-no-punches stories surely helps put into perspective the impossible heartbreak of this very real world—
— in all its wisdom and beauty, and sadness.
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Have not eaten an Alphonso mango (the ONLY mango for me) since moving to an island where such exotic things aren’t always easy to find. That said, I haven’t yet looked because, truthfully, I didn’t think of them until the other day when I stumbled upon a poem written I can’t remember when (although I’m assuming it was when I lived on a different island, where mangos literally grew on trees).
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The poem is a lie. I have never once recalled his face, much less with every mango since, and I’m now thinking this might be down to my discovery of the Alphonso, whose smooth SAFFRON slices magnificently obliterated all memory of mere smooth orange ones… even those cut directly from trees.
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Alphonso season is late March to end of June.
Eat ’em if you’ve got ’em!
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Once upon a time in a once upon a time house, a carpet lived for almost thirty years, playing silent host to the footsteps of friends and family, to six cats, countless hairballs (and worse), where I would sit each morning, on a particular part of its pattern, facing east as the sun rose, until one day we moved toward that rising sun, bringing the carpet with us, to a house where it didn’t fit and to a forest where it did.
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I am doing yoga on the beach with a visiting two and half year old who is in charge of the doings and I am learning lots of new-to-me poses while enjoying tacos and mushroom soup made of sand and the other day we discovered our shadows and that made one of us laugh a thousand times and made the other one smile in gratitude for such excellent company.
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Matilda Magtree 