Some years ago when I was facilitating writing workshops in a women’s shelter I often brought blossoms and leaves, twigs, odd objects, things for the women to use as prompts. One week, a very young woman, really just a girl, chose a sprig of mint, which she inhaled several times, then wrote how it had been a cure-all when she was growing up in Jamaica, a remedy for everything from headaches to stomach aches, and more. Reading that piece out loud to the group, she seemed overwhelmed with the joy of remembering, as if she was back home surrounded by beloved acres of mint and family not alone in a shelter with a baby just a few months old.

The next day I brought her a pot of mint from my garden. She seemed pleased, said she would take care of it. I had no doubt that she meant it and that if time and circumstance allowed, she would.

The following week I saw her again and she ran over, face bright, smiling, talking a mile a minute, telling me that the day I’d given her the mint she called her mother to tell her about the shelter, the workshop, the people that were being good to her there, and that she’d been given a pot of mint and that surely that must bode well. Her mother agreed that it did. And you could see in her face that this agreeing was a tonic in itself.

I still think of her. She’d be a young woman now, no longer a girl. The baby would be in school. I think about the mint too, and wonder what time and circumstance allowed and I can’t help feeling she made it. Somehow. I like to think she found her feet and that she walks in safety somewhere, through a garden fragrant with healing.

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Photo courtesy of WikiCommons.

Reading Theresa Kishkan’s reflection of childhood summers immediately had me in love with the subject so I’m writing mine in the hope of tagging inspiration. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if we inadvertently (or advertently) created a linkable online path of childhood summer memories to stroll down.

I love a vicarious stroll.

For my part..

I wasn’t told to go play so much as told to go hang laundry (after being taught the art of it of course; there is a WAY to hang everything), to go harvest carrots and red currants, pick windfall pears or snap a basketful of peas, but when free at last I leapt onto my bike and headed directly for the canal. I grew up in Niagara (not Niagara Falls, which is known as The Falls, but the Niagara Peninsula) in what was a medium sized town at the time, between lock one and lock two of the Welland Canal.

I wasn’t told to play Tom Sawyer with a marshmallow tied to a string tied to a stick dangled in the canal’s murky water from a slippery grass bank long before protective fences were put up and I certainly wasn’t told to cross the canal where country roads were lined with tadpole-filled streams, and orchards on scorching days encouraged me to thieve a few peaches to eat in the shade of a big welcoming tree (oak or maple?), that for decades afterwards I nodded at every time I drove by and which as far as I know is still there.

I wasn’t told to cut fabric from my mother’s rag bag and make an elastic waisted patchwork skirt on a treadle machine in our cool basement, a skirt I’d wear to school, grade four maybe. Best of all, I wasn’t told not to wear it, probably because my parents wouldn’t have found it a strange item. How grateful I am for that, for learning for myself what would happen, how other kids (who did find it a strange item) would react, what they would say, and for learning whether or not that mattered to me.

I wasn’t told to sit in the pear tree with my potato salad lunch in a bowl hauled up with a rope tied to a bucket from which vantage point I could see various neighbours, the ones who were always working on an old jalopy in the backyard and the others who made excellent shortbread, the ones my parents sometimes invited over for a xmas drink in the rec room and the ones with the immaculate hedge no one was allowed to touch who may have poisoned our cat Inky… inadvertently or advertently.

I wasn’t told to be obsessed with Nancy Drew or to hide in the shrubbery along our street hoping to eavesdrop on passersby who might reveal some secret or other. Dropped gum wrappers held clues.

I wasn’t told to be sociable, not when I was still that young. That came later, the suggestion I ‘get out more’. But until then, I had no idea not everyone played board games or checkers on their own.

Oh, sure, there was simon says and hide and seek and fort and other things with neighbourhood kids. But those memories are a blur. Shouting and laughter. Winners and losers. I remember those parts, vaguely, as if kept in a less sacred vault than the tadpoles and potato salad, the soggy marshmallow, that skirt and the tree on Lakeshore Road, all of which remain crystal clear.

In fact if I give it a minute I can still feel that life-saving peach juice (in a time before water bottles) dripping down my chin.

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Image courtesy of WikiCommons.

The box was purchased on a country road somewhere in Quebec from a guy who said it had belonged to his dear old aunt, a seamstress who used it for buttons. Eight wooden drawers set in a wrought iron-ish metal frame. We knew we paid too much for it but the country road and the dear old aunt got to us. It’s since occurred to me there may not have been an aunt.

Much less buttons.

It’s held recipes since then, its little drawers occasionally stuffed to the point where I’m forced to cull them, one of my great pleasures, letting go of things I have no idea why I kept in the first place, and in the bargain finding things I’d forgotten about… but not why I keep them.

And in this way I stumble upon Heather’s Spicy Fried Fish.

Heather and I worked together two hundred years ago. Me in the office, she in the kitchen, and every morning when I came in to make rye toast for my breakfast, she’d be frying up fish, chicken, rice, for hers. She said this is what she was used to, growing up in Barbados. The fish, especially, always smelled amazing and I always asked how she made it, what was in the stuffing. She’d laugh, a family secret, not possible to share. We started most days like this, eating together, trading a few stories, learning small things about each other over time and when I left that job she surprised me with a gift, a small pin in the shape of two scottie dogs, one black, one white. I must have looked confused. She smiled, it’s us, she said.

Then she gave me a second gift, her recipe for fish, dictated as I scribbled it down.

I wore the pin for years.

The recipe is excellent and well used (evidenced by the kitchen Rorschach) but it’s been awhile.

I think I’ll leave it out to make again.

Maybe even for breakfast (??)

I can almost hear Heather smile.

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Summer is berry picking time around here when me and my milk crate seat commune for an hour or two with birdsong and cool mornings, purple stained hands and the happy sound of berry plonk as they fall into my tray, after which I walk toward the forest where another seat awaits, also red, but this one, blessedly, soft and tilting back and so feet up, eyes closed, hands still well stained and the only sounds, a mourning dove somewhere in the nearby tamarack or spruce and one much further away along the creek, speaking to each other, I listen for I don’t know how long because I have no way of telling time except for my Mississipies as I count (almost always five) between their echoing coo-coo-coo-coooooo…s

and all I can think is how I’d love to know what they’re saying.

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By which I mean raindrops on a window.

By which I mean I was thinking of someone this morning who is searching for something meaningful in their world. No one knows exactly what the someone means by meaningful, including the someone, which is a big part of the problem. The other problem is that they keep looking past things, past the conversation they’re having or the dishes they’re washing, the laundry they’re sorting, the trees to the right as they walk to the corner, a yellow fence with chipped paint to the left, raindrops on the window.

By which I mean they seem focused only on things they have to do AFTER the dishes, WHEN they get to the corner.

By which I mean that even when they get to the corner they’re already focused on things to do beyond it.

By which I mean they seem out of sync with their own world.

By which I mean no wonder they’re searching.

By which I mean I would so love for them to sit and watch raindrops.

As a start.

By which I mean but all I can do is watch raindrops myself and tell them what I see or write it or sing it or paint or dance or sculpt it.

By which I mean… this.

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When I was a kid the local library was a kind of household guru where not only the books were revered but also anyone who answered the phone. My dad’s mantra, call the library!, used whenever he was stumped by one of my questions and didn’t feel like guessing. And it wasn’t a suggestion… but delivered as a godsend solution, a way of contacting The Oracle itself. And while I don’t remember any of the calls, what I asked, what they answered (and there were many calls) I have the feeling they always came through. Wait. I remember one call. I’d received a chain letter warning me to make X number of copies… or else. Heaps of carbon paper and cramped fingers would have been involved not to mention I didn’t know enough people to send them to. Still, I didn’t want the ‘or else’ fate so asked my dad what to do and, erring on the side of caution, he decided The Oracle would probably know how to proceed and if they didn’t no one would. As it turned out, The Oracle was brilliant, I can still feel the relief in my ten year old self. Just send out a couple letters to cover your bases, they said. Maybe I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly. The Oracle never minced words.

A library is a medicine cabinet. What can heal one person may not work at all for somebody else.

—Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own

Long postcard.

But, books.

I was speaking the other day with a friend about home library/bookshelf organization, the categories we have and I loved hearing the sameness and difference of her method to mine. For the record, mine is alphabetical and separate categories. A small room lined with thrift shop and IKEA shelving holds the majority. Novels and short stories get separate spaces. Non-fiction is divided into four categories: essays, memoir, biographies, general info. There’s a poetry shelf. One for gardening (two categories: essays and how-to). Another for nature, generally. A Canada shelf. An anywhere-but-Canada shelf, which mostly includes Florida, Austria, and a tiny island in the Caribbean. A shelf for my favourite children’s books. A small, pared down, collection of literary journals. A shelf of miscellaneous wotnots including greek mythology and holistic cat care. Dictionaries and writing related books live in my office. Art books are in a second sitting room. All food related books are in the kitchen. Yoga and anything I find inspirational, lives on a small bookshelf in my bedroom.

I used to know someone who refused books as gifts because her shelves ONLY held books of the same size and specific colours. Note: used to know.

I often wonder at the origins of a person’s bookish habits, The What and How of what we keep and Why. And, our love of books to begin with, is it a nurture or nature thing, the fact of growing up with many books or almost none, of being read to daily or never being read to, that makes a difference or is there some other mystery involved? Not sure if it qualifies as an origin story, but here’s mine.

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Earliest beach memory is picnics, my mum and dad coming home from work, he from a factory, she from the warehouse of a local Towers department store, neither of them easy jobs and I realize now they must have been tired but maybe, like me, never too tired for the beach, so they’d make coffee for one thermos, koolaid for another, throw some bread, meat, cheese, fruit and veg from the garden into a plaid metal cooler and then my dad would start up the little black oldsmobile he called fatso. It was the sixties.

The only other things we brought were towels and a blanket to sit on. The idea of needing anything to amuse ourselves surely never entered their minds, or mine I guess. After all, there was The Lake. And sand. Shells and pebbles and the endless search for beach glass. There was food to eat and clouds to look at. And there was the effort it took to pretend you knew how to swim, thinking no one would figure out you were still touching bottom. My sister, much older, said she’d learned by being tossed into the lake. I wanted to avoid that lesson.

Most vivid beach memory is the night a storm was brewing. My dad and sister were swimming way out in the lake when big rain and thunder started. My mum was frantic, waving, shouting for them to come back. My dad was laughing and waving from a distance. I don’t know what my sister was doing.

Same beach a few decades later. Me and my mum picking rosehips. My dad gone, my sister too, a decade before him. My mum would make a tea blend with the rosehips, adding (also hand picked) calendula, chamomile, linden, whatever she fancied in the moment, whatever she found in season.

Pictured above: the scene a few days ago. Different beach, entirely different body of water. The grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren of my parents, most of whom they never met, and watching them (I’ve since learned to swim for real by the way) I see new watery memories being made and can’t help think there’s something deeper that runs through generations, that whether people have actually met in life or not isn’t what determines how much they carry of each other, how much they already know of their history without even trying.

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It’s a funny thing, the how of things remembered.

I remember making these napkins seven hundred at least years ago on a sewing machine I no longer have and that the fabric is a Ralph Lauren print, which I bought from a remnants table not because of Ralph but because… blue and white. I used to have a thing for blue and white (now more drawn to turquoise, orange, yellow and green). Children with mustardy faces who now have messy children of their own used them daily to wipe that mustard and more from lips and hands and while I wouldn’t advise looking too closely, they’ve held up well (maybe thanks in part to the magic of Ralph, not to mention the magic of line drying in the sun) and I remember too a certain few folk for a patio lunch one summer day who snorted when the cloth napkins came out, insisting I needn’t treat them specially, that they weren’t above using paper like everyone else and how for a moment I had no idea what they meant by ‘treating them specially’, assumed some kind of joke going on over my head then found out they were sadly serious, that the napkins meant something on a level I couldn’t de-code and when I tried to assure them I wasn’t fussing (because this was becoming A Thing with them), that we used these napkins all the time, that we never used paper, they took even greater offense at what they assumed was a lie.

I no longer see those people (surprise!), but the napkins (and the lineage of children with mustardy faces, also a clothesline) are still happily part of our daily lives, summer, winter, fall, and spring.

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