seasons

spring!

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

Meteorological spring, that is. Begins March 1st. So we’re well into the season and while the view is still all white, I swear there’s something in the air. Walking past the apple trees this morning I notice flitting in the branches; there hasn’t been flitting in that area for months. Vireos probably, they like to nest there. And the chickadees, who hang out deep in the forest where I keep feeders and where the juncos hop about underneath picking up whatever falls, strike me as being more chipper than usual. The geese are active on the creek again, already nesting among the cattails and ice. I try not to disturb them as I tiptoe by. I notice there are more woodpeckers and fleeting notes of birdsong, still rare and subtle and maybe only one voice at a time, but even so… there is something.

And as much as I love winter and this one has been perfection, and though I woke this morning and revelled in dazzling sunrise followed by blue blue sky and pristine landscape and the crunch of snow in the crisp cold air, I thought, for the first time since winter started… I’m ready to welcome the grass again.

Ready, but not in a hurry.

Greetings from my magnificent raised beds, each over a metre tall, the snow so deep and so hard-packed that I can stand on it and tower above them. Don’t even talk to me about the compost bins.

♣

♣

and sow it begins

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I sow radishes because of how they are with butter on slices of bread I make with almond flour and because of that night a half dozen decades ago when in a rainy cabin there was nothing to eat but radishes, butter, a rye loaf my mother made, and I ate and ate and ate and because it instantly became, and remains all these decades later, one of my most precious culinary experiences.

when thoughts turn to radishes, as they inevitably will — what to do with them? the radishes, i mean

rosehips

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

Every year my mother went to the beach to pick the hips of wild roses. Only a short drive from our house, the beach was somewhere we spent a lot of time as a family, swimming, picnic suppers, walking in the rain, collecting stones for a new rockery. The rosehip outings, though, were just the two of us, and always later in the year, in the fall when the hips were ‘ripe’. Not that I helped with the picking, I just liked any excuse to be at the beach. I picked shells and danced barefoot on cool sand while she, some distance away, stood, back slightly bent, leaning over thorny bushes that formed a long line parallel to the shore, filling her apron, or maybe a bag or a pillowcase, holding it open to receive each fat red hip. She would dry them for tea, mixing them with handpicked calendula, chamomile and linden, to make her own special blend kept in tins to enjoy all winter.

I remember how the hips turned the water pink. Magic.

It wouldn’t have occurred to her to buy tea, even if such blends were available then. ‘Making her own’ was a way of being… a farm girl from the Austrian alps, where there were no shops nearby and where everything was homegrown and homemade and medicine came from the garden, the fields, or the forest. Teas were medicine. Even after moving to a medium sized city in Canada with shops at every corner, her way remained homegrown and homemade, our medicine cabinet was the garden.

Someone mentioned roses the other day.

It doesn’t take much.

Another kind of magic.

♥

I think of her whenever I see wild roses anywhere but it’s only those that grow on beaches that come with a memory made in a millisecond a thousand years ago when a child looked up from her barefoot dance and in the distance saw a woman she knew so well but would never truly know, holding open an apron, or was it a bag or possibly a pillowcase…

♥

♥

spring is in the air

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

barn door

Opened the barn door for the first time in two months because until yesterday’s thaw it’s been blocked with ever increasing levels of snow and drifts too big to clear away and was immediately met with a loud and clear fragrance, bringing two thoughts to mind:

one, I’m glad we’ve been able to provide safe shelter for the producer of said fragrance—I’ve seen its tracks in the snow all winter and often wondered how it (and others) survive,

and b) it’s a good thing I like an earthy pong (for that is what I’ll call it).

♦

skunk
Large-tailed Skunk (Mephitis macroura) from the viviparous quadrupeds of North America (1845) illustrated by John Woodhouse Audubon (1812-1862)

♦

yellow cup

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday a cousin sends pictures of alpine snow heavy on branches, mountains, rooftops, and me here in the rain feeling snow envy, sending a message back to her… “A slice of heaven!” I write and forget my laundry on the line and then this morning I open the blinds and see snow heavy on branches and rooftops and the morning light is just starting and I put the kettle on and go out to the porch, my laundry frozen and me here in coat and boots and a bright yellow cup, lemon balm tea as the sun rises through a slice of heaven.

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♥

wordless wednesday with words and music and a hint of pine

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

 

The couple in the parking spot in the alley behind my dentist. They must be in their nineties. He standing outside chatting to her through the driver’s window. She in the driver’s seat. The car parked at an angle across the only two spots reserved for the dental office. Me wondering what they are doing. He looking at me and asking if I want to park there. Me saying yes I do… and then him explaining that they are just there to get a xmas tree and his wife is going to stay in the car and me saying, well, okie dokes, but could she park so that she takes up only one spot and I can use the other? And he, finding this a reasonable request, turns to tell his wife in what feels, even in this alley on this cold day, like such a gentle manner and her face all sweet and agreeable and she moves her car back and I move mine in and I get out and by this time he has gone to the xmas tree lot that’s just there and I can see him, slightly hunched, hands clasped behind his back, looking for just the right tree and me thinking how I was so quickly prepared to be annoyed by the parking situation until their kindness and tenderness, especially with each other, and the fact that they, despite the difficulty of getting around this city, are looking for a tree on their own at some funky Yonge Street place and the whole alley and street corner smelling like pine and she happily waiting in the car and as if all this isn’t enough (& I’m not making this up…) the music playing through speakers at the tree lot is Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman.

Click on the song, inhale some pine, and it’ll be like you were there too…

Wee moments as gifts.

 

 

 

today’s thoughts (from a kayak)

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

 

Red winged blackbirds. Darting in and out of reeds, returning sometimes with nesting material. Sometimes I think they just go out for smokes.

Morning pond air chock full of chittering, occasional grunts from somewhere in the bull rushes behind my boat. I tend not to worry about strange sounds on the water… it’s only what’s on land that’s worrisome.

Kingfisher. Flies like she means business.

Seagull. On perpetual holiday.

All this singing, chittering, trilling, cawing. Is it a band or a choir?

[Every time I don’t bring a sandwich, I regret it.]

Yellow finch flits to the accompaniment of frog solo bass.

Have lodged my boat among lily pads and stare at opposite shore wondering what it must be like to understand nature, to know what tree that is or what everything’s surviving on, what kind of fish is it that keeps jumping here, and then here… to have some idea of how to move through the world less clunkily, to disturb little, to be still. I ask these questions then open my tupperware container of market blue berries and eat them with inelegant fingers.

[The lily pads work extremely well keeping my boat in place. I wonder if the voyageurs knew this trick.]

Water level too high for egrets, herons, both blue and green, cormorants too.

Deer. First one, then two. I paddle gently, watching them on the woodland side of the pond but they must see me because their nonchalance suddenly turns to startled and then they turn into the woods. And, poof, they’re gone.

A kind of elation, mild ecstasy, maybe not even so mild… arrives if I stay in one place long enough. The opposite of boredom. The pleasure of being somewhere long enough to have questions, to understand… something…

Two cardinals. I may have caught them in a picture I was taking of the light that has turned lime green yellow bright on this summer morning.

Or maybe not.

 

 

 

a story of perfection

~ carin ~ 8 Comments

 

Once upon a time I used to spend hours trying to arrange the garden so that the tall blue things would grow behind the shorter yellow things but not bloom before the red things and I’d get frustrated if it all didn’t work to plan.

We had just moved into our house. There was still a lawn then, and a couple of tidy but boring flowerbeds with unloved plants. (The beds were boring not because they were tidy but because they were unloved. You can always tell.)

We planted a veggie bed and took up the lawn and enlarged the boring beds and laid down some stone paths (that become a labyrinth in winter) and although I was still trying to control the reds and the yellows, I began to notice things moving around on their own. And instead of fighting it, I eased up a little and watched the changes, the way the joe pye weed took over the space that was once thick with lupins and though I love lupins and missed them, the joe pye weed brought new pleasures. And dragonflies.

It seemed the garden knew how to be.

And it occurred to me that it didn’t need a foreman or a director orchestrating the blues and the reds. (It needed a maintenance manager for sure, but not a lot else.) The garden knew what to do all on its own.

It knew that this grows well here and that doesn’t. No matter how much you try to force the issue… this will grow and that will not. And it knew that the daisies didn’t want to grow in a clump and somehow they became willy nilly singles and twosomes in places of their own choosing.

So I surrendered to the wisdom of the garden, accepted the job of maintenance manager and let the plants pretty much decide what works.

The result is a chock-a-block, semi-naturalized space with a variety of things, some planted by me, many pooped by birds or self sown and appearing in areas of their own choosing. The dragonflies rest in the sun on native solomon’s seal and the flutterbys flutter by and everything is hale and hearty because nothing is there against its will. *Nothing requires extra watering to stay alive (except the veggies), nothing needs fertilizer. Just the maintenance of clipping and weeding and the joy of daily walks to see what’s new and — oh yes, very definitely yes! — commentary en route. (Plants love a bit of chat.)

Every year it’s the same but different… a drift of bee balm has slowly taken over from black eyed susan while the black eyed susan has moved in among the grape vines and the prairie sunflowers have nudged out the yarrow but make room for the salvia… and the pleasure I get from watching these changes, the symbiosis of the plants, is beyond measure better than anything my wee human mind trained in symmetry could ever plot out.

Perfection is a myth in all its forms.

And even if some form of it were achievable (the gardens of Versailles? the hanging wotsits of Babylon?), I’d opt for the imperfection of happy surprises around every corner. Every time.

For which I take no credit.

♦

“A little studied negligence is becoming to a garden.”  — Eleanor Perenyi