“There are two ways of spreading light;
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
– Edith Wharton
♥
Happy season of light…
seasons
this morning, the smell of chrysanthymums
When they were still fresh, a month or two ago, my single pot of blooms took me directly to a wooden fence made by my dad from driftwood gathered at the beach. Planted alongside was a row of perennial chrysanths. Burgundy. Still the only shade I consider ‘real’ and their smell, decades later, is still about summer winding down, jackets, the grass feeling cooler, street lights coming on sooner.
This morning I notice how they’ve faded, they look more bronze than burgundy.
I lean down, inhale, expecting to be on that fence again but it’s a different smell, earthier, a pile of raked leaves from the pear tree (burgundy and bronze!) and some going brown. Leaves I’d raked myself, a few more every day, the pile growing until my dad said it was time to haul them away. (What did he do with them? Burn them? Bag them? Dig them into the garden?)
I only remember the raking and the leaping and the laying, starfish-like on top, staring up through a canopy of bare branches. I remember tossing handfuls in the air and the dewy wetness of the middle of the pile.
That’s the smell this morning. The middle of that sweet pile.
latebloomers
My favourites, the bloomers with tenacity and courage and no concept of calendars.
strawberries on my mind
And it’s not even the season… except that I was recently given a pint of freshly-picked ones by someone who informed me that there are new cultivars that grow through summer, or at least through much of it. Huh. News to me. I’ve been walking snootily past strawberry displays at the farmers’ markets for ages, assuming they’re imports from re-sellers. And even if I’d known about the all-summer variety I’m pretty sure I’d have given them a miss, assuming hybrids taste yucky.
But the gift strawberries were in no way yucky. And they went very well with ice-cream, just like the real kind. If anything, these were more flavourful than the early varities, which I’ve noticed in recent years have been losing ‘something’.
But that’s not what’s on my mind, strawberry-wise.
It’s picking them. My first serious job. Aside from babysitting and selling Sarah Coventry Jewellery, Avon and Regal Gift Cards door to door. (Actually, Sarah Coventry was sold at ‘parties’. Of which I had one, my mother being my ‘party host’ and whose responsibility it therefore was to invite a rec room full of friends. The host received a complimentary Sarah Coventry brooch or scarf holder or mood ring… Anyway, can’t remember if/what I sold. It was such a sad, sad thing for a child to experience, it effectively ended my whole Sarah Coventry career.)
My strawberry picking career lasted much longer. Almost a whole strawberry season, as I recall. (Please note the season was much shorter then; the people who invented the hybrids had not yet been born.)
The best part was being picked up in a flat-bed truck at the corner of Bunting and Scott at something like 5:30 in the morning. Not only was it great riding in the back of a truck through the city, but none of my friends were up to see how nerdish I was, grinning madly, wind in my face, the sense of berry-fueled adventure coursing through my veins…
The worst part was the rash I got from eating more strawberries than I picked.
When I got my paycheque (I can’t believe I didn’t owe them money), I thought I’d made it, that it just didn’t get any better than this. I had a paycheque for god’s sake. With my name on it.) A picture exists of me holding this cheque. I’m wearing a tie-dye tee-shirt, cut offs and a blue paisley scarf over my hair (tied almost pirate style, but not quite) the way we did in the 70’s when we weren’t embroidering flowers and peace symbols on our jeans.
There’s a good chance I spent it on a Gordon Lightfoot album, incense and a pair of huaraches.
Thank you, WikiCommons
The above memory, courtesy of a post by Gwen Tuinman about her summer job picking tobacco leaves. (I win! You can’t eat tobacco leaves.)
Any other summer jobs of yore out there? Consider the baton passed…
in search of bloodroot
I set out this morning to see if the bloodroot had opened. I’d noticed leaves and buds curled up near the creek the other day. En route I pass the man who I usually see in his plaid bathrobe taking out the recycling… today in a Canadiens jersey, laying out a tarp to dry on his driveway.
A long-haired Alsatian chases a black squirrel with a brown tail while the dog’s person calls something like Jingles! and a cat in a window looks smug.
There’s a house where daffodils and red tulips bloom—dozens of them—it’s the only place that has more than one or two and, weirder still, they look like they’ve been there for weeks and I wonder how this can be.
Over here a truck delivers a load of sod and topsoil and over there a couple of chairs on a front porch look ready for a mug of tea. Further along, a grease stain in a shape that can’t be overlooked and which I add to my collection.
There are reminders everywhere of December’s ice storm.
And on various curbs, a total of three toilets, one bathtub, two sinks and a countertop.
I notice the hockey net around the corner has been replaced by a basketball hoop and a skipping rope abandoned on a lawn beside a pair of mittens.
There is a thing I don’t recognize.
And a song that I do.
And the Italian man with the garden near the park is walking around his patch of still bare earth, smoking, figuring out where the tomatoes and beans and zucchini will live this year. Rotation is good.
There’s wild ginger.
And tame things.
And then, by the creek, one of my favourite oddly named things…
hello, spring
On my way to the library I see a man pacing in his garage, smoking. I’ve seen him there before. He pretends he doesn’t notice me as I pass and I sense I’m meant to do the same. I feel sorry for those who like to indulge in a cigarette. They’re always huddled outside but no one waves, no one says Hello, fine weather, isn’t it! the way you might to someone raking a lawn. I may have to change this pattern next time I go by.
Further along the same street, a boy, playing hockey on his own,
and the blueprints for a house interior sketched onto several squares of sidewalk.
This is the kitchen. The living room is to the left; bedrooms to the right.
Around the corner, a man in a green ski jacket cleans a ski-doo the exact same shade as his coat. When I stop a few houses down to make some notes, I look back and notice the man staring at me. He’s actually stopped cleaning the ski-doo and looks concerned about me jotting things on a notepad with a pencil. It occurs to me that if I’d stopped to look at my BlackBerry or equivalent [which I don’t own] he’d be feeling much calmer. It reminds me of my experiment at the casino, and the unexpected things that frighten people.
At the library, a woman comes up to me, says, quite out of the blue, “You must be an artist,” and I assume she means because of the hat but I ask whatever makes her think so. She says she was driving by and saw me walking, saw me stop on the sidewalk and go back and take a picture of something on the ground. “Only someone with a certain kind of eye would do that,” she says. I tell her she must have a pretty good eye herself and we laugh the laugh of strangers.
This is the picture she saw me take.
Tell me this doesn’t look like a monkey spitting out an apricot.
Back outside a black pick-up truck goes through a red light and from the other end of the street, totally unrelated but at the same moment, tires squeal.
A woman in white plays drums on her steering wheel and sings while waiting for the light to change.
I take a different route home and find a nest of feathers. Not a good kind of nest.
And in a nearby window, what appears to be a rather self-satisfied expression…
Close to home I find a bag crackling in the wind and so I detach it with the idea of collecting a few bits of the always-debris that is everywhere.
Less than ten minutes later, I’m out of bag.
journal notes, solstice in muskoka, 2011
Silver morning. No, scratch that. Too cliché. Go with first instinct: grey and dull and lacking yesterday’s slow copper cherry sunrise followed by blue blue sky.
No. Scratch that too. Here’s the thing: this winter morning lacks nothing.
Frost on new wood of deck at water’s edge. In the lake, a plastic bottle, loose on the ice. I wonder how it got there; did somebody throw it to see if the lake was frozen? What is wrong with the somebodies of us?
The fire pit from last night where we burned marshmallows. No one believed me when I said roasting is an art. They said charcoal was their favourite flavour.
A writing exercise in a book I find tells me to write in third person.
She.
Not me.
She sits cross-legged on a lime green duvet cover that is identical to the one she used to have until it ripped and she gave it to the Humane Society instead of repairing it. Plus it had become too lime green for her taste. Animals, being colour blind [or so the rumour goes], may indeed like it, she figured.
People she knows will have done a series of sun salutations at the yoga studio in the town a few hundred kilometers south where she lives. Once the sun sets they’ll meet again for chanting and meditation. She is at a cottage with husband and stepson. There will be no chanting. Maybe a movie later.
Last night at the bonfire she wanted to talk about all of it, the air, the frozen lake and the extraordinary ways of fish that they remain unfrozen; the lichen and inukshuks on their walk and the puddle in the shape of a rabbit; the smarts of nature and the distance humans have travelled from their original DNA. She wanted to hear about the books her husband and the boy were reading and talk about the day and the places they’d walked and what they’d seen and what thoughts, ideas and questions all of those places and sights had inspired.
But there were marshmallows to cook.
The exercise goes on to suggest that I write about what I see and what makes me comfortable. Excuse me, what makes her comfortable.
She is at a cottage. I think we’ve established that. And what she sees is the vague outline of a lake beyond cedars and through a window whose night-time glass is warming and what makes her comfortable is this rather odd and empty room off the main bedroom, where no one else goes because there is a proper living room elsewhere. This extra room is a private nook, a sanctuary, an addition to the cottage, an afterthought. But it’s heated and there are big windows on three sides and a door to the patio and steps. I like escape routes—she likes them.
She writes in this silent, private space, looking up only occasionally (although even a momentary pause in the writing is frowned upon by the rules of the exercise) to assure herself the lake is still there and when the snow turns to slushy rain she hears it on the roof of this thin-walled room and writes about it. And although it’s irrelevant she writes about how the friends who own the cottage lived here for six months after their dishwasher set fire to their house. The exercise recommends just going with whatever comes to mind so she writes about how she can’t imagine the noise and disruption of kids and a beautiful giant black dog in this space, and how remarkable that none of those frenetic vibes remain. And then she writes about vibes, about lingering energy, the kind you can feel and how some rooms you’ve never been in before can immediately feel good or bad.
She digresses here and writes about how she likes places—buildings, cabins, tents, trailers, everything habitable. She likes paintings and photographs of houses and the ones about to be demolished… she likes imagining their stories, the people who stood on those doorsteps on a thousand snowy Christmas Eves, bearing gifts and casseroles.
Coincidentally, the next step of the exercise is to write about diversions so I skip that.
After breakfast the husband and stepson go out and I’m alone with the radio and the rain in this lovely space and I read and write some more…
And before I know it I’m dancing to the hallelujah chorus on this silver day at noon.
the story of fred (a winter’s tale)
It begins, as most stories do, on a dark and stormy night in Edmonton. Nineteen eighty something. The storm was made of snow and arrived without warning at the end of the work day. Normally, this would have meant nothing more complicated than standing at the bus stop for a much longer than normal period in the whipping wind and infamous Edmonton but-it’s-a-dry-cold minus forty temps. [They tell you that dry part as if it means your fingers won’t snap off as easily as if it were a wet cold.]
But all was not entirely normal… for that very day at lunch I had purchased a hamster cage.
Why? Because the sign said this: Buy A Cage and Get a Hamster FREE!!
Who could resist?
And so I had walked back to my office carrying, in one hand a hamster cage, cedar shavings and hamster food, and in the other a hamster in a cardboard box. Then I asked a guy at work to please transfer the furry little cherub from box to cage because a) I couldn’t imagine touching it myself, and b) the cherub was rapidly gnawing its way through the cardboard.
The guy’s name was Fred and now so was the hamster’s.
It might have been a reasonable enough series of events were it not for the storm. Suddenly the idea of standing in the but-it’s-a-dry-cold, waiting for a bus that might be hours away, wasn’t on… not with a hamster named Fred in an open-concept cage. I called for a taxi and was told the wait would be at least two hours. Undaunted, I did what anyone in this situation might do—I walked over to the Four Seasons Hotel [Fred’s cage wrapped inside my coat] with the genius plan of hopping into one of the many cabs queued up outside the front doors.
Except there was no queue.
Wait time: hours.
Well, the next logical step is obvious. I took solace in the hotel lounge… Fred on one chair, me on the other. A glass of wine between us. No need to panic. [Animals can sense fear.] We’d simply wait until a cab arrived. In the meantime I ordered something to eat, offered my companion some lettuce, and was grateful no one enforced the No Rodent Rule, [which I’m assuming is one of those things that gets waived during acts of god].
We eventually made it home and Fred seemed content enough with his new digs.
The story becomes considerably duller from here on out, mostly involving a wheel on which he ran several times the circumference of the earth.
I’ll spare you the scampering, squeaking, cedar scented details, other than to say I did, eventually, touch him but never loved the feel of his squirmy rodent-ness.
My tiny-toed flatmate lived to a respectable age and rests in a backyard on the south side.
fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth gifts of the season
5. Discovering that dinner at my nephew’s would not be a turducken as he’d threatened, but free-standing birds along with perogies, couscous and snuffing [stuffing to the rest of the world]. Preceded and followed by impromptu salsa dancing.
6. The way Elizabeth Simcoe led me to the origins of the word spinster.
A noble word!
7. Learning that unicorns are real. [Seems they’ve been heard by certain people of short stature who know about these things. They sound like reindeer.]
8. Preparing the annual package of food and clothing that’s then left on a dark and deserted and slightly rundown street with a note reading Merry xmas to whoever finds this. The two best parts: picking out the stuff that goes into it, and wondering about the moment it’s found.
9. The doves. They’d been gone from the backyard for several seasons but earlier this year, after our little tortoiseshell girl died, they returned the very next day and have stayed. And in the most wonderful way this doesn’t feel insignificant.
10. Lunch with a friend. Fries, calamari, kale salad, a glass of chilled Canadian riesling… but mostly the part that had nothing to do with food or wine.
11. Home. Breath. Arms. Legs. The sound of a furball purring. You know, the good stuff.
12. A walk to buy lemons and seeing that the hockey net from last year has returned. I don’t know who sets this up but, like a weird Inukshuk, it tells me whoever it is, is still about. I’m glad they’re well.
***
The first four gifts are here.
the first, second, third and fourth gifts of the season
The first gift was finding my old lumber jacket in the trunk of my car, in my Survival Box, which also included a flashlight that didn’t work and inedible chocolate.
The second was doing the debit machine at the grocery store without my glasses and when it said did I want cash back I pressed ‘Yes’ by mistake. I swore and the cashier said “Everything alright?” I said it was and happily received $20. I felt rich.
#3 was receiving a xmas card from a friend I worked with almost 40 years ago and haven’t seen since. It occurred to me that it’s a small miracle we’ve managed to keep in touch through all our moves. We’ve never talked on the phone, or exchanged email addresses. The only time we’re in touch is December, with whatever words can fit on the inside of a card… no white space.
The fourth was a passage recently stumbled over in Douglas Coupland’s 2004 Souvenir of Canada 2. The original is also a joy. As is City of Glass.
My favourite kind of reading: words about the ordinary laid down in such a way that makes you realize nothing is ordinary…
This is from a piece called ‘Zzzzzzzzzz…. The Sleepy Little Dominion’, essentially a love letter to Canada. It begins with the memory of hatching Canada goose eggs in a Johnny Walker box with his brother.
“When [they] hop out of their eggs, they’re turbocharged little bundles of fluff-packed fun… goslings are alert, affectionate, trusting, curious, loyal and entertaining—the exact characteristics we also treasure in our human friends. It was pure delight to watch them tumble and peep daily across our lawn, pond, patio and (J-Cloths in hand) kitchen floor. Because of their innocence, everything was permitted.”
They become part of the family, snuggling for naps with humans and family dog alike.
“By August, though, there was no denying that [they] were now geese, and the time had come for them to fledge… As we had no rules to follow, we simply corralled them … at the top of the cul-de-sac and ran down the hill flapping our arms—and they followed us.”
He goes on to describe watching the first moment of their flight and even though they immediately return to the yard, “you could sense the wildness leaking into their souls.”
Eventually the birds do leave and settle, temporarily, at a nearby lake and when Coupland and his brother call them, they still respond, and even return to the house a few times.
“But then came the next year, early spring. The geese would come home just once. They would land on the roof, always in the morning, and they would honk as if the world depended on it. In robes and T-shirts, we’d run out onto the lawn to look at them there on the roof’s apex. Once they’d seen us, there was a brief moment when it wasn’t humans and geese, but simply a group of friends happy to be together and alive.
“Then off they flew. Just like that. They’d done their duty, and now they vanished into the wild. I’ve spent my life trying to articulate just what that specific wild was they returned to, for that wild is Canada, and when I think of this country, I think of where the geese go when they leave home.”
***
Gifts five to twelve are here.
Matilda Magtree 