the real world

any excuse for il giardino…

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

Snow’s falling today. Just yesterday I was still wearing sandals. Tomorrow I’ll pick the rest of the celery, dig out the leeks. By the end of the week things could well be frozen and white.

Used to be that was it; I’d hardly go past the patio from December to March, except to feed the birds, maybe make a snow angel. But then, a couple of years ago, I saw Karen Shenfeld’s film about the men and women of Toronto’s Little Italy and their amazing gardens.

There’s the guy who rigged up a clothesline of empty pop cans so he can sit on his patio in his undershirt and enjoy the view of his vegetables growing, occasionally yanking a string that rattles the cans and keeps the birds away all afternoon. Another who uses a handmade hoe and shovel, tools his father brought to Canada more than forty years ago.

The film is filled with music and food and front yards that are planted with tomatoes and zucchini and eggplant; they’re not beautiful in the mown and blown, pesticided, clipped and landscaped way, thank god, but in all the right ways.

These people don’t  ‘have gardens’, they have relationships with their gardens—healthy, head over heels, madly in love with life relationships.

My favourite was the guy who didn’t let even winter stop him spending time in his beloved “il giardino”—every day he’d go out and chip away at a little of the ice that covered it. (He’s the reason I’m not that sad it’s time to dig out the last of the leeks, store the patio umbrella and put on my socks—I’ve got a pile of cedar branches to tie into kindling bundles—one bundle a day, starting in January…)

when it looks like nothing

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

I’m standing in front of an empty cage at the Conservancy of SouthWest Florida—a tiny gem of a place doing its tiny part to help preserve what’s left of nature in that part of the world. They also have a facility to rehabilitate wild animals that have been hurt, mostly in traffic accidents. Those that can’t be released live out their days in large outdoor pens or cages and serve as noble ambassadors on the importance of living in harmony with the natural world.

So along comes a grandmotherly woman, young boy in tow, rushing through, no time to consider how the animals got there, no time for conversation; she merely points, bird, bird, turtle, bird.

Next to me, in front of the empty cage, the boy pauses; the grandmother tugs to keep him moving.

“There’s nothing in there to see,” she says and the boy, reluctantly, allows himself to be tugged away.

And I think: this is how it happens, this is how we train children ‘to see’, to look only for the feature attraction, the shiny, the obvious, the Disney version of things. God forbid they should be allowed to think, to imagine for themselves. In fact, the empty cage contains sand, shadows, pebbles, a small tree, bits of wood… but it’s all been called nothing and the boy has learned something from that.

I hang around the empty cage for awhile, looking at the tree and the sand; evetually another child comes along. He asks his mother what the sign says.

“Unoccupied,” she answers. “There’s nothing in there, let’s go.”

The child looks at the cage, then up at me looking at the cage, then turns to his mum and says, “But something might come into it.”

Even she can’t argue with that.

Still, she takes his hand and they move on—in search, I guess, of the ever elusive ‘something’…

on a warm autumn day…

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I saw a boy riding a bike, thirteen or fourteen, plugged into an iPod, snarly and unseeing and when I moved off the sidewalk so he could more easily pass, he looked at me in his unseeing way and said nothing. The poor creature had not even been taught, or so it seemed, to offer a simple nod of thanks—he had absolutely no skills beyond being able to listen and pedal at the same time.

I saw a tiny tot riding a motorized car while a harried mother moved about in a front yard full of large plastic toys. When the child left his car in the middle of the court the mother said: you can’t leave it there, Dakota, go and get it. But Dakota was already off in another direction and mother was already walking toward the abandoned car. As Dakota, and I, knew she would.

I saw a dog named Steve, the colour of a fox and the size of a rolled up newspaper on a slow news day.

And then I saw hail fall in the garden and thought how odd, until I popped one of the marble sized balls of ice into my mouth—which seemed a perfectly wonderful thing to do on a warm autumn day.

when words and nature meet, good things happen

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Last night on the way to the grocery store, I looked up and saw thousands of starlings flying en masse—their shape changing with every swoop—every wing catching twilight at the same moment—flashing silver— then another turn and all wings are black. The entire flock moving together, gliding, sweeping left then right, expanding and contracting like a perfect shape shifting kalaeidescope.

I’d seen the birds fly in large groups before, but never this pre-sunset ritual, which I’ve now learned is common; supposedly a form of communication before calling it a day.

I stood there alone staring at the sky for maybe ten, fifteen minutes. I assumed the show had only just started, that soon a crowd would gather and we’d all shake our heads and sigh, agreeing that nature is magnificent and we’re inferior dolts that have so much to learn.

But only a  few people even slowed down long enough to look up, and one disappointed voice who did,  said, “It’s just birds,” and turned quickly away.

This is the season for the starlings dance; for robins getting drunk on juniper berries outside my window; for geese arguing about the tidiness of the vee; chickadees, doves, cardinals and finches, a bounce in their step now that the bullyish greckles have finally gone.

With all that avian magic on my mind I happened to come across this interview, which reminded me that I’d wanted to read The Bedside Book of Birds. 

And now I will. 

 

“Stevenson remembered the story of a monk who had been distracted from his copy-work by the song of a bird. He went into the garden to listen more closely, and when he returned, after what he thought were only a few minutes, he discovered that a century had gone by, that his fellow monks were dead and his ink had turned to dust. The song of the bird had given him a taste of Paradise, where an instant is as a hundred years of earthly time. Was the same true of time in hell, Stevenson asked himself.”  (From— The Bedside Book of Birds, by Graeme Gibson)