things i love

spring is in the air, the sequel

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

A story written for a little girl in France, who speaks both English and French.

The preamble: https://matildamagtree.com/2024/02/29/spring-is-in-the-air/

♣

L’HISTOIRE DE PEPE LE PEW

Asseyez-toi and listen to the story of un homme that smelled in a way that not tout le monde loved.

It was hiver and Pepe le Pew was frois. He needed une maison to stay chaud. He tried un arbre but it was tres windy and his chapeau kept flying off.

He tried the inside of a trrrrrreeeeessssssss ENORME rubber boot (a polka dot one!) he found in a ditch, but it smelled worse than Pepe le Pew. And it had boue and l’eau inside, which was not nice pour dormir.

He tried the nid of a chickadeedeedee (too petite), and the nest of an aigle (too high up to climb every day).

He asked the ecureuil rouge if he would like a roommate and the ecureuil rouge said: are you kidding me??? (which means non)

And then une nuit froide, when the neige was starting to fall, Pepe noticed un chat going under one end of the barn. And he followed the cat (we aren’t sure if the cat is a he or a she so we will refer to them as they) and the cat fell asleep on a little nid of newspapers and dry bits of feuilles and they looked very chaud et confortable. 

So Pepe le Pew, very politely, and very quietly, made himself une petite nid at the other end of the grange and there he stayed tout l’hiver and came out during the jour to enjoy the soleil and to find little things to eat and then went back under his end of the barn to snuggle up for the nuit.

And the chat didn’t mind one bit.

And so they spent the hiver together, tranquillement.

But that’s not the fini of the histoire because even though by printemps Pepe le Pew had moved out of his nid d’hiver he had left behind a fragrance in the grange that when the door was opened for the premiere time (by moi), made moi rire et rire et rire (parce que I don’t mind the fragrance) and say, ah, c’est evident you were ici, Pepe le Pew!! and I’m heureux that we could give you a maison d’hiver. Bonne chance, bonne chance!

Come back again l’annee prochaine!

La fin.

pepe

Le vrai, et le vraiment, le Pew.

♣

♣

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)

♦

metaphor in pin stripes

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

I have a black and white pin-striped suit.

For many years I loved it.

I wore it to fancy events with bare feet and Birkenstocks. I once wore it to a black tie event with bare feet, Birkenstocks, and a black satin tie loosely looped like a necklace.

Once upon a time I was required to attend many fancy events. I don’t like fancy events.

And eventually I didn’t like the suit.

Or thought I didn’t.

I kept trying to give it away but it wouldn’t leave. It just stayed at one end of my closet like an old friend, the kind that still feels part of your life even though you know you’ve grown apart, gone down different roads. You still understand each other, but you also make each other uncomfortable.

The suit had become a source of familiar discomfort.

So the other day I decided again to get rid of it.

I tried it on, for old times sake. I started with the pants.

And suddenly everything made sense.

I love the pants. It’s the jacket I don’t like. I have never truly liked the jacket. There, I said it. What a relief. I hate the jacket but I love the pants. I want to wear them with a unmatching jacket or baggy sweater, a tee shirt, a loose cotton blouse. And Birkenstocks. Always Birkenstocks.

And, no, I don’t want to wear the jacket, at all, with anything.

And this is the amazing thing: to realize I can let go of the part that no longer suits me. I don’t need to keep the jacket just because it’s a SUIT.

Why didn’t I know this years ago?

I can let go of the part that no longer suits.

And embrace what remains.

me, merrygo

the tao of garum masala

~ carin ~ 2 Comments

♦

Here’s how it goes:

You run out of garum masala.

Days go by. A couple weeks even.

You love curry.

But you refuse to shop in grocery stores for things you can find elsewhere.

There is a spice store in town.

You don’t go into town that often.

So this morning you look at your Indian cookbook (one of Vij’s), hoping to find a discussion about what to do when you have no garum masala and are not heading to town anytime soon.

Make your own Vij says.

Of course!!!

He also says: but make sure your kitchen has good ventilation and the doors to your bedrooms are closed as the roasting of spices can get quite pungent. Maybe open a window. Also you will need a spice (or coffee) grinder.

Hmmm. You’re missing a few of the spices and anyway you don’t feel like breaking up a bag of cinnamon sticks or buying a grinder and you especially don’t like the word ‘ventilation’…

But you DO have SOME of the necessary spices and this in itself is oddly thrilling, this idea of neither buying garam masala nor roasting and grinding your own nor doing without but simply making an easy version of it… until you next go to town and can either a) buy some already made or b) buy the spices necessary to blend your own now that you know what they are, but what’s even more thrilling, and seriously odd too, is that it never once occurred to you in all the decades you’ve been making curry to wonder what garum masala actually was.

Epiphanies come in many flavours.

spice blends

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extreme ikebana

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

Also known as an empty vase.

A wedding gift that over the decades has held bouquets of tulips, daffodils, all manner of wildflowers, yarrow and goldenrod, bunches of dogwood, wild pussy willow stems, sometimes nothing more than a single leaf from a giant sage green hosta, and just a year or two ago it was home to a birthday arrangement from a faraway friend and the magic of it kept bits of that arrangement going for a ridiculous number of weeks.

But we have young cats now and they jump everywhere and notice EVERY NEW THING that’s brought into the house. A single hosta leaf included.

And so, Ikebana — the Japanese art of minimalist flower arrangement, the idea being that the empty space around the stems is an important part of the arrangement.

Ikebana translates to : making flowers come alive.

And so, extreme Ikebana : the empty vase itself becoming the space where bouquets of memories and memories of bouquets… live.

All of which, invisible to the cats.

vase

the light getting in

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

There’s a beach where I sing Cohen’s Anthem to the seals, the chorus anyway, about cracks letting in light, the perfection of imperfection. I’m pretty sure that’s what the seals are singing too.

But this post isn’t about seals.

It’s about trees, which is part of the reason I’ve been inconsistently present for the better part of a year,

I’ve been wandering among what’s left of the them ever since Hurricane Fiona struck the east coast, when the island is said to have lost 40% of its trees on that single day in September, 2022.

Much has changed about the landscape since, not to mention the shoreline, not to mention the bridges, wharves, barns and houses demolished. The everywhere piles of timber have become a testament to the art of log stacking.

I’ve been wandering in what’s left of wandering space in the forest around my house, initially dazed, less so each time. We’ve done mammoth cleanups and have begun to cut a few new trails but we’re taking our time. I realize I don’t need a whole forest to wander through in order to feel awe.

There is new sunlight, saplings too, and mossy glades have sprung up among the still standing spruce and eastern larch (tamarack), the maple and birch, groves of beech, mountain ash, serviceberry, alder and aspen.

The other day I counted eight or nine new oak trees I’d never seen before. A few days after that I saw twenty on the same walk. This morning I stopped counting. This is the way of trees, I realize, the slow reveal of them. A forest at a glance is… green space. Up close it’s an unending universe.

Just the other day, at the edge of the tree line, I found two new apple trees, each a great distance from the other. One I call the galette tree for its tiny perfect fruit, tart enough for galettes, one of the few things I enjoy baking, precisely because the crust wants to be imperfectly shaped.

The old linden beside the house was perfectly shaped, but also imperfect because it had grown so large it almost touched the hydro lines and a month or so ago when another hurricane threatened, and because the direction of the forecasted winds (different than Fiona’s) would force the tree’s branches right onto the power lines, we took no chances, and had it cut down. I expected to be sad, pained even, but it wasn’t in the least painful, not a bit sad. There was a sense that the tree itself knew it had become a danger and the space it left was given like a gift, not only to the bee balm and juniper, lilac and witch hazel that have barely survived in its shadow but to me, personally. Its stumps invite me to weave ribbons around them and carve them with Cohen’s words.

Now every morning I salute these stumps and the space once filled with the old linden’s canopy, thank it for its willingness to continue standing despite (we realized) rotting from the middle and something eating its leaves, for making it easy to do what was necessary, and for the light its absence allows.

The other day in my ramblings along the tree line, I noticed among the ‘greenery’ a tiny grove… of linden saplings.

What else to say…

Here’s to the cracks and the light.

Ring all the bells.

light gets in

summer postcards: I saw these questions somewhere and answered them because I love everything about the Where and the How of the places each of us live and could talk about it almost endlessly (but not to worry… I’ve kept this short)

~ carin ~ 6 Comments

curtains - Copy

One thing you love about your house.

The curtains billow in a breeze.

One thing you’d like to change about it (that is changeable).

If my bathroom was bright green and white or turquoise and white (or possibly bright yellow and white) tiles I wouldn’t complain.

And one thing you’d like to change about it (that is not changeable).

A place to put up an indoor winter clothesline (but that would require a proper basement and one of the things I love is the rather improper basement).

Where does the sun rise and set?

Rises behind the forest across the road where I’m told there used to be a mill — the millpond is just around the corner and has a bench for sitting and trout for fishing. I can see the sun rise from my bedroom and the light also floods the living room and greets me in a most delightful way when I go downstairs. It rises above 200 berry bushes and a meadow of wild thyme.

What does your kitchen most often smell like?

Currently possibly cat food as our cat recently had dental work and there are sometimes six bowls of different flavours and textures (pate, gravy, gravy and chunks) spread out for her to nibble on as she fancies. This is the equivalent of giving ice cream after tonsils.

Where to do you like to sit (or be) when it rains?

In the cottage, attached to the kitchen. The cottage is where the curtains billow.

Do you have a small sanctuary of your own, a chair, a window, a room?

Many. Each serving a different purpose.

How do you know you’re home?

I read something once that said the trick is to find a place where you fit. That’s the whole enchilada right there. When you fit, everything feels right and looks beautiful. And the thought of bathroom tiles is insignificant to the pleasure of being able to breathe. When you fit, so does everything else.

♥

 
 

the way of love

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

I’m talking about books of course, book love.

The way a book finds you just when you didn’t know you needed it.

The way a friend who isn’t known for popping things in the mail sends you a book and you think: oh dear because it’s not your usual kind of book and now what? and you open it and begin reading, just to say you did, and before you know it you’re ‘away with it’ because of course it’s your kind of book, you just didn’t (yet) know it and you’re just a little surprised at how she’s glimpsed a side of you you didn’t realized showed.

The feel of the paper (we all have our favourites).

The art of the cover.

The marginalia!! (either finding it — the joy of second-hand books — or adding your own, which is a whole conversation in itself; I would love to have a book club meeting limited to the book’s marginalia; in fact I’m reminding myself that there is a book circulating right now among five friends, each of us encouraged to add notes before passing it along to the next person; each of us using a different ink so we know who’s who)

The books of our childhood, of our lives, that just by opening to a random page or illustration take us back to some summer afternoon and yellow peddle pushers, cool grass on bare legs, an afternoon of pages, a stack of buttered saltines and solitude and never once feeling alone.

Please note: I will never borrow a book from you, at least it would be very very unlikely, because I’m too familiar and relaxed with books. I bend them backwards and fold down pages, mark them up; I take them into the kitchen where the olive oil and blueberries live and to lunch and on tea breaks with chocolate. I stuff them into beach bags among mustard sandwiches and leaky water bottles and leave them under maple trees at night when it might rain and sometimes it does.

Would I lend you mine? Depends. If it’s one I’ve formed a strong relationship with, probably not. But I would love to buy you your own copy to christen with salsa and jam.

~

After all this, and in the spirit of book love magic, what do I stumble across this morning but this passage, by Jill Robinson.

“Once in a very rare year, there comes along a new book, and I say, as I am reading, as my eyes eat words without a blink, as my heart and mind grab each other, This, I say, is The Best Book. I know before the first page is gone. I sense it building. And as the book finishes, I go as slow as I can. I don’t want to leave the book’s world.”

~

And on the same page, my handwritten response:

Treasures that come to us in the arrangement of letters and punctuation. Who knew in grade one that the alphabet we were learning would be everything?

the-new-novel

♥

grateful

~ carin ~ 11 Comments

 

For so much.

For landing here among berries and forest and sea.

For each morning’s walk and talk with trees and the discovery of edible fungi, for the galette I’m about to make with freshly picked apples, for moss and clover.

For the smell of salt air.

For the kindness of new friends and gifts of manure, jam, books, music, laughter, excellent advice, garlic, and conversation.

For family farms and wool mills where you can bring your own fleece to have cleaned and spun and where you can buy a skein of wool in any colour you choose and send it to a friend who will magic it into a toque, just for you.

For friends and family who stay in touch no matter how far away you roam.

For the luxury of warmth as the nights get colder.

For a sky full of stars.

For a good harvest of mint and the winter teas it will make.

For bees on the sunflower and how the bright red geranium, which has the same name as my newest nephew, has come inside to warm its toes on a sunny windowsill and how when I send my nephew pictures of it I receive pictures of a cherub’s toes in return.

For an excellent vacuum cleaner. This is not small potatoes.

For potatoes. And a garden in which to grow them.

For having become really good at cutting hair.

For not caring if a haircut looks a bit funky.

For the endless love in a cat’s eyes and how they become teachers, and sometimes angels.

For screaming less loudly at the sight of a snake (aka Kevin).

For the smell of supper cooking as I write this and Tea for the Tillerman playing, reminding me of the centuries that have come and gone, all of them leading to here.

For afternoon light and a porch that is made for watching it.

For the frog in the tomato bed, the ladybug in the shower, for the person I saw swimming in the ocean and mistook for a seal until they emerged and I realized they are not a seal but a selkie and who has since become an almost friend. Who would not want a selkie as a friend?

So much.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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here and there

~ carin ~ 10 Comments

There, at this time of year, I’d be in my kayak just as often as possible, throwing Lulabelle onto the roof of my twenty-three year old Camry (best car in the world) and heading to a small local marsh connected at one end to Lake Ontario but me and Lulabelle staying in the pond where it’s pristine and quiet, just us and the banks of earth-fragrant reeds, egrets, a blue heron colony, thousands of blackbirds rising in clouds at dawn and disappearing-who-knows-where, the magnificent swan ballet, a family of deer watching us from shore, an eagle named Eddie.

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But I am here now, and not there, and Lulabelle is in our new garage still waiting to be dipped into something briny. I’ve been too busy getting from there to here, too busy unpacking and putting in a garden, harvesting berries from the dozens of bushes (blueberries, haskaps, blackberries) that are also here, discovering beaches and tides, where to dig clams, pick oysters off rocks, which seaweeds are tastiest. Busy getting to know the landscape and marvelling at maritime skies, finding the farmers who grow veggies the old-fashioned way, raise meat and eggs ethically, who bake bread and pies and croissants, who make cheese and soap, a mill that will spin your wool for you, a young family of fisherwomen and men where we buy fresh haddock and smoked salmon and the corner mom and pop grocery that sells off-the-boat mussels every Friday.

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There, at this time of year I would take my breakfast, a banana, yoghurt, tea, and park in the lily pads with a book.

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Here I walk barefoot on sand, naming every bend on the shoreline: First Point, Second Point, Toad Point, What’s the Point, Around the Bend, Sandy Point, and Bring a Chair Cove.

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There, at this time of year, the marsh closes to paddling to allow the birds peace as they prepare for migration.

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Here there are apples to harvest and juice, rows of berry bushes to clean up.

But unlike there, here our paddling destination remains open until freeze-up and while I am both excited and nervous to paddle tidal waters for the first time, Lulabelle is calm and ready and as eager here as she ever was there.

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