I am doing yoga on the beach with a visiting two and half year old who is in charge of the doings and I am learning lots of new-to-me poses while enjoying tacos and mushroom soup made of sand and the other day we discovered our shadows and that made one of us laugh a thousand times and made the other one smile in gratitude for such excellent company.
♥
♥
♥
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.
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…
♥
♥
There used to be a little book shop in Toronto, near the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. This was back in the early 80’s. I lived near enough to ride my bike over on a Saturday morning. The shop was above a bakery and I may or may not be imagining that you were allowed to take your goodies upstairs and sit on one of the couches or at little tables (my imagination also recalls a fireplace) and browse the bookshelves. I’d buy the Saturday Star there and a few croissants, which I’d bring home in the basket of my bike. Home being a postage sized single room in the attic of a big old house on a tree-lined street of big old houses. It wasn’t ritzy then. Many of those houses had been divided into apartments and rooms. I lived with my best pal, a black cat named Joshua, who’d spend the day outside and when I came home from work he’d be there to greet me and we’d trot up three (four?) flights of stairs together and settle in for the night. My apartment (a room really) was teensy. Big enough only for a mattress on the floor and a dresser. No couch, no table, a beanbag instead of a chair. and a sewing machine for making most of my clothes while sitting on said beanbag. I had a small television, a shelf for plants and books. A stove, fridge and sink against one wall. It was enough. The bathroom was shared with the teensy apartment next door, where T, who worked for the CBC, lived alone surrounded by giant, unwieldy stacks of old newspapers he couldn’t bear to get rid of and (apparently) mice. (No mice problem at my place given four-legged roommate.) He made a mean kedgeree, T did, and almost always made extra for me and I swear I can still remember the smell and the promise of it as Josh and I walked up those stairs.
All this from a picture that crossed my path the other day. I don’t even know who the artist is, but thank you.
Also… feeling a strong yen for smoked fish and rice.
♦
♦
…. when checking on my scarves, which are daily feeling like metaphors blowing in the wind, I find a nest I assume is a hummingbird’s so I ask an island expert on such things and she tells me that, no, not a hummingbird but a vireo made this beauty, which delights me because I’ve heard what I dared to fancy were vireos chorusing in this particular neck of the woods and now I wonder if this little place will be returned to like a swallow’s box because the very truth of it having withstood the heavy snow, pelting ice, and winds of winter is astonishing and if the vireo owners are maybe thinking of subletting, I’d like to suggest that ‘durable’ would not be an overstatement in any ad.
The picture distorts size. Imagine the cupped hand of a small child. Also, know that it’s hanging in mid-air, fixed to thin branches by spit, grasses, and hope.
A hummingbird, I’m told, makes a nest the size of thimble.
♣
I admit I’ve been easily distracted for the last wee while.
Which often takes me away from my desk and into the forest, tromping through snow with high boots and more recently over thick crusty snow and ice (because it’s March) with cleats.
I stand facing the sun as I watch ducks and sometimes geese on the small river we call a creek and soon the red squirrel and chickadees find me and hint hint hint hint hint that it’s time to walk deeper into the forest where their feeders hang in chickadee glade and where I’m suddenly surrounded by the sound of wings floofffing and whooshing as I add sunflower seeds to a handmade wooden feeder so old and squirrel-gnawed I’ve forgotten where it came from.
Never fails to make me smile, this floofff and whoosh, the sound of it, yes, but even more than that, the reminder of what also is.
♣
♣
There is the conversation recently about conversation, how differently it behaves and changes or doesn’t, depending on whether conversing while walking or sitting, which leads me to ponder the differences too when chatting via technology versus carrier pigeon or smoke signal, the differences in email versus inky letters (also quill versus Bic), the way one conversation is better by phone and another in person or vice versa, in which case I wonder: is it the subject being discussed or the person being spoken with that makes the difference because it seems also that some of us are simply better by phone and worse in person and best by email and hopeless in ink or so many variations of the above.
The point is this. There is all that.
And there is the pleasure, too, of this conversation possibly never entirely ending.
♦
♦
There is a cat on on the sill of an open window behind me and freshly fallen snow, a pot of soup on the stove made from frozen summer harvests and the other day, a drive to a thrift shop for scarves and a chat with the woman who runs the shop, who was delighted that I bought so many because, she said, they are buried in scarves and I said that’s music to my ears.
I like scarves, I told her. And she laughed.
♦
♦
Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student
♦
And yet.
♦
♦
♦
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.
♥
Matilda Magtree 