A Different Kind of Storytelling

I started pulling a tarot card a day on January 1st. 

I’m using this daily card as a way to reconnect with the deck that sat unused for close to two decades. I knew where it was, safely wrapped up in the attic amid some of my other things. I could see it in my mind’s eye, resting in its storage box, but hadn’t really felt the pull to lift it from that space. 

In the summer I went digging for something else, something I have forgotten entirely now, and there at the top of the box was my Rider Waite deck. And, at that point, I felt a tug toward it. And so I brought it downstairs. 

It sat for a few months on one of my bookshelves, the yellow of the box catching my eye every time I walked by. Occasionally I would hold it, feeling the weight of it, the smoothness of it comforting in its heft. Eventually I took the cards out of their box and shuffled them a little bit. Tarot cards are larger than your average deck of cards, and I’ve always felt my hands are a little too small to handle them properly. But the more I shuffled, the better they felt.

On a day in late December I took the box to my desk and pulled the cards out. They are still shiny smooth—I wasn’t a consistent tarot reader back then—and the images and the intricacies all started coming back to me. It was time, then, to start over.

The card I pulled on the morning of my 57th birthday.

In my previous life, when I first wanted to get into tarot, I spent so much time trying to memorize every card, every meaning, every image and message. It was exhausting and impractical. I mean, you can do it that way, but for me it felt like I was treating it like an exam or assignment, committing the information to memory, reciting it by rote. I wasn’t trusting my intuition that the cards would reveal their information to me as I got to know them individually. And as a result, there was no emotion in it, no real story, either. I’m older now and more trusting of my own observations, my own intuition. And this is what a daily tarot card pull is helping me do.

Instead of pulling a card and immediately looking up the meaning (which is what impatient, “I need to know everything perfectly and NOW” Elizabeth did in the past) I take my time with the card. I savour its image, I notice the small details, and I write down my thoughts as I do. Some of the questions I ask myself are: What am I seeing? What is significant about this image? What details are there that I might have missed before? What exactly is happening in this card? What feelings or emotions are arising in me as I look at the card? I look at the expressions on the faces of the people featured, should there be any people in the card I pull. I look at the sky, the background, the terrain, the weather. All the little details that tell the story of that card specifically, and its relation to the deck as a whole.

It feels a little like freewriting, or writing with a writing prompt. I’ll make these notes and let the card’s image and the feelings it conjures sit with me for some time, occasionally dreaming up a little story about it, wondering what led to this moment, captured in the frame of the card. Later in the day, I will look up the traditional meaning and interpretation and add those notes to my original thoughts. Sometimes there are similarities and sometimes what I perceive is not even close, but that’s ok. It’s all learning, after all. And I kind of liken it to tarot practice through osmosis. I am absorbing the images which help guide me to the meanings, which helps me build a picture and tell a story.

And tarot reading is storytelling, after all. If you’ve ever had your cards read, there is an art to it—not just to the understanding of the cards, but to the way the information is conveyed. Good readers spin a yarn for you about you, about what they are seeing in the cards, about the world we live in and our relation to it. It’s fascinating, and I hope to one day be able to unwrap my own worn deck and help you see what the cards say to you. I feel this is quite a way off, mind you. But I’ll get there.

For now I’m keeping it simple at one card for each day, grateful for this morning ritual that aids me in both my writing practice and my understanding of tarot.

Review: Grey Dog by Elliott Gish

I always feel there is an urgency to a story that begins in the midst of a journey. Whether it’s via train, car, or other mode of transportation, it sets the scene for an escape, a life change, or an adventure. Sometimes all of the above. And then, to add to that, a novel with a story told through a series of journal entries always feels extra personal and even a bit decadent. You’re reading someone’s thoughts (even a fictional someone) and it gives a secretive kind of vibe from the get-go, like you’re getting away with something and learning the innermost thoughts of the protagonist. 

So imagine opening Grey Dog by Elliott Gish and finding yourself thrown onto a train midway into a journey, right into the opening pages of the protagonist’s diary where she hints at secrets and an escape from her past. Literary perfection! And it only gets better. 

Grey Dog opens in the late summer of 1901 with Ada Byrd writing in her journal as she travels to her newest post as the school teacher in a village called Lowry Bridge. There are some hazy details surrounding Ada’s past life and career, and we learn that she was removed from her previous teaching post under a cloud of shame which helps to deepen the mystery surrounding her past. 

Ada is, at least on the surface for the townspeople, the epitome of a spinster teacher: reliable, an upstanding member of society, firm. But through her journals we learn that Ada is all those things and more. She is intelligent with a keen sense of observation and a deep interest in and passion for the natural world. As children, she and her sister Florrie could be found exploring the outdoors, discovering and cataloguing their finds, and for that were often punished by their father. Ada reflects on this childhood and upbringing throughout the novel and we see how unloving and also, at times, violent it was. The mid- to late-19th century (and even well into the 20th, honestly) was not a friendly one for girls and women with scientific leanings. 

Ada’s journal entries typically outline her observations about her students, the townspeople, the weather, and other mundane subjects. Yet amid entries that speak of Sunday School picnics, village barn dances, and the day-to-day goings on of a rural one-room schoolhouse, there are entries devoted to her blossoming friendship with Agatha, the minister’s wife, and there is an undeniable yearning and a fire in Ada that is not at all what would be considered befitting of a spinster school teacher at the very beginning of the 20th century.

When you read a novel that is made up of journal entries, there is a sense of foreboding. How did we come to receive these journals? Who found them and what happened to their author? Grey Dog gives off an “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but I know it probably won’t end well” vibe, which adds to its excitement. Gish strikes an incredible balance with this format because you distinctly know you’re reading journal entries, that’s very clear, but everything flows so well— the conversations, the descriptions—that you sometimes forget. Yet when you’re brought back to that realization everything aligns and the story continues without a hiccup. It is storytelling at its finest.

As the year goes on, Ada begins to hear and see strange, frightening things that seem to appear only to her and while she initially tries to ignore them and pass them off as odd coincidences, it quickly becomes clear she cannot. Her journal becomes more and more raw, and she herself begins to tip into unhinged territory threatening to disrupt the order of the village and her own well-guarded sanity.

This is a remarkable story of female friendships and an intense look at women’s roles in society, but it is also a story of appetites and desires and who is permitted to act on them. Gish does a masterful job of allowing us into Ada’s ever shifting mind, blurring the lines between reality and imagination, causing us to alter our beliefs multiple times as the story progresses.

Grey Dog is perfectly paced with gorgeous writing throughout and an extraordinary story steeped in mystery that is revealed entry by entry, bit by tantalizing bit. When the entire thing unfolds in glorious fashion, we are left with a beautifully crafted and highly satisfying ending that only adds to the book’s deliciousness.

I am so grateful to ECW Press for their ECW Insiders program! Huge thanks to them for sending me this book (and so many others over the years!) to review here on my blog. Grey Dog is out in April from ECW and I highly recommend you pre-order a copy. 

Review: All Things Seen and Unseen by RJ McDaniel

I read All Things Seen And Unseen by RJ McDaniel in one sitting. I am not exaggerating. There was something so propulsive and anxiety-inducing (and I mean that in a good way!) about the novel that I couldn’t put it down, nor did I want to. This novel is a page-turner among page-turners.

The story belongs to Alex Nguyen, a 24-year old university student with undiagnosed chronic pain who we meet in a psychiatric facility. We learn little about why Alex is hospitalized, but within a few pages we understand she is to be released soon into a world that she is completely unprepared to re-enter. Alex has missed so many classes her only option is to withdraw from university, and as a result she is running out of time in her residence room. She has no job to go back to, and she is avidly trying to avoid her father whose only contact seems to be to pursue Alex for money, of which she has very little.

Right away, McDaniel builds in a soft touch of hazy unreliability which adds to the story’s tension and to the level of mystery surrounding Alex, her recent past, her hospital stay, and her estrangement from her friends and family

Included in this unreliability is the character Adam, a shadowy figure from Alex’s recent past who haunts her if not literally then at least figuratively and this is where the “seen and unseen” reflected in the book’s title begin to show up. After she is released from hospital, Alex relates an experience with Adam that we initially take at face value, but quickly the ground shifts from under us and we can’t be sure what is real and what isn’t. It’s an unsettling effect and McDaniel amps up the ambiguity quickly until we are, like Alex, unable to really trust anything.

Alex’s luck seems to take a turn for the better when an old friend reaches out with a plan for her to house sit her wealthy parents’ home on Vancouver Island and she is hopeful this is the fresh start she so desperately needs. Yet, an incident on the ferry and a strange poster on a community bulletin board set her off, and she realizes she is not free from the paranoia and trauma she thought she could leave behind.

The house Alex is hired to look after is an incredible blot on the natural world, all glass and metal, electronic and voice-activated with an elevator and an entire security room to ensure the wrong kind of people don’t get close. The house provides an extra layer of tension for Alex and for the reader and it is also an excellent commentary on who gets to exist in nature, and proof that money does indeed help you get away with anything. This house is worlds away from who Alex is and where she comes from and as the story progresses, there is a part of her that believes the house is rejecting her because she didn’t follow its rules.

In spite of everything, Alex opens up to a few islanders when she meets and befriends Amara, a trans man, avid bird watcher and leave-the-city-behind kind of guy with whom Alex ultimately has a relationship, and Leo, a friendly teen barista at the village coffee shop. When she is introduced to Amara’s friends and learns of their connection to her past life, things start to come into focus for Alex.

At the beginning of the book we are introduced to Alex using she/her pronouns, and yet toward the end there is a pronoun shift that is subtle but also unmooring. Again I wasn’t sure if I could trust Alex’s recounting of events, of the change in pronoun use, but ultimately, I could see that Alex was beginning to come to a realization about the trauma they’ve repressed and is allowing things from their past to come better into focus. And, in the end after all, Alex’s story is the only one we’ve got, so trust it we must.

I really loved this book. I loved how it dipped into climate fiction with its descriptions of the suffocating heat of the summer, and I loved the gothic nature of it with the futuristic house as adversary. I also loved Alex’s character (what can I say I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator) and the pockets of humour McDaniel (and Alex, by extension) uses to effectively paint a picture of a troubled yet hopeful character who is trying to put a life back together piece by broken piece.

I reiterate that I read the book in one sitting, and then I read it again to write this review, and I am still thinking about it. An absolutely wonderful debut (debut!) novel that I hope gets as wide an audience as possible.

Huge thanks to ECW Press for the ARC, I am so grateful. All Things Seen And Unseen is out in April, and you are definitely going to want to pre-order it!

Share the same space for a minute or two…

I went to see Stop Making Sense at the Playhouse Cinema earlier today. I was excited, yet a little apprehensive. On the surface, it was a fun afternoon adventure with my kid who has just recently discovered that they really love Talking Heads. But deeper, much deeper, it was something so much more.

The film, deemed by some to be the greatest concert film of all time, has been recently restored for the lead-up to its (gasp!) fortieth anniversary. The date at the end of the credits read MCMLXXXIV (this is 1984 for those who might not have been taught Roman Numerals in school which my generation was for some reason, but it comes in handy for film situations) so the showings are just a little ahead of its anniversary. When it was released, I was in grade eleven or early grade twelve, and I remember being excited to see it in the theatre on a giant (for the time) screen. And I remember that I was extra excited to go and see it with my friend Ric.

I wrote about Ric in another blog, my very first blog. I’m not going to link it here but the reason I wrote about him in the spring of 2008 is because he died very suddenly that year, the year we both turned 41. 

Ric was a transfer student to our public high school from the Catholic school system. In the mid-80s, if you wanted to go to university, if you wanted an education that would prepare you for university, you left your Catholic school and did the final few years at a public school. At least in Hamilton you did.

He and I had a few classes together and we developed a friendship quickly. We liked the same films (never movies, how pretentious we were at seventeen) and the same music and we had similar senses of humour. And it was with Ric that I first saw Stop Making Sense.

Some movies (I’m so much less pretentious now) can change you and that’s how it was for me with Stop Making Sense. I have never once thought about or heard mention of that movie in the past forty years without thinking about Ric. About him and his Datsun (a very old-fashioned word) with its strategically placed floor mat on the passenger side because the floor itself was mostly missing. About how we would get in trouble for laughing in English class. About how he wrote in my yearbook, “I like you because you like David Byrne and plain donuts.” About how after university we would only ever see each other every couple of years—usually at Christmas when he was home—but we’d manage to squeeze in a movie and a couple of drinks and we’d spend so much time laughing.

When I read that the film was being restored and re-released I knew I wanted to see it, but I also knew it would conjure a lot of feelings and now that I am home after the showing, I can confirm that it was a very emotional ninety minutes.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it opens with a shot of a shadow on the floor. You can hear crowd noises. Eventually, the shadow moves and is revealed to be a person and a guitar. As the shadow moves to cross the floor the crowd noises increase. David Byrne walks to the centre of the stage and places a small boombox beside him. He presses play and launches into Psycho Killer. It’s a brilliant beginning to a brilliant concert. By the second song, Tina Weymouth, bass player extraordinaire is also onstage with Byrne and they play Heaven, which—oof— gave me big, big, feelings. I managed to keep it together (mostly) for a while but then This Must Be The Place sucker punched me and I just let it all out.

Memory is wild and memory association is wilder, still. I think I will always associate Stop Making Sense with Ric and 1984, but I was really glad I got to experience it again, almost forty years later, with Chuck. And I think Ric would appreciate that, too.

This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb, burn with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong… nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes
And you’re standing here beside me
I love the passing of time
Never for money
Always for love

Cover up + say goodnight… say goodnight

Home, is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there
I come home, she lifted up her wings
Guess that this must be the place
I can’t tell one from another

Did I find you, or you find me?
There was a time before we were born

If someone asks, this where I’ll be where I’ll be
Hi yo we drift in and out
Hi yo sing into my mouth
Out of all those kinds of people
You got a face with a view
I’m just an animal looking for a home
Share the same space for a minute or two
And you love me till my heart stops
Love me till I’m dead
Eyes that light up, eyes look through you
Cover up the blank spots
Hit me on the head ah ooh

Review: The Girl Who Cried Diamonds by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Have you ever finished a book that amazed you so much that as soon as you closed it after reading the final page you wanted to immediately start over from the very beginning? Maybe it was because the ending rocked you, threw you for a loop, and you wanted to start over to see if you could, on a second reading, see the twist coming. Or perhaps the writing was so glorious, the characters and the  world-building so vivid that you didn’t want to leave them/it? Now imagine a book of short stories—fourteen in all— where each story, each individual one, demands an instant reread because of literally all the things mentioned above. Imagine the writing, so beautiful and haunting, the plots so twisted and unsettling, the characters so thoughtfully constructed, so tightly wound, that only a second (and third in some instances!) reread would do?  This was exactly my experience reading The Girl Who Cried Diamonds by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. ECW Press kindly sent me an ARC to review and I was riveted from the very first page. Each of these fourteen stories packs a certain kind of punch, and although it’s never the same punch twice, there are definitely some themes that run through the stories, threading them together, creating a mesmerizing, perfect collection.

I can’t stop thinking about these stories.

Hirsch Garcia masterfully takes aspects from myth, folklore, and fairy tales to create incredibly realistic characters who she then throws into incredibly unreal, extraordinary, and often dangerous situations. In the titular story, for example, a girl’s body emits precious metals and jewels in its fluids. In Common Animals, in the middle of an argument, a woman’s partner suddenly turns into a wolf. In the final story in the collection, Woman Into Cloud, a middle-aged wife and mother escapes the confines of a body and becomes, well, a cloud. And while these very brief plot summaries suggest whimsy, much like the fairy tales they evoke, there is a deep, deep darkness to them. Indeed, they feel like the kinds of stories that are passed down as warnings; tall tales to keep us from straying too far afield, to warn us of certain things, certain evils that cannot be named—or things there are no names for. 

Hirsch Garcia explores several themes throughout the collection and the one that really stood out for me, the one I just couldn’t stop thinking about, was that of being trapped or confined in a space or situation—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—the resulting exploitation of the situation and the way the characters find their way out…or don’t. In A Golden Light, the very first story in the collection, Sadie, on hearing about the death of her father becomes unable to move. In Mother, arguably the most unsettling story of the collection, a father, son, and daughter go out searching for mothers. In these examples, both Sadie and Mother are trapped in situations beyond their control, and while their resulting freedoms (I’m not spoiling, I promise!) differ wildly, there is deep commentary in these stories and in several others on the expectations society places on women—another thread that runs through the collection.

I am so grateful to ECW Press for sending me an ARC of this collection to review. It is beyond stunning, and I hope my words here have done it justice. Please go and read it and once you have, please come and talk to me about it! I desperately need to talk to someone about it.

The Girl Who Cried Diamonds is out October 3, 2023. PRE-ORDER NOW!

Just let me eat my lunch.

My library is still operating on a hybrid basis. This means that while the public services department (of which I am a part) shows up every day to open and operate the library, the other departments (administration, technical services, etc.) work on a rotating basis with some staff coming in two to three days per week, some staff opting to work from home every day, with the exception of special events, etc. It’s a rich tapestry and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of who is working from where on which days. But we get by.

To be honest, it’s a lot for the five people—four, right now with someone off on a medical leave—to manage. Hybrid work is great if you can do it, work from home is even better if you can do it; but for people whose job is to staff the information and research help desk physically…well until holograms are a real thing, we’re kind of stuck.

I miss the days when we had a full contingent in the library. I miss the conversations that happen by accident or by coincidence when everyone is in the same place. I miss learning about what people are up to, what their kids are doing, how their ageing parents are faring in this new world. I miss a lot about working with a large group of people. What I don’t miss is the toxic lunchroom experience.

With only four of us working on a regular basis, we don’t get a lot of lunch company. And I like that. I like being able to head to the lunchroom with my food and my book or my journal and spend an hour either alone or in quiet companionship, should there be another staff member in there with me. Sometimes we will chat about the usual things people chat about in the workplace lunchroom, but more often than not we are both seeking time away from talking, so it’s quiet.

This week many of the staff who work from exclusively from home are in the library for meetings and the dynamic shift is palpable. The library is a bit buzzier, people are catching up, there has been lots of chitchat in the hallways and in a lot of ways it feels like “the old days” which is kind of nice, but which also comes with a price.

The quiet lunches with one or two of us are gone for now and involve more people breezing into the lunchroom and loudly deciding whether or not the snacks provided for the meetings are “worth the calories” and equally loudly asking why did someone bring in chocolate because “don’t they know we’re all watching our waistlines so we can fit into our bikinis?!?” I could go on. But I won’t.

And look, I know this kind of behaviour is a byproduct of diet culture; we’re all expected to shake our heads at cake and cookies or at least pretend like we’re not going to eat them so we can feel better about…something… And I further know people like to go on about what they perceive as “unhealthy” foods or joke about “oh no, the chocolate, what will I ever do?” but frankly it’s exhausting. And uninteresting. And in some instances, dangerous.

I’ve spoken before about my relationship with food and how messed up it was and how it sometimes still is. I’m on this journey and will be for the rest of my life and I’m fairly open about it. But not everyone is, and making these kinds of comments even jokingly in the vicinity of someone who may be struggling with disordered eating is just a really shitty thing to do. That adage that everyone is fighting a battle you can’t see so be kind? Definitely extends to negative food talk.

When these comments were made I was the only other person in the lunchroom. It took a lot of resolve not to internalize the words as being directed to me and me alone. It took a lot of energy to remind myself that those comments are more about the person vocalizing them than they are about me, and that in reality they are not about me at all. This person, I told myself, has a challenging relationship with food and in this scenario they are projecting their issues. This has nothing to do with you, I told myself. It’s good self-talk and I’m glad I have those tools in my arsenal. But when you’re the solitary chubby person in the room and you are trying to move past disordered eating and body image and someone is ranting about bikinis and the importance of not eating chocolate and ruminating on the caloric value of foods, it’s hard not to feel like you’re being attacked, because in the past so many similar remarks were passive-aggressive attacks; “joking” comments lobbed at me and others like me in the room.

That’s a lot of energy to expend and baggage to unpack while I am just trying to eat my goddamned lunch in the one hour I have to myself in the workday.

And so I said, quietly, that perhaps we should thank the person who brought in the chocolate because they obviously did so because they wanted us to have a treat. That perhaps we could simply enjoy the chocolate should we want to? And if we don’t that’s ok too.

My words did nothing to quell the rant and again, that’s not my issue. But it did cause me to pack up my things and go back to my desk and remind myself that this week might be a good week to leave the library at lunchtime. To go for a walk or at least find a quiet corner someplace to enjoy my food and my book in peace.

I’ll miss a lot of the full-house library vibes when the week is over, but I will also be grateful to be able to go back to a lunchroom that feels like neutral territory.

Juncos, not to be confused with JNCOs.

If you are a bird person, it’s hard to have a favourite bird, but if I was pressed, I would have to say that Dark-Eyed Juncos are among my favourites. See what I did there though? I didn’t commit to having a favourite, but I acknowledged that Juncos are one of my favourites. See? Hard.

Juncos arrive in winter which is maybe why I like them. Just at the moment a lot of the other birds are saying peace out for the season, these little ones show up, brash and bold. If you’ve not met a Dark-Eyed Junco, allow me to introduce you. They are small, chubby little birds, around the same size as a House Sparrow, those hardworking ubiquitous urban birds. But it’s hard to measure a Junco against a sparrow because the House Sparrow is sleeker so somewhat “taller” you could say. Juncos are squat and round (which is possibly another reason why I like them, relate to them.) Their back, head, and wings are a dark grey, and they possess a buff belly. Their beak is a shocking kind of yellow-orange that stands out in the winter trees and bushes. The bird books say they are a grey colour, but to me they seem to be a kind of dark, navy blue. And their under feathers are white, so when you catch them in flight they resemble an adorable tiny striped awning. I suspect they have a song, because all birds have songs, but I don’t know that I have ever heard it. As winter birds, it makes sense that they are quiet. They hang out in the bare branches and hop along the ground for seeds. They don’t seem to be feeder birds as I have never seen them land on our feeders, but they love to scoop up what the other birds kick out and down to them. Resourceful, then, too.

All winter we have had one or two on a regular basis, but this week we have had four under our feeders which has been delightful. I don’t know when they leave us, I don’t know how far they migrate or where they go. I could look it up, I know. Like many women in their 50s, I have a bird app, because of course I do! But I like their mysterious ways. I like knowing that any sighting might be the last at this time of year. I like the expectation in November as to when the first Juncos will arrive. Will it be with the first snows? Or will they come earlier when the temperatures drop into the single digits?

Spring is all about renewal and new birds arriving back in the north. American Robins, of course, the most famous of the Spring birds, the harbinger of the season itself. And, I saw a map the other day that showed hummingbird migration patterns and they are also on their way back here now. Soon too, the Baltimore Orioles will be feasting on the oranges that we leave out for them, and the Cedar Waxwings will be creeping around the thick evergreens; the Northern Cardinals will be nesting in our overly tall cedar and waking us at 4am with their insistent calls like car alarms, smoke detectors.

One day soon the juncos will depart for a time and my mind and our feeders will be occupied with the birds of summer: American Goldfinches and Red-Winged Blackbirds; Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds and Northern Flickers. But then, in frosty November, the intrepid juncos will grace our part of the world again, and one wonderful day, without notice or fanfare I will see them hopping under the feeders, and perched on the cold bare branches of the rosebushes and the chestnut, their dark blue heads gratefully bobbing at me (I imagine) in their search for winter sustenance. And they will be most welcome.

In Spite Of

Today is March 14 and it is Pi Day, if you are into that. I am not, really. I am Team Cake all the way, there are few pies I truly love and none that I crave or insist upon. My husband is Team Pie, so it’s true what they say, that opposites attract, if you believe that the opposite of cake is pie, which it probably isn’t. In spite of this obvious difference in our psyches, on Friday we will have known each other exactly 30 years. We should probably celebrate with cake and with pie, to be fair.

Today it is also -2 degrees Celsius in Hamilton, with the windchill making it feel like -7 degrees Celsius. In spite of this, I am inside and the sun in beaming through my living room windows making it feel much warmer than it is. It’s lovely, honestly.

We moved the clocks ahead an hour on the weekend, so it’s incredibly dark now when I get up at 6am but in spite of this, I have been enjoying the quiet the dark provides in the early mornings. I have been enjoying sipping my tea with only the streetlights shining softly in the windows. I like the early mornings, in spite of myself. I never thought I’d be a morning person but here I am. To be fair I am a morning person who requires silence and a cup of strong tea and approximately one hour in which to be quiet before I can begin my day, so perhaps I am still a night owl whose hand has been forced by circumstances. And capitalism.

In spite of the fact that spring arrives in a week, it feels nothing like spring. At least ten centimetres of snow blanket the lawns and gardens, and massive piles of grey-black icy snow grace the street corners. It’s been a strange winter in southern Ontario but in spite of this, I walked the dog this morning through the quiet, dark streets and enjoyed the crisp cold air and the feeling that we two were the only ones up and about at 7am. Not true, of course, there were other people and their dogs, there were buses rolling by, several runners, etc. But until the light of the sun broke through, it felt at least a little bit like we had the place (the neighbourhood) to ourselves.

A headline told me Ontario has experienced the greyest winter in more than seven decades. In spite of that—or perhaps because of it—I’ve been savouring the sunny days, documenting the blue skies, and thrilling to the sounds of robins in the air. It feels so early for robins, but in spite of the cold and the snow, they are back in my part of the world. I have yet to see one, but my ears are attuned to their song, so I know.

Great Lakes and blue skies exist, persist. In spite of everything.

I have been off work the past two days—well today is the second day—because I’ve not been feeling well, and while I probably could have gone in today, I’m glad I didn’t. I am learning, finally, at the ripe old age of 56, to allow myself the opportunity to slow down when I need to. To take it easy or if not completely easy, at least easiER than I might have done last year or the year before or twenty years before. Yesterday was a day for sitting and drinking tea, for napping, and for staring into the middle distance and then napping again. In other words, it was a day to take care of my body. Today I am writing, I am reading, I am blogging, I am making food. Today, then, is a day to take care of my mind. I am still taking care of my body, I am listening to its signals, listening to what it needs, how it wants to be. My track record for this kind of thing has not been great, but I am learning. In spite of everything.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Love.

I was thinking recently of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. I was thinking of the cookbook, specifically, because it’s cooking season again in my world, and this is the time of year I pull out my favourite cookbooks and turn to the recipes that comfort; the recipes that nurture as well as nourish.

I do cook in the spring and summer months, but that kind of cooking is different. I can’t explain it fully, but spring and summer cooking, to me, is “Just-in-time” cooking. It’s vegetables from the farmer’s market made purchased that morning and turned into big colourful salads or grilled to perfection on a BBQ, occasionally with hamburgers, hotdogs, sausages or fish. It’s rarely, for our family, a season of leftovers. Autumn and winter cooking, by contrast, is “Just-in-case” cooking.

Both these terms are business terms which is very odd coming from me, an extremely non-business person, but they seem to work well to explain what I mean here. The Just-in-time strategy refers to inventory or stock that is kept low and replenished on an as-needed basis. This, to me, is summertime food. The Just-in-case strategy refers to maintaining a large supply of inventory so as not to run out. This then, in my scenario, is fall- and wintertime food.

This is the season to cook big batches of your favourite things and store them in the freezer. It’s the season for building multiple lasagnas and using all the elements on the stove to make double- and triple-recipe curries. It’s frozen meat and veggies that can be thawed slowly in the fridge during the week for a binge of stew-making on the weekends. And it’s my favourite time of year.

Samin Nosrat, in her excellent book mentioned above, has some of these kinds of recipes, and when I pulled out the book, I reminisced about watching her wonderful TV show of the same name, and reminded myself that I need to watch it again. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a marvel. Nosrat travels the world to highlight the specific elements (the salt, fat, acid and heat) needed for cooking and creating wonderful food. It’s highly educational and is also a beautiful testament to the power food has to bring people together in community. There are people who will tell you that food isn’t love, but they are wrong. Food is definitely love. Cooking and/or sharing a meal with your people is to me one of the highest forms of love. My dad, who died nineteen years ago this month, instilled this into me, but what solidified it completely is that the last time I saw my dad before he went into hospital, he was doing just that.

John and the kids and I were at the family cottage the weekend of the massive August 2003 blackout. Our power, oddly, was restored before Hamilton’s and so I called my parents and suggested they come to the lake with us. They showed up with a whole bunch of pickerel that my dad bought the day of the blackout that needed to be cooked before it spoiled, so he invited the neighbours to a big fish fry. He was in his element. Battering fish and dropping it into the oil, chatting and laughing with the boys and the neighbours and just having the best time. I am so glad he had that. I’m so grateful we all had that.

October is a beautiful month. It’s also the gateway to the dark months and I know there are those who miss and crave and yearn for the light and the warmth of summer and I get it! I do love a good summer backyard BBQ with friends and family, but my absolute favourite shared meals are inside. I can’t resist a bright kitchen with the oven on and all four elements bubbling away, creating steam and fogging up the windows. I adore seeing a group of friends gathered around a big table in a warmly-lit dining room. Flushed faces sipping wine, laughing and chatting, and helping themselves to seconds while the cold wind blows the leaves around outside.

Every episode of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is beautiful and the ending made me cry because Nosrat’s whole thing is about sharing food with the people you love, learning from each other, and making memories around the table. And every time I do that, every time I host my friends or make a meal for John and Charles and Max I think of my dad and how he created something so special without even realizing it. He thought he was just making dinner for the people he loved the most. But he was doing so much more.

My Year of Sitting Quietly

When I sit to do my daily meditation, I try not to look at my meditation streak. Like a lot of apps, Headspace, the meditation app I use, calculates a variety of different things, captures a variety of metrics. Minutes meditated is a big one, as is number of days meditated.

I tend to be a somewhat competitive person, and so sometimes these metrics do more harm than good for me. I want to have the longest streak! I want the most minutes meditated! I don’t know why I’m like this (ok fine, I do, I’m a Capricorn) but it’s sometimes off-putting to me. It felt weird to be gamifying meditation. Apps can be sneaky that way, I’ve learned. Like when I found out I had high blood pressure and my doctor suggested I find a way to track the sodium content in my food and so I downloaded My Fitness Pal, the only app that seemed to be any good at the time I was doing this. Sodium tracking was part of the premium plan at the time (not sure if it still is) so I paid a monthly fee to access that, but what I learned was that there was NO WAY to turn off the calorie counts. This really fucked with my head and sent me back into disordered eating for a time because LOOK HOW MANY CALORIES I CAN RESTRICT JUST BECAUSE! I’ve since deleted it and now I just wing it with sodium which might not be the best, but it’s not worth backtracking on the progress I’ve made with regards to eating. Also: if anyone knows anyone at the Heart & Stroke Foundation, there are probably lots of people who would benefit from an official H&S sodium/cholesterol tracking app! Spread the word!

Anyway, so Headspace. I’m almost positive when I started using the app ages ago there was no tracker feature, but over the years they have added a phenomenal amount of content, and one day I finished my mediation and a little ticker flipped over and read “Current Run Streak: 1.” Now the type A part of me thought “Oh, it’s on, suckers! I am going to create a streak that is so long!” and then I thought, wait, what are you doing?

Meditation isn’t a competitive sport. Does it matter if you miss a day or a few days because you’re sick? Or your phone died? Or, or, or… I mean no, it doesn’t. But if you’re like me, the type of kid who strove for perfect attendance and read the most summer reading club books, it’s a hard habit to break.

And I would do a month’s worth of meditation and it would be a nice round number like 30 and then I’d miss a day and when the little ticker went back to 1, I would feel like I’d let it down. I need to be better at this, I would think to myself, trying to organize my day around meditation which is fine in and of itself, but not the best when it came to this weird obsession.

But after a few months of starting over and watching the ticker go up and up, something shifted in me. I no longer cared. 195 days, 62 days, 12 days, whatever. I was showing up and meditating as often as I could, sometimes two or three times in a day, and that felt good. I started closing the app before I could see the total number of minutes meditated, the number of days in a row I had sat in silence. I started focusing only on allowing myself to breathe and giving myself what I needed in that moment. I began carving out time in my morning to practice instead of saying “oh god, must meditate so I don’t lose my streak!” I started incorporating a night time routine of winding down meditation as well, and I began to look forward to heading up to bed. Ok fine, I always look forward to heading up to bed, I love sleeping and I am SO good at it. But this routine with a half hour or so of reading followed by a wind down or a sleeping meditation became such a part of my day, and an important part of my routine.

Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking / into the future…

And yesterday when I finished my morning meditation, I did see the little number tick over and the screen read “Run streak: 365 days.

A year. One entire year of daily meditations. It seemed almost impossible that I’d made it. I don’t remember saying on August 11, 2021, “Right, this is the time you don’t give up, this is the time you make it to a full year!” Because I didn’t say that. At all.

And I’m thrilled! A year of doing anything that is beneficial to your mind and/or body is a very good thing! But I also recognize that had I stopped for whatever reason at 360 days or 279 days, that also would have been ok too.

One of the founders of Headspace had this to say to a user on Twitter last year:

“Whether your run streak is 4 days, or almost 4 years, today is a good day to congratulate yourself…and to keep that same streak going.“

And I loved that. That is truly the crux of it. Showing up daily to meditate or walk or run or swim or whatever it is you do for your mental health is always a good thing, whether you’ve been at it for years or you’re just getting started. Whether you’re a creature of habit or you roll with the punches and the whims of the weather.

We did it, Joe.

Will I keep the streak going and this time next year be celebrating two full years of daily meditation? Possibly! But there’s also a good chance there will be a morning when I will forget and then I’ll fall asleep before I’m able to do the nighttime routine and when I wake up the little ticker will have reset itself to 1. And I’ll probably grieve the loss of that streak, whatever it was (the Capricorn vibes are very strong, after all) but I’ll be ok. Because 1 is a start. And 1 is always better than nothing.