alharris

Not Quite Still Life

Working with words means one spends quite a lot of time turning them over and moving them around, fitting and refitting them together like stones in a wall. Thinking is a cerebral, iterative process that lends itself, oddly enough, to physical motion. Years ago in grad school, I used to write for an hour early in the morning before showering, and tease out ideas while shampooing my hair. While biking downtown to teach, I map out lectures between traffic lights, sometimes becoming so preoccupied that I’ll forget to turn down Yonge toward campus. I’ve done a lot of writing on trains, and out in the woods, and down along the lake. If I am not moving while writing, ideally there will be other things in motion: a river eddying around rocks, trees twisting in a wind, snow falling fast and slantwise.

A pandemic is a study in stasis, and after a year spent working from home there have had to be accommodations. After months spent livestreaming lectures from my office I’ve abandoned that space, opening up my laptop in the living room, or in the sitting room on the third floor, or even at an old secretary desk in the spare bedroom. In each room I’ll work for a while before getting up to check the fridge, or look out a window, or check the mail. A neighbour comes out of her house. The recycling bins need bringing back in. Hoisted by cherry pickers, city crews are trimming street trees. A cat wants out. A cat wants in.

In the house, winter light illuminates the undersides of things, and so I get up to look. This wooden shelf, hung in a corner by the bay window, glows between snow squalls in the pewter afternoon light. There is a story to every piece here. The shelf itself I found discarded at curbside around the corner five or six years ago. It is handmade, probably a project piece made from instructions in a DIY magazine published not long after the War. The sage-coloured candlesticks, jam pot, carved wooden bird and vases are from my mother.

I bought the two leather-bound books on the middle shelf for a dollar each at an Eastern Ontario yard sale many years ago: one (published in 1829), is a life of Alexander the Great; the other (dated a decade later) a life of Peter the Great (the volume on Alexander the Great has a folio-sized fold-out map of the Middle East and Central Asia). I found the brass owl and squirrel figurine on the shelf at Value Village. The two books lying on their sides are fascinating. The first, John Ruskin‘s Ethics of the Dust: Ten lectures to Little Housewives on the Elements of Crystallization, is a Socratic-voiced manual of geology, minerology … and metaphysics. Ruskin was a leading Victorian thinker who was influenced by Darwin and very much interested in education (including the education of women) and independent thought. The other volume, The Blind Farmer and his Children, is a nineteenth century ‘improving’ novel originally published in 1817 (my copy “awarded to William Meikle as a prize for regular attendance,” by teacher Agnes Morrison on 27 June 1872). Ethics of the Dust was a gift from my mother; I found The Blind Farmer and His Children among her books after she died. The green china deer came from the Leslieville Flea; the double-decker bus from an eastern Ontario flea market.

On the bottom shelf are my Mother West Wind books from childhood, some little books I like to look at (The Observer’s Book of Furniture, The Observer’s Book of Architecture, two ‘Mr. Cuthbert’s’ gardening guides from the early 1950s, and A Flower Fairy Alphabet.), and a small green pitcher I spotted on the shelf a year ago at Value Village and left there, regretting the decision as soon as we left the store. A week later it was still there, and came home with me.

I look upon these treasures, illuminated in the pewter light. The snow squall ends, the light shifts. It’s time to return to work.

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Still City; Resolve

The first day of the year, and light returns to the hemisphere. Early this morning I left the house, and moved through the nearly silent city on my way to the gym. Below the balustrades pigeons flapped like bellows, and sparks jolted down from the streetcar wire and guttered in the intersection, and smoke rose from grates and chimneys, and the city glowed like a banked fire against the pink and pewter dawn.

Years ago I used to make new year’s resolutions: in my twenties they focused on weight loss and grad school; by my thirties they revolved around research projects and, one memorable year, getting and staying pregnant (and, you know, giving birth). And then, since my forties began, I have been too busy for boot-strapping, and the new year is mainly a somnolent moment between teaching terms and publishing commitments. But this year I have taken a sabbatical, and have the sort of time for personal projects I have not enjoyed for years.

Like many academics, for me the ‘real’ beginning of the year is in September when the teaching term starts, and this was when my sabbatical began, so by chronological measure I have gotten a bit of a head start on certain things. But a new year is a new year, and so I will post herewith a haphazard inventory of my 2020 resolutions.

Smoke on the Water

Early last August, after years of talking about doing so, we finally bought kayaks, and put them to very good use through the end of the season, paddling the navigable stretches of the Humber River and on Lake Ontario as far west as Samuel Smith Park.

In 2020 we plan to take the kayaks with us camping, and have a few lakes in mind we’d like to explore. We also hope to spend much more time on the water at Toronto, perhaps paddling to Hanlan’s Point and revisiting some favoured beaches and inlets along the shores west of the city.

Shaking My Jelly I

Last summer was the second year of what I anticipate (and hope) will be a long apprenticeship as a maker of amateur preserves. Last fall I entered a batch of lemon verbena jelly in the preserves competition run annually by the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, and it won first prize!

In 2020 I would like to make more more jams and jellies, improve my techniques, and perhaps try other preserves, like pickles. I am very interested in garden-grown and wild-picked foods (I grew the lemon verbena used in my prize winning (!!) jelly on our front balcony, and experimented with mulberry jam, and sumac, crabapple and wild apple jellies picked from street trees), and would like to expand my repertoire, perhaps to include rose hips (tried and failed last fall) and rowan berries.

Shaking My Jelly II

In November we joined a gym: the West End YMCA. I know! I never thought I’d join a gym either. But even after 45 years in Canada, winters are hard on my husband, and I have to admit they’ve lost some of their charm for me. We figured that joining a gym might stave off some of the inevitable winter erosions to health and well-being, and so far it’s working.

By good fortune, on the day we went to sign up, the Heart & Stroke Foundation had set up a table advertising their Activate program, offering two months of free membership at participating YMCA locations, a free session with a personal trainer, and wellness coaching for six months. My husband qualified because he is a cardiac survivor, and my historically low blood pressure and, ahem, weight have increased after years of unremitting overwork and periods of extreme stress, so I qualified as well.

As noted elsewhere, even five weeks of regular gym-going (we go together at least twice a week, and I almost always go three times) has been transformative. I’ve lost weight and gained strength, of course. But more pointedly: I feel good. My resolution this year is to continue going three times a week and to make further progress with a balanced program of cardio (I run! Or did until I strained my left MCL a week ago; now I use the elliptical) and strength training. I’d also like to try some of the classes, all of which look like fun with all the slogan-shouting and deafening music and uncurbed enthusiasm.

Shaking the Dust

Three years ago, when my beautiful mother was dying, we talked quite a lot about forgiveness. One of the many things we had in common was having borne the brunt of certain kinds of family dysfunction. Over the years we had made parallel accommodations to it, but mine was harder-edged. She had forgiven (or had at least tried to understand), while I had, at long last, said no.

Our discussions were an interesting inversion of the somewhat parallel conversations we had years earlier, after my father’s death. My father was a powerful, arrogant, larger-than-life person who was, at times, a terrible person to live with. But in the later years of his life he exhibited a startling, real and I think very rare awareness of the effects his disposition and choices had on the people in his life. He regretted the damage. And for me this was enough. But for my mother–who loved my father but also endured him at times–forgiveness was difficult and incomplete.

My mother was able to forgive dysfunction involving other family members because she saw these dysfunctions, in part, as consequences of my father’s disposition and behaviour, even after decades had passed.

I could not.

While my mother remained at home, I provided nearly all of her care, and after she died, I alone sorted her possessions and packed up her large, cluttered house. I kept silent about many things: much of my silence was at her request. I have maintained that silence. At some point I began to think of silence as the closest to forgiveness I am likely to get.

Until sometime last year that silence was a weight I carried. I had been carrying it for years–for years and years–but after my mother’s death certain things happened to make that silence heavier. In recent months I have taken steps to lighten that burden, and in 2020, my resolution is to set it aside entirely.

Purging

A few weeks ago, for the first time, I made shelf space for my own published work, rather than hiding it in various files or dispersing it among the books in my library. Then I cleared some shelf space for the books I love most, which have also been dispersed among various sections in my library. And then I cleared shelf space for research materials associated with current projects. And then I donated a ton of books I will not read again and do not care to retain. So cathartic! In 2020 I hope to expand this process vastly.

Projects

I have two important projects on the go, and in 2020 I am hoping to finish one of them and set the other one into meaningful motion. More soon.

People

I am considering–considering–being more social in 2020. I might–might–even go out voluntarily at night.

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Three Views of Winter

The towering canopy of the honey locust tree that shelters our front garden, above; and, below, this morning’s view from the spare bedroom on the third floor.

Lastly, the view from the window of my office, a converted sunroom at the back of our house. Often cardinals come to visit, and sometimes a hawk.

In the night it snowed. The birds huddle together and then cluster at the feeder. Soon the squirrels will emerge from the roof over my head and descend to pick up the seeds they kick down to the ground. How stoically — how gently — the cedars bear the birds, the squirrels, the the feeder, and their burden of winter.

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O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Today it is the first Sunday of Advent, and thus begins the Christian calendar. In the United Church of Canada, the Church I was Christened and Confirmed in, each Advent Sunday has a theme: on the first: Hope; the second: Peace; the third: Joy; and the fourth: Love.

It has been many years since I attended any church regularly, and I have always been more culturally Protestant than spiritually Christian, but my faith in Creation–the Creation of trees and the wind and soil and all the things that live and regenerate–persists. I remain ambivalent about the divinity of Christ, am indifferent to the Resurrection, and am not except in form a worshiper of the Holy Trinity–views that in some circles would make me a heretic–but my God, the God I speak to, and who hears my prayers, is the God embodied in the natural world, and I serve this God with steadfast conviction.

This morning the sky has the cast of twilight and the wind roars in the cedars. Sleet pellets the house, but we are warm and safe in the shelter of our Keep. The gardens have been put to bed, the compost banked for the winter. The trees we have planted this year–our major offering to the cosmos–are staked and mulched and protected. Little birds have taken shelter in the cedars, singing against the storm, and the fat squirrels nesting in the roof above my little office caper restlessly but remain under cover.

The first Sunday of Advent celebrates Hope. And today I find hope in the light that shines in the darkness, and have faith that the darkness shall not overcome it.

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Endless Summer

This morning’s forecast–one last sultry, sunny day before fall weather descends–was enough reason to drop everything, toss our kayaks on the car, and spend a day on the water.

We put in at Humber Bay Park West and paddled west about 5 km to Samuel Smith Park. The sun beamed down; the breeze was mild; the lake warm, the swells gentle. We had a picnic and watched the downtown towers glitter, 15 km away. Paragliders rose and descended in the middle distance. Dogs dragged driftwood along the beach. Endless Summer, for one more day.

We surfed the swells all the way back, the lake just beginning to roil. The haze closed in; thunderheads loomed behind us. In the parking lot crickets were abuzz with the news: a storm, oncoming. Endless summer, for one more hour.

We made it home before the rain, and made pizza for dinner, savoring our sore shoulders and October sunburns.

Endless summer, one

more

day.

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