Thrifted Treasures, 7 Mar 2025

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Thrifted treasures: dresses, a book, fish napkin rings, and vintage jewelry.

Twice a week, after visiting my mother-in-law at the long term care facility where she now resides, we stop in at a nearby north Toronto thrift store. While my husband, being a man, checks out the electronics and science fiction, I browse … everything else.

I like thrifting: it’s a lot like foraging or beach-combing, and an hour spent browsing idly in a thrift store is an hour not spent worrying about the state of the world. After having death-cleaned both our parents’ homes, and having become increasingly mindful of our own propensity to accumulate clutter, we try to be careful about what we bring home. Our first stop at the thrift store is usually the donation bin, where we drop off things we no longer need. And a question we ask of any object before putting it in the cart is: “Does this add to our life?”

A good example is this Wood & Sons ‘Holly Cottage’ teapot, which made it into the cart about a month ago. It most definitely adds to our life even though it cost about $10 and I have not yet used it for tea. Wood & Sons 'Holly Cottage' teapot.

Is it not delightful?

Today’s treasures included two dresses, a set of brightly painted wooden fish napkin holders, two unusual pendants, and a copy of horticultural historian Judyth A. McLeod’s In a Unicorn’s Garden: Recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens (Murdoch, 2009).

I love these vintage (?) jade-chip pendants so much.

Vintage brass pendants (an owl and a fish).

I don’t even use napkin rings, but do, of course, have fish-themed dinnerware and will definitely deploy these as table decor.

Brightly painted wooden fish-shaped napkin rings.

I have donated many of my practical gardening books to the little library down the street, but love scholarly works on horticulture. This book, whose title draws on the mythos of unicorns in medieval art and fable, is copiously illustrated and looks like a cracker. It definitely adds to our life.

Image of a book: Judyth A. McLeod's In a Unicorn's Garden: Recreating the mystery and magic of medieval gardens (Murdoch, 2009).

As anyone can see, today’s thrifted finds unquestionably add to our life. If one ascribes, as I try to, to the advice often attributed to William Morris—to “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”—these items exemplify the latter.

Not pictured, but useful: some electronic doo-dad my husband found among the old computer monitors and disused printers.

P.S. The green velvet chair in the first picture is also a thrift find (for $15!), from late last year.

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March Light

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At the beginning of March—sometimes earlier; sometimes a little later–there is a change in the light. After months of darkness, light returns to the hemisphere. At first it is muted, and then pale, and then it leaves us blinking at its unaccustomed strength.

Let us be strong in this light.

 

 

 

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Shelter

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Image shows a small burrow entrance through snow into a dead tree stumpManitoba maples (Acer negundo) are native to northwestern Ontario and the prairie provinces, but have controversial status in southern Ontario, where they can spread aggressively. Manitoba maples grow quickly, colonizing disturbed areas such as vacant lots and along urban alleyways. Due in part to rapid growth, Manitoba maples tend to have brittle branches, leading to their reputation as ‘junk trees.’

But Manitoba maples also provide useful ecosystem services. They reduce erosion, hold soil, and grow where many other trees struggle to take root—especially important in disturbed areas. Their seeds feed squirrels and (among other birds) attract the evening grosbeak, a member of the finch family with distinctive yellow plumage. Manitoba maples also host boxelder beetles and rosy maple moth.

I am ambivalent about Manitoba maples. For years we had several growing on the margins of our city property. One, out front, we maintained as a privacy hedge until, tired of the need to prune it twice every summer (Manitoba maple branches grow as much as 2 metres each year, with pliable green shoots turning woody and dense by the following growing season), I cut it down. Fortunately an eastern redbud had volunteered beneath it— a slow-growing native species which produces a dreamlike halo of violet blooms early in the spring.

In the back, between our and our neighbours’ garages, a Manitoba maple once quickly grew tall and thick enough to crack the pavement in the walkway and damage the eavestroughs on both structures. With regret we took that tree down—except for an eight foot stump my husband suggested we leave in place to serve as a post supporting our back gate.

Over the past decade that stump, now weathered to bare wood, has housed a surprising variety of creatures. For several years a colony of carpenter ants dwelt within its chambers, hollowing out the wood until the stump resonated like a drum when rapped. One year, after the ants had moved on, it housed a small colony of native bumblebees. The stump has also housed a variety of shelf fungus, including turkey tail and Dryad’s saddle, and from time to time raspberry canes have sprouted from openings in its trunk.

Each year the stump wobbles a bit more on its axis, as what remains of its roots decay and gravity calls it back to earth. Last summer my husband stabilized the top with wood and wire, hoping to buy another two or three years out of our organic gate post. Our plan, when the trunk finally falls, is to take it to the circle park just down the street, where I coordinate a community pollinator garden, to enrich the soil and provide valuable habitat as it returns to earth.

Over the last few days Toronto has received a major dumping of snow, with about 50 cm accumulated over a three-day period. Between snowfalls we’ve managed to keep the sidewalks and walkways clear, albeit with snow mounded high on either side. While clearing snow near the back gate some of it, inevitably, ended up piled against our Manitoba maple stump.

This morning, on the way out back to shovel out the car, I noticed several small openings in the snow right against the trunk. Burrow holes, for a mouse, or a chipmunk, or possibly even a rat. Alongside them was a small cascade of wood shavings, sawdust from burrowing, Somebody, it seems, is overwintering in the long-dead stump of our Manitoba maple, taking shelter against the storm.

The next time I go out, I will leave it a small offering.

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What May be Mended

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During the lull between the years, when the nights were at their longest, I took stock of things and decided that, this year, I will focus on what may be mended.

In the world at large there is a storm: it is now all around us. The famous lines from Yeats have ever more relevance, only, this, time, it is impossible to say whether it is the best or worst who lack all conviction, are filled with passionate intensity, or are both at once. These are now the most visible symptoms of a great social ill threatening—determined, it seems increasingly clear—to destroy everything in its wake.

Margaret Atwood, whose essays appearing at In the Writing Burrow are among the most informed and cogent cultural analysis I have read in years, has issued a timely warning of what await us, unless we “call the bluff” that our societies are broken and can only be fixed by revolutions, terrorism, invasions or dictators. Atwood’s most immediate focus is on the upcoming US election, but her analysis applies anywhere democracy, due process and the peaceful transition of power are under threat.

In her commentary, Atwood points out that it is the aim of extremists on both the ultra-left and radical right to sow division, sabotage social accords, spread misinformation, undermine public institutions and elections and create chaos in what she calls “the temperate zone”—in political language this is often referred to as the centre or middle, but includes centre-left social democrats as well as small-c conservatives—in order to create opportunities to seize power.

In pursuit of these aims, extremists harness the dissatisfaction of ideological fellow-travelers, the genuinely aggrieved, and those who cynically anticipate, following the hoped-for revolution, uprising or seizure of power, to be appointed to positions of authority themselves. Their rhetoric becomes increasingly radical and ever more authoritarian. Anyone who questions the ideological imperative is an enemy. The divisions deepen. Rakoth Maugrim—the Unraveler, the Destroyer, the self-appointed bearer of Vengeance—steps in and seizes the world in his teeth.

Unless ordinary citizens refuse it.

I refuse it. And so can you.

It is not even all that difficult to do. One good way to begin is by muting the ideologues who—most often via social media but also, increasingly, in progressive as well as conservative faith communities, political organizations and, depressingly, educational environments—spread the poison of the movements they have attached themselves to. Watch for their absolutism, and for their calls for obedience to cult-like kinds of fundamentalism. And mute them; banish their invented or exaggerated claims, their one-sided narratives, the propaganda they reshare, their exhortations to burn everything down. Halt their takeovers of your communities, and their silencing of anything that sounds even remotely like dissent. Do this even to the ideologues on your own ‘side.’ Do it even to yourself, because chances are good you too have contributed to the ideological dumbing down of our society.

When you do this it’s actually amazing how quickly the airwaves quiet. All at once there is room to breathe, time for perspective, an opportunity to weigh your own thoughts alongside the experiences and perspectives of others, and a chance to notice all the other people who, likely a lot like you, both build and benefit from the social institutions extremists want to use you to destroy.

It’s okay to be critical. Our society is imperfect. There is much that may be improved. But anyone who says it must all be burned down and remade in their name or in the name of their ideology is not interested in improvement.

During the lull between the years, sickened by the news and nauseated at the rhetorical spewage on social media and in one of the communities I belong to, I set aside my laptop. Instead I brought down my sewing box, set it up beside the old wooden table in our kitchen, and, in peaceful silence on a dark winter night, the kitchen warm, the dinner dishes washed and drying behind me, set to work mending what could be mended.

Mending is about much more than sewing up seams, and it would be foolish to pretend that mending a beloved winter coat I’ve had for 25 years has much to do with repairing the world.

But I am a person who believes that the things we do as individuals have resonance far beyond ourselves, and that it is not only big acts but small ones that make the world. Small acts are actually practice for larger ones, in the sense that the way we do small things usually parallels the way we do larger things.

Not all things may be mended. Some things are too broken to fix. But a great deal may be repaired, and much that may be mended exists in the spaces between us—in our personal relationships, in the civility we owe to our communities, and in our duty of care to the natural environment. And if we are able to be mindful of these nearby things, we might also appreciate the virtues of stable democracies and their social contracts, and the separation of church and state, and the close connections between innovation and prosperity, and the benefits of charity, and civil liberties, and so on.

Yes but!, I can sense you saying. Yes but!—late capitalism is evil, communists are everywhere, carbon taxes are destroying the economy, the planet is burning, a drag queen is reading stories at the library, a stranger misgendered me, the deep state is watching us, big pharma vaccinated my dog, pop singer psy-ops, settler colonialism, the lamestream media, chatbots, 15-minute cities, megachurches, stolen elections, Superbowl shootings, the unborn, the undead.

Hush.

In an excellent recent essay on the excess of noise—literal and figurative—in contemporary culture, and on the urgent need for quiet, cultural commentator Michael Harris observed that

[S]ilence leaves room for the development of a rich interior life, for daydreaming and the formation of an identity independent of the hive mind. Our personalities mature in the empty spaces that allow them to self-reflect; we discover what we really think or really feel when inputs hush and we can sit a while with what we’ve already received. In this way, amid doses of quiet and stillness, the self coheres.

If the loudest mantra of the moment is “burn it all down,” then the mantra of those of us interested in mending should be “turn it all down,” and “tone it all down.”

Turn down the ideologues, especially on the social media platforms whose algorithms promote extremism via ‘engagement’ and ‘reach.’ Tone down your own propensity to be persuaded by one-sided rhetoric and oversimplified narratives. Stop making everything about politics (and maybe consider: When did choosing what to read, watch, attend and value become principally a performative expression of political identity? And what has doing so cost us in terms of perspective?).

Put down your phone. Go for a walk. Pet a cat. Talk to a dog. Smile at a baby. Pick up some litter. Say hello to a stranger on the street. Get up early. Look at the sunrise (no: really look at it). Stay up late, and listen (even for just a few moments) to the wind roaring in the trees, or to the silence, or to cars on the highway, or to those tiny rustles in the grass. Grow something (in a pot, on your balcony, in your yard, or in a nearby park). Pick a dandelion. Thank a bee. Go to a bookstore or a library. Read a poem. Remember, even if only for a few moments, how fortunate you are—how fortunate we all are—to have been born in this corner of the expanding universe.

Mend something.

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