I still have last year's planner open on my desk, and atop it, this year's. It seems only fitting to look over 2024 and make concluding remarks before shelving the planner. Did you know that Leuchtturm means lighthouse? When I look at it, this time last year, we were in Jamaica. It was pretty neat. We came home, and it was like what my daughter said, when we unlocked our door last week after a New Year's Eve party with friends, "it always feels weird". Winter felt weird. Dryness too.
When I look back over the collected weekly newsletters I sent out to our family members and friends, they seem a little mundane. I report, too frequently, the visits we make to the dentist, the orthodontist... But throughout, there are highlights. I discovered this recipe for Vegan Amaretti Cookies and now my sister benefits from it too. And so long as the recipe involves aquafaba (the water from canned chickpeas, or chickpeas cooked at home) I might also note that William, age 10, ate a chickpea for the first time in his life, thanks to Smitten Kitchen's Lemon Chicken with Potatoes and Chickpeas. And so long as we're on the subject of culinary wins, Sohla El-Waylly's detailed instructions for home-made doughnuts were an effort that paid off extraordinarily well. None of us have ever eaten such good doughnuts.
2024 will forever be associated with what could have been a terrible accident. Christian, cutting a tree branch, fell from 17 feet and had only scratches and a minor pelvic fracture to heal. Still, when I think back to this event, it forms a divot shape in the calendar year, the way the linear lines of a grid curve around the mass of an object in the theory of relativity. May 11th had the sound of yells, neighbours running over, the decision to call an ambulance and hours at the hospital while the kids stayed with friends. Subsequently it had all the tasks a healing man in crutches couldn't do: the bed-making, the shopping, the dog-walking. It had the heart-touching kindness of friends.
Eventually, gradually, he healed of course, marking the signs of betterment one by one; shopping, walking the dog in July, cliff-jumping in August, running in November.
The city decided to cut the tree down and came on a drizzly day in October in the form of a team of people: the chainsaw man, the tractor driver, the canopy cutter, the twig raker, the chainsaw-man's driver, the tractor-hauler truck driver, the loader driver, and a few backup crew.
This year had a bubble tea quest, resolving, ten or twelve bubble-tea places in, with the favourite being KHAB Tapioca, our newest go-to for a treat.
I've noticed that when something unusual happens to disrupt my routine, I take an excessive amount of pictures... My uncle's hospitalization provoked a mini photo-essay. When he took a trip to Quebec, I filled Christian's absence with so many things to distract myself and the kids: Sushi for the first time, a dinner party with friends, an evening dog walk to record river-height, a garden-center shopping trip and more photos of everything.
We've had visitors, and Mme Palud turned 87 in September. We threw her a little party at home, decorating the table with low bouquets of carnations.
She's a big part of our life... On Thursday afternoons I take her and a friend to the mall usually. On Sundays, she's our supper guest. I find malls mostly depressing, but I try to record her moving through them. It's made me curious about the history of retail which is its own little side-project.
So there, those are a few notes from a year as a family. It's hard to write more without betraying the kids' privacy, even though it feels like we move through life like a little pod. I hope to keep writing in the new year, to keep learning and growing. "Semper floreat" as the motto reads for the U of M's Faculty of Arts. I hope to keep hailing the cyclical milestones, the seasonal things we do, like planting flowers or setting up the pool (“the other half of my life” as Cedric declared in July) with tender gratitude, and to embrace the little adventures our quests for novelty bring.
Enjoying: A post on Sasha Chapin’s substack about enjoyment, specifically the qualities that can lead to its increasing like, “Let the intensity in” and his comment “curiosity instantly inverts resistance”. Or how his tips “Getting lost in a detail” and “Build a context” harmonize with qualities I feel are part of my academic studies in history. In his tip “Find one flaw” he writes: “I find that if I love something deeply, I end up loving it all the more if I locate its weak points. […] If conducted covertly, this particular mental habit allows you to love people more deeply and realistically, by noticing how the annoying thing about them and the great thing are fundamentally intertwined.”
Also: Hetty Lui McKinnon’s comments on the podcast The Dinner Plan, in which she says: “[…] cooking dinner is not hard. It’s the thinking of what you’re going to make.” And: “[…] cooking dinner, I think is the most, one of the most empowering daily acts that we can do as humans. If you were in a position of privilege where you can actually cook dinner for yourself, for your family, for your friends, for your community, it’s such a privilege and I don’t see why it should be demonized in the way that it actually often is […].”