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Our puppy’s name is Enzo. He only cried a few times in the night, on that first night, and Christian brought him out twice between our bedtime and morning, to pee outside, which he did, like a pro.
Interrupted sleep reminds me of when we had a newborn. The feeling is one of being stretched, like everything in my being becomes shallow: virtue, thought, breathing. It’s a frantic, “what’s next, what’s next, what’s next” state of mind.
On a hot day at the end of June we travelled to St. Laurent to pick up our puppy. Puppies, as it happens, are not conducive to writing. I am overwhelmed by feelings and have no distance between them and myself. If I pry a little spot, this is what rushes in: I marvel at our good luck - the breeders are an extraordinary couple with decades of experience and so many awards for their beagles that they’ve donated a portion (by the bagful, he tells me) to a center requesting award-décor.
The puppies in their cages yelp eagerly and wag their tails. Their parents are outside, relaxed and lean, the bitches in one fenced-area, the studs in another. There is our puppy’s mom, there is his aunt. There is his dad.
There is a trend online with the hashtag “adopt, don’t shop” and I understand this well-meant admonition. I feel guilty about our pure-bread, about not nobly stepping in for a rescue. Conversely, I’m very relieved to be able to rest on the fact that our puppy’s breeder is top-notch, that their kennel of beagles is an ideal one.
There are many guilty pleasures I'd rather not talk about here and watching the British thriller series Marcella is one of them. However, the conclusion of the third season, in which there is a shocking amount of deaths that might not surprise a regular viewer of the Marcella series, had one niggling detail I can’t let go of.
I might just be kibitzing here, but while disbelief is suspended most of the time, the final scenes are concluded with such haste that disbelief, hung in a balloon, is punctured by the blast of events.
I'll not summarize the events, but there's this: Rory Maguire lies dead on the floor and while Marcella is telling his stroke-muted mother about this, she opens his laptop and holds his eyeball up to the camera for an eye-scan that allows her access to his financial accounts. It’s this eyeball bit that bothers me because the eyeball, and the suspiciously long nerve attached to it, is a prop Marcella neatly pulls from her pocket, wrapped in a piece of paper towel. It's completely rigid, as if Marcella pulled it out of Rory's head and let it cure a few days on the counter, except for the inconvenience of the rapid-fire timeline. How did this eyeball held by a cord of vein or nerve, like a marshmallow on a stick, become so solid and maintain the necessary preservation for an iris scan? Liquid nitrogen? What is worse is that when Marcella leaves the house, walking past Rory, his eye sockets look perfectly undisturbed.
It's not that I would have wanted things more gruesome, it's that I would have wanted the writers to pick a side. If we are to have gruesome deaths, why not have a gruesome eyeball? If we are to have not-too-gruesome, then give me a scene where Marcella uses her phone to take a picture of his iris and an app to properly reverse it so that the iris-recognition could be fooled and the viewer along with it.
I like detail. Big plans are fine, big plots too, but platters of detail are my delight.
In an essay titled “Eclipse” Annie Dillard writes about a painting she regrets to have seen: “It was an image of the sort which you do not intend to look at, and which, alas, you never forget. Some tasteless fate presses it upon you; it becomes part of the complex interior junk you carry with you wherever you go.” It’s the “complex interior junk” I want to talk about, and for me, it’s not a painting, it’s this adolescent event that forms a memory that simply won't go away.
When I was 15 or 16 and my organ teacher asked me to be a part of her bridal party as train bearer. We weren't related, but we’d developed some kind of friendship over the course of a few years of organ lessons and I would spy the dark-haired guy who would wait for her after my lessons. They were to be married in the spring and after that wedding she was no longer to be my teacher and the teacher who replaced her, I decided in advance, would not be my friend because I was through with caring for the intricacies of student-teacher friendships and so I stayed distant and didn’t make excuses for not practicing the organ.
Being in a bridal party felt like a momentous honour and I was totally unable to put things into any perspective at the time. I thought I was her favourite student, but she'd also invited another of her students to be a train-bearer. Although I had no train-bearing experience and was a teenager with teenage clumsiness and occasionally stepped on the underskirts that poofed out her bridal dress, I was determined to be the better train bearer of the two. I also hoped I was the prettier train bearer even though my mom didn’t allow me to participate in the pre-wedding bridal activities like the visit to the hair salon or the spa for manicures. Instead, mom, with every good intention and some desire to allow me to participate, painted my nails pink and curled my hair. My hair went limp by the end of the ceremony and looked like a cat had draped its tail across my forehead no matter how much I tried primping it back into place, out of my face. It was not for nothing that my mom had given me the nickname “fluffy” at home.
The bridal party wore emerald-green dresses made out of sateen material. There were pictures taken on the university grounds and the elm trees we posed under were besieged that year with worms. One of the bridesmaids kept going on about the worms and I thought she was silly, so I made the kind of joke, I realize now, that my dad would have made. I said “Oh look! There's one on your shoulder!” But I was too naive to understand that her silliness was an actual phobia, and my desire to lighten the mood had the exact opposite effect: I made her cry. I hadn’t rushed to say it was a joke but because everyone reacted so dramatically I immediately realized my mistake. When they couldn’t find the worm, I eked out a lame, half-devastated, “It was a joke…”
It is well-understood at weddings that mothers can cry, but people in the bridal party should not be brought to tears on a day entirely immortalized in pictures, for which people are hired to apply makeup professionally. I understood then that there was no chance I would be the best train-bearer. The groom even shot me a severe look.
I think it was after the pictures that we trooped into an A&W for a snack, and my spirits revived a little at the commotion we caused. At the reception, I had no place at the bridal table, I wasn't friends with the other organ student, and in fact, I knew no one but the bride. Eventually I called my dad and said goodbye to the bride and left the room and waited for him to deliver me from the whole day.
Although I feel a great amount of shame about that day, I also have pity for that 15-year-old girl who knew so little of the world. Sometimes the shame is stronger though, and as a defense, I wonder what that bride was thinking to have asked me to be one of two train-bearers.
Today I made muffins.
I say that I've made muffins because it was a small thing I could do, on the list of things to do, while the kids did projects in the dining room. Baking supposes cheerfulness, and while it seems impossible to feel gloomy while the scent of cinnamon wafted through the house, these actions can sometimes only just barely stretch enough to simulate normalcy in what feels like pervasive worry. But people have faced worry before! Look! In December of 2006 Nora Ephron wrote: “The morning talk shows will remind me (not that I need to be reminded) that the world is currently in the midst of a total meltdown, that we have the worst president in current history, that the elation of the recent election has passed to a numbing foreboding that nothing is going to change and that innocent people will continue to die in this hateful, violent episode we've unleashed.” And although I'm not sure which election she's talking about, and suspect the violence is about war and not racism, still, I kind of hope she was being sarcastic? Because this year’s meltdown feels like the meltdown of all meltdowns. Sometimes I feel silly for reading Nora Ephron. I picked up her book from the library on the last day it was open. It was a fat book titled The Most of Nora Ephron and I thought it could be the light reading alongside Harold Brodkey. Instead, Ephron's humour feels outdated. I’m partly to blame... I don’t get all the references. I do get the recipes though! That part is still pertinent.
(I’m editing this two weeks later, and that criticism about Ephron’s humour makes me feel guilty. Especially since I read the essay she wrote titled “Revision and Life: Take it From the Top – Again” and realize how much work she put into “a way of writing that looked chatty and informal” by her own description. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that her writing highlights the ways in which the conversation has changed, and I crave depth.)
I baked muffins. They’re breakfast muffins for my mother-in-law and I’m happy to make them because they are a small thing I can still do. I’m happy to drop them off so they’re ready for breakfast next morning even though we greet each other under separate clouds of worry. Hers are the worries of an 80 year old. Mine are the worries of motherhood. In Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie writes a scene wherein the children meet Captain Hook who enjoins them to become pirates. One of the lost boys’ name is Tootles. “‘Don't irritate him unnecessarily’ had been Wendy’s instruction in the hold; so Tootles stepped forward politely. Tootles hated the idea of signing under such a man, but an instinct told him that it would be prudent to lay the responsibility on an absent person; and though a somewhat silly boy, he knew that mothers alone are always willing to be the buffer. All children know this about mothers, and despise them for it, but make constant use of it.”
Mothers as buffers! Isn’t that so? I imagine myself providing for our home precisely that kind of buffer with enough realism and hope to guide them through this passage. I’m acutely aware that it’s not a game of pretend, that to provide a buffer for my children, I need to be a good example. When “How a Traumatized Nation Can Recover” offers advice like this: “Make sure that we disconnect and we turn our attention to our own wellbeing and stay connected to activities that feed us. Make sure you’re resourcing yourself like a plant. Watering and feeding yourself and engaging in activities that really do give you energy.” I agree, and come here to write. And when I don’t know what to write, I try to describe what I’m doing and what I’m thinking.
We saw this remarkable thing about a week ago when we took a hike in Manitoba's Spirit Sands park. At first I thought it was a hummingbird flitting from flower to flower except that it was tiny and beige coloured and it had two long black antennae. At the restaurant that evening I googled descriptions for clues and discovered we’d seen a type of moth.
That was all I was going to write about that, except that later the same day I read the New York Times article titled “How Humanity Unleashed a Flood of New Diseases” and went to bed disheartened. I know about climate change, systemic racism, and the growing income inequality and yet what seems to be happening right now is that these things are coming into clearer and clearer focus. If previously it had been fine to move through life with only a vague, even somewhat dismissive, sense of these things it is no longer the case. Surviving the pandemic will be a minor detail compared to the uncertainties that will reach tendril-like into our homes.
That is why, taking a hike as a family into a landscape that can still be enjoyable feels like a limited pleasure, a thing slipped under the wire.
A year ago thereabouts, I went to the downtown library to browse books. It so happened a wedding was occurring in the library's courtyard and I left to go home at the same time as one of the guests, who like me, was taking the elevator to underground parking. She was wearing a dress and high heels and had a date. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened, I waited for them to go first, but she said, “No you! It looks like your arms are going to rip off!”
I like words. I like making a game of choosing the right ones and play at that with the children sometimes, providing them synonyms and nuance. The word rip seemed particularly violent. Rip sounds like flesh tearing, like jagged dismemberment, issuing blood. The violence of the word could, in a Freudian slip kind of way, suggest the violence of the mind from which it came. Had this young wedding guest played too many videogames? Or watched too many horror movies? I was only holding a pile of books, on cooking and home decor.
But a love of words can be an impediment. Communication is laborious enough as it is, why add to it particularities of usage? In fact, words are two dimensional and action is the thing that gives meaning. Perhaps what that wedding guest saw was a person full of words, full, full, full, becoming like paper herself and she was alarmed that all this paper, under stress, fragile as it was, would, indeed, rip. Maybe her word choice was perfect and I’d wasted all this time thinking it was not.
The boys coloured our paving stones before bed. The surface isn’t ideal, but they attacked the project like adding colour was their job. They don't care if there is rain in the forecast. They don't care if their time is limited or if they should continue or stop tomorrow.
My daughter made 37 paper boxes for the fun of folding their shape in different colours. Sometimes she finds something to put in them. She isn't thinking of monetizing her confections. The production makes us both laugh, as if their proliferation were as random as mushrooms after a rain.
I need these constant reminders because I'm an adult, careworn and worried. I take encouragement I can find it, like sips of tea: “Every artist has a different journey, and you'll have to figure out yours - you'll have to determine how much you can endure. Because the roadblocks, doubts, and insecurity are all part of living an artistic life.” (Jenna Fischer).
The problem I have with tattoos is that I would be unable to decide on the design. Reading Inheritance, I was almost jealous of the way Dani Shapiro memorialized the life event that is the basis of her book. It was properly symbolic and fittingly permanent. I can't seem to settle on anything.
Time is constantly forward moving. Write a history of something and within your own life, revisionist historians can change the conclusion you came to. Maybe it's built upon. Maybe it's torn down.
Has it ever scared you how some people hold on to a thing? Like say your dad always lied and so you've committed yourself to always telling the truth, and it's become the cure for the difficulties in your childhood and the pain you've worked through in young adulthood and now you tell everyone you know the importance of truth-telling. You tell your children, you enforce your rule with friends, you marry a blunt but sincere person. But sometimes you hurt people, because your conviction is not theirs, or rather, it doesn't take into account the delicacy of their situation and you never realize how you lost sight of the balance required by love. And then you're eighty years old and your children and grandchildren gather around and they say, "grandpa always told the truth" in the way that people who look for qualities say things about dying people that also mask a familiar pain.
I worry about that. I worry about holding on to a thing so tightly that I lose the ability to let go and reach for the next thing.
In 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: "Mrs. Stewart, very fine, with her locks done up with puffs, as my wife calls them: and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily - but it is only because she sees it is the fashion."
Here, there is no fashion to imitate: the less salon visits, the better; grow out the roots and stay healthy, there is no one to impress. Of course, I tease, because, pandemic or no, there will always be vanity.
I used to live with an elderly woman who had snow-white hair. She declared that if she ever felt sick enough to call an ambulance, she'd take a bath first. She continued to age, and each health issue was like an axe swing to an oak tree, before felled in a hospital bed where she lie, awake to tell me a few days before she would die, that on the other side, when she ran into my dad, she’d tell him hello from me. I really don’t remember what her hair looked like, flattened as it must have been, against the pillow.
It's summer now. My hair is long so I can tie it up. All I need is a hat to wear to the beach. I'm thinking of a fedora, but perhaps I'll check Instagram to see what other women are wearing.
While the kids had school at home, we took daily walks as an exercise regimen. We always did a loop in Henteleff Park near our house. On Thursdays we chose a park anywhere else in the city. And so we explored 13 other locations as an adventure.
Spirited Woods
St. Norbert along the dike behind what used to be Villa Maria.
The Sagimay Trail in Assiniboine Forest
On Earth Day I equipped the kids with gloves, garbage pickers and a clipboard and we picked up trash on a boulevard near our house.
Barrière Park
U of M grounds
Whittier Park on a rainy day
Kildonan Park before flowers were planted
A bit of the Duff Roblin Floodway Trail
Pollock Island
Assiniboine Avenue and the Legislative Building grounds
Cardiff Trail
The last bit of Bunn’s Creek Trail
All these walks were fun. For more ideas, I recommend the Winnipeg Trails Association website.
We are picking up a beagle pup June 27th.
On June 27th, we become dog owners.
By the end of the month, our family is acquiring a new member.
I’m uneasy. I grew up afraid of dogs. The extent of pet-ownership was the successive string of gold fish my mother put in my brother’s room. Now, a parent myself, I worry that depriving my children a dog-owning experience would be selfish.
I’m daunted by all the work it will take. I’m scared I’ll weary of the training, that I’ll settle for some bad habits.
I’m scared I’ll fall in love with this dumb furry life change that its intrusion will prove too short and that I’ll be heartbroken in 13 years.
I make cookies for the kids fairly regularly. It was their snack when they got home, came upstairs just long enough to tell me something about their day and then disappear downstairs to watch television. Now they still have cookies as a snack and still go downstairs to watch television, but no bus drops them off beforehand.
When I was in grade three, my friend would come to school with chocolate chip cookies. Since we were best friends, she would occasionally share a piece with me. They had large chips and more of a mounded shape than a flattened one. I've tried finding a recipe to match the memory of those homemade cookies, but I've never been successful. I get annoyed with recipes that promise to be the final stop in the land of chocolate-chip cookie quests. I haven't been able to settle on one specific recipe since the kids seem to accept any iteration of chocolate-chip with indifference. Two stand out to me though because they're just different enough to throw me off from disappointing the memory. One is a vegan version, and the other is made with whole wheat and bittersweet chopped chocolate.
It’s not good going after a memory... Our minds play tricks on us. Once, on a date, I saw a man at another table who looked so familiar I left my shyness behind and asked him if he recognized me. He didn’t. Neither did his wife. We named organizations we belonged to, jobs we'd worked at and neighbourhoods we came from, and still, there was nothing that could have connected us. I had to decide to stop looking at him, even after going back to my seat with an unresolved feeling. There was no fix. The person he looked like never came to mind.
There won't ever be a cookie that tastes of that grade three friendship. But my children will have a stack of chocolate chip cookie recipes to choose their memories from.
I spent a Saturday picking annuals and browsing bushes at the greenhouse. I came across False Spirea and liked it immediately. When I came home, I evaluated the plants in our front yard. They are out of proportion: two cedar bushes are overgrown and leggy, there are no medium plants to bridge their size to the small flowering annuals and perennials.
The cedar that has overgrown the low fence that frames our sidewalk will be cut down first and replaced with False Spirea. I like the way it fills out like Goatsbeard and Astilbe. Their flowers are a spray of white.
I’m grateful to the cedar for the time it served, for the greenery it provided in picture backdrops. I’m grateful for the fragrant smell of its branches as I cut them down one by one with pruning shears and fold them into paper bags.
I’m excited for the landscape change; “Why didn't I think of this before?” I chastise myself. Things come in their own time... at some point the diminishing returns of a thing you enjoyed are outpaced by the sum of critical glances that tip into disappointment and subtly sap your energy.
Still, I wanted to say, “Goodbye Mr. Cedar! We appreciated your stay.”
How do you frame a blog post on the subject of racism? I don't know. I've been mulling over this for weeks, struck by how silence is unacceptable, how a show of solidarity on social media is insufficient, and how people who are white like me set out actions like a to-do list: books to read, charities to donate to, Black businesses to support. I don't think any of this is wrong. But I drag my feet. I drag my feet not out of reluctance, but because I feel like I need a minute, a minute so I can be thoughtful about this.
Change annoys me. Kids are going to be home forever? Give me a few weeks. We should eat more vegetarian meals? I need a year to turn that menu plan around.
Years ago, a reporter on their way out of an office where I worked asked if I wanted to record a thought about some issue in the community that seemed unfair at the time. He pressed record on the device and held the mic up to my mouth. I opened it and mustered: “It’s terrible!” See why I need a minute?
This moment feels like an exam. The answers are quickly becoming a clichéd language everyone is using. Writers have to find ways of bringing meaning back in.
The problem with developing events is that they are just that... developing. How do you write an introduction, an argument in three parts and a conclusion when the conclusion is not arrived at yet? Historians are not journalists. But historians can look into the past to understand some of the why in the now. In Canadian Studies, this has been the case for our country’s racism toward First Nations. Gary Younge wrote in The Guardian:
“I’ve never found it particularly useful to compare racisms, as though one manifestation might be better than another. Every society regardless of its racial composition has overlapping and interweaving hierarchies. Insisting on a superiority of one over the other suggests there are racisms out there worth having, a race to the bottom with no moral center.”
This month’s focus on racism toward Black people is a chance to examine racism full stop. In my case, I have to confront my own (particularly Canadian) disbelief. A recent re-broadcast episode of Cited included an interview with activist Desmond Cole. About disbelief, he said:
“That is what white supremacy does, it looks at violence against Black people, whether it be in the education system, in the prison system, policing, in the workplace and it says ‘uh, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that this is is as bad as you say it is…’ (…) If we were being believed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, but our history would also look very different if Black people were believed.”
The enormity of the problem that we have as a society boggles the mind and challenges any effort of mine to find a solution. But looking for solutions, in a mad dash effort to absolve ourselves of the humiliation we feel for the biases we hold unknowingly cannot sustain change, even if all the efforts are well-intentioned. It feels silly to try and demonstrate here, as Kate Baer wrote on Instagram, a “pledge (of) allyship when our IRL actions are so easily unchecked.” If we are good, we hold within ourselves a high ideal, nurtured by faith or belief, like Augustine of Hippo who said: “...among these shocking conditions, there is only one remedy: do not think ill of your brother. Strive humbly to be what you would have him be; and you will not think that he is what you are not.”
It is not enough to profess an ideal, however much one strives toward it. Therefore, if these demonstrations are a symptom of change to come, then I hope not to stand in its way, not to impede its process, not to fight against the dawn of a new day.
Last summer our family took a long road trip to camp for a week in a beautiful provincial park in the middle of British Columbia. Our trailer backed onto a rushing mountain river and campsites were separated by thick greenery. I had a lot of enthusiasm for this trip and yet, once home I had trouble overcoming the feeling that I had failed as a camper. We had had amenities, the children were all fine, it had been an adventure full of gorgeous scenery and yet… I was so glad to be home.
I didn't grow up camping. When I think of camping, I think only of logistics. What will we cook, what will we pack, how will it be packed, how will it be cooked. How long will things stay fresh, how will our appetites change, what kind of snacks are good, how much can I count on improvisation and what I should have ready for this improvisation. Supposedly, camping is about relaxing. Therefore I'm terrible at camping. Failing the ability to relax felt like failing the ability to breathe.
Then I came across an article by James Somers titled “The Paradox of Going Outside”. I've since read it three times, but this is the line I especially like: “my mistake in Glacier was not in failing to appreciate the high flowers, the playful lives of the squirrels; it was in thinking that such an appreciation would come naturally.” My mistake was in thinking that appreciation would come naturally.
Of course! Look how appreciation for cooking grows with every meal undertaken. Look how appreciation for a well-tended yard grows with every hour spent gardening. I'm not a good camper, but I could become one with practice and repeated experience. It's humbling to be bad at something when others are good at it. It's hard not to let that humiliation turn into disparagement and disdain. I am impatient when in fact appreciation takes patience. James Somers: thank-you!
Our children remind us of things. Their questions sink down into deep pockets of our mind, like carp unsettling sediment on a lake bottom.
Today the kids and I were crafting cards for their teachers and listening to Kids United on Spotify. My son asked what a ricochet was. Two scenes rushed into view: the first of being in the mountains in Quebec where a friend and I, on meandering afternoon walks, would stop at a pool of water in the forest and sometimes just sit in silence. She was better at skipping stones than I was, so I'd find some and give them to her.
The second was of my dad skipping stones on Pike Lake near Saskatoon, where we would go for daytrips as a family sometimes. Some images revive and they have positive associations. Uncovered they are like a surprise, a chocolate in a flavour you like.
A few years ago I read the first two books of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. I remember the feverish way I read through them; only deciding to stop because I was afraid to admit how much time I spent greedily eating his thoughts. I’m re-reading notes I took at the time. They make me want to dive back in to My Struggle. He wrote, for example, “I read Hauge’s diaries. All 3,000 pages. It was an enormous consolation.” I suppose that’s why I read his books; they were consoling.
And here, he writes about the need for solitude. “I require huge swaths of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.”
In the second book he writes: “I was preoccupied, to an unusually high degree, by being liked, and always had been, ever since I was small. I had attached huge importance to what other people thought about me ever since I was seven.” Seven? I thought. That's very young. Then, as I comb through my memories and picture myself at seven, I find proof. I too, at seven, wanted to be liked.
Until we moved into a house, my mom, dad, brother, sister and I, lived on the 17th floor of an apartment building in downtown Saskatoon. Among its residents were kind old people who made my parents’ acquaintance on elevator rides. There was a lady named Pearl whose apartment was full of surfaces softened with crochet and lace. And there was a man whose name I do not remember who would slip me two Werther's candies while my mom and I waited in the lobby for the school bus. I wasn’t allowed to eat sugar but I would bring them to school and before the bell rang to offer them to classmates. I became the center of attention for a few brief moments while I picked more-or-less randomly two benefactors from among the many outstretched hands, and the faces that said “me! me! me!”
Ah Knausgaard! Authors by expressing themselves allow readers to recognize themselves and I am grateful.
I think I would be sad if you took away the seasons. Three-quarters of a year’s worth of daily walks has only impressed upon me the delight to be had with every change. I'll limit myself to winter and summer, the biggest contrast.
You might think that summer walks are the best. After all, that is when there are the most people out. Paths become so congested, social distancing norms that are inevitably contravened are forgiven on the theory that viruses have a harder time spreading outside, in sunshine rays. And you aren't talking to each other anyways. You're passing by. But in summer, there are bugs and worms. And with warmer temperature, the desire to move fast takes a nosedive. There are determined joggers, of whom I'm not one. Instead I notice that I walk more slowly in hot weather, already exerted by my body's attempt to cool off. Walking more slowly has its advantages. For one thing, there is more to look at in the summer. Flowers and greenery burst forth everywhere and there is added depth to the forest. And I should mention the sound... in summer there are so many birds, and when the wind blows, it rustles the leaves!
In winter, there is more silence. Well, perhaps yes and no. In summer, you can move without making much noise: your apparel and footwear are simple, the path is unencumbered and dirt cushions your footsteps. In winter, you are in your own bubble of noise... your footsteps in the snow squeak, your exhalations and heartbeat ricochet in the confines of your hood. The movement of your arms rustles the material of your coat. In wintertime, you move fast: you hurry to move your blood and warm your limbs and you come home with chilled cheeks, invigorated and refreshed. You move fast, and it is quite alright to do so because the forest is little more than brown sticks and white snow. Birds have mostly gone. It is hard to find any colour.
In winter, you are the life and the actor, the colour and the sound, coming in bowed but conquering. In summer, you are the object taking in the burst of chlorophyll and birdsong, coming home filled up and sluggish.
Isn't it a beaut? Craggly edges of a homemade pie crust, and the puffed bronze top of this recipe I found in Anita Stewart's Canada. I started making this pie years ago, back when I was so young that I emailed the author about whether I could freeze this pie, hoping maybe, by dint of asking, I could force a magic yes. She answered no. Of course not, I now think. But this pie is so good, you wish you could make a dozen and store them for the future. You can't though. This pie is meant to be ephemeral. First, it's made with rhubarb which is only harvested in spring and summer. Second, its custard-like filling is folded with beaten egg whites which aren’t meant to be frozen. I like the pie most of all because it is unique... it blends rhubarb with orange juice and orange zest, unlike the more typical rhubarb-strawberry pairing. The recipe is called “Four-Generation Rhubarb Pie” because its source, a man named Fred Gordon who gave the recipe to Anita Stewart, says that it can be traced back to his Grandmother's mom. Both the story, and Stewart's adjectives convinced me to try the dessert promptly.
I feel like such a recipe is the very opposite thing of what Nora Ephron wrote about in her 1973 article titled “Baking Off”. She wrote then about attending the “twenty-fourth annual Pillsbury Bake-Off” that seemed to me to be as depressing an experience as David Foster Wallace's taking a cruise. In “Baking Off”, Nora Ephron writes that “to win the Pillsbury Bake-Off, even to be merely a finalist in it, is to be a great housewife. And a creative housewife. ‘Cooking is very creative.’ I must have heard that line thirty times as I interviewed the finalists. I don’t happen to think that cooking is very creative - what interests me about it is, on the contrary, its utter mindlessness and mathematical certainty.”
I will not argue here about whether or not cooking is creative - I have only to think of Deb Perelman to be awed by culinary creativity. Instead, what a recipe titled “Four-Generation Rhubarb Pie” represents is an honouring of ingredients that is so different from the corporate event Ephron describes as to be on another plane. It brings to mind this quote from the novel South Wind by Norman Douglas, which Elizabeth David used in A Book of Mediterranean Food: “All culinary tasks should be performed with reverential love, don’t you think so?”