032-Puppy

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.

031-Chocolate Chip Cookies

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.

030-Talking to plants

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.”

029-Events

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.

028-Appreciation

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!

027-Ricochet

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.

026-Knausgaard

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.

025-Seasonal

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.

024-Rhubarb pie

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?”

023-Vegetarian

Here are two vegetarian recipes we frequently make. The first is Zuni's Pasta which can be easily described as penne with aromatic oil and canned tuna. It feels fancy with the addition of toasted pine nuts and the sourcing of expensive oil-packed tuna. 

The second is gnocchi. Gnocchi is somewhat finicky: follow the details in the instructions and it is successful, become over-confident and a little non-chalant about pulling off the little potato pillows and they will collapse into effortful sogginess. It makes it absolutely impossible not to apologize for - contrary to Julia Child's injunction against apologizing to guests. Successful gnocchi can be served with Smitten Kitchen’s Tomato Broth, or Ricardo's creamy Tomato-Spinach one, which I which I made often before having children at the table. To make gnocchi a more substantial meal, I recommend a baguette. That is, yes, carbs on top of carbs, but I haven't found a better idea yet.

Our vegetarian repertoire is small. I feel the need to add to it, but face the following challenges: beans, eggplant, winter, habit. 

022-Reorganization

My daughter dislikes change and letting go of things. I don’t know if this is a common thing among most girls, but it is the case with ours. That is why, I was surprised when she instigated the reorganization of her room. I very much like reorganizing things, but her reluctance on this front has held such an impulse at bay. 

Her room looks quite different now, “more ‘grande fille’” as Christian put it. It made me think of a quote by Antonine Maillet's character La Sagouine. La Sagouine in one of her monologues, as it was read to us by an Acadian teacher in tenth grade, had been in favour of the Second World War, to shake things up, as I remembered it. I was sixteen I think, and I didn't grasp the satire. 

Listening to that monologue now, I understand instead that La Sagouine is grateful for an event which relieved the poverty her community lived in. It brought, as she explains it, attention to her otherwise forgotten corner of the world. “Thank goodness the war happened” she says, and this line that jolts the listener isn't about appreciating the drama of an upheaval, as I thought I remembered it. Rather, it's a commentary about how the upheaval forced the government to take into account all its citizens, even the poor ones.

Since staying safe at home, we’ve gone into our house’s corners to exploit their dusty spaces and take stock of things forgotten in storage. I sent my sister's sewing machine back to her. I sent baby items to my brother who's a new father now. We might have done these things without a pandemic to spur us on, nonetheless, I'd like to consider it a small ripple in the wake of a much larger reorganization.

021-Art

Austin Kleon, who is ever inspiring, whose books I own, and whose arguments compelled me to secure this website domain , frequently extolls the benefits of small artistic pursuits alongside writing. For him, it’s collage. I've tried collage, and doodling, and drawing, but succumb to overwhelming self-consciousness. I stopped. There must be a trick to feeling comfortable.

Maybe the first step is letting go of the idea of a right way and a wrong way of doing art alongside writing. Here I crochet, make meals, bake cookies and muffins and direct the creative and not-so-creative activities of my at-home brood and I never thought of considering it a form of art. What is art anyway? It’s beauty, no? 

Perhaps these small domestic things that yield blankets and meals and snacks are too easily overlooked. And while the subject of home-making is fraught with competitive and complicated feelings, it might be worth considering at least some of the actions as artistic exercises. The audience in my case is small, the final results of some endeavors are sometimes enjoyed before disappearing like temporary expositions. Some things, like crochet are done merely for the pleasure of completing a longer project, a way of occupying one’s hands, a way of ending up with something useful. Didn't Virginia Woolf have something to say about making bread?

I think that’s why I like taking pictures of routine things. It’s a way of declaring, very simply, that there is beauty even in the dailyness of meals and child-minding.

020-Friends

We've set a date to eat supper outside with friends since some of the rules are relaxing in June. I miss entertaining. I miss making suppers and desserts. At the same time, the isolation enforced earlier this year was not particularly hard on the introverted family that we are. Now when I think of entertaining, I think about how little time I have since the children are home and my mornings are given over to their school work and routines. I almost envy extroverted neighbours who gather often, six feet apart, invigorated by the exchanges while I cast around for more quiet. They love meeting while I wonder where I would find the time to do it. I worry I might come out of this pandemic more feral since the calendar has no longer forced the practice of the traditions that brought us together: birthdays, Easter, long weekends.

I’ve realized over time that, as Heidi Julavits writes, “It's hard to make new friends at this stage of life (...). I always want new friends, but I know what it takes to make a good one. It takes years, decades, and back when I was younger I had hours and hours of those days of those years of those decades to dedicate to getting to know a friend. Now I have minutes of hours of days of years of decades. To acquire a new friend under these time restrictions would require three consecutive lives.”

While social distancing threatens to cover our social etiquette with a thin mossy film, the opposite is also true. This pandemic has provided the greatest conversational shortcut ever. All you have to say is, “This is crazy! How have you been?”

019-Studio

This is my studio. At least, that's what I like to call it. It's two inches longer than I am tall, and four feet wide. Christian built it in the corner of our garage, raised, so I can look out of the window when I'm sitting down. The window in the summer often has flies. I'm learning to make friends with them or get good at flyswatter aim. The latter is not too hard.

The garage is separate from the house, and therefore a space where there is the kind of quiet I love and missed so much while the schools and libraries are/were closed.

The studio has a rug, a storage container to protect paper and books from dust, and space for a comfy chair and a folding chair. I use one chair for reading and the other for writing, but not always.

The studio is new, but in the winter, with a moving blanket for a curtain, I think I'll be able to keep the corner warm with the orange heater hanging from the ceiling. We'll see.

I used to imagine that things you made had to be perfect to be enjoyable. I imagined that people whose homes were featured in design magazines had a level of contentment that matched the beauty of their kitchen cabinetry. Growing older has become a process of learning that delight is to be had in the imperfect; customized spaces, handmade quality, artistic patina. This BBC series on YouTube titled “How Buildings Learn” is related to this subject. I learned a lot watching it.

018-Dog

Consider pain. Consider the discomfort as it moves from subject to observer. Consider the neighbour’s dog I spied one day sitting at the end of the driveway.

The house across the street is inhabited by a son and his father and occasional other people. The father had slow and stiff parents. Like his parents, he too is slow and stiff. When he leaves his house, he lowers himself into his car backwards, swings in his legs, and beckons the door shut by bending his fingers on the handle and letting the slant of the driveway do the rest.

One day their dog was on the driveway. It was a black dog with a body like a fat sausage. The father put a blanket on the backseat of the car and motioned, with a swing of his arm, for the dog to get into the car. The dog pulled itself up with its front legs and hobbled. It hobbled over to the car door and I could not look. 

When the father and the dog returned, his son came outside. With the lure of an almost empty jar of peanut butter, the dog was got out of the car. I did not watch. Only later I saw the dog on the driveway. 

Surely the dog was in pain. My eyes appraised the suffering. The film as it played was edited by thoughts that rushed about frantically looking for subtitles to the silent action through the window. Had that dog not run away just last year? Surely it was not so old! What had happened that now it could barely walk? This animal is suffering and its owner has offended my sight by letting it be so! Have they been careless? Did they do this?

The subtitles skew toward drama, the way increasingly shocking videos used to automatically queue up on Youtube. Inclined by fear, imagination defaults to what is unkind.

An emergency pet services van came to the house a few days later and took the dog away. That’s all I saw. The rest is interpretation.

017-Laugh

My brother can laugh at jokes and one liners with a giggle. Really, he giggles. Christian and I would hear him from downstairs, laughter so irrepressible, I’d want in. 

“What kind of humour do you like?” my sister asked the other day. 

“I don't know,” I said. 

I looked at Christian, “Do you notice me laughing? Do I laugh?” I asked suddenly alarmed.

I'm a serious person. My seriousness concerns me to the point that I chose “lighter” as word of the year. This year. 2020.

I think I could settle for amused. The other day, I went to Michael's to pick up yarn. The store near our house is staffed with women, a young one to tell people to take a cart and wipe them down, a middle-aged one to tell me about the annoyances of wearing a mask (her co-worker breaks out in pimples because of them), an older one in framing who helped me track down more dark-turquoise balls. At a second location, a woman directed me to a cashier. He was young and I felt shy for him. For a store with aisles dedicated to Martha Stewart line of stationery, paper decorating projects, and "silk flowers" advertised in permanent letters on the front there are few males at one time in the store. Mostly I’ve seen husbands following their wives around, or fathers with their daughters. 

As I was leaving the store, two boys were standing beside a red sports car, affixing letters to the passenger-side window. Because I'm drawn to read anything that is written, I asked them what the window was going to say when they were done. “Your bitch” was already stuck to the window and they showed me their phone screen with the final part: “is probably in here.” 

“Cause the tint's so dark!” one of them grinned back at me with braces on his teeth.

Contrast makes me laugh.

016-Idea

Hold on, I lost the idea… I'm thinking back now to this morning, retracing the steps, my thoughts, what was it? Since this morning, my mind has been populated by other ideas. I've been stimulated by other stories; deep sea divers (This is Love), comedians (Hannah Gadsby on Fresh Air), and business founders (Duolinguo on How I Built This). Aha! It's come back to me! It is inspired by The Daily, specifically, the episode dedicated to some of the 100,000 victims of Covid-19 in the U.S. I loved this episode because it was like a beautifully crafted audio obituary and as such, a touching memento mori. Why can’t we have a podcast dedicated to local people’s lives, right here, right now?

When I was young, I would often visit the Saskatoon Public Library's main branch downtown on 2nd Avenue. It had two floors. The main floor had the adult and teen collection while the second floor was split into three parts: children's section, art gallery, video and how-to collection. In a far corner of the children's section, I remember finding books about artists and one book in particular that offered a glimpse into the daily routines of several artists. I love that genre. Anyway. One artist described reading the obituary section of the newspaper first thing each morning. I thought this was awfully morbid back when I was 12. As I’ve aged though, I’ve started appreciating obituaries. I never miss the “Lives Lived” section of the Globe and Mail when I had the chance to read it. I realize I’m not alone. Was it Maira Kalman who made a joke about it? (Normally, I’m inclined to check this kind of reference, but that is not the point of this collection of essays. I am putting certainty aside in the spirit of reckless practice with the objective of finishing a project.)

I think it’s a great idea! Why hasn’t it already been done? Then again, it’s just an idea… I have no time for it, no time for its execution.

015-Newborns

There are newborns in our life, not our own but directly and indirectly related to us. Up until now babies were alright.

I feel like a child though, one who's been denied something they didn't even know they wanted. We got to visit a newborn, and from the confines of the vehicle oohed and aahed at the tiny bundle that opened and closed its eyes to the light from the comfort of its parents arms. They sat on lawn chairs in their garage, our gift bag in quarantine for the time being. I didn't think I would crave feeling the softness of a baby's duvet hair, or the contour of its supple shape, but I did.

I suppose I've been gifted a tiny preview of what grandparenting must be like, an understanding of the craving for a taste of the thing someone else has too much of.

014-Sew

I’m sometimes overcome by all that I don’t know. When I was young, I thought becoming an adult would open up the world to me, that I would understand all the things that puzzled me and that I would have the freedom to do whatever I wanted. The internet plays into this idea; with one Google search provides an answer to a question, one video resolves a project. But while that is possible, it provides only superficial results. Understanding takes work.

In the field of historical study, you can lay claim to a tiny slice of things. You can become increasingly familiar with one time period in one area of the world and then extrapolate with increasing unfamiliarity into other time periods, other areas. University gives you tools and confidence if that’s what you want to do. 

Do you know what I like? I like getting an assignment, or giving myself an assignment on a subject that is unfamiliar. It’s like parachuting into new territory, running reconnaissance, and trying not to be too awkward about getting to know the area, the features and the people. It’s thrilling, as I imagine domesticating an animal is thrilling, or spending a few months in another country is thrilling. Nonetheless, it takes time and patience. Historical research takes months. It requires sleuth-like pursuit of sources, from books down to private archives. After a period of time, a picture starts to emerge and puzzle pieces connect and you can present a narrative where there wasn’t one before. I am thrilled that this is the work I get to do in my studies. 

I don’t know how to sew. I also don’t know how to swim. Sewing is something I might have learned at home, in an earlier era, and swimming I might have learned were Saskatoon not a desert-like place. A friend of mine, optimistic like myself, undaunted by choice and consequence and a realistic evaluation of time, might say, “you can still learn!” because catching up is always possible, and the news regularly runs stories of people who do things like run marathons into their eighties. And sure, I could. I could decide tomorrow to join a swimming class. I could decide next week to get a sewing machine. But I won’t. I won’t because tomorrow, it will be a gift enough to be able to write a new essay. I won’t be getting a sewing machine next week, because it will be, like this week, a good thing just to manage the meals cheerfully, just to provide home-made cookies as a snack.

013-Duster

There are, I’ve recently learned, historians who specialize in fashion. I didn’t know this specialty existed, but it must be fun. I’ve decided to be, for a little while, an amateur fashion historian in so far as my paternal grandmother’s wardrobe is concerned.

I’ve started with one of my Grandma’s coats. It jumped out at me, with its checked pattern, the giant cuffs on the sleeves and pockets on both sides and the button detail. I noticed it first when she was carrying her first baby in 1954, see? A new mom with a wonderfully forgiving coat.

 Here’s the back of it:

But, combing through the pictures, I found it elsewhere. I noticed it in 1953, draped over her arm as she’s leaving for her honeymoon as a newlywed.

And here, walking with someone, the style is almost paired, but not quite. The other woman has a button at her throat.

The Sears catalogue had a similar style coat for sale in 1952, albeit with buttons, and they called it a duster. They describe it as made with sanforized cotton, which today might be better recognized as “pre-shrunk”. A duster was first used as a way of protecting an outfit from dust while driving. Grandma seemed to like checked patterns because they resurface in dresses she wore too. 

(Via)

How much of it was her taste and how much of it was the influence of style trends, I’m not sure. By the number of times it appears in pictures I’m guessing it was practical and well-loved!