Great little sayings

Time's a wasting!

Cut me some slack.

Pipe up!

Think I'll hit the sack.

So long.

Stick around.

Fuck off.

What is it with Purebreds?

While walking my dogs, I often run into people who admire my dogs. "What beautiful dogs!" they say, "They're so well-behaved! What kind are they?"

I'm always proud to say that they are mutts. I'm partial to mutts and don't mind saying so. Mutts are known to carry the strongest characteristics of whatever breeds they are composed of; they are therefore healthier and more balanced than the average purebred of any breed. The whole idea of *purebred* dogs has always smacked of racism to me; left to their own devices, dogs don't seek out others like themselves to mate with. Research indicates that mammals (yes, us too...) are attracted to the pheromones most different from our own. We instinctively seek diversity, so that our offspring will be strong. And the idea of people manipulating dogs and deliberately mating them to others to create a certain look has always seemed... well, kind of pervy to me.

But anyway. People often express disappointment that they are not some specific breed. The funny thing, to me, is that my dogs are about as different from each other as dogs can be. There is an old Warner Bros. cartoon about a coyote and a sheepdog who go to work together and punch a clock. The coyote tries to catch the sheep and the sheepdog tries to protect them. I believe their names are Sam and Ralph. Well, those are my dogs. Yes, they are about the same size and they sometimes walk side by side but it has been many generations since they shared anything like a common ancestor. Yet people are forever asking me if they are siblings. Sometimes it cracks me up.

So, MOSTLY my dogs are really good. Really well-behaved and obedient. And when people ask me how I achieved this, I say, "Diet and exercise" which is ironically, my answer to many other questions as well. But it's true. If dogs get adequate exercise, (which, I'm sorry to say, only working dogs get; most need many hours a day) they will be well-behaved. UNLESS you feed them dog food, which for the most part is garbage filled with poisonous chemicals and allergens. But my point is, that it's not that they belong to some magical BREED that makes them act wonderfully. People seem to be always looking for that; Oh, we wanted a dog that would be good with our kids, so we got a Golden.

As an aside, I've seen a Golden so out of control that her owner had to muzzle her on walks. That dog never got off leash because she would viciously attack other dogs. And they got her as a puppy. Explain that, purebred enthusiasts.

It's not the breed. It's what YOU do with the dog. Dogs need lots of exercise. Dogs need nutritious food.

I don't have a flock of sheep to occupy my dogs, nor do I have the inclination to spend all day preparing fresh food for them, so despite my strong opinions on this topic, my dogs too get less than they need to be perfect. But when they do something "wrong" at least I recognize that the fault usually lies with me. Dogs really do want to please us but first their basic needs have to be met. And I have yet to meet a purebred more eager to please than my two mutts.

And then I planted garlic!

Yesterday, for the first time, I planted garlic. I have always wanted to grow garlic but for some reason it never really panned out and this year I thought it wouldn't either; I have a community garden plot that gets rototilled every spring, so it just didn't seem to make sense. Garlic must be planted in the fall if it is to do well and between the spring tilling and the fall freezing, garlic just didn't seem to be in the cards.

But then, a few things magically conspired to make it work for me. First of all, the woman who runs the community garden told me that they had decided NOT to till next spring but instead to use the tilling rental cash to put beams between the plots. (I'm new to the garden and at first I thought she said "beans" which simultaneously excited and confused me, but anyway, I digress...)

Then, I was working a coffee gig at the market and I went early to admire the produce. Some folks had bags of local organic garlic for $6.00/lb which is about the going rate here and it was beautiful garlic with tight, fat cloves and a mauve skin. I asked about it and the woman told me that the variety is called "Music". Then, without prompting, she mentioned that I could plant it if I wanted to. I've read that Music does very well in Ontario, so I bought a bag thinking I could eat it all if I didn't plant it. (I like to slow roast whole heads of garlic with olive oil and salt and eat them, smeared on toast.)

Finally, my sister Karen boasted on Facebook that she had planted 300 cloves of garlic in her big garden and I became consumed by envy. I wanted a garlic garden too! I even had some garlic to plant! But those in the know say that root crops should always be planted under a waning moon and time was running out. I was in Toronto for a few days and when I got home it was the last day before the new moon. In Chinatown I found bags of shallots, 2 for a dollar. Why not? I said to myself.

So when I got home, I flew into action. First, I walked the dogs, then I threw garlic, shallots, stakes and red string into a bag with my gardening gloves and hurried off to the garden. I dug and cursed and planted and cursed and marked the plot with red string, then mulched it lovingly with yellow leaves. I only planted 30 garlic cloves and perhaps 8 shallots but I left feeling totally smug.

I won't have a whole lot of garlic but I'll have some and maybe even some shallots, too.

A Moment of Peace

I wonder if I'm not finally learning how to relax. I also wonder how much of the stress and tension in my life is caused by hormones. Really.
I suspect that hormones essentially run the planet, (along with fungi) and that we have no actual control over either of these things.
Tonight I was cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and listening to the radio and I had the sudden realization that I was happy. Just happy in the moment, listening to the radio and having a glass of red wine and dicing a chunk of rutabaga. The dogs were lying around watching because I am cooking a beef stew, which is a rare occasion at my house. I gave them some tidbits of beef and wondered, as they licked my fingers clean, why I felt so good.

Part of it is definitely feeling some sense of order in the universe. Cooking usually does that for me; the order implicit in cutting things up and adding them to the pot, the sensibility of seasonings. Imposing order on the chaos. No doubt I find the familiar voices on CBC radio soothing and the smells of food cooking comforting. Wine always makes me happy. The presence of my calm, attentive dogs pleases and comforts me.

But mainly I think that my hormones are taking a break from their nearly constant driving mission to fuck with my mind. What a relief! How pleasant to just enjoy the sights and smells of cooking a beef stew, slowly in the oven, while listening to the radio and enjoying the quiet company of two old dogs. How restful to sip a glass of red wine and listen to Johnny Cash singing "One", in his gravelly old man's voice or Kiri Te Kanawa belting out a Puccini aria, without breaking into tears and wishing I was dead! A blessed moment of peace in a turmoily universe!

How lucky I feel at this moment.

Things that Suck

Some Things that Suck:

- Waking up with a sore throat.
- Monsanto
- BP
- Buying the "bale" of 20 bus tickets in order to *save money* then only using 2 of them.
- Trying to sell them to your friends, who don't want them.
- Discovering you're the only person in your circle who takes the bus to Toronto.
- Lying in bed, coughing.
- Then spitting.
- War
- Pesticides
- Vomiting
- Colony Collapse Disorder
- Sad dogs
- Feeling too crappy to fix yourself a can of soup.

Mushrooms for dinner again...

So, it would seem to be a *STELLAR* year for wild mushrooms, at least for me.
I bragged in my last post that I finally found white matsutakes in Temagami, after looking for them in vain for about 25 years. Then, yesterday, while walking my dogs at a favourite park, I noticed what appeared to be a rather large, well-organized squirrels nest, lying on the ground under an oak tree. My heart went pit-a-pat.
What IS that? I asked the dogs, who didn't answer. But I wondered if it might not be the polypore called "hen of the woods" and I approached the thing with bated breath.

To make a long story short, we have been eating mushrooms for about 24 hours now and I, for one, am full. The thing weighed thirteen pounds and was nearly all usable; we gave some away and made a huge soup yesterday. There is talk of frying some up, later tonight as we still have a huge chunk in the fridge. I've been bragging non-stop to my long-suffering family.

As a forager, I feel fulfilled.

Pictured above: thirteen pounds of "hen of the woods" or Grifola frondosa. Also known as "maitake", it is one of the mushrooms that has been used medicinally by the Japanese for time immemorial.

Back from the woods

Hey, we're back from our canoe trip!
We were in Temagami for 20 days.
We were rained on for 19 of them.
We ate 12 different species of wild mushrooms! (Not all at the same meal...)
I did not find it warm enough to swim, even once. One day I was almost going to do it, then the wind picked up again and I came to my senses.
We stayed at 12 different campsites.
We made 12 portages.

Highlights:

I found white matsutakes, for the first time ever. I have been looking for them for about twenty years.
We ate a lot of boletes and suillus mushrooms. When fried in ghee and salted, they taste a lot like bacon, or chicken skin or something very meat-like, fatty and satisfying.
River otters: What could be more thrilling?

The One Big Thing

Today, while dehydrating peaches, I noticed that we appear to be having a hurricane. It is exceedingly hot and humid outside; over 40 with the "humidex" but windy as hell! The branches were beating against the windows and I kept hearing things falling over outside. Every now and then there is a tremendous BANG! from behind the house; the sound of a black walnut falling on the tin roof of the neighbour's carport.

It is going to be a good year for black walnuts. The trees are loaded and the nuts are big. It is a pity that I seem to always take my yearly holiday during black walnut season. (Not true of last year's trip to Guatemala and Belize, done properly, in the dead of winter...) But fall is the best season for most things, including canoe-tripping.

I was going to follow this up with a short list of things I hate but find I am totally uninspired. As it turns out, there aren't really that many things I hate anyway. It pretty much all comes down to the one thing and I don't really know how to sum that up.

How a few have everything while most have nothing? How we are cautioned to be grateful for our "freedoms", while everything is taken from us? How we learn to disrespect the natural world and the other animals, and instead worship human celebrities? How we are duped into supporting the war machine?

...Yep, I'm really looking forward to getting into the woods for a few weeks...

The dehydration station

Every year, we go on a canoe trip, usually in September. Last year, for the first time since 2001, I missed out; Rob took a spring trip with a guy I'll call "Neighbour Boy", shortly after the ice came off. I don't remember now why I couldn't go then, but I did manage to put enough food together for their meals and also for Seamus, who went along for the trip. Blue and I stayed home and as I recall, had a nice time. But when fall arrived and it was time for our usual trip, I was involved in a medical drug study that was going to earn me some money. I couldn't just drop out, no matter how badly I wanted to. So, last year, I didn't go canoeing. At all.

Rob came home from Temagami with an awesome camera that he found while picking up garbage from the dock.
I attempted to console myself with a trip to Guatemala and Belize, during which we blew most of the drug study money. And we took a lot of pictures.

We dry all our own food for the trip, with the exception of a few things that we buy already dried, like mashed potatoes and onions. Generally, food prep is my department. Rob assembles our gear and makes sure it is ready for the trip. I plan our meals, cook them, dehydrate them, weigh and sort them, assemble "extra" ingredients and condiments, buy snacks, make and dry dog food. We calculate about a pound of dried food per person, per day. The dogs eat a lot. Their appetites seem to double in the woods. Some of their food is meat - we don't take meat for ourselves but I like to take some for them. We usually buy ground beef from the drug-free meat place at the market and dry it raw. Then it gets mixed with a variety of other ingredients, to make their food. They get oatmeal and skim milk and vegetables and supplements. The mix is so superior to kibble that we always notice a positive change in their coats very shortly after we leave. They get glossy and their eyes get brighter. I'd make it for them year round if I wasn't so lazy. Oil cannot be dried so we have to take oil for all of us, separately.

Our longest trip was 18 days. That worked out to almost 60 pounds of dried food. (We generally take a little extra in case some is lost to circumstance.) This year, we're aiming for around 20 days on the water. I have been a slave to the dehydrator for the last couple of weeks. And I got a very late start. Usually I spend the entire month of August more or less chained to the dehydration station.

Today is a turning point. In the beginning, getting ready for a trip of this length is a formidable task. You dehydrate a basket of peaches and end up with a small zip-lock bag that weighs about an ounce. A head of celery fits into the palm of your hand. It seems like you will never be able to dry enough food, no matter how you sweat and toil. But at some point, you see that it's starting to come together. Today, as I bagged some peppers, I realized that we are starting to have enough food for a trip. We aren't there yet, but I can see that we will be.

This trip is shaping up to be bittersweet because my dogs are both aging so rapidly. This could be their last canoe trip. Every time I run my hands over them I find another lump, bump or growth. I worry about their ability to do long hikes; to portage over rocky trails; to swim, if necessary, a long ways. But they, like us, are looking forward to the trip. Ever since we started hauling out the stuff - the food barrel, the dry bags, our sleeping pads - they have become inseparable from the gear.
They stick close to the stuff, as if we might forget to bring them along otherwise.

Luck

The first time I ever played Lotto 649, I won. True story. I had just started working at a printing place where everybody went in on tickets every week. And, although my naturally frugal aspect was screaming, "Don't do it!" I threw in my $2.00, that first week, in order to feel a part of the group.
The next morning, there was great excitement in the shop. The owners son, a huge deaf-mute guy, was all flushed and sweaty. He motioned at us with his hands: five out of six numbers! We won!

After much checking and re-checking, it was determined that we had indeed won the "2nd" prize; five of six numbers. The jackpot was at least a million, but second place was much less; I think a few thousand dollars. Anyway, after we had divided it seven or eight ways, it came out to perhaps $260. each. At the time, about a weeks pay for me. A nice return on a $2.00 investment.

Imagine winning the lottery the first time you play it. How crazy is that?
It wasn't a lot of money but it was tremendously exciting. For me, it demonstrated two things. One, that lotteries were winnable. By ordinary people, like me and my co-workers. Two, that I was lucky. I couldn't help but think that while my co-workers had been playing the lottery for months and years before I came along, it was only when I joined in, that we won. I have always thought of myself as a lucky person; here now was proof.
For quite a long time after that, lottery tickets were irresistible. I justified buying them by telling myself I had that $260 in credit.

Fast forward twenty-three years or so. (My god, has it been that long?)
Although it embarrasses me to admit it, I still occasionally succumb to the lure of the lottery ticket. I cannot help but imagine winning. So many of my problems could be solved by an influx of cash, that the idea of winning is just too alluring to pass up. Yet I know, somewhere in there, that lotteries are exploitive. That they are institutional money-makers that exist because they make gazillions of dollars on the dashed dreams of poor people. A tax on the gullible and the desperate and the foolish. A tax on me.

I still think of myself as a lucky person but in reality, I almost never win anything. There are people who win door prizes regularly; whose names are pulled from hats; who pick the lucky chair; whose numbers are read out at the end of the evening. I am not one of them.
I only ever really won the lottery that one time. And the more I think about it, the less I think it has to do with me being lucky and the more it has to do with something else; something I'm not sure of and don't know how to name.

But whatever it is, I don't think I'll call it "luck".

Mid-Season Bean Report

Okay. It is now mid-summer and the gardens are in full swing. I rode over to the community garden to take a look. Here is what I found.

My Rattlesnake pole beans are amazing; prolific and delicious. They are probably my favourite bean this year. The Northeasters are confusing; flat, yellow beans except for one plant that bears long flat green beans. They're all very good but... I actually didn't expect them to be yellow. And what's with that green one?

The Tongue of Fire are obviously pole beans. They were sold to me as bush beans and that's how I planted them in both gardens... so they're a bit of a mess, twining and sprawling around. They are not particularly prolific. Additionally, they are apparently extremely attractive to bugs. They have sustained more damage than any of my other beans. We've eaten a bunch of them both as snap and as shelly beans; they're nice enough but not quite as special as I'd hoped.

My tomatoes are all over the ground, due to mismanagement. However, they are starting to ripen up nicely and we've been eating quite a lot of them. The Persimmon variety is fantastically sweet and lovely. The Brandywines are misshapen but delicious. I don't think I'll grow the "Heart" variety again; they are humongous but slow to ripen. I have a couple of mystery plants in there that are producing tomatoes of dubious quality; one appears to be some kind of Roma and I know I didn't plant any of those deliberately. Sigh...

In Karen's garden:

The Thibodeau de Compte Beauce are growing well and are very prolific and quite lovely. They look like a slightly heavy Rattlesnake bean. I'm growing them for dry beans which is good because their pods seem very tough. The Jacob's Cattle are also growing very well. They are reasonably prolific and seem untroubled by bugs. My soybeans look good and seem to be quite prolific. I want to eat some of them as edamame, but I'm not sure I can get out to Karen's to pick them at the right time for that. They were still flowering and had only tiny beans when I went out last week to weed and look at everything. It was kind of thrilling to see all the different beans hanging down from their respective plants.

I'm enjoying the gardens, even though they are more work than I can keep up with. Because of this, I think I'll try to do the community garden again next year. The dry bean garden is an hours drive from here, so not really feasible to maintain. I don't know what kind of yield I'll get from it but I can't really imagine that it will be cost-effective. Still, it will be nice to have some different beans for baking this winter, even if we don't get a lot of them.

If you crawl under a rock and die...

Once in a while, I get the feeling that I'd like to just crawl under a rock and die.

But if you crawl under a rock and die, you will never get to swim in cool, fresh water again. Nor sit in the shade of a hackberry tree and watch the river go by. You will not watch with joy the little yellow warblers flying through the willows on the riverbank. Or feel a cold, wet dog's nose, followed by little wake-up kisses, so gentle, on your eyelids in the morning.

Yesterday, we rode our bicycles to Pinehurst Conservation Area and went swimming. It is one of the parks of Rob's childhood, so we spent the day re-visiting some memorable campsites and trails. We ate a picnic lunch under some big old white pines and oak trees and explored the gorgeous Carolinian forest. It's amazing to me that we can ride our bikes for just a couple of hours and end up in a place with noticeably different flora from our own. Notably, there were a lot of large shagbark hickories, some pawpaw trees, and various flowering plants that I am not accustomed to seeing daily. It was cool! We saw a little wood frog, a brown thrasher and a few butterflies but not much else in terms of fauna. It was a holiday Monday, so the park was busy but the roads were mercifully quiet.

I was pretty beat on the way home and thought that perhaps I'd be miserable today because I had to get up at 5:30 to go to the coffee booth at the market. But I feel okay today, despite the long ride yesterday. Except for this faint, lingering feeling of wanting to crawl under a rock and die. Other than that, and a slightly sore cycling ass, everything is a-okay.

Dogs

Today was a shitty day for so many reasons I can't detail them all. But mostly, I'm just getting really, really tired of being broke and relying so completely on Rob. I've applied for every job that I see that I think I could actually do but so far no luck. I even signed up for a study I don't want to do. It's depressing.

Anyhow, I thought that going to the community garden would make me feel better because it usually does, if only a little. Today I was disturbed to see that my garden seems to be strangling itself to death. The "bush" beans have turned out to have serious climbing ambitions and are flopping all over the place, strangling the flowers and blocking out all of the light from that end of the garden. The tomato plants have all fallen down, taking their laughably tiny "cages" along with them.

As I stood looking sadly at the green chaos, I heard a woman barking orders to her dog: Come here! I said COME HERE!! Leave it! I said LEAVE IT!! Get over here! Sit down! I said SIT DOWN!!! I thought, well, maybe she has one of those hyper dogs who need constant direction to tire them out... but then I noticed that her dog was actually obeying her every irate command and that he didn't seem particularly hyper or badly behaved. This didn't stop her from kicking him when he didn't sit down quickly enough; I heard the impact of her boot; the dog yelped piteously. Then she stood over him, swearing at him as he cowered. I said, "Jesus lady, I hope you don't have kids." but she was already on her way home, dragging the dog behind her. I guess that was his ten minutes of exercise for the day.

I was done looking at the garden. I had about a hundred mosquito bites already. It was too hot for weeding and I'd picked every sizable bean I laid eyes on. I picked some nasturtiums and purple basil to make confetti butter, cut some chard leaves and climbed on my bicycle. On my way out, I couldn't help noticing another depressing thing - the garden is full of produce that isn't being picked. There are overgrown peas and beans covering the plants. I was tempted to pick some peas but I didn't; it would have felt wrong. Somehow even more wrong than leaving them there to rot on the vines.

Another thing eating me is that my dogs are getting so old. I've lived with them for so long, in such a congenial way, that I don't know what I'll do without them. They are there in the morning, (and always happy in the morning; as though they are just glad to be starting another day...) they keep me company throughout the day and they are there at night, when they seem always glad to go to bed. They used to be so springy and resilient; now they are creaky and clunky. They have lumps and bumps. They smell worse. But somehow they are sweeter than they were as young dogs. They seem more affectionate, more trusting, more gentle and loving; happier.

I wonder if that dog I saw today will get to be an old dog. If he will get sweeter as he ages, or if he will be dropped off at the pound with a broken spirit and a bad rap sheet. I wonder sometimes if dogs ever regret having hooked up with us humans in the first place.

Fava Beans

So, I actually grew fava beans once. Last year, I think it was. I had a bit of a garden out at Karen's place and for some reason, even though I had NEVER EATEN THEM, I decided that I should try growing fava beans. The plants grew well, flowered early and formed a few large, fuzzy pods at some point... (I think I was out of town for that, but anyway), when harvest time came around, I picked about twelve bean pods, all different sizes from the fava bean plants. I think I shelled them, getting perhaps 30 beans of various sizes - I ate a couple, found them bitter; it seemed so pointless that I think I gave the rest to the chickens.

Last Thursday, I worked with my friend, Carole, at her coffee booth at the market. Before leaving, I wandered amongst the fantastic bounty of St. Jacob's market and noticed that one of the vendors had many baskets of fava beans for sale. Honouring my bean fixation, I stopped to look. Before I knew what I was doing, I had purchased two 2 quart baskets (2 for $5.00) and was walking away whistling. Fava beans are so enormous that my huge bag, bristling with fuzzy pods seemed like quite a deal for five bucks. At home, the shelling began on the front porch. I sat on the porch step with a colander and my bag of favas, a frosty beer at my side. All seemed well with the universe.

After about half an hour, I looked down at the colander and wondered if I was missing when I dropped beans into it; there was an awfully small pile of pale beans at the bottom. The compost bag beside it was bristling with the fat, empty pods, however. Obviously, I needed some livestock to feed. Probably pigs would do the trick. The shelling continued, unabated, for perhaps another hour until at last I had pried open the last fat pod and dropped the last bean onto the little hill in the colander.
We boiled them for about three minutes, then I tried one. The skin was thick, tough and bitter. The little darlings needed to be skinned! So, another 15 minutes or so went by as we skinned the little buggers. By the time we were done, we had such a small pathetic pile of beans that I said to Rob, "These things are a rip-off! I'm never buying them again!"

I had sauteed a pile of onions and garlic in olive oil, with a couple of nice tomatoes and a bit of salt. We tossed in the fava beans and mixed it all up. We cracked a bottle of white wine (in Italy, fava beans are eaten with white wine...) and a loaf of crusty bread and sat down to eat.
The beans were like nothing I have ever tasted. A little bit sweet, a little bit bitter, a little bit nutty, soft and buttery, totally delicious and very, very satisfying.
By the end of the first bowl, I was eating my words along with the beans. "I'm definitely getting these again!" I said. "We should be growing these things! They're fantastic!"
Rob nodded in agreement, his mouth too full to speak.

In Search of a Better Me

I think that one of the best things about having the "right" person in your life is no matter how cliched it sounds, the right person inspires you to be a better person yourself. Like most things, this turns out to be a double edged sword. Standing beside a really great person kind of highlights what a twit you are, yourself.

My partner, Rob, is one of the best people I know; one of the few real heroes in the story of my life. I say this not only because he is honest and funny and kind and generous, but also because he is flawed and knows he is flawed. We all are, of course, but some of us hate like hell to admit it.

Last night, we had an excellent dinner with good friends. (The dinner included homemade linguine and pesto, epi bread and fancy cheese, a raw broccoli and apple salad and gelato from the Italian place in Waterloo. It was fantastic.) After dinner, Rob told a story about riding his bike up to Paisley (a 7 hour trek) and having one incident on the road; a guy yelled, "Get off the road!" at him. Rob said, I tried to yell back, "Share it with me!" but what came out of my mouth was, "Fuck you, dick!"
Everybody laughed. It was a funny telling but what was really funny about it, is that Rob hardly ever swears like that. He is a very controlled person, and while he does swear occasionally, it is rarely in anger and even more rarely directed at anybody.

I, on the other hand, am quite a potty-mouth by comparison. I have to bite my tongue about a million times a day to keep from chewing out everyone who comes into contact with me and I fail regularly. And, as it turns out, I'm also less honest, less funny and certainly less generous than Rob. (They say you shouldn't compare yourself to others, but really, who can help it?) And if I hadn't met Rob, I might never have figured out that I'm not quite as great as I thought I was; I used to think of myself as really honest and quite funny, and at least somewhat generous. (Umm... fail...)

So I'm writing this because I'm trying to get up my nerve to go to my community garden. I'm afraid to go there because I haven't been in a while and I'm pretty sure that it's out of control by now. Specifically, I'm afraid of my tomato plants, although the prospect of the weeds and my "bush" beans is also alarming. But, look at me, I'm going to take a page from Rob's book and overcome my fears and do the right thing. I'm going to gather up some trellis and some twine and a trowel and I'm going to ride my bicycle over to the garden and I'm going to whip it into shape! Yes, I am! Just watch me!

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Three (3) hours later... did I mention that it's 27 degrees outside? With a humidex of 33? Did I mention that I'm a menopausal female? With a propensity to sweating? And cussing?

Well, anyway, I did it! And I'm back to tell the tale!
Now that I am seated calmly in front of a computer with a cool soda in hand, it seems less terrifying than it was but still... it was pretty bad. You may recall me bragging on how nice my garden looked earlier in the season and even how some of my neighbours' gardens at the community plot looked a little... well... *untended* by comparison. Well, I'm bragging no more. My plot is now second only to the group home's for sheer neglected chaos.
First of all, my best crop turns out to be purslane, which is EVERYWHERE. I actually brought a bag home, planning to eat it in revenge. My tomatoes have curiously decided to both mutate and mutiny. I neglected to be ruthless in my suckering and as a result, today I was forced to tie them up with yarn and hack off some of their limbs with a nail file. (I forgot a knife.) It pained me to do it but I can't have them acting like something out of "Little Shop of Horrors". Still, a few of them have elected to crawl across the path and lie down in my neighbour's garden. Fortunately, she is about 80, blind and very kind, so she might not object. I told them I'm coming back later with some serious bondage equipment but they only snickered.
My Tongue of Fire bush beans are finally blooming prettily but they are also sprawling around smothering things for no good reason. I put in a couple of bamboo stakes and some trellis for them to lean on. My neighbour across the main path planted purple bush beans and hers are very well behaved and are covered in small purple beans already. Another neighbour, Bill, planted scarlet runner beans (which I love) and they are already eating size. I'm envious. My pole beans are taller than I am, finally, and beginning, very shyly, to bloom but they are also looking much less robust than I would like. Bill's scarlet runners are looking very hale and hearty.
The rhubarb chard is finally big enough to harvest and I ripped off some chard stems which we'll eat tonight with the purslane. (I must remember to take a knife next time, if only to threaten the tomatoes.)
The nasturtiums are starting to bloom at last and I was able to pull out most of the remaining french breakfast radishes, thereby freeing up a little space for walking. The marigolds still look stunning, although some of them are now being shaded out by the tomatoes. My tomatillo continues to bloom madly but (unlike Michelle's) is not setting any fruit. (Why the hell not?)

Finally, I intended to take the camera with me to capture some of the joy and horror of the community garden, but in the end, I forgot it. So, for now, a photo of my better half will have to suffice.

Some things I will never do

There are a lot of things that I would like to do, in this life, but will probably never get to do.

Here is a partial list:

1) Write a best-selling novel
2) Learn French
3) Build a bottle house
4) Make my own clothes
5) Get a black belt in any martial art
6) Travel North America in a horse-drawn wagon, like the pioneers, or the old-time circus folk and document my travels with compelling photos
7) Make short animated films
8) Write songs that change the world
9) Speak fluent Spanish
10) Rule the earth as a (mostly) benevolent dictator

Today the humidex reached 42, which I think means about 110, farenheit... (the thermometer measures the actual temperature; the humidex measures the degree to which you wish you were dead...) I do not handle the heat particularly well.

The thing about this kind of heat is that it saps your energy so thoroughly. I do not normally watch sports on the television but I'm actually grateful for the World Cup games because they are such a pleasantly mindless distraction from the things I should do but don't have the energy for. My plan for today involves writing a cover letter for a job that I will probably apply for. I'll be lucky if i accomplish this; I have already screwed up the few small tasks I had hoped to accomplish today... this heat also makes me stupid.

There are some other things that I would NOT like to do but sometimes fear I may. Here is a partial list:

1) Scream loudly in the supermarket
2) Chastise people I see in the grocery store, based on the contents of their carts
3) Get so drunk that I actually feel no pain
4) Forget how to speak
5) Write a book that I love but no one will ever publish
6) Overdose on pizza
7) Alienate Rob
8) Make a "surprise" dish that turns out horribly
9) Kill somebody
10)Forget to thank everyone for tolerating me

Sweat

We were away from home for a few days and when I stopped by my community garden this morning, I noticed that my tomatoes appear to be taking over the world. Yes, I started them early from seed and yes, they are all indeterminate varieties but still I was unprepared for the frightening amount of growth they have put on over the last week! They are as tall as I am, twice as wide, and many times more vigorous, stretching their furry arms out into the paths. I will have to reign them in a little, with stakes and rope, lest they smother the gardens of my neighbours.
On the other hand, my beans, which I started a little late, are lagging behind the beans of the other gardens. The pole beans are beginning to climb but have no flowers yet, unlike the beans across the path, which are blooming madly. My so-called bush beans have developed some distressingly viney growths which make me think I will have to give them a trellis to climb on. However, it is 31 degrees outside, with a humidex of 37. (In case any of you are older than I am, that is 88 farenheit, and it feels like 100.) The air quality is disgusting, by any measure and the UV index is very high. I am therefore not enthused about the prospect of dragging a trellis several blocks for the sake of my confused and malfunctioning bean plants.

Ever since my appallingly premature menopause, (starting at 41) I have been what can only be called sweaty. As soon as I eat or drink anything hot, (or spicy) or experience temperatures even slightly above cool, I begin to sweat freely from pretty much everywhere and I don't stop until I'm sorry I was born. Fortunately, I'm not disgusted by sweat, as some folks are. I've never worn "antiperspirants" and I was not surprised to hear them being implicated in various cancers. Smearing a paste of aluminum and other dubious metals and chemicals all over your lymph nodes can't be a good idea. And the skin is a semi-permeable membrane, selectively allowing direct access into your blood and lymph circulatory systems. Your armpits are full of lymph nodes. I'm not sure of the relationship between lymphatic fluid and sweat but I am sure there is one.

For eleven years, until this January, I was a registered massage therapist. There is quite a bit of sweat involved in massage therapy and I have to say that I don't miss that aspect of it. If I am to be really honest, I don't actually miss any of it, except the earning of money, which in my world is a necessary evil. I have always liked working on people's feet though and I might miss that part, although I often found that my hands smelled like feet for hours after work, no matter how much I washed. I think this must be another example of the semi-permeable membrane in action. (If so, we must be exchanging molecules with one another each time we touch, mustn't we? I wonder what scientists say about this.)

Anyway, I must turn off this hot machine and go rinse the sweat off. This morning, I took the dogs for an early walk and we watched a young doe walk along in the water on the other side of the river. She was browsing in the shade of the trees and many swallows were darting low over the water, eating bugs. When we left she was standing up on her hind legs to get at some particularly appealing leaves. I thought that would be a nice way to breakfast; standing in the water, eating leaves and listening to the sounds of birdsong and the river passing by.

Heat Wave!

The fifth of July brings with it an extreme heat alert. I am unimpressed; the air feels like gritty steam escaping from the devil's laundromat.
We spent the "Canada Day" long weekend visiting friends and family out of town. How lovely to get out of the city and enjoy the cooler, cleaner country air. My dogs were happy about it too. They like to just lie around in the shade and watch the chickens go by. Plus, they hate the "fireworks holidays" so it's nice to get them somewhere quiet.

Tonight, we elected to barbecue on the back porch instead of further heating our house by using the stove. We don't have air conditioning but the house we live in is old and covered in vines (see "Mulberries & Bicycles" for a photo) which help to keep the house fairly cool until we get a serious heat wave, like this one.
Our weather is going crazy, in case you haven't noticed. We're having more floods and tornadoes and at the oddest times. This year, all the rivers here flooded at the end of June. Highly unusual. I've read enough to know that this is the climate change we keep hearing about. I am kind of appalled by the number of things that I, personally, do to contribute to it, without even thinking about it. I'm consciously trying to limit my "footprint" and to be less impactful wherever possible but every now and then I find myself doing something that I realize has got to stop.

So, ironically, (she blogged...) I kind of hate computers. I spent a LOT of time today trying to transfer some photos from my old iMac onto Rob's newer PC. What a headache! I was tired of trying to match my Guatemala trip photos to my blog posts that mostly take place here in Ontario. (Above you see a resident of Caye Caulker, Belize, basking on a lounge chair...) But my efforts were unsuccessful. I'll have to try again another day. And for now, my travel pictures will have to suffice because as I sit here, I feel the heat coming off of this computer and realize that it should be shut down soon, if I'm going to keep this place bearable. All these electrical devices emit heat, even the fans we use to circulate the hot air.

One thing I miss about eating meat is hamburgers. Tonight I made veggie burgers for dinner. I make them out of lentils and nuts and tofu that has been frozen and shredded, then thawed and marinated. This gives it a meatier texture and it picks up the flavour of the marinade. I also threw in some chopped, re-hydrated dried shiitake mushrooms, breadcrumbs, eggs and a bunch of seasonings. They turned out really well which is nice because I made too much and we're going to be eating them for a couple of days. In the past when I've made too much of the mix, I've made a sort of faux meatloaf from the leftover mix but I don't dare turn on the oven in this weather. We're stewing in our own juices as it is.

This post is clearly just a front for bragging on the success of my veggie-burger recipe. I keep saying I'm going to perfect them and then to try to market them. I want to do this because there are a few places in town that serve veggie burgers that actually suck. One tony place even serves a mediocre, frozen store brand patty. They overcharge for it, too.
In an ideal world, I would have a little neighbourhood pub where I would serve veggie burgers and delicious salads and freshly squeezed juices. Rob would tend bar, mixing the fabulous clinky-drinks for which he is locally famous. We would play cool music and talk about life and politics, love and peak oil.

But for now, I'm going to go around the house, shutting things off and closing windows and blinds. In a few hours, this heat is going to be insufferable.

Mulberries, again...

Today I made a horrible discovery. One of the best mulberry trees in my neighbourhood has been cut down, in its prime.

I'm so disgusted. I know why it happened; it was dropping mulberries onto some ugly old muscle cars that were being worked on or fixed or left to die in the parking lot where the mulberry tree had the misfortune to grow. This is something that happens a lot in the city; productive fruit trees get cut down all the time because they are "messy" even though there are lots of people in this city who can't afford to buy fruit. I know some of them; sometimes I am one of them.
According to Canada's "food guide", we are all supposed to be eating something like 5 servings of fruit every day. Hmmm. I don't know anyone who eats that much, except maybe during mulberry season when fruit is plentiful and free for those who want it.

This especially galls me when I think about how we are inevitably coming to the end of this time of cheap oil and year-round cheap produce. If we had any sense, we'd be learning about which local "weeds" are good eating, which local fruits are plentiful and nutritious, when to harvest local nuts, and then passing this knowledge on to our kids. Instead, we're spraying herbicides on our "weeds" and cutting down old orchards. We're teaching kids that trees are messy nuisances that need to be cleaned up before they spill their fruits onto our cars. What's wrong with us, anyway?

I'm lucky because my parents were both raised during the depression, and both grew up essentially on farms. When I was a kid, we ate dandelion salad, ritualistically, every spring. We went mushroom hunting on the May long weekend, and found lots of delicious morels. We ate apples, pears, plums and grapes from the trees and vines that grew in the orchard behind our house. We ate fiddleheads and mayapples and we learned to forage responsibly. In the fall we picked up the walnuts and butternuts that fell from the trees and we husked them and cured them in our basement. And sometime around Christmas time, my dad painstakingly cracked them and made black walnut fudge. And it was DIVINE.

This made a great enough impression on me that foraging is still a big part of my life. We eat a lot of foraged foods in my house. (Thank you, mom and dad! Thank you, Gaia!)

My dad died in the spring of 2008, at dandelion salad time, about a month before the first morels appeared. But a couple of winters before that, as my own black walnuts cured on the basement floor, I called him and got some of his fudge secrets. Then Rob and I made a great, smooth, creamy black walnut fudge and sent a chunk out to Victoria for my folks. They called us to tell us how good it was.

Mulberries are an excellent source of vitamin C, high in bioflavonoids and fibre, and low in calories. They are sweet, juicy and delicious. Their fruit doesn't ripen all at once, so that one tree's bounty can be enjoyed for a few weeks running. The "red" mulberry is native to Southern Ontario; songbirds enjoy it's fruits, it has few pests and the wood is hard and straight-grained. I wish we would plant more of these pretty little trees, instead of systematically removing them from our cities.

Mulberries & Bicycles

Both Rob and I have a complicated relationship with mulberries. You might even say a sort of a love-hate relationship.

There are quite a few mulberry trees in this area. Most of them are black; some are white. White mulberries are not actually white, but have a mauve cast to them and purplish stippling. When it comes to flavour, they have less character than the black mulberries, which are a deep, nearly black, purple. They stain a dark purplish blue and they stain readily. They are sweet, juicy and full of vitamin C. They can be a bit insipid but it is easy to eat a lot of them. Perhaps I should say it is easy for ME to eat a lot of them. *Normal* people, like Rob, get tired of eating mulberries after about five minutes. (By normal, I mean not completely obsessed with food.)
Unfortunately for him, he has very long arms, which means that he is the very best person to pick mulberries with, because he can reach the high branches, loaded with fat, luscious fruits, and pull them low enough for me to pick the berries off. So when he is ready to go, I am still clamoring for more and begging him to reach "that branch, up there, with the really big ones on it!"

One day in June of 2005, Rob and I rode our new bicycles across town and stopped at a couple of mulberry trees where we stood picking, talking and eating. Rob likes to say that we "went innocently 'round the mulberry bush" and when we came around the other side, Rob's new Brodie bicycle had been stolen. Mine was still lying where I left it. (I am about five feet tall; only a dwarf would steal my bike.)

This particular bike eventually came back to Rob, or rather some parts of it did... he had moved on by then and got another bicycle, which was also stolen, but that is another story.

Anyway, I believe that this incident has permanently poisoned Rob's relationship to foraged fruit. For a couple of years after the "mulberry bush" incident, even the word "mulberry" would elicit a visible wince and he still gets an anxious, furtive look in his eye if I suggest that we stop at a mulberry tree. The painful loss of his much loved bicycle will forever be inextricably linked to free fruit, to sweet, juicy little mulberries.

I still have my little DeVinci bike and I still stop at mulberry trees whenever I ride anywhere in June. But I usually do this by myself. (In fact, I suspect that Rob will actually detour in order to avoid passing certain mulberry trees. But even if this is so, who could blame him?)

Today, I stopped at a nearby tree and ate as many mulberries as I could reach. Many more of them were squashed under my feet as I picked; the ripe ones fall and cover the ground where they form a blue-black mash. The fruits are very soft.
I had been at home for more than an hour today when I found an intact mulberry on the washroom floor; I believe it must have stowed away in my hair. I didn't notice it fall. Last Saturday I found a whole, perfect, white mulberry on the driver's seat of my car. How did it get there? I think it must have tucked itself away in a shirt cuff, or perhaps in my hair, while I picked, then arranged itself on my seat when I wasn't looking.
I am starting to think the mulberries have something to tell me, about secrecy or trust; that they have a message for me and are trying to convey it. Perhaps if I keep on picking and eating, it will eventually come clear.

Me and the Beans

This year, for the first time in many years, I have a real vegetable garden. In fact, two gardens. One is my community plot and the other is my dry bean garden at Karen's place.
I discovered in the process of creating these gardens, that I have something of a bean obsession. I kept finding myself at the library, looking at vegetable books (the bean section...) or online doing bean research... or calling people on the phone to talk about beans... (this last is significant because I loathe the telephone and avoid talking on it whenever possible.) Anyway, I was not able to find all of beans that I wanted to plant but I did find some of them.

Here is a list of the beans I am currently growing:

Rattlesnake (pole) I was obviously attracted to the name of this bean.
Northeaster (pole) A variety bred to do well in cool, wet environs... also supposed to be delicious. Sometimes we have a cool wet summer here.
Tongue of Fire (bush) Again, what a great name. Rumoured to be from Tierra del Fuego, a place I visit in my dreams.
These are in my community garden. The pole beans are for eating green, or as snap beans; the bush bean is best consumed as a shelly bean. (Prior to my bean research, I didn't know what a "shelly bean" was; now I am a know-it-all...)

The following beans are my "dry bean garden" that I have out at Karen's place. I am growing them to eat as dry beans. We eat a LOT of beans now that we are mostly vegetarian. I wanted to try growing something different than the usual varieties you find at the grocery store. And I figured that dry beans wouldn't need a whole lot of looking after and molly-coddling. (Let's hope...)

Thibodeau de Compte Beauce (bush) I no longer remember what attracted me to this one; it was probably the lovely french name. I have always wanted to learn french and I frequently fantasize about moving to Quebec and becoming a francophone. I admire the culture, if not Celine Dion.

Jacob's Cattle (bush) These are some of the prettiest beans in existence. A bag of them could make a strong man cry.
Tongue of Fire (bush) I had to have some of these as dry beans, too, just to see. (What if that whole "shelly bean" thing doesn't work out?)
Soybean (variety unknown) So, I was in a bean-planting frenzy when I ran out of beans. Karen had a big bag of organic soybeans that was left behind by another friend, so I planted a whole row of these. I really love soybeans as edamame, (or eaten while green) but I don't know if this variety will be good for that or not.
(We like to steam them briefly in a bit of boiling saltwater, then smother them in olive oil and sea salt and suck them out of their fuzzy pods...)

Sadly, I was unable to find "Lazy Wife" although I think I have a source for next year. We have had very good weather for beans this year, so I am hopeful for my gardens. It has been quite hot and we have had plentiful rain. My pole beans are climbing the bamboo teepees we made for them.
I feel a sense of order in the universe.

Earthquake!

There are some days on which I feel as though everything is ultimately going to be alright; that no matter what craziness life throws my way, I am equipped to deal with it; no matter how hard it rains or how deep the snow falls, I am prepared; no matter how weird things get, I'll get through it.


Then there are the todays.

I am a hopeless, frustrated, thwarted basket case. My every communication is garbled and hence misunderstood. My thoughts are mired in mud. Everything is deeply personal. I am pissed off at the world and everyone in it.

So, how does one reconcile these two realities? There is a lot of pop psychology out there that tells you to act like the person you want to be. Put on a happy face and you will be happy. But what if your happy face won't be put on? What if it is an ill-fitting, distorted mask that makes you look like a demented clown? If little children shriek and run away when they see you?

It is really hot and humid outside today. We are expecting "severe" thunderstorms this afternoon. I am scheduled to drive into Guelph to cook dinner with an old friend. We will hang out in her newly renovated kitchen, talking and drinking wine, cooking dinner with her kids... this should be a rewarding, fun, relaxing activity. However, instead of looking forward to it, I am brooding over it. My distorted thought process goes something like this: What if I don't have anything interesting to talk about? God, my life is so boring... she's going to think I'm such a pathetic loser... and what the hell am I going to make, anyway? It had better be good. What if her kids are picky eaters? Will we have to cook something else for them? I'm not feeling that energetic... and we'll probably have a power failure or something stupid... why do I always pick the worst possible time for things like this...?

You get the idea. Neurotic negativity. Putting lots of unnecessary pressure on myself.

Why do I do this? On another day, I wouldn't. I would plan an enjoyable evening with my old friend, and that is how it would unfold.

So, I took a break there, saved that as a draft and went out to run errands. While I'm out, running around swearing, getting groceries and bitching about what a headcase I'm turning into, we have an earthquake! No kidding! An honest to goodness, actual, ground-shaking, building-trembling earthquake!
And suddenly that's all anyone is talking about, "Did you feel it?" "Where were you?" "I heard it was a 5.7!" "I heard 5.0!" "It was a good one!"

And suddenly, all of my stupid neurotic little worries are kind of washed away. An earthquake! Cool! On my way back home, it starts to rain a little. We might get a LOT of rain today; they're calling for several centimeters! That should make my trip to Guelph extra exciting... this is turning out to be an exciting kind of day...

Re-reading this post, I think "So, you're hopelessly fickle. Do you think people will find that endearing?" The answer is I'm trying not to care. I think people are crazy, all of us. I just keep hoping that if I write enough of my craziness down, I'll start to understand it. And maybe someone else will understand it too. Then we can be friends and cook dinner together on earthquake days, and talk about how sometimes we stress over stupid little things. That is my fond hope.

Guatemala

In January, we went to Guatemala. Surely one of the most intensely strange and beautiful places on earth. A riot of colours; flowers, fabrics, markets of fruit and vegetables, painted buildings, old stone ruins crumbling into flowerbeds, school buses painted up brightly... music and firecrackers in the evenings and stunning, striking views everywhere you look.

Probably this blog is just an excuse to post some of my Guatemala pictures.

Anyway, I want to go back. When we came back to Ontario, in February, I couldn't get over how ugly the landscape seemed; so gray and flat and cold. The people looked sickly and pinched; even their clothes looked drab and ill-fitting. Now we are approaching summer solstice and everything here is lovely and green but it still can't hold a candle to Guatemala.

So, yesterday, I spent the day weeding and mulching two very long, very weedy rows of beans. I have a dry bean garden out at Karen's place. I picked up my mom in the morning and we drove out to Karen's for a visit. We drove through some of the prettiest countryside I know of in Ontario - the pastoral farm country of Waterloo County, past Mennonite farms with their huge, well cared for gardens and barns, fields of corn, wheat and soybeans, vast expanses of yellow canola blossoms, apple orchards and stone farmhouses with lines of clean laundry blowing in the wind.

You have to hand weed around beans if you don't want to disturb their shallow roots and even then, I disturbed a few of them. I hope they'll get over it. At the end of the day, we all went out for dinner to a popular little place in nearby Belwood. We were just about to order when a hummingbird smacked into the plate glass window.

There were some curious little kids fooling around nearby and they seemed about to descend on the tiny bird so I went out and scooped it up in the hood of my sweater and walked away to a quiet place in a sunny field. I sat there with it perched on the sweater and looked at it. It was a young ruby-throated hummingbird with an iridescent green back and a long, thin black beak. It was quite thoroughly stunned and kept jerking its head as though trying to shake itself awake. It was incredibly, shockingly tiny and perfect. At one point it extended one of its inch-long wings, then turned its peanut-sized head to look at me. I could hardly breathe. I finally did breathe, when it suddenly lifted up and flew away with a faint buzzing hum.

It made me think of Guatemala; the brightness, the impossibility of it. So much beauty packed into a space the size of my thumb. Something so small that not only lives but flies so fast and sure, that is not only covered in feathers but in feathers of metallic, iridescent colours, that not only eats but eats the nectar of flowers with its perfectly adapted bill. How impossibly fantastic.

Yet, there it was, in the heart of drab Ontario. Not-so-drab-after-all Ontario.

The tiniest things in nature tie the whole world together.

Temporary

Today was one of those totally surreal days, from this morning's interaction with the cop who thought my car was stolen, to saying goodnight to my mother this evening on the front lawn, as the Snowbirds flew over, practicing for some airshow or another. In between, I worked my first shift at a friend's coffee stall at the market, convinced the cop that I do own my car, watered the dill transplants in my community garden, did a little grocery shopping and had several increasingly bizarre telephone conversations with people I don't know. The last one was with a man who I will call a cemetery manager for lack of a better term. The conversation revolved around the disposal of my late father's ashes.

My dad was cremated last year. My mom, who will be 85 in about a week, brought his ashes with her from Victoria, to be buried in the plot he purchased for this purpose, many years ago, before they moved out west. We had a sort of family meeting where we all sat around and grumbled about what to do next and realized that none of us had a clue about how to proceed. Did we just take the ashes to the cemetery and dump them? Surely not. Did we need to bury them? In what? Are there regulations about hole depth and so on? Would we be needing a marker? Where exactly was this plot my dad had purchased, anyway?

One of the things I wish we could change in this country is the way dead bodies are disposed of. First of all, nobody talks about death as something that happens to everyone. We talk about it as though it only happens to the unlucky. We act frankly astonished when someone dies.
"Remember (insert name here)? Well... you won't believe it... HE DIED!"
Then, we perform a series of bizarre rituals on the body, starting with embalming (eww...) and ending with the burial in an absurdly ornate and indestructible casket. We place this casket in a large, deep hole, occupying a piece of land that can never be used for anything else. To ensure this, we plunk a big granite marker on top, all engraved with words and decorations, permanent enough to be admired until the end of time.

I think it is high time that we started planting people like seeds when they die. Don't embalm me; (please!) instead, wrap my body in a biodegradable shroud and toss me in a small deep hole. Then plant an oak tree on my head. Leave me in the food chain, please. Don't render me useless to the planet I love and call home by "preserving" my body with pickling poison and air-locking it in a vault made of virgin timber. Please!
My dad's ashes are in a plastic urn with a label that says something like, "This is intended only as a temporary container" as though it will suddenly evaporate if we try to keep them in there for any amount of time. Why? We all know it takes plastic a long time to break down. I guess the idea is that you're supposed to feel like a cheap cad if you leave your loved one's ashes in the "temporary" container.

The human body is a temporary container.

I wish we could all get over ourselves and start facing death in a more realistic way. There are so many billion of us now that I guess we'll have to, one of these days.

Lightning Bugs

I can't stop thinking about fireflies. Or lightning bugs, a name I love.

When my sister, Karen, lived in Honduras, I went to visit her during a very hot time of the year. She taught at a little school in the middle of a palm oil plantation - her backyard was bordered by a jungle. One night we watched fireflies that looked like floating lightbulbs, meander through the palms. They were so much bigger than the fireflies here. There was no ambient city-light to interfere with the opaque blackness of the jungle or to diminish the beauty of the fireflies.

I miss fireflies. When I was a child, we used to see them in the overgrown apple orchard behind our house. Then I moved to the city and stopped seeing them. They are hypersensitive to pesticides, which I think is why they are less common than they used to be. I saw them again, in abundance when Karen and I lived at the Donkey Sanctuary, near Guelph. And now that Karen has her own 17 acres of property, some of it wetland, she has fireflies again. And plenty of them; we sit up on her balcony and look out over a little sea of floating, blinking lights. It's wonderful.
But what troubles me is that I don't see them anywhere else. When I make the hour long drive home from Karen's place, I say goodbye to the fireflies and I don't see even a single one all the way home, past farms and drainage ditches and forests and houses and suburbs...

Will they come back? I really want to know. I have this anxiety about them, a "what if they don't EVER bounce back?" anxiety. We have a pesticide bylaw now in Ontario which should work in their favour but I keep hearing that people don't respect the bylaw and use pesticides anyway. And farmers are still spraying pesticides and herbicides on their fields; that's not likely to change anytime soon...

Some days I feel like I'm just putting in time, waiting for the fireflies to come back. Then maybe I'll be able to relax.

Kimchi and Thunderstorms

It's the end of May and we are having a heat wave. Records have been broken. Our doors and windows are closed; our blinds are drawn. We are trying to stay cool. At night, we open all the doors and windows up again and pray for breeze.
Tonight we are expecting a thunderstorm. Seamus hates thunderstorms. I like them, as long as I can hide from the lightning.

Blue was very sick this month with a freakishly enlarged prostate and an accompanying urinary tract infection. Once we figured it out, antibiotics quickly fixed him up. He wouldn't touch food for four days but now he is happy and eating again. I'm relieved; I've had enough sickness and death in the last couple of years to last me a lifetime, thank you. But I know it is not over. My dogs are old and this is no doubt a temporary reprieve from the inevitable. Thinking of the future is painful but important. Planning for death is hard but is something we need to do.

Today, I am on a quest for poles. Poles for the pole beans that I am planning to plant in the community garden. If I were a more organized person, I would have started sunflowers a few weeks ago and had the beans climb up them. Wouldn't that have been great? Yes, it would have. But anyway, I'm having a hard time finding suitable poles. I have found some possibilities in the garage but will need some help in cutting them to size. Rob is good at this kind of thing. In fact, it seems that Rob is good at everything he tries his hand at. Rob is enviable. But... can he make kimchi?

Another project underway is making kimchi. Kimchi is a Korean pickle, made with cabbage and spices and sometimes other vegetables and fruits. It is one of the famously healthy fermented foods that I want to learn more about. I've never made it before but I think I'm going to start today. The recipe that I found online instructs you to "massage" the chilies into the cabbage... having had some experience with both chilies and massage, I'm pretty sure that this instruction is intended for hard-core, experienced, Korean kimchi makers, not little Caucasian novices with soft hands like me. When I handle chilies, I suffer. But I like to go to Vietnamese and Thai restaurants and watch Asian people crunch down the whole chilies served with their pho, as though they were no hotter than bean sprouts.

So I'm going to take a shopping bag and go off into the heatwave to the Asian supermarket where I will buy some napa cabbage and perhaps some fresh chilies. I'm going to cut up a bunch of vegetables and rub chili and garlic paste into them. I'm going to suffer for my dinner. In this way, I will appreciate that I am alive and hungry and able to eat. As I walk to and from the Asian store, dripping sweat, I will look around for the bean poles that the beans will climb on. I am planning for the future, despite the coming storm.

Artichoke Time

Thankfully, we are having an early spring.
Foraging time!

I am first and foremost a forager; Rob and I eat dandelions, leeks, nettles, morels, puffballs, fiddleheads, garlic mustard and a variety of other flora. (We do not eat fauna except on rare occasion, like the time we fattened up our own escargot...)

Spring is for foraging and also for artichokes. Don't be intimidated by them if you are unfamiliar with their charms! Look for them at markets and good produce departments. They are delicious and nutritious and considered by many to be a spring tonic. I buy it; they look like thistles and in my book, that makes them medicinal.

Here is my recipe:

Take as many small artichokes as you want to eat. (buy small, firm, fresh, squeaky ones) We eat about 5 or 6 each, as a simple light meal or lunch.
~ trim off stem and top fifth or so of each choke
~ place in acidulated water while you trim the rest (2 tablespoons vinegar or lemon juice in a large bowl of water) otherwise the cut parts will turn an ugly gray-brown colour...
~ steam in an inch or two of water, covered, 8 - 10 minutes, until a skewer easily pierces the thick part...
~ melt some butter with lemon juice and a spoonful of mustard; whisk together... the mustard is an emulsifier;)
~ sit with someone you love and eat the artichokes leaf by leaf. Dip each leaf in the butter mixture and scrape the good stuff off with your lower teeth. As the leaves get smaller, you will eat more and more of them until you get to the inner heart of the artichoke. This you smother in butter, then eat the whole damn thing.

Warning: they are addictive. Also, they contain a chemical that makes everything taste kind of sweet after eating them. How fun!

Amazing Grace

Seamus, looking at stuff.

I don't go to church; I go to the woods.
Easter Sunday. We walk in an area that is destined to become a subdivision. It is privately owned land, near the Grand River, Bridgeport, Ontario. It contains a field that was planted in alfalfa last year and is now home to a vast colony of field mice.

My dogs like to hunt mice. My twelve year old Australian Cattle dog/Border collie mix, Blue, is especially into this game but he is not nearly so good at it as my eleven year old husky mix, Seamus. Seamus is gifted in the ways of the hunt. Today, he stands motionless for a long moment, his head tilted, listening, then he pounces with amazing grace. A moment later, I see a mouse flying through the air, already dead.
Although he is good at killing things, Seamus doesn't seem to want to eat the creatures he kills. This is particularly strange because Seamus will eat damn near anything. I point out to him that it is morally wrong to kill for sport ~ that eating the mouse would at least give its death a purpose ~ he remains unmoved. He touches the mouse with his nose once; twice; wanders off.

Fortunately, Blue has been watching. He sneaks over and quickly eats the mouse.
Hallelujah. Happy Easter.

Crackadaisical

Bitter today.

I'm so fucking tired of the way we've set things up. Why did we have to go and make it all about money? I don't get it. What made us think that unbridled capitalism was going to make us all happy? Didn't we notice the signs that told us that the biggest, slimiest thugs would rape the planet and stomp on the indigenous people and make their fortunes by squeezing the blood from the people beneath them on the totem pole? Didn't we realize that we were the people under them on that pole? Were we fooled by their insincere smiles and genial chuckling? Dazzled by their designer duds and expensive haircuts? Blinded by the glare off their perfect, bleached teeth?

I come from a family of artists, some of them very productive and somewhat successful. I also come from a family of hoarding pack-rats, some of them certifiable. I am blessed/saddled with the familial artistic temperament, tragically coupled with a crippling lack of self esteem that prevents me from sharing anything I create with anyone, even (especially) the people I love. I also carry the tragic and disgusting pack-rat gene, like my mother's aunt Mary. I have this idea that all this shit I've surrounded myself with, is somehow valuable. (Hint: It ain't.)

In order to survive in this capitalist paradise we have created, a person is required to have 'drive'. A person is required to be 'motivated to succeed'. A person is not supposed to be completely lackadaisical, to be content to spend hours watching the birds in the backyard, or thinking about the varieties of beans one might plant. If one had a garden. Which one doesn't. Because one has dogs, instead.

Rewards: today, as I sat on the porch in the unseasonably perfect weather, our resident flock of chickadees came visiting and sat close enough for me to touch, drinking from the rain bucket. The goldfinches were there too, at the niger seed feeder, singing their cheery song and a white breasted nuthatch dropped in for a while, too. I also saw Senor Chipmunk perched on the wisteria, surveying his kingdom. Later, I scratched Seamus's belly and saw his secret smile.

Now I'm going to roust myself out of this chair and make some dinner. Dinner is one of the few areas in which I demonstrate competence. I'm feeling pretty lackadaisical but there is no denying that it's time to move.

Lazy Wife

I'm on the phone.

I'm on the phone, searching out beans. This year, Rob and I have secured a plot in a nearby community garden, and I am launched by excitement into premature gardening overdrive. I spent a goodly chunk of this morning planting tomato seeds into infuriatingly dusty peat mix, armed with a sprayer and a chopstick. Assorted Brandywines, Stupice, tiny yellow Coyotes. All seems to have gone well. Now, talking to an organic heirloom seed seller, from whom I have ordered Northeaster and Rattlesnake beans, I describe the exact bean I am seeking.
It's one of those ones you can eat at any stage, I say. It's really easy to shell; I think it was one of the first string-less beans...
Ah, she says, you're looking for 'Lazy Wife'.

Lazy Wife. The name kind of says it all, doesn't it?

I spend a moment picturing the harried farm wife of old, awake before dawn coaxing the embers in the wood stove to life before going out to pump water for breakfast, tea, a day of washing and cleaning and cooking. She pauses for a moment, perhaps at the grave-site of one of her nine children to say a quick prayer, then hurries back to the kitchen, lugging the metal water pail. She lives in a time when any effort to lighten her impossibly heavy load will be regarded as "lazy".
Yes, I say. That's the one. That's the bean I want.

What is that sound, anyway?

When I was a teenager, I became convinced that I would die in a gun battle. My death, as I foresaw it, would be untimely; I would be murdered by the bullet of a criminal. No matter that I grew up in a Mennonite family in a quiet Mennonite town. No matter that my home life was peaceful and calm, that my mother gardened and cooked, that I walked daily with my dog in the overgrown apple orchard behind our home. I dreamed nightly of the bad men who were coming to shoot me.

I'm walking the dogs through a spring field of last year's grass, riddled with mouse holes and mole paths. We crunch through brown oak leaves and twigs, gray with lichen. Last year's evening primrose stalks, furry rosettes of mullein, soft and minty-gray. Across the field I notice a rock covered in mosses and lichens. If someone asked me to name the most life affirming thing I can think of, it might be this; this field, these dogs, this rock. The rock is ancient, gray, pitted. How can it possibly support such an intricate emerald forest? Yet it does, testament to the sheer persistence of life.
Squatting beyond the field, there are hulking rows of immense houses, perched on the edge of this park by the river. I remember when there were fields and forests there, too, remember a time before this became a trendy area to live in a luxury home, near the riverbank. Before the foxes and deer were driven away. It seems to me, that somewhere along the way to becoming ourselves, we all got lost. We looked at the limitless wonder around us and instead of embracing and revering it, we shrank away in fear. The fear of what it could do to us. Then, we imagined that we could keep ourselves and each other safe from the world and we started saying and doing stupid things, in order to minimize our perceived risk. We built all manner of walls and fences and compounds; we filled drowning ponds with concrete; we dammed raging rivers; we killed the wild animals because we imagined how they might hurt us. We barricaded ourselves from nature. And we hid indoors.

There is a saying that you don't hear the shot that kills you, in the same way that you don't smell your own brakes burning on the highway. When I contemplate this, I think of my old friend Ann, long dead these years, saying, Now how could a person claim to know a thing like that?

Indeed, I am in the mood to challenge that saying.
In fact, if I keep still for a moment, I believe I can hear that bullet now, a faint, far-off whistle, approaching fast, like a runaway train.