Saturdays

I love Saturdays. They feel so brimful of possibilities. Today I'm going to sort out my office, finish the revision of my manuscript, bake a cake, clean and beautiful my house.

Yep, I know what you're thinking. For that, I'd need a month of Saturdays -- as opposed to time feeling long and drawn out in a month of Sundays. I can hear my late mom using that expression, and I suppose it came from my grandmother's Calvinistic upbringing when Sundays had to be kept as a day of church-going and rest.

Nevertheless, I'm going to do quite a lot on that list, even if I don't accomplish more than start tidying my study, and only get around to laundry and bathroom cleaning.

When I was a child I often used to spend weekends staying with a friend who lived in a mansion, with a garden to match. The lovely thing was, Saturday mornings were always devoted to baking and to picking and arranging flowers. That feeling is surely what still works in me today, all these many years later. Yes, childhood experiences can go very deep.

The good old ways. Better... or not?

Earlier this week I visited my favourite shoe store and bought new sandals. When I walked in, I saw right away that the middle-aged guy who'd served me a few times before wasn't there. In his place was a very pleasant young blonde, who was obliging and helpful. So, what was the difference?

I can say that the man was perhaps not so 'available' as the woman, but he did something I valued. That is, he'd open up the shoes for me to try. He'd unfasten the buckles, undo laces and so on. Both of them took the shoes out of the boxes. Or one shoe, anyhow.

Now that my fingers don't work so well any more, I kinda miss that kind of attention.

The old days came back to me, the days when there'd be a specially shaped stool the shop person would sit on. Your foot would be guided into the shoe, which lay on a kind of ramp. Then the buckles would be done up and you'd be ready to go. Stand up and admire your feet in the mirror. Or not. Decide if the size was right and if they felt okay. Or not.

Still, the blonde was sweet.

St. John's Day

I must confess, I haven't yet found my relationship to this festival. Still, it's interesting that both Christmas and St. John's Day fall three days after their respective solstices, so I'm holding a question in my mind: What happens during these three days to turn from the pagan into a Christian festival?

Today, the holiday in Quebec means a day off for me. Yay. I'd planned a bit of a catch up -- cleaning and computer, and maybe a bit of sales shopping as that's how I keep clothes on my back. However, the dh arranged a meeting and then lunch downtown so that possibility was nixed. And then I received a phone call from dear daughter-in-law to say she'd just taken a bread pudding out of the oven and would I like to come over and share it with her. I jumped on the bicycle and set off. Now, I like a bicycle, the pace of it that gives you a chance to look around at passing gardens, etc., and yet is quicker than walking.

We enjoyed an alfresco tea, the grandsons playing happily nearby. And I thought yes, that was a celebration, even though unexpected and unplanned. Sometimes those kinds of pleasures turn out to be the best.

Mid-summer day

What could be more uplifting than watering the garden early on mid-summer morning?

We have a smallish lot but this year have been reshaping and extending the small, straight bed we inherited from the previous owners. That's also meant that we've divided perennials and planted them again, sometimes in different places. So this got me thinking about landscaping design, and the idea of rhythm in the garden. You know, echoing a planting elsewhere, or creating a kind of symmetry and how that could work for us here.

And then I started thinking about rhythm in language. It seems to me that the way writing is taught today discourages rhythm, even in poetry. I can see what's gained, a certain taut energy. I always read a little before going to sleep, and I remember reading Hemingway and finding him too stimulating, to the point where I couldn't drop off. So I soon restricted him to daytime. But surely, if we write without rhythm, we also lose a certain quality connected maybe with breathing and feeling. To take a very simple example, it sounds very different and surely has a different effect whether I write, 'he began to walk' or 'he walked'.

So maybe the key has to be what I, as the writer, want to convey to my readers. And of course, if I wanted to present an idea and only an idea, the technique would be different again.

Summer dreams and recipes

I know it's not officially summer yet, but I've been revelling in the warmth and the beauty of this time of year. June has to be one of my favourite months. I like the dreaminess of it, the sense of being able to relax and luxuriate in the sights of green leaves and flowers, the scents of lilacs and new-mown grass, the sounds of the birds and the drone of the lawn-mowers. Time was when poetry was the only writing I could do during these drowsy months. However, right now I'm busy with revising a teen novel, hoping it'll be good enough to sell.

But that's all by the way, because what I really want to write about in this post is recipes. I've been doing more cooking and baking of late and that got me thinking that I need to organize my recipes yet again. The difficulty is, as I realized to some surprise, recipes are rather like jewellery. They carry sentimental value, and therefore, some of them are hard to discard. I mean, there's the one I acquired years ago when our eldest daughter was still a toddler, and the mother of a friend of hers, as pressed for time as I was, gave me a chocolate cake recipe that begins, "Into your mixing bowl, hurl two eggs!" Then there are others that I inherited from my mother-in-law, and still more from my own mother, all in their own handwriting. Somehow, when I take those out, I feel connected with them once again. Maybe the best solution is to forget about throwing the recipes away and rather to find a good method of storing them .