SUMMER PLEASURES AND ANTICIPATIONS

Suddenly Toronto has become subtropical, with moist air, intermittent rain, and high temperatures. “At last” the garden smiles, as it bursts into action. In one week it’s gone from torpor (except the leafy greens) to full riotous growth. And as the lettuce leaves toughen in the heat and the rhubarb season ends (sigh!), the chiles and tomatillos, the zucchinis, cucumbers, and eggplants are in bloom and setting fruit. At last.

On Friday I drove north out of the city, leaving at noon just as the long-weekend (Canada Day) traffic was starting to thicken. Once I was in the country, it looked as if the rain we’ve been having so generously had drowned many crops: there were fields of wheat turning yellow with excess water, and low-lying spots covered with several inches of standing water. But farther north, past Shelburne and into Grey county, I was in a different climate zone, where the rainfall had been just right, for there the crops in the fields were standing tall and healthy.

I was on a mission: to do a little visiting with my 87 year old aunt and with friends, yes, but mainly to go and sing with a group of shape-note singers in Durham whom I haven’t seen for over a year. The occasion was a birthday, an excuse for people to make the effort to get together for a potluck as well as the sing.

We sat in a big-windowed living room surrounded by leafy hardwood forest as the evening sky grew pale, and after eating very well we sang and sang, renewing ourselves and connecting. There was a pause for cake with strawberries, and sparklers and champagne toasts outside on the deck, the we came inside and sang some more.

The sky had darkened past midnight blue by the time I left just before 11. I walked out into the damp-scented air of the forest, got in my little red car, and drove down the concession roads that led to the highway and thence to the city two hours away.

That sudden quiet when the car is turned off at the end of a journey, the lovely silence of arrival, is such a balm. As I walked through the garden from the garage I felt relieved to be home safely, but also refreshed and transformed as if I’d been away a week. That’s the power of music and of getting out of town. A change of scene, however brief, lets me see with fresh eyes.

And that’s always a good thing.

Now I have only two days to get my head in gear for my short trip to England and parts south. I’m headed to the Oxford Symposium next week, a three day conference of food and food history. This year the theme is Food and Material Culture. There’s to be a little sale of kitchen tools that people want to off-load. I have one strange spatula that I am prepared to part with, but I am bringing a couple of other tools for show and tell: a bread stamp from Kashgar that is made of bird feathers and a Tibetan butter box made of wood, the aroma of which transports me straight back to nomad tents. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else brings.

And I’m packing several wool sweaters, just to be sure, because I remember how wet and cold it was last year… Surely it will be better this time?

In the meantime I’m expecting friends for supper tonight. We’ll grill over charcoal – lamb leg steaks and some chicken too, as well as shallots and onions and perhaps some late asparagus if I can find any – and talk into the night. Summer is such a luxurious time.

RAINY DAY PLEASURES

Well at least we've had some rain, I thought as I drove up to Grey County early last Sunday, through our third day's dark skies and drizzling rain.  I was headed to Elmwood, where the Saugeen Trading Community was having one of its three annual Market Days at the community centre.  When I got there, slightly early, the place was already packed and lively.

I shared a table with friends.  My offerings were some cookbooks, while they, longtime residents of Grey-Bruce and farmers, had dried shiitake mushrooms, hand-made cards, some young garlic (pungent and potent), hand-carved wooden spatulas (smooth and beautiful, made of maple)...You get the idea.  The spring Market Day is a shopper's paradise if you're wanting vigorous healthy starts (I bought several blue tomato plants and some sorrel), home-made baking of various kinds, interesting vintage clothing, books of all kinds, and a lot more that I'm forgetting now.  And there's always freshly made food to strengthen you if you flag.

Market Days are also a time to catch up with people, especially precious for me since I am no longer up in Grey County very often. Because it was rainy, we had a big turnout.  That may seem counter-intuitive, but in fact after several days of rain, people feel housebound. An outing to see friends is just what they need.

Afterward I went to friends for some great hanging-around time, and supper, and then a sauna.  It's wonderful, an instant piece of time-travel for me, to walk into the heated wooden box that is the sauna.  There's the smell of hot and slightly wetted pine and cedar, sharp and lingeringly soft too, and smooth textures of wood planks under foot and under the bum as you sit up on a bench.  Then there's the sharp intense sensation of hot steam travelling up your nose and hitting your skin, whenever anyone tosses water onto the hot stove.  And a hiss and sizzle too.

The cool damp air outside, the trees new-leafed and tall in the forest, the fading light of a long late-spring evening: these too were part of the sauna pleasure.

After a rinse off in cool rainwater, whose chill was refreshing on my heated-to-the-bone body, and a pause to evaporate dry, it was time to get dressed, have a hot tea for the road, and set out for the city.  Two and a half hours driving alone late at night can feel lonely I suppose.  But I usually have good things to think about, and music to transport me (Haydn's Creation, and Ndjava Vetse, and an international compilation of women singing).

This time there was other company too: the full moon was like a giant headlamp in the sky, silver and radiant, knocking out all possible sightings of stars, making sharp shadows everywhere.  Who could drowse off at the wheel under such magnificent stage lighting?

And once back, sometime after midnight, walking up the street from parking the car, I felt I'd been away for several days.  Is it really true that I left only this morning? was my thought.

Time, like perception and friendship, and knowledge too, can be so elastic.  How wonderful to have it stretched out and extended by a good rich day.  And to think that early Sunday morning I might have groaned at the sight of the rain and decided to lie in sluggishly.  I'd have missed so much.


A NOTE ABOUT GLOBAL PANTRY: I've started doing a bimonthly column for Cooking Light magazine called Global Pantry.  It's about ingredients that people may buy to make a recipe from an unfamiliar cuisine, and then want to incorporate into their cooking.  So for example the first column is about fish sauce, with a recipe for using it in guacamole...and with other suggestions for incorporating it into your kitchen reflexes.  I find I use fish suace every day for seasoning this or that.  Here's the link: http://www.cookinglight.com/food/world-cuisine/other-uses-fish-sauce-00412000075652/

SAUNA CLEANSING FOR BODY AND SOUL

A lovely calm in the city this evening, quite a contrast from the post-police heaviness of last weekend. Dom and Tashi and I are just back in our green oasis (the garden is SO spectacular) from two nights in Grey County. It was a great visit, staying with friends, dancing contra dances with friends and strangers of all ages and descriptions, having a leisurely but intense sauna this morning followed by a delicious swooshing swim in a rain-swollen river. It's so liberating to catch the current and get swept along, riding the power but without fear, a benign mother nature carrying us along.

Up in the country I was sleeping out in the forest in a little cabin-like space, a tiny trailer in fact, with screen windows all round, so that the bird calls woke me early and then kept my morning daydreams company. Last night was clear and moonless until late, so the stars seemed to hang low and for sure there were more of them than usual. "Diamonds in the sky" rarely feels like a good metaphor, but last night they were brilliants, draped across the bosom of the sky, I feel like saying.

The sauna, like all purgings, leaves me feeling aired out and light. And that feeling is carrying me along like the river's current. I feel washed of small anxieties for the moment, delighted with the world, pleased with the recipes I have already worked on for the Burma book, looking forward to telling stories and giving the whole thing shape: it's a lovely freedom, a freed-up-ness.

Now how to keep riding this wave a appreciative engagement? How to surf the happiness?

I saw an aunt of mine up north, well over eighty and still lively and beautiful and very engaged. She came too to the contra dancing and kicked up her heels with us all. S(he also taught Dom to waltz, as the band (fiddle, flute, drums, Irish-style) swept us along. She talked earlier that afternoon about how she always felt, as the youngest in her family, that she was not as smart as the others, not good enough. I said to her (after arguing with her that her inability to count up her change and remember dates doesn't mean a lack of intelligence -she has plenty, and it's lively! - just an area that some people are better at than she is, so what?), " But now surely you don't worry about what other people think of you?" She said, "Well, now mostly not, but it sure made me afraid then, afraid of getting things wrong!"

The conversation made me think about all the crippling expectations we put on ourselves, the unrealistic voices we hear in our heads hectoring us over small mistakes, or filling us with doubts about our ability to achieve. What a waste of energy! And how destructive! I don't mean that we should all strut around with chests puffed out and feeling like we're masters of the universe. But I do mean that the judgementalism of early teachers or parents or siblings can corrode us, and burden us, if we let it.

Maybe we carry it around when we are young, but surely as adults our task is to look those hideous negative chains that hold us down square on, confront them, and then laugh at them. They are our own constructions. We need to see them as papier mache, without power, and we need to laugh at them.

Feeling as I do today, thrilled by Dom's great driving (he has his learners licence and was fabulous driving down from Grey County in the red Honda Fit, loving it and confident) and by the lightness of being that's infected me, I am impatient that any of us gets caught up long-term in negative thinking. It feels anti-life, and certainly anti-pleasure and a waste of good energy.

How to purge? is the question. The sauna, by heating us right to the marrow of our bones, feels as if it's driving out all kinds of toxic crap, leaving us slimed with sweat. When the river or lake or shower washes it off, we are freed. Now what is the sauna for the soul and the trapped-in-a-hamster-wheel brain? I don't know.

But surely days out, not so much the buffer days we allow ourselves (see my earlier post from early feb 2010), but more the completely out of our element days, where we change place and pattern and disconnect from the normal, surely those times are the way we can get freer. Short term freeings-up happen when we dance and dance, into a kind of high that transports us. Heavy physical work can do it too, for sure. (Drink and drugs are other avenues, but they mire us down and we pay sooner or later.) But when we get the chance, let's remember to get out of our stucknesses, however much effort it may take.

AND AS FOR FOOD: Now that the new potatoes are appearing, if you have some spare hands around to shell peas, use them in a simple herbed potato salad: Boil the spuds whole, drain and let them cool to firm up. Meantime get the peas shelled and pick some fresh herbs: parsley, mint, plenty of it, chives, and then basil if you have it... or tarragon if you like. Be generous with the quantity of herbs. Chop the herbs and stir them into an olive oil and vinegar (or lime or lemon juice if you prefer, or a blend) dressing with some salt. A dash of Dijon mustard is an option and/or a dash of good soy sauce. Heat a small amount of water in a pot, add the peas, and cook them briefly, until just tender. Put the peas and potatoes in a large wooden bowl (or whatever bowl you have), pour the dressing over, and toss gently. It's a great dish for a potluck (Lillian made a 10 pounds-of-potatoes salad just like it for Saturday night) or for a hungry crowd, especially in hot weather.

GETTING MOVING!!

My last post was about transformation, the transformation of the space we live in by cleaning and music. Perhaps it’s the spring air and almost-summer heat, but as the flowers leap into bloom and the garden comes to full life, another life-pattern transformation has happened.

It’s a pretty trite and ordinary “passage” for many people, this one, but it feels happily momentous to me: I bought a car. You’ve had cars before, I can imagine you saying, so what’s the big deal? Well it’s the transition from no car to wheels that is big. The feeling of autonomy that you have when you own a car is so wonderful and somehow life-giving, but it’s not much noticed by car-owners. Once you have them, “wheels” become normal, you take them for granted. So, as with many things in life, I can appreciate having a car much more fully now that I have spent time without. Being car-less means being unable to offer a lift to a friend in need, or unable to at the last minute leap up the road to Grey County for a shape-note sing, or unable to take a load of discarded books or clothing to Goodwill, or... just fill in the blanks.

I feel like I’m back in business. And yet before deciding to do this, I had hesitated: money concerns, waste generally, I can’t even tell you exactly all that made me reluctant. Mostly though I had lost track of just how empowering it is to own a car. I had adapted to not-having, as one does, just like a cold makes you adapt to not-health and an ugly dorm room in residence makes you adapt to not-attractive, etc. The transition back to mobility, health, and attractive surroundings is a fabulous one. We see and feel freshly; we learn from deprivation to appreciate what we have...

The agenda for this car is a little different. Neither Dom nor Tashi has a driver’s licence, as many city-raised kids do not. They have been raised in the centre of a city which they can navigate on foot as well as by subway and streetcar. To learn to drive as a resident of this city (Toronto), just like in New York, you have to really want to. The guys never have felt the need, except in an abstract “it’s an idea, sometime...” kind of way. Enter the new car, which is not new, but used. I'm hoping it will seem so easy to drive that they will get really launched on getting a licence. I would love them to have that autonomy, and also of course self-interest is at work here: when I am old and decrepit, I'd like them to be able to drive me around occasionally!!

I bought the car with a friend and neighbour, who also wants the autonomy of owning wheels, while keeping money expenses, and consumption of other resources too, to a manageable level. We’ll share the cost of the car and of the insurance. It all feels like a sustainable way of engaging with car-ownership.

What did we get? A used Honda Fit, a 2007. It’s a small hatchback with great visibility, an automatic, unfortunately (because of the kids and my co-owner’s preference too), and a great gas mileage record. Let’s call it an environmental compromise, this shared used small car. But today, in the exhilaration of having checked Consumer Reports (thanks, Art!), test-driven a Rabbit/Golf,and several Fits, and then finally made a decision out there at the Honda dealership on the Danforth, and plunked down some money, I think of it as transformation. Welcome autonomy! Welcome mobility! Yeah!!

Oh, and I forgot to say, the car is red.

POSTSCRIPT: I'll be away for a week or so, leaving Dom in charge at the house, and the red car with my co-owner to get house-broken. I keep thinking of it as a puppy; next thing you know it will have a name!

I'm driving to Grand Manan for a few days with a friend who owns a small house there. Grand Manan is a large remarkable island in the Bay of Fundy, where New Brunswick and Maine and the Atlantic all meet. We're going there to see whether it's feasible to have a small "immersethrough" session there, hopefully this September, for three days. We'd base it around food, but instead of Thai markets etc, the side-interests and immersion would be in exploring tide pools, checking out the phenomenal French bakery on the island and the dulse industry, and just getting acquainted with a place where survival in a spectacular environment has shaped a distinctive local culture. Please keep an eye on the immersethrough site for updates.

An for those of you worrying about the Burma recipes, they are going really well. I am so pleased. A small part of me is reluctant to get pulled away from my engagement with them, even though Grand Manan is a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. So I'll be back and building up the repertoire soon enough! For now, just remember to pick those dandelion greens, as long as they are unsprayed. Wash them in a large basinful of water, or maybe do that twice, to make sure all grit has gone, and then chop them and stir-fry them with garlic and shallots or onions (which will sweeten them a little) and whatever other flavorings you choose. Endless green deliciousness from the plant so many still revile. How crazy is that?

PASSAGES FROM STRESS INTO BLOOM AND EASE

You must have had weeks like the one I've just had. They're exhausting. Mine was filled with intensities, anticipations, anxieties, and then in the end, with relief and delight that the pressured squeezed period is coming to an end... The biggest measure of relief is that my taxes are done, hurrah! So now I can clean up the garden, plant lettuce seed etc, and engage, at last.

At the same time the young people in the house are writing papers and working their way through their final exam schedule. Argh! It brings back memories of the coerciveness of exams! Give me taxes any day, over that!

One other event this week that marked a significant passage was that I drove the van (the blue Toyota Sienna that has been in our lives for almost exactly eleven years) up to Grey County and left it there. Farewell valiant steed! is what I felt like saying. I'm not a car person and tend not to love or even notice cars or other motorised vehicles. But this van I became very attached to. The first summer we had it, in 1999, we drove it all the way from Toronto to the west coast, to Wyoming, and through Idaho to Washington, then north to British Columbia, back across the Prairies, and then through the Dakotas and Minnesota to Chicago and finally Toronto. That was its inaugural trip. We took the middle seat out and put a rug on the floor, so the kids had lots of room.

Yes, yes, I confess that in the wide open unpeopled spaces of the west the kids spent a lot of time on the floor, out of their seatbelts, playing with Lego or stuffed animals, or reading.

Later on the van became a truck and farm vehicle, handy for hauling lumber and found objects, for pulling logs and heavy objects, a real work horse, up at the farm. The kids both drove it, their first road driving and parking practice, on easy country roads. We also made trips to New York City and Ottawa, and countless trips to Grey County, northwest of here. So we're imprinted with the van, it's almost a member of the family. But now it's time to let it go, giving it a final appreciative metaphorical pat on the nose!

So now the question is, do I look for a small used car? Or do I do the car-share thing and otherwise, if I want to go out of town, rent a car? I don't like to drive in the city, for political reasons, but it sure is nice to be able to offer people rides and to feel flexible.

Perhaps as a friend said to me this week when we talked about taxes, we are facing a more frugal future, all of us. We are more aware of environmental issues, and we soon will need to slow our consumption of (mindless?) consumer items and live perhaps more like our parents did. Maybe becoming carless is my first step in this direction?

Sorry for this not-very-interesting mulling out loud!

Grey County was at the next stage of spring, with fields a rolling brilliant green but trees still bare of leaves. Peepers, little frogs, trilled loudly in streams and ponds. Everything is early this year, a good two weeks, and very dry too. Unpaved roads billowed dust as I drove along them yesterday. The stars were brilliant last night, with no sign of cloud in the midnight sky.

But just before dawn it started to rain, first a pitter-patter on the roof, later a thrumming downpour with a flash or two of lightning shortly after dawn. It soon eased back to fine gentle rain. I walked out into Lillian's forest and it was as if the earth was inhaling the moisture, sucking it in gratefully. The lovely scent of wet leaves and wet wood filled the air. I breathed it in gratefully. Spring regained its softness and promise. In a branch overhead a bird trilled confidently.