FULL MOON, FIRST FROST, & THOUGHTS OF CHANGE & ROUTINE

The moon is bright bright and full, making sharp shadows in the garden. And as often happens at full moon in October, it looks like this is the first night we'll have frost. So I was out there in those sharp shadows an hour ago, pulling up, with regret, the huge strong basil plants in the garden. I have two Med basils and two Thai basils. They've kept us aromatic and intensely flavoured all summer. If I don't pull them up, I thought this evening, they may freeze and then be wasted, blackened and gone. If I DO pull them up then they'll last a little in water in the house and I can use them mindfully and process the last leaves in olive oil for a pesto base that I'll store in a couple of glass jars.

This really feels like the end of the garden... even though there are a few last tomatoes clinging on, not getting any larger but slowly ever so slowly changing colour.

I've been thinking about change these days... well truth be told change is often on my mind, but in this case I mean social change and social and economic mobility, what it means and what's involved. I have been talking to everyone, perhaps tiresomely, about Doug Saunders' new book Arrival City. Here's the link to the site for the book. A friend who heard the author interviewed on the radio said, "Well it's a pretty easy theory to understand so I don't see any reason to read the book." But I found it riveting, details about what works and almost more importantly what doesn't work in some "arrival city" situations, are clearly explained. And the history of places where immigrants land, immigrants from the countryside, or from other countries, and how they help each other and navigate their way into better lives, over time, if given the chance, is fascinating, from Teheran and Istanbul to (failed) arrival cities in Paris and Germany, etc.

I have lent the book out, and it's probably in the library too by now, but it is really worth owning, so you can dip back into it at intervals.

Another recent book is Sheila Heti's "How Should A Person Be?" She has such a distinctive voice on the page, it's so artful while seeming effortless. I heard her read the prologue aloud at a book launch and it was fabulous read aloud. Maybe the best books are? Not sure, but it's a good test of writing, to hear whether it is happy and interesting being read aloud.

On another topic, the unexpected, I had a quick brush with "disaster" the other day. I was running in the sunshine last Saturday, the leaves bright and my spitrits too, doing a long loop to end up in Kensington Market. I saw some guys far ahead of me in the middle of the street working on the street, but didn't notice what was right in front of me as I stepped off the curb to run across a side street... It was a deep patch of fresh cement, and there I was one foot, the second foot in to the ankles and then out again onto "dry land". Yikes! The guys working said apologetically, "We watched you run toward us - sorry not to warn you!" I assured them I'd be fine. "No they said, Go right over there to the cement truck (huge and rumbling). "There's a water hose on the back. Get those guys to help you. And so with a lot of running water I cleaned off all the wet cement and then jogged on squelching a little!

If only all unexpected "bad surprises" could be resolved as easily! I ran on feeling lucky to be unscathed, and able to laugh, rather than wretched. Not sure why I'm telling this story except that as always when events take an odd turn, it was a reminder not to take any joyous moment for granted. And also I guess a reminder that change is one of the few constants in life. Thus if things are going well they can and will turn, and we need to accept that and be ready for it. SImilarly, and sometimes very hearteningly, if things are bad, depressing, rotten in some way, then they WILL change, evolve, get easier. Keeping a reasonable equilibrium in all this up and down and unexpectedness is one of the main challenges and, with luck, the main pleasures of life.

And to turn another topic corner, I find, now that I have been pushed to tweet and participate in that 140 character hamster wheel, that it is sometimes rewarding (when there's an interesting link posted) but more often it is just another place to check, another way of procrastinating.... If I have enough places to check (two email accounts plus Facebook plus Twitter) that means that by the time I have engaged with each of them it's time to recheck the first one again. Do you find yourself doing that? It becomes a reflex, like smoking another cigarette used to be.

Are we just destined to fritter away the privilege of free time and choice on often-meaningless repetitive behaviours? Or are these just highly evolved or hi-tech work-avoidance techniques?

The first check of email in the day, like the first cigarette, can be pleasurable and fruitful, but the subsequent ones?

Some days I avoid the computer altogether, or else I label the day or the morning a non-internet zone. It's amazing how much else I can get done, then. And it's a little scary to find how long it takes me to settle into more focussed thinking or writing or reading, like a kind of necessary withdrawal period.

hmmm

With colder weather arriving, and so less outside time, the risk of getting even more squirrely and online-hooked is real. Books are one great antidote, for sure. And that's one reason to be grateful that publishers are still, despite the warnings about the end of publishing, printing books, acquiring new titles, enticing us into deeper longer thinking and reflecting.

Some things don't change much, and one of those is my simple roast chicken. I've written about it before: I wash and dry the bird, then prick a lemon and put it inside, then drizzle on olive oil and scatter on salt. It goes in breast down for the first while, then I turn it, all at 425 or 450. Around it are sliced potatoes roasting, and also drizzled with olive oil and salt.

And this same old- same old is always a pleasure, succulent and satisfying and full of flavour. Next day's broth is also a treat to look forward to. Usually this roast chicken and potatoes combo is my Thursday night meal, after a heavy day for Tashi and before a heavy Friday for Dom. The guys cook other days, but Thursday it's my turn, a nice anchor in the week. I've come to enjoy this sense of routine, despite my dislike of predictability. Is this old age? Or is it just a realisation that some habits and routines are so pleasing that altering them would be a foolish waste of effort?

GOOD EATING AND THEN WHAT?

Roast chicken for supper tonight, an organic bird from Harmony, bought at the health food store down the street.  I did the usual, cooking it relatively hot, at 400, with a fork-pierced lime inside (lemon is classic, lime is what I had), some olive oil and salt on it, and starting breast side down for half an hour, then turning it over.  I put some peeled and tidied last-year's potatoes in slices around it, tossed in a little olive oil and salt.  With it we had plain jasmine rice (Oxhead brand from Thailand is our favorite, bought in 10 kilo bags) and asparagus I bought yesterday when I was up in Grey County.

 

Yum.

Amazing to be eating asparagus at the end of June, but here we are, storing up enough memories of asparagus pleasures to see us through the long ten month period until it's next in season.  It's been the essential green at our meals for five weeks now, or is it six?

And because today has been rainy and a little cooler, after a week of mostly sun and heat, and because the oven was hot anyway to cook the chicken, it seeemed a good idea to make another skillet cake. Tashi did most of the work, and we put some lightly cooked sliced apple on it just before it went into the oven.  There was added incentive to make a cake this evening because tonight three extra teenagers are coming to sleep over, friends from Grey County, on their way to Montreal.  I assume they'll devour what's left of the chicken, potatoes, and rice, as well as the cake, when they get here sometime after ten.  

And by the way, the chicken carcass is now simmering with some aromatics to make a broth, the next step on the chicken's journey.  And after that?....

In Toronto this last week of June, apart from suddenly (and at last) getting a good dose of hot weather, we also have a municipal strike, which means no garbage pick-up.  But despite the heat, things aren't yet feeling too dire on the garbage front.  Partly it's because some impromptu sites have been opened where people can leave their garbage and so we aren't living with piles of garbage in the streets, not yet at least.

But another big reason things feel fairly civilized so far is that now this is a city that separates its trash.  In other words, the "smelly" part, the food waste stuff, goes in a separate "green bin".  It's pretty low volume (the bin is the size of a small in-kitchen bin).  The larger volume stuff, glass and cardboard on the one hand and non-recyclable trash on the other, is separate, so it's NOT smelly or rotting. 

 What a difference.  Remember when all garbage was lumped together, so it ALL smelled and was yucky to deal with?  Remember the garbage strike in Vancouver, with piles of stenchy garbage everywhere?  And I seem to remember a long-ago strike in London, in England, where garbage, unsorted and all stinky, piled up for weeks....

"So far so good," is how it feels here in Toronto.  

Of course the strike also makes us all aware, each time we have something to throw out - that small "oops! I wonder how long this will last?" reflexive thought - that everything we discard has to be dealt with somehow, sooner or later.  That awareness isn't such a bad thing, is it?  

Now that we are heading into a second missed pick-up of food-garbage, our small green bin, just outside the front door, is smelly when I open it.  But it's not yet smelly from the outside and it's still only about half full (we don't generate much, except the odd chicken carcass and some odds and ends of leftovers, and potato peelings).

We used to compost (though that doesn't deal with meat and fats) but we live downtown, there are restaurants nearby, and there is always the threat of rats.  Some years ago we gave up composting because of rats and I hesitate to try it again, for the same reason.  My grandparents, on their farm in northern BC, had a pail of old milk and general food discards, including peelings, etc, and over-aged leftovers, that went to the chickens; other farms have slop pails for the pig.  Meat scraps and fat go to the dog in a farm household.  But we don't have any of those options.

Which leaves us dependent.  We need the City and the workers to negotiate a settlement.  Just do it, and sooner rather than later, please.

And meantime, it's a bonus to know that acting on the environmental need to sort our garbage also has this short-term side-benefit:  living with a garbage strike is way less stressful and unpleasant than it would be with unsorted garbage.  The other side of the coin is the educational bonus of the strike: it's making us all aware of what we are throwing out and of the problems of disposal.

Are you fed up with me always counting my blessings?  Sorry.  It's one of those tiresome glass-half-full reflexes, a survival skill that is now second nature to me.

And moving from practical issues back to pleasures, where we began:  I stayed last night with a good friend who has a place an hour north of here.  Just before I left this morning, she cut masses of her peonies, still blooming, but weighted and bowed by rainwater, and handed me a huge bouquet to bring back to the city.  The peonies in my garden are all over, and I'd accepted that they were done for another year.  Now unexpectedly there's a gorgeous big vase of white and pink peonies on the counter, sweetly scented, a last hurrah of spring.  Thank-you Trisha!