SPRING CLEANING & NEW DIRECTIONS

Spring-cleaning is a word that I've been reflecting on recently. 

The “spring” in spring-cleaning starts out as a reference to the season that follows winter with its fusty enclosedness (at least in these cold latitudes). But of course it also says liveliness, springing-up-ness, movement in general: “a spring in her step”, “he springs up”. Then there’s the cleaning part of spring-cleaning. It comes with the image of clearing and airing out of cupboards and the putting-away of winter clothes and retrieving of warmer-weather garb.

But the most interesting aspect of the word spring-cleaning is the way it is loaded with metaphorical possibilities. That’s where my thoughts have been tending this week. I’ve been strongly reminded that a spring-cleaning of our attitudes or thought-patterns can give new energy and move us out of the sterile winter of old patterns and into new life.

It’s suddenly the end of May and at last, just in the last few days, I feel truly lighter. Superficial reasons include the fact that only this week did the weather in Toronto warm to an intensity that felt like a foretaste of summer, inviting us to wear shorts or light skirts and tank tops, with no protective overlayers. It’s been wonderful to feel the soft air on my skin, and to be able to sit out in the evening lightly dressed. And pedalling past trees loaded with airy fragrant blossoms – lilac, apple, chestnut, and more – is one of the best pleasures of spring, along with the sounds of the birds and the brilliant green of new life in the garden and on the trees.

But the bigger springing forward has come because I’ve now done my taxes: I’ve sorted through last year’s paperwork, assembled, typed in, and added up the incoming and out-going money flows, and handed the whole listing to wonderful Ian, who prepares my return (and yes I am still in time, for people who are self-employed have a filing deadline of June 15 here in Canada, whew!). The process of looking at everything, being methodical about it, and just steadily working my way through the stacks of receipts, bank statements, etc. has been remarkably calming. In previous years I’ve felt anxious, worried that I’d mess up. I now realise that those feelings of edginess also made me very inefficient, for they led me to take irregular stabs at organising, in between periods of avoiding the job. This year, by committing to being steady, I made the job tidier in every sense of the term.

That methodical, just-plod-through-it-until-it’s-done style seems to have carried over into other aspects of daily and yearly maintenance: It’s the season for getting the garden in order, and this year, instead of being very approximate and inattentive, I have dug in manure and tidied up lost corners (no it’s not a big garden, just a small enclosed back yard, but even so junky nooks and crannies had managed to create themselves). The result is a cleaner lovelier space, yes, and a happier me. 

I think this is more than the pleasure or relief of crossing off something on a to-do list. It is a changed perspective, a new attitude to how to take on chores and obligations. It’s put a spring in my step, this “cleaning” of my attitude.

I do wonder what has helped lead me to this new place. Perhaps just time and growing wisdom? I’m persuaded that it’s something more.

I think that often when we change some small-seeming pattern of behaviour it can shift things more deeply, change our perspective, and free us to move into a new “season”. One new and different thing I’ve done recently is to take an art class (my first ever), three hours of drawing class every Wednesday afternoon at the Art Gallery of Ontario for five weeks in all. In four short weeks (only one class left to go, alas) the instructor, Kelley Aitken, has led us to “see” in ways we hadn’t before. She has insisted that rather than drawing lines, we work with lights and darks. She’s taught us to see tone as the way in which we see contour. We’ve learned to use tone (degrees of shading) as the best way to communicate three-dimensional contour on a flat sheet of paper, using only pencils of various degrees of softness.

Yesterday at the coffee break I found myself looking at another of the students and seeing his face in terms of lights and dark, areas of brightness and shadow, so that it broke down into pieces or patches of different shades. It was as if Kelly had gradually helped me grow another pair of eyes.

Because of making photographs all this time, I have a fairly strong sense of geometry and line, and an eye for light, but this way of seeing is entirely new, a matter of close attentive observation, rather than preconception. The world around me has become much more three-dimensional, in subtle as well as more obvious ways.

It is thrilling to discover a new faculty and to see with different eyes. Travel often gives me a fresh perspective. Often when I return home I am moved to shift things around, reorganise the kitchen or whatever. But this fresh sight feels like a stronger and more lasting change of perspective. And I feel that it’s leading to all kinds of new patterns.

What a pleasure, to realise that there are more windings in the path ahead, and to not know what lies around the next corner.

FULL MOON OF MAY

Full moon last night, how lovely, and everything glowed as I pedalled through Toronto’s late-night streets at about 11. Moon shadows throw different things into relief, and they do that even in the city, especially on side-streets of course. The fruit tree blossoms create a web of shadows on the street, eerie and lovely as I approach, then give a little gust of scent to confirm their friendliness and beauty.

It rained in the night. The maples, plane trees, other deciduous treasures, are all in bloom, some discreetly, others more garishly. And this morning on the rain-darkened ground many trees had a carpet of brilliant green below them, the rain having washed off the delicate bits – pollen? Anthers? Biology was never my strong point.

In the dazzle of fall colours it’s easy to forget that springtime gives us a fore-taste of the same effect: ground carpeted with tree brilliance, tree debris you might say, and what a treasure.

I am delighted to be here for this moment of spring’s unfolding. It’s later than usual yes, and perhaps even more precious as a result.

Happy May moon to you all. I hope the birds and the little frogs are singing to you and that your heart is lifting.

EMERGING INTO SPRING WITH THOUGHTS ABOUT FOOD FOR US ALL

A gusting breeze from the north is blowing scatterings of white blossom from a neighbour’s tree like confetti, across my small back garden. Behind, silhouetted against the clear blue of this morning’s sky, the giant maple that frames my western horizon is pregnant with leaf buds, not quite out. They look like they’ll burst forth by the end of today. I imagine them giving a great “at last!” as they emerge into the light and warmth.

All this new life is crying out to be written about, for spring here in Toronto is a good three weeks late: the magnolia blossoms have just come out downtown, the lilies of the valley in my front yard came through the dirt a week ago, only, which is the time they are usually in scented bloom, and the farmers’ markets are barely managing to meet everyone’s hunger for spring greens.

A slow spring can mean that we get the pleasure of fresh brilliant new green leaves and drooping subtly graceful maple and other tree flowers over a long stretch. But this year it feels as if we have been so delayed that we’ll leap straight into summer heat with barely a moment to enjoy the freshness. I hope not. And I am told that for those who grow grapes and make wine in Niagara and upper New York State, this late spring is probably a complete disaster: Even if there’s heat now, the fruit has not had the long time it needs to slowly grow and fill out, so the harvest will be meagre.

Mother Nature is pretty stressed right now. Even in unpolluted, more environmentally intact times she gave with one hand and took away with the other, producing feast and famine both. But now we seem to be headed for more of the catastrophic and less of the benign, depending on where we live and what we’re trying to grow or harvest.

My time in Kurdistan was a reminder of the small margins that many people live on, and of their vulnerability to food insecurity. The refugees from Syria that I met in a UNHCR camp there were relying on monthly supplies of basic staples: oil, bulgur, rice, salt, sugar from the World Food Program. The stack that was each family’s food allotment, a tall stack, was a visible measure of just how much food it takes to feed a family, and just how difficult the logistics of feeding the world can be if and when there are catastrophes of war or “natural calamity”.

As I went out to Kensington Market yesterday late afternoon to forage for supper (I had black-eyed peas cooked to tender, and a plan to test a Kurdish rice recipe, but needed some greens, a little chicken, onions, and some wine) the choices were dizzying. There is plenty of real food, in a raw, needing-to-be-prepared-and-cooked state here in North America. Our task as home cooks is to take on the challenge of shopping wisely and treating food with respect. And we need to push our families and friends to do the same.

The challenge in my household is getting people to delve for leftovers. We all cook from scratch (and yes, when I am here I do a large part of the cooking), but that’s the positive part of the food picture. Even though I have moved to clear glass containers, to make things more visible (and to avoid plastic), it hasn’t really improved things much. I am the only one who regularly turns to leftovers during the day, and there’s resistance to them even when they’re on offer for supper. Do any of you have this problem?

One approach to avoiding food waste, one that an aunt of mine used to take, is to make smaller meals, to avoid leftovers altogether. Make sure there’s plenty of bread and cheese etc to fill the gaps, but just put out less prepared/cooked food, so that it all gets eaten. But that seems so inhospitable to me. I like the feeling of plenty, the ability to welcome unexpected guests without stinting or rationing anyone. And so the leftovers issue continues to frustrate me.

Any thoughts?

I’m resisting the urge to buy vegetable starts (eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, etc) this weekend. It’s all very well for me to imagine too much of a burst of summer heat, but if we do in fact continue to have a slow cool spring, it’s definitely way too early to put out starts. The impulse to engage with spring and new life is so exciting, so energising, almost irresistible. And that’s perhaps because it feels like a connection to our ancestors, who did indeed live with want and Nature’s fickleness, and without the assurance of the generous food supply that we enjoy…

PAUSING TO BREATHE IN THE SCENTS OF SPRING

I’m feeling light as air this evening. The weather is soft and kind, with showers every once in awhile to keep us moist and the scents of flowers heavy as I walk down the streets. The tall magnificent chestnut trees on Henry Street have all their candles out – tall spikes of white flowers touched with pink, that lightly perfume the air. I have walked under them for years, but this evening for the first time I reached way up to a bottom branch and took the liberty of breaking off one tall candle of a flower. So lovely. I sniffed at it as I walked on up the street and then discovered that my cheeks and chin were smeared with golden pollen.

The sky was smeared with tangerine and golden pinks as I walked past the lovely open space of King’s College Circle this evening after my second Foods that Changed the World class, this on eon wheat and rice. I must get out at dusk more often I caught myself thinking. It’s a time of mystery and promise, especially on a warm mild night.

My lightness is about the beauty of everything at this time of year, but also because I’ve passed through another portal, the Cilician Gates of income tax prep, for this year. Why does it weigh so heavily? Is it the feeling of being called to account? Or is it just the idea that someone is looking over our shoulder? Or is it a basic fear and dislike of numbers, addings-up, and organising tedious paper? Whatever…

I pulled together my records and typed things out on four or five pages. It all seemed to make sense to the wonderful Ian, who does my taxes every year. This time, because everything needs to be translated into Canadian dollars, my first page started with a listing of the exchange rates of US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Burmese kyat, and Thai baht…. It all brings a touch of faraway into the tedium of accounting.  Anyhow, I am delighted to have done with this stage. Yes!

Now I just need to get peppers and tender herbs into my garden, and maybe some cucumbers. I've been eating dandelion greens, asparagus, sorrel, chives, and other herbs, for awhile now. Each bite is so renewing somehow, still full of life because fresh-picked. 

And there is also work to be done, pleasurable most of it. For example I need to be ready for the last four sessions of Foods that Changed the World.  The class is great, lively interested students of all kinds.  Next week is olives and olive oil; peanut and peanut oil. It will take us from the Mediterranean to Peru and Senegal, and to Vietnam too. I so enjoy engaging with food ideas and with the world through food What a privilege to be able to teach it to engaged students.

And now with heavy eyelids it’s time for me to head upstairs to bed. I’m hoping to sleep the sleep of the just, with the heaviest of my deadlines now over with. I’m still not clear why tax accounting weights so heavily, nor why it should come in the spring, when otherwise everything feels so wonderfully optimistic.

I hope you too have the opportunity to stop and smell the flowers this week. It’s a good time to be mindful, for this full moon (May 24 or 25) is celebrated as Buddha’s Birthday, a huge holiday in Thailand and in Tibet, among others. Let’s have that sense of new life and beauty springing forth ignite our feelings of optimism and our energies. Enjoy the light and all the fresh new life that’s emerging and blooming…

STRIDING FORWARD THROUGH THE CHANGING SCENE

These days, in damp and drizzle and wind and hail and chill, the streets of Toronto are paved with gold, and green-gold and white and pale pink and pink-red….the tiny yellow-green maple tree flowers, the cherry and plum and apple and flowering almond blossom petals, that are being washed and blown to the pavement by rain and wind. It’s a dazzling show for those like me who are walking people. The vivid colours are kind of hallucinatory as I rush along; today I was in a hurry to get out of the cold.

The other day I was hurrying along petalled streets to see a young friend whose first baby was born at the end of March. It was my first sight of her. Olivia is of course downy-soft and adorable, her little fists clenched under her chin as she sleeps, her gaze direct and alert when she’s awake. I took her mother some books, kid books, to get her library started. I imagine them later with perhaps crayon lines and marks in them, and fingerprints. Every child needs a store of books. I’m no good at buying clothes or other things; I never know what’s needed or wanted. And anyway, babies grow like weeds, so todays large garment is tomorrow’s giveaway. I’d rather give books.

And that got me thinking about permanence and impermanence. Those flowering trees, fragrant or not, give us a moment of heart-stopping beauty, and then it’s washed away. The tree remains, a reminder of a moment, and it promises us another next year. So too a book gives us intense moments of pleasure, or connection, and later on its presence on the shelf reminds us of those moments and perhaps invites us to open it again and reread it. Kids of course love the familiarity of the already well-known book. They will ask to have the same book read over and over, weekly or nightly. We lose some of that impulse when we become autonomous readers. We seek out the new.

And yet at the same time there are some books that I go back to and reread, as a kind of soothing technique, a remnant of kid-impulse I think. They are mostly books that I read as a kid or teenager: the Complete Sherlock Holmes, in two volumes, is one candidate for rereading, perhaps every three or four years. For my kids it’s the Philip Pullman books, and some of the Harry Potters.

Perhaps it’s age, and the perspective it can give as I gaze back in time, or put my head into an earlier year’s place and gaze forward, but I am more and more aware that one of the things that keeps me feeling alive and well is an ongoing effort to keep a sense of balance as things around me change. Those can be the seasonal changes, that remind us of fragility and loss, even as those first blossoms are emerging on the trees. Or they can be the announcement that a friend or the parent of a friend has only a limited time to live, or the demolition of a familiar building on a neighbourhood streetcorner, or the closing of a bookstore, or the purchase of a new piece of technology that is complicated and needs to be mastered.

All change can be disorienting, or anxiety-making, even just as we contemplate the possibility of change, let alone when it shocks us with its suddenness.

I love through-lines, stories that continue across generations or across continents and oceans. I like other people’s family stories, the history of long-term friendships, I like thinking about the long-term cross-linkages in my own family and in my life. That idea of some kind of continuity is precious. And for me perhaps it’s what helps me keep my balance in the day to day changing scene, helps me enjoy the dynamism of young people’s ideas and the liveliness of their open horizons.

And so as the tulips fade and the petals fall from the flowering fruit trees, rather than regretting their passage, I love the anticipation of the next phase of the year: rhubarb and sorrel and tarragon now my garden, tender asparagus now coming into the farmers’ markets, and then after that the generosities of summer. Yes!