Floral Range
Turkish tulips at the Tulip Festival.
Nope, no tiptoeing.
Cherry blossoms over the forget-me-nots.
Larger than life, sprites who grab every grain of soil and speck of sun. I love the plants that seed themselves.
Anyone know this herb or flower? I think sage, but it’s been a long winter…
Or this tree by name?
Our Iris has over a dozen marvels of blooms.
Quote: “We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.” ~ John Dryden
Why I haven’t written
- I’ve been phenomenally sick and slow to rally back.
- Gremlin-infested body. This headache. You know it? It makes the rounds.
- By the time I finish a blink, 3 days have passed.
- But I have.
- I have.
- Believe you me, I have.
- And sometimes I do, but then bore myself, or work out what I was aiming to say, so delete instead of posting.
- And I’ve been away, working, and reading.
- These explanations also go for the future.
- I don’t expect to pick up the pace either.
- I’ve been aiming to remix my ratios, more face-to-face, less digitalis.
- Although it amuses me that people note with concern I don’t blog anymore.
- #4-6 notwithstanding.
[More 13]
Quote: “Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.” ~ Alexander Pope
What do physical remnants and records of history mean?
Pretty colours in a glass box?
Fashion inspiration?
Does it change to know it belonged to Joseph Montferrand (1802 to 1864), aka Big Joe Mufferaw?
There’s something about things which bridge across time. This was in contact with someone in the era of my great great grandfather.
It’s a sash that the Bytowne Museum keeps. They also have things from The Great Fire of 1900 where much of towns on the Quebec and Ontario sides burned. Where I sit was likely built on ground charred by that fire.
It struck me that we often put in museums are discontinuities…hey, come look at the odd unfamiliar costumes and tools that are obsolete. Try to guess what they are used for.
That tells a story in itself that what we value is what is lost and strange rather than what we can access.
The museum items that struck me as funny at first and then more sensible than usual, was a chalk for a pool cue and a billiard ball that survived the fire. They could have been made this year.
What do we carry forward with us as relevant history to keep? What do we label history vs. relevant? What do we internalize and talk about to keep alive?
People have chosen to hold the sash being from lost. This says something about the line of people who saved it, about who they value, what traits.
A barbarian Christian zealot I’ve been would call that hazardous mental ground. Any object that gets respect could become a talisman, venerated as a god, become a distraction from God, and must be removed for everyone’s safety so that the divine future coming can be the only thing to keep our attention.
It is human nature to hold onto things and nature’s nature to take away.
I’m reading my uncle autobiography from 1999. He gave it to me at the time but my mind wasn’t in a place to receive it. That’s an advantage of the written word. We can retrieve something verbatim thru writing.
If he had only told me stories, what could I reconstruct? Perhaps, I’d learn to paint and portray the memory of the storytelling days as the way shadows were on the lilacs outside the window screen as he talked.
So now I can understand something. I read that Granddad got his first regular income at age 44. He had 11 kids at that point and welfare suggested they should take some. He began working the rail lines. He’d farmed rented land, been a mailman.
My uncle taught up in Flower Station in the 50s for $1600 a year with no summer pay. It was a village then, 30 years later, urban flight was even worse. It was a clutch of dilapidated houses when Dad drove me up to Flower Station. He said the family of my aunt were from there.
There was still a faded general store. All the canned food and boxed cereal as covered with dust and was that facade of a full shelf of one item deep as any convenience store’s habit. It reminds me of communist era Russia, in good times, from stories I know of people I talked to who were there. Oral one-on-one histories have a potency like the sash.
I taught students English who went from university jobs, teas in oriental rug parlours of antiques, discussing physics and philosophy to forced relocation to a dustbowl to farm with the same hand harrows my grandparents used.
To a degree their recounting stories of stoning people or being shot by their fellow citizen in an uproar of madness like the French Revolution still traumatizes me as it does them. So many countries of students who expect their countries agents to still be watching, even decades after the government ostensibly has changed. Loyalties don’t change as quickly as political exteriors.
Living memories are good but they need a chain of people who are willing and able to hear and pass it on. Same as as is true with physical records. We need keepers, maintainers. They can be privately run or centralized.
Both have their risks. Small archives may not have the funding to keep temperatures and humidity right for fragile things and may have no succession plan, especially small ones run by one person. I think of a man I met in the 80s who had a hockey museum in his home. It was curated with sealed glass boxes but what happened to it when he passed? Large centralized depots for documents may have the funding for specialists but are subject to vagaries of funding and will.
Recorded histories have a way of being alone with the one reader.
Up in Flower Station, Dad know the store owner. What he knew was oral and I was a kid who didn’t need to know things. There was always a thrusting me past the bounds of family, for the school and what i discover to instruct me and let that propel me what he perceived to be chances of a better life than his.
There isn’t much of the family physically, except for the people. Mom’s family had fires that destroyed things. They moved often, shedding things as they went. Although in one move, hen they had 4 boys, in 1936 it took 10 loads by sleigh to get done. On the way home from the hospital with boys 5 and 6 two years later, the car was done with and traded for a cow.
How can I make sense of things without knowing the past that informed the motivations for how family reacted and acted? Randomness drives some things and emulating other but the pattern is made by details.
Very few pictures or objects came forward in history to me. Stories and songs weren’t passed on that I know of, not in any sense of keeping legacies or creating a shared history. Some say, just as well. The future is what matters not the past which is dead and gone.
Part of that is a religious heritage, part of that is the bad old days an hopeful future. In fundamentalist thinking, a symbolic destroying of things becomes an emblem of freedom from the past and a making of the future. But school taught me to think of Mao’s China and account of destroying any signs of the western influence, any wealth acquired, rugs or antiques or jewelry, because all citizens are to be equals in the dust.
How one walks away from that time of madness is to embrace life and survival, to keep to the old system, hang on to the new. Wait, no, I think I’m channeling in Old Hippy. [Wait, Old Hippy is defined as old and grey at 35. 35?!? That's a whole 'nother post.]
As a child I was taken to visit someone elderly in a valley town. It may have been Almonte or Pakenham. I’m not sure. I was at the age when the hard candies on the table and the novelty of being in someone else’s house made the strongest impression. She was my father’s elder. I was freezing at her house over the visit.
In the car coming home my father told me that the two sisters never recovered from war rations and restrictions. One insisted on living extravagantly while she could, heating the house too warm, throwing open windows in winter, eating out at restaurants, going thru cash like water. The other sister who we visited preferred to sit in dim rooms, conserving electricity, keeping the thermostat down, switching the radio on only for the national news service, eating simply, saving as much money as she could.
Yet they had the same stimulus didn’t they, came from the same house, the same womb, twins as I recall. How can constitutions vary.
Over the last couple weeks, 3 presentations seem to interrelate on our relationship to remembering and history: on Socrates, Joshua Foer and Phil Jenkins.
Socrates was teaching about it being a duty of a citizen to learn to think clearly, distinguish noise from reasoned understanding.
Joshua Foer was talking about memory tricks and how it’s possible to retain things but the memory of every day and the memory you intentionally stow away are different kinds of memory.
Phil Jenkins was talking about the duty of the writer to society to keep useful bits and to learn self-talk better so that others can witness it and be led to a model of compassion and nuanced right-action thru complexity.
Quote: ”In order to trust, you must learn to distrust” ~ Peter Hobbs, In the Orchard, the Swallow
Cycling Shorts
It’s my inaugural cycle of the season and I only wish my thighs weren’t talking to me anymore. Slow going and hills growing as I head up them as if I’m a tectonic force.
It’s not without upsides however.
Cycling past a house where a suited man stands at the door, searching his pockets, holding a spare jacket. To one side of the house a decorated car full of groomsmen, to the other side a groomsman in shirt-sleeves going in his basement window.
Cycling around a bend in the warm day to startle a fox who sprinted diagonally along the trail ahead of me, long and lean as a cat in a leap, muzzle greyed and red shape soon hidden in some bush cover at the verge.
Cycling by a woman who is in her car at the end of her driveway not moving. A car slows on the road and comes to a full stop. I thought at first it was to let her merge into traffic but no, both are waiting on a flock of seagulls on the road. One driver bips her horn and drivers wave and smile at each other and life continues.
Cycling at a traffic light, two bus commuters greet. One has a bag with yellow tulips peeking out. They talk about the houses boarded up for demolition. They and another are rescuing the abandoned gardens, flowers and bulbs before the blind ploughs come.
Quote: “In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.” ~ Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965) [via My Muskoka]
This Gardening Stuff is Complex
Our seeding technique needs work; when they say plant a bunch, wait a week or two and plant again for successive crops, ‘let the first round die off’ is not implied.
The tomatoes are fine. The arugula died off.
In in round 2, calibrating how much water brought mould-cover to take over the basil.
Round 3. Peat moss pucks are about the size of one-bite brownies once rehydrated. They were sitting on a tray on the counter by moonlight. Hubby came home and presumed brownies! I came around the corner of the kitchen just as one was being lifted to his mouth. A narrowly averted strange facial expression as he chews.
Ah, back to home ground of what I know better: Tonight rob and I give a talk/Q&A on contemporary poetry at the National Library & Archives.
Quote: “The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.” ~ Chauncey Depew [via Comfort Spiral]
