It’s my 67th birthday today, a good day to review the year in creation. What did I make this year? Eleven blog posts (this is the twelfth); a few stories, poems, and essays; felt birds for family members and felt Christmas decorations; three aprons (one for Nancy, one for Meytal, one for me); a baby quilt and matching pillow for the great grandson of my friend, Lillian; embroidered pillows for my niece; a patchwork pillow for my friend Janis; little zippered bags for everyone; “One Thousand Joys,” a wall hanging for our stairwell; a lunch bag for me; some drawings and comics; a sling bag for Nancy; some collages (thank you Kathryn for the inspiration); and cakes and more cakes for friends and family.
Living a creative life feels as important as ever.
Coasters made from a shirt I bought at a yard sale10,000 JoysMe and Nancy – her birthday apronKathryn’s vegan chocolate cakea pillow for Janis’s birthdayMeytal’s birthday apronSling bag for NancyMichael wanted a Boston Cream Pie and I deliveredA lunch bag for meTwo pillows for my niece’s birthdayA quilt and pillow for a little baby I’ll never meetMichael named the owl I made him “Winston”Nat’s puffinI wanted an autumn apron, so I made thisFelt tree ornaments for my dear writing group membersSarah’s swanEvan’s heronCollage: Pieces of Me
Show and Tell
In old age, let us return to kindergarten rituals.
Show something, then tell about it during circle time with our friends.
I went to collage club at the library Women of all ages were cutting up old magazines. Glue sticks and colourful scissors lay across white tables like sacred instruments.
As we cut, some of us spoke; others remained silent.
I made a collage about the pieces of me.
Cool and aloof, wise owl serious as I sew buttons. Sometimes a poor silly worm, my blind eyes sensing light.
In past lives I was fertility goddess, discus thrower seamstress parasitic crustacean.
Inside of me, Batman blocks a monster: “No, you won’t hurt anyone else.”
Inside of me, a bitch brandishes her guns: “Now, I’m really getting aggravated,” she says, her voice rising on the smoke. If women let loose their anger, the world would burn.
One spring day in Toronto, forty years ago, I rode the Queen West streetcar to work. As we clattered past the mental institution, number 999, a statuesque woman, her proud head shorn, strode the sidewalk, naked. Her brown thighs shimmered in the light, her high breasts bounced lightly, nipples hardened in the coolness of that morning. Everyone around me was, for a moment, silent, awed by this strange beauty.
Crustacean, crone, bird, woman, warrior, gatherer of words, seamstress of memories Can you see all the pieces of me?
I angle my chair so I can see the hummingbird at the feeder, only a couple of feet away. Coat of metallic green feathers, needle beak, vibrating wings—an Anna’s hummingbird, so close I could touch her. She trembles as she drinks long and hard at the sugar water I prepared. A ping of pleasure as I watch her become nourished, sated.
When we moved into this house, June 2024, I decided not to put up a hummingbird feeder. Too much work, too much anxiety. I remembered that icy winter a few years ago, when I fretted over the birds getting their food. Once you commit to a feeder, you need to keep it going through the cold months. Non-migratory hummingbirds depend on nectar in feeders for sustenance. So, that January, when the temps dropped below freezing and the liquid in the beaker froze into solid chunks, I cut the toes off a pair of old wool socks and pulled them, one over the other, to encase the container of sugar water, trying to keep it liquid. Several times a day, I removed the feeder from its hook, brought it inside, and melted the ice, so the birds had access to food that was precious, rare, and necessary. I felt guilty when I let the liquid freeze for too long. Worried for days, until the cold spell broke.
from Birds of Victoria, by Robin Bovey, Wayne Campbell, and Bryan Gates. Illustrated by Ewa Pluciennik
Save yourself the grief, I thought. Don’t put out a feeder again. Too much trouble. Yet, I didn’t get rid of the feeder with its four plastic red flowers. I must have known I would want it again someday. Yesterday, I dug it out from the back of a cupboard and made the nectar, 2 cups water, ½ cup white sugar. I was yearning for connection. I watched the first bird discover it hanging off the balcony rail, drawn by the gaudy red. As he fed hungrily, my body responded as if I were nursing a newborn again. Tiny being of my flesh, cradled close, skin on skin, painful tickle of let-down followed by a strong rush of milk, sustained by baby’s rhythmic sucking.
Photo by K.A. Walker
My body remembers well the flow of oxytocin, the pleasure, the sense of deep, silent connection with my sons. For eight years I breastfed three babies. Cellular memory.
Perhaps the sweet ping I feel when I watch a hummer drink its fill at the feeder can replace the rewards I look for on my smartphone. A few days ago, alarmed by how frequently I pick up the phone (for example, 21 pickups in 3 hours), I found a book I’d read in 2018 when it first came out. Catherine Price wrote How to Break Up With Your Phone (there’s a 2025 edition) because she saw how smartphones were grabbing our attention and changing our brains and our lives. I was concerned then, and I went through her 30 day “break up,” becoming by the end, more conscious and intentional when I used my phone. That worked…for a while. Fast forward to late 2025, and I’m back where I was but even worse.
I know it’s worse because when I attempted a digital “sabbath”—turning off the phone for 24 hours—I woke in the middle of the night, anxiety flooding my body, terrified of being cut off from life, from everybody I know. A great black wall towered between me and the living world. Existential loneliness. I crept out to the kitchen and turned the phone back on. Even though there were no texts, only junk emails, a whoosh of relief. A conduit had been re-opened. The potential for connection.
I know that my brain and body have been altered through smartphone use. Over the years, I notice decreased ability to read complex material for longer than a few minutes. I am highly distractible, grabbing my phone for no particular reason. Life feels fragmented. So, again, I plan to work slowly through Catherine Price’s 30 day break-up. I’ve quit other addictions: alcohol, cigarettes. I can do this.
Maybe when I feel the urge to grab my phone, I’ll head over to the feeder. Sit a while. Watch. Because observing hummingbirds at the feeder soothes me, reminds me of feeding my babies, sustaining them with my bountiful milk. The body’s sagacity. A promise to keep these little birds fed throughout the winter is part of the circle of commitment, connection, love, pleasure.
“When we run from our suffering we are actually running toward it.” Ajahn Chah
I’ve been basking in two messages from my unconscious this week. In one dream, a person wearing a bright tie-dyed shirt holds a hand lettered sign, “You are not alone.” In another dream, a young man, bearded, hugs me and whispers in my ear, “Thank you for your patience.” The messages are hackneyed, and yet they were delivered to me fresh, warm, colourful,by stately messengers. It doesn’t matter if they—the messages and the messengers—aren’t “real”; they are just as real as the people and events, the words, ideas, and things I encounter in my dream-like conscious life. And more to the point: They provide great comfort, having bathed me all week in an orange glow, a glow like that emanating from the 10,000 joys wall hanging, now installed in our stairwell.
The wall hanging seems to collect the sunlight falling in through the skylight and send back a peachy radiance. Several times now I’ve gone to flick the hall light off, thinking the switch is on when it shouldn’t be. No, the light is off, but 10,000 joys shed their own uncanny light.
When I made the piece, I kept telling myself, you don’t have to make its counterpart, 10,000 sorrows. It’s okay to just focus on joy right now. But of course, you cannot have 10,000 joys without 10,000 sorrows. I wish we taught this truth to children in kindergarten. You don’t experience joy without experiencing sorrow. And it’s okay. When you cling to joy and try to avoid sorrow, you just prolong it. I wish I’d gone to a Buddhist kindergarten, where these truths would be taught elegantly and logically, instead of being told by adults that “life isn’t fair,” which seems tawdry and cruel in comparison to the dharma.
Inevitably, I am called upon to make joy’s counterpart. I had coffee with a friend yesterday at Esquimalt Roasting Company. As I waited at the counter for our lattés, I noticed a large burlap bag draped over a plastic bucket. I picked it up and showed it to the barista. Can I buy this? I asked. In my imagination, I was already picking its seams and spreading it out, a wide brown canvas for thousands of sorrows. It’s free! she responded. So now I have the backdrop for the wall hanging. I had originally thought it should be black, but brown is less dramatic than black, more subdued and complex, as sorrows often are, especially as we digest them.
The burlap bag was pure serendipity. Another magical find was a zebra at the ReStore in Langford. Purchased for 70 cents ($1.00 but there was a 30% off sale). This zebra is majestic, dignified, kind, warm. She stands about 10 inches high. Her stripes are unrealistic, but otherwise she is a convincing animal. I dug out a stuffed toy zebra I’d kept from childhood in a box under the stairs. It’s remarkable this sixty-year old stuffed animal still stands! They now live together, mother and child, atop a bookshelf in our bedroom. I like to gaze at them from bed. Something about them feels calming, comforting. I loved my zebra striped one-piece bathing suit when I was eight years old. When I wore it, my reward was a zebra tan that was pure magic.
How to find comfort
Face fear, face grief, crunch on them like buttered toast, let them nourish you. Small striped body in the mirror, some kind of childhood magic. Let dreams bathe you in orange light. Sweet’s after tastes bitter, crying sparks a belly laugh. Joy and sorrow are so intertwined, you can’t tease them apart, please don’t waste time trying. Practice the butterfly hug: Hands cross collarbones, thumbs meet, fingers tap lightly, lightly. A comforting rhythm will come. It will come.
We trudge up our front steps in the early evening, returning from dinner with friends. We ate turkey, stuffing, beans and brussels sprouts, gravy, mashed potatoes. Our contribution was a salted caramel apple pie and vanilla ice-cream for dessert. We all ate too much. “I’m putting on my fat pants,” says my husband as he enters the code on the front door. At that moment, I turn on the steps to see a man pushing his daughter in a stroller across the street. The autumn light is waning. I catch the eye of this young father. It’s clear to me that he had heard what Michael said about fat pants. We share a smile.
That moment of human connection and common understanding made me happy all evening. What was it? It was knowing the feeling of eating too much and needing to get out of the jeans and zippered clothing, to put on the good old pjs with the forgiving drawstring. That young dad had a pair of fat pants too, I bet, a grungy pair of UVic sweats he pulls on when he’s eaten too many of his wife’s homemade cookies.
These days I wear fat pants most of the time. There has been a softening, not only of the gut, but of the days themselves. The hard beep of the alarm in the morning is gone, replaced by a warm hand touching my back, caressing my flank. The morning routine is unrushed. I push up the shade to see dawn clouds flushed in pink. The coffee tastes good.
I spend as long as possible in my pajamas, then switch to leggings with an elastic waist to take the dog for a walk. I step on the scale every once in a while, and my weight remains the same, hovering around 55 kilograms. But the body expands, loosens, just as time loosens around the edges. The weekends are no longer demarcated. The fence separating Saturday and Sunday from the rest of the week crumbles to reveal the long week as a flat green field. But as you traverse the field, day by day, hillocks rise up before you, unexpected, beautiful. A sudden offer, an old friend reaching out. Time to read a book in the middle of the day. The best morning glory muffin you’ve ever tasted.
Sometimes you panic because the borders have disappeared. Terrifying, all that unmarked space. So, you write to-do lists and make a lot of coffee dates and sign up for classes and try to get part-time work. Then you wake one morning, see the light leaking through the crack between blood-red curtains, hear the bird singing. You realize you’ve gone from writing in the first person to writing you, in the second person, and that you’re not even sure who you are anymore. Everything feels raw, your nerves pulsing beneath your bare skin. You realize you’ve gone from the occasional joy of a fat pants evening to a fat pants life, traversing a field without landmarks.
I am in Toronto for a few days. This city was my home from 1965 to 1989.
I have been walking Bloor Street West. First, the Mink Mile, that stretch between Yonge and Avenue Road lined with the tall glass storefronts: Zara, Birks, Lululemon, Holt Renfrew. Rich people shop here. Very few birds fly above these tall, inhospitable stores. Instead, big bird shapes in bright shiny colours line the sidewalks, ghosts of extinct species.
It’s cold in Toronto for late May. I wear a toque, jacket, leather gloves. But now I wish I’d brought a scarf. I admire the scarves in the window of Black Goat Cashmere, next to Ashley’s in what used to be called the Colonnade. This mall was one of my mother’s favourite places; after window shopping Bloor Street arm in arm, we’d drink coffee and eat pastries at the Coffee Mill at the back of the Colonnade.
I enter the store. Two saleswomen are upon me immediately. I ask about the small scarves, lifting one of them up out of the wooden box where they are displayed like confectionary, soft cashmere in artful designs, wool watercolours. “How much are these little ones?” “Oh,” says one of the women, advancing, “the Carre scarves are $385.” I laugh, folding the luxury item back into its box. “Perhaps in another lifetime.”
Pulling my zipper up to my chin and walking into a fierce wind, I take a detour to wander around the grounds of my alma mater, Victoria College. I feel nothing as I gaze over the green lawns, watching two young men kick a soccer ball. Alma mater means “nourishing mother,” but this place was not that for me. Those four years as an undergrad in English Literature are a blur. One thing stuck: a Shakespeare lecture by Northrop Frye when he—already extremely old—told us in his quavery voice that Bach’s Mass in B Minor was the voice of God speaking. All of us bent over our notebooks and wrote that down. It sounded profound.
I was a lonely young woman. Barry Lopez writes that “It is not possible for human beings to outgrow loneliness,” and that seems true to me. Though I’m not as lonely as I was. I admire a pigeon perched in the recessed window of the Victoria University Common Room.
On the way up University back to Bloor Street, I check out the Gardiner Ceramic Museum, where I hope to see the work of contemporary ceramic artists, only to find that the main galleries are closed for renovation. I continue back along Bloor. It’s time for a coffee and I remember a Second Cup in the block before Spadina Avenue. And if that is no longer around, there’s a coffee shop in the old Jewish Community Centre (JCC), where my mother did aquafit for the last decade of her life. Back in the seventies, when it was the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, it was home to SEED, the alternative school my sisters and I went to as wild teens.
Second Cup is gone, and so are many of the other businesses on that block. Everything in life is impermanent, so I am not surprised Second Cup and Noah’s Health Foods have disappeared, and the spaces are vacant. Once upon a time there was a greasy spoon in this block where we drank coffee in thick cups, smoked cigarettes, and ate French fries. We walked over from “school” and stuffed our electric bodies into the vinyl booths, laughing, talking, flirting, mystified and excited by life. Once, for a time, my sister lived above the restaurant with her boyfriend, an apartment with burlap on the walls and plants everywhere. There’s history here.
The wine store remains. This is where we bought bottles for the meal marking my mother‘s death in February 2019. Her house is only a few blocks from this corner, and she died at home. We carried the clanking bottles through the snow. My sister made bouillabaisse and we sat around the teak table, drinking, eating, and telling our Virginia stories, stories filled with love, regret, sadness, and confusion.
I cross the street twice to the southwest corner and pull on the doors of the Jewish Community Centre, but my pull meets resistance. A security guard opens the door from the other side, just a few inches, and peers at me. “I am trying to get into the coffee shop,” I say. “No more coffee shop. Coffee shop no more,” a sort of palindrome of endings. And he closes the door in my face.
I keep walking. Surely, there is a sweet, cool, interesting café somewhere along Bloor. I am Ahab stalking the great flat white, but she’s nowhere to be found. I pass more than one Tim Hortons among the restaurants and bars still closed this cold morning, but no, I won’t go there. Cigarette butts decorate the grey pavement, evidence of parties spilling onto the street last night. Pigeons strut their stuff. I keep walking. Yes, I know Futures Bakery might be considered an interesting coffee shop, but I hold out for something else, some uncertain thing, something new, something not in the algorithm.
I keep walking. The Hungarian restaurant where we ordered dumplings and gravy and goulash soup: gone. The delicatessen and the cheese shop with a cow in the window: both gone. The café that once took up that southeast corner of Bloor and Bathurst: gone. Now there’s a Fancy Burger outlet, where you can add a syringe cheese shot to your beef patty for $1.49. This part of Bloor continues to metamorphize. Ethnic restaurants and record stores turn into cannabis shops and bubble tea counters. Used bookstores become pet pampering salons and tattoo parlours.
I am happy to see Midoco, the office supply shop, a place where you can lose yourself among the art supplies and fountain pens, is still in business. Ditto the Home Hardware.
I keep walking, knowing that somewhere soon, I will come upon something interesting. I pass the small corner grocers, happy to see they still sell bargain produce and hanging pots of flowers. I pass Euclid, cross to the south side, and then, suddenly, there is an A-Frame sandwich board picturing a fox with many tails. I walk into Ninetails Coffee Bar, where two young Japanese women bustle behind a honey-coloured wood counter. White walls, a few small round tables graced by simple folding chairs. A coffee bar decorated with ceramic tiles patterned in grey, blue, and white. A full pastry case. Smiling faces welcome me.
My flat white, delivered in a short glass with a foamy fern on top, is delicious—strong and hot. While I drink my coffee I read about the coffee bar’s philosophy.
In Japanese folklore, Kitsune are foxes with mystical powers that can grow nine tails.
“we embrace the Japanese philosophy of ‘ichi-go ichi-e,’ which translates to ‘one opportunity, one encounter.’ This concept underscores the importance of cherishing every moment and every connection we make with our guests, as each encounter is unique and irreplaceable. Our goal is to provide you with a little window to Japan & Japanese culture within each visit.”
I gaze across Bloor to the north side and see, to my delight, a used bookstore that I’ll visit after I drink this coffee. It’s too easy to get lost in the past during this trip. Wandering through old neighbourhoods, remembering past experiences, feeling traces of old sadness and joy. But Toronto, like Freud’s Rome, is a metaphor for the mind. There is no denying that my personal history, etched through the decades, permeates my experience of Bloor West. I feel these vestiges of the past in my body.
But there is also the present: every moment is unique and irreplaceable.
The sun finally emerges from behind grey clouds on this cold day and streams through the glass over my table. I will never experience this moment again, as I drink this coffee, as I gaze at the people around me, the heavily inked man, the woman with green hair, as I examine the fox on the sandwich board outside, waving her many tails. She reminds me there is only one opportunity, one encounter. This is it.
I work a volunteer shift at the upcycle store on Wednesdays. The people that come in delight me, entertain me, astonish me, educate me, soften me. Next week is my last shift at the store. I want to remember some of these people and their stories.
Once a pale man came in and asked if we had a leather hole punch. He didn’t want to buy one, just borrow it so that he could put an additional hole in his belt. He was losing weight, and his pants were hanging on him. Alas, I said, we don’t have one right now. I’m sorry.
I thought about him for weeks, his weight loss, his thinning frame, his sad face. I wondered about his story. Perhaps he was lovesick.
I can no longer untangle my hair I feed on my own flesh in secret. Do you want to measure how much I long for you? Look at my belt, how loose it hangs.
Anonymous, Six Dynasties Translated from the Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth
As if to balance the sadness of the shrinking man, the joy of meeting Randy bloomed inside of me for weeks. He flounced into the store a few days before Thanksgiving, smelling gloriously of rosemary and thyme. Randy is a contemporary dandy, stained waistcoat and tight jeans, flowing grey hair, phlegmy smoker’s laugh lighting up his brown, creased face. He brought crackling energy into the store with him, along with a small plastic bag of herbs.
Do you have any Scrabble tiles? he asked. Yes, I handed him two tall mason jars filled with tiles, and as he dug through his pockets for the cash to pay for them, he told me there was always a few Scrabble boards set up on his coffee table. When my friends come over, he said, they add a word or two or three. We play a never-ending game and nobody keeps score.
What a mouth-watering smell! He opened the plastic bag for me to see the long sprigs of green. I picked them at the side of the road, he told me, just around the corner. The herbs were volunteer plants, free for anybody that wanted them. I need sage, I said, for the Thanksgiving turkey. Oh, he said, I think there was sage growing as well. We smiled and said our goodbyes. An hour later he was back with three sprigs of sage he had picked for me and my turkey.
When I asked a young fellow what he was planning to make with the feathers he was buying, he challenged me: Guess. A headdress? No, good guess, but I am making flies for fly fishing, something his dad taught him to do. He fishes for cutthroat trout under the Bay Bridge with a bunch of female fishers who’d turned him on to it. I never knew!
Last week, a woman came in and poked into the baskets of wool, humming a tune. I noticed her tone—it was strong and true. You have such a beautiful voice, I said. Why don’t you sing us something? Suddenly, gloriously, she burst into “I’m Called Little Buttercup,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. Her rich mezzo-soprano filled the store as she strutted down the aisles, outthrust chest, a beautiful dockside vendor in love with the captain. I and another shopper were the lucky audience, mesmerized by a performance delivered among stickers and glue, balls of wool, knitting needles, jars of coloured beads.
I love hearing about the celebrations people are planning. The woman in her thirties who bought armloads of artificial flowers and a bolt of pale pink draping fabric for the table. She and her siblings had been planning a surprise party for their mother’s sixtieth birthday. She keeps mentioning she’s turning sixty, as if reminding us, said the young woman. She’s worried we’ve forgotten. Little does she know what’s in store! I laughed with her, feeling mudita, imagining the pleasure and wonder of her mother on that day. Surprise!
Finally, I sold the white canvas tent that was propped in the corner for months. The tent is perfect for children to hide and play in, and a woman bought it for her grandchildren. I told her about the teddy bear’s picnic birthday party I’d thrown for my four-year-old so many Decembers ago. We had a play tent pitched in our living room, and the children and their stuffies enjoyed tea and cake. The woman became excited and touched my shoulder in thanks. What a great idea! I’ve got to do that for my grandson! Then she told me that one Christmas her mother-in-law opened the gift of a vibrator in front of the whole family. I wasn’t sure what prompted the story, but we had a good laugh. Teddy bear picnics and vibrators, all in one afternoon.
There’s a regular customer who brings her baby buggy into the store, speaking softly and playfully to her little boy as she shops. She buys bits of fabric, thread, and zippers. Last week, as she paid for her stuff and her baby chortled and tried to put his toes in his mouth in the buggy beside her, she ran her hand over the camel-brown smocked dress she wore and its complementary quilted vest. I made all of this from an old bedsheet, she said. At times like this, I thought, I wish I could whistle. A good long, low whistle to show my WOW in a visceral way. Instead, I shook my head: You are amazing! Queen of Upcycling!
One day I was emptying out the green donation boxes, pricing and sorting items. My hand fastened on something soft. A bit of plush grey fur, perhaps once the collar of a stylish coat. Wrapped in thin tissue paper, there was a small tag safety-pinned to the edge: Chinchilla, written in the shaky script of somebody very old. Suddenly, I was back in the furrier’s on Spadina Avenue, sitting cross-legged on the dusty floor, playing with scraps of chinchilla, beaver, spotted lynx. I caressed them one at a time, rubbed them against my cheek. My mother and the furrier stood above me, two voices discussing the racoon coat she’d ordered. What happened to that coat? And why was my mother—a passionate animal lover—buying a custom-made fur coat?
People stream into the store. Have you got books on stained glass? Do you have leatherwork tools? Ever get pillow inserts? Sometimes I say no, sometimes yes, but other times I’m not sure, and we set out to look together, sifting through the boxes and baskets. Sometimes people cry out in delight when they find just what they were looking for. A particular size of crochet hook, fabric printed with mushrooms, a colouring book of Frida Kahlo drawings.
Last week, a short bespectacled woman said she had an unusual request: golf balls. She was undergoing physiotherapy for an injured hand and the therapist had told her to squeeze a golf ball. I haven’t seen any golf balls, I said, but I think I can help. I remembered that morning finding a bag of large wooden beads strung onto a white shoelace. I thought of a small child or a very old person practicing fine motor skills, threading each bead onto the end of the lace. I found the bag and fished out three of the beads. They were about the size of golf balls. Will this do? I asked as I slipped them into her cupped hands. They’re perfect! And we agreed that they were much nicer to handle, a globe of burnished brown wood rather than a cold, plastic golf ball.
At the end of every shift, as I cash out, sweep the cement floor, turn off the heat and lights, lock the door, I feel full of the people I’ve met, the stories I’ve heard.
Last year, Benji was hit by a car. He was Alma’s last cat of the dozen that graced her long life. I heard the thud as I sat sewing at the bay window. When I looked up, Benji lay crumpled on the street and no car in sight. Some asshole hit him and drove off. I threw down my sewing and ran into the street, grabbing my shawl on the way. He was still alive, making a peculiar huffing noise, blood trickling from his jaw that looked all crooked.
Oh no, this will destroy Alma. I scooped his light body up from the pavement and cradled him in the shawl. When I knocked at Alma’s door, it took a while for her to open it. Her eyesight wasn’t the best, so at first, I think she thought I was bringing her a loaf of my sourdough, wrapped in a kitchen towel. But soon she realized what was in my arms and began to cry.
Alma, we’ll can take him to Peter right away. Our healer Peter lives in a cottage just around the corner. Get in my sidecar, I told her, and I’ll hand Benji to you. Her crying had evolved into low keening. I dropped her purple cape over her shoulders, and she slipped on her sandals. I opened the door of the sidecar attached to my bike, and she slid into the seat, creakily, and held her arms open as if to take a baby. Benji was her baby—a cat she’d coddled and loved since he was a feral kitten, discovered in the old shed behind my cottage with three litter mates. We figured the mother had been killed by a car or racoon. The kittens were starving. We found homes for them, all but one. Alma had been without a cat for almost a year then, and when she saw little squirming Benji, she said she had to have him. Or he had to have her.
She fed him with an eyedropper for weeks and carried him close to her warm, wrinkled breast in a sling she asked me to sew for her. I made the sling with indigo cloth I had left over after making Peter’s shirt. Alma was a sight to behold, walking slowly to the corner store with her shopping cart, the sling around her front, a tiny feline face peeping from the folds of blue cloth.
Oh Benji, Benji. Out of my peripheral vision, I could see Alma bent deep over his little body as I pumped the bike, swooshing down the road and around the corner. It took us only a minute to get to Peter’s. We knocked on the door, no answer, so I figured he was in the garden. We trod the narrow path beside the cottage. His back was to us as he sat on his haunches, examining a potato he had just dug from the soil. I looked fondly at the blue indigo cloth straining across the breadth of his back, a breadth of skin and warm muscle I had run my hands over just last night. My knees trembled with desire as I approached him with Benji now in my arms, Alma hobbling behind me.
An hour later, we sat in Peter’s front room on low velvet couches, drinking jasmine tea. Alma was holding a lifeless Benji in her lap. Peter had determined the injuries too severe to save him, so he’d administered a lethal drug in a long needle while Alma stroked the fur, matted with blood. Now, Benji looked so peaceful, curled up in my red wool shawl, Alma’s hand under his little skull.
Neither love nor money will persuade me to ever get another cat, Alma said, her voice soft and sad. She’d stretched her stick-thin legs out before her. Alma liked to wear sandals most of the year, except when it snowed, liked her feet to feel the air, and today I could see her thick greenish toenails and large bunions up close. She was terribly old.
Peter heaved a great sigh. Benji was a fine cat, he said. We had all loved Benji’s antics. He’d dance like Baryshnikov, trying to swat the clouds of gnats that floated above the garden beds in summer. His meow was a sweet question mark, meaow? And if you were lucky enough to hold him in your lap, you were blessed with a vibrational purr that set your thighs buzzing. A deep warmth and contentment emanated from his slight, stripey body. We all loved Benji.
Peter sighed again, shaking his head at the loss. We came to Peter with our sick and injured pets and even, sometimes, with our own ailments. His stinging nettle tonic has reduced my hay fever. His black cohosh tea has helped women all over our neighbourhood with menopause. Peter is not just a skilled herbalist. His magic hands can make me come just by stroking my breasts.
Several weeks after Benji died, a sunny June Saturday, I was at a yard sale with Alma. On summer weekends, Alma and I did the yard sale circuit together on my bike. I pedaled, and she rode sidecar. She has a thing for small dishes, tiny saucers and bowls, sized for fairies. I like to collect children’s books. I don’t have children, and I never will have. I’m fifty this year, but nonetheless I’m charmed by simple stories and illustrations. I would rather read three or four children’s books to myself at bedtime than a novel filled with crime, sex, mystery, and drama.
A book caught my eye, titled Part-time Dog. I opened the cover to the copyright page to check the publication year, 1965. I always do that first because I prefer old books. They provide the most comfort. I bought it, along with several others, two dollars for the lot. Alma found a gold rimmed bowl decorated with an image of two goldfish. Later, we had dinner at my place—a big salad and thick slices of my sourdough. After dinner I gave Alma a framed photograph of Benji dancing in the garden that I’d taken the year before. I’d caught him with both paws in the air, his golden eyes glittering with excitement. One small foot was off the ground as he leapt. The sun played over his orange and brown stripes, and the patch of white on his face made him look almost human. When Alma saw it, tears rolled down her wrinkly face. I moved next to her on the couch and put my arm around her. Not for the first time, Alma said that neither love nor money would persuade her to get another cat. Benji was the best and the last.
That night after Alma left, Peter slipped in my back door, and we made love silently. Through the open window, we heard whoo-hoo from the owl in the tall pine. I felt us smile in unison. What if this life was an illusion? What if I were a character in a children’s story about a happy seamstress and her herbalist? After Peter left, I lay in my narrow bed with the stack of new-to-me children’s books on the bedside table. Part-time Dog was on top, so I started with that.
Brownie is a small stray dog who shows up in the neighbourhood. He starts walking with the children to school, accompanies Mrs. Butterworth to the bank and watches Mrs. Tweedy rake the leaves in her yard. But he has no home, nowhere to go at night, so he sleeps under someone’s porch. Three women in the neighbourhood decide to adopt Brownie. It would be too much work for one of them to have him all the time. So, one gives him breakfast and keeps him in the morning, one has him in the afternoon and gives him his dinner, and another has Brownie every night, where he sleeps in his warm bed, safe and sound. I liked the book so much, I read it again, then fell asleep, dreaming of a little brown dog curled up at my feet.
In September, Peter noticed a white cat in his garden, sleeping on a warm stone, and he scratched her chin and stroked her, gave her some salmon he was cooking for lunch, and then asked around the neighbourhood. Nobody knew anything about her. She was a short-haired female with one blue eye and one golden, and he named her Nia. Peter worried he’d be taking her from her family, but still, nobody claimed her.
She claimed us, wandering back and forth from my cottage to Peter’s. When Peter gardened, she stayed close to his side, and when I sewed, she spread out on the table next to me, her purr matching the vibration of the sewing machine. And though Alma said she’d not have another cat for love nor money, there were many nights when Nia wandered into her cottage and curled up on her bed.
Christmas was simple and good. Alma, Peter, and Nia came to my cottage. We had a stew made with pumpkin from the garden and my sourdough bread. For dessert, Peter brought an apple cranberry pie he’d baked. We walked Alma home, then we went to Peter’s cottage because his bed is bigger than mine. I stayed all night. When I got up, Nia was nowhere to be found. After we drank our coffee, Peter went and called for the cat, but she didn’t come running, her white tail twitching and her little bell tinkling, as she usually did. Frost painted the windows white, and a crust of ice capped the blue bowl of water we kept outside for her. We went to my cottage next, but Nia wasn’t there. At Alma’s, we knocked at the door. No answer, so Peter opened it gingerly, and we called through. Silence. We walked to the back, to Alma’s bedroom, where she lay peacefully, her long white hair flowing out around her across the dark pillowcase, eyes closed in her wrinkled brown face. We knew her life was over. Nia lay at Alma’s feet, purring deep and low.
Later when we cleaned Alma’s cottage and found a copy of her last will and testament, we discovered she’d left the cottage to both of us. When Peter asked me to marry him in the spring, I said yes, you make me happy. But there’s one condition. Let’s keep things as they are.
We sleep sometimes at my place, sometimes at Peter’s, and other times at Alma’s. We kept things the same. The blue sling that kept Benji close to Alma’s chest hangs on the hook near the door, the framed photograph of him on the living room wall. The tiny dishes, neatly arranged, are displayed the way Alma liked them, on open shelves in the kitchen. Nia wanders from one cottage to the other to the other. She knows that food, water, and love are everywhere.
Note: Part-time Dog is a book I read to my children by Jane Thayer, pictures by Seymour Fleishman
About a week ago, on our morning dog walk, we stood waiting for the traffic light to change and a young girl, perhaps nine, long dark hair, hooded coat and wearing a backpack, approached and stood near us. She looked over at us a couple of times. When the light turned green, she walked in front of us a few metres, but she kept turning back, peering around her big hood to look at me. And at one point, as we crossed the bridge over the Gorge, I decided to say something. “Do you like dogs?” I thought perhaps she was looking at us because of Marvin, our goldendoodle, who trundled along beside us, at the end of his purple leash. Lots of times kids want to pet him, but they’re too shy to ask.
“Yes, I like all animals,” she said. And then she spoke, in the most serious way, a line I will not soon forget: “I’m a big fan of nature.” I moved ahead of Michael and she and I walked together for a minute, discussing how we were both big fans of nature. Then we were at the school crosswalk where we parted ways.
We laughed affectionately about what she’d said—what a great line! “I’m a big fan of nature,” we kept saying to each other throughout the day, and then “I’m a big fan of ____” and we filled in the blank with whatever…fizzy water, sunsets, Marvin, taking out the garbage.
I’ve thought about that delightful exchange many times this week. The girl’s innocent enthusiasm for nature. A simple trust in the goodness of the natural world and people. Her approach wasn’t naïve; rather, it seemed wise. We spoke so briefly, but what she said made me want to adopt her attitude of fandom.
I am a big fan of hand sewing
When we went to NYC in December, I heard about Tatter, a Brooklyn-based textile organization that is “committed to preserving skills of the hand.” They promise a lot:
“We work with makers, archivists, and anthropologists to develop extended courses that use textiles as a portal to reclaim history, cultural encounter, indigenous practices, a harmonious relation to the natural world, and making as a tactic of collective liberation.”
I didn’t have a chance to visit Tatter. However, in February, I took one of their classes on Zoom with Karen Stevens. We learned to hand-sew zippered pouches. Through this class, I rediscovered the enjoyment of hand sewing. The whole-body rhythm of a slow, contemplative backstitch and the satisfying emergence of a line of running stitches along a zipper‘s edge or around an appliqué. There is no rush with hand sewing, no urgency like I feel sometimes when I am at the machine. Hand sewing is portable and calming.
I learned some tips from Karen that I’ll share with you. Perhaps you already know this stuff, but for me, the following was revelatory information.
Don’t thread the needle, needle the thread. This practice makes so much sense, after years of trying to poke three saliva-soaked strands of embroidery thread into a tiny hole. Hold the very end of the thread(s) between index finger and thumb in your non-dominant hand while you angle the needle over the thread. Much easier to get eye over thread than thread into eye.
You don’t need knots. You can just sew one straight stitch several times over to start and end your length of thread. I think of it as akin to building a house with joinery rather than nails or glue.
Basting is a very useful practice. Sure, pins hold things together, but if you baste with big loopy stitches—it doesn’t take long—your fabric stays in place until you’re ready to anchor it with backstitches. I used to think of basting as a waste of time, but what is time for?
I am a big fan of upcycling stores
I happen to volunteer at one of those stores, Women in Need Upcycle and Craft, so I am biased. We just expanded to double the space, and every week I open boxes of fresh treasures to line our shelves. Some weeks it’s skeins of merino wool and tiny wooden canoes. Other times it might be a kit to make a paper lamp and bags of beautiful retro fabrics and lace.
I appreciate all of our sister upcycling stores as well. The Green Thimble‘s name is alluring to eco-conscious sewists. Today, March 4, they are moving from their Quadra Street location to 2950 Douglas St. #400. At Green Thimble, I filled a small paper bag with scraps and loose buttons for only five dollars. I admired the refurbished sewing machines for sale and the bolts of fabric at bargain prices. Supply Creative Reuse Centre on lower Douglas is a finely curated collection of paper, books, cloth, yarn, buttons, ribbons, and more. I was impressed by their sliding scale prices. At Supply, I found a scrap of pink sheepskin for $1.50 that features as the centre of my wall hanging work-in-progress. Thrift/Craft in Market Square is a huge space filled with unusual items and hosted by a devoted proprietress. One of my favourite things there is the weird stuff housed in tiny drawers, for example, Catholic paraphernalia. In each of these places I encounter interesting people who like to chat about making things.
I am a big fan of creative immersion
Immersing yourself in a creative project can lift your mood, and we could all use some mood uplift now. Am I right? I am presently working on “Ten Thousand Joys,” a large wall hanging in oranges, pinks, reds, and purples. At its centre is a fabric circle I created using a ten-degree wedge. I cut and sewed three alternating brightly-patterned fabrics together to make this 45-inch mandala. I cut an old blanket into cascading circles to lay under the mandala to create a three-dimensional effect. At the centre, the bit of pink sheepskin peeps through. I basted the padding onto a big piece of orange burlap I found at Value Village and then basted the circle onto the padding. Now I am in the process of using embroidery thread to sew the circle onto its backing at the circumference. I’ll add lots of embroidery stitches in bright colours, zig-zagging up and down the long wedges. The hanging will be finished by sewing on, not ten thousand, but dozens of pink, red, and purple buttons around the central circle. It feels inevitable that I will make a “Ten Thousand Sorrows” wall hanging next.
“When you open your heart, you get life's ten thousand joys, and ten thousand sorrows.” Chuang Tzu
When I was in my forties, my mother was in her seventies. (We could rapidly figure out each other’s age because I was born when she was 30.) Those days, I had scant time for or interest in her stories. Busy with kids, negotiating the break-up of my marriage, and immersed in the chaotic life of a graduate student, I was living my life 3,000 miles away from my mother.
We talked on the phone weekly and visited once or twice a year. When she started to tell a story from the past, I often zoned out or became irritated. I didn’t really care, or I thought I’d heard it before. She sensed my impatience because eventually she stopped expecting a weekly phone call. “You sound too busy,” she said. I didn’t disagree. My forties turned to fifties; her seventies turned to eighties. We kept in touch, but calls were infrequent.
On Valentines Day, it will be six years since her death. I am 66 now, and at least a couple of times each week, I think of something I want to ask her. Some thread we dropped that I’d like to pick up again. Some mystery from her past I want to understand. Some memory I want her to clarify. (There are so many amorphous, shady memories—are they true?)
How did you make that wonderful crème caramel? I wish I’d gotten the recipe. Tell me more about the trip you took to Russia. When you returned from the trip and tried to tell me about it, I had so much on my mind I didn’t listen. But now I really want to know. And the other trips… so many European cities you visited, sometimes with groups of students, showing them great works of art and architecture. I wish you could tell me more.
You didn’t talk to your own mother for decades. I never knew her, only met her once. Why were you estranged? Your childhood was traumatic. Is it true you missed a year of school because you didn’t have shoes to fit your feet? That you learned to drive the tractor at age nine (or was it 12) so you could help on the farm? That your dad kicked you out of the house at 17, but he’s the one you loved? Am I misremembering your narratives?
I have the old phone number in my head 416-922-9534; if only I could call, we would chat. She’d be happy to hear from me and to reminisce, I know. But she’s no longer available. The stories, too, are gone. They died with her.
I had the wherewithal to record my father talking about his life in 2014 when he was visiting (he was 87). I asked him a series of questions. Now, I am glad to have his voice preserved as he talks about his parents, being a father, his life as an academic and farmer, and formative childhood experiences. For example, he describes discovering an injured bird when he was a young boy, taking it home and nursing it back to health, then releasing it. That event cemented his lifelong love for birds.
I feel wistful now that I didn’t make audio recordings or write down some of my mother’s stories.
I signed up for an online course, “From Autobiography to Illustrated Story.” The goal is to produce a short, illustrated book about an object that we still have from childhood: its provenance and meaning to us. I have precious few objects to choose from. The yellow Tonka truck. A doll my mother made for me out of an old sock with yarn hair and an embroidered mouth, nose, and eyes. Little Bear, the Steiff teddy. And I have some things that belonged to my mother.
I decided I wanted to write about my mother’s Macchiarini pendant. My sister took it from her house after her death and gave it to me, thinking it suited me. I agree. Mom loved the work of Peter Macchiarini, an American Modernist jeweller (1909-2001) from North Beach, San Francisco. The several pieces my mother owned were passed down to us, her daughters. I have a couple of brooches, the pendant, and two belt buckles, and my sisters have other examples of his work.
I want the pendant to tell a story—a story about my mother’s love for mid-century art, particularly from the Bay Area. Mom knew Peter, or at least I think she told me she did. She must have had anecdotes about how she bought the jewelry, what he was like, her San Francisco connection to him. She wore this pendant often, her signature piece. The photo of her and my dad shows her wearing it in 1964. She is wearing it again in the photo with her cat when she was in her sixties.
But the stories about Mom’s relationship with Macchiarini died with her. I can’t remember anything, and now I can’t ask her about them. What can I say about this unusual round pendant, a playful amoeba shape carved into dark wood and set in silver and gold? I can say that when I wear it, I feel warmth under its weight. Warmth around the heart, generated by affection. Our relationship was complicated. She was fucked up, inevitably passing along some of that to me. Yet there was so much love. She instilled in me a reverence for life’s beauty. And inextricable from that, a cellular knowledge of sadness.
I notice that my left hand is placed on my right arm just as my mother’s left hand is placed on her right arm in the 1964 photograph. Coincidence?
In mid-December, I bought a green glass jug in a second-hand store, half price. My aspiration was to make a beautiful winter bouquet for my friend, Lillian. I bought a bunch of silver dollar eucalyptus and two dozen white carnations. I envisioned white wintry bursts among the silvery green, but the more I trimmed and mixed the carnations with the stems of eucalyptus, the sillier and more incoherent it looked. I took basic Ikebana but still haven’t a clue how to make flowers and plants look good.
Finally, I used only the eucalyptus, splayed out in a free-fall arrangement. I attached a few small, red shiny balls to the stems, and the effect, I hope, was Christmassy and charming, if a bit messy. Lillian said she loved it. (But what could she say, really?) I was going to throw out the unused carnations, but it seemed such a waste, so I put them in a white and blue vase and placed it in my study on a low stool covered with a blue-green cloth.
I don’t like carnations, or I didn’t think that I did. I’ve seen too many sad, slender bunches wrapped in cellophane at the mini-mart next to the hospital. They make me think of last-minute purchases for the death bed, cheap flowers that outlive the person you visited. They seem so tight, orthodox, banal. Whorls of perfect, serrated petals, every bloom the same.
But they’ve grown on me. As I spend hours in their presence, they’ve become real. You could say I’ve become intimate with them. I sit here now, the last day of the year, gazing at their fresh ordinariness. The carnation is the sturdy, faithful flower that will see you through. Perhaps they are flower of the year: commonplace as canned milk. Carnations are one-foot-in-front-of-the-other flowers. Quotidian flowers. Bread-and-butter blooms. See you through the hardest times. Last for weeks. Nothing special.
Although 2024 was my first year of so-called retirement, and thus I was given twenty additional hours each week, I wrote less, and I sewed less. (A few felt birds for family and other little felt creations, an apron, a crib quilt start, a fur-lined bag.) I did finish an editing certificate I started in 2020, which is a relief. And I made a lovely new friend and deepened existing friendships. I started a volunteer gig at a non-profit arts and crafts shop in August that has led to meeting many interesting people. Bonus: I get to surround myself with a messy profusion of materials that inspire me.
Kathryn’s robinAllison’s pigeonEvan’s heronNancy’s reversible purple apronNancy’s reversible purple apronSarah’s swanI made felt hearts for friends at Christmas.Nat’s puffinNat’s puffinI started a quilt for Lillian’s great grandson, FoxWilson the owl, a gift for Michael Magic bag lined with fake fur for Nat’s 30th birthdayWomen in Need’s Upcycle and Craft store on North Park Avenue. I work there on Thursday afternoons.
This year, I listened to probably one hundred dharma talks on Dharma Seed, with a broad aspiration of becoming more intimate with life—accepting whatever’s happening in my heart, whatever’s happening in the world. Making friends with wild mind. Accepting the truth of the way things are.
I read so many books this year. A couple that stick with me are Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence and The Age of Loneliness, a book of essays about life during the sixth extinction by Laura Marris.
Solnit writes a lot about being a woman. That’s what her title gestures toward—the peculiar “nonexistence” of being female in a patriarchy (remember mansplaining? She is behind that neologism[i]). She draws on John Berger’s 1972 Ways of Seeing, which I’ve known about for years and now am determined to read. She quotes words from him that jibe with my experience: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.”
Perhaps that sounds dramatic in the Global North in 2024, but that has been my experience. Perhaps it’s different for lesbians. Perhaps it is different for women of subsequent generations, but Solnit and I were born three years apart (1961/1958), so we grew up at roughly the same time. Berger goes on,
“A woman must continually watch herself. … She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as yourself by another.”
Solnit calls Berger brilliant and generous, to be able to imagine a woman’s experience, and I agree. What he writes here feels just as real as the carnations in front of me. Reading the passage and feeling its truth is freeing. No action needed, just awareness.
Similarly, truth pinged through me when I read Laura Marris writing about the age of loneliness. We become lonelier as we bear witness to the drastic reduction, or “great thinning,” of ordinary animals. Marris draws on the work of naturalist, Michael McCarthy, who writes of our baby boomer age group, “As we come to the end of our time, a different way of categorising us is beginning to manifest itself: we were the generation who, over the long course of our lives, saw the shadow fall across the face of the earth.”
Reading this series of essays, elegies to Earth as the shadow descends and animals disappear, I was gripped by a grief so deep I sat for a time and just cried. Again, the truth is freeing. Let’s not deny that this is happening. It’s really happening. We can still enjoy the beauty that is here.
In keeping with my mood of asceticism, I recently deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Unlike the birds who used to sing outside my window, FB and IG will not be mourned. I feel light as I step through life with a new red pedometer safety-pinned to my leggings (the pedometer frees me from carrying a “smart” phone to count steps). Michael, Marvin, and I amble down to the beach at Thetis Cove to watch the sky change. Rippled water reflects a bank of pink clouds.
Thank you for reading. In the coming year, may you experience moments of lightness in a shadowy world.
Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. Penguin. Marris, Laura. 2024. The Age of Loneliness: Essays. Greywolf Press. McCarthy, Michael. 2015. The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. New York Review Books. Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. Recollections of My Nonexistence. Viking.
[i] From Wikipedia: The term mansplaining was inspired by an essay, “Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way”, written by author Rebecca Solnit and published on TomDispatch.com on 13 April 2008. In the essay, Solnit told an anecdote about a man at a party who said he had heard she had written some books. She began to talk about her most recent, on Eadweard Muybridge, whereupon the man cut her off and asked if she had “heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year”—not considering that it might be (as, in fact, it was) Solnit’s book. Solnit did not use the word mansplaining in the essay, but she described the phenomenon as “something every woman knows”.
Madeline Ruth Walker 