Category Archives: childhood

The Time to Write is Now

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On Fridays I work a half-day at home, and every other Friday afternoon, I see my therapist. That Friday seemed like any other. I sat at my desk, sipped coffee, read student assignments, and provided written feedback using Word’s “comment” feature. I gazed intermittently at the grey skey outside the window. Taking a break between students, I checked “The Time is Now” for a writing prompt. Part of the Poets & Writers website, “The Time is Now” offers free weekly prompts for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. I felt like writing something other than “you have a modifier problem in this sentence” or “a transition between these paragraphs will create a sense of flow.” That morning, the poetry prompt I read was this:

I clicked the hyperlink to read Kien Lam’s poem (I invite you to read it here). Then without thinking too much, I opened a fresh Word document and started to type couplets. The apocryphal story of your birth incorporating a fantastical tone. This is what I wrote:

Hallowe’en Baby

Like everyone, I come from a mother.
I curled in a womb until the time of my

birth, when the veil between worlds,
like a fully ripened cervix, was thinnest.

A beldam from the other side
invaded the plexiglass cage where I

lay on my belly, helpless, hours old.
That witch, she pulled me from my

crib into the stars, shrieking with
laughter as my limbs contracted in fear. 

She claimed to be my true 
Mother, but her touch was icy 

and her tits were cold and milkless. 
I hung from her broom until

November first, when a meteor 
carried me, feverish, back to my crib. 

I recovered there, alone, sucking my 
thumb for comfort. Nobody knew.

From that time, grief has grown thick 
as a callous to shield me from assailants:

For example, my Mother might try to 
pierce me again from the other side.

I didn’t toy with the poem too much—this is pretty much as it first flowed. At 1:00 p.m., my half-day of work over, I gathered my things, including the poem, which I’d printed out, and drove to my therapist’s office. I read the poem to her. I realized as I read it that it wasn’t just the prompt and Lam’s poem that had pushed the words out—it was remembering the story my mother had told me: I’d spent my first days of life separated from my parents, lying tummy down in a crib in the hospital nursery. My mother had a fever, and they put me in isolation to “protect me.” My father was at home caring for my two older sisters. I wasn’t held in my parents’ arms for days; I didn’t hear their familiar voices that I’d heard daily in utero. I lay there alone, not knowing when somebody would come to me. A connection was broken. That was 1958; I hope this separation between baby and parent wouldn’t happen today.

Writing the poem and reading it to Nancy felt like rupturing the dam holding back feeling and understanding. A river of sadness and comprehension washed over me. Pieces fell into place. My therapist’s contribution was to help me see the link between the absence of my parents’ touch and their voices in early infancy and my difficulty trusting connection in relationships. 

For a day or two, I felt high with the transformative knowledge. It explained so much. Writing that poem had planted a seed, so I decided to change my writing practice in 2023. My memoir (Sow’s Ear), novel (Geraldine), and book of linked short stories (Deedee and Stan: Domestic Stories) languish in folders on my desktop. I don’t want to continue to stew about “getting published” in 2023, to desultorily send my work out to indie publishers. I want to write. The time is now. So, I signed up to receive weekly writing prompts, and my aspiration is to use the prompts to write, if not weekly, then often, sometimes writing poems and other times fiction and non-fiction. 

I want to focus on the practice of writing: an embodied practice, a way of touching into deep feelings, into life’s mystery. My experience of writing “Hallowe’en Baby” was profoundly moving. I don’t expect all of my writing next year to be equally therapeutic, of course. However, I believe many revelations will emerge from writing this way. 

I’ve started on this week’s poetry prompt, following the Seamus Heaney poem, “Postscript”: “think back to a natural landscape that has made a lasting impression on you and write a poem addressed to a loved one that describes this unique terrain’s lasting beauty.” I realized, with sadness, that I’ve spent most of my life indoors. I can’t remember many natural landscapes that have made a “lasting impression.” Perhaps two or three. So, that’s quite a discovery! And it makes me want to get outside to observe the trees and the ocean, to feel the wind and sun, to watch the sky. It makes me want to go different places, to travel, to soak up the transient beauty of this world.

Saxe Point, Esquimalt, British Columbia

Sewing/sowing history

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The lavender bias tape is sewn in small, even stitches along the inner edge of the richly patterned cloth. My grandmother once sat quietly, sewing this binding to finish the apron she was making for me. After wearing the apron for decades, I have been cutting it apart, incorporating squares of the purple, cream, and brown fabric into coasters for a friend, a shoulder bag for my niece, and now a quilt. These little squares and rectangles sew/sow history into new textiles. 

The old apron
Marguerite Potter Walker in 1922, Manila Phillipines

Grandma Marguerite Walker (nee Potter) was born in 1896 in Fort Scott, Kansas. Although I didn’t know her well, I have fond memories of her. She was gentle and genteel, soft-spoken, and poised.  When my parents when to Europe for several weeks when I was 8 or 9, she came to stay with us in Toronto. She taught me how to set a table during that visit because, apparently, my mother had never taught me the correct way to place napkin, fork, knife, and spoon. I once visited her in Los Gatos, California, where she lived for many years. One day, we wandered about, looking at the shops. “What a lovely colour your blouse is,” grandma said to a woman we approached on the street. That stranger lit up from the compliment, and I never forgot that simple, kind exchange. Another time we heard ambulance sirens in the distance, and my grandmother prayed aloud that nobody was hurt. This was something new for me. “Prayer” was not in my parents’ lexicon. And in her letters, grandma wrote “thot” for thought, not because she didn’t know how to spell—she was an excellent speller—but because she had her own shorthand. 

In my twenties, I underwent surgery to correct infertility. I was told after the surgery that I still had only a 15-20% chance of having children. Grandma Marguerite started sending me her copies of Unity magazine and told me her church congregation was praying for me. Ultimately, I gave birth to three healthy sons. I don’t know about cause–effect, but I was forever grateful to her for the energetic and spiritual work she undertook on my behalf. All of these warm memories float through me as I sew squares of Grandma’s apron into the mix of this new quilt, which I think I’ll call “windows to a purple world.” 

Windows to a purple world (quilt in progress)

This type of sewing I’m describing is upcycling, but with a difference. Take fabric that’s been in your family or is otherwise meaningful and make it into something new. If you do this, you incorporate stories into your sewing. A couple of years ago my friend Nancy gave me a large basket of textiles from her family—old linen tablecloths and napkins in pastel green, pink and salmon that her mother and grandmother had used over many years. I cut these precious pieces apart, mixed in other contemporary fabrics, and fashioned pillowcases. I gave Nancy the pillows for her birthday. She can remember her mother and grandmother and meals at the family table whenever she looks at them.  

I incorporated cloth from pink and green tablecloths and napkins from Nancy’s family into pillowcases.

Scattering scraps of one fabric over countless projects feels like I’m sowing seeds of connection far and wide. When Michael and drove to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon in the summer of 2017, we visited Sew Creative, a beautiful fabric store on the main drag. I fell in love with designs by Australian Aboriginal designers: swirly organic patterns that looked like amoebas and rhizomes done in purples, reds, browns, and oranges. And there was a binder there with each designer’s photograph and profile so I could learn about them–their processes and inspiration. I bought two one-yard pieces of fabric. During the last five years, I have cut and sewn those fabrics into countless things: purses, pouches, quilts, coasters. I love the dispersal of one thing into many. Cadmus sowed dragon’s teeth and up rose an army: the fierce Sparti (which means “sown”). I sow scraps of fabric and up rises. . .  delight! 

Pendleton Store, Ashland Oregon
Ashland, Oregon – Shakespeare Festival 2017
Michael and Madeline, Ashland
The two fabrics I chose

Scraps of the same fabric show up over and over again. The cloth Nat and Sam chose for their aprons (animals on the Serengeti; a bright turquoise broadcloth) show up in the bookmarks I recently made and distributed to friends and family. The blue tablecloth I bought at Value Village became the lining for my blue patchwork apron. It feels, at times, as if I—and not just the fabric—am being dispersed across time and space. It is too easy these days to disconnect and withdraw. I am trying to stay connected through writing and sewing, sewing and writing. Sowing myself far and wide through words and fabric.

Legacy of Loss/ Swords

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Legacy of Loss

“The American experience, the focus on individual achievement, the acquisition of goods and money to prove one’s social value, is built on this sense of loss, this alienation from the warmth of the home culture, isolation from genetic bonds. This separation from one’s tribe creates an inner loneliness that increases as one ages.”

Annie Proulx, “A Yard of Cloth” (p. 20) from Bird Cloud.

I read this passage last night, and I had to get out of bed to copy those sentences. They struck a chord in me. I too feel that “inner loneliness that increases as one ages.” My mother, who died on February 14, 2019, distanced herself from her family as a teenager. When she coloured her hair blonde, her father was furious. Either he told her to leave, or she left voluntarily to flee the strictness of their farm in Lodi, California, I’m not sure which. She ended up in Los Angeles, working the switchboard at Kaiser Hospital. She would later meet an older woman, Phyllis, who became a kind of mother to her, paying for her therapy. My mother would go on to complete a BA and MA at University of California, Berkeley. 

Not only did my mother reject her parents, she spurned most of her seven siblings as well. However, she had a special bond with Fran, a gentle older sister who worked as a nurse. My mother claimed Fran saved her life by preventing their parents from treating my mother’s Bell’s Palsy with some kind of horse medicine. Most of these stories are so garbled in my memory. They seem half-fantasy and half-truth. I’m sure I have most of the stories slightly wrong. 

But the feeling is real—of striking out, fleeing family, rejecting those who engendered you, separating from tribe. That was an element in my mother: brutal independence. I don’t need you. I depend on nobody but myself. I remember the last time I visited her in Toronto, her brother, an Evangelical preacher living somewhere in the States, called her, and I picked up the phone. Apparently, he called regularly, wanting to reconnect, and she always hung up on him. When I tried to hand the phone to her, she wouldn’t take the call. I was shocked. You won’t talk to your brother? He’ll just proselytize, she said. 

My parents migrated from California to Toronto in 1965, another “alienation from the warmth of the home culture” that Proulx writes about. My mother left her adopted mother, Phyllis, which must have been heartbreaking for her, and my father left his mother. We three daughters were already used to being without a large tribe—we didn’t know most of our cousins or aunts and uncles. We were a nuclear family with no extended family to fall back on. I look back on how we grew up without the cushion of uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents and how hard it is to survive that way. But we didn’t know anything different. 

Then, repeating the pattern of migration and loss, my first husband and I left our home in Toronto with our first child. We left our parents and siblings—it felt exciting and freeing. We started a new life in Victoria in 1988. My kids grew up without getting to really know their Ontario grandparents. 

I am thinking of my mother this weekend. It will be three years since she died. She was fierce and proud and insisted on individual achievement as the sine qua non. In her actions, she was a feminist. In elementary school, we were sent home for lunch every day for a 90 minute break, which necessitated mothers stay home to serve their kids lunch. She fought to get the school to allow us to stay there to eat a packed lunch so she could go out and work. Later, she pressed back when the bank wanted her ex-husband’s signature to get a mortgage. But she wouldn’t be called a feminist because she didn’t want to be seen as part of group of women who supported and uplifted each other, challenging the system together. All of her achievements in life, she thought, were due to her own hard work and merit plus a little help from individual friends. And it’s interesting how I’ve inherited some of this thinking, especially an unwillingness to ask for help. 

My mother and her father

As humans, we work so hard to connect. It is our default—we need each other. I treasure my sisters now, and I create my own chosen family in my friends. However, that profound sense of loss lingers at the edges of life. It’s the legacy of leaving family behind and striking out on one’s one. 

Swords

Swords are weapons of destruction and tools of discernment. 

Swords are on my mind.

About a year ago, I created a website for my new editing business and wanted a brand identity.  The Queen of swords from tarot seemed a perfect symbol for a female editor—the independent, unbiased woman, a seeker of truth, with clear boundaries and a direct style of communication. She sees problems and figures out how to solve them; she knows where to cut the extraneous to reveal the truth. Queens are about heart and swords are about mind—so she brings heart and mind into harmony.

I didn’t use a Queen of swords image from a tarot deck due to copyright laws. Instead, I planned to use an excerpt from a painting in the public domain, John Gilbert’s (1817-1897) Joan of Arc. I sent a mock-up of the website, including a sword image, to a few friends for their opinions. One of them noted that the image of Joan of Arc’s armour and sword was martial and scary and didn’t really reflect who I am. I agreed. I decided to let go of the sword as a metaphor for editing because of its primary associations with violence. 

And yet, swords keep coming up. On December 31, 2021, Michael and I each drew a tarot card to guide us during 2022. He drew two of swords; I drew Queen of swords. Evidently, the sword has much to teach both of us this year, so I am listening. As Michael has been studying the tarot for several years now, I asked him about swords. His words are a synthesis of all he has read and studied from various sources (but his main influences are Mary Greer, Rachel Pollock, and Anthony Louis). 

 “The suit of swords is aligned with the element of air, which is the suit of mental processes and thoughts. Swords are aligned with thinking, intellect, reason, yang energy, severing unhealthy connections, and the courage of the warrior. They’re about logos, problem solving, things we have to work through before we can find serenity. 

Swords are aligned with prajna, deciding what to accept and what to reject or cut; it’s the suit of discernment and decisiveness. Also, because swords are about mental things, they can also be about willful blindness, about illusion. Swords is where we discover the obscurations of mind that trap us. 

Two of swords shows a woman blindfolded, and the eight shows a blindfolded, bound woman surrounded by swords. However, these are mental obscurations – imagined entrapments rather than actual physical imprisonment. The four of swords has a person lying on their back with three swords above – this is contemplation. Swords is about how you use your mind. Some sword cards are about meditation: training, calming, and taming the mind. 

Swords are not just about cutting, but they’re also about piercing – which is penetrating insight.”

I asked Michael about his tattoo of the three of swords. “Well, threes are energy, vitality, motion – they arise from loss or partnership or conflict. Three of swords is heartbreak, alienation, and sorrow—mental alienation and loss. The three of swords invites us to find the sweetness and wisdom beneath our sorrow –that’s my take on it. Go underneath the sorrow – penetrate and pierce it.”

Cutting and piercing are the work of the sword. And underneath the pain is sweetness.

Recently, a client asked me to cut 40% from several of her book chapters—truly an exercise in figuring out what’s most important. Same thing in life. Look at what you most value and treasure it. Let go of what you no longer value.

As the Queen of swords accompanies me throughout this year, I would like to continue to examine the mental obscurations that trap me and prevent me from experiencing serenity. For example, much anxiety arises from worrying about the future, but I know there is no future. There is only today.

Michael’s tattoo
Joan of Arc
N. Churchill
My niece Sarah’s tattoo

Late blooming no

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I sat in a coffee shop with a latte and a pumpkin scone, my journal from summer of 1977 before me. Pages and pages of my fat cursive filled the college notebook. At one time, I’d felt burdened by the huge tub of journals—a sporadic record of my life dating back to my early teen years. But lately, I am grateful that I saved these ragged books; they give me insight into who I was and am and the forces that shaped me. I laugh out loud when I come to a passage about my strange encounter on a Greyhound bus from Gravenhurst to Toronto. I describe the encounter as “euphoric.” A handsome man sat next to me: 

Every time his arm brushed against me, shivers went up my spine. For a while we slept, and our bodies were quite separate. While he was awake, I was always worried that he might know exactly what I was thinking. At some point, when the bus turned, my arm was nestled next to his. . . . And then he began to gently stroke my arm. I kept telling myself I was imagining it, but I wasn’t. The rest of the ride was seventh heaven. He continued to ever so lightly caress my arm. Neither of us looked at the other, yet I felt an infinite closeness, a bond with this gorgeous man. As we approached Toronto, I was surprised, the ride seemed so short. . . . When he got off the bus and it pulled away, I saw him standing on the sidewalk looking at me. I looked back. He was so beautiful. That was a most incredible experience.

I love that 18-year-old me: naïve, open to life, hungry for it. Trusting, fearless, sensual, absurdly passionate, saying yes to everything. Wait a minute, though. I take a pause. Yes, there’s something juicy about her eagerness to embrace the strange. But let me think past the wild beauty. This young woman’s lack of boundaries sometimes led her into the dark: dangerous situations and unhealthy relationships. It’s a little easier on my heart to squint from both the distance of time and third person point of view.

The romance of saying yes to life masks an inability to say no, to discern what you truly want, what’s good for you. I see with clarity and growing acceptance how my early childhood experiences of boundary-less-ness have engendered a lifetime of struggling to set limits. I learned early on that to say no, to set a limit, meant to risk being rejected, unloved, or abandoned. Thus, I said yes even when I felt no. I accommodated others at all costs, a human pretzel, ignoring the internal cries that grew fainter: 

“I can’t do this, this doesn’t feel right, I don’t want to, I don’t like this, no, I can’t, no…no…no….” Whispers fading away.

Author James Joyce apparently described “yes” as “the female word” that showed “acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance” (see Hugh Kenner’s [1987] Ulysses. Johns Hopkins University Press). At the end of Ulysses, Joyce puts “yes” into his character Molly Bloom’s mouth many times during her pages-long monologue that ends the book.

“yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” 

I was enamoured by Joyce when I studied Ulysses during my PhD program, and his idea that “yes” was a female word aligned with my view of myself as a nice, easy-going, accommodating female. But now his gendered claim about “yes” disturbs me. Sure, I see the value in saying yes: the self-abandon and relaxation Joyce cites. And female energy has long been associated with yielding, opening, giving birth (the ultimate yes), just as male energy is associated with law and logos. But—as with most things—context is everything. 

I am learning to say no. No thank you, I don’t want to teach a course next semester. No, I’m busy with other clients—I cannot edit your dissertation. No, I’d rather not. No, that doesn’t work for me. Kindly, but firmly: no no no no no no no. Like the terrible or terrific two-year-old, I am the terrible terrific 62-year-old: No, no, no, no. Because saying no makes space for a-flesh-and-blood-I-mean-it-down-to-my-toes, yes. 

Hard Work of No

To push the muslin down 
into the vat of boiling blue, 
I used my broomstick
pounding, nonono and nonono

It took a month to wring 
it out. My shoulders ached,
my hands turned blue, 
each drop a no no no no no

Ten yards of billowing 
indigo—a sister to the sky—
I hung it out to dry, to crackle
in the wind: no no no no, nononono

With bundled sheet across 
my breasts, I headed back 
to childhood, and there I found a
cache of suffocated noes 

reduced to infant bones,
all petrified, but still faint 
echoes of the negative. From
those timbers, I built a scaffold

and as I worked, I sighed  
reminders to my infant bones
of the pleasures of autonomy:
a no and a no and a nonono 

Birds helped by lifting corners 
of the sheet, then draped it 
on the bony frame. A blue-domed 
tent appeared before my eyes then

Spent, I crept inside, where bluish light
bathed me to sleep and children’s bones 
sang me a lullaby of no no no and no no no
of no and no and no and no

It took the hardest work 
to get here. Know my tool 
of choice: Nicely, firmly, thank
you, thank you, no and no and no 

A month went by. I woke 
refreshed and listened to a
sound, a curlicue of pink 
that whistled through my core 

And there again the whistle,
delicious worm of want 
winds up my empty throat, 
and from my tongue

slides out the baby of 
a thousand noes, the 
pretty word all plump 
with meaning: yes





Madeline Walker, October 2021

A sense of belonging

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“Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness.” 

David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

Ever since I was small, I have felt I don’t belong. As I grow older, I see how this sense of not belonging is linked to black and white thinking: I am excluded either because I am not good enough or because I am superior (“arrogant worm,” as they say in AA). This strain of thought is endemic for alcoholics. To break the spell, it’s crucial to look for similarities not differences when you attend twelve step meetings or, indeed, whenever you feel the sharp edges of polarity creating a sense of distance. 

For me and perhaps for you, the isolation resulting from the pandemic has exacerbated loneliness and a sense of exile. Last month I was feeling particularly alone in the sadness that can arise from being a parent. Only in recognizing that many other parents across the world share in this pain did I not feel so alone. Facebook groups and other modes of connecting across space and time are wonderful to bring a sense of “I’m not the only one.” But also useful has been the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, breathing in the thick suffering of others in your predicament and breathing out coolness and healing. This practice connects me with others, but more than that, it dissolves the sense of specialness and exclusion I am prone to. We’re all in this together.   

There is another simple practice I have started. I review small events from the perspective of community. This week, for example, I went to an acupuncturist for the first time. She is a gentle young woman named Demi with a river of brown curls running down her back. She made me feel so comfortable and safe as she stuck a dozen needles into my legs, hands, and back. As I laid face down on the warm table in a quiet room, I felt joined with all of the other people suffering sciatica or other pain in their bodies, and I also felt part of a group of people who get acupuncture. I could picture hundreds of us lying on surfaces—floors, grassy fields, dusty streets, tables, beds—and kind practitioners breathing slowly and rhythmically, putting us at ease, as they insert the slim sharp points. I imagine a collective release of endorphins through bodies old and young, fat and slim, smooth and rough. I imagine our relief. 

The next day, I suffered from self-doubt about my new editing business—will I get clients? Will people I’ve done work for get back in touch with me? And imposter syndrome: Am I really an editor or just pretending? Perhaps I don’t belong.

Drawing a tarot card, I asked, “What do I need to know right now?” I pulled the Six of Wands, then consulted Joan Bunning’s Learning the Tarot. She writes that “the Six of Wands appears when you have been working hard toward a goal, and success is finally within reach. . . . If you do not feel close to victory now, know that it is on its way provided you are doing all you can to make it happen.” I felt encouraged. 

Amazingly, later that day, I received two emails from former clients who wanted me to do work for them. The next day, a new client gave me an update on work that is planned for this summer. And a referral from a colleague I thought would come to nothing yielded another email today asking for my services.

I feel not only encouraged by all of this positive activity, but connected to a community of editors. Yes, I belong. Amazed by the rightness of the card, I feel connected to all those people everywhere who use tarot to help them make sense of life.  I can see the decks being shuffled and cut by hands everywhere—brown hands, gnarled hands, arthritic hands, young hands, a hand with a missing finger. . . . We shuffle and cut and draw and learn about ourselves and others, about our Fool’s journey on this Earth.

On Friday, I felt down again, and as I sat in the backyard with my next-door neighbour and we watched the puppies play, I shared a little of my current grief. She popped out of her lawn chair, “I’m going to get my Animal Spirit cards. They’ll help you to feel better.” She came back with the deck and I shuffled and drew. I tried to pull just one, but two cards were stuck together—Elephant and Otter. She read aloud the description of each animal, and a tear rolled down my cheek. 

The descriptions felt resonant—the qualities of the unstoppable, gentle, noble elephant and the giddy and joyful otter were combined inside of me. I felt connected to my neighbour then, linked to her through her kindness to me and her willingness to explore beyond the rational self. I feel connected to everybody everywhere who is suffering and uses tools to understand themselves and bring solace: tarot, mandala-making, building sand-castles, creating songs and singing them, writing novels and poems, reading palms, tea-leaf interpretation, or casting the I Ching. 

Then on Saturday, I was washing dishes and noticed movement in our back neighbour’s yard. Raccoons? I fetched my binoculars and trained them on a raccoon couple mating—the male straddling the female and biting her neck. Their black bandit masks and long striated fur were crystal clear through the binocs. I was awed. I am part of a community of animals—our bodies are drawn to one another, we mate. I am connected not only to a world of animal lovers, but to a world of lovers of animals. We train our binoculars on birds and lovely beasts of all kinds; we are curious about the natural life we are part of. 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” and that has been my experience. An (invisible) sense of community is essential to me now more than ever. This week I call forth community in many ways. I call it forth through my pain and suffering. I call it through being a patient of acupuncture. I call it through using tarot and other mystical tools. I call it through imagining myself as a member of overlapping groups: editors, parents, and neighbours. And I call it through membership in a society of homo sapiens and other animals. An invisible sense of belonging keeps me going. I may not be able to touch you but I feel you.

Kitchen memories

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Guest post by Judith Walker, aka Jude, my sister and a wonderful cook

Retro, old fashioned, nostalgic, comforting. These words will have different meanings for all of us, depending on our age and our interests. For me, the feelings of nostalgia, craving and comfort come from memories of meals and gatherings from my childhood in the 60s and 70s and also from early adulthood in the 80s, when I experimented with food and first cooked professionally.

When I was a kid we lived in California. Our mom wasn’t a confident cook, she was a late starter and as a young wife and mother struggled to fill her role as the family chef. Some of her meals included simple seasonal items that sound exotic but were quite ordinary for the time and place. Whole artichokes steamed with lemon and served with a bowl of mayo that we shared for dipping. After a lot of peeling and sucking on the tough leaves we were rewarded with the succulent heart. No mayo required, an amazing flavour burst that would linger on my palate for hours. Possibly my first sensuous experience. And the tacos. So basic and so good. We would all help prepare this meal, bowls of fried ground beef, chopped iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes, onions, grated cheese, mashed avocado, and sour cream. And hot sauce for Dad. It must have been the tortillas that made this such a memorable meal. In Berkeley, we had many Hispanic neighbours. I think my mom was able to find fresh tortillas in the local grocery store. I know that my first bite of a fresh corn tortilla in Mexico many years later flooded me with nostalgia.

Another go-to dish for special occasions was ceviche. Mom made one with scallops, shrimp, and onion chopped up and marinated in fresh lime juice.  This was an easy dish she could prepare ahead of time and was elegant and delicious. I don’t recall what she served it with, I just ate it by the spoonful.

And then we moved to cold, Anglo-centric Toronto. No more avocados, scallops or tortillas. It was the 60s after all. So, overdone roast beef, watery spaghetti sauce and tuna casserole came into our lives. Our mother tried to teach us to cook when she went back to school. Cooking pasta (we called it noodles), chopping an onion, peeling veg, measuring, making rice and washing dishes were things we learned. I don’t think the results were great, but I am grateful for the lessons. My fave dish from those days was tuna casserole. I am serious. There is something about that combo of the salty tuna, the creamy blandness of the mushroom soup, slippery noodles and crispy edges that is the epitome of comfort food. I’m pretty sure I made this more than once on a hungover Sunday in my twenties. Better than Kraft dinner!

–cook 2 cups of broad egg noodles according to instructions
-open and drain one can of chunk white tuna
 -open a can of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup
-drain the noodles and mix all the ingredients together in the noodle pot along with a nob of butter.
-pour into a greased 9×9” pyrex dish. If you are feeling fancy sprinkle crushed saltine crackers on top.           
-bake at 350 till bubbling and crispy.

 ( I just checked the Joy of Cooking recipe, and they recommend seasoning the soup with dry sherry! Hilarious!)

Another recipe that was easy for us kids to make and that we actually ate was hotdogs in cornbread:

 -put 6 hot dogs in a 9×9” pyrex dish
-place in a hot oven and roast till a bit brown and blistered
-mix one recipe of cornbread from the Joy of Cooking
 -pour it over the hot dogs and cook according to instructions
-serve with butter and yellow mustard on the side

I sometimes crave this meal, but know if I made it I would eat the whole thing and quickly descend down the spiral of shame.

 My mom tried, she just didn’t have much to work with and not much inspiration in those busy days. We never had Kraft slices, Wonder bread, pop or ketchup in the house. I didn’t know what pizza or french fries were till I was in junior high. I remember visiting my grade 7 friend in her wealthy parents’ fancy penthouse apartment. Their live-in cook would make us toasted Wonder bread topped with bacon and  melted processed cheese. Served with ketchup. I loved it. However, I am grateful that our mother raised us on real food and set us on the path to healthy eating.

Things started looking up in the 80’s. Mediterranean, Asian and Indian food were starting to trend. My mother was travelling a lot then and brought back recipes and fresh ideas. We thumbed through Gourmet magazine and cookbooks looking for our next dinner adventure. The more complicated the better. We would make forays to Kensington market, Chinatown and little India seeking exotic ingredients. And then spend hours in the kitchen, often at Mom’s, gathered around the butcher block on our periodic Friday night family dinners, with mixed results. It was fun and challenging and I learned much that has stayed with me. Pasta from scratch, fresh herbs, toasting and grinding spices, rehydrating dried mushrooms and peppers, fresh cheeses…risotto! So much to discover.

In the mid-80s, knowing nothing about running a business or professional cooking, I started a catering company with a couple of friends called “The Feed Bag.” It was hard work, fun, funny and pretty much a failure financially, but there were some great parties! We made hundreds of spring rolls, massive sushi platters, a ridiculous number of meat, cheese, veggie and fruit trays, with little money to show for it. One of our go-to cookbooks then was The Silver Palate. The quintessential 80s cooking guide. Every recipe has more fat then I would eat in a week now. Decadent. I recently pulled out my battered copy because of a challah recipe request from my sister. I looked back at the most raggedy pages and found one of our old tried and true recipes, chicken dijonaisse. So simple, so good. And easy. I made it recently with a few additions, some shallots, grated parmesan and fresh parsley, and ate it with egg noodles. Delish. Anything served over egg noodles is comfort food for me.

I also made a pineapple upside down cake a while ago, another childhood favourite. Honestly it wasn’t as great as I remember, I think I skimped on the butter in the caramel sauce. I did create an elevated version of this when I worked in fine dining. Individual servings baked in a ramekin with half of a ripe red plum on the bottom. It was beautiful when inverted on a plate surrounded with a creme anglaise or boozy sabayon.

I am not sure why food has been such a focus in my life. I am not academically inclined and hated school, so I managed to make a decent living and support my travels by working in kitchens. But it is more than that. Food was a conduit to my mother, a shared past, our phone conversations in her later years pretty much revolved around what we were cooking that day. And our cats, but that is a whole other story.  It was one of my favourite parts of travelling and a wonderful way to connect to local communities and their customs and everyday life. You can learn so much about any part of our world by learning about the food the locals grow and eat and the history and traditions around them.

 Researching, designing, cooking, sharing and eating food has sustained me on many levels for much of my life.

 This was the menu request for my birthday dinner when I was a kid fifty-five years ago.

 Baked chicken
 Potato salad
 Corn on the cob
 Watermelon
 Chocolate cake

I would grill the chicken now, but other than that I stand by this as my favourite summer meal.

Good food is good food.

The End

Note: I would like to give credit to Judy Gorton for the logo she created for “The Feedbag,” my first business and only adventure in catering. She has been a friend for almost 40 years and is a wonderful artist. I still remember part of the menu from the dinner party we catered for her as payment for the design:

  • Cornish game hen stuffed with basil couscous
  • Carrot sformato (an Italian savoury soufflé, my mom’s recipe)

How very 80s!!

I want to write a poem about aprons

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Aprons are on my mind. I sewed four of them, starting with a free pattern online (https://suzyquilts.com/free-modern-patchwork-apron-tutorial/), and soon started to modify the pattern to make it my own, changing this and that, adding pockets. Then I went to Fabricland with my youngest son and he chose fabric for an apron—animals of the African Savannah—sepia on beige. He chose a bold white on brown polka dot fabric for the lining. When I finish the apron, he thinks he might wear it while tattooing (it will get covered in ink). I bought some lovely tablecloths and placemats at Value Village, piled up now on my sewing table, which I’ll cut and shape into another apron for a friend who loves purples, pinks, and blues. 

What is the appeal of aprons? I love their practicality, their long history worn not just as a cover by women to protect their good clothes when they cooked and cleaned, but worn also by craftspeople, tradespeople, waiters, workers of all kinds throughout the ages. The cobbler at his bench, the candlestick maker pouring wax, the man with tongs at the forge, the woman throwing pots, the child sloshing poster paints over a piece of newsprint. 

I want to write a poem about aprons.  During my year off, I signed up for “Masterclass,” an online offering of video classes by “masters.” For us, this expense has been mostly a waste of money. We paid $240 for a one-year subscription because I was intrigued by the idea of learning how to write a novel from Margaret Atwood. I soon discovered that although she is  a wonderful writer, she does not inspire me. She seems truculent in her mini-lectures, and she says things like, “the garbage can is your best friend.” I feel discouraged. So I watch a few videos of David Sedaris talking about how to write humour. He says we should write in a journal. Of course. Don’t we all already? But I’ll never be very funny. So I abort that class. 

I don’t want to learn percussion from Sheila E. or Skateboarding from Tony Hawk. Nor am I interested in cooking with Wolfgang Puck or building a fashion brand with Diane von Furstenberg. But Billy Collins, the poet, seems promising. So I start to listen to his videos, to read his poems, and I feel encouraged. “Poems are the expression of thoughts and feelings, but they are no longer embarrassing, sort of like a diary without a lock.” I like that. He invites us to write a sentence, the first sentence, and then shape it into four lines for the first quatrain of the poem. So I do that. And then I write another, and another. And the poem, like the apron, grows.

I want to write a poem about aprons

The boy who wore my first apron—a 
simple Home-Ec project in denim—was  
jeered at by the other kids in the mall
where we hung out to smoke and flirt.

He pranced around the spewing fountain 
in the badly sewn thing, making lewd 
gestures, cupping his groin. Everybody  
mocked, so I joined in their laughter.

Uneven seams, unravelling, only an hour
old and the pocket falling off already: a 
garment of mistakes. Sewing is for old women,
home economics a massive bore.

In those years, a pattern coalesced: 
over and over, I betrayed myself.
The second arrow, finding my raw 
heart, buried his head in the pulp. 

Perhaps I want to sew aprons 
now to atone for my crimes against 
myself, self-betrayal just another 
stab at finding love when I was young. 

I dump drawers of fabric on my 
sewing room floor, mounds of blue
and green crash like gelid waves 
off the coast, a tossed bed for the sunset.

Colours and patterns converse
as I move the hot iron over their 
grateful hides. Next, the rotary cutter
slices straight lines to invent a silhouette.

The machine hums with ambition,
the brown paper, resisting my pins,
crinkles and bends, and I cut with the
grand yellow-handled scissors—a shape.

The thing comes together by itself—I, only 
a hand maiden, am guided to choose, to match, 
to press, and slice, and pin, to cut and shape
and press again, deferring to a greater power.

National Public Radio plays jazz 24 hours a day, 
the jazz gem of the Palouse. I love to hear the DJ say,
“the jazz gem of the Palouse,” sweet assonance.
So, breezy drums, sax, trombone, a plucky bass,

they blow the score for a blockbuster movie, a
dramady called Madeline Makes Aprons, 
the story of a girl who slowly learns the art 
of loving the shadow, the mistake, the first creation.

Madeline makes aprons

Shake your wet weathers in the warm wind

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Bouts of anxiety come and go these days: chest tightens, stomach burns, heart flutters. Tears come at any time, unbidden. My hands and face feel raw. My heart even more so. I  am finding comfort in small things. When I saw #StayHomeWriMo’s mental health prompt, “starting re-reading one of your favourite kids’ books,” I took Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie off the shelf, the first two books of a series based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood, specifically pioneer and settler life in Wisconsin, Kansas, Minnesota, and Iowa in the late 1800s. I have the first four books, and I’ve kept them since childhood, moving them from house to house dozens of times. Faded covers, deckled edge pages, and canary yellow flyleaves. Garth Williams’s droll pen and ink illustrations make the stories and the characters come alive. Rereading them more than fifty years later, they produce the same warm feelings of comfort and safety they did back then.

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As I snuggle in bed, I enter a fictional world governed by capable, predictable adults. Wolves howl outside, bears roam the woods, storms erupt and cold winds thrash against the house, malaria descends upon the family, and Indians living down in the creek beds want to kill and scalp all white people. Yet Ma and Pa are there, keeping Laura, Mary, and baby Carrie safe.

Nestling into words and images describing snug, clean, safe indoor environments, I enter the log house in the big Wisconsin woods (Book 1). In the deep of winter, fire shines on the hearth, bulldog Jack and Black Susan the cat stretch out on the warm wood floor. Comfy in her red flannel nightgown, tucked into the trundle bed she shares with her sister, Laura “looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown  fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting. She thought to herself, ‘This is now.’”

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Like a swarm of bees, I can feel the critical arguments seething through my mind as I continue reading: I am trained to call out patriarchal culture, gender construction, racism, oppression, and colonialism, and it’s all there in these books. But I switch off those arguments, sinking into our collective unconscious where an archetypal protector tucks us into cozy trundle beds, watching over us, every one, during this difficult time.

I remembered my 60th birthday party, a year and a half ago. Despite drawing a tarot card that spelled disaster, I experienced the snug feeling of being safe, loved, and watched over. Those were happier times when we were able to gather—when physical distancing was unthinkable.  I invited a friend to the party who reads the tarot, specifically the Motherpeace deck. Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble created Motherpeace tarot in the late 1970s in Berkeley, California, where they worked together as academics, feminists, and sacred healers. This big round deck draws on ancient Goddess wisdom, the occult, magic, myth, and feminine energies. Although when I first saw the deck, I felt disappointed by what I perceived to be crude artwork, I became more and more interested in how these two women had translated the 78 cards from more traditional decks into sacred feminine images.

At my party, I felt honoured by Pamela’s willingness to read for my friends, and one by one, I asked people if they would like a reading. Several of my women friends did, and so by turns, they sat in my low bamboo writing chair that I had dragged into the living room from my sewing room. Pamela, having spread her blue velvet cloth over a low footstool, handed each querent the deck to shuffle. It takes a bit of time to get used to working those big circular cards into a shuffling sequence, and I noticed each of my friends handled the task slightly differently. Pamela asked each woman for her question: What do you want to know? Not a yes/no binary question, but a how or why or what question. Next, Pamela asked them to cut the cards three times, choose three cards, and lay them down. The three-card sequence represents the past, present, and future.

Sometimes, through the buzz of conversations, soft lamplight, music, balanced plates of food, and milling bodies, I glanced at the rapt look on the querent’s face as Pamela leaned in toward her, long blonde hair falling around her beautiful serious face. Sometimes I heard laughter from that corner. And I kept getting little warm flutters in my heart—thinking of how happy it made me for each of my female friends to have this loving attention paid to her for a few moments. To consider her life as this rich, mysterious path. To feel the soundings of old wisdom, submerged, but like a vein of molten lava, spreading warmth and understanding into her body, from the seat of her pants into her torso. But of course these are my feelings about tarot—not theirs. Yet it made me happy. It was as much a gift to me as a gift to each of them.

It was enough for me to know the gift Pamela had given my friends, but then, as I stood in the doorway saying good-bye to a guest, she patted the pillow on the wicker chair. “Your turn.” I sat down, and when she asked me for my question, it came without hesitation, from where, I don’t know: “How do I connect with my power?” The first card, my past, I didn’t take too seriously—six of cups with three women in the water and three riding a wave of orgasm. Perhaps it signified all of the good love I had been experiencing since I met Michael. Perhaps I had started to take it for granted, this bath of love I swim in.

six of cups

But the present card was the Tower, a powerful card of transformation. “This is the card of big change,” said Pamela. “The card that signals big change in a person’s life, like when your husband leaves you—not like this is actually going to happen,” she laughed. And we both looked across the room and smiled at Michael, who was oblivious to our reading, deep in conversation with one of my sons. “I’ve been getting messages that I need to surrender to something,” I hold her. “Well now you have no choice. It could just be turning 60, the big change.”

tower motherpeaceAt the time, I thought the big change the Tower signified was the crumbling of ego. I was being called to surrender to the slow incremental losses of old age. But the Tower signifies sudden change, and today I believe it foretold the capital c Change the pandemic has brought: change that shakes the very foundations of our lives, change that brings our beliefs and systems under scrutiny and asks us what is most important in life.

My future card, the ace of wands, depicts a small brown body breaking free from a blue eggshell, surrounded by flames. Rebirth, creativity, and victory follow sudden loss. All of my life, I have swum against the river trying to locate firm ground. But wait a second, could surrendering to the flow, to the changes, be a way of accessing my power—connecting with it? Letting go, like surrendering to the body’s irresistable contractions during birth, could be the opening to rapture. Ego dissolves into the deep thrum, the slow heartbeat of the Earth that we finally hear when our struggles to get ahead, to get somewhere cease. All my fighting is just thrashing around on the water. Let go and get swept into the current. That seems about right.

ace of wands motherpeace

Later that evening, we lit sparklers and ate a cake, resplendent with glossy chocolate ganache and “Happy Birthday Madeline” in piped white sugar lettering. People hung around for a while, then started to leave—much hugging and laughing in the small entranceway. In the now quiet house, Michael and I cleaned the kitchen and put away the leftovers. Something about hearing the dishwasher clicking into its cycle, wiping down the counters, folding damp dishtowels over the oven door, turning off the porch light, rearranging the chairs felt so simple, safe, and sweet. I had a memory of early childhood, when my father used to go around the house and secure everything. Lights off, things put away, daughters in bed, kissed goodnight. Only the whistle of the radiators and murmur of mother and father talking in their bedroom. Nobody, nothing can hurt me now. Did this ever really happen? I don’t know, but the sensation of being safe and warm was real, just as these last few nights I’ve channelled Laura in bed in the little house in the Big Woods to help calm my anxiety.

Version 2

As I lay in bed that night beside my husband, I felt safe, warm, and contented. Now that I had been given permission by the Tower, I could let go. Everything was coming apart anyway, we were all falling, so I didn’t need to hang on so fiercely after all. I fell asleep and dreamt of blue bits of eggshell scattered over the ground, the detritus from rebirth. They crunched under my bare feet as I shook my wet feathers in the warm wind.

The meaning of that dream feels clearer now, many months later. Now that the big Change is here, we get to choose our rebirth. I like to think of all of us as little birds shaking our wet feathers in the warm wind, bits of shell still clinging. We will fly again.

 

Resources for anxiety

https://bouncebackbc.ca/what-is-bounceback/

https://www.anxietycanada.com/

Resources for writers

NaNoWriMo https://nanowrimo.org/ Sign up with the organization that puts on National Novel Writing Month (November) to get their Covid 19 prompts

How to write when life is sad and wretched: https://discover.submittable.com/blog/how-to-write-when-life-is-sad-and-wretched/

Helen Sword (there is a free online writing retreat coming up later this month): https://www.helensword.com/

 

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A mother lode of feelings

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IMG_0268

My mother loved this card I made for her birthday in 2016. “How did you get me so perfectly?” she asked.

Motherlode

Corns crunch as I turn the wooden grinder
over a tiny heap of grey-black grains for
pfeffernüsse, the recipe you passed to me from your
German mother.

In a clan of ginger, your dark crown pulled the eye.
Beautiful ungainly schwartz
learned to pick peaches at 6,
to drive a car at 12.
You were a barefoot child,
smoldering into life.

Your seed sprang from
hard dry loins of dustbowl farms,
you blossomed dark to light,
turned burlap sacks to rickracked frocks,
pushed hard against poverty,
ate books, ached for knowledge,
opened your scarred scared heart to love.

Passionate proud creature, you live
inside me, your pepper cutting
through my honey, brave unexpected heat
sears the surprised and happy tongue.

“Motherlode” was one of the poems in my first and perhaps last book of published poetry,  birth of the uncool  (2014, Demeter Press). Unfortunately, the first four lines of this poem are missing in the book. When the manuscript was sent to me for a final examination and approval, I didn’t notice the flaw. Without those lines, the poem doesn’t make much sense, which bothers me. I wanted to be mad at the copy editor, but truly it was my fault.

So I offer it here today in its wholeness because I have been thinking of my mother.

When a person we love dies, we measure the next year’s turning as a series of firsts.  First my mother’s birthday rolled around in April, and she wasn’t here to call, to wish happy birthday, to send a card to. Then it was the first time I visited the house where she lived, but she was no longer there, calling from the top of the stairs, “Madeline? Is that you?” Then I celebrated my first birthday without my mother in the world, and coming up is my first Christmas without her.

I spent only one Christmas with her in the thirty years since I moved with my family from Ontario to the West coast. But still, we would talk on the phone every December 25th. I sent gifts, and for a long time, so did she. I’d ask if she had bought a Christmas tree and often she had bought two tiny ones: one for the front room and another for the back room, where they would sit in front of the fire burning in the fireplace, watching the snow fall outside. Sometimes we’d talk about Handel’s Messiah, a piece we both adored and listened to over and over again that time of year. After a while, I stopped asking if she’d made pfeffernüsse because I knew she hadn’t.

She was eating very little in the years and months before she died, cooking only occasionally, and baking hardly at all. But for so many years—all my childhood years—there was the joy of making pfeffernüsse with Mama.

I remember best the warm doughy mounds sliding out of the oven on blackened cookie sheets. A happy human conveyer belt, we dipped them still warm into the bowl of milk flavoured with vanilla extract, then popped them head first onto the plate of powdered sugar, then onto a rack to cool. The powdery tops hit my tongue with a blast of melting sweetness, then my teeth sank into the chewy milk-moistened dough, meeting honey, liquorice, and pepper. We’d line tin canisters with waxed paper, packing them with layers of pfeffernüsse.

I would eat those pepper nuts until I felt sick.  And then when I had my own family, Mama sent me the recipe for “Xmas Cookies,” written in her energetic cursive.  I made them for my boys, even when they weren’t particularly interested in eating them. Eating dozens of them myself, I plumped up like a pfeffernüsse every December.

It’s early November now. Christmas is still many weeks away. But I am thinking of my mother, thinking of our complicated relationship. Acknowledging that while I followed her path in so many ways, I fiercely resisted and resented her too.  After she died in February, I spent the next seven months in therapy, trying to deconstruct the pain and grief I felt, pain and grief spiced by anger, softened by affection. Honey and pepper, pepper and honey. Mama and Madeline, Madeline and her mama.

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Pantoum for the girl within

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I’ve been spending some time around little girls. A friend of mine and his wife adopted two sisters, ages two and five, and I visited them yesterday.  I’ve also been taking a four-year-old girl to the park every week for a while to help her mother, who has a broken arm. I witness the joy they experience of being in their strong flexible bodies. They leap, climb, cycle, run, and whirl through the world. I started to feel the seeds of that old green life inside of me, memories of cartwheels and craziness, of no shame and feeling free and saucy, the time before self-consciousness descends like a constraining shroud. My body’s talking again, reminding me of the green fuse inside.

I’ve been experimenting a bit with poetic form. The Pantoum has captured my attention, an ancient Malay verse form with repeating lines, like the villanelle and the glosa (you can see my attempt at that verse form here).  The quatrains are arranged like this:

Stanza 1
A
B
C
D

Stanza 2
B
E
D
F

Stanza 3
E
G
F
H

Stanza 4
G
I (or A or C)
H
J (or A or C)

Many famous poets have used this form to wonderful effect. I love, for example, this heartbreaking pantoum by Natalie Diaz

My inspiration comes from those little girls I have been seeing on the playground and in my dreams, the little girl buried among my tangled wires of memory. I suspect you have a young version of yourself, too, deep inside, who sends green sparks up your spine.

Pantoum for the girl within

Stuck out tongue and tangled hair
Within me lives a little girl
Turns cartwheels in the falling dark
Laughing, Gleaming, Spinning World

Within me lives a little girl
Yells “I don’t care, just like Pierre!”
Laughing, Gleaming, Spinning World
Turns cartwheels with no underwear

Yells “I don’t care, just like Pierre!”
Legs scissor through the fading light
Turns cartwheels with no underwear
Strong body spinning in the air

Legs scissor through the fading light
Turns cartwheels in the falling dark
Strong body spinning in the air
Stuck out tongue and tangled hair

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Madeline, 4 and half years old

 

I hope that you have had the opportunity to read Maurice Sendak’s “Nutshell Library,”  a series of four tiny books sold together in a little cardboard holder. My favourite was Pierre, a cautionary tale about a boy who didn’t care and was eaten by a lion because of his bad attitude. I always found it slightly shocking, but I hungered for the story and wished I could be as defiant as Pierre, even at risk of death.