Urban garden patch: green tomato relish
This green tomato relish came from …
this early-fall urban garden patch.
Strictly speaking, most of the tomatoes came from the front yard, but lots of peppers and herbs were gathered from the back yard too. When I sent AppleApple out to pick whatever she could find, before the first frost, I never imagined she’d come in with pounds of produce — but she did! Now, what to do with pounds and pounds of green tomatoes? Sure hope our family likes green tomato relish, because we made a ton. I can’t say that another late-night canning session was how Kevin and I envisioned spending our Sunday night, but it seems that canning always happens late at night — or is still going on late at night, no matter how early one begins.
Kevin is also experimenting with dehydrating hot peppers.
Our house smelled fabulous yesterday.
:::
Some other exciting* things happened this weekend. (*applicable to item # 1 only if “exciting” = “organizing”)
1. The kids and I went through all their drawers, plus the bins in the attic, resulting in three bags of purged too-small clothing, and a whole new wardrobe for the younger ones (hand-me-downs, but new to them.) Such a lot of work! Any six-year-old girls in the ‘hood looking for clothes? I’m passing CJ’s outgrown clothing on to his cousins, but Fooey’s will simply be donated.
2. Our family accepted some big challenges this weekend. I ran a tough race on Saturday morning. And both of my eldest kids went to rep soccer tryouts, Saturday and Sunday. This is not big news for our soccer girl, who loves these situations, but it is big news for our eldest boy, who tends to shy away from challenges. And I’ll admit we pushed him a bit to get him out there. But once he was out there, I think he realized that he belonged as much as anyone, that his skills were solid, and that he knew what he was doing. He tried to hide his smile of pride afterward, but he couldn’t, quite.
3. On the parenting front, Kevin and I both felt like we’d added a piece to the puzzle, just observing our son’s confidence after we’d pushed him to try something at which we did know he could fail. That’s a scary thing to ask of a kid. It was rewarding to see him working hard — but I think it was even more rewarding for him to see himself differently, as someone who is willing to take a risk and try his best, no matter the results. I don’t really like pushing my kids, as a general rule — I want them to explore and discover their own passions, and support them as they develop and grow as individuals. But what about a kid who doesn’t seem to know his own passions? How passive/active should a parent be? All I can observe is that our eldest has thrived with a push now and again — he would have given up the piano very early on, if I hadn’t believed in his musicality and insisted he continue, and found a piano teacher who was a good fit; he was recently overheard advising his youngest sister, who is a beginner, that playing the piano is really fun, you just have to learn the basics. I know there are no guarantees of success, and parenting experiments can and do back-fire, but I’m proud of our boy for accepting this new challenge and running with it. I’m curious to see where it leads.
Race day: Run for the Toad
This is a terrible photo. I apologize.
But it was taken post-race, when I was feeling an exhausted high just for having completed the damn thing. Also, I was chilled and needed to get into the car and turn on the heat, quickly. Honestly, it was not my best race ever. It was probably the hardest race I’ve done, not for distance, not for weather, not for any external circumstances, but purely for the mental effort it required of me. I’ll be honest: all along, I just wasn’t sure I could do it.
First, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to train enough to complete it. But as last winter’s hip injury resolved, I was slowly able to add distance runs back into my training. Still, I ended up swimming more than running most of the summer, and had only done one really long run (ie. over 20km) leading up to the race. That said, I knew I could complete it, given the work I’d done. I just didn’t know if I could complete it very fast.
Last year, I was fast.
This year, well, I did my best, I’ll just put it that way. I gave what I had to give. I haven’t seen the official chip time yet, but it looked like I came in about two minutes slower than last year: 2 hours, 20 minutes (over 25 kilometres of trails). I know it’s not a time to be ashamed of. But.
The thing is that I ran the first half faster than last year — I was on a tear. And then I hit the proverbial runner’s wall, which I can quite honestly say I’ve never hit during a race before. This is a course with many hills, many of them very steep and long. On my second lap, I actually walked some of them, head down, struggling; in fact, there were moments when I wondered whether I’d have the energy even to continue walking, let alone get running again.
Thankfully, I always seemed to find more. I told myself that the only way out was to keep going forward. I told myself to be grateful that I could run again. I told myself to stop fantasizing about the finish line, and stay in the moment: be here now, it’s the only way to keep going.
All great metaphors for life, I suppose. But no fun.
I ended the race with a long sprint that kept me in front of a group of four men I’d passed with about 500 metres to go. That felt good, and one of them came up to congratulate me afterward, saying he just couldn’t catch me although he’d tried. I thanked him for putting up a chase, because at that point I had very little motivation to push myself beyond just crawling to the finish line. I have no idea where the energy came from to maintain the speed, and the first thing I said to the woman who put the medal around my neck at the end is: I almost died! Slightly melodramatic.
This felt like it should have been a learning experience. But I’m not sure what I’ve learned.
From a race perspective, I really should know better than to go out so fast. After all, I started all my races slowly last year, with much success. It’s frustrating to have to re-learn things I should already know.
From a life perspective, I can see how my competitive spirit just won’t give up, no matter what. Maybe that’s good. But it can also make situations more difficult than they need to be. I could have paced myself more slowly once I realized I was tanking. Instead, I took breaks to walk, then ran at as fast a clip as I could manage. When I was running, I was running hard. I also spent a good deal of the race reminding myself to be kinder — to myself. Reminding myself: September has been busy. I’m stretched a little thin. Just dragging myself out to a challenging race should be good enough. Finishing? Even better. Instead of judging myself against last year’s numbers. Instead of judging myself against numbers, period.
Always more to learn. And that’s a fact.
Winnipeg: Thin Air Writers Festival
I took our old digital camera on my trip to Winnipeg, and figured out pretty quickly why we’d stopped using it: the battery runs dead after approximately a minute of use. But nevertheless it allowed me to capture fuzzy moments of my whirlwind adventure. The first photo, above, shows the Museum of Human Rights, still under construction, which was my view out the window when I ran on the treadmill in the empty fitness room (I never saw anyone else there). I stayed at the hotel for less than 24 hours, but still managed to run twice, and nap once.
On Monday, I had dinner with Sheree Fitch and took no photos. I knew her instantly though we’d never met in person, and I mean knew her knew her, not just recognized her. Maybe it seemed so natural to be with her that I assumed we’d have lots of time to pose for photos together, forgetting for the moment that she lives in Nova Scotia, and I’m here in Waterloo, and that mere fortune had allowed us to overlap in Winnipeg. Now I’m plotting to bring her to Waterloo to read in some schools — especially in my kids’ schools. How do such things get arranged?
At the table behind us were Bill Richardson and Karen Levine. Sheree knew them both. I’d met Karen eleven years ago when I recorded a story for a CBC radio program — I was just striking out on my own as a writer, and I was also massively pregnant with Albus, and for some reason had chosen to wear gigantic maternity overalls that day. (Why???)
For my mainstage reading on Monday night, I chose to wear my pretty red high heeled shoes that get compliments every time (which my sister Edna has now given to me to keep), and the cute/countryish/suedish jacket that makes jeans look dressy. (I hope.)
That’s me (and my poufy prairie hair) with the the festival’s director, Charlene Diehl, whom I first met when I was 20 and I walked into her CanLit class at the University of Waterloo. What a festival she’s made in Winnipeg. I’m so proud of her. The venues are terrific, the audiences come out (at our book chat on Tuesday afternoon, someone counted 95 people!), and the writers are treated, oh, so well. The hotel was a haven, and I loved every peaceful minute I spent there. What a gift.
I slept soundly. I woke refreshed. I sat and wrote. I read. I ran on the treadmill. There was space to retreat to — I appreciated having that space, as well as having opportunities to connect. As something of an introvert, I need alone time to balance out the meeting and greeting.
Tiny side anecdote: One of the writers on Monday evening was Jess Walters (Beautiful Ruins), who was very funny — and thankfully last to read. He told a story about his dad, who just couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of a reading. “What — you wrote the book, now you gotta read it to them too?” Ha!
On Tuesday morning, I did not sleep in, but I got a nice cup of coffee, I wrote, and ran, and at 12:30 on the dot, with great regret, I checked out of my room and went for lunch. I decided to order a glass of wine with my meal. I sat alone at the table, and read. It was a strange luxury, not one I could imagine getting used to — not one I particularly would like to get used to, when it comes right down to it. But it was good because it was so unusual.
Then I went up to the hospitality suite and discovered a small frenzy, lots of people. Being a bit thick, I didn’t figure it out right away, plopped down on the couch, checked my phone, gazed around, and went, duh! That’s Richard Ford, Pulizter Prize winner, he of the steely blue eyes. We introduced ourselves and shook hands. The general atmosphere was of people excitedly dropping things and attempting not to sound ridiculously giddy or silly.
I missed his reading that evening. I was on a plane back to Toronto, which sounded disconcertingly like its muffler had fallen off.
When I walked through our front door, after midnight, I snuck around to every room and squeezed and kissed and hugged every child. In the morning, in the whirl and bustle of getting us all ready for school and work, nobody even asked: hey, Mom, how was Winnipeg? I though that was funny. It was a short trip, and I enjoyed it immensely, and I’m glad that it was so easy to slide back into home life, so easy that no one seemed to notice much that I’d come and gone. Or maybe they just accepted me back, as if I’d never left.
There’s a bit of that to travelling too. Being present in the moment. And then it’s gone, and it reverts to being almost dream-like in memory, vivid snippets, densely packed. I wonder which vivid snippets from Winnipeg will stick with me most strongly? There’s no telling.
Home again, home again
home
I really want to do nothing more than blog … but I arrived home after midnight last night, and I’m on deadline for a couple of stories, which means I’m off to do research in exactly nine minutes. Seriously. I often budget my time in terms of minutes.
So: nine minutes to blog! YAY! I missed you, blog. I also missed the dogs, and the kids, and Kevin, but that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Thankfully, text messaging has changed travel. I knew the kids had made it home from school minutes after Kevin knew. I knew who had practiced piano, and what was eaten for supper — in fact, the lunch I ate yesterday in Winnipeg, and texted Kevin about, inspired his menu for supper last night (French onion soup). The comforting and comfortable banalities of daily living travel via text, and that really made me much less homesick.
I’ve got all sorts of things to tell you. Instead of blogging, I wrote them all down by hand in a notebook. How old-fashioned is that? Here’s hoping I can decipher my writing in order to tell you all about it.
But not this morning. It will take more than nine minutes to transcribe.
This morning I just want to say HELLO! and happy Wednesday! and life is fascinating and multi-faceted and travel is bizarre because I was there and now I’m here, and there was something else I wanted to say too … Oh, yes. I wanted to share with you the bliss of having a hotel room to myself for 21 hours.
I’m out of time. More soon.
Welcome to the family, DJ and Suzi!
(click on the photos to see them in full)
Marking a momentous occasion in our family’s life: we have signed the papers and are now officially the owners of our two dogs, who came to us through a rescue agency. We’ll never know their full story. All we know for sure is that about a year and a half ago they were found together, wandering the streets in cold weather wearing matching pink sweaters. And no one came to claim them at the crowded shelter.
We’re pretty sure someone loved them, though. Someone definitely fed them from the table (we don’t do that, but Suzi’s probably never going to give up hoping that we might just, someday.)
While there are difficulties in not knowing their history, and in adopting older dogs, and while I’d be lying if I said the transition has been entirely hiccup-free, we’re truly happy that they came our way. I’m developing the theory that all it takes to become a dog person is to get some dogs (or, hey, even just one — we weren’t actually looking for two dogs, it just happened that these two came together, and needed a home). I wasn’t sure I was really a dog person, and was afraid that it would be hard to get used to the hair and the extra work, but it hasn’t been. I just lowered my domestic standards a teensy bit more to make room for the hair.
Because I really just love these loving furry little creatures.
I’ve even got funny voices for them. Suzi’s goes like this: “What’s happening? What’s happening? What’s going on? Something’s going on! I just know it! Exciting! What’s happening? What’s happening?” all in a very fast high-pitched tone. In a much suaver tone, DJ murmurs, as if talking to herself on a hidden recorder: “Secret agent DJ, on the job. I’ve sent the little one off to scout out the scene while I hang back and eat her treat, which I hid earlier. It’s all good.”
We signed the papers on Saturday, and these are some of the photos taken immediately afterward. Everyone was very excited. Well — and happy. Just plain happy.
As you can see for yourself.
:::
There will be a brief pause in services on this blog, unless I figure out a way to post remotely: I’m bound for Winnipeg tomorrow, not home til Tuesday, very late. Bags are packed, schedules organized (here at home, I mean), Kev will be in charge.
We can do this, right?