Our Yard
This is our yard, as viewed from the back porch, where I hang laundry. As you can see, it’s very shaded, and spacious, especially for a lot so close to centre of the city. It’s been an ideal play-yard for the kids, and we’ve added, over the years, to the small swing set that came with the house. We now have a large sand area, and a play structure with homemade climbing elements added on. We also have a soccer net in one corner, and some composting bins for yard waste. We poured the patio and laid the bricks, perfect for chalking, biking, and scootering. But there’s room for more, as the kids grow older. We’re currently saving up — an all-family effort — for a trampoline. A treehouse is in the works, too.
A few years ago, we added raspberry canes, which spread like wildfire. This summer, we’ve tried to contain them, and Kevin cleared paths so the kids could get in to pick more easily. The berries are ripe right now. This side of the yard has a bed of perennials, some which were here when we moved in eight years ago, and others we’ve added over the years. In springtime, the colours are insanely gorgeous. By July, it begins to look a bit weedy and sparse. Yesterday afternoon, the little kids and I spent a blissful hour and a half before supper picking raspberries, playing (them), and weeding (me). The weeding started giving me ideas.
Look at all this untouched space. As I weeded, I started to hear words in my head like “homestead,” and “truckpatch,” and “harvest.” I started mentally cutting down trees: the old pear and apple, which give next to no fruit anymore. The black walnut. The mostly dead maple. The two Manitoba maples in the middle of the yard. (Wow, that’s a lot of trees; what do you think, too many? Will we miss the shade?). But it would call down a lot more sunshine: the valuable morning sun especially. I started thinking goats and chickens, a barn cat, a dog. Could we petition the city to except us from its by-laws so we could have our own little carefully tended urban farm-plot? I won’t ask for a pony. (Could I ask for a pony?).
Meanwhile, this is the extent of our backyard edible gardening: potatoes in the raised beds along the back patio. Kevin built these several years ago, and they’ve never gotten quite enough sun to nourish anything we’ve planted in them. This year, I added tons of compost and new soil. The potatoes were going to seed in our root cellar. Seemed like a good fit. I’d like to add another row of beds just below these, though it would mean sacrificing the tiger lilies currently sprouting on the incline. (My all-time favourite flower, and one I associate with being in the country).
Talking about thin spaces yesterday … there is something about being outside in green space, no matter how hemmed in it is inside a city, that brings real peace to the mind. I’ve had my share of farm fantasies, but, really, I wouldn’t want to move to the country because it would mean car-dependency; I love that we can walk or bike almost everywhere we need to go, and I love our close-knit neighbourhood for the kids (and for me, too!). But I’d love for our yard to be a farm-like sanctuary, too.
Something to dream about while weeding on a lazy summer afternoon. I’ll keep you posted.
Thin Spaces
My friend Rebecca wrote this thought-provoking post on ‘thin spaces’, the Celtic concept of places (or moments) where the spirit world comes very near to our world. We can reach through and touch it; or it brushes us. She asked where we find our thin spaces. It might be a physical place, or it might be an experience. It might be something we can seek out, or it might be something that we can’t, that just comes upon us.
Here is my short list, the things that jumped immediately into my mind:
– being with someone during labour and birth
– sometimes while writing, when the words seem to come from beyond me
– when someone reads a poem out loud
– when my body is working very hard and my mind becomes very quiet
I was out with my siblings last night (and Kevin!), and I was thinking about how all five of us Snyder kids are both creative and impractical (thank heavens Kevin is practical). I don’t mean we’re disorganized or incapable of functioning in the world, but I do think we look at some practical things, such as work and earning a living, differently. Somehow, we must have been raised to value the making of things more than the buying of things. I think within that is some quiet value, never spoken of, of thin spaces. And our thin spaces maybe aren’t that profitable, but we were raised to choose unprofitable over practical if unprofitable feeds us in other ways.
I think many people choose the work they choose because it brings them closer to those thin spaces. What’s your work? Does it take you to unexpected moments or places of peace / calm / meditation / joy / insight / grace / giving / acceptance / fill-in-the-blank-with-your-word-for-a-thin-space?
Ideas
My girl takes after me. I like to write my ideas down. I have to write my ideas down, more precisely. It’s my version of “thinking out loud,” and I recommend it to my older children when they are having trouble with anything: mean siblings, unfair situations, anger management, you name it.
Yesterday, I took my own advice. The big kids are at overnight camp, and the little kids are at a dance camp during the mornings, just for this week; and I have no projects on the go. I’ve completed the triathlon, and the related Chatelaine.com blog. I am waiting for line edits on The Juliet Stories. I seem unwilling to commit to a new character and a new story, just yet. I am at the crux of something. Restless. Curious. So I spent the morning talking to myself in terrible printing (barely legible, even to me) inside the pages of a handy notebook.
Did anything come of it? But of course! If not exactly peace of mind, then peace of purpose.
My mother has a phrase she uses often: She likes to “stay open to the possibilities.” And while there’s plenty to recommend the idea, I’ve decided that rather than staying open to the possibilities, I prefer to pursue, invite, and seek out possibilities–and when the time is right, to choose and to commit, which is kind of the opposite of staying open to more and more and more. Commitment means closing off possibilities–at least, some of them. But it also means believing in the possibilities before you and available to you, and not forever hoping that something better may be waiting around the corner. It’s kind of like getting married. When I commit, I like to get it right. That comes with a certain amount (okay, a giant unreasonable amount) of agonizing and analyzing.
But I’m seeing that commitment can be lighter than that, too. I have before me a flexible year. Certain elements are inflexible: my youngest is still a preschooler for whom I am the primary caregiver. But depending on my income generation, there are childcare options to supplement my responsibilities. And I am at home. I can juggle. I’m not tied to the structured hours of a 9-5 job.
One thing became very clear during yesterday’s brainstorming: I am finding more satisfaction from expanding my working life–my public life, essentially. To connect, to be engaged with the world–it’s what I want.
Something clear to me at this exact moment, as my littlest leans his face onto my leg and says, “I’m bored!” is that I’m not a great mother when I’m typing on the computer or trying to think. The balance … is so imperfect.
Beauty
Children with sparklers, on the farm.
An excerpt from a letter to the editor, published in The Globe and Mail newspaper this past weekend, on the subject of government subsidies for the arts: “Canada subsidizes war. Canada subsidizes car companies. Canada subsidizes oil companies. Why shouldn’t Canada subsidize beauty?”
Best beach day
This is our favourite beach. It’s never too busy, but there are plenty of interesting people to watch. And lots of waves.
We settle in, spread out blankets and towels, and stay awhile. We take picnic food and eat in the sand. I read.
Some of us build.
Some of us cast ourselves upon the sand … face-first.
The water is really cold at this time of year. The sand is hot. Plus we were all up late last night burning things in the bonfire. So we’re tired. We can do whatever we want. We’re on holiday.
Bliss.