teenage dream.

A few summers ago I remarked to myself that I was quickly turning into an 80 year old woman. I was pretty happy with this shift, to be honest. I was in an Old Soul kind of phase of life, newly thirty and living in the town I thought I'd call home for the rest of my life (this blog is often in danger of becoming a Limestone City fan fiction forum). I was content in an inertia comprised of professional apathy, the best friends and neighbours in the universe, and Bob Dylan records. I spent the summer of 2010 whiling away the days and nights eating local tomatoes and writing blog posts about Jonathan Torrens and exploring the multitude of swimming holes in Frontenac County. Every weekend I'd drive out to Tom's house and put up the tent and spend a few days surviving on homemade sangria and campfire coffee. It was a pretty sweet set-up. It was the spiritual equivalent of curling up in your armchair with your knitting. Yeah, I thought to myself, I'll ride this one out for a few more decades.

Life, of course, happened. The events of the following six months pulled me out of my octogenarian reverie, spun me around in circles a few times, then spat me out back in my hometown. It's taken awhile, but I can honestly say that Hamilton finally feels a little more like home these days. Maybe it's the comfort of being home at the Canada Street cottage for a full year now, the sun on my porch and the tomatoes in my own garden. Or maybe it's the manner in which I have regressed in completely the opposite direction and am now turning back into the 18 year old version of myself. Here's the incontrovertible evidence:

1. I'm back on the pill, and just like the first time, my mom has a lot of questions about it.

2. On random weeknights my best friend gets dropped off at my house by her mom, and we sit in the backyard discussing the various ways in which we intend to change the world while also hoping we can score a good stash for the cottage.

3. The only album I want to listen to is Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair.



3a. I may also allow for One Chord To Another by Sloan.



3a(i). I still remember the day One Chord came out. My best friend Heather had an afternoon spare period and drove down to Dr. Disc to buy it. She came back to school and stood outside the door of my Society: Challenge and Change class and held up the album and waved it around like a beacon and my dorky, Andrew Scott-lovin' heart nearly smashed into pieces. Man, I thought, this is going to be a GREAT SUMMER.

There's a guy who's been around a lot lately who often tells me he thinks nostalgia is dangerous. He's not one for living in the past, I guess; he's someone who keeps swimming. I don't mind moving forward, but I'm not going to lie: I love to look backward too. I love nostalgia. It makes me feel connected to all the people I've known, all the different versions of myself I've been. Old before her time; living fast, dying young; part of this large family.

a girl's guide to hunkering.

Anyone who knows me is aware of the fact that I love a good hunkerin'. There is no finer way to spend a day than at home, curled up, enclosed and coccooned and otherwise safe from the outside world. I've pretty well perfected the art of hiding out. It's a sport usually reserved for the colder months, though, and I always feel a little sad when the days get longer, the sun warmer, the urge to leave the house mysteriously stronger. Sure, you can still hunker down in the summer, but it's frowned upon (unless you're deathly ill and there's a wicked heat wave and you have the first five seasons of 90210 at your disposal, but that's another story). That's why Friday's monsoon-style downpour felt like one last cold-weather gift, one last chance to huddle up. 

I didn't get around to my burrowing until late in the day on Friday, which wasn't necessarily too awful. I had the great good fortune not to have to go too far afield. Working and visiting and teaching and running errands, I walked back and forth and up and down Locke Street all morning and afternoon. Each time I left my house it was raining a little harder, and each return home felt like a tiny miracle. There is something so comforting about spending an entire busy day in your own neighbourhood, going and returning, one foot in front of the other. And there's no greater relief than that final coming home when you know you can put on your thick socks and unplug the phone and stay awhile. This is a lucky life.

The worst of the deluge may be over, but Saturday's still looking a little iffy. With that in mind, here's my foolproof summer hunker survival kit.

The Hour. This is a BBC series that takes place in 1956. It's about murder and intrigue in Cold War London, the dawn of the post-newsreel age of reporting, the Suez Canal Crisis, and smart young boys and girls in perfectly tailored suits. At the risk of sounding like a culture-vulture dipshit, I think this series will satisfy all lovers of Mad Men and/or Downton Abbey, which I'm pretty sure amounts to the sum total of the English speaking population of the universe.

Miso gravy on sweet potatoes with steamed spinach and halloumi cheese. It is exactly as incredible as it sounds. At the risk of sounding like a foodie dipshit, I find it to be poutine-reminiscent. Here is the miso gravy recipe that got me started, all the way from the best vegetarian restaurant in the world, The Naam, not far from my old Kistilano stomping grounds. I'm already fantasizing about eating there every blessed night when I'm back in the city of glass this summer.

The June issue of Vanity Fair. This magazine features nude photos and new tales of the last days of Marilyn Monroe, as well as a very informative and tragic story about the last days of Whitney Houston. I'm a fan of last days.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian. The first Bohjalian book I ever read was Trans-Sister Radio. Actually, I listened to it on audiobook back when I lived in Ottawa, and have listened to several of his books since, as well as reading several more on paper. Bohjalian's books are wonderful. He creates rich, morally complex characters wading through myriad life-altering circumstances, from gender reassignment to attempted rape to domestic abuse. He's a master of the trauma-inducing moment and the long, drawn-out, harrowing process of recovery. The Night Strangers is a ghost story of sorts that starts with a truly terrifying description of a plane crash on Lake Champlain and then follows the pilot as he tries to get past what has happened to him. At the risk of sounding like a literary dipshit, it has elements of Updike's Witches of Eastwick and echoes of the best books Alice Hoffman ever wrote (Fortune's Daughter and Practical Magic, for starters). If you'll excuse me, I'm off to turn on every light in the house before I go to bed. Why I thought I could read this book and then fall asleep alone is beyond me but god DAMN if it isn't worth it.

Happy hunkering.

fifty shades of wanting your life back.

So what I did was, I read Fifty Shades of Grey last weekend, and it made me feel things. Sexy things. Frustrated things. Grammatically incorrect things. Here's a random sample.

1. From now on I think editors need to limit writers to only one adjective per noun. None of this "deep, profound melancholy" or "cool, cold water."

1a. Yeah, don't get me started on "cool, cold water."

2. The porny bits kick in around page 87; you can pretty much skip the first part.

2a. And oh my lord, the porny bits! This shit gets REAL.

3. In the words of the poor bastard to whom I kept reading passages aloud one night as he tried to quietly read an article about outer space, "I'd be kind of turned on if it wasn't so horrible."

3a. To that end, here are some of the phrases I hope never to hear again: "the arousal of my sex" (yes, as in vagina. She did use the word vagina, thank goodness, but not nearly often enough), "Come for me, baby," "my inner goddess."

3c. For more of the very, very worst writing of this series, check out Fifty Shades of Suck. My inner goddess can't stop hitting her head on the table.

4. Guys, they have period sex! Insanely dirty period sex! To me this is a Sexy Final Frontier, something everybody probably does but nobody talks about. I love that she went there. I have this image in my head of a woman with one of those headlamp book lights staying up late to read over the description of a dude pulling out a young woman's tampon in a hotel bathroom, eyes wide. It's so over the top. Bread and circuses.

5. Here is something that I both love and hate: clunky literary allusions, meant to lend credibility to otherwise horrifying prose. In the case of Fifty Shades, it's an ongoing reference to Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I know that sales of Wuthering Heights spiked post-Twilight (thanks in part to the terrible Twilight-inspired editions). Given my irrational dislike of the Victorian novel, I will have a nice little chuckle if a whole generation of women starts slogging through Tess. Joke's on you, ladies!

5a. When I was in highschool I had to read Far from the Madding Crowd, also by Hardy. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around the novel until my filthy-minded teacher started pointing out all the penile, erectile, and otherwise phallic imagery in the book, at which point something clicked in my adolescent brain.

6. It is incredible how many people are reading this book. The first one in the trilogy has over 800 people on the library waiting list. I sincerely hope that this leads to bored people having a lot more interesting sexytimes. I also hope its popularity helps break down some of the antiquated social stigma around porn and erotica for women. Given the overwhelming prudishness of our society it's not at all surprising that part of the reason for this book's popularity is that in this digital age it can be read on a tablet with relative anonymity--a number of articles note that fans of the series who are grateful for the ability to read it without anyone knowing that they're reading it, because it's not the sort of book they'd want to broadcast about. The fact that women are still concerned about public displays of sexual appetite is problematic. If you want to read smut on the subway, for pete's sake, just read smut on the subway. Life is short.

7. I also really, really hope it will lead to some better-written smut, because for the love of god, I cannot abide this garbage. My inner goddess wishes E.L. James had had a better proofreader. After all, a solid, unforgiving, take-no-prisoners edit is nearly as satisfying as a solid, unforgiving, take-no-prisoners fuck.

peony season.

I once loved a man who grew incredible dahlias. 

Tom had the greenest of thumbs, which was, like most talents, a blessing and a curse. When he lived at the lake, he kept up a rambling garden patch overlooking the water below, in a spot that had at one time been an inground swimming pool ("You'd have to be an idiot to build a pool next to the cleanest lake in the county," Tom would often remark. "A real fucking idiot."). Tomatoes in garbage pails, rows upon rows of beets and basil, dill the size of potted palms.  Tom tended to his crops like a proud uncle. Some nights in early June we'd lie out on the grass next to his plot and just be still, certain with the certainty that some consumed substances might bring that we could hear things growing.  On heady nights later in the summer, we'd eat like kings and queens from that garden and then he'd send me on my way with a plastic cup full of flowers. It was easy to be in love back then.

Of all the blooms he cultivated, his dahlias were his finest work. Dahlias are finicky flowers with petals like infinite spirals folding in upon one another, beautiful little mandalas. Every spring as he planted the bulbs he got from his mother, he'd let me in on his particular strategies, none of which I can recall. Maybe it was a combination of his own neurotic energy combined with the equally frantic juju of his mother's garden, two generations of hardy, panicked part-Russian stock willing those flowers to bloom. Whatever he did, it worked. Those flowers were perfect, and inspired healthy envy. When we first got together Freya used to say she was glad we were together because it would give her an inside line on dahlia bulbs (best friends are best friends for many reasons).  

Last summer was my first in awhile that didn't include drives home from Frontenac County with a bouquet and leftover tomatoes in the passenger seat. As the first dahlias bloomed last August, I felt vaguely unsettled. I resisted the urge to take the scissors for a walk and pillage my neighbours' beds. I felt that small hole inside me grow slightly larger, as it often did, ebbing and flowing, expanding and contracting.  I rode it out, because 2011 was the year of riding things out.  I waited for those mandalas to fall off their stems, certain I would survive this season as I'd survived the ones before, knowing that this dahlia crop would be the hardest, with each one following getting a little easier.

Then, in October, I went to visit a friend in Halifax, and we spent a golden afternoon wandering in the Public Gardens, where the dahlias were just finishing up--Nova Scotia is a good few weeks behind us season-wise, just as my mother always said.  Erin and I wandered up and down rows of miraculous new cultivars, sun-baked on one of the last mild days of the year. Okay, I thought to myself, I can remember this instead.

So what happens now? It's May, and it's peony season. Last spring I moved into my cottage just as the peonies were finishing up, and in those first few days at home I cut blooms from branches, stuffing them into vases in every room in the house, feeling so hopeful and independent and free. All year, I've looked forward to their return. On the advice of a garden-minded colleague (one of the wonderful things about working in a library is the constant, endearing, instructional kindness of your coworkers) I trimmed them back to nothing last fall. I prayed all winter that I hadn't somehow killed them. These past few weeks I've watched their buds get fat, their branches bend under the weight. This week they all opened at once and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Peonies are huge, messy flowers, fragrant and heavy and frilled. They're also easy to grow, eager to be cultivated, happy to be admired. They were here before I arrived, but I can do little things to help them along. They're not entirely mine, but for now they're under my wing, year after year. 

And I might still decide to plant a few dahlia bulbs along the sunny back fence. I think the bulbs will need to go in soon--it might already be too late for this year. Sometimes I wish I'd listened harder to Tom's secrets for success, but really, I'm not too worried. It's nothing I can't figure out on my own.

what we talk about when we talk about levon.

Over the years I lived in Toronto, I probably watched The Last Waltz no less than a thousand times. My best friends were hippies and music lovers and someone always had a copy kicking around. There was one summer when my brother and I were back at home and we had three Last Waltz DVDs in the house: his, mine, and dad's. There existed among us an encyclopedic and apocryphal knowledge of the film: the story about the supposed editing-out of Neil Young's coke nose, Mavis Staples' so-quiet-you-might-miss-it whisper at the end of The Weight. We knew that concert backward and forward, knew the Band's catalogue better than the books we pretended to study from as we listened in. And I always knew that it was Levon Helm I loved best.



What was it about Levon? He just seemed like a gentleman. He was quiet and kind in the interview portions of the film. Immortalized in his prime in The Last Waltz, I had such a crush on him; in the present day, he was the best father figure you could ask for (second only to my own father, of course). And oh my lord, could he ever drum. I've always had a soft spot for the guy keeping the beat. Watching Levon crane his neck over to the mike to sing as he drummed filled me with this surge of joy every single time. What a combination, to hold steady as you sing your heart out.  My brother is a drummer, and the first time I ever heard him sing and play was ten years ago at the Casbah, when his band had a weekly gig doing cover songs over the summer. Toward the end of the night, Noah kept time as he sang From The Back Of The Film by Thrush Hermit.  It was, and still is, one of my favourite songs. I felt like my heart might explode. "He's our Levon Helm!" I shouted into my boyfriend's ear. It was the highest praise I could bestow on anyone, really.



My own copy of The Last Waltz accompanied me out west, where I'd watch it whenever I was feeling homesick or sad. That music was a balm for all that ailed me. Sometimes I'd just watch the first few minutes over and over again; that incredible, rip-roaring version of Don't Do It made me feel like I was complete again. I loved the fact that the movie began where the band ended, with the last song they ever played together. Levon's voice held me back from the edge. Years later it would become the theme song for my doomed relationship with Tom. There was a particularly sketchy period out there at the lake when the only thing we had to listen to was a scratched-up copy of The Band's greatest hits and a Last Waltz DVD held together with tape and sheer force of will. We would drink wine and blast the volume and sing along with Levon till we lost our voices. Sometimes on Sunday afternoons as I debated driving back into town, Tom would put on the movie and say, "don't go yet." And so I wouldn't.

Tom had a great voice too, he really did. He'd always deny it when I said so, but he could harmonize with the best of them. Not surprisingly, he sounded best when he was singing along with Dylan or The Band, the music that was so ingrained in him it was more familiar than his own breath.  One of our favourite songs to sing together was Ain't No More Cane from The Basement Tapes--again with Levon's heart-wrenching vocals off the top. It was, and still is, one of my favourite songs. We'd sing it with the album accompanying us, we'd sing it with me on guitar, we'd sing it without any backing track at all. We'd sing it till people told us to shut up and go home. 


(I couldn't find the Basement Tapes version online. This one's a very, very, VERY close second.)

When they announced his death on the CBC on Thursday, I felt something in me sink. I fumbled through the CDs in my car, looking for Levon, and I found him in no time--there he was, singing The Weight along with the Staples Singers, on a mix CD I made in 2004 just before moving to Vancouver.  This morning I heard The Band's version of When I Paint My Masterpiece on the radio. It was, and still is, one of my favourite songs. (I'm sensing a pattern here.) I learned to play their version of it on the guitar when I was younger. I loved Levon's interpretation, so much more melancholy and beautifully world-weary than Dylan's. It was a song that made me feel sad and longing and full all at once. This morning I heard him sing his heart out one more time and I cried. Garth Hudson talked about Levon and then wished Jian Ghomeshi well, saying he hoped everyone was "doing alright up at the station," making the CBC feel suddenly like a solitary broadcasting tower in the middle of an Eastern Ontario pine forest. 



What was it about Levon? It was his soulful, groovin' voice, his incredible beat, his handsome face, his mesh-back trucker hat, his lanky arms, the way he held it all together.  He may have been a good old Southern boy, but Levon sounded the way Canada felt to me--the way it felt to be alone near water, watching the moon rise, the way it felt to be on the open road out of town, the way it felt to fall in love with a person and a place so fully and completely. I am, by all accounts, a city child, but Levon's voice helped me find my country heart, beating deep down.

shake shake shake. shake your booty.

A Friday afternoon playlist designed for ass-shakin' at the end of a long-ass week.


Addicted, Amy Winehouse. (instructive.)



God Put A Smile Upon Your Face, Mark Ronson. (the best Coldplay has ever sounded.)



Diamond in the Back, Curtis Mayfield. (slowdance/makeout.)



Make Her Say, Kid Cudi. (bouncing.)



Let's Dance, David Bowie. (yes, let's.)



Kick, Push, Lupe Fiasco. (for coasting.)



Passin' Me By, the Pharcyde. (a grand finale for old, old time's sake.)

oh, holy holy.

I've always had a thing for Holy Thursday (for the long hard soul-searching days leading up to Easter in general, really). It stems from my wannabe-Anglican leanings, which I've written about before (on Holy Thursday, no less). I love the darkness before the dawn, the ending and the beginning nearly overlapping, the profound and heartfelt sadness you can feel free to immerse yourself in fully, since you know there's brightness coming, just a couple days away.

I always seem to find myself on the road on this Thursday, which is part of why I love it so much. Running away, running home, running back: I have always been a sucker for the great escape. When I was a student I'd usually be on my way back to my parents' place, loaded down with books, because Easter weekend always seemed to fall smack in the middle of finals. I'd be feeling tremendously sorry for myself, but also somehow hopeful. We were nearly through the shitstorm. The time was so close when I would never have to think about Absalom, Absalom! again. The darkest hour before the dawn, and all that. I'd schlep home for a few days and hunker down and eat candy and lie awake in my childhood bedroom and maybe take a trip to the garden centre to buy Easter lilies. The hard part was almost over. The summer escape was on its way. It was a good life.

The year I started this little verbal vomit trail, I spent Holy Thursday feeling happier than I'd been in a long time. After years of planning my way out of Ottawa, I'd finally found my exit route: I'd accepted a job in Kingston and was gearing up to move in a month. The job was fairly secondary to my happiness; the better news was that I'd be moving to the town where my oldest friend lived. I didn't know it yet, but we'd end up living five minutes from each other, just like we did when we were kids, and it would be wonderful. I was also, in spite of my better judgment, making the move to be closer to a man I'd fallen in love with. At the time I knew in my deep-down secret heart that hitching even the sketchiest of wagons to that particular star was probably a bad idea. And yet, and yet. We do what we can with what we've got when we've got it. At the time, the prospect of proximity made me feel happy, and that was enough. That April Thursday, I brought in chocolate for my Ottawa colleagues, who still didn't know I was leaving in a month (I'm a leave under cover of darkness kind of girl--I think they call it the Irish Goodbye). I left work early and drove home to Hamilton, fueled by the music of Joel Plaskett and the incredible high of knowing I would soon wipe my slate clean.



One year later, Kingston was home in all senses of the word. Tom and I had survived yet another winter at the lake and he was in the process of buying a piece of property that he promised would be ours together. It was unseasonably warm and gorgeous that weekend, and we planned to spend most of it truck-camping in those woods, his woods, our woods. First, though, we had some family obligations to endure. On Holy Thursday he picked me up after work and we drove out to Brockville together to have dinner with his parents. "We'll just get it over with," he promised, not that I needed convincing. Visiting his family was anthropologically fascinating to me. His mother's definition of vegetarian cooking was pretty heavy on chicken, and there was usually a Dairy Queen ice cream cake. We drank cheap red wine and dodged questions about having babies and took advantage of their cable television and trundled on up to bed in our separate rooms. If you've never spent the night alone in the single bed your boyfriend slept in as a child, sharing the room with a photo portrait gallery that includes a professional shot of his former longtime partner, I suggest you try it sometime. It was surreal. The next morning, Tom snuck into my room and jumped on top of me to wake me up. "We should get out of here," he said. "Fast." (In hindsight, two proponents of the Irish Goodbye in one relationship is probably a recipe for disaster). After a quick breakfast we hit the road, driving along the Thousand Island Parkway on our way back to the County. Tom pointed out all the islands he'd spent time on as a kid and yelled at me for blocking his view as I reached over him to take pictures as we passed. By lunchtime, we were home--home in South Frontenac, home at the hideout.



I haven't found myself in transition much lately, and after years of getting high off the terrifying potential of massive change, I don't miss it as much as I thought I might. This is not to say that I don't still have an escape route planned (I keep a sleeping bag and a tetrapak of bad red wine in my trunk, just in case), but at the same time, I've finally come to the realization that there's value in staying put and settling in. This Holy Thursday, I'll come home from work and sit down at my piano, maybe noodle through a few old Lenten hymns (I may be the only Unitarian in possession of copies of both the High and Low Anglican hymnals), and water the icicle pansies on the back porch. It's been an unsettled spring, fraught with hail and flash freezes, but they've survived. They're hardy, and their roots are deeper than you'd think.