Closing

The sky has now turned a hazy gray, a backdrop against firey trees that are slowly shedding their red leaves. The mornings are now cool and the sun is setting sooner (if we can see it at all). the Muskoka chairs we so lovingly put together this summer are soaked with lashings of autumn rain.

The seasons are changing. To say it’s been an eventful year would be an epic understatement if there ever was one. A year so full of momentum, and joy and heat and the requisite anxiety. Lots of moments of excitement scattered with a few moments of panic.

Perhaps it’s age, but I’ve started to turn a new leaf on the winter as a season of rest. I’ve disliked the winter all my life - the biting cold, the lack of songbird, the immobility that comes from being frozen in place (in my case because the roads are icy). The layer upon layer of clothing, the inability to shake of the bone chilling cold of the wet Boreal winter time (though on any day, I’ll take the rain over the snow). Not even as a child did I think that this season was particularly magical so much as it was loud and bright.

This year feels different. On the first day that it was reasonably cold enough to make a big pot of soup, I decided to treat the next few months as a season of rest.

The wintertime brings with it a certain urgency that comes with the year slipping away. We have a penchant to seize every moment - shall we get together? And when? It seems the four days over the winter holidays are a rather endless expanse of time in which to see everyone and everything. Not recognizing of course, that it would deplete before we even set foot into a new year. And perhaps that’s a good way to fill one’s cup at times. There are no wrong answers for joy.

While there are certainly many moments of gathering over the next few months, it’s the quiet reflection of dark mornings and warm evenings spent in the home that I’m craving this year. There is something ultimately comforting about tending to both your inner life and your home and surroundings at the same time in the season. It’s a moment to replenish, take stock and gather in a way that is meaningful. And while I’m a big fan of shedding things, I find that the more we turn toward the things that rejuvenate, the more we turn away from the things that don’t - in the most natural form of shedding that there is. This year this feels more necessary than ever.

As we dip our cold toes into the season, I’m setting the intention for quiet repose and for closing out the year rather than rushing through to it. Right now I’m being buoyed by the thought of a warm cup of tea, of woolly socks and of many quiet nights in (and always of bread and butter), of good books and brisk walks.

How are you treating the next season?

A few little things to read:
Katherine May’s “Wintering” and her interview on the On Being Podcast
Nigel Slater’s “A Thousand Feasts”
Zadie Smith on Optimism and Despair

In Hot Water

The second half. The pleasant comfort of baking bread and whiling away your evenings reading seem a distant memory this year. The promise of slow, somehow lagging. And there is a little while yet to go. 2020. The year we’ll all remember for its exceptional nature.

The second half of this year has been accelerated for me. I’m so very lucky though. I’m safe, employed, supported both at home and at work. I’m also bone-tired. Some of it is of my own making (as you’ll see).

Today, I cracked a little bit. And I cracked over a boiled egg.

I was making an egg salad sandwich for lunch for my husband and me. I boiled the eggs the same way I always do. Cold water. Bring to simmer. Take off the heat. Cover for 15. Perfect eggs, right?

Not today.

Today, the membrane wouldn’t give and the entire thing disintegrated in my hands. The quivering whites simply clung to the shell, exposing the bulbous yellow, the colour of a cloudy whipped up marble. I wasn’t happy about this. My eggs are usually perfect. It wasn’t the actual eggs - we just had them the other day. It must be me. It’s definitely me. I can’t boil eggs and I can’t do much else.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” my husband said, “It’s just an egg,” he pointed out as I worked myself up into an untenable state for 10 minutes.

Lunch was now the dark cloud in my otherwise quiet day. This is what happens when you have to much time to process.

The quickfire pace of the autumn finally gave and I took a few days off to catch up on sleep and do some laundry and get my head back on straight (a forced reprieve that was needed). I’m not used to large empty swaths of nothingness - life has always been scrambling between one crisis and another - it’s addictive, this productivity cycle. I’d rather clean out a closet or polish the knobs on the stove than sit there doing little. I’ll sign up for things, cramming my schedule with activities that render me exhausted, so that I fall into bed desperately tired each evening. And then I do the whole thing again. But I’m trying to maintain a level of productivity from five years ago under the acute stress of a global pandemic. We all are. And it’s not fair, is it?

All this fuss over an egg. But even when you’re in isolation with the rest of the world, the lessons keep on coming. I’m fairly certain it’s a call to dutifully subtract the nonsense that threads through my everyday - mostly the nonsense I create for myself. And to take the foot off the gas. What’s the end state here?

All the meditative walks in the world won’t help you surface it. It’s that ability to deliberately hold discomfort in the air like an unresolved note at the end of a song. It’s there. You have to be alright with it.

And so we come to this: Fewer cracks at room temperature. Lunch can be imperfect. Drink some water and hold space. It won’t feel good, but then again, it doesn’t have to.

Here’s a few things to read:

For Home Cooks, Burnout is a Reality This Holiday in NYT

I Believe that Marriage is a Sacred Union in The New Yorker

All the nice gulls love a sailor. ugh in The London Review of Books

Brene Brown speaks to President Obama

Cut Fruit

Around the world, people have been locked down for a solid two months. Many of us (barring those who are keeping the world running) have had the time to nest, reflect, reorganize and reimagine what life looks like now and what we’ll want it to look like after. The rituals of our days have changed with many more people in one spot. And many of us have had to opportunity to rekindle or perhaps, go deep in exploring the relationships in our lives.

Of course, this lockdown has given way to thousands of memes. People find ways to be funny when they discover new things about their spouses, parents, siblings and friends. Humour has in so many ways kept the world ticking, too.

My favourite memes of course, are the ones that come out of the shared experience of Asian cultures. And my favourite of all of them have been the “cut fruit” jokes. Things like, “are you even an immigrant if your mom doesn’t interrupt your Zoom meeting to bring you cut fruit”

Mostly, cut fruit has been the purview of mothers. My own would bring a big platter of orange slices, apples, peaches, grapes, plums or whatever else was on hand for a snack in the evening. And if it was the summer, chili and lemon usually accompanied it (try it, if you haven’t - it’ll change your life). Or perhaps a gigantic bowl full of cubed watermelon. Or mangoes, where we would fight over who got to suck all the juice off the pit. All three of us would crowd on a couch to watch terrible shows on TLC or gossiping and sometimes even just silently eating.

Cut fruit is the ultimate demonstration of love. Our parents cut our food up for us when we’re young, long before we have the manual dexterity. It shows that they don’t want us to suffer through the tough pits and peels, the seeds and the “icky bits” like the butt end of a banana, to get to the good stuff. It says, “I took the time to peel, slice (or dice), pit and arrange this for you so you wouldn’t have to work hard.” For anyone who has tried it, it is intensely laborious. Wrestling with slippery mangoes, projectile grapes across the kitchen floor. Cut fruit is a warrior’s battlefield full of frustration and seeds.

Then it’s no wonder that those who care about us most are willing to go to such lengths so we can literally enjoy the fruits of their labour. Just the other day, as we visited my grandmother-in-law, as we left the house, she handed us a bag of cut pears - for after the fast because we’ll be hungry. You’re never too old for cut fruit. And you’ll never say no.

As we approach the end of the holy month of Ramadan, our home has been extra quiet. No sports, not many meals during the day (except for me, always eating cashews for whatever reason). And lots of time to think about things. I’ve also - though I’m not a mother, only graced with the title of Big Sister - started cutting fruit. So we have something quick to grab between Zoom meetings. And so my husband has something he can eat with his breakfast when he rises at 5:00 to eat before his fast begins.

Though none of us know how much longer we might have to be in our homes and how slow the creep back with normalcy will be, I for one, will continue to reflect on everything in my life. And when we finally surface at the end of the tunnel, I plan on asking myself the one question that I ought to have asked about all the decisions and people and labour in my life so far: Is this worth cutting fruit for?