My third crop of garlic went in the ground this afternoon. I started with two bulbs of Phillips, a hardneck variety purchased from Hope Seeds, in 2020. That duo yielded 22 bulbs that I planted last fall, with the miraculous result that all 150 cloves planted grew! I credit the aged chicken manure produced by our little flock for the good outcome.
I kept the 50 largest bulbs to plant this fall and the rest I have been using in the kitchen. Local garlic is wonderful but expensive, so it really is a worthwhile crop, even in my small garden. It doesn’t take a lot of work, and having something to plant in the fall when everything else is going dormant and there is less to do in the garden is very hopeful.
I plant garlic in rows 6″ apart. Luckily the dibber I use to poke the hole for each clove has a shaft that is exactly 6″ long, so it’s easy to space them out in the bed.
But equally as lucky, if I just want to poke a hole with my finger, is that I know that my hand is 6″ long, and my index finger is almost 3″ long, pretty much the perfect depth for a garlic clove. One of our set design teachers at the National Theatre School taught me that trick, to measure your hands and fingers so you would never be without a measure. It is one of the “handiest” hacks I know!
Just now, as I was looking out the living room window trying to decide how to spend this day, a flock of robins bounced down our lane. Two, then three, leapfrogging over each other. Moving from the red dirt road to the green grass, all of it covered with leaves from the white birch, the maskwi.
I counted seven in all, running and hopping, turning over leaves that were nearly the same colour as their beautiful rusty breasts. They were finding little earthworms and the ancient sowbugs, tiny crustaceans that walk on earth.
As the last robin hopped out of my view, I was still undecided as to what I should do with the rest of this day, still fresh and new, but my robin friends certainly reminded me to walk lightly on the earth and appreciate whatever I find. The sun is finally up and the maskwi are glowing in its light.
Modern Stoicism are offering their ”live like a Stoic” week again this year starting October 24, and you can still sign up. I’ve been participating in this free program for many years, and while I probably couldn’t call myself a devoted Stoic, Stoic Week has given me tools that I believe help me feel more balanced and happier. It is now a rare morning when I don’t think upon waking: “Today I will encounter things I can control and things I can’t control, and I will try to deal with both calmly.”
I have not yet written about my family’s experience with post tropical storm Fiona, but I was surprised at how I was able to emerge from our house after the storm, faced with weeks worth of cleanup and an altered landscape, and just look at it all but not pass judgement. It was what it was. I have said many times over the past three weeks: ”At least a tree can only fall once.”
For someone who has always predicted, planned and prepared to try to stay ahead of problems, this calm and, dare I say, Stoic outlook was proof that at least some of what I’ve been studying these past few years has worked. Stoicism is not at all about becoming emotionless or robotic; it is about finding balance and perspective, and learning how to ride out the storms of life, both literal and figurative.
It’s sort of remarkable that I’ve reached this point in my blogging life and not really talked much about decluttering or minimalism. I am not a minimalist – far from it – but love the idea of it, and aspire to live with fewer things cluttering my house and mind.
Just as life is too short to eat terrible bread, it is also to short to use a terrible pen. Once upon a time I would pick up free pens wherever I saw one, and they were almost all terrible. The ink never runs freely and smoothly, they don’t last, and generally tend to be better advertisements than writing utensils.
The result of all this was that I used to have a drawer full of pens, but as most of them didn’t work or worked poorly, I usually grabbed the same one every day, most often a blue ink retractable Papermate Flexgrip, which I bought by the box.
I finally came to the conclusion that keeping things I would never use was silly and a waste of resources. If someone else can use it, then pass it along or, better yet, don’t acquire something I will never use or never really enjoy.
So the obvious first step was easy: stop taking free pens! Next, I took the pens I didn’t want and that worked ok to meetings with me, where someone usually forgot to take a pen and wanted to borrow mine. “Here, take this one, and keep it,” I would say, like Daddy Warbucks. Little did they know they were helping me out more than I was helping them.
Over the dozen or so years of this whittling down, I’ve made myself use pens that worked well but didn’t like until they finally ran out of ink. Now I can take the dead pens and throw them in a recycling bin at Staples, where I am optimistic they actually make something with them and not just greenwash them into the local landfill.
This morning the last Flexgrip I have gave up the ghost. I am left with a Bic Round Stic that Steven got at a conference. When it wears out, I have the Sheaffer pen someone gave me when I graduated high school in 1984. I was able to buy a new cartridge for it, and it will likely be the only ballpoint I will own.
Had a stubborn stain on a white shirt today, so did what I have always done: grabbed a piece of homemade soap and a washboard and gave it a good scrub. The soap was made by my mother’s uncle, Elmer Hardy, mostly likely with chicken fat as he raised hens for meat and eggs. Not sure what else went in the soap, but it certainly contains lots of lye and is hard on your hands if you do a lot of washing with it. Red knuckles will result if you are out of the habit, as I am, and you scrub too vigorously for too long.
In case you’ve never done it but find yourself in a rustic backwoods cabin with dirty clothes, you place the washboard in a laundry tub with some hot water, rub the soap over the washboard, leaving some behind in the grooves, and then scrub the piece of clothing over it. I use our modern plastic laundry tub, run a couple of inches of water in the bottom and a bucket for rinsing, and wash and rinse and wash and rinse until clean. Hang your cleaned item out on the line and the sun will do the rest of the bleaching!
Uncle Elmer died in 2002 at age 92, and I can’t remember when he last kept hens or made soap, but it was many years before that, so that soap could be over 30 years old and is still hard and perfect. He didn’t use individual moulds but instead poured the mixture into a big pan and cut it before it set too hard, so some of the pieces have rounded bottoms. I laugh when I see bougie soap makers now going for a similar raw look to their hand and body soaps, rough and misshapen bars wrapped up in brown paper and twine.
Who taught me how to wash clothes this way? My mother, I suppose, though I don’t remember her showing me, I just picked it up from watching her, as she watched her grandmother, and on and on back in time. My hands hold old knowledge.
Arrows, Xs and masks will certainly be the most memorable symbols of the COVID-19 pandemic for me, but so will these little official-looking squares found in many disposable mask packages. 65%, 35%, 85%…better wear two.
The land where I live in Foxley River remains the unceded territory of the Miꞌkmaq people, who have occupied this island for over 12,000 years. Since European settlers arrived, the piece of land where my house is has been claimed by six people, as far as I can figure, including me.
It was once owned by Creelman MacArthur from Summerside, a businessman and politician. As far as I know, he never lived in Foxley River, and I suspect he bought the place solely as an investment. He had hoped the property would be designated as Prince Edward Island’s national park, as he mentioned when he spoke to a National Parks Amendment Bill in the Senate on June 17, 1938:
Hon. CREELMAN MacARTHUR: … Five years ago I acquired the old Warburton estate of 655 acres, only to realize that it was a white elephant. I built a lodge and a concrete and steel dam and put in some 50,000 trout. In a word, I did everything that I thought might appeal to the Commission when selecting in the province an area for a national park which would be attractive to tourists. But it seems the outstanding requirement was surf bathing, and my property had only sheltered stretches of river. It is a very beautiful area and its waters are well stocked with trout, lobster and oysters.
Right Hon. Mr. GRAHAM: What a place!
Hon. Mr. MacARTHUR: The property cost me some $15,000.I offered it to the Government as a gift, free of restrictions of any kind. I thought in that way a greater service would be rendered to this country, and to visitors in this country, than could be rendered byme as an individual.
However, it was deemed the part of wisdom to select an area in Queen’s county, of which the honourable senator from Queen’s (Hon. Mr. Sinclair) can speak in more detail than I can. Mr. Cromarty and another gentleman from the Parks Branch went down and after looking at four or five sites selected the one referred to in the Bill. Unfortunately, there was some difficulty with three or four landowners with regard to the expropriation, and for a year or more there has been some contention. This difficulty has now been removed, and the purpose of this Bill is to describe the area. We are now looking forward to having a park which will be the equal of anything in any other province in Canada.
And so the PEI National Park did not end up in Foxley River, but in Cavendish, in the heart of the area made popular by author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her Anne of Green Gables books. Just as well, but I’m sure Senator MacArthur had hoped to recoup part of his $15,000 investment, even if he did say (after the fact) that he had intended to give the property to the government as a gift. I don’t say that to be mean, and I never met the man, or his family, but I’m sure there would have been some way for him to make a little money on the deal. Business is business.
Mr. MacArthur died in 1943, and his Foxley River estate eventually broken up into smaller parcels, 23 acres of which we now inhabit. Part of the lodge he had built in 1933 is still here, as well as the dam and the descendants of those 50,000 trout!
I found a postcard online years ago that was probably taken in the 1930s or 40s of the view from the shore in front of our house looking northward up Foxley River. I wondered when I found it if MacArthur had the photo taken to advertise the beauty of his property, perhaps as something he could hand out to sway the opinion of the decision makers at the Ottawa Parks Branch. There really isn’t any other reason why this photo was taken, being so far from the beaten track as we were and still are.
I have many times tried to recreate this postcard photos, capture some mountainous clouds, but never have I caught a similar sky. It is startlingly the same vista, though, despite the massive forest fire that ravaged this area in 1960 and the many decades that have passed. The building in the centre is long gone, but the trees on the far shore look almost the same, with the same breaks in the treeline.
Yesterday a neighbour was making hay on that far field, as has been done for nearly two centuries on that piece of land. This area dodged becoming a tourist mecca 90 years ago, but how long before that field becomes cottage lots is anyone’s guess, so I am thankful for its timeless beauty every day. A miracle, really.
A friend asked me what I’ve been up to lately. I said I’ve been in my shop fixing an old school desk that was wiggly because the glue holding it together had dried out. She asked me to send a picture, so I did.
I was going to delete the photo, but then decided it is possibly the best portrait I could ever make of my brain: quite messy but also reasonably organized, full of stuff I probably should have gotten rid of ages ago, practical, a mix of old and new, slightly scattered, but all mine.
When I hear a small plane or helicopter approaching our house, I run outside and give them a big wave. I’ve been doing this my entire life, but the little plane that flew over our house just now is the first one that clearly waggled its wings back at me. Never give up.
I used to spend part of each yoga practice gently encouraging Sally the tabby to move off my blanket as she joined me in the weird human thing I seemed to be doing, which often puts me in a cat petting position, but rarely results in feline adoration. Then I folded my blanket a bit differently one day, and she had a place to do the cozy cat while I did the downward dog. Sometimes the best way to get what you want is to give a little.